Welcome to the Stay or Go podcast, where we're changing the dialogue around divorce so that no woman ever stays in her marriage out of fear. Get ready to dispel myths, learn life-changing tools, and build a solid foundation in yourself from which to make your decision. And now your host, me, Fritta Joe. Oh. Hello, hello, love. So I don't know about y'all. It's middle of June. And for today's episode, I was just like, let's let's slow down. Let's just have this episode be a little bit of a slowdown together. Maybe like me, you've been feeling a little under-resourced at the moment. I feel like everywhere I go, I keep seeing friends that are saying, like, this summer's crazy and life is going so fast and our schedules are so packed and everything's just go, go, go, go, go. And so as I was sitting down to record this episode, I started it once and then stopped because I was like, no, I cannot, I cannot show up to this episode and just kind of be right now. Where I'm at is let's just, let's just vibe. Let's just vibe for this week. Especially after our last two episodes, which were so big for me, y'all. I mean, just a lot went into those last two episodes, reading both of those incredibly intense historical books and then digesting and getting to share it with all of you. And, you know, huge props to Quinn, especially on that last episode, just being there in it with me. But yeah, for this week, when I was thinking, okay, what do I want to be sharing instead? What came up for me was yes, we've just done two big intellectual framework episodes. So I wanted this week's episode to just get us back to the basics. And here's what I mean by that. When I was going through the process of considering divorce, and specifically when my husband and I were separated, I was really in a period of trying to decide, you know, okay, are we moving towards divorce or are we gonna end up back together? One of the things that when I look back at my journals has stood out the most to me is how consistently each week when I would see my therapist, she would start off by checking in with two things. The first was, how is your sleep lately? And the second one was, how is eating going? And so that's what I want to talk with you guys about today. Not no big deep philosophical systems work, none of that. I just want to ground us back into some of the most fundamental and yet often overlooked parts of this process with considering divorce that seem so small yet make a immense difference in the middle of it. So let's start off with the first one, which is sleep. And I am speaking, I think why this episode is coming up this week is because I have noticed lately for myself with summer happening, our schedules being off, um, you know, there's no, there's no real sometimes having something that's happening the next morning is what I need to kind of force me to get to bed on time. Cause it's like, okay, I have to get up. But when I don't have to get up in the morning, it's like loosey goosey. Um and lately I've noticed because of that, you know, we're staying up till 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock at night. Um and I had a bit of a check-in this week with, you know, thinking about this episode as well, where I was like, hmm, how is my sleep going? And I had to get very honest with myself that it's not going terribly well. And by not going well, I just mean I know myself well enough to know I tend to do better when I get to sleep before midnight. It's I some of you are gonna have to, you know, maybe in the comments over on Substack, tell me if this is the same thing for you. Because for some reason, the hours before midnight seem to be twice as good sleep-wise as the hours post-midnight. So I can go to bed at midnight and wake up at 9 a.m. and feel really not nearly as good as I would if I got to bed at 10 p.m. and got up at 6 a.m. It's wild. Um but what I've noticed is once my sleep starts to get off, it's kind of, you know, the thread that starts unraveling all the rest of the pieces. And when we are in a process of stress, of uncertainty, of trying to navigate big, big decisions, not having enough sleep can be one of the biggest culprits for making the situation just 10 times harder. So I remember back when my therapist would ask me how my sleep is, like a part of me at that time was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know sleep's important. But let me drive home in this episode, my loves. It's important. Okay. So I want you to pause for a moment and just check in with me. Just, you know, me to you, like someone who loves you, cares about you, knows that you're going through some big stuff right now. And just ask, how's your sleep right now? And if it's not that great, if you're noticing that you are struggling to fall to sleep, or you're feeling exhausted in the mornings, or you're staying up later than you mean to, I just want to offer that we're gonna move sleep to the top of the list priority-wise this week and going forward. Um, these two pieces of getting enough rest and nourishing ourselves with food. When we don't have these two pieces in place, I feel like we can spend so much time and energy trying to make the external things that we're working on go better or make decisions that ultimately could just be more difficult because we're under-resourced. We are lacking sleep and we are not nourishing our body. So if it's coming down to sleep, a few pieces that I wanted to recommend are that naps are your friend. I know many of you may have trauma around naps. I know my partner Joe definitely does. Um, you know, maybe in our childhood it wasn't okay. Like you'd get in trouble if you were caught napping, or maybe even in your relationship. I have found that naps can be one of the kindest and most compassionate ways to re-mother myself, being like, okay, you're tired. And instead of getting one more thing on the checklist done, and instead of pushing for one more thing to get out the door, we are gonna go take a nap. Now, I, you know, I recognize the gift of being divorced is that half the time I don't have my children. So I am able to take naps, you know, without having kids interrupt me. But I want to encourage here making space for that. Even if you are married and you have a partner and part of you is like, oh, I can't, I can't take a nap. No, girl. Yes, you can. Absolutely. And to facilitate that, I'm hoping some of you will have already used these, but if you haven't, I highly recommend the orange earplugs. Okay. When you are looking for earplugs, I remember hunting. I went through a whole period where I was looking for different earplugs, trying different ones because that's part of the issue when kids are around, or you know, your spouse is still home and everybody's around is trying to sleep while everybody's making noise. Get yourself a solid pair of earplugs. The ones I like, like I said, they're like neon orange. Woof. Sound blockage is amazing. In fact, I remember I used to buy like a box of a hundred pack of them, a hundred bears, that I would keep in my bathroom just so that I always had them on hand. I'm down now. I'm gonna have to buy my box again, but vital, vital for your mental health, vital for supporting you and everybody around you, you taking that time to take a nap. Or I also wanted to offer one of the things that I really love and admire about Quinn is her boundaries around sleep and bedtime in her home. And because she has older kids, she's like, okay, I'm I'm going to bed, especially when she was during school this year with nursing and everything. She was like, 8 p.m., I'm in bed. That's when I go to sleep. You guys can handle things. Um, so if I found myself having to do this this weekend too, where I was like, okay, I know it's summer, everybody wants to stay up, but I am going to bed. And I am going to go to sleep now. And the rest of you, you know, you're brushing teeth, you're getting yourselves ready for bed, but I am going to prioritize getting my sleep first. Um, so perhaps that's telling your partner, hey, I am underrested and overworked. And tonight I'm going to be going to bed a couple hours early. You got the kids. I know these for like these pieces, prioritizing ourselves, prioritizing something that seems as flexible as sleep. I think a lot of us, especially as, you know, women, we're like, oh, I can get by on less sleep. But eventually there starts to be a cost. So if you're hitting that moment where you're like, nope, I need more sleep, I want to really encourage you on this episode to lean into that. Let's get some more rest. Now, the second piece that my therapist would ask me while I was going through this was, how's your eating going? And I'm actually reading a book right now that I'm excited to hopefully get to talk about more on the podcast in the future, but a book recommended by my therapist called Mother Hunger by Kelly McDaniels. And that word, mother hunger, is basically just another word that she's created for insecure attachment. And within the book, she talks about how she basically hasn't met a woman that has insecure attachment, which, if you guys are like, wait, insecure attachment, what was that again? Insecure attachment is our anxious attachment, our avoidant attachment, or disorganized attachment styles. I've talked about it openly on the podcast. I have a disorganized attachment style from my childhood. Um, and you can kind of fall in, you know, different ranges with each of those different ones, anxious, avoidant, disorganized. But she basically says in the book that she's never met any of her clients that have insecure attachment that don't also have complex relationships with food. And this is something I really haven't, I don't feel like I've mentioned this that much on the podcast. But for me personally, I definitely, I would not say it's been a like central focus of, you know, I've I've never had my relationship with food go to a point where I needed like external support, but it's definitely something that the people who love me keep an eye on, like Quinn, my partner Joe. Um, just noticing that when I start to get stressed, when I start to get uh, you know, overwhelmed, I tend to undereat. I usually don't feel like I have as much appetite, especially now with my ADHD medication that can affect appetite. It's been something for me to keep track of and to notice when I start getting stressed, if I'm starting to, you know, it's a very like subconscious and subtle restricting of just, or or just not even making time for food, really. Usually when I'm stressed, it's like I'll sit and work for hours and hours and hours and hours and just skip food. And then by the time I get done, I'm ravenous and hungry, but I've, you know, I'm then I haven't eaten lunch. I'm only eating like breakfast and dinner. So for some of you, that might be the relationship with food, more of a restricting undereating. For others, it might be more of overeating, of you know, having emotions and feelings and then going towards food to feel better. Um, I feel like I use, you know, restricting food to feel more in control, to feel, to feel more um, I don't really want to use the word better around our emotions, but yeah, it's a type of like numbing towards how we're feeling at the time. And with complete and utter just right, just love for all of us and like no shame whatsoever in understanding that food for many of us, especially those of us that have insecure attachment, was one of the biggest ways that we could comfort ourselves. And we could comfort ourselves by either going to food or also restricting ourselves from food. So this is my moment to ask you, babe, how is eating going for you right now? And let's just notice together. Are you finding yourself leaning to either side of that spectrum? Are you noting your are you noticing yourself reaching towards a lot of sugar lately? Oh my goodness, hands up here this last week. I just was like sugar, sugar, sugar. And I paused before I did this episode to go, oh yeah, look, look at that. I think I might be feeling some stuff. I think I might be going through some stuff because I'm kind of wanting to eat sugary, sweet foods that give me that kind of hit, but I'm not really wanting to like sit down and eat and nourish myself. And having my therapist ask me these two things, you know, how's your sleep? How's your food? were just great reminders to me each week of coming back to the basics. I don't know about y'all, but for me, a part of one of the ways I can cope, one of my coping mechanisms is staying up in my brain and just thinking, thinking, thinking, managing, checklisting, like staying on top of all the stuff. It's its own little kind of way to cope with life. And getting down into my body can be more difficult, which often that's exactly what sleep and eating do. Sleep takes us out of the conscious brain and drops us down into our subconscious. And when we're in our subconscious, stuff comes up that we don't have control over. When we eat, it stimulates our vagus nerve to relax. And if we allow ourselves to actually sit and be present with our food, it can really bring us more into our body. You'll notice too, I notice when I want to eat and like watch TV, when I don't want to sit and be in front of my food and just like be tasting my food or chewing my food. That's usually a pretty good indicator that my nervous system's pretty revved up. And yeah, it's time to do a check-in and get back to the basics. How's my sleep? How am I nourishing myself with food? So those were two of the pieces that I wanted to give you guys on today's episode as just a basic little drop-in for this week. Something that you can come back to, that you can remember when you're starting to feel, you know, like, oh, there's so much going on, and there's this and that and this. Let's just slow down and come back to the basics. Also, in this book about the mother hunger, you know, she's she's talking about how a lot of our mothers didn't teach us as daughters how to be connected into those signals from our body. Oh, I'm tired. I need rest. Oh, I'm hungry. My body needs nourishment. Um, what is my body actually needing? That's the word I've been using a lot lately when I think of food, because I've noticed how much there's food that I'll eat that tastes good and, you know, in the moment feels great, but I don't feel very nourished by it afterwards. And then there's food that after I've eaten it, I'm like, yeah, that felt really nourishing. And let me be transparent too, that for many of us, checking in on our sleep, checking in on our food may be triggering in its own way. Because if we've learned that self-neglect and prioritizing others is what's valued in our families of origin or what's needed to keep our marriage running, then prioritizing ourselves can feel dangerous. And I hope that this episode, though, and and me bringing this to the forefront reminds you that the most important and foundational pieces of all of this work are caring for and loving you first. And boy, do I need that reminder too. This week in therapy, my therapist, I brought up all the things, just, you know, 10 different things that I was completely overwhelmed about. And ultimately, where she landed back with me, not diving into any of those, changing any of those, was just, Britta, if we don't have you and you resourced and regulated and taken care of first, none of the rest of this matters. So I want you to start there, just in that gentle question of, okay, where's my sleep at right now? Am I nourishing myself? And if you're noticing, like I have this week, that those have gotten a little out of balance, I just want you to make some gentle moves back in that direction. Maybe you're taking a nap this next weekend. Maybe you're going to bed a couple hours earlier and you're letting your partner take over getting the pi the kids to bed one evening. Maybe you are slowing down this week and instead of going out with friends or another service project or another activity, you're giving yourself some time and space at home to make some chicken soup or to bake some bread if you're looking for something nourishing and delicious that you can make for yourself. But hopefully we can take some time here at the midpoint of the year in June to slow down a little, to just gently breathe, check in with the basics, and take care of ourselves. With that said, loves, you guys know where to find me. Show notes below if you're looking to work with me, to do a 90-minute, to join the community, to work with me one-on-one. I'm excited, so, so excited to have heard the feedback from so many of you about the last two episodes. Please continue to share those with women that you love, mothers you love, sisters you love, friends you love that may be currently being very hard on themselves in their marriages, in their relationships at work, in their lives, not understanding all of those pieces that we talked about in those previous two episodes. And most of all, know that I love you and we're in this together. I will see you next week.