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When You’re Overwhelmed, Simplify

The feeling of being overwhelmed is extremely common in the people I talk to, and it's becoming more and more clear to me that this is the default state for most of us.

We're overwhelmed by it all: all the things we have on our plates, all the interruptions and messages and emails, all the things online and on social media, all the news and chaos of the world, all the things going on in our relationships.

It's a lot! We can celebrate the abundance of our lives, but often we bemoan it. The problem isn't the abundance, but our fear and anxiety about all of it. Actually, for most of us, the fear is that we'll let people down. We'll drop one of the many balls we have in the air and let people down ... or worse yet, we'll drop them all and we'll be exposed as inadequate!

So how do we deal with it? I suggest three practices of simplicity. And as you practice with simplicity, you might recite a kind of mantra: When you're overwhelmed, simplify. Let's talk about the fear and anxiety before we talk about the three simplicity practices.

- Fears That Drive Our Overwhelm

The first reason we feel overwhelm is that we often have too many commitments. We've taken on more than we have time for, often out of optimism for how much we can do in a day. It's a lot less than we usually think. Once you can tune into this, can you rest your attention on it for a minute? Take some slow deeper breaths, and give yourself some loving compassion.

- Simplicity Practice: One Breath at a Time

Only after you've done the first practice should you take on this one: take one thing from the Huge Pile and focus completely on it. We can only breathe one breath at a time, even though we have millions of breaths left to breathe (hopefully!). We don't get overwhelmed by all the breaths we have to breathe, we simply breathe the next one.

What would it be like to simplify, and focus on just the next thing to do? Ask your heart: What do I want to do next? What am I being called to do? Then give yourself to that.

- Simplicity Practice: Protecting Your Time & Commitments

Finally, what can we do about having too many things to do? Well, first, we'll probably always have some of that, no matter what. We can relish in the abundance of it if we like — can you imagine what would it be like to never have anything to do? We're blessed with abundance!

- What would life be like if you let your Sacred No protect your time and the commitments you cared most about?