Spring Is Here, but Is Your Engine Check Light On Too?

Spring is here, and before we rush into the next season, we’re pressing pause. In this episode, Sarah and Whitney guide a gentle self check-in—asking what you’re carrying, how you’re responding, and what your nervous system might be trying to tell you. If you’ve been feeling off, overwhelmed, or just tired of pushing through, this episode is for you.

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Spring Energy And Seasonal Mood

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hi guys, welcome to Preview Alliance Podcast. This is Sarah, and I have our favorite therapist, Whitney. How are you? Hey friends, I'm good. How about y'all? Well, I think we're all better because guess what's upon us? Whitney's favorite season? Spring. I love spring so much, y'all. It makes me so happy. This brings the little joy, the sparkles in Whitney is spring. We've survived the cold flu nightmares of the post-holiday January, February. And now we're starting to literally see life bloom in front of us.

SPEAKER_02 0:44

Yes. Like the sun is out. There are colors again. It's not just gray and bleak.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

So you know, seasonal depression is real. And I feel like the like the aftermath of like returning back to school, we've put up everything, and like every kid's sick. And we're like, wait, we can't just sit and eat and watch TV all day and break. And like it was just like a hard couple of months. It is. And the pressure is like releasing of like the new year. People have circled back when we're like, hey, let's get back after the holidays. Well, that's kind of over. It's this whole new season. Like, we're actually supposed to be on our game now. We're actually supposed to be fully functioning.

A Gentle Spring Self-Check

SPEAKER_00 1:24

But what we're here to hopefully do is to talk about why things are new in spring and we're blooming, why it's the best time to start, not like we're trying to add your plates, listeners, but a gentle self-check-in about spring, how we can kind of look at ourselves and say, okay, what's working, what's not. We are not self-diagnosing, we're not going to TikTok, we're not going to Instagram, Chat GPT, and putting in our symptoms. Right. Um, but what we are doing is a pause, like a moment of awareness. We're trying to recognize things, patterns, feelings, reactions that maybe we're having right now. And you're going, okay, well, that sounds great. Um, should I judge myself on this morning to drop off with my kids? No, you probably shouldn't on one moment, one day, but let's let's look maybe in the past week. Let's look at the past month. And you know this, Whitney, and listeners, it's research shows early awareness and reflection, especially using CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, can help us reduce anxiety, depression, overwhelm, and actually just help us access support sooner. So it's we don't want to start thinking check in is because something's wrong, right? It's kind of like a car of maintenance. Like, you know, when the old light's on, it's a little too late, right? So, like, but we want to get ahead of this. So that's what we're trying to do. And we want you, you're not, we're again, you're not being your own therapist, you're not googling like crazy, but you're going to say, you can do this paper, you can do this with a friend, your partner, your whatever therapist. That could actually be really good to have your therapist kind of do this with you.

SPEAKER_02 3:19

You're sounding bored and a reality check because we are gonna have blind spots in our own lives. Like we're human.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

That just is.

Rate And Track Emotions

SPEAKER_00 3:28

So the step one is kind of going, what's showing up with me lately? What emotions have I been feeling this past week? You know, am I anxious? Am I sad? Am I snapping? Do I feel like so overwhelmed? Am I happy? Do I feel lonely? Am I finding like myself at the end of the day feeling like it's another hamster wheel day? What am I rating these emotions? Right? Because it's like, and that may be something you've never done in your life. I never really done that. Right. It's kind of weird to be like, hey, Whitney, rate your happiness, zero to ten right now. But what we're getting at is there is different levels of all these emotions.

SPEAKER_02 4:13

Well, and I will say, especially if we try to track them, whether we're logging it in the notes app on our phone, pen and paper, whatever it is, you know, we could say Monday, my happiness was kind of a two out of 10 because I woke up and had a flat tire, and then I was late getting my kids to school, and then I was late getting to work. Like, and you can say that, but if we are starting to see a trend of our happiness stays between a two and a three on a regular basis, or especially if we're thinking about our cycles, like if we notice those dips the week before our periods, it's like, oh, something more clinical could be taking place. You know, same thing if we say, well, my sadness was, you know, typically like a seven to a nine on any given day, and we get to see that pattern and we're kind of tracking it, that can be a really good indicator and help have us have objectivity with it and say, oh, maybe there's more to this than just the flat tire. And you say, okay, well, that Monday, yeah, my happiness was a two out of ten. Like it was just a bad, bad day for me there kind of thing. But all your other ones went back up and your happiness was typically between a seven to a ten. Yeah, you had external factors. That's not clinical depression, that's not clinical anxiety. That's you had some really bad luck that morning.

SPEAKER_00 5:40

That's life, right?

SPEAKER_02 5:41

Life was life in that

Window Of Tolerance Explained

SPEAKER_02 5:43

day. You know, like last spring, it was one I had one of those days where, God bless it, no joke, no joke. My husband had passed a kidney stone that morning. I'm driving to work. Now, mind you, it takes me about 15 minutes to get to work, and I'm not even taking the interstate. I'm just taking normal city roads. I was five minutes out from work, and all of a sudden my car started making a weird noise and pulled to the right. I had picked up a box blade out of nowhere and my tire was flat as a pancake. Friends, my happiness was quite literally a zero out of 10. My anger and my anxiety and frustration, we we were nine and 10 out of 10 on that.

SPEAKER_00 6:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:22

And I remember telling my therapist, and I said, my window of tolerance was about as big as a sheet of paper. Whitney had no extra room. Whitney had no extra capacity. I had no extra wiggle room. However, when I look back on it, it was one of those my husband had been struggling with that kidney stone for three or four days. So it had been multiple days in the works. So I was default parenting. I was doing all the homework, all the drop-offs for kids, picking kids up, taking them to softball practicing games. I was doing all of that while maintaining my normal daily things. And then I just had to pick up that box blade and then, you know, literally putt-putt around the corner to go get a new tire and drop $400. I didn't know I was gonna spend. Winnie was unwell that week, okay. How is window of tolerance?

SPEAKER_00 7:14

What is that? Because I I love that now as you have to think of what it is, but I'm and I've actually seen it. Okay, going back to don't Instagram and TikTok, I've seen it, and I was like, oh, what is window of tolerance? What is that?

SPEAKER_02 7:25

So our window of tolerance basically, in a nutshell, is saying it is our capability or our capacity to handle adversity or challenges, however, you want to say that. So again, I had been working on like three or four days of my husband not feeling well, legitimately not feeling well. Like it's not the man flu and he's got the sniffles. Like, we had already been to the ER once for this, and that was a whole that's a whole nother can of worms right there. So there was that, and then my daily responsibilities that does impact our window of tolerance, but then I'm default everything at that point in time, and it's running around like a chicken with my head cut off, and then I just had to pick up that box blade, yeah. So then I had to call the office and bless my first person of the day. I said, I'm so sorry I have to reschedule you because I literally can't drive to work right now because my tire was as flat as it could have been, like I was driving on the hubcap, so not a good thing to do, and then I had to go drop $400 I didn't know it was gonna drop on a tire because I somehow picked up a box blade and you know flattened my tire. So my window of tolerance, winny could not tolerate much more. I was I was at capacity, if not over capacity, and I knew that then, and I remember telling my therapist about it, I was like, if it could have gone wrong, it legitimately did go wrong. And I'm not really one to throw a pity party, but I was very realist about it. Yeah, and I said, however, I knew that I had multiple external factors that were playing a role in my anger, in my frustration, in my anxieties. My happiness was kind of non-existent if I'm being honest about it. However, that was not a pattern, it was not week in, week out, zero out of ten happiness, ten out of ten anger, ten out of ten anxiety. That week was absolutely an anomaly. That was my outlier of hey, life said, let me throw everything at you in about four or five days, and we're gonna see how you tolerate that. Yeah, that is that window of tolerance of how much capacity or capability we have to tolerate adversities. Now, if it had been one thing, if it had been just the tire alone, okay, yes, frustrating. Absolutely, that is frustrating. I get it. I don't think I would have been 10 out of 10 anxiety and anger for days. Yeah, it would have been a few hours, maybe the whole day, but it would not have been multiple days in a row. But also, it was that week because the next week, guess what? My husband was recovered. I had a tire at that point. I could share parenting and household management responsibilities again. So anxiety and anger, we go down. We go down to probably a baseline of like a two, maybe a three, given any day of what's going on. Then my happiness goes back up to its baseline of probably a six or a seven, given whatever the circumstances are. My window of tolerance, guess what? It's a lot roomier that week. So I didn't have this pattern of high anxiety, high anger, and no happiness. When we see that consistency in that pattern, that's where we would say we have a clinical indicator of something.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

Something's going on. And I think to the fact of sometimes, I think this happens to all of us, which keeping track of what's going on, just making little notes because life comes at mom so quickly and so fast.

Body Clues Sleep And Appetite

SPEAKER_00 11:15

And to your point, it can avalanche. So, like you can go back and say, Okay, yeah, well, that Monday I got this work email. This happened with my mother-in-law, this happened, the baby was sick, right? Um, and something else happened, right? And then, oh my gosh, and this happened that day. And sometimes we too tend to forget because so much happens, right? And you're your throat, you're just like a jugular, yeah. This ball, that ball, that there is a lot, and that that can help get perspective of you too, or on the opposite side where you're like, Okay, well, nothing really external is happening, right? So both lenses are really, really important to kind of just take a bigger picture and go to your therapist and be like, okay, so yeah, this was my past month. And some people, it is unreal what's thrown at them in a month, and other it's just like, okay, so that was a pretty routine month. Let's talk about then you go into some other things, right? You go to your body kind of energy check of like, well, am I sleepy? No, my child is in a four-month regression and I'm awake now every hour. Or how's your body feeling? Right? Because we always say, you know, are you sick? Are you back on chronic illness? Are you noticing stress like in your shoulders, in your back? Are you having migraines? Are we having GI problems? Are we going to the bathroom frequently? Throwing up acid reflux. Yes, yes, it's saying what you know, let's again, we're pulling back, we're we're trying to put together a whole picture, and you know, people are like, Well, why does it matter about my body? Well, because body or health, mental health affects our bodies, like it is all connected, so even though it's amazing, you're not showing it, your body screaming, hey, I'm experiencing rage, anxiety, PTSD, overwhelm. Just feeling like it's too much and crashing. I think sometimes it's like, okay, well, do you find yourself doom scrawling that night? Or do you find yourself wanting to meet up with a friend? Or does that like or to your famous one? I always remember it's like do the things you normally do that bring you joy, do you not want to do that? Right.

SPEAKER_02 13:32

That's the biggest thing, too. And you know, changes in appetite of either we eat quite a bit for comfort, not because we're actually physically hungry, or are we not eating at all and we just have no appetite? That's an indicator of depression. I would also say sleep changes. Like, are you sleeping all the time as a way of escaping? Are we not sleeping because we're so wired and our cortisol is through the roof type situation?

SPEAKER_00 13:58

Yeah. Yeah.

Coping Habits And Patterns

SPEAKER_00 14:00

I think boundaries. Are we having boundaries? Are we having reset times? Are you taking, you know, are you rushing from work to pick up your kids to food to homework to down to bed? Are you ever giving yourself that little space? Like just look at your day, even just map after your day. Is it going a million miles an hour or are you setting healthy boundaries? Just again, that whole big picture. And I think another important thing is asking yourself, okay, how am I responding when things are getting hard? How did Whitney respond in that external event versus how does Whitney respond? You do not. How does Whitney respond when her her daughter doesn't want to put her shoes on? Right? Like those are two different responses, right? But it's like, are you pushing through and you're feeling now that you're withdrawing, you're doom scrolling, you're snapping, you're crying, you find yourself in the pantry eating a bazillion Reese pieces. Like, what do you do? Because we all do something, right? No reaction is a reaction.

SPEAKER_02 15:06

Now, if if anybody who listens to the podcast drove by and saw Whitney when I had the flat tire, words were said, and that's what I'm talking about. On the side of the road, they're going, That's my therapist. Whitney was saying some words that were are not child-friendly. We'll say that much. And I told my therapist, I was like, Hey, I'm just really glad you did not see my very bad coping skills at that point because it was it was language. There was some language.

SPEAKER_00 15:34

And everybody has a coping skill, you know. It it can be healthy or unhealthy, but it's important to say in that moment or these situations, again, patterns, it's not the one-off, it's the everyday. How do you respond? Right. And what are your responses? Because sometimes we don't even know. And a lot of times, our children, our spouses, our best friends, our coworkers, they can very clearly say, no, this is how you respond when this happens. Right. So get curious a little bit. We're doing a self-check and we're not trying again to make ourselves feel worse, but we're getting curious because a small kind of recognition of a repeated behavior, thought, or reaction is where we then start like making progress.

SPEAKER_02 16:26

Right. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 16:28

Name it to tame it. If we don't even know what we're doing, we're never going to tame that.

SPEAKER_02 16:33

Right.

Vulnerability Without Shame

SPEAKER_02 16:34

Absolutely. Well, and here's the thing: doing this insight, doing this introspection does take vulnerability.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 16:42

That's not a pleasant feeling. But just because something feels unpleasant doesn't mean it's bad or wrong or harmful. So keep that in mind. Also understand that when we are doing this, it is not to be self-deprecating. No, it is not to be judgmental. It is so that we can improve upon ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 17:07

Yeah. And if you grew up, or this is your personality now, of feeling shame every time someone said now, Whitney, you responded wrong, or why did you do that? Or you felt like a mistake wasn't an opportunity to learn. It was more of a like, you made a mistake, how dare you, right? All these things you could feel like, whoa, my nervous system feels really unsafe, even hearing things that I'm doing wrong, or I can't do this. Or it's just never been safe for you to improve on things, or it's never been safe for you to recognize patterns. Right.

SPEAKER_02 17:41

That can be really scary. Absolutely. Well, again, it's not enjoyable. We, you know, it's not enjoyable to have that insight. It's not enjoyable to open yourself up to it. It is necessary if we want progress and improvement. It is. And you know, we gotta think about it. Progress and great achievements are not made without hardship of some type. Yeah, some whatever that is. And so reminding ourselves hardship is necessary to achieve what I want. Hardship is not failure, and I'm not bad, I'm not a failure due to hardship.

SPEAKER_00 18:24

Yeah, yeah. And there's not a moral assignment with that. No, no, uh-uh. And then if you're even struggling with that, I think that's things to know and talk to a therapist. Be like, why do I feel like I it's not okay for me to struggle? Why do I feel that I push through everything and I never and I feel guilty for giving myself a rest? Or I do see myself snapping, I do see myself withdrawing, I do see myself X, Y, Z, but I again, you know, our brains are so interesting, right? They're they're pliable, they're fixable, but yeah, the more we you know, we will go to what's safe versus what's right.

SPEAKER_02 19:09

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

So if discomfort feels safe, right, you know, you're able to push through because you know it's on the other side, but if it feels scary, you're gonna try to improve and it's gonna be like, oh no, no, no, I can't do this, and you retreat. So, but that is again, this is not meant to be like you have to fix yourself, there's something wrong. It's just like it's like use this new opportunity to get curious what you're experiencing. You may come away and say, My gosh, I have 50,000 things on my plate. I really only need a hundred of them. Right, you know, or you may say, I am being anxious more, or you know what, the grief is bothering me more than I ever realized. Or I miss friendship. I need to figure out how to get into it. You know, find we just moved. I need this, or you know what, I'm seeing something in my kid that I see myself, and we need to figure this out. Absolutely. And it's okay that we do that. So we with this message really hope that you are just curious. And as always, if you are and you're noticing things, a safe space is uh material mental health therapist or your therapist to work out some of these

Getting Support And Therapist Blind Spots

SPEAKER_00 20:29

thoughts. And it doesn't mean you're gonna have to go into intensive therapy, it doesn't mean any of that, but just means that you need someone who is trained to help you recognize patterns behavior, absolutely, and things about yourself that you need a professional to tell you.

SPEAKER_02 20:44

Absolutely. Well, because here's the thing we all have those blind spots. Yeah, a therapist is supposed to be objective, they are the person from the outside looking in, and they can give you that feedback, they can help spot those patterns if you can't spot them yourself. And again, it's okay if you can't spot them yourself because you're in the thick of it. You can't see the forest because you're in the trees, but your therapist can see the whole forest because they're on the outside looking in, they're removed from that.

SPEAKER_00 21:15

Oh, I love that. And sometimes, uh, and the word says we gotta wonder if we're out of the woods yet. So I think we will be with our therapists. But Whitney, thank you for being vulnerable. As always, my friend, we're wishing you no tire issues in this season.

SPEAKER_02 21:30

No, spring is for refreshment and rejuvenation, and that's what we're doing.

SPEAKER_00 21:35

All right, listeners. We will be back next week, but we hope that this has been insightful and we're encouraging you, and we'll do our self checks just like you guys. Till next time.

Closing Message And Podcast Mission

SPEAKER_00 21:48

Maternal mental health is as important as physical health. The Preview Alliance podcast was created for and by moms dealing with postpartum depression and all its variables like anxiety, anger, and even apathy. Hosted by CEO, founder Sarah Parkers, and licensed clinical social worker Whitney Gay. Each episode focuses on specific issues relevant to pregnancy and postpartum. Join us and hear how other moms have overcome mental health challenges as well as access tips and suggestions on dealing with your own challenges as moms. You can also browse our podcast library and listen to previous episodes at any time. Please know you're not alone on this journey. We're here to help.