I'll never catch up

Last night at 8 pm, I was lying on my bed staring at the ceiling, too overwhelmed to fold the 4 loads of clean laundry piled on my couch. My kids going back to school on top of my usual single-mom-and-business-owner duties just felt like wayyyyy too much to handle. My thoughts were:

• No one knows how hard this is

• I have 879 things to do tonight

• I want to cry

• I can’t do this

• I’ll never catch up

• My kids need more than I can give

• I’m a Life Coach, and this is exactly what I help my clients with! Can’t I be immune to feeling this myself?

I went to bed, without doing anything else on my list. I felt a lot better after 9 hours of sleep, but the overwhelm was still there. I turned to the tools that I use with my clients. I’m sharing now in case back to school is making you feel overwhelmed, too.

First, just pause.

Name what’s going on. "I am overwhelmed"

Remind yourself what it is. "Overwhelm is an emotion that I feel in my body. It doesn’t feel good, but it won’t kill me."

Question if you’ve felt this way before. "Yes, I always feel this way at the start and end of school. The extra parenting time required doesn’t jive with my work schedule and makes me feel stressed."

Choose a new thought. For clues, look at your original thoughts and choose a better option. Instead of “I can’t do this” I’m going to choose “I can do this and I already am”.

Take one new action to solve this problem. "I called a laundry service to look into having my laundry picked up and delivered clean and folded. One thing off my plate will feel so much better."