When life is (VERY) hard

One of the themes that keeps showing up in my coaching work is overwhelm during a (very) hard season of life.

Most of us have been there. Those stretches where everything feels heavier “just because”. And then there are the seasons that are genuinely, unavoidably harder: illness, loss, family or financial strain, or other life quakes (a great term coined by Bruce Feiler).

But when I did, I discovered that everybody feels their life has been upended in some way. That they’re somehow off schedule, off track, off kilter. That the life they’re living is not the life they expected. That they’re living life out of order – Bruce Feiler

These seasons don’t arrive neatly. They pile onto already complex lives: more appointments, more mental load, worries about money or the future, and sleep that’s patchy at best. And, according to Bruce Feiler, they usually happen in clusters/clumps.  It’s not just one thing – it is lots of things.

What’s interesting, though, is this: with the possible exception of health-quakes where there’s genuine physical incapacity, nothing else really stops. Life doesn’t clear the deck.

My coaching clients describe the same pattern again and again: things keep getting added, but very little (if anything) is taken away. So, in addition to the complexity of life, there are more difficult things to do with fewer resources to do them.

There’s an odd quirk in us humans: stepping back can feel like failure. Stripping life down to the essentials can feel like “giving up”, rather than the sensible, temporary response it actually is.

But hard seasons aren’t the time to prove capacity. It’s the time to protect it. One of the most helpful moves people can make is separating what’s necessary from what can go, even briefly. And most of us can’t do that well on our own when we’re tired, worried, or emotionally stretched. This is where support matters.

Some practical tips

* Do a ruthless, short-term audit: What truly has to stay for the next 6–8 weeks?
* Make the reduction visible: tell people, so expectations adjust with you. Even better if your boss or another person can support this message in the broader system.
* Park any decisions that don’t need to be made now. Good, clear decision-making is hard in periods of acute or chronic crisis.
* Ask for practical help, not just emotional support: meals, lifts, admin, help with kids or house stuff, deadlines moved. And if you’re not good at asking for help, enlist a bossy friend who can coordinate this on your behalf.
* Learn some breathing/calming techniques for when panic sets in.
* And possibly the hardest one of all: don’t abandon the basics. Gentle movement of some kind. Food that’s decent enough. Plenty of water. However much good-quality sleep you can realistically muster. And support or connection that actually helps, not the kind that drains you further. This is the scaffolding that stops everything else from collapsing.