Are you ready to level up? I'm Michelle Johnson, a business coach, business owner, corporate manager, wife, Mum, and a juggler of all the things. I would love to help you juggle all the things that are important to you. How do you stay calm in control and achieve your goals? Join me in the mindset corner. Hello, hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the mindset corner. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are. I hope you're having a fantastic day. Today's episode is about being busy and stressed. Are you glorifying busy in your life? Do you think it's a good thing? I often think about when people ask me just like, Hey, how are you going? And I always feel like I need to say, I'm really busy. Like, it's some way to justify my existence. If I'm busy, I must be productive, I must be contributing to society, I must be successful. And I wonder if I say to people, yeah, I just slept in and then watch some Netflix and took some time out. And now I'm here. What people would really think of that, because I feel like this whole concept is really like perpetuated by society that busy equals good. And I just want to talk today about whether that's actually the case. So I often have a lot of things going on at the same time in my life. But it's generally quite planned out and intentional. I wouldn't say all the time, I definitely still get stressed just like everyone else. But I really try not to say that I'm busy. If someone asks, how's it going, even if I want to say that I'm busy, I'm more likely to say something like, I have a lot going on, but I'm really enjoying it. It just has a much better insinuation, then saying that you're busy, which implies that maybe you're stressed in a good way, quote, unquote. And I really love all the different things that I do. But sometimes I get myself in a position where maybe I don't even realize that committing to so many things or being busy is actually causing me some stress. And I'd like to talk to you about how to recognize when that's going on for you. So the reaction to stress in your body is a little bit like a fight or flight response, your unconscious mind or the part of your body that sort of operates on autopilot and looks after your breathing and digestion and things like that. It's kind of hanging around in the background, just monitoring the environment. But when things get stressful, it triggers these responses in your body. And your body can feel a little bit like you're on a roller coaster of these sort of hormonal responses. So you might feel that when you're stressed that you want to sort of shy away and don't want to talk to anyone and really kind of go inside yourself. Or that you really want to leave the situation, which would be in those categories of flight. Or maybe you feel like you want to take it out on someone, or take it out on something, or, you know, do something to try and get less less stressed. And so our body, when we're stressed is being triggered like this several times every day, you're going up and down the emotional roller coaster. And I guess a whole might help a hormonal roller coaster where your body's pumping you with adrenaline and cortisol every time you're getting these feelings and then you having to kind of come down from that and get back to a normal state again. And that can be really tiring. We don't actually need that much adrenaline, you know, day to day, we're not really in a threatened state in the traditional sense. It's not like there's a lion coming to, you know, the might eat you. And so you definitely need to get scared and run away. It's sort of an inappropriate use of our, our ancient brain. If you like to get really stressed about situations that are just like I have a lot going on right now. Or I'm not sure if I'll meet this deadline, which is not a life threatening situation. But the reaction in your body is the same. It also means that your brain can't really think clearly in those situations because when you're in fight or flight mode, everything is reserved for just whatever you need to either get away or to have a fight. So you're a lot of you kind of usual functions. Your rationalization is not there, it's not being utilized. Those parts of your body aren't required in this situation. So you might feel a little bit like you've got tunnel vision, like you can only see what's directly in front of you. And it makes it very hard to make good decisions. Because you you're not using all of your usual decision making capacity, you're really just deciding like, am I going to die in this situation? Or not? Or how, how quickly do we need to get out of this situation. So sometimes when I'm stressed, I find that I make the wrong decision for the bigger picture, even if it's the right decision for just in this moment. So for example, if I have a lot of tasks to do, and I'm feeling stressed, I'm more likely to pick the task that's easy, or is kind of automated or administrative, and doesn't really require as much of my attention, rather than doing the task that is, maybe involves a lot more thought and strategy. But that will actually deliver me a much better outcome and be much more productive for me in the long term. But when when you're stressed, you can't always see all of that information. And it's not about your skill, it's just about your physical response. And in the end, in that situation, you're not achieving what you want to, you might, you're just sort of getting things done and going through the motions, but you're not moving yourself towards your goals, either in your, your day, what you want to achieve today, or bigger picture in your life. And if you're in this state a lot, then you're constantly making decisions that are just good for you in the moment and not necessarily aligned with the bigger picture. So yeah, when you're operating in survival mode all the time. It's kind of like running a marathon. And then when you get to the end, you realize you were actually on a treadmill. So you've been putting in all this effort and going and going and going, but you actually didn't get anywhere, because the things that you've been working on weren't the things that are aligned with your big picture goals. So, normally, for me, I know I'm in this state, when I wake up feeling anxious. And it doesn't happen that often. But when it does, I instantly know that there's something on my mind, I might not know exactly what it is. But I might find that I have trouble deciding on simple things. Like I can't decide what to eat for breakfast, or I can't decide what to make for dinner. And when I start to notice those couple of things happening, I can say to myself, like, okay, stop, what's happening here? Why am I feeling stressed and just sort of investigate what's going on in my life right now? Who am I around what's going on? I'll give you an example. Actually, we've just gone past Christmas. And the week of Christmas for me was, it's kind of like every area of my life goes into steroids at that time of the year, because I've got my corporate job is very busy, my businesses get really busy, my personal life gets really busy. And my usual ability to kind of separate and plan and focus on different things is not as easy. So it's like everyone in my life wants something for me, every aspect of my life wants something for me. And I'm being pulled in all of these directions. And I feel that in my body all week that I'm sort of feeling anxious and not not at my best because I'm just in this real like responsive state to everything that's going on. And then I get to Christmas Day. And I'm completely exhausted, because I've spent so much energy from stressing and being anxious about everything that's going on. So what I have been thinking about this, like next year, I need to really plan and think about how I'm going to attack that week, and make sure that each area of my life has some time allocated. And I can just focus on that in that period. So this year, I was like trying to do work and then remembered that I needed to buy someone a Christmas present. And you know, I couldn't really do any of those things effectively. Whereas if I really set myself up about saying, you know this, on this day, I'm just going to focus on buying Christmas presents, and I'm going to make a list and I'm gonna get everything sorted. And then the next day, I'm going to work a really long work day, get everything done, get all my administration sorted, to set myself up better so that I'm not trying to multitask, which Yeah, I don't really believe in multitasking being successful. So the science would support me that. So during the week of Christmas, I'm very much in responsive mode, then I'm constantly dealing with things that come up and I really feel I'm quite productive in the moment because I'm like putting out all the fires, like, oh, I need to do this, bam, that's done, oh, this bam, that's done. But it's all kind of coming up randomly. And what I need to do, instead of thinking about putting out fires, I need to really think about how do I set myself up so that the fires Don't even start. And that's what I'm going to work on for this year. So in the situation, I would always think you just need to stop, get out your detective, magnifying glass thing, and really examine what you're doing, why are you operating in the way that you're operating? And can you change something? Maybe I was scared about, you know, not getting everything organized before Christmas. Or maybe I was worried about what other people would think, if I let any of those balls drop in that week. And maybe I was worried about like, letting people down, I'd made a lot of promises for things I was going to do. And so all of those things are feeding into the stressful situation. So just stopping and thinking, gives you a chance to reassess and decide how you want to move forward. And then you can actively and consciously choose the right path that fits with, with your goals and what you want to achieve in the future. I think I developed a little bit of my habits around stress when I was at uni, because I remember being very good at getting my assignments done at the last minute. And over time, I've developed this mindset of like, I work really well under pressure, I achieve my best results in a pressured situation. And I had proven it to myself over and over again. Because every time I got into a stressful situation, where I was close to the deadline, and I needed to do more work I achieve to achieve the result. And I got my, my assignment done. So I was just telling my brain Yep, this is working for us. Let's just keep rolling out that strategy every time this situation comes up. In my last year of uni, I was working full time and had another job and was doing uni. And that strategy wasn't working for me anymore, because there was no last minute because I might have had another commitment at the time. That was right before the assignment was due. So I had to force myself to work in advance. And I sort of hacked my brain by telling myself that I worked really well, ahead of time when I had more time to think and plan what I was going to do. And I reinforced it by when people would ask me for help, I would always I would have already done the assignment ahead of time. So I was really able to help other people and let them know what I tried to do and what I thought about and that made me feel really good. And so it kind of created this new feedback loop where instead of thinking I work best under pressure and getting a good outcome, I was thinking I work best ahead of time and getting a good outcome. So if you really investigate where your thoughts are coming from, and how they are either serving you or holding you back from something, it gives you that chance to change it. And that's totally in your power to just decide how you want to think about something. So I really hope that this episode has given you a few insights into how to think of it differently and to help you deal with the busyness and the stress in your life. So the mindset hack for today is to stop and ask yourself, What's going on here. Thanks for joining me today on the mindset corner. If you're enjoying the episodes, please share it with your friends on socials. And if you love today's episode, please leave me a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you choose to listen. It really helps people find the podcast. If you'd like to learn more, visit the mindset corner.com. There you can check out my current five day course last to mind boss which is always available for you to lift up your mindset to the next level. Okay, see you next time and have a fantastic day.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
