How can I cope with stress/being overwhelmed/exhausted when there is little leeway in my life?

It sounds like you're living a very full and satisfying life, doing a lot of great things to create the future you want for yourself. That is wonderful, and like you said, probably exhausting at times. It can be challenging but essential to your long-term success to find as much balance as possible between pushing yourself to accomplish your goals and compassionately taking care of yourself. You must engage in the life-long process of learning to take care of the different parts that make you a whole person; your physical, your intellectual, your social, your spiritual, your vocational, and any other important parts of you. It will be beneficial for you to pause your busy life periodically to take a self-inventory of how you're compassionately caring for yourself in each of these different areas. There are plenty of free online "self-care" resources that you can utilize to help in that process as well. Everything in life needs regular maintenance to function optimally.

One of the most important life skills that you can develop in this journey of self-care is stress management. I believe that stress management at its most basic level is a two-part process, problem-solving and coping, and I think of it in terms of balancing a scale. On one side of the scale you have the stressors that are weighing you down. On the other side you have the coping skills that balance out those stressors. We are effectively managing our stress when the scale is balanced. So, problem-solving removes as many stressors as possible from that side, and coping strategies hopefully can neutralize or balance the remaining stressors that can't be solved. However, not all coping strategies are created equal. There are varying degrees of healthy and unhealthy coping. In fact, we could think of coping strategies on a spectrum ranging from very unhealthy to very healthy. Some examples of unhealthy coping strategies are isolation, avoidance, eating disorders, risky sexual behavior, compulsive shopping, nail biting, hair pulling, and the list could go on down the spectrum. Some examples of healthy coping strategies are emotional expression through crying, rest and relaxation, social and family support, physical activity and exercise, listening to or playing music, appreciating or creating various other forms of art, journaling or writing, cleaning or organizing, and this list could go on up the spectrum. Just a word of caution about these healthy coping strategies, some or many of them can gradually turn unhealthy if practiced in excess. Too much exercise or too much cleaning or too much of anything can become problematic for a number of reasons. One of the best ways to prevent that from happening and to maintain healthy stress management is to practice a variety of the healthy coping strategies as much as possible.

I know you stated that you're very busy and you have "little leeway" in your life, so you might be thinking "how do I fit more things into my life right now?" I hear you and understand that feeling. Life is full of choices we have to make about what we do with the 24 hours we have each day. If we don't choose to spend some of that time taking care of ourselves, we might lose some of our options to illness or just to decrease effectiveness from wearing ourselves out. If we think of ourselves as knives, we have to take breaks from cutting things periodically to sharpen ourselves, so we can keep cutting effectively and not break. Another metaphor you've probably heard that I like compares our lives to jars that we fill up with a combination of stones and pebbles and sand. If we fill up our jar with the sand first, then the pebbles and stones won't fit. But if we fill up our jar with the stones first, then the pebbles, then the sand, it will all fit. The stones represent the biggest most important things in our life; our own basic needs and wellness, our family and friends, faith and spirituality for some, or whatever we value most. The pebbles represent the moderately important things in our life; our job or career, financial assets, hobbies, and so on. The sand represents the rest of the nitty gritty things we have to do in life. If we fit all the biggest things in our lives first, then the next most important things, and then let the small things fill in around the rest of the space, it will all fit for us. You've got to keep your knife sharp. You've got to assess your stones and pebbles and sand, and put them in your jar in order.