Overcoming Overwhelm

I am no stranger to overwhelm. As a sole parent who is trying her best to raise her children to live their lives to the fullest (and still take part in activities at the same level as if two parents were supporting this), plus work, and my own life, it can feel like a lot. Add in some perimenopausal hormones and it may seem like the perfect storm of overwhelm.

My Mom took this picture of me at my favourite spot, the beach at Lake Huron, this past summer. I know it is just a single snapshot in time, but I notice I look like I am carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders.

Lately, I have been doing a lot of reflection and reading about overwhelm. In my line of work as an Executive Coach, overwhelm is something I see often in my clients. It robs us of our quality of life and our peace of mind. When we feel overwhelmed, it can lead us to feel we are in too deep, doing too much, out of control, with a lot of pressure.

We are never going to live our best lives or do our best work from this place. But, overwhelm isn’t all bad. When we notice we are feeling this way, it is a call for us to shift something. Maybe you need to take a really hard look at your schedule. Or, perhaps it is the way you relate to all of the tasks and/or people in your life.

Let me explain more as I found this fascinating to dissect how this was playing out in my own life. My new self-awareness on this now has given me a lot of power. So, I would like to share with you a bit about my personal journey.

I noticed that the voice inside my head was saying, “I am constantly driving my girls to many activities - sports, their work, social, and school events each day from before school begins until bedtime. This is insane. There is no time for me. I am self-sacrificing myself to ensure my kids get to do all they want to do. I guess I will try to enjoy this because in 5 years’ time, they will be off and then I will be bored. These girls are my world.”

You will notice some powerful words in that paragraph, like “insane and self-sacrifice.” Imagine the messages that is sending to my nervous system. Also, if I was being really honest with myself, I could see a victim mentality creeping in that was making me feel unhappy. Yes, it is completely sad that my husband died and the girls and I miss their Dad tremendously every day, but I still am in control of my life and the life I create for my girls and me. I choose to do the drives and everything I am doing. If it is creating so much overwhelm, why don’t I just stop? It really is within my control. Nobody has a gun to my head telling me to do everything I am doing.

So, here’s where it gets interesting. I do this stuff, yes, because I love my girls, but let’s go deeper than that. I do it because my goal is for the girls and me is to live a full life, in kindness and in a way that brings value to the world.

So, it would be unrealistic for me to think we are going to have a full life and not leave the house or do things. Yes, I still had to challenge myself to take a long hard look at my schedule and examine places for all of us to build more downtime as that is important, too. But, I can’t create a goal like this and then complain inside my head about the actions that align with it.

I come from a long line of farmers from my grandparents on both sides and before, so I will use farmers for this example. If a farmer has a goal of growing crops, they know that they will be driving the tractor, and working long hours during the prime planting and harvesting seasons. That is the role. You don’t hear the farmer complain all the time “Oh, I have to drive the tractor today. Oh, I have to be out in the heat.” They maybe don’t always like it, but they know that is the job. This is what aligns with their goal.

I considered how I can align this way of thinking with my own life as it relates to overwhelm. So knowing what I have committed to in terms of my goal for our family and the way we live. Each action I perform aligns with that.

I choose how I think about each thing I do (or don’t do). I can wash the dishes and think how much I hate this task and I have got better things to do. Or, I can wash the dishes and think how grateful I am to have had food on these plates and clean water to wash them with. These scenarios create completely different experiences yet, the dishes get done either way. So, what messages do I want to be played out in my head? And more importantly, who do I want to be? Not just on the outside as we can manage our persona to a certain extent, but on the inside where we sit with the cocktail of emotions and thoughts brewing inside.

Making this shift is a work in progress, but once you take the time to define (and actually write down your overarching goal for your life), and see how the actions you do align with that (or else remove them), then you are living your life in a way of your choosing. That is empowering to come to that realization.

You are in control of you!