How to cope with overthinking and overwhelmed by stress without breaking down

Dear Ire:

I am truly sorry that you are feeling such great pain, and have been enduring such great emotional distress!

It seems that you have been working hard for years in order to assure graduation, with your degree.  It also appears as if right now you need a place, and the space to first focus on what is the most distressing aspects of your current life as a student, and to find the means to resolve those underlying issues.  Coping with these distressing elements, and seeking relief for what you describe above, is the first priority (it seems to me), because if that emergent crisis that you are undergoing is not addressed, and a resolution does not happen, you already anticipate what will occur: You “breaking down”.  So therefore, the first order of business is prevention of the “breaking down”.  This preventive step can help protect all that you have already done, plus will also preserve your health, and wellness.   

Coping without “breaking down”, involves first of all: An Assessment.  Thereafter:  Decisions, and ensuing protective Actions.  There are planning questions that you can embrace, so as to discern the short term, and long term problems that you may be facing, and that can then be part of a plan to resolve what troubles you.  These questions can include the following inquiries: What is it that is leading you to feel so mentally exhausted, now?  Can you identify how much rest you will need in order to not “break down”?  When you indicate that you are “feeling too much at once”, can you list, and identify what it is exactly that you are presently feeling?  Are there also fears?  Are there perhaps any other traumatic events from either the past, or the present?  The answers to these questions, can lead you to prioritize what happens next.  You get to make this determination, and if you need help, you can go to a therapist to possibly help you structure this within the next few days, so that you can decide how it is that you will orchestrate what happens next, and how to execute the actions that will meet your immediate, and longer term needs.

Please, notice that I am only addressing you, and your determinations, and your ensuing choices.  You are the only one who can play an active role on what your needs are, and how these needs can be addressed.  Once that is done, then you can enlist the opinion of others, and define how it is that those opinions can either help you, or not, but everything can be subsumed under your determinations, and decisions, moving forward.

I hope this is a helpful anteroom to provide you the necessary steps to organize your set of actions, moving forward toward your success.