Samantha Brody - Overcoming Overwhelm: Dismantle Your Stress from the Inside Out

For Julian, my wise-beyond-his-years little who always knows just what to say to help me see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I never told you life would be easy.

MY DAD, HOWARD BRODY (19312016)

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

IF YOUVE PICKED up this book, you know what it means to be overwhelmed. The demands are endless.

Your boss wants just one more revision of that report.

The kids need their homework supervised.

The sink is full of dirty dishes.

The dog threw up on the carpet.

To top it off, you polished off the better part of a pint of Ben & Jerrys standing up at the freezer again.

You know that you should take time for yoga, meditation, a nutritional plan, and self-care, but seriously, who has time for that when youre already stretched so thin?

It seems no matter how many times we try to do the things weve been told will help us manage our stress and overwhelm, we succeed for a time, but the minute we add a new commitment, experience a stressful event, or even just have a few bad days, we find ourselves back where we started. We cant fix overwhelm by putting more things on our to-do lists, even if those things involve self-care or managing our stress.

Stress management is important, but its a Band-Aid, not a solution. While you can manage stress, you cant manage overwhelm. In fact, trying to manage overwhelm most often causes more stress. Overwhelm needs to be systematically undone rather than managed. When you undo it, your stress will necessarily decrease, along with the impacts that stress has on your system mentally, emotionally, and physically. You dont need new ways to manage your stress; you need to prevent it from overwhelming you in the first place.

Enter Overcoming Overwhelm.

What This Book Is, and What It Isnt

Whether you are a student, a stay-at-home parent, an hourly wage earner, or a high-powered executive, Overcoming Overwhelm provides an actionable, step-by-step plan that places control of your life squarely back into your own hands. It empowers you to actually reduce your stress load, starting today, to vastly improve your health, energy, and state of mind. It takes into account the reality of your multifaceted life, as well as your unique values, goals, circumstances, and current capacity for change. It allows you to find long-term solutions that will work for you solutions that line up with your own values and that are within your reach to implement today or whenever you choose.

This book isnt a time management system, nor does it offer a litany of coping strategies. Its not a book on minimalism or how to organize your files. Instead it gives you a completely new way to think about overwhelm and a roadmap for dismantling it. It takes the idea of self-care and turns it from mani-pedis or taking an extra-long sauna at the gym into a new paradigm for living a life thats lined up with your own values. That is real self-care.

How It Works

In over two decades as an integrative physician practicing both Western and complementary medicine, I have been teaching patients how to live their lives with less stress, greater resilience, better health, and peace of mind. This book is your access to the same tools and guidance I use in my practice.

By working through the four steps in this book, you can change your life and health for the better as you define it, in the ways that you can, when and how you want to, with practical, reasonable, and sustainable changes.

First, in step 1, Find Your True North, youll identify your core values and look at how you want to feel and what you want your life to look like on a day-to-day basis. With this vision, it becomes possible to assess your choices and be sure that they line up with what is most important to you.

Next, in step 2, Establish Your Foundation, you will look at how you make change best, what things may get in your way of the life you want to live, and how to assemble a team to support you in making changes. Change is never easy, especially if youre overwhelmed. This step will give you confidence and prepare you to make a reasonable, achievable plan.

In step 3, Take Your Overwhelm Inventory, Ill lead you through a process of discovering and enumerating the stresses in the different realms of your life stresses affecting you in mind and body, at home and at work; stresses that stem from what youve committed to do and what youve avoided doing. Looking at the totality of your overwhelm will allow you to make a specific plan to relieve it.

Finally, in step 4, Craft Your Personal Plan, youll pull together everything youve learned about yourself to design a plan that incorporates both immediate fixes and long-term solutions.

At each step, youll answer questions about your preferences, goals, priorities, and feelings. You can work through these exercises slowly or quickly. You can put aside a day or a weekend to go through all the steps at once, or you can move through the book as your schedule allows.

Even if you arent ready to work through your plan in detail right now, Overcoming Overwhelm will help you to think about your life and your stress differently, and this alone can, without a doubt, significantly improve your quality of life.

My Approach

The process I guide you through not only allows for individuality of approach, values, and belief systems, but it also insists upon it. Through the entire book, my approach is holistic and easily accessible, mindful of the body-mind connection from a science- and logic-based perspective, and inclusive and respectful of all approaches to self-care and health care.

Im not one of those people who believe that a positive attitude and a vision board are all you need to turn your life into roses and sunshine. Life, after all, has its ups and downs no matter what you do. But with intention, dedication, and a commitment to lining your choices up with your values, you will be able to ride those ups and downs with the energy, health, and ease that you crave.

You dont have to settle for feeling tired, run down, or overwhelmed. You dont have to settle for a life less fulfilling or meaningful than you want it to be. I know youve picked up this book because youre ready for things to be different. And they can be; I promise. For each individual, there is a sweet spot in which you feel the best you possibly can. This book will help you find yours.

A New Understanding of Overwhelm

YOU CANT SOLVE stress and overwhelm by doing the same things youve been doing but doing them harder, more, and better. You cant solve them simply by learning to say no or turning your back on things that are important to you. And you certainly cant 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 dont 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 dont solve the underlying problem of overwhelm.

Second, its natural for our stress and overwhelm to increase over time if all we do is try to manage it. The stress is water breaching the hull of a 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 havent 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 were 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 its all our own fault! If wed just be better, more organized, more disciplined... The end result is more stress. Its truly a vicious cycle.