It’s a tough place to be in, so in today’s post I want to walk you through a three-ingredient “cure” I often use with my therapy and coaching clients (not to mention with myself) when life gets to be overwhelming.

Read on and see if this recipe for overwhelm “cure” can be applied anywhere in your own life….

Discernment.

So what exactly *is* overwhelm and how do you know when you’re in it and what you need? 

Overwhelm, according to Webster’s Dictionary can be defined as:

“: to affect (someone) very strongly

: cause (someone) to have too many things to deal with

: to defeat (someone or something) completely”

Sound familiar?

Strongly affected, too many things to deal with, feeling defeated? Yep.

That’s overwhelm in a nutshell.

And I think that by understanding the literal definition of overwhelm we can use the definition to recognize when and where in our lives we’re experiencing it. For instance:

• Where are you feeling defeated in your life right now?
• In what area(s) do you simply have too much to deal with?
• Which life areas feel particularly emotional or challenging? Where are you strongly affected?

Also, I invite my clients to pay attention to their fantasies, day-time reveries and mind-wanderings that can often alert them not only to overwhelm but also clue them into the life areas that they might most need to tend to and what they most need and want.

For instance, are they daydreaming about ending up in the hospital so that they can actually get taken care of?

Daydreaming about running away to a cottage in the Scottish Highlands to get some space?

Fantasizing about deleting their social media profiles so they can feel a little less exposed?

Each of these reveries (a state in which you are thinking about pleasant things) contains important clues about what you might most need. So let me ask you:

• In times of overwhelm and overcommitment, what do you fantasize about?
• What’s at the essence of that fantasy? (hint: rest, space, support, connection, and security are usually at the core for most of us.)
• What would it look like to start to address the essence of that fantasy in your real, waking life?

This last question is key, because, let’s face it, most of us can’t drop everything and run away to a cottage in the Scottish Highlands, but we *can* start to identify the fact that we need space and less social contact in our daily lives, which can inform how we apply the second ingredient of the overwhelm cure…

Pruning.

So in my yard, I have these gorgeous, abundant fruit trees: figs, Meyer lemons, apples, and persimmons.

One of the things I’ve learned in the last few years of living here and enjoying their delicious fruit each season is this: pruning back the branches and blossoms, while seemingly ruthless to this newbie gardener, is critical if I want to enjoy fully-matured growth of some of the fruit.