DOSSIER With you in mind

There are days when life just feels like too much and the old adage ‘keep calm and carry on’ is a big ask. Anita Chaudhuri learns how to keep your head when others are losing theirs

PHOTOGRAPHS: GETTY IMAGES; SHUTTERSTOCK

The other day, I had a meltdown in my local hardware store. I went in to make a simple purchase –a new bulb for the hall lamp. Alas, this was no longer a straightforward errand. Did I need an LED or an eco halogen bulb? How many lumens was I looking for? Was I interested in a smart wifi-enabled dimmable bulb with colour-change option? It was all too much and, close to tears, I slunk home feeling downcast and useless.

It might sound trivial but the experience was a wake-up call –a lightbulb moment even… Evidently I had reached a tipping point and was in danger of becoming totally overwhelmed with the minutiae of daily life. I felt like a fraud for talking to anyone about it. After all, what did I have to feel overwhelmed about? It’s not as if I’m a key worker facing long shifts with people’s lives in the balance. Whatever the reasons, while surveying the towering piles of books, papers and mail taking over every surface of my living room, I knew I needed to take action.

In her viral BuzzFeed post on millennial burnout, the writer Anne Helen Petersen coined the phrase ‘errand paralysis’, which seems to perfectly sum up one of the major symptoms of our collective overwhelm regardless of age. Errand paralysis is the syndrome where you keep moving items from one to-do list to the next without ever taking action.

As Petersen describes it: ‘None of these tasks was that hard: getting knives sharpened, taking boots to the cobbler, getting my new dog a microchip, sending someone a signed copy of my book, scheduling an appointment with the dermatologist, donating books to the library, vacuuming my car… Emails festered in my personal inbox, which I use as a sort of alternative to-do list, to the point that I started calling it the “inbox of shame”.’