Do you ever get to the end of a day so full that the idea of self-care feels almost like a joke? Someone tells you to rest and fill your own cup, and you look at your calendar and your kids and think, with what time? I want to offer you something different today, because the belief underneath all of it is the very thing keeping you empty. I’ll walk you through three ways to fit this into a day that’s already full, and I’ll teach you something that takes about thirty seconds. This is the second of two episodes.
What you will learn in this episode
- Why your body recovers in small waves rather than in one long block
- What wears a nervous system down over years, and it isn’t the stress itself
- How all-or-nothing thinking quietly votes for doing nothing at all
- Sleep, soothe, fuel and move, shrunk to the size of a day like yours
- Orienting, a thirty second practice that tells your body there’s no threat in the room
Transcript
You don’t need more hours in your day to stop feeling so depleted. You need to know what to do with the minutes you already have. And that’s what I want to walk through with you today. This is Leadership Parenting: How to Stop Running on Empty.
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.
Welcome back to Leadership Parenting. Happy to be with you today.
Last week we talked about the difference between the things that numb us and the things that actually refill us. And I promised we’d come back and go deeper. So here we are today.
Do you ever get to the end of your day and self-care feels almost like a joke? Someone tells you to rest, to fill your own cup, to take time for yourself. And then you look at your calendar, your life, your kids, your to-do list, and none of it’s going to do itself. And you think, what time do I have for self-care? There’s no free afternoon coming. There’s no quiet morning waiting for you.
And so I think all of us know what this feels like. We kick the can down the road, because restoration feels like something other people maybe get the opportunity to have, not us. Somebody who has more help or more money or fewer people demanding things from them or needing things from them. And so we keep running.
If this is where you live, I want to speak to that today. Because I think we all know what it feels like to be running on empty. And the way we know it is that little short fuse, the tears that come out of nowhere, the flatness or that dullness in our feelings.
But often the solutions we get offered are to use things or find time or opportunities or resources that we just don’t have, especially when it gets to things like a weekend away or time to ourselves. I’m thinking of moms who have one, two, three children and partners who travel, busy schedules. And when I ask them what recovery looks like in their actual life, they literally laugh at me. They say, what recovery? And they’re not being dramatic, they’re being accurate. Days don’t contain free hours. At least it doesn’t feel like that. And I want to tell you what I tell these moms, because I hope it will change how you see this whole thing.
Recovery works in small waves
Here’s what I tell the moms when we have this conversation. Your body was not designed to rest in one big block at the end of the day, or the end of the week. It was designed to recover in waves, little small dips into calm scattered all throughout your day. Because our bodies are built to move between effort and recovery, tension and release, again and again.
And the problem in our mom life isn’t that we’re missing that one big chunk of time. A lot of times self-care rests on the idea that you need a big chunk of time to get restored. And I’m all for that. But where we get depleted is that we are not getting little tiny bits of restoration throughout the day.
Your body can carry an enormous amount of stress, but only if it has a chance to reset, to come down in intensity in between those periods of stress. And what wears us down in the worst possible way is when we get no recovery, hour after hour, with our nervous system never once getting the signal that it’s safe to relax or soften.
And the name for what we’re looking to do is called allostasis. I don’t know that you need to know that, but it’s the way we manage our energy. What that means is the way we anticipate and adjust our energy in the face of what we think the demands are going to be. And when we don’t do that, stress slowly accumulates and it gets heavier and heavier, and our resources get smaller and smaller. I think that’s what moms are experiencing when they feel absolutely depleted and burned out.
And here’s the helpful part. If that stress wear on our bodies comes from missing small recoveries, then repair will come from putting those small recoveries back into our lives. Not from finding a free afternoon or a weekend or someone to take things completely off your plate, but finding 90 seconds, and then another 90 seconds, and then another 90 seconds.
The trap of all or nothing
There’s a thought pattern that keeps a lot of us stuck right here. It’s all-or-nothing thinking. If I can’t do the whole thing, there’s no point in doing any of it. If I can’t get a full night’s sleep at eight hours, why protect my sleep at all? If I can’t get an actual break, like a mini vacation or a full vacation, then I might as well just push straight through.
Do you ever hear that voice in your head? It sounds so responsible and reasonable and even a little noble, but it’s the exact logic that leaves you with nothing. Because in a mom’s life, the whole thing is almost never available. So all-or-nothing thinking quietly votes for nothing every single time. And that’s exactly the strain and the stress we are feeling in our bodies and in our minds and our emotions.
So the way out is to let the little things count. To decide that 90 seconds isn’t a failed version of a couple of hours. It’s a complete thing on its own. And it’s enough to change your body’s state right now. This is the heart of what I teach about caring for yourself.
Sleep, soothe, fuel, move
And I build it around four simple things your nervous system needs. Sleep, soothe, fuel, and move. And most of us hear those four words and picture a whole program. Eight hours of sleep, an hour at the gym every day, a perfectly balanced plate of food. And then we can’t do the program, because we can’t always make all those pieces fit perfectly. So often we just don’t do anything.
Let me show you what these look like when you shrink them down to the size of a normal day in a mom’s life.
Movement doesn’t have to mean a workout. It can mean standing up and rolling out your shoulders while the water heats for your pasta, or swaying in the kitchen with a baby on your hip. Anything that lets your body release a little bit of what it’s holding. If I could plan it for you, I would get you outside whenever you could go. Maybe you’re walking with the kids. Maybe you can slip out early if your husband is in town and just walk around the block by yourself before or after dinner. Maybe it’s after your kids are in bed, and you walk the length of your street a couple of times and look at the stars and just feel the quiet and breathe for a minute.
Soothe can be one long exhale, or a slow look around the room that I’m going to teach you in just a minute.
Fuel can be as small as not skipping your own lunch, or drinking a full glass of water before you pour everyone else’s. It’s listening to the hunger your body is telling you about and answering it with some gentleness and a little bit of food, which in plain terms means you need to feed yourself something good at least a couple times a day.
And sleep can start with protecting just the last 30 minutes of your night, so that you can be ready to have a restful sleep instead of handing that time over to your phone, or letting it slip away with one more load of laundry or even one more episode of something. Small decisions, and they change how you are going to feel the next day.
Let me give you three ways to put this into a day that’s already very full, I’m sure.
Attach rest to moments you already have
First is to stop trying to add recovery and start attaching it to things you already do. You already stand at the sink, you already wait at pickup, you already stop at red lights. Those moments are where your small recoveries live. One long exhale while the water runs. Dropping your shoulders and rolling them at every red light. One hand on your own chest while the microwave counts down. You aren’t finding new time. You’re using time that was already passing, and letting it do something for your body instead of nothing.
Orienting, to tell your body it’s safe
The second thing is a body-based practice I mentioned a moment ago. It takes almost no time and it works quickly. It’s called orienting, and it’s one of the oldest ways a nervous system checks whether it’s safe.
The next time you feel that wound-up, buzzing feeling, I want you to stop where you are and slowly, without rushing, let your eyes just travel around the room. Turn your head behind you. Let your gaze rest on things. The window, a plant, a photo, the color of the wall. Notice a texture. Notice how it looks in conjunction with everything around you. And stay on anything that feels even a little bit pleasant or curious.
What you’re doing is telling your body, through your own senses, that there’s no threat here. There’s no tiger in the room, just your kitchen, just your life. 30 seconds of slow looking around can bring a racing system down a notch. And if you pair that with a deep slow breath, you’re going to start to feel things shift, because you’re speaking to the oldest part of the brain, and it’s the only language it can trust. Safety that you can see and feel and sense.
Protect the bookends of your day
The third suggestion I have for you is to guard the two bookends of your day. The first few minutes and the last few. The first few minutes before your house wakes, and the last 30 minutes or so before you go to sleep, are two places where a little protection can pay back the most. Just a few breaths before you get out of bed and your feet hit the floor. An actual wind down before bed, instead of falling asleep on the couch with something still playing around you, like TV or your phone. Sleep is the foundation the other three things rest on. And protecting even the edge of that sleep is going to change how you feel.
We don’t need to add a single thing to our calendar to try to block out time for ourselves. What we need to do is start catching small recoveries that we’ve been walking past, that we haven’t seen and we haven’t taken advantage of. When you take that long, slow exhale in the middle of whatever you’re doing. Or look out the window on purpose while your breakfast is cooking. Putting your hand on your chest momentarily throughout the day to check in and ask, how am I doing? And do I need anything? Am I hungry? Can I get a little sip of water? And finding a bedtime routine that you actually look forward to.
None of this is going to look like self-care, but all of it is. And a few weeks in, I think you’ll start to notice small changes. A little more energy. More trust in yourself, because you’re finally listening to what you need. And a sense that you matter, which I think is missing in our day as we care for other people.
It’s not just about feeling better. That’s reason enough. But no one else is going to take care of you the way you need to be taken care of. I hate to say that. There is no Prince Charming walking in the door, watching over what you’re drinking, eating, moving. Nobody who even knows how to gauge where you’re at and what you need. No one but you.
And we’re good at doing this for everyone else, and we’re not good at doing it for ourselves. And that has to change. We want to feel strong to do the work we’re doing. We deserve to feel that way. And if you’re depleted, it’s going to undermine every good plan you have for staying calm and speaking softly and doing all this beautiful parenting stuff that you’re training in. Because your biology is going to undercut your best intentions when you’re hungry or you’re tired or you’re holding that much stress in your body.
Small steps, bigger returns
So let’s relieve some of that suffering with small changes, so we can get a larger return. Stop waiting for rest to arrive in one big piece, and start gathering it from the places in your life that are already there.
I am doing the exact same work you are. Sometimes I forget this. I get to the end of a hard day having pushed through it, no exhales, no pauses, sometimes no lunch, wondering why do I feel so wrung out? And I’ll realize I never let my own body come down from being on alert. I teach this and I still miss it. So if you miss it too, we are in the same boat, learning the same thing. One small soothe and recovery at a time.
Here’s what I want to leave with you today. Most of us feel depleted because we’ve been carrying stress with nowhere to set it down. So today I want you to think about small ways you can set that stress down for a very short time. Just to soothe your body. A small way to fill yourself back up, with food, with movement, with 30 seconds of looking slowly around a room, with a breath, with planning how you can protect your sleep a little bit. It might even be a nap. Small, already within reach.
And know that you are not alone doing this. There are millions of us as mothers in this exact same boat. This is a rallying cry to all of us to take little steps to care for ourselves, so that we can keep going and feel good enough.
I’d love to hear how this is going for you. Send me an email, leigh@leighgermann.com. I read them and respond to them myself. I hope you take little steps to take good care. I’ll see you all next week.
Disclaimer
The Leadership Parenting Podcast is for general information purposes only. It is not therapy and should not take the place of meeting with a qualified mental health professional. The information on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition, illness, or disease. It’s also not intended to be legal, medical, or therapeutic advice. Please consult your doctor or mental health professional for your individual circumstances. Thanks again and take care.