I fail completely to be able to be in the moment when I am overburdened or overtired or stressed. So I need to give myself enough time to sleep and allow myself to be imperfect and do a less than exceptional job on each of my responsibilities (work, health, kids, home etc).
A couple of things seemingly opposite things have helped, the first, was
getting organised spending some time planning and
doing the basics of living, eating etc in advance, less fire-fighting. That frees my mind up so that I don't have 10001 things that I've got to keep track of whilst playing with the kids, being at work, enjoying a walk.
This is going to sound weird, but that all comes from joining the flylady home organising site: I don't have to think about any of that stuff; I follow their schedule, they can think of all that stuff for me; it's covered.
The other, conversely is
less planning and more
doing as a means of stopping my worrying. I am a classic -spend-so-much-time-making-the-perfect-revision-timetable-that-there's-no-time-left-for-revision procrastinator. Before when I used to worry about big stuff, I would make a plan about it, I would worry about the various possible outcomes and try and have contingencies for all of them. Now I try to just do one small practical thing that would make my life better right now or in a week/months time, usually completely unrelated to my worry, even if that is just throwing out the old stuff in my fridge or writing to an old friend; something simple that I can concentrate on wholly for a few minutes. If I'm still worrying, I do another thing and try and concentrate on that.
If that doesn't work and I'm still overcome with emotions and the need to try and forsee or manipulate the future, with worry, I try and practice mindfullness - a counsellor taught me the basics (and I've never got past the basics, because my mind is an unruly wanderer).
I often have to pull myself back into the now of life, I really spent none of the last week just being: two exhausted kids with completely disrupted sleep patterns, grumpy, demanding and overwhelmed completely threw me off, and I had some huge anxiety and future-tripping going on. But that's okay, cos I don't have to be perfect
