Brain Freeze
- Stress Headache
Learn how to overcome brain freeze and stress headache, one chunk at a time.This has nothing to do with eating ice cream too quickly. That's fun (okay, fun-ish), but this is about stress-related brain freeze - that feeling when your brain just says "no more!" and effectively throws its toys out of the pram, metaphorically-speaking. You may try and work through it, coaxing and reasoning with the ol' grey matter. But the rest of your body has already got the message: overload alert, unable to cope, shutdown processing... This is a self-preservation response, and that's fair enough, but why is it triggering? The stress response is an in-built mechanism to help you deal with impending danger, but is your physical well-being really in jeopardy when the brain freeze kicks in (obviously, if it is, then the response is doing a great job - pay attention to it!)? Ah, what about your mental well-being, then... If you've read
this article on Self Restraint
you'll know that your mind likes what it already knows and learns from what it doesn't know. How does this help? Well, brain freeze occurs at the edge of what you know how to do. Most often, there are two causes of this feeling of overwhelm: - You need to do something but don't know how.
- You have many things that equally need doing but don't know where to start.
Sometimes, it can be both. "Nooooo..."
So what to do about it - first, stop torturing yourself and take a few minutes to clear your mind, breathe deeply and deliberately, and walk around a bit. Ease the pressure off. Imagine this:In the 1970s, a French entertainer by the name of Monsieur Mangetout (eat all) ate a two-seater aircraft. Never mind 'why', think about the 'how'... How does a man eat an aircraft? One small piece at a time - it may have taken him two years, but he did it. Interesting. You may have an obstacle or challenge to deal with, and at first glance, you may feel that you cannot possibly tackle it. There's too much to deal with all at once, so where do you start? With one small piece at a time. What's the easiest thing you can do? It may seem pointlessly small, but you can do it, no problem. All large tasks can be broken down into smaller chunks. Just like eating an aircraft, when you can break it down into manageable 'bite-sized' pieces, it will get done eventually. What if you have a time-limit? Remember, you're one human and you can only do so much at a time. How about giving yourself more time? If that isn't a possibility, how about sharing the load with someone else? Two humans 'small-chunking' will take half the time. And what if you don't know how to do something, no matter how small the pieces? Don't even think about faking it - take some time to expand your knowledge instead. Learn the basics of this new challenge - you don't need to understand it all straight away. Small chunking applies to learning, too. Your brain will get the message and begin to prepare the way for new skills. When you know how to do something, then doing it becomes a choice rather than a challenge.
You may also be interested in
this article on Procrastination
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