War. Climate Anxiety. A child with health needs so complex that caring for them feels like it might be your whole life… forever. Sometimes our problems feel unsolvable.
Let’s take a breath. Let’s reframe our thinking.
This is my 3 step process for managing my anxious thoughts when the problem is too big for me to solve on my own
So this is a video for when you are overwhelmed for things that are out of your control.
It's a grounding exercise that I like to go through and walk folks through when they are dealing with the big problems in the world right now, whether that is war, whether that is climate anxiety. This is the three-step process.
So the first thing that is really important to do is to ground your nervous system.
Orient yourself in your reality in this moment. Things like in this moment I am safe. Can be helpful to think about acknowledging that the room that you are and the place that you are and your place of safety and this. Context in this fear is really important as much as you can.
To get your nervous system to be able to start calming down so that you can move through the next steps. The next step that I really encourage people to think of is.
What are my spheres of influence?
Okay. So when a problem is big. When we have anxiety around something that. It feels like we have no control over. It can be really easy to focus on. Where we don't have influence where we wish we were a bigger player where we wish we had someone's ear so that they could do more.
It's unproductive. And it's overwhelming. And sometimes when we're in this state of panic and overwhelm and like, oh no, What am I going to do about this? It can be helpful to come back to here are places. Where I actually do have influence. And I actually keep a list in my, and my head. You know, I've got my family, my work in my business, my school, my church.
So you can think of this for yourself, where. Where are you situated? What areas do you have influence? What year do you have? And then the third piece is,
what am I already doing?
What am I doing for this already in my day-to-day life. Am I spending some time. Am I supporting an organization with my money? Am I doing education work? There are lots of different roles to be involved with. We're looking at a huge problem. And being clear about which ones you were already doing. Is a helpful starting point.
I chose your strengths and is a good way to remind yourself that this is not the first time you have thought about this. If you get to this point and you're like, there's nothing that I'm doing about this right now. Sure. Then that's then. That's fine. That's something to notice if you get to this point and you're like, I'm doing a ton for this already. That's also fine.
That's a good thing to notice. And then the question that I asked after you looked at what you're already doing is how matched does that to my capacity.
There is this drive sometimes an anxious notion to be like, I have to fix this myself. I have to do more and more and more in this world to make it a better place.
This is a good and beautiful way of thinking. And. It can burn people out and it can just feel into this anxiety, this not enough-ness. And so in order to think about whether what you are doing is enough, one way that I would invite you to consider that is to think about your current capacity and see how well matched it is. Our is what you were doing. Within your capacity. To do and give.
And if you have the ability to do more, absolutely do more. If you are feeling overwhelmed and burnt out by what you're doing. Maybe there's something on that list that you can scale back on. This is not about judgment. It's about finding the right match so that we're all contributing and that we're not burning out. And that we're doing this from a place of grounding.
So this is, you know, something that I've, I've talked about it before in the context of other. Other times. And I'll continue to bring it up because this is real life anxiety. Some of these things do not go away. They can be a big, event, like I mentioned at the beginning, but sometimes these draining things are actually personal and small and you can use the same technique to go through whatever this big stressor that feels out of your control.
It's so if you try it, let me know how it works for you and what you think of it.