When Everything Feels Out of Control, I Do This • The Prairie Homestead

Turning Panic Into Motion…

I just finished a ten-day horsemanship clinic.

It was exactly what I needed.

Horses have a way of bringing me back to the present moment. Considering we were also roping, there’s very little room for distraction when you are connecting your thousand-pound animal to another live animal with a rope… And your fingers are somewhere in the mix.

It’s fairly dangerous, but that also makes it exciting and forces me to be fully in my body instead of lost in my head.

So even though I ended the clinic tired and sunburned and rope burned, it was a very good week.

Then I came home.

Funnily enough, all the things I left unfinished did NOT magically fix themselves while I was out living my best cowgirl life.

Weird.

The garden plants are still dying from some mysterious herbicide situation.

The half-done bathroom remodel is still staring at me every time I walk past it.

The fence still does not exist.

The financial accounts still need to be addressed and organized.

The dust from the next-door field continues to enter my house through closed windows and coat everything in a fine layer of silt.

As I surveyed the situation, my brain did what it loves to do when life gets loud: it took five separate problems, threw them into a blender, and handed me one giant smoothie of panic.

Nothing was actually on fire, but it sure felt like it was.

This is the part where another content creator might would tell you they lit a candle, journaled peacefully, and surrendered to the process.

But I didn’t.

I freaked out for a minute… Cried a little… Walked in circles for a bit…

And then remembered I actually do know how to handle this.

Whenever my life starts feeling like a junk drawer, I have learned the most merciful thing I can do is to stop trying to hold it all in my head.

I don’t know much about neuroscience, but I suspect our brains were not meant to be storage units. At least mine isn’t.

They are not meant to hold the garden troubleshooting, the bathroom timeline, the fence supply list, the financial questions, the dinner plan, the kid schedule, and the vague dread of “what if this all falls apart?” at the same time.

Yet we carry it all around like a tangled ball of yarn, then wonder why we feel exhausted before we’ve even begun.

For me, the antidote is ALWAYS mapping.

It’s not about fixing everything or becoming a higher-capacity woman or even more coffee.

Just mapping.

For me, that looks like writing down everything swirling in my brain and then attaching the next smallest action to each thing, like this:

The garden plants are struggling big time. I know there is some sort of herbicide damage involved (more thoughts on this soon…) So my action is: test the soil and call the Wyoming Department of Agriculture for ideas.

The half-done bathroom remodel feels overwhelming and halted and gross. So my next action is: paint the vanity (and watch a bunch of videos on how to change out a light fixture).

The fence is still just a vague, looming idea. So my next action is: meet with a friend, walk the space, and make a supplies list.

The money and accounts feel scattered. So my next action is: have the call with my financial advisor.

The dust in the house is making me crazzzzy. So my next action is: order a crapload of weather stripping.

None of those actions magically fixes the whole problem. But the weirdest thing is that even before anything is technically fixed, writing it out makes me feel better.

Because once it’s written down, the problem is defined. It’s no longer just a foggy, looming mass taking up space in my brain. It has edges. It has shape. It has somewhere for me to start.

I’ve learned that overwhelm thrives most in vagueness.

It feeds on the big, sweeping, dramatic stories our brains love to tell: Everything is too much. I’m behind. I don’t know where to begin. I’ll never get caught up.

No wonder we freeze.

But the moment I can turn the swirl into a sentence, and the sentence into one small action, something shifts.

The problem may not be solved, but it is no longer shapeless. And for me, that makes a huge difference.

This is why I always include brain dump sections in my planners. They give the chaos a place to land.

When I can take the swirling ideas out of my brain and put them on a page, they lose their stranglehold on me.

I love the old adage, “action cures fear.” But action cures a lot of other things too. It cures fog and paralysis and that dreadful feeling that everything on your plate is too big, too tangled, too late, too much.

And simple action is enough.

It may not always be Instagram-worthy, but it is how life gets built. And rebuilt.

One phone call, one errand, one coat of paint at a time.

So if your life feels like a junk drawer right now, maybe don’t try to solve the whole thing today. (Speaking to the choir here…)

Just name the thing.

Write down the next smallest action.

And do that.

I’ll be doing it right alongside you.

-Jill