Hey guys, welcome to the Roots and Refuge podcast. I am your host, Jessica Sourds. I'm so glad that you're here today. Here on our podcast, we talk about all things homesteading, growing food, preserving it, raising animals gardening, trying to live more mindfully in relationship with one another and with the earth.

My husband, Jeremiah, and I are homesteading on 27 acres in the Midlands of South Carolina,

where we grow much of our large family's food.

And we've been sharing this journey on social media over the course of about the last 10 years.

You can find us at roots and refuge.com as well as Roots and Refuge on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook,

and we post new podcast episodes here every Wednesday.

The topic for today's podcast is inspired by my own life.

Today I want to talk to you a little bit about overwhelm,

specifically seasons of overwhelm. And this is going to be a transparent talk. I'm going to be

really honest about my own internal processes here. That's not easy, but sometimes worthy things

are hard. And I would like to be able to share from

this place in hopes that maybe it could bring some help for other people. And this is the exact

kind of topic that I really wanted a podcast for, that I could just really sit down and,

and share these conversational type things.

I'm going to talk about overwhelm in terms of homestead and gardening and largely parenting,

but I think that these principles probably apply across the board if you are a person who is

prone to overwhelm.

To begin, I want to talk about the actual definition of the word overwhelm, which is,

I would just want to be on the same page that what I'm communicating we understand.

So the actual definition of overwhelm is that it is a verb, and it says to bury or drown

beneath a huge mass, to completely to give too much of a

thing to someone like inundate um to have a strong emotional effect or to be too strong for a person

...