Have you ever woken up and felt like your whole world has fallen apart? The future you thought you were living has all of a sudden violently shifted direction and put you on a path that you never thought you would be on? The impact of COVID-19 on us as a society has changed us forever.
You feel like you don’t know who you are anymore, you don’t know what you are doing or whether what you are doing is right? The commitments to someone or something, the decisions that you made only months ago, have been forcibly changed and not by you?
Do you wake with a sense of overwhelm and anxiety before you have opened your eyes? Feelings of a vice around your chest and a breathlessness that keeps forcing you to yawn. Your mind goes into a rush of chatter like a run away train that you cannot seem to keep up with or catch? Questions fill your head like “how am I even going to get through today?” “how do I hide this overwhelm from my kids, friends, employees, team members when the bags under your eyes are so heavy that you look like you have been punched in the face a thousand times, how am I supposed to home school and work and parent and do everything else I need to do today?”
Everyday, full time working women and men everywhere around the globe are feeling the same thing for various reasons, yet are trying to not be seen as weak, incapable or ineffective in whatever roles they are playing in life.
Imagine going to your boss and saying…”John, my partner has walked out on me, I am filled with so much grief and loss that I am barely able to function, I need to take a couple of days to catch my breath and get back in form?”
Who would dare to do that, especially right now when the world is so unstable and there are so many other people out there looking for work. It is a sad truth for many of us, me included, in fact it is me right now! That is actually my story right now. The person I thought I would grow old with left me. I have been here before in my life with people and business, too many times to want to recall to be honest. It leaves me with such a feeling of dis-empowerment and failure. I feel stuck, thwarted and this is only playing more into my feelings of overwhelm and anxiousness.
What do you do and how do you even move through these feelings to get back to a place of equilibrium? How do you shift it enough to see through the pain and suffering and get clarity over what steps you need to take to regain control of yourself, your emotions and life? Can anyone relate?
I am with all of you all that can relate and I have been here so many times now that I feel like a guru at it, so I am sharing with you all now 4 of the strategies that I have learned over the many years that have truly worked for me in all these situations:
- Scream it out — in ancient eastern traditions, screaming out loud has been used to shift energy out of the body and bring feelings of relief. For me, I normally jump in my car and put on whatever music feels right as loud as you can and the scream and scream and scream until you have nothing left in you. Sometimes you may lose your voice for a while however that just means you don’t have to talk much to people!
- Move your body aggressively for 1 minute — aggressive movements such as punching a bed, hitting a bed with a tennis racket, burpees, a hill sprint or anything else, changes the way the brain functions and promotes the release of the feel good hormones. When these are released they negate the stress hormones and therefore have a calming effect on your mind and body. Go for longer than a minute if you need, however I have found that after I do this, I get a moment of clarity that allows me to see what actions I need to take to move me out of the pit.
- Cold showers — It is now scientifically proven that cold therapy reduces stress hormones in the body. Wim Hof, also known as IceMan has been talking about this for years, however it is only now that research has caught up. This is a real mental game as you body is more than capable of handling it, its the mind that thinks it can’t. Doing this everyday has made a huge difference to reducing the cortisol running through me, as it forces me to focus my mind on handling the cold, which takes the focus away from my feelings of anxiety. I start by having a normal shower and then slowly turn the water to cold before I hop out.
- Take a day when you need a day — Just do it, empower yourself to admit to yourself that you just cant give to anyone that day. Don’t try, just be. Of course, with kids to attend to that is something you will need to do, however everyone else that wants from you for the day can wait. Its OK to say “I am not OK today!”. You are not OK, which means you are not well, emotionally well. So saying that you are not well and wont be the best version of yourself is the truth. As a leader and a boss, I would much prefer to hear that from one of my team than to have them do a half job, make mistakes and spend the next day having to fix them. I speak from experience here, because only yesterday I did not have the courage to say that I was not OK and I ended up making 2 decent mistakes that I am now fixing today.
Finding a pathway out of overwhelm and anxiety when you feel like your world has been shattered is one of the hardest challenges we will ever face as women and human beings, however, if we can find the strength and courage to do small things like the above suggestions, we can move through it and wake one day in the future as a stronger, more resilient version of ourselves which everyone benefits from including YOU.
I have so many more techniques that counteract stress and anxiety in my latest book “Stuff Yoga, Learn to Scream: Hack your stress to find your calm”, I have also created a free stress hack webinar so simply drop your email in here and get access now, to hopefully help you through those tough times.
Nicxx
Photo by Yuris Alhumaydy on Unsplash