If you're currently feeling a lot of stress and tension in your body, and also have a hard time focusing and showing up in your work and life the way you usually do, how do you navigate that? I came up with 5 strategies to help you cope during this time.

A racing mind and an overstimulated nervous system feel very UN-restful, even when our bodies are physically resting a ton. Real rest comes from us learning how to regulate our own emotions and calm our own nervous systems.

Whenever our brain gets stuck in an anxiety loop, ignoring the worst-case scenario or convincing ourselves that it is unlikely can be a lot less helpful than actually picturing it and discovering our resourcefulness, resilience, and ability to handle it.

The first questions to ask when trying to set better work boundaries are not “what should I do?” or “how can I best do it?” The first helpful question is most often “what am I thinking about this?”

Today, I made a typo on an event flyer that was circulated to a wide audience. When I got the note about the typo, my body was immediately flooded with stress hormones. I felt very embarrassed, disappointed, and angry at myself for not catching this sooner and allowing such a silly mistake to happen.

Most advice related to overwhelm boils down to figuring out which tasks on our list we can postpone, delegate, or fully abandon. I will not argue that uncovering that can be very helpful. But one thing we often ignore when it comes to overwhelm are the mean thoughts we have about the remaining tasks on our list, which are preventing us from making some of those tasks simpler, more joyful, or more manageable.

Even though it sounds pretty funny when you say it out loud, a lot of us do hold the belief that unpleasant activities are better and more virtuous than fun ones. The underlying logic usually goes something like this: unpleasant activities accomplish something (whether a physical result of producing some work, or another result such as personal growth), and producing something is always superior to not producing something.

Most of us have learned many unhelpful “lessons” about work, success, and productivity throughout our lives. Unfortunately, these beliefs are not only untrue, but are making work stress and exhaustion worse, pushing us closer and closer to burnout.

You know how you sometimes have bursts of energy, during which you feel fired up and ready to go, and other times you feel sluggish, distracted, and uninspired to work on anything? But what does honoring your energy levels look like when you have a work schedule, a list of deadlines to meet, or a calendar full of meetings?

If you get the “Sunday scaries” at the end of every week, or have a sinking feeling in your stomach during the last few days of every vacation, it might be because you are thinking of your time off as a special and unique time separate from your “regular” life.

You know how sometimes you feel tired but also wired, and all you want to do is burn off some energy by dancing around your apartment, going for a walk, or tidying up? And other times you feel tired and all you have the energy for is to walk the distance between your desk and your couch? Why is it that fatigue and energy levels don’t always line up?

Human beings are not machines and we cannot just slip from productive to relaxed mode and back to productive mode seamlessly day in and day out. Those in-between spaces are our times for exploration of ourselves, our thoughts, and the world around us. They can be our play time, our chance to discover the small joys and wonders of life. Or they can be a time to process feelings and be uncomfortable for a bit in order to allow the full spectrum of human emotions.

Think about what you picture when you envision yourself relaxing? Do you have a specific set of activities that count as relaxing? And how do you picture yourself feeling while you are relaxing? Despite what we have learned to believe, relaxation doesn’t depend on 1) a specific set of activities or 2) a specific set of feelings. Relaxation comes from leaning into and accepting our normal flow of thoughts and feelings, rather than resisting them.

You know how sometimes you wake up on a Saturday and just feel this sense of unease and low-key dread, because you know you’re supposed to be relaxing but you’re worried you won’t be able to take full advantage of your free time and will squander your weekend? That’s relaxation stress for you!

Removing mental restriction around food is a very similar process to removing the restrictions a lot of us have around rest. Our society has taught us that rest needs to be controlled, deserved, and only consumed in tiny portions. It’s the chocolate cake of activities. We need to feel guilty if we let ourselves have a bite too many. We need to “work it off” if we “indulge” too much. We need to surreptitiously sneak some more when we are starving. We need to hide in shame if we let ourselves “binge” on it. We fantasize about having a period of relaxing and letting go, but just can’t get ourselves to do it (at least not without a large side serving of guilt, self-flagellation and several days of compensatory over-working to follow). We worry that if we just allow rest without guilt, we will choose to never move or work again, and will need to be surgically separated from our couch when we die, because we will have become a human-couch hybrid from not moving a single time in 50 years.

Do you ever feel like you can never actually relax because there is always more you could be doing?

• Done with your work tasks? Yeah, but the bathroom needs cleaning!

• Bathroom is clean? Sure, but what about that drawer in the bedroom that you’ve been meaning to organize for awhile??

• Finished with the drawer? Well, now new work emails arrived so I need to turn back to those!

You see where I’m going with this?

I absolutely LOVE making to-do lists. The feeling I get from putting down everything I can think of that I want to get done on paper is a magical combination of relief, exhilaration, and pride. I even love transferring my to-do list into my calendar, moving chunks of to-do tasks across days of the week and feeling like I’ve conquered the world once I’m done. But when it comes time to start tackling the projects I’ve put together for a particular day is when my love affair with project lists comes to a crashing halt.

Seems like a painfully obvious statement that does not warrant much discussion, but take a second to think about how much you actually believe that. Because I thought it was obvious too, until I recently realized that deep down, I did not believe this at all. I believed that days usually do differ from each other, but I did not believe that was OK at all.