3 Tips For Coping With Feeling Overwhelmed for Women Leaders

Today we’re sharing three tips for coping with feeling overwhelmed as a woman leader. At Her New Standard we focus on advancing women in the workplace. We get the extreme pleasure of working with really talented, successful, ambitious women and oh boy – in the last few weeks, we keep getting asked this question: “How do I cope with feeling overwhelmed?”

Overwhelm usually comes into play when you’re feeling stressed. When you first found out about COVID, you probably went into fight-or-flight mode, the biological response to fear and stress. It’s very natural. It’s healthy. But when weeks go on, it starts to get exhausting and very draining. So what do you do?

Well in the simplest terms, you have to start turning down your fear response and turning up your relaxation response. To do that you can use these three simple mindfulness techniques:

1. Leverage the power of your breath.

When you take a deep inhale in, oxygen enters the body filling your lungs and triggering the relaxation response. Exhaling then allows your body to release any toxins. Throughout the day, do a series of 5 deep inhales and exhales to start to stimulate the relaxation response in your system.

2. Bring your awareness to the present moment.

When you bring your attention to the here and now, you can start to turn off the natural instinct of your mind to be worrying about the future or disappointed with the past. Focusing your mind consciously on what’s right in front of you can allow you to see and appreciate incredibly beautiful things that you might have been missing before.

3. Focus on what you can control, instead of what you can’t.

There are many things right outside of your control, but you can control what you eat and drink, how much exercise and sleep you get, as well as your amount of screen time in a given day. Focusing on these key practices for well-being will help you stimulate the relaxation response. With this in mind, you can start to turn down the feeling of overwhelm and better cope with the difficulties in front of you.

We at Her New Standard wish you the best! If you have a leadership question that you would like us to answer, please send it to us here. Thank you and be well.