Feeling overwhelmed at work? What to do in the next 10 minutes

Why overwhelm freezes you

Unfinished tasks don't sit quietly. Psychologists E.J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that unfinished goals keep popping into people's minds, and even made them worse at unrelated tasks.

That's the freeze you feel. You try to answer one email, and the deadline, the invoice and the meeting prep all shout at once.

But the same research found something hopeful. When people made a specific plan for their unfinished goals, the intrusive thoughts and the drop in performance went away. You don't have to finish everything to feel calm. You just need a plan for it.

Step 1: Settle your body first

When you're overwhelmed, your body is usually on high alert: fast breathing, tight shoulders, a racing mind. Planning is hard in that state.

So start with your breath. In a Stanford trial, a pattern called cyclic sighing (two breaths in through the nose, then one long breath out) improved mood and calmed the body more than meditation did, at five minutes a day. Two minutes at your desk is a good start.

Step 2: Empty your head onto paper

Take one page. Write down everything: tasks, deadlines, emails you owe, worries, the thing you promised a colleague last week. Don't sort, don't prioritise. Just empty.

Most people are surprised by two things. The list is shorter than it felt. And once it's on paper, it stops spinning in your head.

Step 3: Pick just one

Look at the list and ask one question: "If I only got one thing done today, which one would make it a good day?"

Circle it. Then write its first physical step. Not "the report". "Open the report and write the three headings."

That's all you're doing next. Everything else can wait.

Step 4: Give the rest a time, or a "not now"

Now go through the rest of the list, quickly. Each item gets one of three labels: a time this week, someone else to hand it to, or "not this week".

This is the planning step that, in Masicampo and Baumeister's research, quietened the mind. If you want to go further, block the items into your calendar. We show how in time blocking.

Step 5: Protect the next hour

Overwhelm feeds on interruptions. In a study by Gloria Mark and colleagues, people who were interrupted finished their work faster, but reported more stress and frustration.

So for the next hour, mute Slack or Teams and email if you can. Set a status: "Focusing until 11." Put your phone in a drawer. Give the one task you circled a clean run.

If you run the business

When you own the business, everything lands on you. Overwhelm is almost part of the job.

When you do your brain dump, add one more question for each item: "Does this actually need me?" Owners often find a third of their list could be handed to someone else, automated, or dropped. The rest goes into your calendar.

When overwhelm keeps coming back

If you feel like this every day, the problem may not be you. It may be the workload. Take your written list to your manager. A list on paper makes it far easier to say "which of these should wait?"

And if the stress is affecting your sleep, your health or your life outside work, please talk to a doctor. Some things need more than a better routine.

The reset, one click away

The hard part isn't knowing these steps. It's remembering them at the exact moment you're overwhelmed, when your brain is too full to plan anything.

That's what CatchScroll is for. When you feel it, tap "Overwhelmed" and it walks you through a short breathing exercise, a quick brain dump and one next action, in about two minutes. Then it puts you straight back into a focus block. See how it works.