How to transform overwhelm into clarity

• The Root of Overwhelm
  Discussion on why many women feel overloaded, including societal pressures and the expectation to “do it all.”
• Brain Dump Method for Mental Clarity
  Erica introduces the brain dump technique to organize thoughts, prioritize tasks, and alleviate mental clutter.
• The Power of Mindfulness and Movement
  How yoga and meditation practices can enhance productivity by grounding the mind and body.
• Practical Steps to Reduce Overwhelm Daily
  Tips for creating a daily routine that balances personal needs with professional goals.

“Overwhelm isn’t a badge of honor; it’s a sign that we need to pause and recalibrate.”

“When we start with a brain dump, we’re giving ourselves permission to get everything out and prioritize with clarity.”

“Self-care isn’t selfish—it’s essential for showing up fully in our work and lives.”

“Incorporating small, calming practices into our day can be the difference between thriving and burning out.”

“Balance isn’t about doing it all; it’s about doing what truly matters with intention and presence.”

ANNE RAJOO

Many women entrepreneurs struggle with feeling overwhelmed by their responsibilities, and this can easily lead to burnout. This imbalance can create so much stress and hinder your ability to focus on your goals and even your dreams. And I’m excited to have Erica Diamond on the episode today. Erica is a certified life coach and career coach and a certified yoga and meditation teacher, she helps women transform their lives of overwhelm by incorporating calming purposes. And one of the strategies Eric has suggested is a brain dump to manage your thoughts, prioritize your tasks, and this can really alleviate the mental load and free up cognitive space and energy. The mental load is an essential topic when we talk about Peaceful Productivity, because it often is invisible and deeply impactful for many, particularly women balancing multiple roles, the mental load involves not just managing your tasks or tracking your tasks and schedules and deadlines and taking care of the different to do’s of your family, work and personal life, but it really involves having the mental capacity and energy and bandwidth to handle all of this.

Welcome to the Peaceful Productivity Pod. I’m your host, Anne Rajoo, and together we redefine

Productivity and find your sweet step where performance meets happiness.

In the last episode, I shared some bits and pieces of my personal motherhood experience and what led me to coming up with Peaceful Productivity. Go back to the episode with Dr Gertrude Lyons to listen to that and explore the transformative power of self-care and why it’s essential. 

Eventually, in my journey, I got to a point where I realized I needed to break out of this autopilot of doing more and sacrificing more to be everything to everyone. And so I did my inner work. I got into coaching, did a coaching certificate myself, and I recognized some happens that were playing into my motherhood experience, and then I was repeating in entrepreneurship that includes perfectionism, overachieving people, pleasing lots of fears and limiting beliefs around what I can and cannot do. And like many women, I felt that I was not qualified or deserving of success, which is really just the root of overworking, because there is constantly this feeling of needing to prove ourselves, proving that we’re worth what we’re doing, that we’re worth the success that we’re experiencing. And this is absolutely a mindset that spirals into burnout and creates unrealistic expectations of perfection. 

So what helped me to challenge and eventually break this belief was intentionally building a strong support network. I’m fortunate enough to have a supportive husband and friends and family who continuously remind me that I don’t need to do all the things or be everything to everyone, and that definitely I don’t need to be perfect to be worthy. So this intentional support network has been a key breakthrough in giving me the strength and the desire to create the podcast and to overcome all that self-doubt that still creeps in. So through self-care and embracing my support network, I’ve learned that it’s okay to step back and prioritize my well-being over all these crazy standards that I was trying to achieve, so if I had clung on to these expectations, I might never have the confidence to launch this podcast. So self-care for me means letting go of the perfectionism, leaning on others and recognizing my own work. 

But now let’s hear from Erica, and she’s got a four-step self-care process that she’s sharing that includes focusing on mindset, energy and well-being, as well as time management and transformation.

ERICA DIAMOND

A lot of us just kind of work on autopilot on Groundhog Day, and that’s how burnout happens. A lot of us just kind of wake up and it’s automatic. We make breakfast for the kids and breakfast, get the kids to school, brush our teeth, blah, blah, blah, go to work, get the dry cleaning, make dinner, groceries. Like everything just is supposed to magically appear, and we’re supposed to look great, not put on weight, feel an abundant energy, like it’s all just supposed to spin, like Mary Poppins, but it’s all supposed to look easy. 

And the problem is social media to our detriment. You know, so many people make it look so easy, like everything is just perfect, that they can, you know, they have financial wealth and a beautiful family and a perfect job and that, you know, beautiful spouse, and everything’s kind of working, but social media is fake and illusions and smoke and mirrors and so that really doesn’t play into our own self-care. But self-care is paramount. It is the foundation for us thriving personally and professionally. And a lot of people will ask me, well, why is self-care so important? And you know what I say? Just try not taking care of yourself, and see how that works! And that will explain why self-care is so important. 

Because try not caring for yourself. I was there. I was on the brink of burnout, and it’s no fun. So there are ways in which us moms can, you know, refill our cups, rejuvenate and be able to care for ourselves so that we can drop, so that we can feel an abundance when we perform all of our roles and duties people assume. And it’s been historically thought of that self-care is this sort of luxury wellness, expensive retreat or getting massages or manicures and pedicures, and I say, Wow, we love those who doesn’t love getting a massage. 

The self-care that I teach, is the ability to feel grounded and calm in times of instability, and what that looks like sometimes is doing hard things that don’t feel very pleasurable in the moment, like sitting down and diving deep into your finances and making a plan to pay it off, breaking up with a toxic friend, you know, deciding that you’re worthy of leaving a toxic job or maybe even a, you know, an unhealthy marriage. So the self-care that I work on is real habit stacking. We look at mindset. 

I have a whole four-step process of self-care. And it’s not bubble baths that, like I said, and we love those. But you did say nap and sleep is a massive part. So I have a four-step process of self-care, and then in one of the steps, we talk about the five pillars of well-being, which, if you tell me how you’re operating in those five pillars of well-being, I’ll tell you how you’re feeling. So to give you an example that is, what you eat, how you sleep, how you move, how you manage stress and how you connect socially. I’ll say it again, how you eat, how you sleep, how you move, how you manage stress and how you connect socially. 

So if you’re eating like crap, if you’re not getting enough sleep, if you’re not moving your body, you know, as the Mayo Clinic says, or Harvard Medical School, 30 minutes a day of moderate physical activity if you are not managing stress with some sort of breath work or meditation or grounding exercise. And if you’re not connecting socially with others, girlfriends, other people, chances are you’re not feeling an optimal wellness and well being. So I take a look a lot like that. Those are five good questions to ask yourself right now. 

How am I eating? 

How am I sleeping? 

How am I moving my body? 

How am I managing stress, and how am I connecting socially with others? 

So that will tell you a lot.

So I get asked a lot if I’m doing nothing for myself right now. You know, how can I start self-care? So I say self-care right away, if you’re really, really not taking care of yourself after water intake, and start walking. Okay, so walking and water because a lot of us are walking around dehydrated, and it leaves dehydration leads to a lot of wonky things. So make sure you’re drinking water and walking. And then, if I could throw in a third meditation, is game-changing. But so basically, look how you if you’re eating, well, that’s great. Look at where you’re struggling. If you’re like, all the areas are good, but you haven’t. 

You’re working at your desk, you haven’t left, you haven’t gone for dinner or a drink or a date night, or you haven’t kind of, you’ve been mothering and you haven’t seen adult people like look to see where you’re weak. But those are the areas you should be working on. So to go back to how that all comes together. So again, if you’re doing nothing right now, may I suggest starting to walk 20 minutes, if not every day, every second day, getting outside. Vitamin D, full spectrum, light, moving your body. I just did a whole seat-in segment this morning on the studies of 20 minutes a day of walking water and then any kind of you know, having an app like Insight Timer or breathe or calm, on my Instagram at Erica Diamond, you can share my five favorite meditation teachers. Bedtime meditations are game-changing because they help you with sleep and they help you with stress and energy and anxiety throughout the day, so they’re life-changing. 

But when I look at self-care, my whole process is a four-step process. We start first with mindset, because we can’t begin to change our lives and start to feel better if we have a, you know, the wrong mindset, if we are in a scarcity mindset instead of an abundance mindset. If we are operating from limiting beliefs that we need to challenge. I’m not worthy, I’m no good. I only have this job because I’m lucky. I’m a terrible mother. I’ll never have time to do anything I want to do, like if we live in that negative mindset, we will never be able to feel worthy or want to take care of ourselves. That’s our first step. Step two is energy and well-being, and that’s where we look at the five pillars of well-being that I just shared. 

So once we get our mind ready, then we get our bodies together. That’s where we practice yoga, where we move, where we eat, well, where we talk about sleep. That’s where we reclaim our mindset, then our body. 

Then we move on to the third step of self-care, which is time management. So once we’ve reclaimed our mind and our body, then we’re able to time manage like a boss, and, you know, become the boss again of our days and let go of no longer serves, and reshuffle our days and making sure we’re, you know, doing our strongest task, we’re most alert. And what can we shedule to next semester and all those things? 

And then the fourth step is, is transformation, and that is, once we get some new, brave habits going, how do we make those transformations last. How do we keep habits going? So it takes 21 days to form a new habit, and about six months, 66 days, up to about six months for them to start to become more automatic. When you start changing your life for the better, you know, progress looks like a very slippery – kind of we take two steps forward, then we fall off our wellness lag. And I say so those are kind of numbers. As you start to improve your life, 21 days to form a new habit, but 66 days, up to six months for it to start to become more automatic. 

So that is a little bit about finding self-care, how it works, how you notice changes. Some things you can do, it’s it’s a lot, but as soon as you start to make subtle changes, you will feel a difference in your energy, in everything. So how to ensure those habits happen, I would say, and I’m going to explain to you, you attach a trigger to the habit to cue the ritual. So I’ll give you an example. So let’s look at a bad habit like smoking. Smoking is closely tied to the trigger cues the habit cues the ritual. So you know, generally, smoking is skewed after, you know, wake up, have your morning coffee, have a cigarette, have a meal, smoke a cigarette. 

So the lock the habit is really strong between the habit and the ritual, the same way that bad habits are closely locked, the same way that we can form the lock between good habits. So for example, getting up, waking up, brushing your teeth and meditating, having dinner, taking a bath, having a self-care activity. When we attach, we can start to attach the cues to the trigger, to the habit to ensure that it happens, but we do that for good activities as well. And then it starts to become more automatic, like every night you leave your gym clothes out on your night table before you go to sleep, that ensures it happens in the morning. That ensures that you wake up earlier and you work out in the clothes that are staring at you, and you don’t have to waste the time choosing. 

I also would say Sunday is a mom’s friend. Do as much as you can on Sunday. Eat some meal prep, freeze and stuff. Make some chicken breasts, Matt, eat them, throw them in the freezer. Maybe make a meat sauce. Maybe make like a stir fry. Throw stuff in the freezer. So that will help you. During the week, you get up in the morning. I like to plan my meals on Sunday. I like the kids to be part of it. Okay, what are we having? We’ll meet pizzas, Tuesday night, chicken, Wednesday, burgers, Thursday, lasagna, Friday. Like, we like to plan it out. And then I could batch cook a little bit on Sunday, and then I pull out food as I needed during the week. Okay, I’ve got my meat sauce. I pulled up my meat sauce that’s for Monday. Perfect. Also, like on Sundays to cut up some healthy fruits and vegetables. And vegetables and Tupperware so that it’s easy, like the snack shelves are organized, or they’re on a low level for the kids to grab something. So if they want a healthy snack, there you go. Everything is there when they can reach you know, when I’m hungry, if I want to eat junk, I see that there’s healthy food already cut up and prep that ensures that I eat food that’s good. 

And then it’s a matter of diving deep into your schedule. I say brain dump everything that’s stressing you out right now. Everything you have to do, you know, the dentist appointment for the kids as something you want to do for your business. Take everything off your little line that’s wearing on you, and put it onto a piece of paper and start your priorities. Prioritize. What can you do now? You take the action items and you slot them either into a calendar appointment that you’re going to work on it, or they become a task item? Boom, your list is done. You’re great. You’re it’s not weighing you down. It’s not stressing out. You’ve made time to do everything. 

So my prescription is 30 to 60 minutes of self-care daily. And if that sounds like a lot, again, I encourage our viewers to go to my Instagram. I made a beautiful pie chart, and it shows a breakdown of four slots of a pie, and that’s 60 minutes of self care a day. And that really helps a lot of people to make them see so a bath is 10 minutes, mindful, eating without a phone is 20 minutes. A walk is 20 minutes. Gratitude and journaling is 10 minutes. So it’s made up by 60 minutes. And that is a beautiful 60 minute day that you can break up throughout the day, or, you know, just to replenish your cup, just to give yourself, I would say, to find moments either start programming yourself to go to bed earlier, 15 to 20 minutes at night, so that you can wait 20 minutes early. 

I love the mom Power Hour. If you can take an hour 30 minutes to wait before everybody wakes up, to make a cup of tea or coffee, to journal, to read, to move your body, to meditate, to have some sort of morning solo routine with pleasurable activity just by waking up early and not being so rushed and frenetic, and seeing how beautiful that feels. Also, you guys can pick up the book, which is really, really wonderful, how Elrod has the Miracle Morning, and he talks about the morning by SAVERS, the six things that he does, and that successful people do in the morning which completely changes their trajectory. 

And that is SAVERS. S stands for silence, some sort of silent meditation. A stands for affirmation, setting, some sort of affirmation. I am strong, I am capable. I am a good mother. V, visualization. Visualize kind of the mother you want to be, the working woman you want to be day you want to have when we don’t know where we’re going if we can’t see it. So that’s visualization. E is exercise, any kind of movement in the morning. R is for reading, picking up a smart novel, or something inspirational or something enjoyable, for reading. An essay, scribling or some sort of gratitude or journaling. So those morning favors, he says, In a perfect world, you do 10 minutes of each for 60 minutes, he says that you can still get the benefits of a morning self-care routine by doing a minute of each favor. 

So jumping jacks for a minute or dancing is exercise a minute of gratitude or prayer a minute of visualization. So yeah, those are all helpful ways to make it happen. The morning is a really important time, I think, to start a self-care routine, because it sets your day up for success or failure.

ANNE RAJOO

I just love what Erica shares there, and I can only reiterate the importance of self-care. And as mentioned before, taking away the pressure of perfectionism has enabled me to allow more self care, and I often felt that in my entrepreneur’s journey, it just didn’t go fast enough. I just wasn’t reaching the goals that

I wanted to reach, and I felt everything took too long, and so I really started breaking down my goals into baby steps, and that made it just more attainable, more actionable, but also easier to track progress and to celebrate small wins. And celebrating small wins is definitely a form of self-care for me, and I have developed this daily practice of what I call my morning reflections. That’s a quick journaling exercise that I do every day before I start my work, I sit down in my office with a cup of coffee. I don’t start my laptop yet, but I sit down and I write down a couple of things. Three intentions, positive affirmations, my three priorities for the for the day, and if I feel cold, there are a couple of other prompts that I journal on it, but I don’t do this every days – only on occasions, when I feel like I want to really get things off my chest. But that really helps me to structure my day. And with that, just don’t have so much room for perfectionism. 

So if you want to get that PDF, the morning reflections, the link will be in the show notes.

And I just want to say thank you for listening. And free way to support this show is to leave a review. If you’re on a podcast, leave a review. Write to me what you love about the show, what helps you in the productivity journey. Or if you’re on Spotify, leave a five-star rating, click the little stars. Choose the first one if you feel like it. This really helped me to spread the word, because the reviews and ratings are really what help to bring the podcast in front of more women like you who want to change the way they work and be peacefully productive. 

So next week, I will talk to Lisa Johnson, and the episode will be bit more business-focused. She will share her challenging background, from a council estate in England to achieving huge corporate success, while also again, facing the demands of motherhood. So tune in next week to explore my conversation with Lisa Johnson. Until then, be peacefully productive and catch you next time.