Did you know that just a few seconds can completely change the way you handle stress, frustration, and overwhelm? In today’s episode, we’re talking about the incredible power of pausing—those small, mindful moments that can completely shift how we handle stress, frustration, and overwhelm. If you’re ready to feel more present, calm, and in control—even in the midst of chaos—this episode will give you the tools to make it happen
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
1. Why your stress response isn’t a personal failing
You’ll understand how your nervous system shifts into fight-or-flight, why you snap or shut down, and how your brain is simply trying to protect you—not sabotage you.
2. The neuroscience behind pausing
You’ll learn how a few seconds of breathing or noticing your body activates the parasympathetic system, brings your thinking brain back online, and rewires your reactions over time.
3. How to create space between trigger and response
You’ll discover simple, realistic ways to interrupt automatic reactions—helping you respond with more patience, clarity, and intention.
4. Practical micro-pauses you can use throughout the day
Morning pauses, transition pauses, three-breath resets, hand-on-heart grounding, gratitude pauses, and bedtime resets—tiny rituals that take seconds but create big change.
5. How pausing strengthens connection and emotional regulation—for you and your kids
You’ll see how your pauses create a calmer home, model self-regulation for your children, and help you parent from your values instead of from stress.
Transcript
0:59
Hey friends, welcome back to Leadership Parenting. If you’ve been listening for a while, or even if this is your very first time, I just want to take a second to say I am so glad that you’re here. I love having these conversations with you each week and if this podcast has helped you in any way, I have a favor to ask Would you take just a minute to leave a quick review or share this episode with a friend. It’s one of the best ways to help more moms find me. I read every single review. It means so much to hear your thoughts, so if something in today’s episode resonates with you, please share it with another mom who might need it too. That’s how we’re shaping these conversations by addressing real struggles and, hopefully, finding real solutions together, and today we’re talking about one of those struggles.
1:46
All the emotion that we get as moms, that incredible feeling of stress and overwhelm that’s just so common as we’re parenting our children have you ever reacted in a way that you immediately regretted? Maybe snapped at someone you love, rushed through a conversation without really listening, or maybe even felt completely overwhelmed by everything that’s piling up around you? I recently worked with a mom who felt like she was constantly losing her temper with her kids. She told me I don’t want to yell, but it feels like it’s my only option when everything is falling apart. Here’s what was really happening in her nervous system, and in yours too, and mine.
2:25
When we feel overwhelmed, when we perceive stress, that nervous system we have activates the fight or flight response, and we’ve talked about this so much. I know you might be a little sick of it, but I really think it’s important that we recognize this is built into us. It is turning on and off throughout our day. That isn’t unusual. So when you’re stressed it’s going to pop on and that’s not a failure or a personal weakness. It’s part of that programming that keeps you alive. It’s a survival mechanism. Your body’s going to interpret frustration loud noises, constant demands Okay, all those things we have as mothers right? Your nervous system interprets all those things as threats and shifts us into this reactive state automatically, without our permission. This means that when we find ourselves yelling or feeling out of control, it’s not because we want to be doing that, it’s not because we lack willpower even. It’s because our body is responding to stress in the best way it knows how.
3:27
That mama I was working with this was the key component of us turning that around. Understanding this. We worked on one simple change, just one adding a mindful pause before reacting Instead of immediately yelling. When she got frustrated, she took a deep breath, three seconds, just three seconds, to notice her emotions before responding. Over time, those brief pauses helped her shift from reacting impulsively to responding more intentionally.
4:00
Does that seem impossible sometimes to you? Sometimes, even when I teach it, I think this is a miracle that we know how to do this, that we can actually get good at doing this. But you guys, I have watched mom after mom learn this skill and I want to talk about that today, because you may have never heard of this before, or maybe you practice it every day. Either way, we have to keep this top of mind because too many times we are just so hard on ourselves for the kinds of responses that are coming from our nervous system, and when we stay in that place of self-blame and shame and owning it as if it’s a flaw in us, it doesn’t get better. That only turns our threat system on more. It’s so much better to recognize this as a process, a nervous system process, and to learn how to work with your nervous system.
4:49
And what a nervous system needs is a pause. That pause helps us regulate those emotions by creating a moment or a second of awareness. Instead of going straight into fight or flight, we’re creating space to calm our bodies down and choose a different response, and this is why we use the word mindfulness, because we are mindful in the moment of what’s going on, even when it’s not pretty. We’re noticing and we’re pausing, and these are very compassionate practices. Instead of beating ourselves up, kind of riding that crazy train through the emotion that just takes over and gets us yelling or gets us shutting down, we are starting to learn how to drive that emotion because we have a spacer between the nervous system’s response and what we choose to do. And we start with mindfulness because it allows us to be where we are, to understand what’s happening and, ideally, what I’m trying to sell you on is to offer yourself the kindness that you deserve so you can turn off that threat system and decide to respond in a way that works so much better for you and for your family.
6:00
When I talk about pausing, I’m not suggesting this ideal Zen state of perpetual calm. I’m talking about a real life practice for real moms with real feelings in the messiness of everyday life. I’m talking about finding tiny spaces of possibility between trigger and response, spaces that we can practice growing wider and wider as we get better at this. In that space is emotional regulation. We hear that word a lot in the mental health field and also now just in our general kinds of conversations. Emotional regulation is the key. You guys, we’re trying to teach it to our children and we’re trying to make sure we’re using it ourselves right.
6:46
It is the protection from the damage that stress does. It is the protection from the damage to our relationships that our getting dysregulated does when we start to do things that don’t align with how we want to parent, like yell or storm out of a room or withdraw and shut down. And we often think we have to reduce the stress externally so that we can get this to happen. But actually what we need to do happens inside of us, which I think is really good news, because I can’t control all the stress around me. You get into a kitchen with a bunch of kids on the road in traffic. Can you control the chaos and the stress around you? Maybe once in a while, maybe you can get a few things running orderly and get everybody marching to the same drum in some miraculous way once in a while, but I raised five kids. I couldn’t ever get it to happen every day. So we’ve got to figure out a way for us to calm and regulate ourselves in the midst of the chaos. Does that sound impossible? Sometimes it feels impossible. I know that I teach it and on the regular I will often feel like this just feels impossible. However, it is not.
8:03
Let me take you inside your brain for a minute. When you’re stressed or triggered, your amygdala that’s an alarm system that’s in your brain. It activates and it sends stress hormones coursing through your body. Your prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that handles your rational thinking and your decision-making, and when it gets flooded, your whole body gets flooded with all of this cortisol and stress hormones. Your prefrontal cortex doesn’t work as well as it normally does. We often say it goes offline. Of course, it’s not that exactly that it really goes offline, but it just does not take the front seat in making your decisions. It’s so hard to think clearly when you’re upset, but when we pause and take a deep breath, we actually create a physiological shift and that counteracts all of those stress hormones. Your parasympathetic nervous system gets activated and it slows your heart rate down and it brings your prefrontal cortex back online. And isn’t it amazing that something as simple as a breath can create such a profound shift in your brain and your body? People are researching this. There are studies about this, and what most of them find is that even brief mindfulness practices can reduce stress and improve our cognitive functioning. That’s what we call that.
9:27
Prefrontal cortex is a cognitive function and this means that those few seconds that we take to breathe, to pause, before reacting to a tantrum, or before raising our voice to a child, or before letting the overwhelm kind of dictate what we do, those few seconds to pause can give our brain the space to choose a thoughtful response. Now we could still choose to yell, but it’s our choice instead of a reaction. Beyond the research, I’ve seen this power of pausing in hundreds of moms. I’ve worked with Women just like you and me, who thought they were doomed to reactivity, discovered that small pauses can lead to profound shifts in their ability to parent the way they want to, and that they don’t just feel calmer, but they feel more connected to their kids, more aligned with their values, more confident in how they’re parenting and so much less self-critical and full of shame. The byproduct, of course, is that, as they’re emotionally regulating themselves, they’re modeling it for their kids.
10:35
Every time you pause, you’re strengthening neural pathways in your brain, literally rewiring those default responses in your brain, literally rewiring those default responses. What does a pause look like? It could be a slow, deep breath. As a matter of fact, breathing tends to be the number one way that we start to practice this little bit of a pause. But you can also pause by noticing the ground beneath your feet, mentally stepping back before you act, or even physically stepping back. Mentally stepping back before you act, or even physically stepping back, counting silently to three, whispering a phrase to yourself, feeling the sensation of your hands, observing emotions rising within you, without judgment. It sounds small, but these little moments of awareness are changing everything for us inside.
11:23
Pauses matter for us because we are often living the lives of our children and I don’t mean actually living their lives, but as adults we’re living within the realm of toddlers and teenagers and all the stages in between, and our job is constant and their emotions and struggles are literally all around us all the time and we don’t get breaks, maybe for a few hours if you have kids in school or you go to work, but it’s all waiting for you when you arrive back home together. Right, there are a lot of emotions going around, we’re swimming in them and I want you to think of your nervous system kind of like a stress bucket. Every frustration, every deadline, every tantrum, every demand fills it up and if you never drain that bucket it overflows. So pauses are like tiny drainage holes, letting stress out in manageable amounts so you don’t reach that overflow point. One mom I worked with described it this way Before I started practicing pauses, I felt like I was always one step behind myself, constantly reacting and then regretting.
12:29
Do you ever feel that way? I’m constantly reacting and then constantly regretting it. It’s like this cycle of self-punishment, right, like I can’t stop the cycle. That’s what she used to tell me. And then she said, when I learned to pause, I started to feel like I caught up again, like I was actually present in my life while it was happening. She said she could feel a trigger coming and then paused, created a space around the trigger before it kind of pushed the automatic button and then, you know it kind of her stress took over. She found this tiny sliver of what she called freedom between what happens and how she responds to it. That sliver of freedom is available to all of us and it grows wider with our practice, creating more room for our intentional choices as we parent.
13:21
Okay, so I want you to be thinking what does a pause look like for you? I think, first, it’s important to start with. When do you get that sense of feeling overwhelmed? Do you know what that feels like in your body? We spend a lot of time talking about identifying your emotions. I love the emotional body scan. What am I feeling? Where is it in my body? How big is it? When you’re feeling that high emotion, that’s when you know you need to take a pause, because emotions are the things that cause us to act in the way that we act. So I want you to be thinking about where do you need a pause? And when you have those big emotions, do you notice how quickly, right after the big emotion, the frustration I mean, it’s never love and joy and gratitude that causes us to lose our temper? Right, it’s those big, gnarly emotions that tend to come up like a volcano, and then we react. So I want you to pinpoint some times when that happens for you. That’s where you want a pause, and you don’t need an hour of meditation to bring mindfulness and pauses into your life.
14:32
There’s some simple ways to do it. We’re talking about pauses on the run, we’re talking about pauses in the moment, pauses in the middle, and the best way by far to practice doing pauses is to work with your breath. So I love the idea of a three-second breath you breathe in and then you breathe out and you kind of count mentally, count to three, breathe in two, three and then exhale slowly. This is worth practicing, you guys. This slow, deep breath does so many things for you. Not only does it delay your reaction, it fills your body with oxygen. It tells your nervous system that you are safe enough to pause and breathe. If you have a wild animal chasing you, you are not going to stop and take a slow three-second breath, and your nervous system knows that. It senses that when you choose consciously to breathe slowly, you are manually turning down the threat system, and that is so powerful. So that’s the first, easiest kind of baseline way to put a space into your life to be mindful and to put a pause there.
15:46
Let’s talk about a couple of other ways that you can pause. At any point in the day you can pause and name one thing that you’re grateful for. This is going to shift your mindset literally in seconds. Researchers study the chemicals in the brain releasing dopamine. Serotonin when we have some kind of gratitude pass across our thoughts and in our mind. The feel-good neurotransmitters help us counteract those stress hormones. When your emotions are running high, you can place your hand on your heart. This touch activates your vagus nerve, which regulates your nervous system. It’s also a powerful self-compassion exercise. When you put your hand on your chest In between your activities, those little transitions between what you’re doing shifting from the car to the house or moving from room to room, finishing an email or clearing a table I want you to take a deep breath and notice your body.
16:44
These transition moments are natural opportunities to reset. I kind of think of them as clearing what’s going on inside before moving to the next thing. These are just a couple of examples of how we can start to look for spaces in between the things that are going on in our lives. It’s like sometimes I feel like we’re living in this one run on sentence right when there’s no commas, there’s no periods, there’s no dashes. It’s just one thing after another. We go into activity after activity and emotion after emotion. So as you start to practice putting little spaces in between the things that you’re doing, you’re starting to train yourself to manage the momentum in your life.
17:27
And there’s another powerful tool that can help you pause in the heat of the moment. It’s the emotional freedom technique, or EFT, and it’s sometimes called tapping. This is something you can do anywhere in just a minute or two, and it’s sometimes called tapping. This is something you can do anywhere in just a minute or two and it can bring your stress level down very quickly when you feel yourself starting to get heightened or lose your patience. Eft combines this gentle tapping on specific acupressure points with calming thoughts or phrases that you combine with that tapping, and the idea is that when you stimulate these points on your body, places where energy pathways in your body are close to the surface, you’re sending a message of safety and calm directly to your nervous system and you’re basically telling your brain it’s okay, I don’t need to be on high alert. And our research is showing us that just five minutes of tapping like this can reduce cortisol, that stress hormone, by as much as 40 or 50%, and that’s a big shift from such a small action that you can do yourself.
18:25
So for moms, one of the easiest places for us to use the tapping is on the collarbone point. So let me walk through it with you really quickly. You can find this spot in your collarbone by placing your fingers in the hollow of your kind of throat in between the space where your two collarbones come together and then slightly go to the right or to the left, just a few fingers, and there’ll be a slightly tender spot there. That’s the spot that we’re looking for, and you don’t have to stay on that spot perfectly, but you’re going to take four fingers not your thumb, just four fingers and lightly tap on that spot and take a slow breath in and out, and as you breathe you’re going to be continually tapping on that point with your four fingers and just keeping a steady rhythm, not too hard, just enough that you feel it. And while you tap, you can then say that calming phrase to yourself, something like I can handle this, this is just a minute, this is not forever. I’m safe, I’m capable. I get to choose how I respond.
19:32
I want you to pick a phrase that resonates with you the combination of tapping and taking a breath and using these affirmations, these affirming words. They help you anchor your pause and it helps you calm both your body and your mind. When you do this, you’re actively shifting your physiology. You’re moving from fight or flight into a calmer, more centered state, and we all need more of that, don’t we? So here’s my invitation the next time you feel tension rising in your body, in those emotions, I want you to just pause, take a breath and remember some of the simple tools we’ve talked about for creating space for us in the middle of our busiest moments.
20:13
Remember, you don’t need an hour of quiet or a perfect routine, just a few seconds to make a big difference. You could take a three second breath, letting your inhale and exhale reset that nervous system. You can place your hand on your heart, reminding yourself that you’re safe, that you’re supported. You could pause to notice one thing you’re grateful for. You could shift that mind towards steadiness and perspective, and you can try tapping gently on your collarbone point to combine a breath and those affirming words to calm your body and your thoughts.
20:44
If you’d like some extra guidance on understanding how to do that tapping, I’ve recorded a short video demonstration to walk you through the technique step-by-step, so you can find it by going to my website and clicking on this episode’s show notes, and you can download that demonstration and it will give you a clear picture of where to tap and how to use it when you need it the most. So remember, pausing isn’t about being Zen, it’s about giving yourself space, that’s all, to come back to calm so you can show up as the person that you want to be and just take care of yourself. Give yourself that space to feel better, and every time you do this you will be strengthening those pathways and strengthening your resilience. I’d love to hear how this goes for you. Please let me know. You can send me an email, lee, at leegermancom, and check out that video so you can learn how to calm your body down very quickly with that tapping exercise. We all need to learn how to calm your body down very quickly with that tapping exercise. We all need to learn how to do this so we can take really good care of ourselves and then take good care of our families. I’ll see y’all next week.
21:46
Take care, if you feel like these ideas really speak to you but you’re not sure how to actually apply them in your own life, I want you to know you don’t have to do it alone. I’m currently opening a few one-to-one coaching spots for moms who are ready to go deeper and get personalized support as they build their own resilience. This is where we take everything we talk about here and we tailor it to your life, your story, your goals. If that sounds like something you’re craving, just head to leighgermancom and click on one-to-one coaching, we’ll set up a free call to talk about where you are, where you want to be and whether coaching is the right next step for you. You can always find me on Instagram, at leighgerman, or on my website, at leighgermancom.
22:35
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.