What to do When Feeling Overwhelmed with Life

The first step for when you’re feeling overwhelmed with life is to actually recognize and acknowledge the moment when you start feeling overwhelmed. Overwhelm is however something that kind of creeps up on us very slowly, then suddenly hits us like a firecracker. It often begins in a very subtle way by making us feel a little rushed. This pushes us out of our comfort zone and we progressively start losing control. What’s more is that we now no longer have the clarity we need to get stuff done, and as a result we become very negative and start complaining and blaming everyone and everything, but ourselves.

Having recognized that you’re feeling overwhelmed with life, it’s now time to take one long deep breath… then get-on-out-of-there and completely remove yourself from the situation. Yes, I actually mean walk away from the situation in the opposite direction. You cannot continue what you’re doing feeling this way. Remove yourself, and do it fast! The sooner the better. At least now you have the space to think things through more clearly. And your first thoughts must be directed at what exactly triggered your feelings of overwhelm. Identifying this trigger is the first step toward taking back control.

Feeling overwhelmed with life is very much like a problem. You have this experience that you just can’t seem to handle, however you are only feeling this way because of how you’re viewing this situation. You will never find a solution to your problem if you’re emotionally invested within that problem. You must therefore separate your emotions from this experience and then challenge yourself to think things through a little differently. Specifically, you must decide to either shift your perspective of the situation, to change the situation, to remove yourself from the situation, or to figure out how to best cope with it.

Let’s say that you decided to challenge yourself to try and work through this situation. Well in that case, it’s now time to take a personal inventory. A personal inventory is an acknowledgement of your personal strengths, knowledge, skills, tools and the support you have on hand to help you cope with this situation far more effectively. With all these things at your disposal you no longer need to succumb to feeling overwhelmed with life or with any particular situation. You just need to figure out how to make use of these resources to help you work through your predicament in an optimal way.

Having taken a personal inventory, you should now understand where your strengths lie, and therefore you probably feel more capable of working through your feelings of overwhelm in this particular situation. Consider for a moment how you could utilize your time, skills, tools and the resources you have on hand to try and make things a little less overwhelming. Ask yourself how you could potentially work through your task more effectively and rationally. Possibly the solution lies in tackling your task in small pieces. Or just maybe there is a better way to do things that you hadn’t considered before.

No matter what solutions you come up with to your dilemma, it’s now time to take full responsibility and start moving forward. In other words, commit yourself to taking charge of the situation. Yes, there will be things and aspects that you still won’t be able to control. However, don’t allow these things to distract you from everything else that you can do right now. With this in mind, focus on what can be controlled and work through these tasks one small step at a time. Even if you can’t do it all, you can at the very least begin somewhere. Start small and slowly build momentum one mini-task at a time.