Hi friends and happy Monday! I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. We bought Arabella a pool this weekend and she absolutely loved it. We had so much fun just sitting in our driveway, watching her splash around and soak up the beautiful weather. It really felt like summer and I have a feeling we will be doing a lot of more of those types of weekends moving forward.
Today I wanted to talk about a concept that I actually heard about on a podcast (Episode 657 of the Goal Digger Podcast), but that I feel has really changed the game in dealing with the feelings of overwhelm, stress, and, anxiety a busy workweek can bring. Tina Wells discusses this concept, and after hearing her discuss this various other topics on this podcast, it’s clear I definitely need to read her book The Elevation Approach, but anyways….let’s get back to it.
Tina’s suggestion is that when you are feeling really overwhelmed or anxious with your home or space, or even just life in general, she suggested looking at it by asking yourself what is one thing I can do that will make me feel a little bit better in this moment. Sort of like, okay you have 6,000 things to do or that are asking for your attention, but instead of looking at all of it, what is one thing (the simpler the better) that you can do to help make you feel better. She gives the example in the podcast of maybe in your home, it is simply just cleaning your counter top off. Sometimes just the simple act of having a clean counter can make you feel loads better because you aren’t looking at a whole bunch of stuff strewn across it given many times our countertops are spaces that tend to be dumping grounds for anything and everything.
I like to take this concept even a bit further and utilize it in all capacities…many times we have a to do list a mile long and truthfully I feel like my to do list can sometimes paralyze me because it is so lengthy and overwhelming. This spurs anxiety in me and something that helped me to understand my personal anxiety a bit was that many times anxiety is felt due to the emotions felt with not wanting to do something. It was described to me as an emotion that results from the lack of inaction, so in order to ease anxiety, the best step is to TAKE ACTION. Now, I don’t think this applies to all anxiety by any means, but for me personally, the majority of the time when I would feel anxiety would be when I felt overwhelmed (by all the things), so in order to ease that overwhelm…I needed to take action. Which is why I love this concept so much.
Sometimes, the best step is taking action. But that doesn’t mean we have to tackle the hardest thing first or the most cumbersome. Instead, I like to combine these two concepts and say tackle whatever will ease your overwhelm the most, but choose something that won’t take you an hour. Choose something that will take you 5 minutes or 20 minutes maybe, like cleaning the countertops or picking up the toys, then, see how you feel. If you have more time, do more. But maybe all you needed was just the kickstart to get going, or maybe just cleaning the countertops made you feel better, which is awesome.
My last little tid-bit to add to this is if all else fails, set a timer for 20 minutes and just see what you can get done in that time. I use this method ALL THE TIME and it is amazing how much I can get done with 20 minutes. Not to mention, I can easily carve out 20 minutes in my day and/or it’s something I can do before going to bed even when I am beyond done and drained from the day.
Just remember, our goal is to always get back to that place of peace…that place where we can enJOY and live life. I like to encourage you to always absorb this information in the fashion of: take what works for me, my personality, my family, and LEAVE THE REST. Maybe there is one nugget in here that is helpful, or maybe for you, none of this is helpful and that is okay too. If that is you, I would love to know what works for you because we are all so different and have all gained so many pieces of advice and lessons along the way.
Have a beautiful day, friends!
xoxo,
Melissa
