The Day Has 24 Hours

Do you ever feel overwhelmed?  I’m not talking about being busy; everyone I’ve ever met is busy, even if they’re retired or on vacation.

I’m talking about looking at your mile long to-do list and then deciding your best course of action is to go back to bed kind of overwhelmed.

I’m talking about standing in your kitchen overflowing with dirty dishes, unopened bills and papers from your kids school knowing you would feel better if the clutter was gone…so you go into a different room kind of overwhelmed.

That’s kind of where I was last week:  I had so much to do I ended up doing nothing.  My trainer asked me how my posing was going for my bodybuilding competition and I was like, “Uh…” and he said, “I thought so.”

In fairness, my husband has been out of town for business so I have to handle work, my kids, my mom, helping out my brother in NJ, and the Easter holiday festivities alone while also, you know, training for a bodybuilding competition that happens in less than a week.  So, yeah, I was unproductively overwhelmed.

When I get like this, I find it helpful to re-read inspirational quotes from people that I’ve written down in my journal.  (Yes, I keep a journal.  Call me sixteen.)

Total Recall is the autobiography that Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote and has some really great motivational tips I found helpful while preparing for my last competition, the Arnold Amateur.

The advice I latched on to for that show was,

“Reps, Reps, Reps”

Which is to say that success comes only with hard work first, and if you want to be good at anything you have to practice repeatedly.

My weakest aspect of bodybuilding was the posing; I felt completely inadequate and embarrassed, so I decided I was going to do 1,000 reps of my bikini poses until I felt comfortable.

I put 50 / marks on a row of my journal and each posing rep completed I crossed the other way to make an X.  By a week before my competition I had done literally 1,000 reps.  The confidence I felt after seeing all that hard work and preparation on a single page was amazing.

This show I barely had 175 reps done and the show’s just days away, so I didn’t do anything.  (There’s that whole unproductive, overwhelmed thing again.)  So I scanned Arnold’s advice and this time the line that struck me was,

“The day has twenty-four hours.”

When you think about it, that’s a lot of time to get stuff done, considering I’m lucky if I sleep for seven hours in a given day.

So this week, I looked at the pile in my kitchen and decided while the eggs were boiling I would do the dishes.  BOOM.  Done.

After finishing running errands for work I had twenty minutes of nothing before having to pick up the kids, so I practiced my posing for a few reps.  It’s not 1,000 reps, but it’s more than I had yesterday.

And when the kids went to bed I worked on my mother’s taxes for an hour or two and did some curls when I got bored of typing.

I’m not killing it, or running any victory laps yet, but I’m not stuck either and am making progress at staying on top of my tasks.  Action is a great remedy for overcoming feeling overwhelmed.

How about you?  What tips do you have for getting back on track when you’re feeling overwhelmed. 

Lisa

Lisa Traugott is a Mom’s Choice Award winning writer, fitness blogger, wife and mom of two.

A lot of memoirs show you the “before” and “after” pictures…this book tells you all the messy stuff that happens between the pictures.

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