Home » Happiness » Page 4

Tag: Happiness

how-to-find-more-than-24-hours-in-a-day-christine-carter

How to Find More Than 24 Hours in a Day

 

Find the minimum effective dose — of everything.

The “minimum effective dose” (MED) is considered to be the lowest dose of a pharmaceutical product that spurs a clinically significant change in health or well-being. In order to live and work from my sweet spot, I had to find the MED in everything in my life: sleep, meditation, blogging frequency, checking my email, school volunteering, homework help, date nights.

We have a deep-seated conviction that more work, more enrichment activities for the kids, more likes on Facebook or Instagram, more stuff would be better. Unless we like feeling exhausted and overwhelmed, we need to accept that more is not necessarily better and that our go-go-go culture, left unchecked, will push us not only beyond our MED — but Gain an Extra Day Each Week eBook Cover - ChristineCarter.combeyond the “maximum tolerated dose,” the level at which an activity (or drug) becomes toxic and starts causing an adverse reaction.

Take Action: The first step in dialing back the busyness of everyday life is to figure out your minimum effective dose of everything. Ignore what other people think and assume and demand of your time. Figure out how much time you actually need to spend on your email, going to meetings, driving your kids to their activities, etc. in order to be effective at home and at work. If you think you’ll need help with this, download one of my most popular eBooks to date, “How to Gain an Extra Day Each Week.

Join the Discussion: What activity have YOU found the MED for that surprised you? Your story will help others have the courage to dial back their own busyness.

This is What I Hope I’ve Taught You

My baby Fiona giving her 8th grade commencement talk. (A reminder to me that she’s got this thing — she gave better advice to her friends at graduation than I provide in this article.

 

My daughter, Fiona, leaves for school this week. I’m happy and excited for her—and also broken up about it. Although it was always the plan for our kids to grow up and move away, this week, like so many parents who have a child going off to school, I’m consumed by grief.*

I’ve done my best to teach my kids everything I know about finding happiness and fulfillment in life, but who knows when they are really listening? Just in case she missed something, here is a list of the principles I hope Fiona takes with her to school.

1. Make kindness the central theme of your life. Look for opportunities to show compassion and generosity. Don’t be tricked into thinking that happiness will come from getting what you want; happiness comes from giving, not getting. When you’re feeling down, help someone else.

2. Tolerate discomfort. Have the difficult conversations. Let yourself truly notice when other people are suffering. Do the right thing even when the right thing is hard. You are strong enough.

3. Live with total integrity. Be transparent, honest, and authentic. Do not ever waiver from this; white lies and false smiles quickly snowball into a life lived out of alignment. It is better to be yourself and risk having people not like you than to suffer the stress and tension that comes from pretending to be someone you’re not, or professing to like something that you don’t. I promise you: Pretending will rob you of joy.

4. Let go of what other people think of you. Another person’s opinion of you is their business, not yours. Great leaders are often criticized. Especially ignore critics who seem delighted when you stumble.

5. Invite constructive criticism from the people who want the best for you. Other people offer us a different view; we need their broader perspective to grow and improve.

6. Accept that well-meaning and loving people will sometimes give you bad advice. You’ll know when something isn’t right for you because you’ll feel it in your body. Our unconscious mind is our best source of intelligence, but it communicates through intuition and bodily sensations, not words. Learn how to read your “body compass.”

7. Know the difference between legitimate and not-helpful fear. Legitimate fear, like terror in the presence of a dangerous person, makes us want to get the heck out of whatever situation we are in. When you feel legitimate fear, run like the wind. Not-helpful fear, on the other hand, makes ushesitate rather than bolt. (Like when we are afraid of looking stupid and so don’t ask an important question.) Ignore your hesitation. As Maria Shriver wrote in And One More Thing Before You Go, often “anxiety is a glimpse of your own daring … Whatever you’re afraid of–that is the very thing you should try to do.”

8. Your relationships with your family and closest friends are always more important than any achievement. Prioritize accordingly.

9. When you hurt someone, apologize. Even if you didn’t intend to hurt that person, or you think they are over-reacting.

10. Look people in the eye. Chat with people in elevators and in line at the store. Look up. Smile.

11. Develop a strong handshake. Try to connect with people in your first interaction, to make them feel your delight in them (even if you are scared to death).

12. Hug people liberally. Even people you’ve just met. People are stressed. They need more love. Don’t withhold it.

13. Don’t compare yourself to others. When we get caught in a web of thinking that we are better or worse than others, we usually end up depressed, anxious, and insecure. If you notice that you are comparing yourself to others, try asking yourself these questions: What do I appreciate about those people? How can I connect with or learn from them? How can I add value to their lives?

14. Develop good habits; you won’t need so much willpower that way.

15. Don’t wear uncomfortable shoes, even if everyone else is doing it. High heels are the cigarettes of the future; they are bad for your health and they get you in the habit of ignoring pain in order to look good to others, which is never a good idea.

16. Let yourself feel what you feel. When we feel stressed out (or sad, or disappointed), we live in a world that offers many ways to numb those negative feelings–to not really feel them. But to honestly feel the positive things in life—to truly feel love, or joy, or profound gratitude—we must also let ourselves feel fear, and grief, and frustration. Your emotions are how your heart talks to you, how it tells you what choices to make. Practice listening to your heart. This is the way to know who you are and what you want.

17. Train your brain to see the positive in your life by keeping a gratitude journal.

18. Don’t believe everything you think. If a thought is stressing you out, it is probably untrue.

19. If you feel overwhelmed, unplug. Create times and places in your life every single day where you are free from technology.

20. Make your bed, and keep your room clean. The state of your bed is the state of your head. The outside tends to match the inside.

21. Know when and how to say “no.” That way, you’ll feel more joy when you say “yes.”

22. Chase meaning, not happiness. What purpose or value does your work and your passion have for other people? If you don’t know, find out.

23. Focus on the journey, not the achievement. Instead of wishing you were somewhere else, or saving your happiness for when you get where you are going, enjoy where you are. Right now. You are always already right where you need to be.

24. Remember that talents are actually skills. Talent” comes from hard work, passion, and great coaching or teaching.

25. Give people the benefit of the doubt. When someone does something hurtful or annoying, consider the idea that it isn’t about you. Practice compassion and empathy by putting yourself in the shoes of others.

26. Make mistakes. In the classroom, in your relationships, on the athletic field, at parties, at home. We learn stuff from our mistakes that we couldn’t learn any other way.

27. When you make a mistake, don’t beat yourself up about it. Self-criticism makes us depressed, and much more likely to make the same mistake again. Instead, remind yourself that mistakes make us human. Feel compassion for your suffering. It can feel really awful to make a mistake. It’s okay to feel awful–to feel frustrated, embarrassed, guilty, disappointed, etc. You can handle these feelings.

28. Repair your mistakes. Use them to become a better person.

29. Love what is. Wishing to be older or younger, wanting other people to be different than they are, wanting it to be sunny when it is raining–this is fighting with reality, and it is a futile and frustrating pastime.

30. If you are tired, rest. Working 24/7 will get you nowhere fast. (Trust me, I’ve tried this.)

31. Remind yourself that more is not necessarily better. Do this especially if you are worried that you won’t have enough of something, if you feel like you don’t have as much as others, or if you are feeling ungenerous with your belongings or your time. Many of your peers will spend their time striving for more: more money, more likes on Instagram, more clothes, more popular or important friends, more prestigious schools. But as they accumulate more, odds are, they’ll just want more! True abundance is not a quantity of something; it is a quality of life, a feeling of sufficiency. When we step back from the idea that more might be better, often we see that we have enough to share.

32. Surround yourself with people and situations that make you laugh uncontrollably. Laughteris heaven on earth.

* Fiona is going to boarding school for 9th grade. This is at once terrible and wonderful. Even though I went to the high school she’ll be attending (The Thacher School), and I’ve served on its board for nine years, I’m really having some hesitations about all this going away business. But then I remember: I had an incredible experience at Thacher that I would never dream of depriving Fiona of, especially just to satisfy my own selfish desire to keep her home. Still.

Fail at Your New Year’s Resolution

2657846618_bd0b518e73_b
Photo by Avern

This week is an important one for people who made New Year’s resolutions (I hope that’s you)! If you can keep your resolution for the rest of the week, you’ll be much more likely to end the year having kept it, too.

When starting a new habit, it can be frustrating to fail. But failing is also essential to the process of creating a habit that sticks. Unless you are some sort of superhero, you will not be able to get into a new habit perfectly the first time. You’ll trip and fall and royally screw up. And then you’ll have the opportunity to learn something from your failure that you probably couldn’t have learned any other way.

Faltering is a normal part of the process. It doesn’t matter if you have a lapse, or even a relapse, but it matters how you respond. If you’ve had a slip, don’t get too emotional or succumb to self-criticism.

Take Action:  If you’ve started faltering with your resolution, the first thing to do is forgive yourself. Remember: lapses are a part of the process, and feeling guilty or bad about your behavior will not increase your future success. Make a plan for the next time you face a challenge similar to the one that caused your lapse. What will you do differently? What have you learned? What temptation did you face that you can remove? Is there something that you need to tweak? Were you stressed or tired or hungry — and if so, how can you prevent that the next time?

Join The Discussion: Tell us about your lapses in the comments. Be sure to ALSO tell us how you’ve gotten back on track.

Need more structure? If you want more support in making a change like this one, please sign up for my free online class. You’ll get a worksheet and an email everyday for 21 days that will give you more help establishing good habits like this one.

 

The Sweet Spot Manifesto - Christine Carter

Happiness Tip: Find a Manifesto (Free Download)

Before I wrote The Sweet Spot, I needed a manifesto — something to organize my passion for the project. I started keeping lists of phrases and pieces of advice that captured my thoughts. When I was done writing the book, it was fun to go back and look at all the little lists and edit them down into this manifesto. I hope you are inspired to download the beautiful printable version my publisher created.

If this manifesto doesn’t do it for you, find one that does! Or create your own. Having go-to sources for inspiration and motivation can guide us towards those thoughts and behaviors that bring us the most meaning, fulfillment, and satisfaction.

The Sweet Spot Manifesto

Life might be short, or it might be long. Either way, better to enjoy it.
If you are tired, rest.
If you can’t solve a problem, take a walk.
If you feel overwhelmed, stop checking your phone.
Forgive yourself, again.
Focus on the journey, not the achievement.
More is not necessarily better.
Learn to apologize.
Repair your mistakes.
Let yourself feel what you feel.
Smile at the barista.
Chat with folks on the train.
Chase meaning, not happiness.
Look for opportunities to show compassion and generosity.
Develop good habits; you won’t need so much willpower that way.
Consider that your worry isn’t legitimate.
Say no strategically.
Say yes with abandon.
Accept that you’re divergent. Go with it.
Embrace the better-than-nothing plan.
Remember when you’ve been brave before.
Understand that happiness is only the cart; love is the horse.

Click here to download your own printable Sweet Spot Manifesto. 

Photo courtesy of Jon Jordan.

Happiness Tip: Stop Checking Your Freaking Phone

4323860889_dde94023ed_b

Photo by Andres Rodriguez

I would love some help figuring out a tiny habit to help me unplug from my phone. It’s the first thing I reach for in the morning, when I’m stopped at red lights, when I get home from work–my brain has become used to checking my email, text messages, facebook, playing plants vs. zombies constantly. It’s hard because I use my phone for so many things throughout the day (except of course as a phone!), so it’s constant presence makes it hard to forget it’s there at the times that I’m not really using it. Any ideas?”

–Pamela

Pamela, you’ve got a great goal for the New Year. Two new studies support your sense that you will be happier (and less stressed) if you check your phone less. A study of college students at Kent State University found that people who check their phones frequently tend to experience higher levels of distress during their leisure time (when they intend to relax!).

In another study, Elizabeth Dunn and Kostadin Kushlev regulated how frequently participants checked their email throughout the day. Those aiming to reduce their email checking to only three times a day (vs. an average of 15 times) were less tense and less stressed overall.

Unfortunately, it usually doesn’t work to just will ourselves to stop a compulsive behavior. We check our phones and our email because it provides us with what researchers call “variable-ratio” reinforcement–once in a while we get an email or message that is particularly rewarding, and that once in a while is enough to keep us checking compulsively. (Slot machines also provide variable-ratio rewards.)

Instead of willing ourselves to just check less often, we can configure our devices and work time so that we are tempted less often. The goal is to check email, social media, and messages on your phone just a few times a day–intentionally, not impulsively. Our devices are thus returned to their status as tools we use strategically— not slot machines that randomly demand our energy and attention.

Take Action. Here’s a plan to lower your stress and tension:

1. Make a strategic decision about when you will check your email and messages. I check my email quickly before work to delete or unsubscribe from junk and respond to anything urgent. I respond to everything else in my work email at 3:00pm and my home email at 7:45pm. I actually block this time out on my calendar as a recurring task, and then move it around as necessary — that way I check strategically, not impulsively. I look at (and maybe post to) social media once in the morning before work, if I have time, and then I close it for the day. I respond to texts and voicemails once mid-morning and once mid-afternoon (between calls and meetings).

2. Tell your family and colleagues that you are establishing a strategic checking schedule. Worried that people will see you as unresponsive or slacking at work? Leslie Perlow’s research indicates otherwise; in fact, your colleagues will likely notice your increased productivity and see you as more collaborative, efficient, and effective when you reduce constant phone and email monitoring.

3. Remove distractions. Set your mobile devices to automatically go into sleep mode an hour before you go to bed until your first pre-determined checking time. Consider removing email from your phone, or at least moving it to a back “page” of apps, so that you don’t see it if you are turning off your alarm or using another app. I think of this as hiding the Halloween candy: If you wanted to eat less candy, you wouldn’t put a bowl of it on your bedside table, bathroom counter, kitchen table, dashboard, and desk at work–right? So don’t do that with the slot machine that is your smartphone. While you are on your computer working (or in the car driving), keep your email program closed. Turn all notifications off. Put your phone in sleep mode. This may seem drastic, but trust me. Your life is about to get way better.

4. Focus on other things. Now, do your most important work or something that brings you peace, or joy. Replace checking your smartphone constantly with something better. I set reminders for two-minute relaxation breaks three times a day, when I take a dozen deep breaths (breathing in for 5 seconds, and out for 5 seconds). This triggers my vagus nerve, inducing a feeling of calm, and reversing the ill-effects of stress.

5. Savor the benefits of this effort. You will likely start sleeping better. You’ll be more focused, productive, and efficient at work. You’ll have a heck of a lot more time to do the things that really matter in your life, things that bring lasting happiness. But none of those benefits really matter unless you take the time to enjoy them. Studies by Fred Bryant suggest that by consciously and deliberately savoring positive events in our life, we can increase the amount of happiness we derive from them in the short and long run. So enjoy being less stressed and less tense–relish your new life.

Join the Discussion: What do you struggle with the most in trying not to check your phone and email constantly? What has worked best for you in creating a strategic checking schedule? If you need help, post a comment here.

Need more structure? This is a pretty hardcore Happiness Tip (usually they are much less dramatic.) If you want more support in making a change like this one, please sign up for my free online class. You’ll get a worksheet and an email everyday for 21 days that will give you more help establishing good habits like this one.

Happiness Tip: Make a Really Specific Plan

3605270661_af21c45390_b

Photo by Carrie Eberhardt

If you are setting New Year’s resolutions this year, whether or not you are able to keep your resolutions will depend on how detailed a plan you make for your new behavior.

A large meta-analysis of eighty-five studies found that when people make a specific plan for what they’d like to do or change, anticipating obstacles if possible, they do better than 74 percent of people who don’t make a specific plan for the same task. In other words, making a specific action plan dramatically increases the odds that you’ll follow through.

Take Action: Take a minute to write down a specific plan for your resolution. What exactly will you do?

Join the Discussion: What do you find most challenging about starting a resolution or habit? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Need support for your resolutions? Be sure to sign up for my free online class — you’ll get a worksheet and an email every day for 21 days that will support you in keeping your New Year’s resolutions.

 

establish-a-tiny-habit-christine-carter

Happiness Tip: Establish a Tiny Habit

Do you have resolutions you’d like to make this week?

Maybe you’d like to read or workout more, or remember to call your mom on Mondays. My best advice is to start by picking just one ridiculously easy habit to work on. Start with what Stanford habit researcher BJ Fogg calls a “tiny habit.” The reason that I want you to think small is that deliberate habit formation is a skill. Starting with a tiny habit is like learning to dog paddle before you learn the breast stroke.

Here are some of Fogg’s suggestions for tiny habits:

“After I pour my morning coffee, I will text my mom.”

“After I start the dishwasher, I will read one sentence from a book.”

“After I walk in my front door from work, I will get out my workout clothes.”

I know, I know: tiny habits seem so tiny. By necessity, they need to be ridiculously easy, and this makes them feel trivial and unimportant. But tiny habits are about skill building, and about inching your way towards the bigger resolutions you made in the year.

Take Action: Pick something small, like taking a daily vitamin, or flossing just one tooth (that’s BJ Fogg’s suggested starter habit) — anything that takes less than 30 seconds, requires little physical effort, little money, and doesn’t require that you go against a social norm (like flossing in the public bathroom). It should take little time, but not require that you time yourself (e.g., floss my teeth for 30 seconds), because timing yourself is a hassle. This tiny habit needs to be something that you do at least once a day — no exceptions.

Join the Discussion: What’s your tiny habit going to be? List it here and I will help you format it correctly.

The 3 Most Important Things for Keeping Resolutions - Christine Carter

The 3 Most Important Things for Keeping Resolutions

Don’t join this failing 50% in the new year!

Instead, follow these three research-based strategies for making resolutions that stick:

1. Make your resolution a habit, not a goal.

Your goals for 2015 might include losing 10 pounds, or totally clearing your house of clutter, or finding a new job. All of these might be goals worth setting, and they all involve a lot of different behaviors–and, therefore, a lot of opportunities for failure.

Simple behaviors that can become habits that automatically help you achieve your goals make better resolutions than grandiose goals. For example, resolve to eat an apple every afternoon instead of a cookie, or spend 10 minutes each weeknight before bed cleaning out a shelf or a drawer, or send one networking email every morning before you leave for work.

For something to become a habit, there needs to be something else that triggers the new behavior–a regular, uniform stimulus that tells you its time to perform this behavior. My morning meditation is triggered by my alarm going off at about the same time every day.

If you have a habit in mind that you don’t want to do every day, choose a trigger that occurs only occasionally–ie, at the times when you want to perform that new behavior regularly down the line. For example, “Do a 30-minute yoga video twice a week” isn’t a habit. It’s a to-do item for your task list because there’s no clear trigger, and therefore no clear way to make it a routine for you. If you want to squeeze that twice-weekly yoga into your schedule, a better approach would be to say, “I’ll pop in my 30-minute yoga video after dropping the kids off at soccer practice on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.”

2. Bake a reward into the actual behavior, rather than holding out until you’ve achieved some far-off goal.

We human beings may say that we are pursuing happiness, but really what we tend to pursue is reward. Anything that we might desire could count as a reward: a cashmere sweater, a pretty little cupcake, attention from a mentor, a sense of accomplishment, some affection from a loved one.

When our brains identify a potential reward, they release dopamine, a feel-good chemical messenger. That dopamine rush motivates us toward the reward, creating a real sense of craving, wanting, or desire for the carrot that is being dangled in front of us.

Fortunately, we can make dopamine work for us rather than against us as we build our habits. To get into a good habit, you’ll need a really satisfying reward–ideally one that’s immediate or, even better, intrinsic to a routine.

We can do this by making the activities themselves more rewarding — more fun. This is what I did when I switched my silent, sitting meditation (a very serious, long vipassana — like eating kale for the mind) to meditating along with a Deepak Chopra recording (short, inspiring, and easy — like an iceberg wedge salad with bacon and blue cheese). I was getting a lot out of the longer vipassana meditations when I did them, but I wasn’t meditating regularly. Just as any salad is better than a diet without greens, I decided that at this stage in the game, any meditation is better than none. It might not be a sure road to enlightenment, but it’s closer than hitting snooze in the morning.

I’m also a huge fan of the “Yay me!” reward, which I learned from B.J. Foggat Stanford. Even something as small as a short mental victory dance can trigger a little hit of dopamine, enough to tell your brain to repeat whatever you just did. So when I hear my alarm and sit up in bed, I congratulate myself. If you heard my running internal commentary, you’d think I was utterly crazy, what with the constant “Yay me! I did it again!” self-talk. But it works!

3. Prepare for failure.

Unless you are some sort of superhero, you will not be able to get into this new habit perfectly the first time. You’ll trip and fall and royally screw up. Research indicates that 88 percent of people have failed to keep a new resolution. In my experience as a human being and a coach, 100 percent of people starting a new habit lapse at some point. Faltering is a normal part of the process. It doesn’t matter if you have a lapse, or even a relapse, as much as it matters how you respond to that lapse.

So take a minute to think about what tools you need to embark on your new habit. What obstacles will you likely face? People who plan for how they’re going to react to different obstacles tend to be able to meet their goals more successfully. For example, research suggests that recovery from hip-replacement surgery depends in large part on having patients think through obstacles to their recovery and then make a specific plan for how they will deal with those obstacles.

What obstacles can you predict and plan for? Don’t forget to include the people in your life who (often unintentionally) throw up roadblocks. For example, my husband was not a fan of my morning exercise routine when he noticed how early I was going to bed, and I was successful only when I planned out how I’d respond to his attempts to convince me to stay up later with him.

In his fantastic book The Marshmallow Test, the celebrated psychologist Walter Mischel gives what I think is his best advice for responding to challenges: make an “implementation plan.” First, identify the “hot spots that trigger the impulsive reactions you want to control,” like your alarm going off while it is still dark, or seeing your favorite hot wings on the menu. Then, decide what you will do when the trigger goes off, phrasing your behavior plan in simple, “If-Then” terms. For example: “If my alarm goes off and I want to press snooze, I will immediately get out of bed and walk to the bathroom.” Or: “If I see hot wings on the menu and feel the urge to order them, I will immediately choose a salad to order instead.” This strategy may seem too simplistic to work, but lots of research proves it to be, as Mischel writes, “astonishingly effective.”

Finally, even with the best laid plans, lapses are still going to happen–probably over and over again. In those cases, what’s important is that you don’t beat yourself up for your lack of willpower but instead try to practice “self-compassion.” When we practice self-compassion, we recognize that everyone makes mistakes and falls short of their expectations for themselves at one time or another–in fact, our shortcomings are what bind us to the rest of our fellow humans. Pioneering research by Kristin Neff, of the University of Texas, has found that when people treat themselves with self-compassion–that is, they extend to themselves the same kind of understanding and kindness that they would show a friend who makes a mistake–they are actually more likely to bounce back from a failure and stay on track to meet their goals.

Enjoy Every Sandwich - Christine Carter

Happiness Tip: Enjoy Every Sandwich

Imagine you’ve just been told that you have less than six months to live.

  • What do you need to do? 
  • Who do you need to talk to? 
  • Where do you need to visit? 
  • How will you spend your remaining time? 

These are all questions that Lee Lipsenthal, author of Enjoy Every Sandwich, asked me and some friends after he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer. As he led us through a visualization of our own deaths, I felt my life slow way down. All the hustle and busy-ness no longer seemed very important.

My life, and everything wonderful about it, was put into stark perspective. I felt deep gratitude where only moments before, I’d felt stressed and exhausted. Sometimes we get trapped in a way of thinking that curbs our happiness; often a dramatic change in perspective can help. Lee wrote:

Some cures require a radical intervention of the soul: a change in our mindset and our way of being. These cures require us to stop racing through our busy lives, working, providing, and consuming. Some cures require that we stop and enjoy every sandwich.

Are the holidays starting to exhaust you? If so, try radically shifting your perspective.

Take Action: What if this was your last holiday season? Who would you spend your time with? What would you be sure to really savor?

Join the Discussion: What will you do today to “enjoy every sandwich”? Inspire others in the comments below.

If this Happiness Tip intrigues or inspires you, I think you’d like my new book, The Sweet Spot: How to Find Your Groove at Home and WorkYou might also like my manifesto for enjoying life more — read it, or download it free here.

Photo courtesy of Adrian Dressler.

 

Happiness Tip: 9 Ways to Ease Overwhelm

A lot of my new book is about easing the overwhelm that comes from the busy world we live in. Here are 9 of my favorite ways:

  1. Make your bed. There is something true about the adage that the state of your bed is the state of your head.
    .
  2. Set your phone to automatically go into silent mode an hour before your bedtime. Enjoy the peace and quiet.
    .
  3. Develop a way to “give good no.” As in: “Thank you so much for asking, but that isn’t going to work out for me right now.”
    .
  4. Turn off your TV unless you intend to watch something specific. Never watch commercials — record your show and skip through them.
    .
  5. Eat at least one meal a day without doing anything else at the same time. No driving, reading, or responding to email.
    .
  6. Make decisions about routine things once. Buy the same brands at the grocery store every time; get the same outfit in different colors so you don’t have to decide what to wear every morning; prepare the same basic meals most week days.
    .
  7. Clean out one drawer or shelf a day. Eventually, everything in your home will have a place, and this will make it easy to find what you need when you need it.
    .
  8. Establish “predictable time off” with your colleagues and family. When will you commit to not working? Start with dinnertime, work up to weekends.
    .
  9. Stop multi-tasking. It makes you error prone, and even though you think you’re getting more done, it’s actually quite inefficient.

SS_EaseOverwhelm_thumb Click on the image to download a beautiful printable version of my 9 Ways to Ease Overwhelm list.

If this list resonates with you, I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering my new book, The Sweet Spot: How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work. In it, I go into a great deal more detail about overcoming overwhelm and other stress.

May you be happy,