From overwhelmed to calm

We are all powerful people.  But powerful people have their limits.  How is your power being weakened throughout the days, weeks, months as we lead our professional, home, and personal lives?  There are aspects of our lives that can be creative, happy, and engaging in the right setting, but all too frequently we find ourselves overwhelmed and doubting our abilities.

We certainly all know the feelings of being overwhelmed and over extended.  Of having to put our time and energy into the frustrations of life.  In a state of being over extended we may find that our personal relationships are suffering.  We may find ourselves uninspired to connect in meaningful ways with our loved ones.  For some of us may find our jobs have become our primary relationship and our job has become an unforgiving taskmaster.

Health can suffer.  We may find ourselves unable to fall asleep or stay asleep with the nagging worries we have.  Unhealthy eating or not eating enough, our bodies become lethargic and weakened.  Purposeful exercise feels like it would be a luxury.  We are in a state of overwhelm when…

*Our shoulders feel the weight of the world on them.

* We wake up in the middle of the night with racing thoughts of worry.

*  We don’t look forward to doing what once brought us great happiness.

*  We find ourselves thinking if we only worked harder or did better than we could make it all work out.

Different choices need to be made when we are overwhelmed.  The following strategy will be able to help identify and get out of the over extendedness and prevent it from happing again.

  Know Your Limits

We must be able to recognize when we are over extended.  So many of us have been fighting and pushing for so long that we see it as normal.  Everyone of us has signs that let us know we’ve hit our limit and those signs are present before we are overwhelmed.  This is the line between being happily busy and productive to being overwhelmed.  To discover our limits we need to think back to a time to when we were happily busy and productive…functioning, not stressed.  What were we doing?  How were we doing it?  Discovering our limits requires an inner journey to discover how we want the rhythm of our life to happen.  By knowing our limits we can avoid or notice it more quickly and be able to correct it sooner.

  Change Priorities

When in the state of overwhelm there is a different way of prioritizing  that supports us, it is a mindset of crisis intervention, so to speak.  Rather than looking at the most important items and plugging away, look to complete the easiest.  So the project that can be done the fastest and easiest.

  Focus On the Inner Journey

Being overwhelmed is a state of mind.  Thoughts such as, “how am I going to get all of this done?” and “I don’t have any time for me anymore.”  Feelings of anxiety, frustration, and fatigue are telling us that we are running on fumes.  We must be mindful of filling ourselves up, with creativity, positivity, joy, and vitality.  This is our fuel.  When we recognize that our positive emotions are depleting, we must give ourselves the time and attention necessary to bring balance back into our lives.

  Restful Days

Just as our bodies need recharging, so do our minds.  This requires rest on a regular basis.  This means taking a day out of every week where the focus is on rest.  The rest of our days are already filled up with work, school, laundry, and grocery shopping.  A day of rest requires a different sort of energy… one of calmness, recharging, relaxing, and fun.  By taking this one day a week for ourselves, we are supported in keeping our creativity high and the ability to meet whatever presents itself to us in a positive manner.

Make the choice to choose a strategy that will have you transforming feelings of being over extended into feelings of calmness.  Know that you deserve it.

Self-gratitude

With so much emphasis on gratitude and how it positively affect our lives, I would like to focus on self-gratitude.  When we have self-gratitude, we can appreciate ourselves without any outside influence.  It can be difficult to do, but it is one of the most powerful things we will ever do.

There are so many wonderful books and articles that focus on self-improvement.  There is only one thing that makes the advice and tools work or not – the user.  It’s how the user feels about themself that will determine if the self-improvement technique will work.  That is the key to positive change.  Gratitude is a powerful attitude that will bring results and self-gratitude can change everything about your life. 

We all play the “lets beat ourselves up” game.  We replay over in our heads the mistakes we made, regrets we have.  We tell ourselves we’re not good enough.  It is a self-defeating cycle that is heart breaking.  So learning self-gratitude requires that we begin to appreciate ourselves where we are less than satisfied with our choices.  It’s time to give ourselves a break already. 

One way to do that is to write out a done list.  Not the things we need to do, but have already done for ourselves.  We are the most important person in our lives. If we fail to recognize the things we do for ourselves, we will be discounting our value.

Always start by being grateful for what is.  If we make ourselves a delicious breakfast, acknowledge and feel the gratitude.  Write down everything on the list that we’ve done for ourselves, even if it’s finishing the laundry.  Also the needed time to refocus and recharge and let the gratitude felt, spread to the other things we do.

Eventually we’ll see our done lists get longer and longer.  The magic that happens from having self-gratitude is we will find that we get better at the things we do.  As we start to have more appreciation for ourselves there will be less and less beating ourselves up. 

As we write our life done list and our daily done list we can get creative and even crazy.  No one else needs to see the lists.  We will shine in our own excellence.