Knowing what to do when you’re struggling is hard enough, and it gets even harder when part of you is waiting for things to get “bad enough” before you take them seriously. Episode 360 of Let’s Talk About Mental Health explores what to do when you’re struggling and how to find a realistic place to start. So, Let’s Talk About Mental Health!

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Episode Overview:

Working out what to do when you’re struggling is tricky…especially when everything seems to demand your attention at once. So where do you even start? Whether it’s a week that’s run away from you or a stretch of time where even the basics take every bit of energy you’ve got, feeling overwhelmed can make the usual advice like getting organised or pushing through feel useless. Plenty of people also talk themselves out of taking their struggles seriously because things don’t seem ‘bad enough’ yet, and that hesitation costs far more than you might think it does.

In this episode of the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, I’m making sense of what happens in your head when it all piles up and why trying harder so often makes it worse. You’ll come away with a kinder, calmer, and more workable way to cope when things are tough, and a clear sense of where to go next for whatever kind of struggle you’re facing.

👉 Ready to discover what to do when you’re struggling, even when everything feels like too much? Then let’s talk!

💡 TL;DR: When you’re struggling and can’t see where to begin, there’s a simple starting point that works even on the days you’ve got almost nothing left to give. 🙂

New here? Hi! Let’s Talk About Mental Health is your weekly dose of practical mental health advice for real life. I’m Jeremy Godwin (hello! 👋) and I keep things simple, honest, and doable so you can feel more in control of your life and your mental wellbeing. If you’re not already a free subscriber, sign up below to have episodes and transcripts land in your inbox every Sunday:

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Episode Transcript:

What to do when you’re struggling (and where to start)

What are you supposed to do when you’re struggling and everything feels like it’s too much? Some days getting through the day, or even just the next hour, is the whole achievement… and you don’t have to be falling apart for that to be true.

So in this episode, I’m going to help you figure out what’s actually going on in your head when everything feels like it’s too much, and I’ll give you a clear idea of what to do next.

So let’s talk about… what to do when you’re struggling.

Hello and welcome! I’m Jeremy Godwin and this is the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, where every week I help you make sense of your head.

Before we go any further: If you’re in danger, please reach out to someone for support immediately. Because when you’re struggling like that, in that sort of moment, you need a lot more than just a podcast; you need real help from real people who can guide you through your specific situation. You’ll find support services for most countries listed at: ltamh.com/resources, and it’s linked in the description.

This episode is specifically for less urgent kinds of struggling. So, let’s start with something simple that you can use right away.

When everything feels like it’s too much, most of us ask ourselves, “How do I fix all of this?” OK? But when you’re overwhelmed and struggling, that question doesn’t have an answer… because it’s like, “Well, where do I even start?” And so all the question does is keep you stuck.

A much more useful question to ask yourself is this: How far ahead can I actually see clearly? That question always has an answer… even if that answer ends up being just, “Oh, maybe about the next hour at most.”

Asking yourself that different question, instead of “how do I fix this?”, then decides whether you can move forward even in some small way… and I’ll come back to what that means and how to use your answer later in this episode. But to get to that point, I want to make sure that we’re on the same page so let’s talk about…

What not coping actually looks like.

Alright. So ‘not coping’ or ‘struggling’ looks and feels different from one person to the next and from one situation to the next. But underneath it, there’s usually the same experience: everything feels both urgent and too big at the same time, and you can’t work out where to even begin.

Sometimes it shows up as a stretch of time where the demands on you just keep coming faster than they can possibly be met, and the list of things that you have to deal with keeps growing and growing… no matter how hard you work at it. Other times, it’s when the ordinary things that used to happen on autopilot, like getting out of bed or replying to a simple message, suddenly take an enormous amount of effort to do.

Underneath all of that, you feel scattered and exhausted at the same time… as if your head is completely full, but nothing in it will stay still long enough for you to act on it.

And then there’s the part that we rarely talk about: how much effort goes into looking fine on the outside. You turn up to things and you smile at the right moments, but all the while you’re holding yourself together through sheer willpower alone. You can look like you’re coping and still not be.

Something I see a lot is that that busy-week version of this and the barely-functioning version are the same experience. They’re just at different volumes. What changes from one person to the next is how intense it gets, and it counts at every level… because ‘not coping’ has no minimum entry requirement.

And understanding that really does matter, because one of the biggest things that keeps you stuck is the belief that what you’re going through isn’t ‘bad enough’ somehow to count. Usually that belief comes from comparison: someone else supposedly has it worse than you, right? And so what right do you have to be struggling?

Research shows just how common that kind of thinking is. A large international study run through the World Health Organisation looked at people with common mental health conditions who hadn’t sought support, and they found that the most common reason why was that they didn’t think they needed it… and that was more likely when things were on the milder side.

And among the people who did recognise that they needed help, the most common barrier to getting it was wanting to handle it on their own. Now, that study was specifically about diagnosable conditions and formal treatment rather than everyday overwhelm, but the pattern is a very hard one to ignore.

And so that raises the question: who exactly decided where the ‘bad enough to matter’ line actually sits? Who made up those rules? Because I don’t know about you, but I’ve never once seen it written down anywhere; certainly not from a reputable source!

I mean, I’m a counsellor and so people pay me to talk these things through, and you’d be surprised how often someone apologises for taking up time talking about their struggles. If they’re apologising to the person whose job it is to listen, then I can only imagine how much they’re trying to “just get on with it and cope” in their day-to-day lives!

So let’s be really clear about this: you are allowed to find things hard, even when nothing supposedly ‘big’ has happened, and even when someone else may or may not have it worse. Be honest with yourself about what’s going on, and let it count.

Because if you’re struggling, then waiting until things are somehow considered to be ‘bad enough’ before you take them seriously only means that you end up starting from a lot further behind when you finally do. Struggling does not mean you’re failing, and it can happen to anyone.

Feeling overwhelmed like that usually means that something in your life needs to change… and that’s a very different thing from failing or being weak. That feeling is information, and it deserves your attention.

So then, what is actually going on in your head when you’re struggling? Well, now let’s talk about…

Why everything feels like too much at once.

OK. So let me take a moment here to talk about what’s going on in your brain when you’re in this overwhelmed type of headspace. When you’re under a lot of pressure, the part of your brain that plans and prioritises, and that sorts things out by size and timing, that becomes a lot less reliable.

And there’s research around this. A neuroscientist found that this planning region is the part of the brain that’s most sensitive to stress, and that even fairly mild stress can quickly reduce those abilities when that stress feels like it’s out of your control.

So in plain English, the part of you that normally decides, “Ooh, this is urgent,” and, “That can wait,” it goes quiet… and so everything arrives at full volume. To paraphrase Spinal Tap, everything gets turned up to 11.

And so when everything is that loud, your mind does the only thing it can think of… which is to try to fix all of it, all at once. And of course, that’s impossible… and so you stall, and then you take stalling as proof that you’re failing.

But the task that you set yourself was impossible from the beginning… because nobody could ever solve their entire life in one go, least of all when they’re running on empty.

That’s often where shame comes in, and it tends to push you in one of two directions. The first way shame manifests is pushing harder: you know, it’s 11 o’clock at night and you’re still answering emails or still rewriting your to-do list, trying to sort the whole thing out, because slowing down feels like giving up or giving in.

The second way it shows up is pulling away. Someone asks you, “How are you?” and you just reply, “Yeah, good!”, because, well, it’s easier than telling them the truth.

Both of those can feel like coping, but both of them actually drain whatever little energy you had left… and they cost you, whether that’s the price you pay for then snapping at someone that you love over nothing because you’re stressed or the cost of drifting away from people who want to help you. And so all of that means the whole situation looks and feels even bigger the next time around.

Either way, both pushing harder and hiding it keep the cycle going. I have found it myself many times in the past, where trying to hide things has just created a vicious cycle of things getting progressively worse.

When you’re not coping, the things that protect your peace are usually the first to go: things like rest, quiet time, doing whatever normally refills your energy levels, all of that stuff. They feel like they’re optional, and so they end up becoming the first things that we tend to cut… but the longer you go without them, the less you’ve got to work with energy-wise and so the bigger that everything looks and feels.

That’s why protecting your peace matters so much, especially when it feels like it’s the least important thing on the list. It’s not. It’s actually the most important thing on your list.

This is the bit that I really want you to hear: when your head cannot magically sort out the whole of your life in one go, the only thing you can actually work with is today… or maybe on the tougher days, just the next hour. And so some days protecting your peace and getting through the day or even just getting through the next hour is the achievement… and it deserves to be treated like an achievement.

Narrowing what you look at can feel like you might be settling for less… but you’re not, because that’s how progress comes back bit by bit. Making the next step smaller is how you get moving again. Because small steps give you your capacity back.

Once you can clearly see that the problem is the size of whatever you’re dealing with, rather than there being something wrong with you, the situation becomes something you can change. So how do you actually start doing that? Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to talk through right after this quick break.

[AD BREAK]

And welcome back! So now let’s get into the ‘how to’ part of today’s episode, and let’s talk about…

How to get through when you’re not coping.

OK. So I’m going to share three shifts for you to make in terms of how you think about all this, and then two simple things that you can practice over the next few weeks. You’ll find everything in the transcript at: ltamh.com/episodes and it’s linked in the description, so you can always refer back to it later.

So the first shift is…

Stop trying to fix everything.

And so this is about moving from thinking that you have to fix everything to instead just getting through what’s directly in front of you. Remember that question I asked you earlier: how far ahead can you actually see clearly? Whatever your honest answer to that is, that is the realistic stretch of time that you work inside of… and only that stretch; if your answer was this week, then you only look at this week… if it was just today, OK, you look at today. And if all you can really focus your energy on is maybe the next hour or so, then the next hour is the whole job. The whole focus. Everything beyond that point gets set aside for now. And no, that is not the same as abandoning it because you are going to come back to it once you’ve got a lot more capacity. Overwhelm stops you from being able to sort out the whole picture, and so the answer here is to narrow down the focus until it’s small enough to sort again. Now, does that sound almost too simple? Well, if it does, then good… because it’s meant to be. The entire point here is about keeping this as simple as possible, because that’s what helps you to start finding even the tiniest bit of peace of mind when you’re struggling. And so when you’ve got a clear sense of what the stretch of time is that you can realistically work with, then there’s only one question to ask yourself: what would make it a little more bearable? Then you do that one thing, and nothing else. Now, I’m not going to give you a list of things here because you know you far better than I do and you know what that thing is for you potentially. For me, I know that when I’m at capacity I find the smallest thing on my to-do list, something that I can realistically knock over in five minutes or less, and I do it because it just helps me to feel like I’ve done something… and then I usually reward myself with a coffee or tea afterwards. It doesn’t have to be huge. In fact, the smallness of the task is the entire point because it’s easy enough to do and that helps you to reset. When things are busy, maybe it might be eating something proper or answering the one message that’s been nagging at you all day. And when things are tough, it might simply be getting up. The amount of time and energy that you can focus on will probably change from day to day, and so if it’s shorter tomorrow than it is today that doesn’t mean that you’re going backwards; take it one day at a time, focus on what energy you have and what bandwidth you have on a particular day, and be kind to yourself about it. You don’t need to see the entire path in front of you; you only need to see the next step. Next…

Let it count.

And that means shifting your mindset from “this isn’t bad enough to count” to “it counts now.” So if you’re waiting for permission to take your struggles seriously, you’re going to be waiting for a very long time… because nobody is going to hand that permission to you. You have to give it to yourself. That means letting yourself say “this is hard” without tacking something like “but other people have it worse” onto the end of it, or, “but I’m too busy to worry about it.” That means acknowledging “this is tough” without then thinking, “but I have to just suck it up and get on with it.” Right? Because none of that actually helps you to move forward. All it does is keep you stuck in self-judgment. And this also means noticing what you have managed to do, rather than only what you haven’t… because a small thing done still counts. Next…

Make protecting your peace your main priority.

Honestly, stop trying to just push through when you’re struggling… because all you’re doing is reinforcing to yourself that you have to get on with it, rather than attending to your needs. Like I said earlier, feeling overwhelmed or like you’re struggling is information… and it deserves your attention. Now, realistically speaking, not everything is urgent and not everything needs to happen this week. There is a huge difference between ‘urgent’ and ‘important’. So for the next few days, decide ahead of time what is enough for now and what can simply wait. This is about making a deliberate choice with an end date, which is very different from letting things just fall apart around you. Your usual standards were built for an ordinary week, but if you’re struggling then this definitely isn’t an ordinary period of time. Now… at the more day-to-day end that could mean the house stays messy, or dinner is something basic. At the bigger end of struggling, it might mean stepping back from a commitment or taking some time off. And funnily enough, it’s often the expectations that we cling to the hardest when we’re overwhelmed that nobody else would even notice. Seriously, just focus on the basics, right?! Just brush your teeth and put some deodorant on, pretty much everything else can wait! This is what it means to protect your peace. And look, doing that can come with guilt. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. That guilt usually shows up because putting yourself first can feel like you’re letting other people down, especially if you’re used to being the one who holds everything together. So notice the guilt and let those things wait anyway… because giving in to the guilt is just going to keep you stuck in overwhelm. Protecting your peace is your job, and nobody can or will do it for you. Deciding what can wait is how you protect your peace. And if you have a tendency to put yourself last, or very low on your priority list, that’s actually something I’m going to be talking about next week… so make sure you subscribe or follow so that you don’t miss out on that.

So those are the three mindset shifts to focus on from today’s conversation, and now let’s talk about two simple things to practice over the next few weeks. And if you only do one of them this week, make it this first one:

Tell one person.

And by that I mean to tell one person who you trust, in one sentence, that you’re not coping. So you don’t need to explain all of it, and you don’t need a plan to do it… even just one sentence is better than saying nothing. Wanting to handle things on your own often ends up being the biggest barrier to getting support, and it makes the struggle feel even bigger, and so this is how you start getting around it. Trying to handle everything on your own can feel like you’re being strong… but more often than not, it’s the thing that keeps you stuck. Now, the person that you choose to open up to might be a trusted friend, or a partner who already knows that things have been a lot, or maybe it might be your doctor or someone who you’ve been hiding all of this from. Whoever you choose is up to you, but choose someone to talk to… because the more we talk about it, the easier it gets. If reaching out makes you feel like you’re imposing on people, check out my episode about feeling like a burden; it’s linked in the description. And if there isn’t anyone safe for you to tell, or who feels safe, that’s OK because I’m going to be coming to other options in a moment. So with that in mind, the next thing to do is…

Check in with yourself once a day.

Over the next few weeks, ask yourself that question once a day: How far ahead can I see clearly today? Then pick one thing that fits inside that window, and do it. Now, some days the answer will be “the whole week,” and other days it’s going to just be “the next hour.” Either way, you’re building the habit of working with the capacity that you actually have rather than the capacity that you think you should have.

And look, a few final thoughts here about where to go from today’s conversation.

Once the immediate pressure has eased a bit, and I’m talking about in weeks or months time rather than days or hours here, that’s when it will help to ask yourself what is actually driving the feelings of overwhelm? What’s underneath it? Is it having too much on your plate? Or too little energy left every day? Or is it something more specific? You know, if you’re mostly shutting down or freezing up, or your emotions keep taking over, I’ve got episodes on both of those to help you dig a bit deeper. And if it’s something like, you know, your thoughts won’t stop, or more of a sense of emotional heaviness, I’ve got episodes on those too. So I’ll link them all in the description rather than listing them here, along with a few more on things like anxiety and low mood.

So whatever it is, identify it and then identify the next step to take and check out an episode that’s going to help you with that because this is about creating change… because nothing changes if nothing changes.

And when it comes to support, start with what’s free… because let’s be realistic, not everyone can afford therapy. The World Health Organisation has a free illustrated self-help guide called Doing What Matters in Times of Stress and research on the course that it comes from found that structured self-help, even without a therapist, can genuinely reduce distress. So I’ll link that as well.

And beyond that, talking to your doctor is always a good option and so is counselling if it is a choice for you. And if you’re in danger or having thoughts of self-harm, please don’t wait; go to ltamh.com/resources for crisis support in your country. It’s linked in the description. Because you deserve real help straight away.

And then over time, as things start to ease, you can begin looking further ahead again while also proactively looking after your energy levels and your mental wellbeing; feeling OK for a while is a very good reason to keep on proactively looking after your peace rather than a reason to stop. It’s preventative maintenance… and prevention is better than cure. That’s the sort of stuff that I talk about every week in this show. So if you haven’t already, follow or subscribe and use it as your weekly dose of mental self-care.

Conclusion

So here’s what I want you to take away from this episode. Some days getting through the day, or even just the next hour, is the whole achievement… and that still counts. You don’t need to fix everything all at once; look only as far ahead as you can clearly see, and remember that protecting your peace is where coping starts again.

So what’s one thing you could let wait this week in order to protect your peace?

Because when you boil it all down, coping starts with the next thing you can see… long before you’ve got everything sorted out.

Each week, I like to finish up by sharing a quote about the topic and I encourage you to take a few moments to really reflect on it and consider what it means to you. This week’s quote is by the late writer E. L. Doctorow, and it is:

It’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow

Let me repeat that:

It’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Alright. That’s nearly it for this week.

If you’d like some help with putting all of this into practice, come and join me for my Protecting Your Peace on Purpose coaching program starting in late January, 2027. Registrations are open until January 17, unless filled earlier, and you can find out more at the link in the description or head to: ltamh.com/programs. Spots are strictly limited.

My Patreon supporters get a discount on the program as well as weekly early access to my podcast, so consider becoming a supporter. You can also check out my book Life Advice That Doesn’t Suck for more practical advice for better mental health. They’re all linked in the description.

Thank you very much for joining me today. Look after yourself and make a conscious effort to share positivity and kindness out into the world… because you get back what you put out. Take care and talk to you next time!

Next week I’ll be talking about why you often put yourself last. In the meantime, check out my episode on why protecting your peace isn’t optional; it’s linked in the description. I release new content every Sunday, so follow or subscribe to never miss an episode.

Let’s Talk About Mental Health is an independent program. Discover more at ltamh.com.

Related/suggested episodes:

• Feeling like a burden (Episode 336): https://ltamh.com/?p=20357
• Overwhelm, freeze, and shutdown (Episode 330): https://ltamh.com/?p=20056
• Emotional regulation (Episode 327): https://ltamh.com/?p=19866
• Thoughts (Episode 344): https://ltamh.com/?p=20856
• Feeling emotionally heavy (Episode 351): https://ltamh.com/?p=21318
• Dealing with anxiety (Episode 281): https://ltamh.com/?p=16786
• Feeling miserable (Episode 342): https://ltamh.com/?p=20725
• Depression (Episode 188): https://ltamh.com/?p=11106
• Protecting your peace (Episode 354): https://ltamh.com/?p=21557

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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Find more content at www.ltamh.com

Let’s Talk About Mental Health.
Making Mental Health Simple.

Let’s Talk About Mental Health. © 2026 Jeremy Godwin.

The information provided in this episode is for general awareness on the topic and does not constitute advice. You should consult a doctor and/or mental health professional if you’re struggling with your mental health and wellbeing. You’ll find additional information on the Resources page of this website.