Random Advice Type #11: What To Do When You Are Overwhelmed?

Posted on 09/30/2022 by Pisaries Creator

I admit I don’t vacuum as much as I should. I grew up with parents who vacuumed every week. They cooked meals each night. I didn’t take after them by any means, which is a shame in a way. I hate cooking and find nothing relaxing about it. I wish I liked to cook more. I don’t mind baking once a while. I’m the first one to change the TV station to something non-cooking or non-house related when it’s on in the break room where I work. This is not what overwhelms me although if I committed to vacuuming, I probably wouldn’t have found three spiders in the apartment. I find myself unable to slow my mind at times and based on my recurrent dreams and inability to fall asleep right away, it all points to higher stress levels than normal. I try to keep my emotions in check even though my current situation puts me closer to the edge of unreason some days when I let my mind get away from me. I’m sort of in the middle of the pack these days. I’ve dealt with PTSD and bouts of depression for a large part of my life although I’ve made great strides to keep it in check the last 15 years. I still feel a little uncomfortable stating this, my vulnerability, and much it has to do with from the way I was raised. I always hate bringing this up and wish it wasn’t so ingrained into my personality, but it’s very real because that is how I survived. Even though I was very young, I was taught and learned early to remain a stone.

What should you do when you are feeling overwhelmed? I suppose it differs on what kind of overwhelming you are feeling. There are different reasons why people feel this way. I’m sure there are tens of hundreds, if not thousands of reasons, but whatever they are, the first thing to do is to try your best to get out of the severity and intensity of the funk you are feeling. Certain people would tell me go for a walk or write in a journal as a way to get through these overwhelming feelings. The last thing I wanted to do was go for a walk or jog or run. I would probably throw my iPod across the room because I was so pissed off. The biggest relief, if you could call it that, was venting whether it be in my journal or talking to my mom because she’s one the few people who can listen to me complaining about my life. There are valid reasons to be brutally honest with why you are overwhelmed. Once I am done with venting and writing in my journal, which usually amounts to identifying my problems (easily done) and how to solve them (somewhat easily done) although taking the steps is much harder.

Another hard thing for me to do is changing my perspective on the situation and the actions I take in order to get my desired results. I start to look at the unknown in where I might end up in six months to a year (or less if I’m feeling very confident that day) as a challenge, as an opportunity, as a way to grow because it helps me not feel so hopeless. I’ve never wanted to be stuck in life and worse, feel completely stuck in life, but sometimes it happens, and you feel it all over your body. There’s a line between having success and getting some rewards for your hard work and having nothing good happen to you in more than a year’s time. This is where many people are in life right now. I would bet my hands on it. Here we are still breathing and trying to make tomorrow just as good or better. Reading a book from someone you’ve never read before is good too if you like to read especially if it has funny parts in it. The humor allows you to step away from your overwhelming issues and escape into a different world/perspective. The other parts of the book should be teaching you something new and if not that, then entertaining you.

The bottom line is you have to work through the funk, maybe several times, maybe a lot more than you want to be doing. You have to do it anyway or else you will give up and if you do give up, fine but circle around and give it another try. I can tell you with complete honesty I have been in the darkest of the dark night and reached maybe not the highest of the skies, but that is a part of human life. Minimizing our humanity including our faults does nothing good for anyone. Shaming someone is one of the worst solutions you can do to someone (an example is telling the person to snap out of it). If what I said doesn’t make sense, there is always throwing darts in a bar (if that’s your thing). Just don’t drive intoxicated. No one needs that kind of headache unless you like spending your money and having your license revoked.