Apart from that precious “What day is it?” week between Boxing Day and New Year, there’s hardly a time of year that isn’t fraught. Yet somehow we persist in believing that in the near future, perhaps a month from now, we’ll be less frantic.
In reality, little changes. And now and then everything accumulates and we get that gut-churning feeling of life hurtling out of control. Most of us are familiar with that sensation of being overwhelmed — or “overwhelm”, it having been deservedly upgraded to a noun. But rather than helplessly snowball towards burnout, there’s a lot we can do to ease stress powerfully when it feels insurmountable.
Claudia Hammond, the award-winning writer and presenter of All in the Mind on BBC Radio 4, and visiting professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Sussex, knows that sense of it all feeling too much. “I am a burn-the-candle-at-both-ends person, I like socialising as well,” she says. Her friends were amused when she wrote a book on rest — “You never rest, you’re always doing everything,” they said. Now, though, she’s changed her ways, inspired by researching and writing her latest book, Overwhelmed: Ways to Take the Pressure Off.
Claudia Hammond
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“If I’m working at home I’ll always pop out to the garden for ten minutes to see what needs doing,” she says. “I used to feel guilty about that and now I don’t feel guilty at all. This is a protector of my mental health.” And while she concedes “I might be a bit of a perfectionist”, she adds: “I’m trying to not beat myself up if I make a mistake.”
Her book is full of neat, practical and psychological evidence-based strategies to help reduce the strain. Here are seven rules to live by this year.
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1. Write a detailed to-do list before bed
But accept that your to-do list will never be done. Hammond has multiple to-do lists — one, on her phone app, runs to a horrifying 93 items. But she wisely reframes this as evidence of a full life, not “a litany of oppressive demands”. She reveres rather than fears a detailed written list as it disburdens brain and memory. Scientists call this cognitive offloading.
Hammond cites a study by Michael Scullin, the director of the Sleep Neuroscience and Cognition Laboratory at Baylor University in Texas. He found that writing a to-do list before bed helped busy people fall asleep nine minutes faster than those who merely wrote down all they’d achieved that day. Those writing a longer to-do list — ten tasks or more — fell asleep 15 minutes sooner than those who made no list and six minutes faster than those who wrote a brief list. Scullin told Hammond that if you just think through the list, your brain realises this information is important and keeps “trying to refresh it in your head”. Write it down, she says, “and you don’t have to worry about remembering to do all those things”.
2. Start judging yourself as you would a friend
“Perfectionists often do very well as they try very hard,” Hammond says. But they put themselves, and often others, under immense pressure. “You can’t make a single mistake and must be absolutely brilliant — and brilliant at everything.”
Essentially perfectionism makes us feel “super competitive” and not good enough, she says — whether it’s self-imposed or expected of you by others. “If you’re a perfectionist and competitive and there are others around you who are also perfectionists then you can all end up competing. And then you can end up feeling you’ve failed,” she says. It drives insecurity and self-blame and is demotivating.
The perfectionist trait of being self-critical increases mental strain. Hammond suggests employing the check of “would I be this mean to a friend?” There are kinder ways to boost your chances of success, such as describing yourself as what you hope to be (within reason). This supports motivation, as shown by a study conducted during the 2008 US presidential election. People were asked either how they felt about “voting” or about “being a voter” — 95 per cent in the “noun” group went on to cast their vote, compared with 82 per cent in the “verb” group. “You can use that with other things,” Hammond says. “You can say ‘I’m a runner’ rather than ‘I go running’. You begin to see that as part of your identity.”
3. Use stress to your advantage
Embrace the fact that not all stress is bad for you. Hammond describes research that put people in the pulse-quickening position of giving a surprise talk. “Beforehand they got one group to say ‘I am excited’ and the other group ‘I am calm’.” The excited group’s talks were rated as more persuasive, competent and confident. “There is such a thing as being too relaxed if you’re trying to perform,” Hammond says. Our acute stress response equips us to deal with a perceived emergency. “It sends more blood to the brain, it also stops you being distracted — it sharpens your thinking so you’re focused.”
More evidence of the benefits of reframing stress symptoms as a challenge and not a threat were shown by another study at Harvard University. Volunteers had to give a speech, which was filmed, in front of po-faced evaluators, then do some mental arithmetic. Hammond reports that participants who knew about “how to reframe stress to their own advantage had increased cardiac efficiency and a more adaptive cardiovascular response” (their hearts were pounding but their blood vessels remained relaxed) than those told to ignore their stress. But what if we believe all stress, not just chronic stress, is debilitating? Hammond cites Stanford University research which found that a two-hour session on the pros and cons of stress shifted people towards having a more “stress is enhancing” mindset and coping better.
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4. Don’t allow others to make you feel emotionally invalidated
Cheer up. Don’t worry. It’ll all be fine. Has anyone ever trotted out these platitudes to you, meaning well but making you feel worse, Hammond asks. She cites a co-panellist at a science event: “It’s pressurising people to be dishonest about how they truly feel.” It’s encouraging us to suppress our negative emotions. Hammond quotes another co-panellist who had stage 3 bowel cancer but, partly for her children, pushed herself to go out to see friends. Comments such as “Look at you bouncing back!” made her feel ashamed and a failure for feeling dreadful when everyone wanted her to feel fine.
Minimising time with people who “emotionally invalidate” you is important. Hammond mentions research that shows that people who experience emotional invalidation persistently, especially as children, are more prone to chronic pain, eating disorders and depression. So take note, emotion-squashers — “cheer up” doesn’t help gloom or grief to pass.
We can help ourselves, though. When we are upset or tense, research shows that what is useful is being very specific about the emotion, Hammond says. “Are you feeling ‘miserable’ or ‘jaded’ or ‘rattled’ or ‘trapped’? Studies have found that naming emotions dampens down those brain responses.” Whereas, “If we just try to push those emotions away, we are almost emotionally invalidating ourselves.”
5. ‘Swallow the frog’
One item on Hammond’s mighty to-do list — making her will — sat there for more than two years. “I knew it was a good idea to do it, I wanted to do it,” she says, yet she still put it off. (The essence of procrastination is delaying a task despite knowing this could make it worse.)
She highlights a mic-drop insight from psychological research: “Procrastination is not essentially a time-management problem but an emotion-management problem.” Hammond didn’t want to think about her own death. We also procrastinate if we’re scared we’ll fail or make the wrong decision, she says. “You’re not procrastinating about emptying the washing machine.”
Research finds that we often procrastinate as a way to manage our feelings — “temporarily you feel better” — and that procrastinators are less skilled at regulating their emotions (for instance, calming themselves if they feel anxious) compared with those who complete their most dreaded tasks without hesitation, she reports.
How to get started? Hammond cites the wisdom of Brian Tracy, a motivational speaker who advocates “swallowing the frog” — that is doing the worst thing first — and starting your day with your priority task. Also, Hammond adds, “embrace the idea that there’s no gain without pain”. And the gain is you’re free of that mental burden.
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6. Don’t obsess over regrets
We hate loss twice as much as we enjoy a win, Hammond says. The explanation for this is thought to be evolutionary, that “if you’ve got some food, you need to keep hold of that food, and we’re very alert to losing it”. It’s the same with money. And regret is a feeling of loss for what might have been — which we’re prone to idealising despite, as Hammond notes, lacking “the counterfactual”. But regret can be valuable. “It’s useful,” Hammond says — but only if we learn from it and change our behaviour as a result. In Overwhelmed, she quotes Daniel Pink, the author of The Power of Regret — “It clarifies. It instructs.” I’m reminded of Doctor Foster who went to Gloucester. (He stepped in a puddle right up to his middle — and never went there again.) Finding an “at least” — rather than fixating on a “what if” — makes all the difference, Hammond says. It’s why many Olympic bronze medallists look happier in video clips than silver medallists.
7. When you’re really busy, take a break
We don’t value rest enough, Hammond believes, no layabout herself. But if you’re busy, you’re more likely to complete your tasks successfully if you take a breather — you might just stretch, scroll, snack, doodle or lean back and shut your eyes.
Never letting up risks fatigue, which leads to poor concentration, memory and judgment, and ultimately, overwhelm. Taking more breaks reduces stress and anxiety and boosts productivity, creativity, even memory. Particularly helpful, Hammond says, is doing something that doesn’t demand much attention: “All the things we weren’t allowed to do at school — staring out of a window, allowing your mind to wander, if you’re not ruminating about negative things, can be really beneficial.”
She cites research from the US that found that to restore vigour and concentration, a break of five or nine minutes was better than 60 seconds, but “even a single minute, sometimes referred to as a micro-break, had an impact”. Though it’s worth trying for two: Hammond cites a South Korean study that found that two-minute micro-breaks can have a “significant restorative effect”. Not only was the concentration of participants enhanced when they returned to work, at the end of the day their mood was better too — a double win.