The Power of Less

The feeling of being overwhelmed is extremely common in the people I talk to, and it’s becoming more and more clear to me that this is the default state for most of us.

We’re overwhelmed by it all: all the things we have on our plates, all the interruptions and messages and emails, all the things online and on social media, all the news and chaos of the world, all the things going on in our relationships.

It’s a lot! We can celebrate the abundance of our lives, but often we bemoan it.

The problem isn’t the abundance, but our fear and anxiety about all of it. Actually, for most of us, the fear is that we’ll let people down. We’ll drop one of the many balls we have in the air and let people down or worse yet, we’ll drop them all and we’ll be exposed as inadequate!

So, how do we deal with it? I suggest three practices of simplicity.

And as you practice with simplicity, you might recite a kind of mantra: When you’re overwhelmed, simplify.

Let’s talk about fear and anxiety before we talk about the three simplicity practices.