Lessons in managing stress and taking back control

The symptoms!

Are these feelings familiar to you?

Unsure which task to start next, because there are so many and they all need done as soon as possible.

Easily distracted by anything other than work.

Secret hope that some of the projects on your list will be cancelled or reassigned.

If you can related to any or all of those, then it is highly likely that you are in a state of overwhelm.

The explanation!

Overwhelm is usually a result of stress cause by falling behind on during a busy period, starting a new and demanding role or dealing with the learning curve of a new system or technology while trying to manage the existing workload.

About three years ago, I was working in a role within a technical design department. The nature of the work involved managing multiple projects simultaneously and required a 200+ page specification document to be maintained for each.

The projects were quite dynamic, so there was a lot of email traffic each day covering all the requested changes and associated email changes discussing the merit of each.

In addition to the workload itself, there were quite hard and fast deadlines to meet for final approval of the design. Unfortunately quite often clients left it to the last minute to make design changes, which had to be incorporated before approval. This resulted in many night working late to include the changes for a deadline looming the next day.

The result of all of this was a steadying increasing vicious circle of tiredness, stress and overwhelm.

I remember clearly, that one morning I can into the office and sat down at my desk as normal. However when I opened my emails and was hit with the size of the task in front of me, my whole body froze up and my hands started to shake. I just couldn’t make a decision on what to start next or how I was going to get all of this done.

Looking back on the experience now, the best analogy I can make is that I had gone into sometime akin to a “crash” that a computer makes when the CPU, Hard drive and RAM all hit their limits at the same time. I had reached my physical and mental limit and now was just “frozen”, much like a computer in the same position.

The remedy!

Continuing the computer based analogy, the only way to get out of this state of overwhelm is to perform a “reboot”!

Trying to work your way out of the situation through longer hours, is only going to compound the issue.

Going back to my own experience, these are the three steps to get over the overwhelm:

Go home at 5pm (or whatever your earliest finishing time may be) — The first step is making a clean break and heading home at the earliest time allowed. It is important to do this no matter what you think “needs to be done”. It is the only way to get out of and break the vicious cycle. When you go home make sure to spend the evening doing something completely different to work, something that you enjoy and something that will consume your mind. It doesn’t matter if it is a hobby, sport or just watching a film.

Get to bed before 10pm — The next step is to ensure you get a good nights rest. Sleep is critical to our physical and mental wellbeing, so it would be foolish to think that you can move out of a state of overwhelm by depriving your body and brain on something as essential as sleep. Working late and getting up early in this instance is counterproductive and will only make the situation worse. Also simply going to bed early one night alone, is not enough. This needs to be a habit that you perform on an ongoing basis. If you have enough sleep then you will be able to tackle the next day much more productively than spending an extra 2–3hours working late.

Make a commitment to tackle just and only one task on your list the next day — The brutal reality, is that if you want to stay employed, then you are going to have to get the work done. Now you are on the right road following steps 1&2, then the next thing is to start working through the tasks. You have to be realistic than you are not going to get them all completed in one day, but you are going to have to start somewhere! Making a clear commitment to finish one of your outstanding tasks will give you the feeling of control and achievement back. In fact you will be surprised how quickly it seems to unlock the entire situation!

Thanks for reading!