31/08/2026
This morning I was up early. I didn’t have work, but I did need to drop my youngest at work for 5am.
Back home I made myself a cuppa and thought about what I wanted/needed to get done today. So many ideas 💡 swirling round my head. I couldn’t work out which one should get priority.
I could feel that familiar sense of overwhelm starting to creep in; the thoughts that accompany it:
“if you were a better person you could do it all”,
“what’s wrong with you, why can’t you keep on top of everything?”,
“honestly you’re just lazy sitting there with a cuppa.”,
“why can’t you go on a bike ride, pay your bills, write an email, reply to a message, clean the house, sort the hedge out, run your business at the same time right this minute?”.
Thankfully with a lot of work and support I’ve learned to acknowledge these thoughts, acknowledge that they are just thoughts, not reality, and slow myself space to breathe.
I sat with my cuppa, and did a brain dump. This is where everything in you mental “got to get it done now or I’m failing” list, gets put on paper (or your notes in your phone), and gets them out of your head.
I drank some more tea, looked at the list and realised most of the stuff on it wasn’t stuff that could be or needed to be sorted right here right now in this moment, and therefore having it rattling round my head causing the sirens to go off wasn’t helpful.
So I gave myself permission to put them down. Interestingly one thing that never seems to make it into this list of urgency is self-care, “sit and drink your tea and take a moment” never appears as a sense of urgency or something important that needs attention, yet it was probably the single most useful thing I did.
Taking time to give myself space to see the bigger picture, space to breathe and to allow my nervous system to calm down was the single most effective way of managing this impossible list of tasks in my head.
Next time you feel that sense of urgency and panic, try taking 5 mins to breathe, write it all down, then look at that list as if it belonged to a friend. This helps with clarity on where to focus your energy and takes the urgency and panic down several notches ###