Why you can’t ohm your way through carpool, get a monthly massage, or drink chamomile tea to solve your stress and overwhelm: you have to take time to dismantle your stress from the inside out.

This video is an excerpt from my book

Overcoming Overwhelm:
Dismantle Your Stress from the Inside Out.

Learn more about my book and/or read an entire sample chapter here. 

Transcript:

A New Understanding of Overwhelm

You can’t solve stress and overwhelm by doing the same things you’ve been doing but doing

them harder, more, and better. You can’t solve them simply by “learning to say no” or turning

your back on things that are important to you. And you certainly can’t solve them with short-

term coping mechanisms, like ohming your way through carpool, getting a monthly massage, or

drinking chamomile tea. The reasons these strategies don’t work are threefold.

First, they miss the bigger point. They focus on managing the stress you experience,

rather than on decreasing whatever is producing the stress. They may help you cope, but they

don’t solve the underlying problem of overwhelm.

Second, it’s natural for our stress and overwhelm to increase over time if all we do is try

to manage it. The stress is water coming over the edge of boat, and stress management consists

of bailing out that water. At some point there will simply be too much water to bail.

Third, when we try to make changes but haven’t set ourselves up properly to make them,

they often add to our stress instead of decreasing it. When we stay at work just ten minutes too

late to make it to our exercise class, or we’re too rushed in the morning to meditate, we feel

guilty for not doing all we think we “should” do to deal with our stress. Our exhausted, harried

state—it’s all our own fault! If we’d just be better, more organized, more disciplined . . . The end

result is more stress. It’s truly a vicious cycle.