Crash Landing!
Well, that’s not what I thought would happen…
Sometimes we overestimate what we can pack into a day, a week, a month, or even the hour or two we have free in between other commitments. This is entirely normal, and sometimes it’s just due to unexpected issues arising in the midst of something routine that you thought would be smooth sailing. But what if this is the norm, how you’re living your life habitually? If you constantly overschedule yourself, there will be a lot of misery subtly built into your routines. You’ll feel like you’re always running on empty. You’ll tend to be irritable, grumpy, and resentful of requests, even from people you love. You’ll have to push yourself to do everything rather than powering your actions on enjoyable anticipation. And the truth is, this just isn’t necessary.
If you’re in this position, there can be a few things going on, and a few solutions that can quickly help:
You were taught that you should always be striving, and it’s lazy, or bad, or even dangerous to take time for relaxation when there are things still on the to-do list. This one can be the hardest to grapple with, because what we learn when we’re small can seem so true that we don’t even notice that there might be other options—the beliefs we were fed before our conscious mind really developed can be invisible, and therefore hard to change without help. In this case, you’ll need to either find yourself some assistance, or commit to setting an intention to find the beliefs that are running your behavior, and spend some time noticing what you’re thinking when you’re most stressed. These beliefs are invisible only until we concentrate on finding them. Once you turn a spotlight on your mental processes, it doesn’t usually take more than a few days to get an idea of why you’re acting the way you are. Once you have seen the inner workings, you can do the good work necessary for changing your problematic beliefs. Tapping is an amazing tool for this!
Somewhere along the line, you got used to trying to meet everyone’s expectations without remembering that you always have a vote. This one can also be fairly tricky to deal with too, because if the pattern is very old, as in, you learned in childhood that you should be seen and not heard or some other negating message, you’ll have to do some work on understanding where this comes from and changing your beliefs about what you deserve and what is possible. This takes some doing, but it’s so worth it!
Your stress levels have gotten out of hand, and you feel like you have to run to keep up with a fast-paced life over which you feel you have no control. This is extremely common in today’s world. There is so much to balance, and expectations of what we should be able to do (based on what other “non-us” people are doing) bombard us from all sides. Since you are a unique person with unique abilities and desires, much of this really makes no sense at all, but we take it on anyway. In this case, you need to give yourself permission to make your own decisions about what makes your life good; you then need to make a plan for how to rebalance based on this and carve out time to counteract any tendency you have to just churn and burn through every day without making conscious choices about what’s actually happening in the here and now—is it serving you and what you really want?
You’re a driven, goal-oriented, or very competitive person who genuinely loves getting things done, and ticking things off your list is part of what makes life fun. If this is you, you’re lucky to have consistent access to motivation, but it’s easy to burn yourself out to the point that this becomes essentially an addiction. You must take regular compensatory measures to counteract the effects of so much hard work. If it helps, you can add sleep, leisure activities, lazy family time, and alone time to your to-do list so you can acknowledge that recharging is still “doing” something very important. Notice what works here, what renews your sense of excitement at getting back to your tasks, and make sure that those are a consistent part of your schedule.
Life is complicated, and it’s often impossible to predict just how your days will go. We all get tired, overwhelmed, and disheartened sometimes, but if you start keeping an eye on why you’re doing what you’re doing and how consistently you’re at your best, you can begin to do a better job of recovering from overwhelm and predicting ways to create a better balance. Challenging yourself is often a good, inspiring thing. Consistently running yourself on unrealistic expectations, on the other hand, just produces disappointment, shame, and frustration. None of these will help you; motivating yourself with healthy vitality, balance, and inspiration will fuel your life beyond what you might believe to be possible.