Ep 149 Feeling Overwhelmed? You Don't Need Another Plan

When you look at your life, your health, your body, does it feel like such a tangled mess that you don't even know where to begin? The sleep, the energy, the eating, the stress, the aches, the hormones, the mood, and on, and on, and on.

Faced with all of it, most of us either freeze and do nothing, or try to overhaul everything at once and crash within days. In the second of a three-part series, Carly offers a gentler third way: not another plan, but the clarity to know where to actually begin.

It's never just one thing, but it's never everything either. Featuring a real client story and an analogy about renovating a house you can't move out of, this episode helps the whole overwhelming tangle start to make sense.

If joining the dots on your own has started to feel like too much, this is exactly where I come in. You can book an Embodied Strength Profile with me here, and we'll make sense of the tangle together.

Thanks for listening to Rooted In Presence

If you’d like to get in touch with a question about today’s episode or find out how I can support you with coaching, here’s how to reach me:
📧 Email: carlykillenpt@gmail.com
📱 Instagram: @carlykillencoach

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Transcript

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0:46

Hello, and welcome back to Rooted in Presence. I'm Carly, your curious midlife guide and founder of Still Space Hull. And here we are at episode 149. So this is the second in a little series of three, where I'm sharing some of the shifts I've noticed over the years that seem to change everything for the women that I work with. And if you missed the first one, feel free to go back. Do have a listen, because we talked about the shift from fighting with your body to working with it. So maybe go check that out. But you can absolutely start here too, because today's shift stands very much on its own, and it's about what happens when it feels like everything needs fixing all at once, right now. When you look at your life or your health or your body, and it feels like such a tangled mess that you don't know where to even begin. If that sounds familiar, then perhaps this episode is for you. So I'm gonna start with describing something and maybe see if you recognize it. You've reached that point where you know something needs to change, but when you actually look at it all, it's not just one thing. It's the sleep, and your energy levels, and the eating, and the stress, and the aches, and the fact that you haven't moved your body properly in months, and the thing with your hormones, the mood, motivation, and, and, and, and, and, and, and. It all feels connected, right? It all feels urgent, and it all feels like it needs sorting immediately, now, yesterday. And faced with all that, most of us have done one of two things. Either we freeze completely because where on earth would you even start? So we do nothing, and we feel guilty about doing nothing. Or we can go the other way, and we can try to overhaul absolutely everything all at once a new eating plan, new exercise regime, new sleep routine, supplements, new everything, and all starting on Monday, of course. And I think you can probably guess how that tends to go. We last about nine days. We're exhausted, overwhelmed, and then here comes the crash, and it becomes more evidence for that horrible little voice that says, "See? You can't stick to anything." And okay, maybe it's not a horrible voice, but it can sound very unkind. But neither of these things are a personal failing. They're both completely understandable responses to feeling like everything is broken all at once. But there is a third way, and it's the shift I want to talk to you about today. It's the shift from trying to fix everything to actually joining the dots So what I've learned so far over 15 years of doing this work is it's never just one thing, but it is also never everything. And just maybe I need to say that again, 'cause that is the heart of today. It's not just one thing, and it's never everything either. And the wellness world loves to sell you the one thing, the single magic fix. If you just sort your guts, if you just balance your hormones, if you just do this one protocol, everything else will fall into place. And that's rarely true, is it? Because we are not machines with a single broken part. We are whole, interconnected human beings, and our sleep affects our mood, which affects our eating, which affects our energy levels. Our movement affects our sleep, and it goes round and round so that one thing will usually disappoint. But then the opposite belief is just as unhelpful, the belief that because it's all connected, you therefore have to fix all of it at once, or there's no point starting. That's the belief that leads to the overwhelm and the crash, and it's, it's simply not true. You're not broken. You don't have to hold all of it at once. I mean, you couldn't, and you're not meant to. And what you actually need is definitely not more information or more plans. You've probably got a drawer full of plans already. But what really helps here is clarity. Clarity about where out of all of this to actually begin, which dots, if you gently attended to it, would start to make some of the other dots easier to join. And that's the work. Not doing everything. It's finding the thread that when you pull it, it kind of starts to loosen the whole tangle of a mess that can feel like life sometimes. So let me tell you about one of the women I've worked with who gave me permission to share this, and I'll keep her details private, as always. She came to me feeling completely overwhelmed. She had a long list of things she felt was wrong in her life, things she wanted to change, and she'd been carrying that whole list around for a long time, feeling like she was failing at all of it simultaneously. She tried lots of things. She was not lacking in effort or information or willingness. If anything, she had too much information and had-- really it left her more confused, definitely not less so what we did together was not add anything to her list to start with. We didn't find her another thing to do. What we actually did was the opposite. We sat with the whole mess, the whole thing, and we started to join the dots to see what is connected to what. How the things she thought was the problem was actually downstream of something else. How a few of those items on her list were really the same root coming from different perspectives. And slowly, out of all of that tangle, a shape started to emerge, a place to begin. One thread to gently pull, and for a short moment, it meant she could put everything else down, which is really a great place to start. And the thing she said to me, which I've never forgotten, was, "Well, you helped me join the dots." That's where I got that idea from. I finally understand not you gave me a great plan, not you told me what to do, but she finally understood her own situation. And from that understanding, the next step became obvious and doable and her own. The overwhelm didn't lift because she could do more or she had more information. It really lifted for that first time because things started to make sense there's an analogy I love when it comes to making life changes. It's something that really helps the dots join up for me, and I've shared it before, but I think it's been well over a year, so perhaps it's a good time to bring it back out again. But if you think of your body and your life as your home, and imagine it needs some work, maybe quite a lot of work. It's a bit of a fixer-upper. Maybe you can feel like that about yourself. Now, if you were renovating an actual house and you decided to do everything all at once, all right now, you'd have a real problem. If you rip out the whole kitchen and gut the bathroom and take up all the flooring and strip the bedroom back to the bricks all at the same time, you can't live there anymore. You'd have to move out and live somewhere else while it all got done, and yeah, some people do that. Some people have a caravan on the front lawn while they sort it all out. But the problem is here that you can't move out of your body. You can't move out of your life. You have to keep living in your home the entire time that you're doing the work, and that changes a lot about how you can actually realistically approach it. You wouldn't gut the whole place at once. It would be better to bring in that focused, compassionate attention to one area, get it to a point where it's functioning and livable, and then move your attention elsewhere. And essentially, that focus can then start to flow. It's not that you attend to one thing forever and ignore everything else. It's more like you let one area have enough of your focus to know it can stand on its own before you gently move on, and the attention gets to flow from room to room as and when each is ready. You keep living in your home the whole way through, and it slowly becomes a place that holds you better. And that's what I mean by joining the dots and working on one focus at a time actually looks like not putting your whole life on hold, not ignoring everything apart from one thing. Just letting your compassionate attention rest where it's most needed right now until that part can hold itself, and then, yeah, allowing y- yourself to flow into the next thing onwards. And that's why trying to overhaul everything doesn't work. Even when it feels like everything needs holding, you'd have to move out of your own life to achieve that, and well, you can't. You really can't, And even if you did, you know, put everything on hold and had this perfect six weeks, how would that actually hold when real life got back involved again? So if you are sitting there right now with your own long, tangled list, feeling like everything needs doing at once, I have a gentle offer for you this week. First, a breath and a bit of relief. You do not have to fix everything. You really, really don't, and as I said, nothing really needs fixing. I'm just lacking better words right now. But that pressure you're carrying, the one that says it all has to change at once, or there's no point, you are allowed to put that down, because it was never true that your whole life needed fixing. And then rather than asking, "What do I need to fix?" Which invites the whole overwhelming list to come flooding in, perhaps a gentler question. Maybe, "If I attended to one thing right now, one area of my home, what might make some of the other things a little easier?" And you might not know that straight away, and that's totally fine. You can take time with this. But sometimes joining the dots is exactly the work that's easier to do with someone alongside you, someone who can see the shape of that tangle a little more clearly than you can from right in the middle of it all. But even asking the question starts to change things for you, because it takes you out of the overwhelm of everything, and perhaps into the possibility of something being different. So that is the second shift for you, from trying to fix everything to joining the dots. Instead of drowning in the whole tangled list, maybe finding one thread that begins to loosen all of it. The next time, in the final part of this little series, we'll look at the third shift, which is about looking back and moving forward, and why the things that got you this far might not be the things to carry you forward, and it ties into something really lovely, so come back for that next week. And if joining the dots is exactly the thing you'd love some help with, if you are tired of carrying the whole overwhelming list on your own, and you'd love someone alongside you to help it all make sense, that is a huge part of what I do. It's why I created the Embodied Strength Profile, where we spend some proper time together looking at how you move, how you breathe, and how your body and life fit together so that the whole tangle starts to make a bit of sense, and you can find a clear next step that you can trust. We can do this in person at Still Space Hull or online wherever you are. So you'll find all the details at carlykillen.com, which I will put in the show notes. So until next time, may you meet yourself with compassion, walk with presence, and remember you already have everything you need