Breaking Free From Overwhelm: 4 Steps to Reclaim Your Sanity (#78)

Are you drowning in to-dos, constantly saying yes, and feeling like you're failing at everything? You’re not alone! High-achieving women often take on too much, leading to burnout, anxiety, and feelings of inadequacy. 

In this episode, I share my recent moment of overwhelm (yep, even I struggle!) and walk you through 4 powerful steps to break free and reclaim your peace!

✅ Start with Prayer or Breathing Exercises – This helps calm your mind and bring yourself into the present moment.
✅ Focus on What You Can Control – Learn to stop stressing over things outside your sphere of influence and shift into empowered action.
✅ Brain Dump & Prioritize Actions – Get everything out of your head, categorize tasks, and delegate what you can.
✅ Try EFT Tapping – Use this science-backed technique to release stress and reset your mindset. I’ll walk you through it step by step!

If you’re a six-figure professional ready to exit corporate but feel overwhelmed by the process, let’s chat. Book an Empowered Exit™ Call today and take control of your future!

🎥 Watch the EFT Tapping demo in my Facebook group & YouTube channel.

If you're looking for additional support through coaching, visit my website to learn more about working together and my signature program EDIT Your Life™: www.karinfreeland.com/life-coaching

Then book a call here!

Not ready for coaching? Get a copy of my self-help book: Grab Life by the Dreams!

Transcript

Karin Freeland: 0:00

Welcome to Rock Your Reinvention, where I help high-achieving career women like you get unstuck, make your corporate exit strategy, and successfully transition to your next chapter. Hi, I'm your host, Karin Freeland, a certified life coach and corporate exit strategist. Whether you want to start a business, become a speaker, or something else, I'm here to give you the tools and strategies to shift your mindset, build your confidence, and take bold actions so you can rock your reinvention. Ready? Let's go. Welcome back to another episode of Rock Your Reinvention. Do you ever say yes to too many things and then feel like you're failing at 80% of them? Can I be honest with you? This is so me right now, and I am dying to reclaim my sanity. As a successful type A woman, you and I know how to get stuff done. We also have a deep seated desire to succeed. So we tend to take on a lot. We hold ourselves to really high standards. And there was a time that I probably did this for kudos or to prove that I could just do it all. But I think that as I've grown, this is now because I'm just so passionate about my work, both the paid and the volunteering work that I do. and I wanna have a bigger impact. And I know the more that I'm involved, the bigger the ripple effect, the more lives that I can positively touch. However, that has its downsides too. It can sometimes feel like a curse because we tend to say yes to a lot and we can easily overwhelm ourselves. Especially if you're a mom or as a working woman, we tend to experience overwhelm and anxiety on a regular basis and may even start to consider this our normal. Or better yet, we become addicted to the rush, that thing that we experience in those hectic, busy seasons. And then when we conquer it all, we're like, oh, I did it. But it shouldn't be our normal because that's the fastest way to burn out and often leads to feelings of inadequacy. Like I said at the start. I got involved in a lot of stuff but then performed poorly because I took on too much and then I beat myself up for it. So let me give you the 60-second context so you know the backstory before we jump into some tips for fighting overwhelm and anxiety so that you can reclaim your sanity. And then maybe you won't feel so bad about your situation after you hear my failure. Okay, I've had two really big calendar mix-ups this week. The first was I forgot to put a webinar that I was hosting for the Junior League, which is a volunteer position, in my calendar. And I booked my news segment for the same day. So then I had to go back to the news and ask them to give me another slot. Now, I try to be pretty low maintenance with the news because I don't want to lose that gig. Then I realized I moved the news to the day I'm supposed to be teaching a sex trafficking prevention class to a group of high school students. Because when I put the sex trafficking class in my calendar, apparently it only went in on one Thursday instead of three Thursdays. Insert panic attack here. I just wanted to jump back into bed and make it all go away. But I know it doesn't really work like that. So yeah, I'm human. I make mistakes. And calendar mishaps are common errors when we feel overwhelmed. And I've clearly been moving just way too fast for my own good. So whether you're in the planning stages of exiting your corporate job or you're in the throes of entrepreneurship, What can you do when you find yourself in these situations? And today I'm gonna share a few tips with you that I rely on when I find myself in these overwhelming or anxious seasons. So the first thing I like to do is start in prayer or do a breathing exercise. Now I know depending on your faith background, you may or may not practice prayer, but I find it tremendously helpful for a few reasons. First of all, somatically in my body. You know, I could immediately feel this tightness in my chest today. And that's one way that overwhelm manifests in my body. And the other is the good old eye twitch. When I can rest in prayer and ask for guidance and wisdom to handle my circumstances, that helps my body take a beat and calm down. And this is important because it gets you into the present moment. And so often we experience feelings of overwhelm when we're worried about the future or things that are happening a month from now. So whether you're doing a breathing exercise or you're taking some time in prayer, this is going to help you sort through all those thoughts and emotions that are going on. And it's also gonna help you be less reactionary and put you in a state of level-headed action. There are so many different kinds of breathing exercises out there. Square breathing is one of my favorite. You can look it up, but essentially you draw a box in your mind while you take a breathing pattern of inhaling for four, holding for four, exhaling for four, holding for four. Another one is equal breathing, where you just take the same amount of time breathing in as you take exhaling. And that just kind of helps you get into like a state of equilibrium and balance. So play with a couple, see which one works. works best for you. And then you can come up with like your own set of tips for yourself that are going to help you most. Okay. So that's the first thing. Love to go to prayer. Love to just spend some time doing some breathing exercises. The second thing I like to remind myself is to focus on what you can control. So often I stress over things that I have no control over. But if I shift and I focus on what I can control, like the things I say yes to, what I say no to, how I recover from my mistakes, how I show up in a situation, I can control how much grace and care I show myself. I can control my boundaries and how I prioritize my day going forward. I had a client recently who was getting overwhelmed about the news of layoffs next quarter. They announced, hey, we're going to be laying people off next quarter. So now everybody is all worked up about it. And she was working herself into a tizzy. She's like, well, what's going to happen? What if I get laid off? How am I going to provide for my family? And what if I don't get laid off? Then am I just going to have to pick up all this other work? And so there was this whole swirl of emotions. But the reality is she has absolutely no control over whether or not she gets laid off. All she can do is prep herself for either scenario. So once she was able to do some breathing exercises and get into that calmer state, she could work through both scenarios and we could come up with a game plan for how she was gonna tackle each outcome. So she became more empowered because she now had specific actions that she could take and she felt a huge weight come off of her shoulders and the anxiety just melted away. And that's one of the benefits of having a coach, right? Because we can't always do that for ourselves. Sometimes we need a third party to come in who can see things a little bit more objectively and help us work through that. So the question for you is, are you giving yourself anxiety because you're focused on things you simply can't control? Let me give you a couple of other examples. Are you worried about something your kid might do at school or your husband's health and the eating choices he has? Are you worried about something your boss is going to do or say at the next staff meeting? Or how a coworker or team member is going to react to your new idea? Are you worried about things in the news, politics, the economy, the stock market, taxes? Stop. You can't control any of those things. You definitely can't control other people's reactions or emotions. Go back. back to focusing on what you can control. And that's going to free up so much mind share for you to focus on the things that you can actually do something about. Okay, so there you have it. Second step, after you've done a breathing exercise and gotten into that more calm state, you can start looking at all the things going on and going, okay, let me focus on what I can actually control. The third thing I love to do is what I just call a brain dump. And I list out, what are all the things I feel like I have to get done right now? Everything, just put it all down on a piece of paper. And then I prioritize it into buckets and I look for what has to happen right now, right? This is urgent, this is important, like has to be done now. What can wait? Or what can I remove from my list altogether? And it's really surprising to see how many things you might find that can actually be moved out until the following week or two, and how many things you can probably take off your list. Next, I look at what I can delegate and what I have to do myself. I mean, there's certain things, right, that only I can do. This might be something that I can offload to my husband or someone that I'm volunteering with. It might be something I outsource to my podcast manager, for example. So who are the people in your world that you can delegate to? Maybe a coworker, a team member in a different department, a relative. And don't forget about paid help. There is no shame in investing in help, especially when it can improve your mental health. And I don't know about you, but when I'm feeling overwhelmed, my mental health is not great. I'm super short. I'm snippy with those around me. I'm not in the present moment. I'm sort of distant from everybody. So I highly encourage you to take me up on this brain dump and prioritization exercise. And it's going to quickly put you in a state of empowerment because you're going to see the things that you actually need to get done today. And we have to get it out of our head because if we just leave it in our head, it just kind of keeps swirling around in there. And we don't feel like we can stop thinking about it because we haven't captured it somewhere. And that's why I love the idea of these lists, right? And writing it all down. So you can just free up that energy to be like, no, no, it's okay. I don't have to think about all these things and keep listing them out in my head. It's already put down on paper. And that for me is really comforting. So perhaps you'll find the same. Okay, the fourth thing that I like to do in these seasons of overwhelm and anxiety is something called EFT, aka tapping. This is emotional freedom technique, that's what EFT stands for, and it's a form of psychological acupressure that works by tapping on specific meridian or energy points on the body. And while tapping, the individual, the person, you, going through this, right, focuses on a specific issue. In this case, it would be your feelings of overwhelm and anxiety. And then you would repeat a series of affirmations while you tap to release that overwhelm. And I really think the best thing to do is experience tapping. Now, for those of you listening on the podcast, I know you can't see me. So you might want to Google those meridian points for tapping. And if you do that, like literally just put in meridian points for tapping, you'll get an image. If you're familiar with it, then, you know, we'll jump in, in a second and you just will know where to tap, but I'm also gonna put this video in the Facebook group or on my YouTube channel. I'll put it somewhere as a resource so that if you wanna come visually follow along, you'll have that. Even without the tapping though, even if you don't do the tapping, there's still gonna be some benefit to repeating after me and saying these affirmations out loud. So let's go ahead and take a moment and jump in to a tapping exercise. if you are not driving go ahead and close your eyes take a deep breath in through the nose and then release it out of your mouth letting go of any overwhelm or stress or tension as you breathe out and then we're going to start with a karate chop on the side of the hand and so i'm not going to tap too hard because i don't want it to come through on the microphone and be distracting but Even though, and you're going to repeat after me, okay? So I'm going to say a sentence and then you're going to repeat after me. Even though I feel completely overwhelmed right now, I deeply and completely accept myself. Even though my mind is racing and I don't know where to start, I deeply and completely accept myself. Even though I feel stuck in this overwhelm, I deeply and completely accept myself. Now we're going to move to the eyebrow. This overwhelm feels so heavy. Side of the eye. There's too much on my plate. Under the eye. I don't know how I'll get it all done. Under the nose. It's like I'm drowning in to-dos. Chin. I feel pressure to do it all perfectly. Collarbone. I don't even know where to start. Underarm. This stress is sitting in my body. Top of head. It's hard to breathe through all this tension. And we're going to repeat one more round. Go back to your karate chop. Even though I've been carrying all this stress, I choose to release it now. Even though I still have a lot to do, I know I can handle it one step at a time. Even though I've been overwhelmed, I am open to feeling calm and in control. Back up to the eyebrow. I'm letting go of this tension. Side of eye. I don't have to do everything at once. Under eye, I can take a deep breath and reset. Under the nose, clarity is starting to replace the chaos. Chin, I am capable and resourceful. Collarbone, I choose to focus on one step at a time. Under arm, I am releasing overwhelm and welcoming calm. Top of head. I trust myself to handle what's ahead with ease. Great job. And just kind of take your hands and wash them down over your body and sweep off any of that last anxiety or overwhelm. Take a nice big deep breath in through the nose and let it all go out through the mouth. How do you feel? Just take a moment to notice any shifts in your mood, in your body, maybe in your thoughts or your energy. This is a really powerful exercise and you can come back and you can do this anytime you need a reset. It's one of the things that I love to do with my clients and I have just seen it create great results, especially when you do it consistently. So there you have it, four things that you can do right now today to combat overwhelm and anxiety and reclaim your sanity. The first thing is to start in prayer or a breathing exercise. The second thing is to focus on what you can control. No more worrying about the things that you can't. Number three, you're gonna do a brain dump and prioritize all those things on your to-do list. and figure out what can you outsource? What can you delegate? What's most important? What do you need to start with today? And then of course, you can rely on EFT, the tapping exercise that we just went through. And I know that if you put this into practice, you'll be feeling empowered and back on track in no time. And if not, it might be time to finally invest in a coach like me who can help you break the patterns and hold you accountable for implementing these strategies. So if you're ready to explore coaching, make sure you book a call today. The link is in the show notes and I hope to speak to you real soon. To learn more and book your 45-minute session. Until next time, stay fabulous.