The mental load is something we all have to cope with, but at this time of year, it can be even worse. There’s too much to do, buy, and think about, and I often wake up in the early hours and remember a message I need to send the next day or recall something urgent that I forgot to do. None of these habits is doing my brain, body, or core sleep any good.
Mel Robbins, the bestselling author, podcast host, motivational speaker, and former lawyer, has a hugely demanding career. Like the rest of us, she admits to feeling overwhelmed and sometimes struggles to sleep at night.
Mel discusses a study from Baylor University in the US, where 57 adults were split into two groups and asked to complete a writing task for five minutes before bed. One group journaled about what they had already accomplished. The other group wrote down everything they didn’t do. “It was the people who wrote about their unfinished tasks who slept better,” she says. “They fell asleep 9 to 10 minutes faster than the group of people who wrote down what they had done.”
She adds that “this is the same effect as some prescription sleep aids in clinical trials”.
The Zeigarnik Effect is responsible for this outcome, Mel says. This is when our brains focus on, or remember, the unfinished tasks rather than the completed ones, which is what causes mental stress or a tendency to fixate on the things we haven’t done.
“Your brain hates open loops. Open loops are these open tabs in your mind. It’s all the things that you haven’t done. It’s the lingering ideas, it’s the things on your list you didn’t get to. These open tabs, these undone things. Your brain is just going to keep cycling through them because it’s afraid you’re going to forget them. It’s trying to help you.”
She says when your brain sees the mental load on a piece of paper, it knows that we’ve “cognitively offloaded it”. “It’s like ‘oh, check, check, check’” – ticking off the things you’ve written down, and it doesn’t tell us to think about them anymore.
“When you’re lying in bed staring at the ceiling thinking about emails and errands and phone calls, the fix isn’t lavender oil or white noise, it’s a brain dump,” says Mel.
Are you stressed or overwhelmed?
In the same podcast episode, Mel and her contributors shared four steps to help you identify whether you’re stressed or overwhelmed, and to manage it.
- Label what you’re feeling: Are you actually just stressed, or are you in a state of overwhelm? You’ll know if it’s overwhelm rather than stress or early signs of burnout if life feels like it’s coming at you at a fast pace and you can’t cope. This will feel harder to manage than simply feeling stressed about bad traffic or a colleague’s email.
- Use cyclical breathing to reset your nervous system: Speaking on the podcast, Harvard medical doctor Dr Aditi Nerurkar says our “breath is a powerful gateway” to helping us deal with stress. Cyclical breathing, also called the Physiological Sigh, involves a double inhale through your nose and a long exhale out of your mouth. Studies from Stanford University have shown that doing this daily can reset your nervous system and ease your stress levels, while woman&home’s own resident doctor has spoken on the benefits of box breathing for stress relief.
- Do a brain dump: As we’ve talked about above, Mel says we should “take everything on our minds”, both the to-dos and the emotional things you need to do too, and put them down on paper. She suggests setting a 10-minute timer to get it all out.
- Choose an active challenge: When we’re overwhelmed, we often stop doing what makes us happy and what we have control over, such as exercise or hobbies. This means life becomes even more dominated by the issues we can’t control. Dr Alok Kanojia, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, tells Mel we should add an activity that we care about, such as reading a book, that is just for us and our own happiness.
