Are You Feeling Stressed and Depleted?

I know how easy it is to get stuck in the mode of chronic doing and get depleted from your jam-packed life. As a recovering over-thinker and over-doer, I’ve been there. I had to find what works for me to shift from stress and anxiety to a happier state of peace. I’m finding this to be a life-long practice.

When you’re stressed or anxious, it affects your children. They feel it when you’re not really present with them. They can sense when the most important person in their life is not coping well. In a child’s emotional brain, this feels unsafe. When kids feel unsafe, they go into fight or flight stress and this shows up as difficult behavior. 

If you’re overloaded and running on empty, you have nothing to give. When your kids are acting out their own stress, it’s more difficult to effectively deal with it if you’re depleted. 

You can’t put yourself at the bottom of the list. 

You may want to ask yourself:  How are you giving yourself away to the detriment of your health and well-being?

It’s so important to take care of yourself. 

Self-care. Oh yeah, that.

Self-care has become the new buzzword in parenting. Moms talk about scheduling “me time” as if it’s something that they need to grab on to and make happen somewhere within an already busy and impossible day. That’s why it doesn’t happen.

I think about self-care a bit differently. It’s a process of re-parenting yourself with love and compassion. 

What if you were to wake up every morning and make an intention to feel as good as you can possibly feel throughout your day? This can be a practice of tuning your thoughts and nurturing yourself in little ways throughout your day. You can make moment-to-moment choices to give yourself what you need – whether it’s doing small things that make you feel better or simply responding lovingly to your own thoughts. 

Many of us have voices in our heads telling us what’s not right about the present moment. Perhaps you have a voice that tells you what you “should” be doing, or what’s wrong about how you are being. If you can start to notice this voice, you can begin to loosen its grip and change it. It can take quite a bit of repetition to change this voice; it doesn’t happen overnight. You can begin by simply having the intention to notice what’s alive in your thoughts. Once you’re in the habit of noticing, you can gently begin to shift to more loving and self-accepting messages. 

Self-care is making it a habit to tune into yourself throughout the day, regularly monitoring your mood and tending to your thoughts and emotions – so you can adjust, rewind, and return to a feel-good state. This doesn’t just happen; it’s an ongoing practice that you have to commit to doing every day. It starts with an intention and a devotion to yourself. 

When you shift your energy and how you feel about yourself, it’s amazing how what’s happening around you also changes. Your perspective changes and you can see things from a new vantage point. When you begin to feel better and more at peace, you may notice your child’s difficult behavior becomes softer or less frequent. When you shift, your children shift too. And then you’ve increased the peace and joy factor in your home.

There will always be moments when you lose it. We all do. And it’s important to allow yourself to feel all of what’s happening within you – your full range of emotions. With self-awareness and compassion, you’ll have a better understanding of what you need to bring yourself back to your inner peace and happiness.

At the end of the day, you’ll feel better about yourself and not depleted. And everyone around you feels better.

Do you want your kids to have the best of you or what’s left of you? It’s true that when mom is happy, everyone is happy – and everything goes so much better! 

OK so let’s be real – 

This won’t happen unless it’s easy to do and doesn’t take much time. I’ve put together some quick and easy things that will help you to cultivate a more frequent happy state of peace. There’s a self-nurture list, some quick breathing practices, and two short meditations – one that helps you find your own inner sanctuary and one that helps you tap into self-love. I’ve also included a resource for you to find the one thing that brings you joy and do it every day. 

These resources will help you to begin to create the peaceful happy home you are longing for -amidst the craziness that’s happening all around you. Let’s get you into a happy state of peace!

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