You may be taking on more responsibilities at work or school, juggling a busy schedule with social commitments, chores and getting your eight hours of sleep every night.
Maybe you’re prepping for finals or graduating soon, what with the rapidly arriving end-of-the-semester season, and now you’ve got yet another thing to worry about.
When everything starts piling up, every responsibility becomes a burden, and even the fun stuff might be done begrudgingly. When you enter a state of overwhelm, where everything is just too much, it’s easy to lose yourself under the weight of it all.
That’s when it’s most important to pause, step back, take a breath and work to reconnect with yourself. So let’s get into it.
Back to the Basics
Sometimes even the most basic daily habits are the hardest to maintain because they require consistency. It’s easy to lose that consistency during a period of focusing on a million other “more important” things.
When you feel disconnected from yourself and just all around “yucky,” try to ease yourself back into a reset by returning to daily healthy habits and routines.
Ways to get into those healthy habits and routines may involve getting morning sunlight to stabilize your circadian rhythm and get better sleep. Along with eating many colorful servings of vegetables and fruits, also remember to take your vitamins and medications, drink enough water, and brush and floss twice daily.
Rinsing off makeup and sunscreen buildup at the end of the day is also important, as is returning to daily physical movement, whether it’s gentle stretching or something fun like rock climbing.
Touching Grass
If you’re feeling mentally overloaded from spending hours upon hours online, whether it’s for school, work, or you’re just feeling cooped up and frozen in an endless cycle of doomscrolling, it’s time to log off!
If you’re struggling to disconnect from the internet, set boundaries with yourself. Implement time limits for social media apps using the Settings app, delete the app from your homepage to prevent easy access, or simply just delete the app entirely.
Something that helps me is keeping my phone in a drawer in another room, so I’m not compelled to seek it out.
Then, get outside and breathe in fresh air. Go for a walk, explore new places, or even just lounge around and soak up the sun without any online distractions.
Reconnect with the Old
In order to reconnect with yourself, you need to remind yourself what you consider to be “yourself.”
If “yourself” is your hobbies, for example, then in order to reconnect with yourself, you should reconnect with an old hobby. Perhaps you used to love baking, but in a flurry of exams and added work responsibilities, you haven’t touched the oven in months.
If “yourself” is who you love, then make an effort to reconnect with friends and family. Even just a quick text message or FaceTime phone call works, especially if you’ve been struggling to maintain your social life during the state of overwhelm.
Of course, it’s impossible to dilute “yourself” into just one or two dimensions. But I personally think this is a great place to start feeling like “yourself” again.
Now’s the time to try it all out again.
In with the New
If looking into the past for ideas isn’t your thing, try something new instead. Get experimental, in a big or small or even medium way.
For example, big things can be going on a road trip to a new place, starting a long-term creative project, or buying concert tickets.
Medium: join a new club or class, play tourist in your own city, or rearrange your room.
Small: listen to music in a new genre, take a different route to work, or try a new tea flavor.
The key here is to add variety, creativity, and novelty to your life. Being overwhelmed in one area of life can lead to stagnancy and confusion in other areas, so the important thing is to mix it up a little and look for a new spark.
Organizational Reset
A cluttered environment will only lead to a cluttered mind. It’s important to pay attention to how both your digital and physical environment are affecting your mental clarity.
Digitally, you can delete photos, emails, documents, and other files. Rearrange your desktop, delete open and unnecessary tabs and withdraw from any subscriptions you no longer need.
Physically, you can deep clean your room, discarding and donating things you don’t want anymore. Or even just start small by doing the laundry or making your bed up.
My Personal Favorites
For a mind-body reset, I love turning the lights low and doing a gentle yoga flow on my own. It helps me align my breathing with my movements, relax and refocus on emotional awareness and adaptability.
For a purely mental reset, I turn to journaling by hand, either doing a brain dump and stream-of-consciousness exercise or following a specific prompt. Journaling is great for introspecting and, like yoga, connecting with the self. It’s beneficial for building emotional intelligence and simply relieving stress.
You can even get creative and work on self-expression through arts and crafts, if you’ve been feeling creatively blocked due to overwhelm.
Try writing poetry or stories, or exploring fiber arts, claymaking, flower arranging, painting, dancing, singing, whatever suits your creative preferences at the time!
With midterms rapidly escalating into final projects, exams, and presentations, and the whirlwind of extra work that comes during the busy spring season, it’s understandable and easy to get overwhelmed.
How do you reconnect with yourself when you’re feeling overwhelmed? Let us know at @HerCampusSJSU!