Overcoming the Feeling of Overwhelm
Imagine this: You are so depressed and you struggle to get out of bed each day. When you wake up, you aren’t sure what commitments you will actually keep. You have to fight every step of the way to get your day started. Doing anything, even showering, is an absolute battle to complete. If you actually make it to your commitments, once you get home, you feel empty and sad. The only thing that brings you any kind of joy is eating junk and indulging in food. Once your belly is full, you feel intense shame for what you just did to yourself by consuming garbage. You watch endless TV until it is time for bed, and as you go to bed you find great sadness in imagining you are going to have to do this all over again tomorrow. You know you’re a disappointment to the world because you’re a disappointment to yourself.
This was my life 15 years ago. I was so unhappy, and very little in my life brought me joy. I loved to eat junk food and I loved my dogs. Pretty much everything else in my life I viewed as miserable. I was overweight, unhealthy, had turned my partner into my caretaker, was a sub-par employee with a big attendance problem, had strained family relationships, and had very few friends. I thought about dying pretty frequently — I longed for it, actually. I didn’t want to live life like this. There was no joy to be found in my life. I was so lost, and I had no idea what I could do or needed to do to make things better.
Then I made the choice to start somewhere. A lot of things needed to change for me to find my happiness, but all of those things could not be tackled at once. That thought kept me suspended in time for many years. Looking at the big picture of my life, I had no idea where to start. There were too many things that needed to change, and that seemed quite overwhelming to me. The feeling of defeat would cause me to do nothing. My thought would be, “What’s the point? There is too much that needs to be done — I will never be able to be happy.”
That kind of thinking becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you stand still, you will never move forward. Once I understood that, I decided to work on just one thing. The thing I chose was napping throughout the day. I made the decision that I needed to stick to a normal sleeping schedule. I was no longer going to allow myself to take a nap or fall asleep in front of the TV. I knew that sleeping too much was a very unhealthy thing to do, and while I used it to escape my depression, it was making it worse.
In the beginning, it was a struggle. My body was not used to being awake for 16 hours a day. I was also still depressed, and sleeping was such an easy escape from that feeling. I fought the urge to sleep, though, and I held myself accountable. I wanted to do something that I could be proud of. I had so little behavior in my life that I could be proud of, and in the worst way, I needed just one thing that made me feel good about myself.
Creating a schedule wasn’t a perfect process, and in the first few weeks, there were several days where I ended up napping. Eventually I got my footing, though, and I was able to stick to a normal eight-hour sleep schedule. This may sound like something small to you, but it was very big to me. It was the first thing I had done in a long time that made me feel capable. These were the very first steps I took towards changing my life.
Fast forward to today, and you will see a very different person before you. My life looks nothing like the first paragraph of this story. I changed it all. I am now basically incapable of napping to boot. I already slept way too much of my life away, and I am not willing to waste even one hour in a nap that I don’t need.
This is how personal growth begins. Start somewhere. Choose one thing to work on, and give yourself a chance to make progress on it. Personal growth is like building a brick house — it happens one brick at a time. After you have the first layer of bricks down for the foundation, you start building the house faster and faster. You understand the process. Your personal growth will happen the same way. The first few changes can be difficult to implement, but once you do, the feeling of accomplishment that you get from implementation will be overwhelming. That will be the fuel you need for the next change. The next change is easier to implement as well because you know that you are capable of doing it. The changes you already made are all the proof you need.
Start somewhere — choose one thing you want to work on and start working on it today. Don’t think about anything else that needs changing — devote all your energy to this one thing. Your focus has the ability to create lasting change in your life.
Originally published at https://mastermindpersonalcoaching.com on February 9, 2021.
