Do you feel stressed because you feel you have so many things to do?

5 years ago

Do you ask yourself, "What am I going to do today?" and then feel kind of bad because you know there are many things you have to do, but NOTHING COMES TO MIND. Or maybe something does COME TO MIND, such as learning English, but now, because you've created so much stress thinking about all the things you have to do and how you haven't really gotten anything done in the day, you feel like you're not in the right mind state to do something productive. Maybe you need to take a walk and relax. Maybe you need to watch something on Netflix to calm down, and maybe you can't even enjoy that because while you're doing those things, all you're thinking about is what you should be doing instead.

If your process of getting things done is something that makes you feel out of control and OVERWHELMED, I think this video will help you. It is quite long, but watching even the first 15 minutes will change the way you think about how to plan your day. I found it a week and a half ago, and simply changing this way of thinking has reduced my PRODUCTIVITY-RELATED stress to almost zero. I'm still working on applying it fully.

I'll leave you with a question that hopefully will make you interested enough to watch the video: 
What would be a better question to ask yourself when planning your day than "What do I have to do today?" Share an answer in the comments before watching the video if you want, of course. If this is a new idea for you, tell me if it helped!

Short Version: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJNY8jjF7Bs&t=1s


FULL (and also very long) Version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mZDDYgi0AU&t=2s
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Explanations, Useful Phrases, and Vocabulary - (Try to use these in a sentence!)

- "NOTHING COMES TO MIND" - Imagine I ask you, "Can you give me a list of all the movies that have made you cry?" and you think hard about it. You search your memory to find the names of those movies. You know that those names are somewhere in your brain, but right now, none of those names COME TO MIND. In other words, none of those names go from the unconscious part of your brain to the conscious part, where you can finally hear the voice inside your head tell you the name and then you can tell me the names of those movies. Sometimes things COME TO MIND without you even trying.

- OVERWHELMED - 
---People who have 20 things to do in one day might feel overwhelmed. 
---An employee at a very busy Starbucks who is working alone because his coworkers didn't come to work might feel overwhelmed.
--- The guy in this picture looks overwhelmed: 📷

PRODUCTIVITY-RELATED - this means related to productivity! Have fun making adjectives by adding "-related" to a noun. More examples with common uses:
1. "I'm not getting a lot of sleep because I'm having a lot of WORK-RELATED problems", my friend told me. 
2. "Let's talk about something that's not school-related", I told my classmate.

Hope this helps just a bit as you work to improve your English!