Healing Overwhelm

Overwhelm is a frame of mind, an energetic environment created around us triggered by an overarousal of any emotion, negative or positive.

When we allow our past and future thoughts to engulf our present moment, overwhelm pervades us.
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Simply put, overwhelm is the feeling you get when you are doing too much and don't even realize you are doing it.

How do you spend your day?

More importantly, how do your thoughts spend their day?

The answer to this question will likely guide you toward your source of overwhelm.

This inventory of your thoughts and emotions will help you to organize and manage your mental clutter leaving you high vibrating in peace and calmness. When you are high-vibin, your energetic frequency elevates you above whatever is causing your low-vibe state of overwhelm.

This October will be the 10th Anniversary of the publication of my children's book  Angel Birthdays. 13 years ago, I was in deep overwhelm. I wanted my book published but didn't know how to make it happen.  I just kept receiving rejection after rejection.  I was overwhelmed with emotions...until I started taking small steps that I could control which brought me closer to my end goal. 

I launched a website and hosted a launch party. A friend who attended the launch party introduced me to her illustrator friend who became my book's illustrator. I decided to self-publish and hosted a Kickstarter to raise the funds necessary for the process and then a publisher found me via Kickstarter. 

My ultimate goal was accomplished but it took small controllable steps to help me move from overwhelm to completion.

Overwhelm can look one of two ways:

1) It can look like an analysis paralysis where we have so many thoughts, we are afraid to move or 
2) Overwhelm can keep us "so busy" moving back and forth from task to meaningless task that at the end of the day we are exhausted but haven't really "moved the needle forward" on what really matters.

Do either of those scenarios sound familiar to you? 

A tactical solution to overwhelm may look like this: At the end of your day, choose three meaningful tasks for the following day to complete that will move you to your next goal. This helps us to manage our overwhelm by offering you a manageable roadmap.
 
When we can shift our perspective on these following aspects of overwhelm, healing truly begins.
 

Managing our external and internal focusDetermining what is the higher power responsibility vs my responsibilityTaking emotional inventory and welcoming in all of our emotionsPracticing mindfulness and recognizing how worry and rumination trigger overwhelm

According to Very Well Mind, overwhelm can be caused by grief, excessive workload, personal relationship conflict, financial problems, health concerns, or traumatic experiences.

While I do agree any one of these experiences can trigger overwhelm, when we can take a step back and recognize that each of the above events is an external trigger, we just upped our healing game exponentially.

Healing overwhelm is an inside job.

1. Managing our external and internal focus
 
When we focus on the external environment more than our internal environment, we are dictating that the outside world has more influence over us than our powerful inner world.
 
This would feel a lot like wanting to turn on your car’s A/C and hoping someone standing outside of your car will turn it on. Here you are, feeling super uncomfortable and hot while burning up sitting inside the car but believing only someone outside the car can change the dial. 

Sounds crazy, right?
 
The state of overwhelm follows this same template. 

When we are experiencing overwhelm, we believe a truth, a person, or a solution outside of us can make a bigger difference to our mental state than we can to ourselves.

We are our most qualified inner change-maker. We can make more powerful changes than anyone standing right next to us.
 
When we do create that shift, and turn down our own A/C, we begin to magnetize that which is in alignment with that refreshed energetic frequency and manifest blessings and abundance equal to the energetic frequency that we emit. 
 

2. Higher power versus my responsibility

In January 2022, I wrote a Love Letter entitled, Are you Barely hanging on?, where I detailed a process of handing over overwhelm and stress to your Higher Power and focusing on what only you can control. When we can successfully complete this process, we can bask in faith, trust and peace knowing that all things fall into place in the perfect time and way.
 
 
3. Emotional inventory and welcoming in all of your emotions

So often when we feel grief or sadness, we feel that something is "wrong." 

What if your grief or sadness completed the picture and was the perfect complement to your joy and exhilaration? What if the grief and sadness balanced out the joy so you remained in emotional equilibrium? What if we experienced more joy as a result of healing from so much pain? 

Is it possible that your grief and sadness are the most important components of your joy? 

The next time you feel overwhelmingly emotional, take inventory of your emotions. Notice how one might be balancing the other and that there are no "good" or "bad" emotions, each and every one of them serves a purpose. 
 

4 Present moment- rumination vs. imagination
In December, I wrote a Love Letter entitled, Now is the most powerful place to be, where I dive into the power that the present moment offers and how this mental state offers us the antidote to overwhelm.

Not living in the present moment creates overwhelm.

We exhaust our energy when we use our imagination to create multiple future scenarios:

the great outcomethe feared possible outcome the doomsday outcome

This prediction energy depletes us, leaving no energy for the present moment. The same is true with the opposite of foreboding. Its evil counterpart, rumination of the past, is equally exhausting.

When we expend our energy this way, we are left with little to no energy for our present-moment experience.

Healing overwhelm is a process, not a singular event. Although there may be a moment where you recognize your growth when a trigger presents itself and you no longer engage or feel overwhelmed, you take that moment or situation in stride. More often though, you will notice a gradual shift as you begin to make progress on little tasks, one by one.

The overwhelm healing doesn't end here. 

Join me for today's meditation as you learn this powerful technique to overcome overwhelm.

Want to understand the energetics of overwhelm? Join me on my Love.Heal.Thrive. podcast tomorrow, Healing Overwhelm where I dive into the nitty gritty of our energy states and how they create this frequency of overwhelm. It is such a helpful episode to help you come to understand your overwhelm from an emotional and energetic state. 
 
Much love,
Erin

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