Feeling Overwhelmed? 5 Steps to Organise Your Thoughts

In this day and age, it is increasingly easy for us to feel stressed and overwhelmed. Especially with the fast paced lifestyle technology has presented us, we are likely to find ourselves plagued with information overload.

This could cause us to feel tired, swamped or even helpless. So if you find that you need some handy tips to help you organise your thoughts amidst all this chaos, here is the article for you!

For those who prefer to watch instead of read, click play on the video above!

“The most fundamental principle of the organised mind is to shift the burden of organising our brains to the external world.” - Daniel Levitin, The Organised Mind

If you’re overwhelmed by a flurry of thoughts and ideas, the best way to keep track of them is by taking it all out of your head. Try organising your thoughts on paper so that you can start to declutter!

After all, our brain can store a lot of information but it’s not always the best at retrieving it. More often that not, the information comes out distorted or even in pieces!

So by keeping all this information externally, we can not only unload the data in our brain, we can even free up more space to process things of priority, and have something visual to refer to.

If you’re wondering about how you can transfer the information from your head onto paper, you could try using the Eisenhower Matrix method. The way this method works is through categorizing your activities into four quadrants of: Do, Decide, Delegate, and Eliminate.

By having it visually reflected to you, you can have a better idea of what is deserving of your attention. Alongside that, you can also use our Planner, which has spaces for each day so that you can organise your day to day and overall priorities!

You’d be surprised at how large of a space decision-making takes up in our lives. In fact, we’re constantly making decisions whether we are conscious of it or not.

Hence, it makes more sense to create an automated decision-making system that will help you manage the flood of information in your head.

That way, you can eliminate the time taken to process the small matters in life thus, alleviating any unnecessary stress. Try creating a decision-making tree to help streamline your thought process.

Here are some prompts to get you started!

• What decisions are considered important to you?

• Which details are unnecessary?

• What shortcuts and ways can you implement to simplify your decision-making process?

Have you ever been in the middle of something only to find yourself picking up your phone to distract yourself?

If you think that multitasking works for you, make sure that it’s productive! More often than not, the reality is that our brains can only do so much at a time so by constantly switching between tasks, it can really be counterproductive!

In general, our brain would prefer to work on one thing at a time so do try avoiding working on several things at once. It can tire you out and cause you to waste more valuable time that you could use for something else!

You can start by putting your phone on silent mode or try creating 25 minute blocks of uninterrupted time to concentrate on what you want to complete.

When you’ve worked on something for the longest time and you’ve reached a point where you don’t see an end to it, it’s okay to step away from it. By giving yourself permission to do nothing, you’re also giving your brain time to rest.

The current climate now is always to go, go, go but it’s okay to take some time off as well. Don’t busy yourself to the point that you feel like you haven’t progressed at all!

Breathe, take a walk, and come back to your work with a new set of fresh eyes! It’s really as simple as that!

We hope this little write up has convinced you that it’s completely normal to be overwhelmed! Things go so fast these days that it’s almost hard to find those that aren’t affected at all.

So we hope these tips can help you come out of this as someone who knows how to face these challenges better.

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What are some things you do to cope when you feel overwhelmed? Let us know in the comments below or DM us @mosseryco on Instagram!

Thank you to @moodoodles for collaborating with us on the video!