You know the feeling: You have a full, bright day ahead and a sunny List of Champions to conquer. You’ll feel super satisfied and accomplished when you check off the list.

But your brain short-circuits about where to begin and… you decide to lie down… and you conquer the Nap of Champions instead. (Granted, if you’re at work you may not be able to fully lie down, but you can still doom scroll endlessly, answer needless emails, look for that dinner recipe, or [your favorite avoidance/distraction strategy here].)

We set ourselves up to fail this way, with a long list to complete on a “day off” or fresh to work on a Monday. We slide right into overwhelm, then don’t accomplish much of anything. We feel disappointed or worse, self-punishing or self-destructive, devolving into negative self-talk and a familiar, vicious cycle.

Here are ten great options for relief, and you can even practice these new overwhelm-coping skills with this list itself. Ten may be too many ideas to absorb at first. As you’ll learn in the first hack, you can read or try just one or two of these suggestions (they can be worked together or separately), then come back for more. They’ll still be here! In no particular order:

1. Lower your expectations.

This is a game-changer, but easy to accomplish. If you have a list of 20 tasks, or even five accumulated from the last week or month, that’s great. But never expect yourself to get them all checked off in a day.

Reframe your idea of your list. Consider it an ongoing, running tab, and if you accomplish even one or two items on a given day, it’s a win: apply #8.

2. Block it out.

Yeah, yeah, we all know we’re supposed to block out time for........

© Psychology Today