My “SAFE” Tool to Shift out of Overwhelm

In last month’s post, I started sharing about how overwhelm makes us feel, including how it grows out of the tendency some of us have to be far too harsh in our judgment of ourselves. I shared a useful exercise encouraging you to look back to your past to a time when you were greatly challenged and shift your treatment o yourself from being harsh to being gentle and supportive.

Today, I’m going one step further and sharing a tool that I developed to help with shifting out of overwhelm. It was a lifesaver for me in the midst of my toughest challenges over the past decade, most especially coping with the loss of my father, severe challenges with bullying and overwork at a past job, and learning to find positivity again after my baby daughter’s brain injury in 2012. I call it the SAFE Tool not only because it is an acronym, but because it returns me to the feeling of safety and competence when I feel the onslaught of overwhelm from situations and events tearing my composure and control away.

Here’s a simple exercise to help you tune in to the way you speak to yourself.

S: SEE a relaxing place in your mind’s eye. If you are able to just close your eyes and visualise a place you love, that’s great! When I started this exercise, I could not actually picture the place, and so I would use my words to describe it to myself or I would draw the place with a pencil. That imaginary place is often a beach or garden, though some persons to whom I have taught my tool have chosen to climb mountains, hang-glide, go swimming, and so on. With this step, you can shed your overwhelm and absorb the healing sights, sounds, smells, and textures of nature to begin a reset process. Certainly the sensory explosion could even stretch to taste, if your exercise includes you biting into some favourite fruit, for example.

A: ALIGN your focus by moving it out of your overtaxed mind and into your body. You do this by just concentrating 5 or 10 minutes on moving your body. The physical movement could be simple stretches, a few yoga poses, a quick run or leisurely walk to get your energy moving in a different way and distract your mind from the heavy thought in which it has been stuck.

F: FEEL lightness filling you up. Sometime meditation is what I need to do this, but most times, the visualisation from the SEE step is enough to move me into feeling joy, hope, love, etc. The important thing is to help you connect with a light, high vibration, so you can let go of the dark, dreary, hopeless vibration of overwhelm.

E: EASE into action by taking one step or task at a time. Overwhelmed people tend to feel so inundated by demands or responsibilities that they feel unable to think or act clearly or decisively. You shift out of this floundering feeling by choosing ONE thing to do. Plus, if your one task is too large, you should break it into some smaller tasks and just start with ONE micro-task. When you complete that one task, you’ll feel satisfaction flood you (that’s dopamine, a feel-good chemical in your brain!), and then you can move to a second micro-task. Don’t put too much on your to do list at any one time and you’ll find yourself enjoying things and returning to a feeling of joy and fulfillment.

So, Friend, don’t overthink things and don’t overload yourself either. You don’t have to be a superhuman. Take some time to centre by getting out of your overactive mind and overwhelmed emotions. Then as you are able to refocus, take one step at a time. Don’t forget to let me know in the comments what you like about the tool!