Monday Reset: When looking at your to-do list makes your chest tight

This week's focus: Reduce the overwhelm

You think of your to-do list and your chest tightens. There’s too much. Work deadlines, emails piling up, laundry that’s been sitting in the dryer for two days, bills you need to pay, that text you never responded to. Everything feels equally urgent. Everything feels impossible.

So you freeze. You do nothing because you can’t figure out where to start. And the longer you sit there, the worse the anxiety gets. By the end of the day, you’ve done nothing on the list and you’re exhausted.

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Your Brain This Week

When we're overwhelmed, our brains lose the ability to filter what actually matters from what just feels loud. Everything hits at once with equal intensity. Our brains can't sort through it all and decide "this can wait" or "this matters less." So everything lights up as urgent, and the result is paralysis. Traditional productivity advice says "just pick three priorities." But when everything feels urgent, that doesn't help. We need a different question.

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This Week’s Strategy: The Relief List

Ask what will make you feel less anxious by the end of the day.

Here’s what to do:

1. Look at your to-do list (or just think about everything swirling in your head).

2. Ask yourself: “What 3 things would make me feel LESS anxious by tonight?”

   • Not most urgent

   • Not most important

   • Just: what will let me breathe easier?

3. Write down only those 3 things. Everything else can wait.

4. Do those 3 things. That’s it. That’s your whole list for today.

Why this helps: When you’re overwhelmed, productivity advice makes it worse. You don’t need to do more or be better at prioritizing. You need relief. The Relief List gives you permission to focus on what will actually reduce your anxiety instead of what you think you “should” do.

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The 2-Minute Worksheet

Three things that will make me feel LESS anxious by tonight:

1. _______________________

2. _______________________

3. _______________________

Examples: respond to that one text, pay the overdue bill, put the laundry away, send the email, make the appointment

Grab a piece of paper or open a note on your phone and fill in the blanks above. It takes 2 minutes and it might just help :)

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