Building Your Stress-Relief Toolkit

Ever feel like you’re running on empty by the time dinner rolls around? If that's the case, this episode is for you! Building a personal toolbox of stress-management strategies is the heart of this episode. 

We'll explore the daily stress points you face, from the morning school rush to evening chaos, and reveal practical strategies for managing these stressors that  suits you best.

From methods like therapy and meditation to unconventional ones like indulging in some chocolate or finding a few moments of solitude and using the spoon analogy to help you manage your energy better, ensuring you don’t hit that dreaded "zero spoons" level where survival instincts kick in.

Listen in and discover how to manage your stress better and live your life on purpose.

What you'll learn in this episode:  

• How to build a personalized stress-relief toolbox of strategies
• Finding stress relief methods that work best for you
• Common stressors in a mom's daily routine
• How dysregulation can lead to operating on survival instincts
• Understanding the spoon analogy as a tool to avoid burnout

Click HERE to watch this video to learn The 3 Things to Avoid When Reading Self-Help Books

How to Connect with Lara:

Web: www.larajohnsoncoaching.com

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Work with Lara: www.larajohnsoncoaching.com/work-with-me/

Transcript

Welcome to the Mom On Purpose podcast. I'm Lara Johnson and I'm here to teach you how to get out of your funk, be in a better mood, play more with your kids, manage your home better, get your to-do list done and live your life on purpose. With my proven method, this is possible for you, and I'll show you how. 

You're not alone anymore. We're in this together.

Welcome back. It's so nice to have you back today. Now I'm going to tell you that you aren't picking up the sound of the wall that I'm sharing with my son, because I can hear him gaming and squealing with all of his friends right now. So, I do hope that you're not picking up on that, but I do enjoy the sound, because there's nothing better than just kids laughing and playing. So welcome, and I apologize if you're hearing some giggles in the background. 

So, I want you to think for a moment about times in your week when you typically feel really stressed. This might be when you're trying to get out the door, trying to get the kids to school on time, trying to get to a doctor's appointment, when you've got after school activities, where you're going back and forth. It might even be around the dinner chaos time when you're trying to make something, the kids are doing homework, or the baby's at your feet and they're teething, sore cranky, or it might even be the witching hour, which kind of bleeds into the dinner chaos sometimes, where it's that you know few hours between dinner all the way to the moment you lay your kids in bed. It feels like all hell can break loose.

 At times it might even be the time when you get really stressed, like right before your period, and all of a sudden you feel rage-y and angry and you're trying to clean up and you look around and your family members are on their device or they're playing and nobody is helping you and you want to lose your freaking mind. I know every single one of us has been in this spot over and over again. So, in this moment of intense stress, what starts to happen inside of our body is we become very dysregulated or unregulated. So, everybody has a nervous system that manages their emotions. That's how you start staying calm. But every person will get to a point when they become dysregulated, when your body has gone into that fight, flight or freeze response, and that's typically why you want to run away sometimes. 

That's typically why, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you find yourself yelling. Your body has switched from regulated to unregulated or dysregulated inside and your basic survival instincts start to take over. This is really important to understand, because so often moms feel guilty after they've been yelling at their kids and they tell themselves I shouldn't be yelling, I shouldn't be yelling, I like I got to get through this, or you know, at the end of the day they commit to try and do better, when reality that all they're doing is really working towards willpower and just forcing them to stop what. But you're going against millions of years of survival instincts that your body has been created to do. So that brings us to. Well, what do we do about it and how do we manage that stress? Because every single one of us at some point is going to be very stressed and our instincts will take over. So, we're going to pause that for just a second. We're going to come back to it Now. 

The next thing I want to talk about is what we call the spoon analogy. Okay, and I will bring all this together. It all makes sense Now. The spoon analogy is often used in the neurodiverse world. It's how we gauge how much we can kind of push or pull our neurodivergent kids and when to kind of back off, because their nervous system usually teeters a lot closer to that fight or flight response and it doesn't have as much regulation as maybe a neurotypical person does. Now, if you are neurodivergent in some way, you'll probably relate to this quite a bit. But regardless, this analogy the spoon analogy applies to every mom, okay. 

So, I want you to think about every morning you wake up with a certain number of spoons. Now, when your kids wake up, maybe that amount of energy to help get your kids breakfast is maybe a one spoon. Activity like that takes one spoon. Now if you wake up and you have five spoons, suddenly you're at four spoons and then you've got to put a load of laundry in. That's not that big of a deal but folding the laundry or putting the laundry away takes, you know, maybe two spoons. Now suddenly you're down to a lot less spoons. Okay, if you're starting with five, then suddenly you're down to two. Okay. 

So, during this time what starts to happen is you're engaging in like a give and take of spoons all day long. Now there will be times that you receive spoons back and you can feel your energy start to come back. Now this is where we, you know, bring it back to that nervous system. When you get to zero spoons, your survival instincts will take over and I think so often us moms will get used to being at a zero to one spoon and I'm sure a lot of people listening to this are thinking okay, well, I'm in negative spoons. Okay, we're not going to go negative, we're just going to go to zero. 

And then, if you imagine negative spoons, I just want you to think that's just your survival instincts that you're functioning from and you have very limited control over those survival instincts, that nervous system. Okay, so we want to start thinking about what are the activities that can give you your spoons back, either when you wake up or throughout the day, so that you're not always teetering in that zero-spoon environment. 

So, I was talking with a client about this the other day. So, I was talking with a client about this the other day and this client has a very common or it's a very common tool that these individuals uses for their stress management, and that was candy, and I think all of us can relate to this. Chocolate candy might be alcohol, it might be like some kind of vice, it might be carbs, like something that you're eating, and it brings you comfort, and it calms your body down. 

Okay, so that's an example of how that can give you a spoon back. And a lot of people will sit and say, well, I don't want that to be how I get all my spoons back, because during the day I don't want to only be depending on chocolate the entire day. I understand that, so that's what we want to talk about Now. 

Imagine we're going to have another analogy here. Imagine you've got a toolbox, and you have been asked to go and build a house and you pick up this toolbox and you go show up at the building site. You've got your lumber, you've got your sheet rock, all of that and you go to open it up and the only thing in the toolbox is a hammer. Okay, well, I guess I can get kind of far with this. So, you start hammering things together, but you're not really sure you know. You don't have a measuring tape, so you don't really know how it all goes together. 

You could imagine how shoddy of a house you'd be building if you only had a hammer. Okay, that's essentially what it's like if you only have candy, for example, in your toolbox, and that could be anything. If you only had meditating in your toolbox, or if you only had medication in your toolbox, or if you only had medication in your toolbox, suddenly you're going to use that, but it will only get you so far. 

So, you want to have a whole variety of tools in your toolbox to build a really nicely planned, a very secure home. So, when we're thinking about again, we're going to toggle between these two analogies when we're thinking about getting our spoons back, we want to have more tools in the toolbox that allows us to get those spoons back. And when we have those spoons back again, that's where we stay regulated and we can manage our emotions, we can manage our home, we can help, not yell at our kids all the time. So, let's talk about some of these tools that you could have in your toolbox. 

As I'm reading through and discussing these, just take a note of the ones that jump off the page Well, not the page just like light your heart, like there's just a spark inside of you. Okay, because for someone one of these tools might take away, but for someone it might be very giving, okay. So just kind of be aware for yourself and write the ones down that really speak to you. 

So, some of the traditional ones, of course, are medication, therapy, coaching, music can be a really important tool in people's toolbox. I know for me I can usually tell about where my heart and where my emotions are based on the genre of music that I'm listening to and that I feel drawn to. You know, family and friends can be a really amazing tool in your toolbox, and I guess I didn't slow down therapy coaching. I've used that. I've used medication. I have clients that also see a therapist and a psychiatrist to help manage their medications. All of those are incredible tools for your toolbox. It's finding the ones that are right for you and sometimes you don't know unless you start pursuing those and go down that route. 

Another couple that are more traditional would be meditating or being very prayerful. I call it like prayerful meditation, where it feels like you're praying to God, but it feels very. It's not as start and stop of a prayer, it's more I'm going to commune with God, I'm going to ponder on his words and like there might be peaceful music. Also doing like breathing work, and they call it breath work or grounding techniques. 

I was telling this client the other day when we were talking about candy being the only tool in the toolbox and expanding it, I was telling this client that I used to never think that breathwork or grounding techniques could do anything. I was a little skeptical I'm not going to lie, because I'm just kind of a skeptical person. So I had to really step back for a second and do some study on, like the science behind it and why it works on a physical level, like understanding, like what happens when you're flooding your cells with oxygen and what happens when, when you're focused on something very concrete in front of you. That's like the grounding technique. So, once I started understanding some of that, I was more willing to try it, and I have found that I do get a lot of spoons back when I'm taking the opportunity to practice and use those tools in the toolbox. 

Now some of the more untraditional ones and this is where, again, if it speaks to you, untraditional ones and this is where, again, if it speaks to you, make a note of it. If it doesn't, that's okay. But I know one of the untraditional ones might be candy or chocolate. Now there will be times when you know you've crossed the line and it starts to take spoons away because it's not in alignment with your dreams, it's not in alignment with your goals. It's not in alignment with your dreams. It's not in alignment with your goals. 

But, yes, there are specific times where I choose to engage and allow that chocolate to give me a spoon back. Now it's much more deliberate. It's a conscious choice and it's something that I'm enjoying every bit of the way. It brings me joy. It doesn't bring me comfort. If I'm looking for comfort, then I already know I'm trying to get away from an emotion and it's not going to help me. But if it's something that brings me joy like there is a specific restaurant with a specific dessert and I eat it, like once a year and it is like the most joyful experience that always gives me a spin back. 

Sometimes being alone can be a really rejuvenating tool for a lot of people, especially those that are introverts. It's always wonderful to have people, safe people that you can lean on, but you also need to give yourself that opportunity to be alone. I've had this conversation with my kids over the last couple of weeks, where it's summer, they're wanting to stay up later and then they want me to tuck them into bed and I had to let them know. 

Being alone is how my battery recharges, just like they plug in their devices so that they're charged for the next day. So, I had to explain to them that mom's battery is out Like there's nothing. That's working inside of me when it comes to 9.30, 10 o'clock at night, when I've been running full steam since, you know, 6.30 in the morning. So that's where I'm able to let them know. 

Being alone watching a show, crawling into bed, scrolling on my phone, all of those things are rejuvenating me. Which brings me to my next one, which is an electronic zone out. I think so many of us really judge ourselves for scrolling on our phone and this is where it's really important for you to be onto yourself, because it may be giving you a spoon back or a couple of spoons back, but it may also be taking it away from you. Now I know in the evening if I'm scrolling, for you know two, three, four hours, it's definitely taking spoons away. But yeah, I don't mind checking in and zoning out for a little bit. It's very rejuvenating, after I've put the kids to bed, to just have an electronic zone out. 

For some people it might be some kind of game you might have, like my husband, before he goes to sleep, he plays like all his New York Times games. It's like Wordle and connections and all that. That's how he zones out and calms his brain. Okay, which also brings me to the next one, which is light and sound zone out. My husband is the one that feels calmer when he's doing those games on his phone and the light doesn't bother him. But I have to roll over because I like to zone out from the light. 

The light is very harsh to my body so in order to like give myself some spoon back, sometimes I sit in the dark and I find dark, cool corners within my home and my kids know if I'm in a dark, cool corner, it's time to leave mom alone. She's recharging, but also with sound. So many moms become stressed and dysregulated when there is a lot of sound chaos going on, a lot of questions, a lot of demands, a lot of noise, and it requires being able to remove the sound noise cancellation headphones. You know, putting music on that you like to listen to. Somehow being able to zone out in that way can be a huge way for you to gain spoons back. 

The other thing is to disengage from individuals. That's kind of like being alone. Sometimes we're in spots where we can't be alone and you know there are times where I've even asked my children okay, for the next few minutes we're not going to be talking, I just need to go into my brain and into my body. Now they're a little bit older now, but even when they were younger, we practice this and sometimes it was setting a timer for five minutes and anytime they had something to say, they'd have to raise their hand and hold it there for a few minutes because mom needed to disengage. This is how I regulate my body. Okay. 

Another one is being able to celebrate yourself. I know we talk about this, or I try to talk about it very often, because that can be something that gives you tons of spoons back. When you really sit and practice the skill of celebration, when you reconnect to your soul, when you are allowing yourself to feel proud and accomplished, that is an incredible way to give you spoons back. And, of course, the very last one. I'm putting a plug in this right now because I know that this will be something that gives you spoon backs and that's my new program, the ultimate mom blueprint that will be launching this fall, so you'll definitely want to be on the mailing list. 

You can go to www.larajohnsoncoaching.com. You can click on the discover your purpose guide, which is a fabulous resource. Every person should have that. But once you download that guide, you will be added to the mailing list or the emailing list so that you will be able to know when this program launches, because it will teach you all of these tools for your toolbox. That will be life changing. 

So, there you have it. I hope that you practice these skills and a time outside of when you're dysregulated, because that will allow you to tap into them easier when you become very stressed, and it will bring so much more peace and calm to you and to your home as you start engaging and deploying these tools from your toolbox. Have a wonderful week. 

Thank you for listening. Please share, review and subscribe to this podcast so that together we can live life on purpose.