When I was in my first year at University, I tried out for the Club Soccer Team.  Now, this seems like no big deal, but at the time I was SO nervous about making the team.  I felt overwhelmed by the prospect of trying out for a university club team. My thoughts buzzed with how I would show my skillset, how I would compare to the others on the team, would I be good enough, etc.  I went to a friend for advice, and what she said was simple and incredibly helpful for this situation and others. 

She said, “Get the ball, find someone to pass to, pass the ball.  Next time you can, get open and do it again.”

When I was at my try out, every time I started to get overwhelmed I would remember, get the ball then pass the ball.  Soccer is, of course, much more complex than this, but today we will be discussing this process rather than the sport. 

The process: Simplifying to a size in which helps you to act when feeling overwhelmed.

First, what do I mean by simplifying?

The whole of something can be broken down in many ways. For example, washing the dishes can be seen as the whole act of washing all the dishes, the act of scrubbing each dish individually, or the act of squeezing and moving the sponge.  Thus, a simplified actions of washing dishes can be viewed as holding the sponge and scrubbing the dish, one pass at a time. 

Now for most, washing dishes does not feel like an overwhelming task that you will never complete, but for many health or fitness habits and goals do.

For example,a woman, let’s call her Sally, is 55 years old and a recent empty nester.  She stopped working when she and her husband had children and spent her time caring for her children and household.  Over the past 10 years she has started to feel aches and pains, fatigue, and weight gain.  With her increase in time, she is interested in improving her food choices, starting to exercise more, and making sure she is doing what she can to keep herself healthy.

While these changes are very important to Sally, every time she thinks about it, she feels overwhelmed by the amount changes she wants to make and the ways these changes can be made. 

Questions like; What should I do first- work on sleep, food, exercise?  What’s the best way to do it- buy a Peloton, join a gym, start a diet? 

This feeling of being overwhelmed can be very uncomfortable, and commonly results in one of the options below:

1. Freezing; either avoiding looking at it or feeling panicked which both result in a lack of action and choice.
2. Doing it all; trying to make all changes at once by jumping from one to the other. While this is an action step it commonly leads to a short-term change.
3. A combination of 1 &2; oscillating between action and inaction.  Again this commonly does not lead to lasting changes.

This is where zooming in may be helpful:

In this example, Sally could try zooming in and simplifying until it feels manageable.

• If thinking about all the changes is too big, zoom in on one area. For example, food choices.
• If thinking about food choices feels overwhelming, Sally could try focusing on a single meal. 
• If thinking about one meal feels overwhelming, she could try simplifying to adding fruits or vegetables to one meal.

You’ll notice the simplest version of the task brings the whole, in this case improving overall health, to a task that can be done, in this example adding fruits and vegetables to one meal. 

The benefits:

When we have a larger goal, getting on a soccer team, losing weight, or decreasing pain, action is often needed.  We need to pass the ball, change our exercise or eating habits, improve posture or movement patterns.  As noted above, feeling overwhelmed commonly results in a lack of consistent action.  

The tool of zooming in (and out) allows you to change the size of your focus day to day, hour by hour, minute by minute.  For certain topics and/or days, it may be possible to work on more than one meal or topic, while other days it may be just barely manageable to focus on eating vegetables at one meal.  The continual adjustments allow for consistent movement and change, in turn these small changes add up to weight loss, decreased pain, finishing washing the dishes, etc. 

Is this helpful for you?

Try it out!  If you have a goal you are working on, try breaking it down into a simplified task to complete and see where it takes you.  Let me know what you think in the comments below.