How To Not Drown
When Life is Flooding You With Bullsh*t
Today I want to talk about what to do when you’re overwhelmed with life. But more than just overwhelmed, because that’s a term that gets thrown around like confetti these days. I’m talking about when you feel like you’re literally drowning. When the water is rising, there’s no life jacket in sight, no one is reaching out a hand to save you and you can hardly catch your breath.
Why are you drowning? It might be that your mental health has tanked and you’ve succumbed to all of the scathing false beliefs your brain tells you (this is one of my particular types of drowning). Maybe life is throwing constant bullshit your way- little things that continue to add up or just a few big things that immediately sink you. Or it may be that you are doing your best to keep up with having too many things to do and not enough time to do them, and you’re flooded so quickly you don’t realize it until it’s already happening. Could just be your luteal phase each month wreaking havoc. Not to mention we are all consuming more information at a rate that our nervous systems were never designed to handle and I’d argue that alone is enough to knock over those of us deep-feelers at least monthly.
My last week, well 10 days really, have felt like a state of constant drowning. I’m wired but tired; I can’t sleep well but don’t want to get up in the morning. This is not new to me and although you’d probably like to know why, I treat what I share here with the same considerations as if I were disclosing it to a client in a session. So while much of the “why” will stay private, what I want to share with you is my game plan that I rely on when this happens.
Because if I’ve learned anything it’s that I can’t stop or control these episodes. I live a robust, full and often lovely life that also has very real and painful challenges. Over the years I’ve figured out that all I can do is have strategies and faith in myself to rely on to pull me through. Here is what goes down: