What do you do when you feel overwhelmed with work? How can you find joy again?

I found a few simple steps work for me. When you start feeling overwhelmed, it's your emotional senses telling you, "Listen, things are out of control, there's too much going on". And if you sit in that feeling of overwhelm and that negativity, it will become worse and worse, and the overwhelm will just make you less and less effective, until you stop moving forward.

So the first thing is, you've got to stop and you've got to breathe.

Just stop and just breathe and allow oxygen to flow back to your brain. Try to shift your mind from this panicked feeling, this overwhelmed feeling, to a calm place so your rational brain can start kicking in. Sometimes you need to take a walk to get that to happen (sometimes I go for a run), but you have to get out of that feeling of being overwhelmed first. Once you are calm, and maybe it's a while later, you come back.

Now it's time for you to say okay, why did I get overwhelmed in the first place? What is causing it? Now I'm in my rational brain, I can have creativity, I can have curiosity, and I can unpack it. So then I unpack all the different elements of what caused the overwhelm.

I can then work on those things productively. I can set out a schedule, I can make sure it doesn't happen again or, if it does happen, I know how to recover and go forward.

It's natural and normal to feel the negativity of the day-to-day. It's natural and normal to sometimes feel overwhelmed when stuff is just too much for us.

And it's simple, if you know the steps: to stop, to breathe, and then to be curious and unpack it and build a plan for you going forward. Because then, you know you'll grow forward.

If you don't feel overwhelmed from time to time, it may mean that you're not driving hard enough, you're not taking on enough challenges. So the overwhelm is actually a sign of growth, it's a positive thing, but it feels very negative in the moment.

Hopefully that's helpful. See you next week.