Motherhood & The Brain
Are you tired of feeling like you’re always at your wit's end, especially when it comes to yelling at your kids?
You’re not alone.
Motherhood can be overwhelming, especially when your preteen seems to push every button and you just can’t seem to get through to them without losing your temper.
This podcast is for moms who are juggling work, family, and everything in between, and are ready to stop yelling and start connecting with their kids in a more peaceful way.
We’ll take you on a journey through the ups and downs of raising a preteen, offering brain-based strategies and practical tips on how to handle everything from discipline to managing your own emotions.
We’ll dive into topics like how to better understand your child’s behavior, how to stop yelling and start listening, and how to build a stronger, more trusting relationship with your preteen.
You’ll learn about positive parenting, emotional control, and simple, science-backed methods for managing mom anger and helping your preteen thrive.
If you’re looking for real, actionable advice on how to deal with the challenges of raising a preteen, this is the place for you.
Let’s make this motherhood journey a little smoother, together.
Motherhood & The Brain
Reacting vs Responding
What happens in the split second before you yell at your children? The answer lies not in your parenting skills or your children's behavior, but in the invisible thought patterns running beneath your conscious awareness.
When your child slams a door in your face or ignores you for the fifth time, thoughts like "they're disrespecting me" or "no one listens unless I yell" aren't your conscious choices.
They're programmed responses shaped by your childhood, culture, and years of unconscious repetition. These automatic thoughts trigger physical reactions, tension in your chest, quickened breathing, rising voice, before you even realize what's happening.
The transformative truth explored in this episode is that you can train your brain to think deliberately. Through the inner coaching method, you learn to create space between triggering situations and your responses.
This isn't about perfect parenting or toxic positivity, it's about reclaiming control over how you show up in challenging moments. When you pause to question "is this thought helpful?" you unlock the power to choose differently.
Your brain operates like a forest trail, automatically following well-worn paths until you deliberately carve new ones through repetition. Between your child's behavior and your reaction exists a space where choice lives.
Every time you select a thought like "This is hard, but I don't have to meet it with tension" instead of defaulting to frustration, you're literally reshaping neural pathways.
The goal isn't raising perfect children because they don't exist. The goal is your emotional freedom, having your feet firmly on the ground no matter what happens around you.
Join this journey to master conscious choice rather than unconscious reaction, and transform even the loudest moments into opportunities for growth rather than guilt.
Subscribe now to continue exploring how understanding your brain can revolutionize your motherhood experience.
👉 The 60-second Yell Less Reset quiz is your first step toward change.
“I never wanted to be the mom who yells…”
But here you are, raising your voice, snapping over small things, saying things you wish you could take back.
You love your kids more than anything.
And you know they don’t deserve a mom who yells.
You just don’t know how to stop; especially when they won’t listen, talk back, or push every single boundary.
👉 The 60-second Yell Less Reset quiz is your first step toward change.
Already taken by many moms who wanted to break the yelling cycle.
Based on the science of how your brain responds to stress, this quiz goes beyond surface-level tips.
It helps you pause, uncover what’s really fueling those outbursts, and start shifting the pattern before it spirals again.
You’ll discover:
✅ Your personal Reset; so you can get your kids to listen without needing to yell, threaten, or give in
✅ It’s not just their behavior; it’s the moment you feel like nothing you say matters
✅A clear next step to help you stay calm and in charge; even when your kids are testing every boundary
We don't just wait for our kids to behave better. We practice calm even while things are melting down, because the goal here is not to raise or to have perfect children, because no one is. The goal is emotional freedom. The goal is to be able to not be rattled by everything that happens in your life. The goal here is to learn to have your feet on the ground no matter what is going on around you, and the only way to do that is to become aware of what we are thinking, and then you choose deliberately what next steps to take.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the Motherhood and the Brain podcast, where overworked, stressed-out moms come to breathe, reset and remember they are not alone. My name is Esther Mbabazi. I am a mom and a certified coach, and I hope you understand what's really going on in your brain when the pressure builds and yelling feels like the only option. On this podcast, we talk about real-life motherhood moments, the kind that push your buttons, and how to meet them with calm, clarity and self-compassion, not because you're doing it wrong, but because no one ever taught us how to do it differently. This is your space to pause and make the shift from reaction to intention. Let's get started. Just a quick note this podcast is for informational purposes only and isn't a substitute for therapy, medical treatment or medical advice. Please reach out to a licensed professional if you need personal support.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to Motherhood and the Brain podcast. This is episode number 67. My name is Esther Mbawazi. How are you doing, mom? How are you feeling in this summer heat? Is it hot where you live too? Well, where I live, it is hot, and a few days of rain, which makes it worse, in my opinion, because then we have all this humidity and we are sweating and we don't want to go outside. And you know, you see how my brain works, the human mind we don't know what we want. My brain works. The human mind we don't know what we want. In May and June it was raining and I felt a certain way, and now that it is way warmer, I'm again complaining In my brain. My brain thinks that the weather should be like maybe 25 degrees Celsius, that's perfect, 28. But of course we don't get to control that. We just have to roll with whatever we get when it comes to the weather. Which takes me to my episode today, which brings me to today's episode, actually, because everything is about what we think by now.
Speaker 1:If you have been listening to this podcast, you know why we snap and yell. You've seen how it is not about being a bad mother, but it is about being a human mother with an overworked brain and nervous system and decades and decades of unconscious programming. That is below the surface. But now comes the part where many moms never get to.
Speaker 1:Why do we have those thoughts that lead us to snap and yell? The thoughts that sneak in without warning, the ones that feel so true, they create an an emotional fire before we even know what happened. This is the part where we stop reacting and start taking back our power. Most of the thoughts that lead to snapping and yelling, for example, they are disrespecting me. I can't take this anymore. No one listens unless I yell. These thoughts are not consciously chosen. Let me repeat that. Thoughts like they are disrespectful, they are disrespecting me. I can't take this anymore. No one listens unless I yell.
Speaker 1:These are not your conscious choices or thoughts. They are old, they are very fast and they are familiar to the brain. These thoughts have been rehearsed through years and years of repetition. These thoughts have been rehearsed through years and years of repetition. They have been shaped by your childhood, by your environment where you grew up, by your culture, even maybe by the way that your parents reacted. That is why we call them programmed thoughts. They run quietly in the background like default settings on your phone. You don't notice them until your body reacts, for example, the tension in the chest, the quickening of the breath, rising voice, all these things. But here is the truth that changes everything Just because you have a thought does not mean you have to keep it, and just because a thought is automatic, it does not mean it's yours or it's you. And this is where the shift begins.
Speaker 1:Inside my program, the Yearless Formula, I teach this simple but radical truth you can train your brain to think on purpose. I know that was groundbreaking for me too, the first time I heard that you can train your brain not in a fake positive vibes only way, but in a grounded, powerful, life-changing way. And it starts with awareness, which is exactly what we build using the inner coaching method. The inner coaching method is a tool that we use inside of my program to bring awareness, to create awareness to what it is that is going on in our brain. The inner coaching method is not something to beat ourselves with, something to judge ourselves with, to use to judge ourselves. It just creates awareness for what is going on in our brain and then from there, you get to choose what to do next.
Speaker 1:You learn to see your thoughts as they come up no-transcript, let us say, your 11-year-old slams the door in your face. When you try to speak to her and this is maybe the third time she's done it today your body tightens and you think she's disrespectful. And that thought leads to frustration. That frustration drives you to snap. Now pause for a moment. Frustration drives you to snap. Now pause for a moment. What if you could slow down and say is this thought helpful? Is it even true? This is where a deliberate thought comes in. You don't have to keep the thought she's disrespectful. You can choose something else. For example, she's still learning boundaries, maybe she's overwhelmed, maybe she needs space. I can breathe before I respond. Or this is hard, but I don't have to meet it with tension. Those tiny pauses are not nothing. That's the shift in real time. And here is what surprises many moms. Once they become aware of their own thinking, they expect instant change.
Speaker 1:Because we are human beings, we want things to work very fast, but that is not how our brain works. The human brain doesn't work like that. You don't get a new thought just because you want one. You get a new thought by repeating it. Our brain, the human brain, is like a trail in a forest. The brain will always choose the well-worn path until you deliberately carve a new path for the brain. And what do I mean by repeating it? When you, for example, like I said, if your child slams your door in your face for the third time today, instead of going all in on her or him, you could think to yourself this is hard, but I don't have to meet it with tension. And then you keep repeating that this is hard, but I don't have to meet it with tension. That is why, in my program, we don't stop at insight. We practice new beliefs, we create new thought patterns through repetition and we wire in calm, not by chance, but by design. We don't just wait for our kids to behave better. We practice calm even while things are melting down.
Speaker 1:Because the goal here is not to raise or to have perfect children, because no one is. The goal is emotional freedom. The goal is to be able to not be rattled by everything that happens in your life. The goal here is to learn to have your feet on the ground, no matter what is going on around you, and the only way to do that is to become aware of what we are thinking and then you choose deliberately what next steps to take. And then you choose deliberately what next steps to take.
Speaker 1:You are going to have a lot of thoughts, because scientists say we have around 60,000 thoughts a day. So many of those are unconscious, but at least we have some conscious ones. So some of the thoughts that you have in a day are old patterns. Some thoughts will lead you to react in a certain way, but woven inside those thoughts is the power to choose. Will I believe the old story, will I fuel the spiral or will I interrupt the spiral? Will I follow the reaction or will I lead myself through whatever it is that is going on around me?
Speaker 1:I learned this just a little tangent. I learned this from a book called Man's Search for Meaning by Dr Victor Franco. He survived the Holocaust and he was already a psychiatrist when he was taken in the concentration camp and he I don't know, maybe because he knew how the brain worked, I don't know works, I don't know he was able to survive those horrendous, horrendous circumstances they were put in or they were under, because he understood that whatever it is that was going on outside of him, between him and whatever that was going on outside of him, there was a space there. There was a space for him to choose how he showed up. I can't explain this like on the go now, but I read that book many times to understand this and this is actually how I understood that between me and my children's quote behavior, unquote that there was a space there. This book helped me understand that, that there was a space there. This book helped me understand that that there was a space between me and my children that my children were not reaching in my brain and manipulating me and manipulating things in the brain for me to respond or react the way I did by yelling. This book helped me understand that Between you and your children is a space. Between you and your children's behavior is a space. Your children do things, yes, or they don't do things, yes, but there's something. There's a way you respond to their behavior. There's a way you respond or you react to their behavior that leads you to yell. So when I understood this, this led to this journey and where I am today, and I am very grateful. I went down that rabbit hole. I wanted to find out more. I was tired of living like that. I am so grateful I did not give up on myself and I went all the way through it, and I'm so grateful of where I am today.
Speaker 1:So every time you choose a new thought, you are literally shaping a new brain pattern. You are carving out a new path in your brain for the brain to follow. It's like a forest. When you have been walking in the forest and you want to carve a new path, you start somewhere and the more you walk on that path, the more defined that path will be. So it's the same thing. Every time you pick a new thought, you are teaching your brain new patterns, new ways of reacting, new ways of responding to circumstances, not the programmed automatic ways. Every time you choose a new thought, you are becoming a new version of yourself.
Speaker 1:Every time you choose a new thought, instead of going with the automatic thought, you are showing up as the mom that you want to be, and let me say you want to yell. At least do it consciously in a coaching method, the tool that we use to bring awareness of circumstances at the end of the after you have. It's a tool where you plot in something that happens. Let me say, your child slammed the door in your face and you think she's being disrespectful. And when you think that, let me say you feel frustrated. And when you feel frustrated, maybe you bang on the door, maybe you yell from behind the door, whatever all these things that you do. So we use this tool to create awareness for what it is you're doing, and maybe you want to continue doing that, but at least you are choosing consciously what we are trying to learn.
Speaker 1:What we are mastering here is doing things consciously. What we are mastering here is doing things consciously, not unconsciously, like we are in a dream, and every time you do that, you are showing up as the mom that you want to be. And this is basically what we do in my program. We don't just tell you what to think, I don't just tell you how to think or what to think, but you yourself master how to change what you believe in. You get tools to respond from your values and not from your unconscious programming. Because, to be honest, I have spoken to a number of moms and I think everyone knows the kind of mother they want to be. They really do, we all know, but the yelling is just in the way. And when we use this tool, the inner coaching method, to bring awareness, then we choose to respond from our values. We choose to respond from the kind of mother that we have always wanted to be. What we lack here is awareness, and this tool brings awareness or helps you create awareness. And when you use this tool, you master how to build new beliefs.
Speaker 1:For example, I am allowed to pause. Let me say your child slammed the door for the third time in your face and you could choose a thought. I am allowed to pause. Let me say your child slammed the door for the third time in your face and you could choose a thought. I am allowed to pause. I can trust myself in hard moments. Being calm is a skill I can practice. It's not a personality trait that I have or I don't have or another way. Another thought could be. My voice does not have to be loud to be powerful. So if you ever think how can I possibly change with all these thoughts that are running through my head, just remember you don't have to change all of them, you just have to become aware of them and then start choosing one new thought at a time. And when you do, even the loudest moments in your home can become a place of growth instead of guilt. And this is the power of deliberate thinking, like we call it. That's the transformation, or that's the shift waiting for you inside the year-less formula what it means to year-less, not by trying harder, not by memorizing things, affirmations, but by learning or mastering how to think differently.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening today. If you have any comments, if you have anything you want me to talk about on the podcast, you can DM me. I have an Instagram account. It's at helpmumsyourlesscoach. Dm me, give me feedback, talk about anything that you want to talk about. If you want to work with me, if you want to have your feet in the water and see what coaching is all about, go to wwwmasteryourownwellbeingcom. Forward slash coaching. Thank you so much for listening today. Talk to you again next week. Bye for now.
