48 | Coping Isn’t Calm: Why Scrolling and Snacking Won’t Fix Your Stress

Do you ever crash on the couch at night with snacks, Netflix, or endless scrolling — telling yourself it’s finally your “me time”… but then wake up just as stressed and exhausted the next morning?

That’s not calm. That’s coping. And while coping can get you through survival seasons (newborn nights, family chaos, busy mom life), it won’t carry you into the life you actually want.

In today’s episode of Overwhelmed to Empowered, we’re talking about the hidden cost of coping. Why numbing with food, scrolling, or busyness might give you a quick escape but actually keeps you stuck in overwhelm. And more importantly — how to start moving toward real calm without adding one more thing to your already too-full plate.

If you’ve ever searched “overwhelmed mom help,” “how to calm my mind,” “mom burnout signs,” or “time management tips for busy moms” — this one’s for you. You’ll learn:

• The difference between coping and calm (and why it matters for your health, your family, and your peace)
• 3 questions to spot if you’re numbing instead of resting
• A simple “five senses reset” you can use anytime to get out of survival mode and back into the present

Mama, your worth isn’t in how much you push through. It’s in the courage to choose something better.

👉 Grab your F R E E P.A.U.S.E. Guide: 5 Triggers Keeping You Stuck (and How to Break Free). ✨ Click Here Now. ✨

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🎶 Instrumental Acoustic Guitar Music by Viacheslav Starostin (original_soundtrack),

W E B S I T E - LisaCovert.com

I N S T A G R A M - @lisamcovert

Transcript

Your Host Lisa Covert: 0:00

that remind you who's actually in charge and what you're in charge of. Your worth isn't in how much you can push through. It's in the courage to choose something better. You just heard a clip from today's episode of Overwhelmed to Empowered podcast. In this one, we're talking about why coping isn't the same as calm because late night scrolling, snacking, or zoning out might give you a quick escape, but they won't fix the stress underneath. Let's get into what coping is really costing you and how to start moving toward real peace. Welcome to episode 48. Hey, I am Lisa Covert. Welcome to the Overwhelmed to Empowered podcast, where we stop pretending we are fine and start leading lives we are proud of. No more to-do list, no more burnout, just real talk, real tools, and the reset your heart has been asking for. Let's get into it. Let's talk about it. Because the more we numb, the more stuck we feel. So today, we're talking about why coping isn't calm, where it keeps you in survival mode, and how to actually start shifting out of it without adding another chore to your list. Because, Lord, you don't need anything else on your plate. For me, I thought I was managing things well. And the overwhelm was so extremely high. I was the busy mom. And I want to talk about overwhelm quick. It's not that you never get overwhelmed, but your overwhelm is a indicator that things are kind of off. Because the ultimate point is, is we have control over our choices. When I was at the height of the overwhelm, I was constantly coping. I thought on the outside, I'd be like, oh, checking off the list. I got the kids where they need to be. I threw dinner together. I even squeezed in some work. And in between that, I got a load of laundry done in between the work. So from the outside, that list was getting checked off. It looked like I was on top of things if you looked at the list. But inside, I was literally hanging on by a thread. The second something went wrong, by wrong, didn't go as I planned. Like my son refuses to eat the dinner that I made or the laundry that I washed, dried, and folded, people didn't put away, or they piled some dirty clothes on top of it. I would snap. It was like from zero to 60 in less than a second. And it wasn't about my son not eating the food. It wasn't about the laundry and the imperfect situation that I somehow didn't have control over and felt overwhelmed about it. It was about the pressure The pressure I was constantly feeling and putting on myself. The truth? I wasn't calm. I was coping. And maybe for you it looks like staying up late and scrolling on your phone or binge watching a show or even laying in bed and just not even hearing anything and napping. Just to zone out. Or grabbing a snack. That was always a good one. Especially at night. I was not hungry but the moment i felt a little bit i gave myself permission because gosh i was going all day long it was my turn to feel a little bit comfortable and calm the other times too you ever numb yourself with busyness so you don't have to feel how tired you are i just do that all the time don't let myself take a nap during the day you're tired i stayed would stay up late the night before way too late just to have some time by myself and then i would never get give myself permission the next day to relax because why would that? And the pattern would keep repeating or repeating. Well, here I'm telling you from experience, coping at first feels like a break. It feels like a much deserved break. But if you wake up just as stressed or more stressed, it wasn't calm. It was survival. You put a bandaid on a situation that needs a change. The band-aid is not going to change it. Yes, it feels like a relief for just a few moments, but it doesn't change the situation. It doesn't improve it. And here's the big kicker. If coping doesn't actually calm us, why do we keep going back to it? Why do we keep doing those late nights? Why do we keep doing it when we wake up tomorrow more stressed? We're waking up more busy, more and more overwhelmed. Seeing why do we say yes to someone? Why When we already know we're overscheduled, we're overcommitted already, but it never feels fulfilling. We constantly feel like we're failing everywhere as a mom, as a wife, or at work, all of it. But yet we never give ourselves the space to improve in those areas. Where do we want to improve? How? Because the coping is just keeping us in this season. Coping worked in a survival moment. When you were in the thick of, say, newborn nights or that season where everything was falling apart, coping saved you. It was great. Coping mechanisms are all over. We learn how to cope, how to not go right down the path of snapping or feeling the big feelings because in those moments, those were big feelings that were going on. But what saved you in a survival mode and a time where and you needed that, that can't carry you into the new season. We can't feel the same overwhelm when we had newborns decade ago or more. So here are three signs that I know and ask myself when I am feeling stuck in coping instead of calm. It's not to say it never happens, but you catch it before it becomes a habit again. You stop it and say, that's it. This season is stopping. I don't want to. eat at night and gain weight. I don't want to have no energy to play a game with my kid. I don't want to feel like I'm unworthy of taking a break until that to-do list has some accomplishment on it. My worth does not depend on a checklist. I choose to know my worth beyond that checklist. So here's the three questions. One, you feel guilty after a break. That is a telltale sign that you are coping. You don't need to earn a break. You don't need to complete so many things before you allow yourself to take a break. You can have a list mile high. You can have so many demands, so many things going on. You are allowed to take a break. Again, if you shift that, because I know you're questioning in your head. If I told you all the things that I had to do and I was not allowing myself to take a break, break. Doesn't a break keep you healthy? Doesn't a break keep you happy? We've all seen people accomplish things and then they look like there's this frantic squirrel all over the place who's ready to flip. They give, you know, we all know the mom look. How many times can you keep it together and your kid does something and you give them that look like, try it again. And those looks are beneficial at certain times. But when we are coping because we don't let ourself as a break to get in a more of a this is the point when your emotions are not your choice when your next move is automatic you are coping and any person needs a break so that you know your next choice you know maybe you're focusing too much on the outcome of a situation that you don't have any control over your kid eating their dinner or not is not in your control. You can make a meal and guess what? One day they might not want it. Maybe they don't feel good that day. Many different things. Okay, number two, you need more and more just to take the edge off. Maybe at night you need a little bit more show to watch, to relax, or maybe you need a new one to get into, or a little bit more food just to numb, or a couple more cocktails just to relax or a few more glasses cups of coffee it's never it doesn't feel like enough it's always more and more staying up later and feeling more stressed that is a sign that you're coping three you wake up tired even though you thought you rested that's a big one you know you're coping because what happens in health wise if we are constantly all day long releasing that cortisol because that's not great for us we know this wherever Steve you are, if you're in perimenopause, menopause, not there yet, through it, we do not want to be dumping cortisol in our body all day long. It will affect your sleep. When you wake up and you don't even, you know you rested, but you don't even feel rested. You're yawning all day long. That is coping. Coping shrinks you. It keeps you reactive, resentful, and always one step from snapping. Calm is different Calm expands you. It gives you space. It gives you clarity and steadiness. You feel like you are making your decisions. You have space between your thoughts. Coping numbs. Calm restores. If coping is a trap, what does it actually look like to create calm? I used to think overwhelm was just part of being a mom. Part of life. I mean the stress. The short fuse. Losing myself somewhere between the never-ending to-do lists, the laundry, everybody else's needs, and, let's be honest, all the things I wanted for myself. Whether it was building a business, finally getting the house organized, or chasing down those personal goals, they always came last. Or worse, I'd try to squeeze them in and it just made everything feel heavier. That's just how it goes, right? But let me be real with you. It wasn't working. I was exhausted, resentful, and waking up every day already behind. And not just behind on my tasks, but buried underneath the weight of it all. Heavy emotions, heavy thoughts, all of it. And I finally hit that moment where I realized I wasn't just disappearing from my life. I was disappearing from their lives too. The people I love most. My family. They weren't getting the version of me they deserved. They were getting a distracted, frustrated, barely holding it all together version of me. And honestly, the only time I'd stop, the only time I'd sit with them and truly be present was after I crashed. After I'd hit my limit and couldn't do anything else. That's not the kind of mom I wanted to be. That's exactly why I created the Empowered Living Six Week course. It's how I went from constantly overwhelmed to finally stepping into ownership of my life, not just surviving, but actually feeling confident, present, and dare I say, excited to show up for my life and theirs again. If you're listening right now thinking, yep, that's me, then this is your sign. You deserve to feel good again. You deserve to lead a life that actually feels like your own and your family to So here's the reset I use when I feel that spiral coming on. I stop and I do the five senses reset, which for me is what are five things that I see? What are two or three things I hear? How about what are some things that I feel? Physically, I'm not saying feelings in the emotions. I'm feeling tight in my shoulders. I'm feeling my hands maybe touching my legs. I think about what do I smell and what do I taste? Those few moments bring me back into the moment. Within a minute, I'm back in my body instead of in the storm. There's this exercise I learned from, it's a woman named Dr. Sue and you can think of things back and forth too so really what I feel like is you can take your mind and you can focus say look out the window and you can be looking out the window and just looking seeing the grass maybe seeing the street seeing some plants seeing the sun or the rain and then I'm still looking that way but I'm like oh let's see how my body feels and I'm still looking that way but now I'm focusing on my body and I can feel my hands I can feel my legs And when you do that exercise of back and forth, you start to create the muscle in your mind. So doing this five senses reset, I am creating the muscles in my mind to, okay, come back to this. There's no reason to get lost in that storm because out of control doesn't mean broken. It doesn't mean something's wrong with us. Nothing. It just means no one taught us how to pause and reset before we move on. That's it. When I look at my to-do list and things start to feel overwhelming. When I feel like I need to accomplish something else before I can take a break. I come back. I pause. I reset. And say, okay, here is where we're at. Now what are the things that I really do want to accomplish? What are other things that might be fluff on the list? Because again, my worth is not by completing everything that day. I focus on where I'm serving. I want to serve. If I'm completing a podcast, I'm serving the people that are listening to it. I'm serving you. I'm not serving you if I am in a constant overwhelm mode. If I'm trying to control everything, that's not what it's meant to be. You don't have to control every person, every mood, every mess. You just need to choose your next step from peace instead of panic. And the only way to do that is to take a pause and a reset we're not blaming anyone that we didn't know how to do it but now it's time to do it now we're going to learn to do it because coming from that place to take a next step for peace that's where real calm comes in it's not about perfect houses or perfect kids calm is you deciding right here i'm not going to bully myself into one more chore one more scroll or one more more snack. I'm going to choose to be present right now. Again, here's the truth. Coping might get you through the moment, but it will never give you the life you're craving. Calm is possible and it starts with small I like to call them micro-resets that remind you who's actually in charge and what you're in charge of. Your worth isn't in how much you can push through. It's in the courage to choose something better. Think about what we're showing our kids or the people around us. Do we want them to see that their worst is only based on a to-do list and how much they get done? And before we wrap up, I just want to remind you a bootcamp is coming. The bootcamp is called From Coping to Calm Bootcamp. And if you want to be the first one to know when the next one is coming and it's going to be live. So here's what to do. Go to lisacover.com slash bootcamp and And just pop in your name on the waiting list. That way you'll be the first one to know when it's going live next. And while you're there, grab the five triggers freebie. It's a quick way to start spotting the exact patterns that keeping you stuck in survival mode. You don't have to stay stuck coping. I'll see you in episode 49. Until then, take a breath, take a pause, and remember, peace is always one choice away.

My Son: 17:57

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Your Host Lisa Covert: 18:07

If this episode made you pause, reflect, or even breathe a little deeper, would you do me a favor? Take 30 seconds and leave a quick review for the show. It helps more women who are stuck in the same overwhelm we've talked about today actually find this podcast. I'm not here for everyone, but I am here for the woman who's tired of holding it all together and ready to live a life that finally feels like her own. And hey, if you're feeling brave, take a screenshot of your comment and email it to me at lisa at lisacover.com. Every month I do a little giveaway drawing for listeners who share or review the show. You never know, you might get something special. Thanks for listening. Thanks for being here. And most of all, thanks for choosing to keep showing up for you. you