Try this next time you feel yourself spinning out into overwhelm

At the time of writing this I am in that pre-holiday mad rush, where I seem to have a herculean amount of things to do before I catch my flight tomorrow morning. The to-do lists have to-do lists and I seem to be adding more to-dos to the lists than I am ticking them off.

And so, inevitably, the blind panic is starting to set in.

This happens every time I have any kind of looming deadline and the countdown is on. No matter how much I tell myself that flying into a panic literally will not help, that whipping myself up into a frenzy will only make things worse, my reptilian brain does not care.

It firmly believes that hitting the emergency fight-or-flight button is the only way I’m going to get through the 7,568 things on my to-do list by tomorrow morning.

And so before I know it I am fizzing with adrenaline, pacing around the house leaving half-finished jobs in my wake and hammering away at my laptop, leaping haphazardly from one open tab to the other.

But the problem is, when I’m in the gr…