When life gets overwhelming, step back and take a deep breath

I am in the thick of the fall semester, teaching a full course load’s worth of bleary-eyed students who are in the midst of midterm exams and papers.

We are wading through the weight of the work. I’ve made a concerted effort to help them find the relevance and even excitement in the lessons at hand. But there’s no arguing the fact that they’re run down.

I understand how they feel. It’s a busy time with work, family and a few creative projects. But the draining feeling seems to be coming from all the other stuff — the background busy-ness that’s just looming in the shadows of my mind.

It’s the image of the baby shower invitation on my fridge that I keep forgetting to RSVP to. It’s my Bible app alert that buzzes my phone every night at 9:37 p.m. (seriously, it’s very random) and says “Don’t forget to read ‘Your Utmost for His Highest.’” This is a devotional I started, oh, maybe a year ago when I first downloaded the app. I didn’t like using it — I’m still generally a paper book kinda gal — but the darn alert gives me a clench in my gut every time. Oh yeah, that’s right, I think to myself every night at 9:37. I should finish ‘Your Utmost for His Highest.’ Never mind that I’m halfway through a sink full of dishes or in the middle of writing a column. My brain is more than happy to interrupt itself with false urgency.

It’s as if I’m walking down a long hallway to the room called “thing you must do now,” and on the way I am being interrupted and grabbed at on both sides. The things grabbing me are called “thing you can’t forget” or “thing you said you’d do yesterday” or “stop thinking about cookies and just eat one already.” I wrest myself free of their clutches and race to the room, quickly shutting the door behind me. Now I can do the thing I must do now. But first I need to breathe. And that could take a while. And when I’m done, I might be out in the hallway again. This is what busy feels like.

So what gives? Besides sound sleep and healthy eating, of course. Well, I like to try another mental tool: the zoom-out feature. I breathe. Deeply. And ask myself some questions. Will forgetting to RSVP for a baby shower by the deadline destroy a friendship? Will deleting the Bible app seal my sorry eternal fate? If I nearly forget about a meeting, fail to scramble together a sitter, and end up at home with my kids watching “Dora the Explorer” instead, will I spontaneously combust? Usually, the answer is no. And silly as it seems, those “no’s” steel my nerves in a major way.

In his New York Times op-ed “The ‘Busy’ Trap,” Tim Kreider puts it this way: “The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”

Now let’s all take a deep breath and get to work, shall we?

This story was originally published October 14, 2016 at 4:14 PM with the headline "When life gets overwhelming, step back and take a deep breath."