Managing Stress, Overwhelm, Or Lack Of Balance

As part of the Self Improvement Fast Track series, today I want to elaborate on the third reason why people like you choose to invest time in their self-improvement, which is because they want to get better at managing stress, feeling less overwhelmed by all of their responsibilities, and create more balance in their life.

I get it - life is busier than ever. It can feel like a constant sprint where you’re just trying to get over the hump, only to find an even bigger hill to climb behind it, over and over again. It’s like you’re running a race where the finish line is always moved forward before you reach it. And waiting for things to slow down is pointless because something else adds on and you never get a chance to recover, leading to burnout as you’re slowly being overstretched too thin.

At work, it could be that things just keep getting added to your plate and it keeps demanding more and more of your time. In your personal life, maybe things just keep piling up where family emergencies and commitments like trips, visits, decision-making and being a supporting system all fall on you. Not to mention the financial pressure you carry to continue performing in your work so that you can ensure a sense of security for you and your loved ones.

Stress and overwhelm are the symptom of the same thing - you don’t have the personal capacity to comfortably handle everything that life demands of you. And as a result, you get pulled out of balance and start overweighing certain areas of your life at the expense of others, particularly your health and self-care, which are the pathway to expanding your capacity.

So what needs to happen first is decrease the demand - To set better boundaries, take on less, get out of the rat race of trying to survive the day. Then with that space, you can start investing in things that increase your capacity, like a more reasonable work schedule and consistent health routines, that keep you from overexerting yourself. And it’s by improving your physical and emotional state that you can start doing things with more quality, and more efficiently, to be the person capable of taking on the challenges life throws at you. 

It’s by arriving at a more settled, sustainable, balanced state that you get out of the daily fight and start enjoying the things you’re doing more, because you have more capacity to be present with them and you’re actually in a place to make progress on them.