Like with slowing down, simplifying too has magic powers – especially when you adopt it as a daily practice and infuse it with awareness.
If the prospect of simplifying seems uninspired, boring, or too small a gesture to address the chaos that lives in your home, head, or heart, consider this scientific fact: When you reduce a task into smaller, doable steps, and repeat the task, you effectively bypass fight-or-flight triggers in the brain and rewire it. Over time this reduces internal clutter, noise, and overwhelm for good.
Taking a simpler, baby-step approach to life ultimately makes it possible for us to accomplish a whole lot more! And a whole lot more means a richer, more inspired, and more spacious life.
Welcome to the Overwhelm Solution, Part 2 of a free 6-part series on reducing overwhelm. If you're getting this from a friend and would like to sign up for the full series
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What is Simplifying?
Merriam Webster's Dictionary defines simplifying as:
"to make simple or simpler, such as, a) to reduce to basic essentials; b) to diminish in scope or complexity: streamline; c) to make more intelligible: clarify."
That pretty much covers it. Except for one thing. What is missing is: "with awareness."
There is reducing an overwhelming task down to smaller steps that do not activate the fight-or-flight. And there is doing so, full on, with awareness and compassion.
Can you guess which one takes you much farther into game-changing territory?
Simplify, Simplify
Now that we've had a little practice slowing down (and tuning into the resistances that arise when we do), the next important step to reducing overwhelm is to simplify. And who better to teach us how than the place we all know so well: our home. When we slow down and bring compassionate awareness to our tending of this place, that’s when some real magic starts to
happen.
Take, for example, the simple task of moving things around. It could be rearranging the books in your bookcase, changing the position of your utensils, or placing your coat hangers facing out instead of in to identify the clothes you don't wear from the ones you do. Taking a few minutes every day to address a task and repeat it can lead to pleasant surprises, like this student shares here:
“I changed ONE thing in my kitchen (moved the knives to a more useable spot), and next thing I knew I was emptying my spice cabinet, throwing out spices I have had forever, and reorganizing and making ROOM. That led me to another cabinet, and my husband even joined me for a bit (reaching high shelves and carrying heavy things), and in a few hours we’d rearranged the whole kitchen, cleaning
as we went.”
If you're wondering how taking one small, simple step can lead to big changes like these, it will help to remember the amygdala, the part of the brain that goes into fight-flight-or-freeze (see Part 1). If you can find ways to tiptoe around this sleeping giant, keeping it asleep, there is no end to what you can accomplish! The trick is to simplify-simplify-simplify a task, and keep simplifying, until it no
longer sets off alarm bells in the brain.
Two Ways to Simplify
Here are two of my favorite ways to cultivate simplicity. They offer the added benefit of helping you bring more focus and consistency to your efforts. They are:
- The 'Rule of One' approach: When you feel overwhelmed by a task, break it down. Attend to it in increments of one: e.g. one piece of paper, one pile, one area, one minute. With awareness, of course. Instead of going on a wild binge of clearing your basement, for example, choose one smaller area or time frame to work with.
- The R&R (Reduce and Repeat) approach: To take it one step further, reduce the task, area of focus, or time spent and repeat it until it no longer elicits a stress response. Instead of diving into filing cabinets stuffed with papers you no longer use or need, for example, choose a smaller area to work with (one drawer, one folder perhaps?), set a clock, and repeat the task every day
until the job is complete.
Choose a task that is mildly challenging to begin with and grow from there. If you experience even the tiniest bit of overwhelm, that would be a sign that you've taken on more than you can handle. Dial it down until you no longer feel the stress.
The Upside of Downtime
Whether your quest is to lighten your physical load or the mental and emotional burdens you carry, there is a huge upside to adopting a simple... daily... conscious... "slow drip" approach to clearing.
While it may not feel like much is happening at first, here's what's going on under the radar of most discernible progress:
- You are effectively rewiring the brain that is stuck in the old habits and growing new habits
- You are cultivating greater ease and bandwidth to deal with difficult situations
- You are expanding (each day a little more) your sense of what is doable and possible
You might even find yourself tending to other elephants in your home and life that you couldn't imagine tackling before! (...Just sayin')
Practice 2 – Simplifying
Here's my invitation for the next five days:
- Walk around your house and make a list of tolerations. Tolerations are those niggly housekeeping tasks that you've had so long on your to-do list that you don't "see" them anymore (to actively irritate you). It could be the squeak in the door hinge that needs oiling; the porch light or sweater button that needs replacing; the car that needs an oil change.
- Assign a number between 1 and 10 next to each item on the list (10 being for tasks that are too overwhelming right now, or require multiple steps).
- Pick a task to which you gave the lowest number and attend to it today. Apply the Rule of One and/or the R&R approach if necessary. Give the task all of your attention and observe your stress level before, during, and after. Notice any niggly resistances that come up. Be open to what might be on the other side of this resistance.
Photo and text by Stephanie Bennett Vogt
Portions of this material are excerpted from A Year for You, Hierophant Publishing, 2019
Copyright © All Rights Reserved
