The emotions that come from thinking about everything you need to or could do can easily overwhelm you. You can control negative feelings by leaving the emotional state and intentionally listing and ranking what you need to do.
Problems have a way of jumping out at you. You don’t have to look very hard to find them. Once a problem has been identified, the usefulness of paying more attention to it is limited to what it takes to add it to the list of problems to include in your next training session, where you will make a plan of how to solve those with the highest priority. Unfortunately, almost all our brain interactions with problems is in worrying about them instead of thinking about what can be done about them, or evaluating which is most important. Once a problem is recorded, focus only on what you have intentionally determined is most important until and unless you have constructive new ideas about it.
Mental anguish comes as we incorrectly assign the feelings that come when we aren't doing what we can about the things we can change to the things we can't change. Focusing your attention on future events outside of what you will do today will create a feedback loop of anxiety that will prevent you from doing what you actually need to do today, causing less joy and more suffering in your life than what could have been had you not self-sabotaged.
There is no point fixating on what lies outside of your power. As you do all that lies within your power to obtain what you seek, you will find that you have no attention to spare on what does not. Those who do all they can will find surprising peace that endures independent of what others do or don’t do.
People treat overwhelm as if it can’t be predicted or avoided before it comes, nor adequately overcome once it arrives. The truth is that overwhelm isn’t a problem, but rather the symptom of a problem. Stop thinking of overwhelm as an opponent that is stronger than you, and start thinking of it as a signal that you need to do something differently than you do.
The natural reaction of overwhelm is to do less, but this response isn’t just in the wrong direction. It’s in the wrong dimension. Overwhelm isn’t a question of working harder, but an indication of a need to work smarter. Overwhelm indicates that you haven’t sufficiently planned and prioritized your to do list. If you feel overwhelmed, you have not yet sufficiently differentiated the priorities of the tasks you could accomplish with your limited resources.
Overwhelm comes not just because you have too much to worry about, but also because you are often worrying about the wrong things. Limitation of resources will require you to pick which problems to be most concerned about. Interestingly, when you focus all you have to give on what matters the most, your concern about both the things you are focused on and the things that are not as important evaporates.
When you live life unintentionally, you have no way of comparing the relative priority of different initiatives, but the life plan gives you everything you need to compare and order competing demands on your time. The more confident you are of your values and the fact that you are honestly doing all you can to complete the most important tasks you can, the less mental anguish you will experience.
With every task completed from these lists, you are going to not just find that you have less anxiety, you are also going to feel like you have more resources than you did before to tackle the next task. You will gain greater resources to complete more, and you will also develop more implicit confidence in yourself and your life plan.