Feeling Overwhelmed? 3 Frameworks To Help Your Anxiety & Regain Control
Everyone I talk to feels overwhelmed each December, but it doesn't have to feel that way.
Starting in mid-November, most people start to feel like they have too much to do, too many places to go, too much that needs to happen, and too little time and sleep to cover it all.
Our jobs want last minute things done before year-end.
We have gifts to buy for the people we love.
Our kids have themed days at school every day.
We need to coordinate when to see friends and family.
Decorations have to be hung.
And somewhere in all of it we need to be jolly all the time.
It's all becoming too much and we find ourselves overworked, overwhelmed, and wanting the festive season to just be over.
Fortunately, I've found a few frameworks that have helped me from people much smarter than me.
Framework 1: Focus On What You Can Control
Matthew 'Ollie' Ollerton, who is an author and former UK Special Forces, was on a podcast in 2021 and was asked, "Do you have a 30-second trick people can practice to increase their mental strength."
Ollie's advice? Write down everything you're worried about, cross out the things you can't control, and deal with the things you can.
The advice holds true for businesses owners and content creators too by taking it a step further. Put the things from your list you can't control on a separate list, draw an arrow, and find something you can control that influences the thing you can't. If you're worried about your audience not growing on social media (which you can't control), focus on how consistently you're showing up (which you can).
Whatever you're worried about, worrying about something you cannot control does nothing but increase your anxiety, so deal with what you can control instead.
Framework 2: Decide What You Care About
The holidays have so many different people pushing and prompting you to care about everything as much as they do, but you can't care about everything.
I think about it like you're a pitcher of water and tons of different, empty glasses are in front of you from yourself, friends, family, neighbors, and your job. You only have enough water to fill a few glasses fully, so your options are:
Try to fill every glass as much as you can.
Pick the glass that matters the most, fill it to the top, then if you have water left, repeat till you're out of water.
You can either barely care about everything or you can decide what matters to you, put everything into what you care about, and discard the rest.
Easy analogy, but more difficult when turning people down.
For me, I really care about spending time with my wife and daughters on Christmas Day, so I fill that cup up first. That might mean that I say no to getting together with other friends or family on that day, which is hard. But it's more important to say yes to my wife and daughters.
If you get stuck, try to reframe it in your head as you're fully saying "yes" to fewer things, rather than saying "no" to more things.
Framework 3: Urgent & Important
Ali Abdaal shared this framework and it has also helped me set what my priority is each day.
When you have a ton of things to do, Ali recommends drawing a 4-section grid, labeling the rows "important" and "unimportant", and labeling the columns "urgent" and "not urgent". What you end up with are these 4 boxes:
Important & Urgent
Important & Not Urgent
Unimportant & Urgent
Unimportant & Not Urgent
Take everything on your mind and put each item into one of the 4 boxes.
Start by crossing out everything in the Unimportant & Not Urgent box because it's taking up too much bandwidth. The Important & Urgent box is what you need to tackle today (or this week if it's a lot). Completely finish that box before moving to the final 2 with Urgent still taking priority.
The focus on both Important & Urgent is key so that you get some breathing room and knock out important things first.
What can be tough is the things in Unimportant & Not Urgent tend to be those shiny objects you want to distract yourself with, so stick to the plan.
Bonus: Combine All 3!
Each these frameworks works well on its own, but like many frameworks I share, they are better together.
You can list out everything on your mind, for those you can't control find a thing you can, and get a good master list. Then, go through and decide what you actually care about and want to give everything to and cross out what you are going to consciously skip. Finally, take your list actionable list you care about and triage it into the urgency grid to help you identify what to tackle first.
However you tackle your overwhelming list, let me know what is and isn't working for you!
