The Overwhelmed Brain

Emotional Intelligence for Critical Thinkers

Personal Boundaries: Protect and Honor Who You Are at Your Core

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Boundaries are the rules we set up that dictate the people and experiences we allow into our lives. These rules also drive our decisions and behaviors, so that we can achieve a certain level of comfort and stability.

In other words, if you feel comfortable with someone, you share and give more of yourself. You can allow yourself to be more authentic, and feel vulnerable yet safe. These are the people you allow into what I like to call your “castle walls.”

If someone makes you feel uncomfortable, and they’re asking or pressuring you into doing things you don’t want to do, these are the people you keep out beyond the moat that surrounds your castle. You don’t let them cross the drawbridge, because if you do you’ll certainly compromise the integrity of your castle.

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Getting Past Your Past

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balloon

The residue of negative emotions after a significant event happens in your life can become consuming and controlling. They can affect your perspectives, the decisions you make, the people you connect with, and even your health.

So why do we hold on to negative emotions of an event from the past? What keeps something like anger, sadness, and other negative states around for weeks, or even years? The answer is: [Read more…]

We Are Taught To Be Grateful But…

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It’s truly challenging to be grateful for something until you’ve experienced inner appreciation first. After that, appreciation for everything else comes easier. When you’re in stress and overwhelm mode, however, it’s almost impossible to stop and appreciate anything. After all, once turmoil takes the stage, it steals the show!

We tend to focus only on what isn’t working in our lives instead of channeling our energy toward what is. One of the reasons we do that is because of our survival mechanism. We are conditioned to continuously monitor for danger. So our awareness focuses more on what could harm us, and less on what is harmless. [Read more…]

Do You Converse With Flow Or Resistance?

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Flow leads to well-being, resistance leads to stress. Image source: http://www.bumc.bu.edu/integrativemed/clinical-services/qigong/
Flow leads to well-being, resistance leads to stress.
Image source: http://www.bumc.bu.edu/integrativemed/clinical-services/qigong/

In Tai Chi, there’s a movement exercise called Pushing Hands. The lesson to learn when doing this exercise is that force can be redirected. If you redirect a strike, it will never make contact. The strike won’t meet resistance; therefore, the flow of the motion is never interrupted.

Pushing Hands teaches the Tai Chi student about flow and resistance. The less resistance there is during the exercise, the more it flows. Another way to look at flow versus resistance is by comparing a dam to a boulder. Water will flow its way around a boulder, but cannot penetrate the resistance of a dam.

In conversation, flow and resistance work very similarly. Do you find that you can easily speak your mind, allowing your conversations to flow along, while feeling a general sense of well-being? Or, are you more defensive when you talk to people, feeling vulnerable, and on-edge? [Read more…]

What Is The Meaning Of Life? Oh, THAT Question Again…

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When using Google to search for the term: “the meaning of life”, there are roughly 4.7 billion results. When you exclude the term “monty” from the search, you see a significant drop to just over 7.8 million.

The meaning of life is...
The meaning of life is…

Aside from the obvious implication that the Monty Python movie is more popular than the actual philosophical question that has been tossed around for centuries, and that many books, articles, and TV shows have some version of that phrase in their titles, it is still one of the most sought after, but hardly ever attained answers to the question:

What is the meaning of life?

At The Overwhelmed Brain, I look at how everything relates to becoming overwhelmed and stressed. And, how to transform those things into clarity and peace. And I truly believe that when you are able to find your purpose, and the meaning of your own existence, you will not experience overwhelm or stress anymore – at least in the same way.

Acting from a place of purpose gives what you are experiencing an entirely different meaning. For example, if you had unwavering faith that something you were doing was not only the right thing to do, but also made you feel passionate and alive doing it, would you be as easily stressed? [Read more…]