Grounding yourself is crucial for combatting overwhelming feelings. It is easy to lose touch with reality when feeling overwhelmed. Everything starts feeling blurry and unreal. That is when grounding is especially important. Grounding yourself will give you the ability to calm down and get back in touch with reality.
There are a few ways to fight these feelings:
1. Take some time to yourself
Sometimes the simplest way to calm overwhelming feelings is to just take a second to yourself. Whether that means simply sitting alone in a bathroom stall at the office or at school for a few minutes or even sitting at your desk by yourself focusing on trying to relax and breathe.
Taking a few minutes to relax, take some deep breathes, and place your focus inward instead of on outer stressors can be all it takes to beat overwhelming feelings.
2. Prioritize
Intense feelings can often be linked to stress. When we get overly stressed we often start thinking about hundreds of tiny details and little things we have to get done and that can very rapidly spiral into feeling extremely overwhelmed.
By prioritizing these stressors and deciding what things are most important and which can be placed on the back burner for a while can quickly relieve stress. Every small thing does not have to get done immediately, and prioritizing can help clarify which things don’t need to be worried about.
Thinking about every single thing all at once is not productive and leads to feeling overwhelmed. Prioritizing things allows you to focus on one thing at a time.
3. Positive reminders
Often the thing we need most when feeling overwhelmed is simply for someone to tell us we are doing okay. We need positive reinforcements to remind us that the world is not crashing around us and remind us that we are doing a good job. The simplest, but sometimes hardest, way to get that reinforcement is to give it to ourselves.
You don’t need someone else telling you that you are doing great job—you can, and should, tell yourself. Waiting on someone else to praise you can be extremely unreliable. Instead, rely on yourself, your personal cheerleader, to remind you.
Why should you wait for someone else to encourage you when you can do it yourself? When you are overcome with overwhelming feelings, taking a minute to tell yourself that everything is okay and that you are doing well is a quick and easy way to relax yourself.
Feeling overwhelmed is common. It happens to everyone, all of the time. But it doesn’t have to be debilitating. There are many ways to combat those feelings and help yourself relax. And you can do them all without leaving your office and without having to wait for other people to calm you down. Just take a minute to yourself to breathe, prioritize your stressors, and remind yourself that you have things under control.
You’re always doing better than you think. Just relax and breathe.
