How to eliminate overwhelm [VIDEO]

What the grocery store understands about overwhelm

The other day, I got a seed catalog in the mail-I love landscaping and planned on making a cut-flower garden this year. So when my seed catalogs arrived, I was so excited!

But as I quickly flipped past the pages of vegetables, I stopped for a moment on the page with carrots.

HOW ARE THERE SO MANY CARROTS??

I looked at pages on pages of carrots thinking “wow…I mainly look for orange and then choose whole or baby.”

The grocery store is the perfect examply of our mind’s filing system. And the people who develop a store’s offerings and layout learned a long time ago that if they break apart a category into too many sub-categories, customers will get overwhelmed, be unsuccessful in completing their task and have a negative brand experience.

Let’s talk about this a bit more:

What is overwhelm, exactly?

It’s our mind’s way of protecting us when we step outside of our comfort zones. When our unconscious mind observes that we’re doing new things, it may use overwhelm as a trigger to get us safely back into our comfort zone. Even if your comfort zone is self-sabotage or disappointment in yourself. 

Remember, your comfort zone is about what’s familiar to you...not, ironically, what’s comfortable 

The structure of overwhelm

Overwhelm has a structure to it and learning the structure of overwhelm helps us eliminate it. From an NLP perspective, Overwhelm is a result of either chunking down too far into too much detail or chunking up too high into too big of a picture. 

When we chunk up or down too far, we then take the energy we’d apply to a next step and we apply it to either the ENTIRE huge project (chunked up overwhelm) or to every single detail (chunked down overwhelm), making us feel like we need 10 times the energy we have available. 

This creates a sense of emotional overload or...overwhelm and we often end up giving up and shuffling ourselves back to our comfort zones.

How to hack your unconscious filing system to eliminate overwhelm:

So, let’s follow the grocery story idea and use that to help us eliminate overwhelm.

Step 1: identify the structure

Is your overwhelm from thinking too big or too detailed?

step 2: Chunk your thoughts in the opposite direction

If you’re overwhelmed because you’re thinking in too much detail and you need to create a sense of agreement or harmony in your mind, you’ll want to chunk up and you can use the questions: 

Questions to help you chunk UP

• What is this an example of? 

• For what purpose? 

• What is your/my intention…

Questions to help you chunk DOWN

If your overwhelm is due to having TOO big of a picture and you need to create some details or distinctions for your tasks to feel feasible, you can chunk down using these questions:

“What are examples of this…”
“What specifically?”

So, let’s apply this to 2 common instances:

Eliminating To-Do list overwhelm by chunking UP

Much like going to the grocery store to buy carrots and seeing 16 different kinds of carrots, looking at your to-do list and applying your energy to each item on your list creates...OVERWHELM!

So, Don’t look at your to-do list and apply energy to each item, but instead use this question to bring your energy up a level:
“What is this (my to-do list) an example of?”

A to-do list may be an example of: 

• A workday

• Hard work

• Productivity

• Dedication

Or something else in your mind. Pick the category that best describes what a to-do list is an example of for you and apply your energy to THAT. 

Chunk up until you feel the overwhelm is gone.

So, instead of applying all your energy to each item in your to-do list, you can apply it to pursuing your soul’s purpose, then apply it to today’s work, then down to the to-do list items. It should feel more like a trickle down effect instead of a tidal wave. 

Eliminate goal overwhelm by chunking down

Let’s say you have a money goal you’ve set for yourself. If you feel overwhelmed at the entire goal and think “oh my gosh, this is too big-I don’t know how I can do this!” Then eliminating that feeling of overwhelm will actually come from chunking down.

So, if your goal is to make a million dollars in a year, chunking down to bi-annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, or even daily amounts may help you find an amount of money that feels like a goal you can aim for. 

Bonus tip: choose that amount you feel good about-for the sake of illustration, let’s say the monthly breakdown of a million dollar year, which is roughly $84,000. Make the money until you’ve made the full $84k, then challenge yourself to make that amount of money in less time.

Maybe it takes you 6 months to make $84k. Once you’ve established that it takes you 6 months, challenge yourself to do it in 5. Continue collapsing the time until you accomplish your goal of making $84k in one month!

Then…repeat it!

What do you think? Does this help you eliminate overwhelm in your life?

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