How to Handle Overwhelm

Listen to Jeanette’s audio on Handling Overwhelm

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How to Handle It

All of us experience overwhelm from time to time. The need to re-focus and to deal in a constructive way with that sense of feeling overwhelmed is what often prompts people to seek out a coach.

Increasingly there is a trend for people who come to me for coaching to be experiencing overwhelm beyond their personal problems and it is big questions to do with the evolution of consciousness and issues involving planetary survival that are emerging to trouble them.

With a world wide epidemic of depression there is more than a personal need to notice and to then respond to any feelings we might have of being overwhelmed. Finding equipoise in the midst of the change in our lives, enables us to respond to others with more compassion and to be more effective in local community action. And a step such as this can have global consequences.

A beginning step may be something as simple as taking a deep breath and dropping your shoulders. We might find it helpful to give ourselves some time out, -to do nothing, take a nap, “sharpen the pencils”…This may have been seen as procrastination in time management approaches of the past. Now we begin to understand it like re-booting a frozen computer, It can free us to ‘get going’ when we’re ‘stuck’.

There is a place in contemporary world for taking ‘doona days’ on the one hand and also for getting stuck right into what we CAN do.

In coaching we talk about ‘tolerations’. These are unfinished incomplete things which drain our energy and to begin to ‘zap’ them can be very energising and liberating.

One day a coach in a class I took issued us with a ten minute ‘’toleration challenge’. This was such fun,- to try to quickly engage as many neglected tasks as possible – things that bugged us. It was very exciting to hear the results the next week, as so many of us found that this simple ten minute action triggered huge subsequent actions. The experience of starting with small immediately achievable tasks was very energising and refreshing and freed up a lot of mental disc space.

For me, the cleaning out of my handbag can be a start to freeing my mental and emotional freeze.

I wonder what you can think of to do straight away that can relax ground and release you for your next step?