Do you often feel overwhelmed with life and everything you have going on? In this episode we discuss what is really the cause of you feeling overwhelmed and how you can overcome it so that you can be more confident, organized in your daily life, productive, and feel better. Play In A New Window Download    Show Notes I hear a lot of women today talk about how overwhelmed they are with their life.  And believe me, I’ve been there too.  We are overwhelmed by our homes, our jobs, our kids activities, our church callings.  Everything is just so overwhelming. So if we think about the The Model that I taught in Episode 17  The FEELING of overwhelm would go in the F line.  And as we know, our feelings are caused by our thoughts.  Now, lets think about what kind of THOUGHTS bring on the FEELINGS of overwhelm. Thoughts like “I don’t have enough time” “There is too much to do” “I can’t get it all done” “I’m not capable of all this” are usually some of the thoughts that bring up the feeling of OVERWHELM And when we are overwhelmed, what do we do? What is the A line (the action line) of our model? I would say for most people the feeling of OVERWHELM brings INACTION.  When we feel overwhelmed, we don’t do anything or we do something to AVOID doing what actually needs to get done (like watch netflix or scroll Instagram) am I right???   And when we do this, what is our R line in the model? Our result?  We don’t get anything done and now we have LESS time because we sat around and drank our diet coke while scrolling instagram for way too long! Do you see how thinking those thoughts actually made things worse? I like to say that OVERWHELM is an indulgent thought.  Now think about what indulgent means.  Mr. Webster defines indulge as “taking unrestrained pleasure in, to yield to the desire of, or to treat with excessive leniency, generosity, or consideration” So in being “overwhelmed” we are taking an unrestrained pleasure in, yielding to the desire of,  and treating with excessive leniency the thoughts that we entertain so that we don’t actually have to do what needs to be done. So how do we not feel overwhelmed? I know, as wives and mothers we have so much on our plates.  Sometimes it is more than we can physically do.  But that is where taking control of our thinking comes into play. I want you to think back to Podcast 18 on Setting Goals.  We talked about having 6 areas of our life (mental, physical, social, spiritual, family, and work) and having a VALUE statement for each area, and then making long term goals, short term goals, and breaking it down to daily tasks.  Doing this gives us a way to prioritize what is truly important in our lives.  This also makes things more ORGANIZED in our mind. When we know what we value, we can more easily organize our time and our tasks by what is truly important. If our mind isn’t organized, we will never be able to organize our lives. We have to get things straight in our brain first.  Internal organization creates external organization. Now one thing you may not know about me, is that I LOVE to organize.  Organization is something that comes really easy to me and its something that I love to do and I’m really good at. So when I am organizing a drawer or a closet or a room, I first take everything out, sort through things, get rid of all the unwanted and unneeded items, and then put things back in an orderly fashion by categories.  Everything has a home. The same is true with our minds.  You need to examine your thoughts.  Sort through them. (memories, subconscious thoughts, judgements, negative self-talk, positive self-talk, plans, gratitude, etc.) Get rid of the unwanted and unneeded thoughts, and decide what you want to keep.  Is there any new thoughts you want to add in there?  Make sure its something you really want and have a place for. When I am at the store, say Target, there are ALWAYS a ton of cute home decor items I really want to buy.  I could