7 Ways I Stay Sane in a Crazy World

Here are 7 powerful tools to stay sane in a crazy world. As a result, you will handle situations better, improve your health, enjoy better relationships, and reach your goals.

Staying balanced and in tune with your body, mind, and spirit takes a commitment to self care. By taking care of yourself in these ways, you create better physical and mental health.

It does seem like the world is crazy at times.

I can’t say I feel sane 100% of the time—who does? But I’ve built some solid practices that I turn to again and again to help me feel better.

I just don’t write about practices I think “sound good.” I write about what works, day in and day out, over long periods of time.

Recently I wrote a post called Daily Routines to Help You Feel Better. It’s a more updated version of this post.

The Three Foundations of Feeling Sane No Matter What

For me, staying sane and balanced is feeling emotionally resilient, being strong and healthy, and getting what needs to be done, done.

Finding balance starts with the intention, belief, and commitment to being in present moment, no matter how crazy life seems.

BELIEF

One of the most important places to begin is with your belief in your own resilience to navigate current events. 

One belief that I have is that I can live my best life no matter what. This doesn’t mean I walk around oblivious.

However, I believe that the more time I control what I can control and try not to stress about what I can’t control, I feel better. 

Much of what goes on in life around us, is a distraction that keeps us from self-acceptance and self-love. 

One of my core beliefs is that self-acceptance is one of the most powerful states you can be in as you navigate your own life. 

Many of us go around always wishing we were different in some way. I’m all for making changes in a healthy way, but I absolutely believe that begins with acceptance of who you are right now and the belief that you absolutely deserve to feel batter.

INTENTION

My intention with all I do, is to find peace and create positive energy in my body, mind, and spirit. 

When I feel balanced and sane; I do my best, not just for myself but for the other people who are in my life. This thought completely transformed life for me and maybe it can transform yours.

Here’s the thing, it might seem selfish to want to feel good, create better habits, and aim to be the very best version of yourself.

However, and I see this over and over in my work. When women take care of themselves and let go of self-defeating attitudes, they become their best self.

As their best self, and an understanding of what is best for themselves, they show up differently.

The intention is this. To be your best self and you do this by: 

• Prioritize your own self-care
• Create better habits that support you
• Practice complete self-acceptance (I promise you won’t become lazy or selfish)
• Make small improvements that build confidence and even more self-love

Here’s what I know. When I or my clients do the above, that when we do our best work, get our best ideas, and have the best relationships.

Living an intentional life comes with another benefit. You’ll have fewer regrets and less guilt, worry, anger, disappointment, and resentment.

For the record, I don’t make my best decisions when I’m anxious, worried, or mad. I don’t do my best work when I’m overcome with strong feelings of resentment or frustration.

Yes, these or normal and they’ll come and go but getting stuck there is not good for anyone!

I love the full expression of feelings, but my intent is always towards balance. It’s where I live my best, happiest, most productive life. It’s where good flows more easily to me.

COMMITMENT

It may seem counterintuitive to commit to spending additional time on things that may seem like luxuries to some people.

However, in my experience, by taking time for essential self-care practices, you free up additional time or you become more efficient with your time.

By caring for yourself this way, you are not adding on to an already busy day—you are actually creating breathing room. You will create real change–not just put a happy-face bandaid on feeling stressed.

Also, by committing, you give your practices time to work. We all know that exercise is good for us and helps us shape our bodies. We also know, that working out once a month is not going to get the job done.

The same is true with any balancing practices; you have to commit to doing them regularly over a period of time.

You create true change in your life when you commit to taking care of your emotional, mental, and physical self. We are programmed from the get-go to take care of other people’s feelings before our own.

That does make it difficult to wrap your mind around the absolute necessity of spending time on your own well-being.

You create true change in your life when you commit to taking care of your emotional, mental, and physical self.

There are so many diseases and mental conditions that are all around us. You are most likely dealing with something yourself.

I believe that when we ignore our body, our emotions, and our crazy thinking, we become more vulnerable to sickness and suffering.

I can’t say these practices will cure or prevent all sickness but I believe 100% that they will help you deal with whatever you are facing more effectively.

By ignoring how stressed and out-of-whack you feel, you open yourself to illness, pain, and out-of-control emotions.

How I Stay Sane in a Crazy World

These are my top 7 ways I stay sane and balanced. Some of these are practices that I’ve used for years.

Others are newer practices that I’ve found to be super effective. When I find myself out of whack or off-balance, I look into these tools first.

WRITE THINGS DOWN

With a lot of moving pieces to my life, I have to keep things written down. By hand, with a pen, and on paper. I’ve tried online methods but they don’t work for me.

I write all my to-do things in an inexpensive composition book. I use one page per day. I write out what I want to get done.

There’s plenty of room for notes, phone numbers, or the odd inspirational idea. It’s also easy to go back and find information if I need to.

I cross things off as I get them done. If I don’t get to something, it’s still there in writing that it needs to be done. Even if I’ve written down something I don’t want to do but I must do, I will eventually get to it.

My “planner” feels like a friend and it honestly keeps me moving forward at a steady pace.

Get things out of your head and onto something that is in front of you.

MAKE STRONG DECISIONS

I wrote about the power of making decisions a while back. I had no idea how powerful just making a decision could be. At the time, I had a few things going on in my mind that I just couldn’t figure out what to do about it.

I made a decision to—you know, DECIDE. I picked the one that was most worrisome and I just made the best decision I could with the information I had.

And that worrisome problem that had been bothering me for months—went away. My mind was at ease about that subject.

Once I had decided what to do, and committed to doing it, my mind could let it go. It was on the calendar, paid for, and was going to happen.

Looking towards the actual event was not even close to being as troublesome as not having the decision made!

But there were more decisions out there. I did the same with them. Honestly, I was blown away how powerful making and committing to an actual decision could be.

This is probably one of the most helpful discoveries I’ve made for myself.

WALK OUTSIDE

Eating well and having a fit body is not solely about aesthetic appeal. It’s because having a functionally fit body, is less stressful than worrying about extra pounds or not being able to get around.

I’ve written extensively about walking. It’s that big of a part of my life. When I hit my walking trail, something in my body immediately relaxes. Walking outside truly helps me keep my body in shape but it also helps my mind too.

Long walks outside can also help lower stress hormones which damage your body and can cause extra weight.

HAVE A GRATITUDE PRACTICE

I don’t practice gratitude because it’s the trendy thing to do. I do it because it calms my mind and shifts me into a place where I can think clearly and tap into my creativity.

My life moves at such a pace that it would be so easy to overlook the positive things that happen every day.

Sometimes I’ll sit down to write about things I’m grateful for and I’ll be surprised at how many there are. I’ll even have forgotten a couple until I take the time to recollect the day before.

FORGIVE AND FORGIVE SOME MORE

Forgiving someone is the ultimate freedom. And sometimes the most difficult one to achieve. Yet, it is so worth it. It’s easy to get caught up in holding a grudge or being mad. Been there, done that, way too many times.

In fact, I believe practicing forgiveness is the most powerful thing you can do to feel sane! When you hold on to anger and hurt, you are truly hurting yourself.

Carrying long-term resentment is the opposite of sanity!

I’m not perfect at this but I actively practice forgiving and letting go. I believe in it so much, I enlisted a counselor colleague to create a forgiveness script and I produced a guided mediation to help with this.

The act of forgiveness is difficult to define. It sometimes feels impossible! However, by having the intention to forgive you create the environment for forgiveness to happen.

Sometimes that is all you can do. But don’t minimize the importance of taking this step.

This guided meditation takes only five minutes to do. It’s one of the best five minutes you can spend to help yourself keep sane.

TAPPING

Tapping or EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) as it is officially known is probably my most out-there practice. But I’ve been using it for eight years to manage anxious feelings and negative thinking.

EFT uses pressure points to help with physical and emotional issues like acupuncture does, but without any needles. It’s something that is easy to do at home and I find it immensely helpful in managing worry and anxiety especially.

There are many practitioners out there but for free access to quality tapping, I recommend Brad Yates. He has a YouTube channel and puts his work out there for free. He has tapping on just about any subject you can imagine.

I’ve bought a couple of books on the subject but I just can’t follow a written script. I need to have someone in front of me doing it, to follow along with.

Here’s a link to Intro to Tapping. It’s super easy to follow along with. Here’s Brad’s YouTube channel.

WORK IN SMALLER CHUNKS

I wrote about this in a post called How to Get Unstuck in Life. I discovered this process when I was at my lowest point in life and felt that I couldn’t get anything done.

Yet, I discovered that by committing just a few minutes a day to something that was important to me, not only did I get it done eventually, but I did it well.

Since that time, I’ve continued to use this method over and over with equally great results. I cannot even explain how powerful this is. I’ve literally built a viable business working in small amounts of time.

But I do know from many years of working with college students, that there is a tendency in humans to think if we can’t do something in a BIG way, we shouldn’t even bother.

That is so not right!

In fact, I have seen that thinking you can only do something if you can do it in a big way, create situations that are actually detrimental to the overall goal.

When you bite off more than you can chew, you get overwhelmed, discouraged, and eventually give up.

By working in smaller do-able increments, you begin to achieve measurable results that in turn motivate you to keep making progress.

Eventually those small steps create momentum and projects and goals you thought were impossible get done.

As my business has grown, I have increased my capacity to focus and work in bigger chunks of time.

However, I have a trick I use to get more done in less time. I challenge myself to get more work done in less time. If I have content to write, I don’t give myself unlimited time. I give myself an hour or an hour and a half and then I go get it done.

Stay Sane in a Crazy World

Staying balanced is a worthy goal. But it’s unrealistic to think you can feel like that 24/7.

Aiming for feeling that way 80–90% of the time. You can do that! By taking care of yourself first, you handle all situations better, improve your health and fitness, and maintain healthy relationships.

And while I don’t have a practice around it, maintaining your sense of humor through everything really helps too. There truly are things that happen that are no laughing matter.

But around those things, in life in general, there are things we can find to laugh about. And finding those things–helps keep us sane even when we’re dealing with the worst.

It may feel like an insane world at times, but that’s always been the way. And your best way through it is to tend to your mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

The better you feel, the better you’ll do and you’ll be a better friend or family member as well.