For people who are already overwhelmed, that reaction can spiral into shame or self-criticism, which only makes it harder to re-engage. People often start beating themselves up, says Margaret Sigel, a therapist in Santa Monica, Calif. “If you’re thinking, ‘My desk is a mess and I can’t even do anything about it,’ that will just feed the shame spiral,” she says. Yet the problem isn’t that you don’t know what to do. It’s that your brain has decided it’s too much to handle.
Why putting away a few items works
One simple way to interrupt this cycle is with what’s often called the “five things” approach: Instead of trying to clean an entire room, put away just a handful of items—books or magazines, shoes scattered around the lobby, toiletries strewn across the bathroom counter, or anything else. The task is intentionally small, which is exactly why it works.
When you put away just five things, you interrupt the cycle of paralysis by lowering the bar to something your brain will accept. “The reason it works isn’t really about cleaning,” Sigel says. “It’s small enough that the nervous system doesn’t register it as an overly taxing demand.”
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