8 Gentle Ways to Find Peace When You’re Stressed or Overwhelmed
You deserve to find peace when you’re stressed. While “this too shall pass” applies to most things, instead of white knuckling through a stressful time, find peace with some of these suggestions.
Use these gentle ways to find peace and ease stress anytime you begin to feel the chaos around you. With practice, things can feel calm within you even though they feel chaotic around you.
1. Take care of you when you feel stressed.
That moment, when you think you don’t have time to take care of yourself, is the exact moment you have to take care of yourself. Self-care can’t be a “when I have time” thing or something extra or indulgent. It’s essential. Remove a layer of stress and overwhelm by taking care of yourself (especially when you don’t think you have time).
2. Be selective about how you spend your time and energy.
Even though your schedule is different, or you have no schedule at all, you still get to be selective about how you spend your time, energy and attention. Is it going towards fear or love? Are you spending it on what you care most about right now? So much may feel out of your control but you still have agency over where these precious resources are going. If you can’t be selective, start by slowing down so you can start to notice what really matters to you.
3. Stop believing everything you think.
Thoughts, fears and worries aren’t always true. Remind yourself of that when you are getting carried away by believing everything you think. This is especially helpful if you are prone to catastrophizing. When I do this, I remind myself that if the worst thing can happen, it’s just as likely that the best thing can happen. Mind tricks? Yes. Effective? Also, yes.
4. It’s time for practice not perfection.
We are figuring things out. We aren’t going to say the right things every day. We aren’t going to find balance (do we ever?) and some days are going to be better than others. Instead of striving for perfection or being the best, acting like you’ve got it all figured out or trying to do it all, just practice.
Practice …
- being gentle with yourself and others.
- taking care of yourself and others.
- feeling your feelings.
- changing your mind.
- losing it all together and coming back to your self.
- setting boundaries around how much news you let in. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
- minding your own business. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
- finding your way.
- trusting yourself.
5. Find peace when you’re stressed by remembering that worry doesn’t work.
Worry never works. The way something turns out never depends on how much you worry about. Let your worries go. It won’t be easy, but do it anyway. Write them down, and walk them off. Practice rituals to let your worries go and keep letting them go. And then do that again and again and again.
6. Don’t wait for things to be good to be grateful.
Gratitude makes the hard stuff bearable and the good stuff even sweeter. Start acknowledging a few things you are grateful for every day, even on the bad days. Write down 1-3 items. On the days when it feels really hard to come up with something, review the list you’ve made and be grateful for everything you’ve been grateful for before.
7. Rest, renew, recover and repeat.
Our bodies, brains, hearts and souls need rest and time to do nothing all the time, but especially now. Rest makes space for recovery and sick or not, we are all likely going through something that is demanding our strength and attention, and will continue to demand our strength and attention. It’s why I wrote a whole section about rest in my new book, Gentle, Rest More, Stress Less and Live The Life You Actually Want.
The way we stay strong and present is through rest.
Rest your body. Rest your mind. Rest your heart.
8. Keep coming back to yourself.
Author, Danielle LaPorte said that if you have to step outside of yourself, away from your values and soul to get your needs met, then you’re not really going to get your needs met.”
If you feel worried about what’s ahead, keep coming back to where you are right now. When you feel overwhelmed, or things feel like too much, come back. Coming back is your connection to hope, and there is healing in hope. Whatever it is that helps you feel better in your body, heart or mind, this is an invitation to come back to it. Come back to health. Come back to love. Come back to you.