Overwhelmed?
Just know, you are exactly where you are supposed to be.
Meant to be
Should be
Every moment of your life so far has led you to this exact spot.
You’ve probably heard that before. I know I’ve said it to myself about a hundred times while I struggled to get my shit together over the last few years. Because the thing about that statement, the absolute truth of the whole mindset is you usually only need to HEAR it when times are tough. You’ve hit a bump, swerved too far in one direction, tripped on something or full on crashed in your life.
Maybe even believe you, gasp, FAILED – but the thing is, we all fall, we all trip and up to this point we’ve all gotten back up. And we’ll do it over and over. And another nugget – you can’t ‘win’ if you haven’t failed – or more to the point, you can’t ENJOY a win if you haven’t fallen flat on your face. It’s an oh-so-much-sweeter victory.
So, by the grace of God or sheer grit and will, we’ve gotten back up. You see – you and me, we’ve got one very big thing in common. We’ve made it this far. Look around, you’re here! Haha, we’re here.
We’ve survived our worst days. Every single one of them, even when we thought we couldn’t go on one more step, face one more failure, one more embarrassment, one more late bill, one more death of a loved one. We’ve survived. And we’ll continue to do so, every day. Over and over.
As it was meant to be.
Once more, YOU are exactly where you are meant to be in this exact moment.
That beautiful cliché – today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Every day.
Today may feel utterly overwhelming.
There is a trick to it. Something I’ve learned over the years, a way of moving through the overwhelm. Tearing that bad boy down so it doesn’t seem so intimidating, so all consuming.
When things start to seem insurmountable and your head is spinning and you are in a near constant state of panic – (which weird can actually be addicting, I’ll get into that in another post).
STOP everything.
Breathe.
Count backwards from ten.
Grab a piece of paper, or your journal. Make a list of everything that is on your plate currently. You can make it in list format, an outline, overly descriptive paragraphs (my default) or doodles. Whatever way feels more aligned to you.
Write out everything that is crushing your soul. Relationship, work, bills, that person who’s bugging you so bad they are taking up way too much of your brain-space right now. Everything.
Getting it out of my head and onto paper is the beginning of relief for me and in some cases, just enough to relax the anxiety. Grabbing the thoughts that have been banging around in my head out and onto a clean page is refreshing.
Oh, so refreshing.
Now, we’re going to take another piece of paper and make a few columns.
House – – Work – – Relationship – – Emotions, etc. Make them broad categories.
I want you to take that ‘master list’ of problems and write each one under one of the above columns. We’re chunking down. If you have an issue or two that span more than one column, just pick the closest one, this isn’t the time to get anything perfect. You’ll find at the end of this, much of the issues could fall under emotions anyway.
Personally, I like to take one big one and one little one at a time – example, the bills are piling up – I make a plan and make phone calls to creditors or utility companies to let them know when I can pay or if I can get a reduced rate. Etc. Then I check that off my list.
Maybe the house is a mess, I’ll take that and make an additional list of each CORNER I want to tackle first, and I’ll give myself a set amount of time to tackle that corner, I set an alarm and when it rings, I move to another corner.
Baby steps.
Take breaks after you check something off the list.
Life and its problems can feel so DAMN big. We get lost and start to spin when we let everything into our minds at once. We cannot do that. It’s a paralyzing notion. The EVERYTHING all at once. I personally freeze up and do absolutely NOTHING. And people in general are more likely to pick up unhealthy coping mechanisms. Self-medicating, binging on food, binging on Netflix, etc.
When we stop everything and numb out, that gets us?
Exactly nowhere. And in some cases, worse than before we started.
But if we can take it all – write it out and organize the things that are attacking our mind. We can start to BREATHE again and know – We got this.
You’ve GOT this.
Let me know if you would like me to create a mini workbook for working through everyday stresses?
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