Couples Counseling for Overwhelm and You

The Morning Ritual of Resistance

You open your to-do list. Thirty-five tasks stare back.
The brain starts counting, sorting, tightening.
That old familiar worry settles in: how am I ever going to get through all this?

Before you’ve even touched the first item, your chest constricts.
Your breathing shallows. The day already feels impossible, and you haven’t started anything yet.

I know that feeling intimately. I used to meet it every morning before my tea, convinced something was fundamentally wrong with me for not handling it better.

Too often I let the feeling of overwhelm keep me from doing anything that day.

The worst part? I had excellent systems. Color-coded calendars. Time-blocking. Productivity apps that promised everything.
But none of it worked because I was fighting the wrong battle.

Can Overwhelm Be a Help, Not a Hindrance?

I considered: could I have a different relationship with this feeling?
What if, instead of fighting with it every day, I simply looked on it as a blaring alarm signaling that I am resisting what already exists?

When I stopped treating overwhelm as an enemy to conquer and started treating it as a messenger, something profound shifted.

Action became possible again, not because my list was shrinking, but because with this new perspective / relationship, it was no longer running the show.

This isn’t about positive thinking or pretending everything is fine.
It’s about something more powerful: accepting reality exactly as it is, then acting from that perspective instead of from the emotional reactivity that is resistance.

The tasks don’t disappear. The feelings don’t vanish.
But the internal war ends. And when that war ends, energy returns.
Movement becomes natural instead of forced.

How I Broke the Cycle

I used to freeze at the sight of my list.
I’d waste hours reorganizing, rewriting, and planning. Anything to escape the discomfort of feeling snowed under.
Some days I’d accomplish almost nothing because I was too busy managing my anxiety about accomplishing nothing.
The irony wasn’t lost on me.

Then I saw it. It wasn’t the list that was paralyzing me.
It was my thoughts: “I can’t handle this many things. I’ll never be able to get all this done. What’s wrong with me?”

That mental chatter created the friction that stopped me cold.
It turned the neutral fact of thirty-five tasks exist into a personal failure.
It made every item on the list evidence of my inadequacy, my incompetency, my inability to keep up.

When I finally replaced that charged thought with simple neutrality: “Thirty-five tasks exist”, something interesting happened.

Suddenly the overwhelm was just a feeling, not a verdict on my capability.
I could observe it without becoming it.
I could feel it without letting it decide what happened next.

I could act again. One thing at a time. Calmly. Cleanly.

Acceptance didn’t erase the work; it erased the war I was waging with reality.
And that made all the difference.
I finished more in one focused afternoon than I had in the previous week of spinning in resistance.

The tasks hadn’t changed. My relationship to them had.

Your Three-Step Reset

This week, when you feel the wave of overwhelm rising:

1️⃣ State the fact: “These tasks exist.”
Not too many tasks or overwhelming tasks. Just the neutral observation: This is what’s in front of me.
Acknowledge every task in objective, neutral language.

2️⃣ Drop the judgment.
Become aware of every “should,” every “too many,” every story about the task or what it means about you.
Those aren’t facts; they’re the source of your friction.

3️⃣ Accept the feeling
“OK. Feelings of overwhelm are here.”
You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to make it go away.
Just let it be present without fighting it.

That simple reset turns resistance into motion.
You don’t have to wait until you feel motivated.
You don’t have to fix the feeling first.
You don’t need a better system or a clearer mind.

Just notice. Accept. Act.

Overwhelm can ride along but it doesn’t get to drive.

This is how productive people actually work.
Not by eliminating difficulty, but by ending the inner war that makes difficulty unbearable.
Not by feeling ready, but by acting anyway.

Your overwhelm is showing you where you’re still fighting what already is.
Thank it for the message.
Then take the next step.

Cheers,
Alessandra


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