With all of the projects I’ve been working on, both inside and outside of my current day job, I’ve been feeling overwhelmed.
My old, habitual response for dealing with stress was to amplify it – with anxiety.
It might sound crazy to you (I mean it’s definitely crazy since it was wildly detrimental,) but I would start worrying about the amount of stress I felt, and that came along with negative self-talk.
It was a spiral of shame and stress, where I fed myself doubts about my ability to get everything done.
This time around, I’m choosing the road less traveled.
I’m not dealing with my stress in the way I habitually would.
I’m making the conscious decision to not feed my anxiety with negative self-talk.
This time around, I’m choosing to abandon the anxiety narrative and just keep reminding myself that I’ll survive.
Yea, I’ve got a lot going on — but in the grand scheme of things, I’m healthy and alive.
Everything will work itself out. And if it doesn’t, I’ll STILL survive.
Even if all of my projects blow up in my face, I will still be healthy and alive… and isn’t that the only thing really worth stressing about in the first place?
What I’m coming to realize is that when feeling overwhelmed, I get so wrapped up in the narrative about the feeling that I blow everything out of proportion.
It’s during these moments that I forget to take a deep breath and ask myself the most important question: “what’s the worst thing that will happen?”
The answer to that question is almost always more manageable than we make it out to be in our head.
So the next time you’re feeling overwhelmed, take a deep breath, remind yourself of your resilience and say “I’ll survive.”
