Do you ever take the time for yourself that everyone says you should take, the pedicure, the show after bedtime, the hour alone in a store, and come back feeling exactly as tired as when you left? I want to talk about why that happens, because it isn’t that you’ve been taking care of yourself wrong.
In this episode I walk through a difference I’ve been talking about with moms lately, one that separates the kind of rest that drains away from the kind that actually refills you. I’ll also give you a practice that takes about ninety seconds and does more for your body than a night out.
This is the first of two episodes. Next week we look at how to fit restoration into a day that’s already full.
What you will learn on this episode
• Why stepping away from what’s stressing you doesn’t clear the stress out of your body
• The difference between soothing and numbing, and why the two can look identical from the outside
• The one question to ask yourself before you reach for your usual break
• Why your exhale matters more than your inhale
• What one true refill a day looks like when you have no spare time
Free Download
I made you a one-page guide with the breathing practice from this episode written out step by step, so you don’t have to remember the counts while you’re doing it. It also has a second practice I’ll teach you next week. Keep it somewhere you’ll see it.
Transcript
You can check every box on the self-care list, the bath, the treat, the night out, your shows, and still wake up the next morning feeling like you never rested at all. If that’s ever been you, this is the conversation I want to have with you today. This is Leadership Parenting, The Self-Care Myth: What Actually Refuels You.
Did you know that resilience is the key to confidence and joy? As moms, it’s what we want for our kids, but it’s also what we need for ourselves. My name is Leigh Germann. I’m a therapist, and I’m a mom. Join me as we explore the skills you need to know to be confident and joyful, then get ready to teach these skills to your kids. This is Leadership Parenting, where you learn how to lead your family by showing them the way.
Friends, I’m so glad to be back with you today. I was just thinking about recording this episode and all the things that I have to do on my list, and I was excited that I could set all those things aside and come and just talk with you. I just wish so much that I could be sitting across from you and hear your thoughts, and that this could go back and forth. We could learn from each other. But the next best thing is that I get to visit with you.
So if you ever feel inclined that you want to send me an email and share your thoughts, oh my gosh, that would make me so happy. I would love to hear from you, love to have that conversation back and forth just a little bit, and to hear what seems to be the most helpful thing for you. And especially the things that maybe you have concerns about or worries over that you would love to have addressed as we meet together during these episodes.
So today, I want to talk about something that I hear a lot in the conversations I’m having with moms right now, about their own restoration, their own sense of feeling better, of having the care that they give themselves. And I know self-care would be that term, and oftentimes that is an interesting phrase.
Self-care has had a lot of definitions, a lot of ways that we look at how we give ourselves time, ultimately, to restore. And what I’ve been having these conversations with women around is that they are doing the things that they thought would restore them. It’s that pampering yourself, maybe getting a pedicure, doing something that you feel is kind of luxurious, or watching your shows after your kids are finally asleep, or even having the freedom to sit and scroll and not be interrupted, being on social media.
And a lot of times, women crave that because of how it feels for them. I mean, it’s a double-edged sword, but these are the things that I see women doing to try to take care of themselves. And the thing I want to talk with you about is whether you ever find that when you’re doing some of these things, you notice that not a lot has changed for you after you have this self-care time.
Maybe you feel the same as when you started. Maybe even a little worse, maybe even a little foggier. You follow the advice to take time for yourself, but somewhere underneath it, maybe you find that the tiredness is still sitting there, exactly where it was when you tried to relieve it. Well, if you’ve felt that, I want you to know it’s not necessarily because you’ve been taking care of yourself wrong.
It’s because a lot of what passes for self-care was never going to refill you or restore you in the first place. And I think it’s easy for us to get confused about this, because when we’re trying to do everything that we’ve been told we’re supposed to do, like get the occasional pedicure, or have a standing night where we watch our shows after the kids go down, or we get to go out by ourselves to a store and wander the aisles, I think those are the ideas that seem easy for us to take care of ourselves.
And what moms are telling me is that these things are not working very well. A mom I talked with recently said that she takes time for herself to do some of these things, and she comes back to her family feeling like she has nothing more to give than before she left. And that was a panicky feeling for her, because if taking care of herself wasn’t restoring her, then it felt a little hopeless.
And she started to wonder if maybe something was seriously wrong with her, and that she was just a person who maybe wasn’t well-matched to mothering, and that she couldn’t get filled up. So I don’t know where you are in this, but I want to address it, because I think we can come at self-care in a different way.
There’s nothing wrong with us as moms that we get tired and that we feel depleted. And when we don’t feel restored, I think it’s normal for us to feel a little bit panicky, a little bit unsure, like, am I ever going to get restored? And I think it actually comes down to a technical difference when we look at self-care.
It’s the difference between soothing our bodies and numbing or distracting our bodies and our minds, I would add. And those two things can look almost identical from the outside. They can even feel similar in the moment, but they do completely different things to our minds and our bodies, and only one of them actually restores you.
And I bet you can guess, as I give you the names soothing and numbing, which one actually restores you and which one just delays your stress. If you guessed that numbing is the thing that isn’t working well, you would be right. Numbing is anything that helps you not feel what you’re feeling, or delay what you’re feeling.
It can press pause on your discomfort. So whenever we’re scrolling on our phones, unless we’re purposefully going to get some information, that scroll is usually masking or distracting us from some uncomfortable feelings. The shows that we binge sometimes do the same thing. Wandering aisles, just looking at stuff, these are ways of stepping out of our life experience for a little while, and there’s nothing wrong about that, nothing shameful about wanting to step out.
I think we need to do that, and I’m not against any of those things I just listed. All of those do give you a break out of your normal life’s process. When you’re depleted, you’re kind of checking out, and it can feel like relief, and it is briefly. But this kind of distraction, this numbing, doesn’t discharge anything.
The stress that we carry when we sat down to do the scroll or to watch the show is often still in our body when we stand up. We didn’t actually process the stress. We just paused it, or we covered it, or we distracted from it. And a paused feeling doesn’t disappear. It just waits. It waits for us.
Soothing is different. Soothing is anything that helps your nervous system actually come down out of activation and return to a sense of safety. It doesn’t take you out of your body. It brings you more back into it. It doesn’t take you away from your emotions. It actually gives you strength and courage and capacity to feel those emotions and let them settle.
And that distinction, whether a thing pulls you out of your experience or settles you back into it, that is the whole difference between self-care that drains away after you do it and self-care that actually heals and supports you. Now, this is kind of a novel concept. We don’t talk about how we care for ourselves very much, period.
But oftentimes we go so superficial that we don’t look at this deeper difference. So I invite you to put on your glasses, your nervous system glasses, and look at it through that lens.
There’s a piece of research that reframed all of this for me when I began to understand it. It made a distinction between two things that we tend to treat as the same thing. One, which is the stressor, and two, which is the stress itself.
So let me explain this. The stressor is the thing that causes you stress. The calendar that’s packed. Having to get somewhere at a certain time, get a project done. The kids who get upset in the car about something, or they don’t want to go to school, or they’re pushing back. The arguments that we have sometimes with our partners.
The stress is what happens inside your body in response to those things. The flood of activation of that nervous system, where you feel it in your chest, maybe that tightness of your muscles, that sense of discomfort in your belly. This would be how we hold the response to the stressors.
So two things: the external things that are happening that we call stress, and then the internal ways that we respond to it that we also call stress. A little crazy-making there, a little bit difficult for us to distinguish, because we use the same word for two different things. So I’m asking you to start to delineate that and separate them. And here’s the part that I think impacts us.
You can deal with the stressor and get it finished, get rid of it, or avoid it, or walk away from it, and still be carrying the stress. Here’s what we deal with as moms all the time. We solve the problems. We get the kids to bed. We finish the hard day. We remove the things that maybe are the hardest on our plate. But sometimes our body can still be sitting in the full physiological response to all of that, as if the threat was still happening right in front of us.
So the situation is over, but the stress cycle in your body is not.
So you know what most self-care advice tells us to do? It’s mostly aimed at dealing with the stressor. Take a break from the thing. Get away from the kids. Escape the house. Do something that you don’t normally do so that you don’t have to deal with all those stressors.
Well, those breaks are great. I’m all for them. We need them. But if all we do is step away from the stressor and still carry the stress within us, meaning all of the adrenaline and the cortisol is still coursing through our body, then we haven’t completed the process. We’ve just gone somewhere quieter and kept carrying it.
So I’m all for going somewhere quieter and getting away, but we also have to remember that we’re dealing with managing that stress that we are carrying. That’s why I think we can take our nights out and our store trips and our pedicures and still feel depleted. So we get distance from the stressors, but we don’t help our body finish the stress that it’s holding.
So what actually lets us finish that stress cycle and discharge it? Well, this is the part I love, because it’s so much more available than the version of self-care that requires a babysitter and a spa and a free afternoon that oftentimes we just don’t get. The thing that completes a stress cycle in the body, it’s mostly physical and mostly small.
So movement, that’s a big one. When your body is flooded with the chemistry of activation in your nervous system, physical movement is how you can tell it that the threat has passed, and it’s safe to relax and move into a parasympathetic nervous system state. So going on a walk, dancing in the kitchen, shaking your hands out, literally shaking the way an animal shakes off after a fright. That’s one very powerful way that you can discharge the stress from your body. Literal self-care.
Breathing is another big one, specifically that long, slow exhale. When we talk about taking a deep breath, most of us focus on the long, slow inhale, but that’s not what turns the nervous system down. The long, slow inhale prepares us for a much longer, slower exhale, because that long, slow out breath is one of the few direct signals that you can choose to send your nervous system to tell it that it’s okay, that it’s safe, that it can turn down.
What else? A good cry. A good cry does it. Do we try to avoid crying? I think most of us probably do. It doesn’t feel like it’s productive or protective or beneficial in any way. But if you’ve been feeling pent-up emotions, letting yourself cry, not a problem, not a bad thing.
We could also go the other end: laughter. Finding something that amuses you, or that tickles you, or that feels funny. Interesting that that can send safety signals to our body as well.
And I know you’ve heard me say this over and over again, but connection, that is perhaps one of the most powerful ways that we can calm our nervous systems. And the things that I’ve just been talking about are ways that you connect with yourself. You’re choosing to move your body, and that helps you in your choice to connect with your stress system and let it discharge. But connection with other people, where you feel seen and you feel heard and accepted and loved, that can soothe your body as well, through co-regulation.
So none of these things that I listed require you to leave your life. They actually ask you to come back into your body and let it work through the stress response that you are feeling to all the stressors that are around you.
So the first thing you can ask yourself, before you reach for whatever your go-to is when you’re having a hard day or you’re feeling all those stressors coming at you, is this: am I about to soothe myself, or am I about to numb myself? I don’t want you to go into judgment around this. I just want you to get some information.
Start asking yourself that question: what do I need right now? And if your answer is, I need to distract, I need to numb out for a minute, then I think that’s okay. What we want to do is have you choose something that isn’t going to be dangerous to you, something that will not go against your values.
So some nights numbing is what you only have capacity for, and I would never tell you to white-knuckle your way out of the one thing that gets you through. But even asking the question starts to wake up your awareness of the difference, and you get to notice which things leave you a little more like yourself and feeling more powerful, and which things just get you through. That noticing is the beginning of everything.
The second is a body-based practice that you can use at any time, that’s actually going to directly calm and soothe your nervous system. It’s a breathing practice.
Very helpful when you do this, if you stand up, take a breath in through your nose for the count of four, and then hold it for two or three seconds, and then let it out slowly through your mouth for a count of six to eight. So the exhale is longer than the inhale, like we talked about.
And do that three to four times, maybe even up to six times. And this isn’t something I want you to be hyperventilating around. Take your time. See what feels comfortable. But on each long exhale, let your shoulders drop a little further down. Relax a little bit. And if you have it in you, add some movement. Roll those shoulders. Let your arms gently shake and sway side to side.
Now, you might think this looks a little funny, and it does. It’s not something we do every day. But this is actually doing the work for your nervous system. We have so much cool research on this, on calming that vagus nerve, helping you move from sympathetic nervous system to parasympathetic nervous system. You’re physically discharging the activation that your body has been holding all day.
This is what we’re trying to get away from. We’re trying to distract from this pressure, and we’re using the wrong tools to do it. So we want to signal to our nervous system, through our breath and through our movement, that it’s safe to calm down.
And this process takes probably 90 seconds, and it does more than getting a babysitter and scrolling on Instagram and doing things that try to make you feel better but never get deep into soothing that nervous system, telling your body that it’s safe.
Okay, third thing. I want you to build in one true refill a day, and make it something very basic. Not a self-care routine, not a morning of solitude that you’re probably never going to get.
One small thing that settles you rather than just distracts you. And this is where you’re going to have to do some research on yourself. See what it feels like to go for a walk around the block. Ten minutes of music with your eyes closed. A phone call with a friend that makes you laugh. Something that brings you back into your body, into your life, into your sense of peace and calm. And I don’t know exactly what that is for you, friend, but you will know what it is when you start looking for it.
You’ll stumble over it. You’ll realize, I got out for a walk, and that felt amazing, and I need to do more of that. Or, I sat outside on the porch for a few minutes, and it was quiet. Or, I watched some birds, and I felt like everything was so peaceful for just a nanosecond. Your resilience, your recovery, your soothing is not going to be built in grand gestures. It’s going to be built on these small, repeatable ways that you return to yourself.
So we’re not looking to change our schedules radically. It’s what we do with the tiredness that we feel inside when we notice it. We want to check in, notice where the stress is in our body, whether it’s in our shoulders or in our breathing, or that little bit of tension that we feel, and instead of reaching for something to cover it, we want to tend to it.
Talk to somebody that we care about. Pick up the phone, have a quick conversation. Go on a walk. Lie down on the floor and stretch and breathe until our body finally starts to relax.
And once again, if you want to watch your shows, do it. Go to Target by yourself and wander the aisles. All of those aren’t bad things. We need those things too. But notice that if you’re not letting your body calm and soothe, that stress stays with us even when we do those other things.
We can’t afford to do this just once or twice. This is like eating daily and breathing daily. We don’t just breathe once and then we’re good, or have one meal or one glass of water and then we’re good. Soothing ourselves is a day-to-day self-care activity. We actually need it to live and be healthy and well. We need to do the thing that fills us.
So if you’re trying these other ways of self-care and wondering why you still feel so empty, I hope you can hear that the problem is never you. It’s just a version of rest that isn’t built to completely restore us. It’s only part of the equation. So we can’t blame ourselves if it’s not working. It was never meant to work that way. It’s the wrong tool. The right tool is much smaller, much closer, much more available than anyone knows.
I still catch myself reaching for those things that distract me and numb me instead of the thing I know actually helps. So even though I know all of this and I teach all of this, I still feel that tug to just deal with the stressor. So we’re all in this together, in very good company, hopefully.
But we have another tool available to us, and we’ve talked about it today. So this week, I want you to notice the difference between what distracts you or numbs you or just covers up the stress, and what actually attends to it, what refills you, what lets you settle back into this sense of calm. Just notice it.
Next week, I want to take it a little further. We’re going to look at how you actually build restoration into a normal mom life, one that doesn’t have a lot of spare time in it. So that soothing needs to be something that we can actually know how to do and put into our busy lives. So that’s what we’re going to talk about next week.
But for now, just this. Notice what helps you soothe and calm. Try that one long exhale. Lie down on the floor and stretch. Call someone that you love, that you feel safe with, and check in. And check in and ask yourself: what does my body and my mind need right now, and how can I soothe rather than distract?
That’s all I have for you today. I hope that this gets your mind turning. This is such exciting work, to know that the thing our mind and our body needs is available to us. It doesn’t cost anything, and we can start to become experts at soothing and calming our bodies.
Thanks for spending time with me today. I look forward to talking to you all next week and continuing this conversation. Take care.