Codependent Doctor
Podcast focusing on codependency. Learning how to create healthier relationships, healthier self and healthier lives.
Codependent Doctor
61: Burnout & Boldness: How to Stop Shrinking and Start Living Fully with Dr. Wendy Schofer
In this episode, Dr. Wendy Schofer joins me for a conversation that’s part personal story, part wake-up call. As a dual-board certified pediatrician, lifestyle physician, and trauma-informed coach, she’s learned firsthand how burnout, people-pleasing, and emotional disconnection can show up in our careers, relationships, and even our relationship with food and our bodies.
We talk about what it means to live boldly instead of shrinking to fit someone else’s mold, how emotional regulation changes everything, and why slowing down isn’t failure — it’s the gateway to meaning. Wendy also shares her free resource, How to End Emotional Eating: A Parent’s Guide, which offers insight into breaking unhealthy patterns tied to stress and emotional overload. You can download it here.
We also mention Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey — a must-read if you’re craving real rest. Buy it on Amazon (affiliate link: I may earn a small commission if you choose to purchase, at no extra cost to you).
Connect with Dr. Wendy Schofer:
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This episode includes a paid partnership with BetterHelp. Click this link, betterhelp.com/drdowney, to get 10% off your first month.
📗 My Books: Enough as I Am (codependency recovery) Enough as I Grow (365 day guide journal). Affiliate disclosure: I am an affiliate parner with Amazon and therefore receive a commission at no cost to you.
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🎵 Music: Touching The Air by Graceful Movement
Today's conversation is a deep dive into what it really means to be bold, not just in your career, but in motherhood, your identity, and your day-to-day life. Dr. Wendy Schaufer joins me to talk about burnout, body image, emotional regulation, and how we break out of the roles that keep us small. It's honest, practical, and packed with insights to stop shrinking and start leading with boldness at home and at work. Welcome to the Codependent Doctor, a podcast where we unpack the messy, beautiful journey of healing from codependency. If you're burned out from people pleasing, stuck in unhealthy patterns, or just tired of putting yourself last, you're in the right place. I'm Dr. Angela Downey, a family doctor and fellow codependent, and I'm here to help you reconnect to your authentic self. One honest conversation at a time. Here we go. I'm Dr. Angela Downey, and I'm so glad that you're hanging out with us. I want to introduce you to today's guest. Dr. Wendy Schofer is a dual board certified pediatrician, lifestyle physician, improv comedian, and trauma-informed parenting coach. As founder of Family in Focus, she's on a mission to help one million parents relieve stress, strengthen relationships with food, body, and family, and design homes where health feels easy, joyful, and connected. I'm so excited to have Dr. Schaufer on today's show. She brings such a bold and refreshing perspective and being unapologetically yourself. Hi, Wendy. It's so great to have you on. How are you?
SPEAKER_00:Great. Thank you so much for the invitation to join you here today.
SPEAKER_01:So maybe we can start by having you introduce yourself and tell us about your journey to becoming a pediatrician and a lifestyle physician and a parenting coach.
SPEAKER_00:I never know exactly where to pick up the thread and pick up the story. And so a lot of times I'm just like, hey, I'm Wendy. I'm a girl who likes black coffee, long dog walks, and the sound of laughter. And to be honest with you, I think that covers a lot. And yeah, I know people are like, and tell me a little bit more. So yeah, I am a pediatrician. I trained within the military. I practiced within the military. I retired from the military. One of the greatest days of my life. But, you know, with the practice in the military, it's been really cool because I got to practice with children, of course, as a pediatrician. And we are all general physicians as well. And so I also got to practice with adults. And so I had quite a wide range of experiences in the military after I got off of active duty. I was doing a lot of work in the community around the social determinants of health and doing volunteer work. And one of the things that I was doing was actually researching about diabetes prevention programs for children and to find the data for it and just what programs worked. And that was when I actually stumbled upon lifestyle medicine. And at the time I was reading it, I was like, hold on a minute, focus on nutrition, on movement, on sleep, on connections, like all these things. I'm like, I do this all the time. This is my practice. I'm like, lifestyle medicine, this is a thing. Like, yeah, there's a name for what I do. It really resonated with me. And so that was when I said, I'm already integrating this within my practice, and I want to surround myself with other people that are also doing this similarly yet different, because that's just the way that we do it.
SPEAKER_01:And the parent coaching, how did that come to be?
SPEAKER_00:Great question. So as a pediatrician, we all know the drill. During the well visits, I was looking at growth charts and hearing parents come in with worries about how their children were growing, what they were eating, mental health concerns, use of electronics. And I was like, I got you. I know evidence-based medicine. These are the prescriptions. This is how you eat, how you move, how much intensity of the exercise to have for your child. And I would write out a prescription and say, come back, see me in three to six months. And then they said, Hey, doc, this doesn't work. We're failing this plan. We're having fights, food fights. I'm making food that my kids don't want to eat. I don't like to exercise. Now I'm trying to make them exercise, and I'm finding canned wrappers under the bed all the time. And the thing that really stuck with me was when the parents were saying, I'm failing. I'm failing the plan. I'm failing my kids. I'm failing. Like I have my own concerns about my health and I can't help my kids. And that really stuck with me because I was facing the exact same concerns in my own home. Oh my gosh, those candy wrappers were everywhere. Facing those same concerns. And I was thinking, you know, if we have parents that feel that they're failing, these plans that we're making, failing as a parent, well, that's going to impact the health of the whole family. And I mean, since then, it's something where the Surgeon General has even come out with the concerns about parental burnout and how that's impacting the health of the family that is really closely related right there, with parents feeling a sense of failure and experiencing stress and burnout. And so I realized that there was so much more to the conversation than just me coming in as the expert and saying, this is what you do, because by the way, it wasn't working for the expert either. And so really looking at how do we focus on what it is that we actually want, which is a very big shift in the conversation. And so instead, I was like, let's focus on relationships, relationship with food, relationship with bodies, relationship with our each other, and connection. And that's the language of coaching. That's totally the language of coaching. I was doing more listening and reflecting what it is that they were telling me. And so I have my expertise, and so do the parents that I'm working with. And that's such a huge shift because everybody wants to tell everybody about how they are the expert and they're going to tell them how to fix their problems. It's not working. I mean, we've got all sorts of experts, whether it's, you know, when we go to the medical office, when we go scrolling on Instagram, you know, whatever it is, when you go to the grocery store. Heck, the other day I was at an event and a dad comes up and he starts telling me about, you know, this dynamic between him and his wife, and all these other people around us started telling him what to do to fix it.
SPEAKER_01:What to do.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And it was like, oh my gosh, this is playing out in real time right here.
unknown:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:All that unsolicited advice. So yeah, you've been open about your own experience of burnouts. Are you okay maybe taking us back to the moment and maybe what was happening?
SPEAKER_00:Wow. So it's plural. No. Plural for the episodes of burnout. So um I I think that this story actually goes hand in hand with what I was experiencing in the office and professionally, as I was feeling like I wasn't being particularly effective as a physician to be able to help these families, let alone to be able to help my own family. And so just kind of spinning and feeling so ineffective, that's really exhausting. So, you know, just kind of that emotional burden that I was taking with me. And I didn't have the words for it, but I recognize that I've gone through many different cycles of burnout over time. At that time, I thought that I just wasn't good enough, smart enough, hardworking enough, dedicated enough, a good enough mom, a good enough wife, all the things. It was all about me not being good enough in whatever way. And I mean, I'm not somebody that I would say is struggling with self-esteem. It's not something that I'm going around, you know, kind of like Eeyore and, you know, oh, woe is me. Woe is me. Yeah. And yet I was carrying that around with me because while I kept on getting that message from others. Well, if you just work harder, if you just work longer, if you just figure out how to actually practice medicine and be a mom at the same time, you can just figure this all out. And so it was just a recurrent, recurrent cycle that kept on coming up. But I didn't realize that that was the case. It wasn't until honestly years later when there were a lot of folks talking about burnout. I was like, what the heck is this? Everybody keeps on talking about it. Like, what is this? Like, I don't understand. And conveniently, this was in the early days of COVID when the world was shut down and I was cleaning out my closet because I finally had some time to do it. And I opened up to this box that was from that time frame when I was really hitting the fan or hitting the wall. Other things were hitting the fan. And I pulled out this t-shirt that I had not seen in years. And it was a t-shirt that my husband had made for me, gifted to me for Christmas. That on the front of it it had the hospital logo, and on the back of it, it said a very choice word that basically said blank them all. And you can fill in the blank. I would not have thought of myself as being a pediatrician with the sailor's mouth back then. But this was something that I would come home from work every single day and I would say to him, And it hit me when I opened this up years later, that's depersonalization.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:That's what they're talking about with burnout. So I knew the exhaustion, I knew the ineffectiveness. And then when I saw that's depersonalization, I'm trying to like push everything away to be able to protect myself. I'm trying to discount all of that because I'm just trying to survive from one day to the next. And that was when I realized that was burnout. Hold on a minute. It is me too. Yeah, we have many different flavors of it, and this is such a very common experience that we have right now that's all slightly different. So let's really listen to well, what is your experience? What's going on for you? It may not look the same as this person over here.
SPEAKER_01:So, how do you think that you recovered from that?
SPEAKER_00:What steps did you take? Well, I mean, let's acknowledge this is something that I think is an act of recovery every single day because as much as I talk about what's beyond burnout, it's not something where it's like I've gotten to Shangri-La and you know, never burn out again. I recognize what the indicators are for me. Like when I am getting to that point where I'm really exhausted. Overwhelm is a big part of burnout for me. When I am taking more things on than what I can really execute in a way that is meaningful and in a way that I feel that I want to complete this. And so it's more of kind of what is, what is the word that I'm looking for? Kind of like a litmus test for it, or what is my my barometer for experiencing those symptoms. It's knowing myself. And I think that that's really important to not paint this picture of, you know, burnout is something that you just like move on and that's it. You know, we've sutured this up and and you're gonna heal and there's nothing else to do. This is a human experience. And we need to be able to really be aware of what we're experiencing when we can see ourselves going down a path that maybe we need to be mindful, or maybe even say, you know what, I need to back up, or I need to slow down, or I need to swerve a little bit here.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Um, do you think it was a matter of taking things off your plate? Was it I'm sure it wasn't a matter of you just working harder and giving more of yourself?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Was it calling on the support of others? What what do you think helped you get through it?
SPEAKER_00:So I think, and thank you, because I did not answer that question before. I I think that one of the greatest things that I recognize was how I practice, how I parent, you know, what it is that I do at my best. Where is it that I really shine? And so a lot of the times when I really struggle professionally, it was when I was doing things that don't really align with me. If you've heard me talking about connection relationships, I'm really big on connection and relationships. I am an amazing outpatient general doc. So general pediatrician, mental health, growth, nutrition, like bring it on. We are going to really connect and understand and build a relationship, and I want to see you over time. Go figure. I have a very hard time when it's in critical care. Back in residency, now I recognize why I barely made it through the NICU. I'm trying to build relationships, and it's really hard to build a relationship in that critical care must fix now situation. And so that helped me understand I need to be focusing on the relationships. That's what really works for me.
SPEAKER_01:And that's where it is with your values and what's important to you.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. And where I am magical, by the way, and not always feeling like I need to work harder, longer, faster, you know, all these different things. And it's like it's kind of like climbing uphill to something that you're like, what's the point here? Why am I doing this? When I have this other place over here where I just truly shine. And I think that working to strengths, working to joy, working to the things that you're like, this is what I want more of. I mean, that's been a complete shift for me in my clinical practice and of course, you know, building out my parent coaching program and that practice and also with my family.
SPEAKER_01:You've said that you're not failing, you just haven't been supported. So, what are some of the supports that you needed but didn't have back then? And how did you start building those supports?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. You know, it's funny that the words of improv comedy come into my head as soon as I think about that. And so at one of the times that I was experiencing burnout, my husband was deployed once again. I was single parenting. My kids were like oil and water. So I came home from work and I said, do not hurt yourselves. I'm going out tonight. I need to hang with adults. And I went to improv comedy and started learning there. And one of the things that we teach in improv is, I've got your back. I've got your back. It's one of the things that, you know, we are just practicing all along the way before every single show. We go out there and we actually tap each other on the back and say, I got your back. I got your back. And I realized how that is so much of what I needed. I've needed all along the way to feel like, you know what? I'm gonna go out here. I'm going out and really trying something new. Because I mean, the other thing with improv comedy is that they always tell you, go out and fail. I'm like, I'm sorry, I'm a doctor. I do not fail. I'm a mom. Are you kidding me? I am not going out and trying to fail. And the whole point is, well, you go out and try to fail. Because if you're not, you're not doing it big enough. You're not trying something that's outside of your comfort zone. And if we keep on staying in our comfort zone, it gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And so the combination of challenging myself to go out there and fail, to not be afraid, to yeah, really be bold, and to know that I've got my own back and I've got others around me too. I mean, that whole village of improv was so important for me. For just to be able to know that you've always got partners all around you. They've got your back.
SPEAKER_01:It sounds like that's what refilled your cup and gave you more energy and more life. And I that might be different for different people too, right? So re filling your cup might be reading or going to like a knitting class or something, but for you, that that's that's what did it. And I love that you found something that you loved and really helped you reconnect with yourself and with other people. I also appreciate that you say that it's important to be okay with failing because I am a perfectionist. I always have been, and it really kept me trapped. It prevented me from trying new things that I've always wanted to try. And I heard a podcast one time, and the gentleman on the podcast said, I want you to try and fail at least four or five times a month or something like that. And I thought, why would I want to do that? But allowing myself to fail just allowed me to try new things. And I thought that was just, it was so liberating for me. And and I would try something, and sure enough, I would fail. And I'd be like, okay, well that's time number one. I I have three more that I need to do this month. But it really helped me get out of my shell. So I I love that you weren't afraid to try something new. And even if one thing doesn't work out, well, then maybe you try another one. But I love that you found something that really resonated with you and and really helped you fill up your cup.
SPEAKER_00:I would be lying if I said that that was one thing. I mean, it's really like taking a little bit of a sprinkle here and a sprinkle there, because you know, in addition to that, it was getting really good sleep. It was, you know, really kind of slowing things down so that I didn't have to keep on pushing all the time. Like actually giving myself permission to slow down. Oh my goodness, if you want an amazing book. Oh my goodness, have you ever heard of Rest is Resistance?
SPEAKER_01:No.
SPEAKER_00:My goodness. So it's written by a woman named Trisha Kersey. She also goes by the nap minister. Okay. Okay. If you got an awesome name like that, yes, I'm listening. Absolutely. But her book is so powerful about how we don't need to earn our rest. We don't need to work so hard to finally get to that place. How this is truly the foundation for everything that we do. Our rest, our need, our deserving is inherent.
SPEAKER_01:Sometimes I'm sitting on the couch and just watching TV. And somebody walks in the room. I sometimes I jump. I feel guilty that I'm sitting there watching TV. And I'm like, wow, I haven't done enough to deserve this, right? So, like, you shouldn't feel guilty for taking time to rest. And this is something I need to remind myself of all the time. It's something I've struggled with for a long time, just feeling like rest needed to be earned and I needed to do everything else in the house before I actually got to sat sit down with myself for 10 minutes and do something, just watch a TV show. It's terrible. So you've talked about slowing down to make life more meaningful. So, what does that look like when you're still working and parenting and trying not to fall apart? I love the third part there. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I will admit that falling apart is a part of the deal. I mean, let's just first acknowledge that. I've had a really tough year over the past year. And there have been times where I'm like, I'm falling apart right now. What do I need? What do I need right now? All sorts of different challenges that have been going on. And so I want to make sure that we can actually call that out and embrace it and say, you know what? Falling apart does happen. Absolutely. What do you need to be able to say it's okay? I'm in a safe place, whatever that is, creating safety. And also we get back up again. And part of that is that that failure thing. I mean, in a way, it is that whole part about go out there and fail. Well, go out there and fall apart. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Falling apart can happen. You need to learn to do what to do when that happens.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Well, and the things that I fall apart on, it's all stuff where it's like, this has been really meaningful to me. Something really big is happening here and listening to that. So I think that slowing down is a big part to be able to embrace that we will fail, we will fall apart, and we can refuel. We can kind of like rebuild. I think about uh Martha Beck talks about, oh I'm gonna mess this story up, but kind of like, you know, in order for the caterpillar to turn into the butterfly. And inside it's like it turns into like gobbledygoop, absolutely nothing mush before it can re-emerge as the butterfly. She describes it much more eloquently. And yet, how many times do I recognize I'm just in the gobbledygoop mode right now? And that's a part of the process. There's no rushing for the caterpillar to be able to become a a butterfly.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:It's kind of a vulnerable stage too, right? When you you are a bit gobbledygoopish and any anything can happen, but you just need to like just get through that that phase and whether or not that means you need a therapist or someone to talk to. But but you do re-emerge, which is the good thing to know.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. It the reminder. The reminder to have, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the relationship with food and body and family. Because you've said that these are not separate things and that they're all linked. So can you talk about that a little bit?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. We are all growing up in a society that is very focused on the external. So on weight, on bodies, on growth, like what we see externally, and also on eating habits, you know, all the different habits, but in particular, I'm focusing on the food part right now. And it's something where we have been speaking a lot more in the office and in the community about, well, I don't want my child to have diet mentality. I don't want them to have restriction. I don't want to seed eating disorders as I'm trying to help them navigate how they're eating. I just want them to have a healthy relationship with food. And I was like, you know, we keep on saying this, but does anybody actually know what that means? Like, what does it mean to have a healthy relationship with your food? And so the more that I've been talking with families, I was like, this is actually what we're working on. The more that we control food, the more that we manage it, the less that we're actually having a relationship. Our relationship is all about our thoughts, our beliefs, and the way that we feel about food. Well, guess what? We eat 90-some odd percent, and that's totally my number, 90-some odd percent of the time we are eating because of an emotion. Very rarely are we actually eating because of physical hunger. We're eating because you know it, it feels good. Where I'm celebrating, or I'm coming together with other people. I mean, there's lots of forms of emotional eating. This is normal. We are pretty much by definition all emotional eaters. And there's a lot of stuff that happens in our lives where we feel bad for whatever reason. Exhausted, frustrated, overwhelmed, disappointed, whatever it may be. And we also turn to food because it's comforting. It also just happens to be there, like all the time. And understanding our relationship with food is understanding, well, what is the role that it plays in our lives? Not with any kind of judgment and saying, oh my god, I can't eat that anymore, or you gotta like get rid of all of it. But that's interesting. I turn to food, food feels better when I'm feeling exhausted. I would much rather oh my goodness, I would always stumble home and go right to the pantry when I was exhausted coming home from from work.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Well, Doritos feel amazing when I'm exhausted. Interesting. Interesting. And so it's really something about just seeing those connections. That's really the relationship, seeing the the connections that we have with our food. And I try to slow things down as much as possible because we want to jump in with the judgment like oh, this is bad. Oh, I should stop doing this. I need to do less of it. I need to do something differently. If you hear the word need, I need to. You're like, okay, hold on a minute. I'm trying to control where this is going.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Earlier today, I was running errands. I had to go to the dentist, I had all sorts of stuff going on, and I passed by a McDonald's, and I thought, oh, I'm just gonna go pick up something at the McDonald's. And then I was like, Am I actually hungry? Like, am I going there because it's it's just like, is it just there? What is it? Am I feeling bad? I knew I didn't really want to take the effort to make a lunch when I got home. This was just easier, but I wasn't even hungry. And yet the first thing that popped in my mind was to go and buy something. And I was like, I'm not hungry, I'm just gonna go home. And you know, when I do get hungry, I'll make myself something. But it takes energy to make a healthy meal. So that bag of Doritos or that food that you pick up is just so much quicker when you are tired and you're managing so many things, so many, you know, other people's emotions, their meltdowns, their meals, kids bringing them everywhere that they need to go, that you're tired, and sometimes it's just easier to pick up those quick meals.
SPEAKER_00:You are hitting the nail on the head because there's a lot of things that we're dealing with that are hard. A lot of really hard things. And so, of course, we're looking for what's easy. Of course, I mean it's here in your story about how it was even just kind of like subconscious there. Like, I just need something that's easy right now. Not even necessarily about food. This is just easy. Yeah.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Anyways, I had chicken and a tomato. And it was it was really tasty. Um, I've got like a gazillion tomatoes coming out of my garden right now. So I just um we can't even keep up with how many tomatoes we have. So maybe that was part of it too, is just having tomatoes every day was was starting to be a lot, but I miss those days.
SPEAKER_00:I used to have the most kicken tomato garden, and it's about five years overgrown right now, and it's really sad looking.
SPEAKER_01:I miss those days. We even we even come home and sometimes there's like tomatoes on the porch because our neighbors have given us tomatoes, and we're like, we have more than enough tomatoes of our own. Here, take some of ours. So it uh it seems to all come at once. But yeah, no, I I made myself look better lunge and I I think I enjoyed it more because I did take the effort. But it is hard sometimes when you're really busy with kids to come up with those healthier meals when you're just you're racing from one place to another. That you mentioned slowing down and slowing things down a little bit just gives you that much more time to invest in, you know, making healthier meals and taking care of your body and being able to move more often. And I think that's that's really important. But I tend to fill up my life with so many things that it's hard to get those things done.
SPEAKER_00:We all do. I mean, it's so very normal. We're we're filling our lives up, and that's not a bad thing. I think it's really just looking at maybe periodically, asking, okay, is this what I still want to include here? Or is this something that is giving me energy? Or is it all taking energy away? My mom for years would always say, Oh, you're so busy. Oh my god, I'm not that that busy. I'm doing what I want to do. Yeah, like even now, she keeps on saying, Oh, you're such a busy person. Like, you have no idea how glorious and slow my mornings are.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:They are just delicious. Like nobody can touch me, nobody can talk to me, nobody can reach me in the mornings because that's the way that I've set it up. And she's like, Oh, I can't reach you in the mornings. You are so busy. I'm like, Yes, you're right.
SPEAKER_01:I'm not picking up my phone. Don't tell her. And you can keep thinking that I'm busy. I'm gonna keep taking my mornings to myself.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, we can talk about boundaries in all sorts of different ways, but I gotta tell you, one of the most amazing ones is just saying, my phone does not signal anything.
SPEAKER_01:No. That's amazing. One of my favorite things that we had talked about earlier was that we're not having enough conversations about being bold. Being bold in motherhood and bold in our career. So, what does boldness actually look like for women?
SPEAKER_00:Oh my goodness. So, again, everybody's different. Okay. And for me, okay, I keep on thinking, okay, me staying within the confines of this office. That was my cozy spot, you know, being in the medical office. Well, bold. I was like, well, what else is possible for me? Where else can I go here? What can I do if I'm not afraid to fail? Which is really kind of like the very beginning of me saying, okay, this means getting outside of my comfort zone of the office. If I'm left to myself, I would be in my comfy pants and quiet conversation all the time. Like, not that I wear my comfy pants at work, but you know what I mean. So I I'm very much an introvert, quiet person. And being bold to me is like, you know what? There's so much more impact that you can have in this world. And it's not just staying in the office. It's about going out and again, attempting failure. Like really going out and like, you know, making faces at it and like, I'm gonna try it. I'm gonna taunt you. I'm gonna go out and do big things. And you know what? If I don't fail, I didn't go out and try it big enough. That is such a mind changer, game changer for me. And I know I can definitely hear the lessons of improv in that. But if you also listen, it's like the the lessons of growth mindset. It's really the lessons that we're trying to teach our kids to be able to say, hey, go out there, go play, go explore. You don't know what you can do or what you don't, you know, what you can't do, what you enjoy, what you don't enjoy, until you go and try it. Well, I gotta take a page from that book for myself. And I think that that's really something that as we're trying to teach our kids, we're trying to, you know, open doors for them, but we have to do it first. It's not telling them what to do, it's really modeling. And by the way, modeling does not mean this beautiful airbrushed picture of exactly what it should look like. Modeling it is saying, yeah, I'm doing it too. Look at what I'm learning and how I'm growing all along the way.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I like how you uh how you're saying being bold is just getting out there and seeing, seeing what you can do and doing the things that you want to do. I felt kind of trapped when I was doing family medicine. I think at one point I was doing almost five, six days a week, and then you're doing paperwork in the evening, and that was all I was doing. In the morning, you're preparing your charts, then you're seeing people, and you're doing paperwork at night, and I was just, I wasn't having fun. I wasn't enjoying medicine anymore. So then I was like, I'm just gonna work a little bit less. And I wrote a book and I started a podcast, and I just, I just keep learning new things, and then I'm really enjoying what I'm doing, and I still get to practice medicine, and I'm actually really, really enjoying the medicine that I'm practicing as well. I like it way more than when I was doing it full time and didn't have all these other interests that I was taking a chance out, right? It's hard to put yourself out there and write a book. I like that bold thinking that you have.
SPEAKER_00:So when you were just describing there about having fun, I think that that's really the thing that I use as my indicator about burnout and also my indicator for is this something I'm gonna keep doing? Because fun is such a tremendous value for me. I mean, go figure. I'm a pediatrician and a comedian. Yeah, of course. I really embrace fun. And of course I do. Like these are the things that are really important. This is what fuels me. And so it's not necessarily about comedy or performance. It's really about how can I bring in different aspects that I find are fun. And so, yes, I've set up my clinical practice so that I have a lot of fun. I have a lot of fun in my clinical practice. I've set up my coaching practice, the way that I live with my family. It is about embracing fun because that's what works for me, for us. And I mean, that if it works for me, it's gonna work, you know, in that ripple for everybody else, including all the way out to this is what works within my practice. Absolutely. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So maybe how can we start practicing bold parenting?
SPEAKER_00:Great question. You know, the boldest thing about parenting doesn't look like it's bold. It actually looks and feels like you're doing nothing. And that I really think is the key part here. It's slowing down and just being there with our children. I think a lot of times we think that bold is going to be like big and lots of activity and you know, again, the go, go, go type of thing. But I think that with parenting in particular, it's connecting with our children, being there with them wherever they are, and they're going through a whole lot of stuff right now, and they're really on the roller coaster with growing up in our society, in this environment, and all of the emotions all along the way. And so being bold is about saying, I'm right here with you. There's nowhere else that we need to be right now. There's nothing that needs to be fixed, which is in and of itself a pretty darn bold concept.
SPEAKER_01:Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. But just connecting with, yeah, this is where you are, this is where I am. It's all it is right now. Big part of slowing it down, right? That is the slowing down in parenting, being right there with our children. It is so vastly needed and bold.
SPEAKER_01:I feel like I grew up in a household where like maybe emotional regulation or boundaries weren't really modeled for me. So it was difficult for me when it came uh with my own children uh to just to just be there because I knew, you know, racing off to soccer practice and then racing off to piano lessons, and it was it was all over the place. And um that's kind of what I had in mind when I was parenting my kids, and it just kind of made for a lot of chaos at home. And it's interesting. I wonder sometimes what things would have been like if we would have just slowed down quite a bit more and just taken the time to just be.
SPEAKER_00:I hear you on that. I mean, it the way that our generation has been raised, and honestly, I mean, all the generations up to this point, it's really been a lot of you know, with emotions, there's a time and a place for emotions, and it's never here, it's never now. It's always like you gotta save that. We're not doing that here. We don't have time for that. And of course, it was really layered on thick for me in medical school. Okay, we don't have time for that in medical school. And then the military, oh my goodness, like on top of all of it. And so a lot of this is really seeing the opportunities to unlearn the way that we have been taught, to see the parts that we want to do differently. And thankfully, our kids are learning a lot in school about social emotional learning. We need it though. We need it. And so at the heart of gosh, everything that I do, it's really about connecting with emotions. I mean, really, we're we're talking about connection and relationships. It's all emotions. It's all about emotions. Now, you know, a lot of us are like, I don't I don't do emotions. Well, that's why I like to bring in the fun. That's where I bring in the play. Because we don't even know that we're doing it. We're just trying things on. We're just we're just playing. It's okay. We're just playing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I've definitely put my emotions off to the side and just kind of like, I don't have time to deal with this now, but we never really had time to deal with with some of those feelings that we are having. And it's all about the logistics of getting from point A to point B and not really paying attention to what our needs are in our own bodies and that that need for rest. And I know we were talking earlier, you have your mantra, which has to do with sleep. So maybe we can talk about sleep and rest for a little bit.
SPEAKER_00:I would love to because I love sleep. Everybody's like, oh, you do everything about like food and exercise. And I'm like, actually, my mantra is sleep comes first. Because if we are not getting the rest that we need, everything else goes sideways. All of it. I mean, if you think about our mental health, our eating habits, our even like interest in moving at all, just plummets when we're not getting the rest that our bodies need. And so, you know, over the course of many years, of course, I was focusing on childhood nutrition and development and mental health. Well, I had a lot of different types of evaluations that I would say, tell me what's going on. Okay, now the one thing we haven't talked about is your child's sleep. Before we go anywhere else here, we need to understand their sleep. Because if they're having problems focusing in school, if we're having struggles with their behavior, with their eating habits, with their motivation, interest in moving, anything, we need to understand about their sleep because it is that critical to all of the other different aspects of their bodies and their lives.
SPEAKER_01:It's such an important piece. And one thing that I've noticed is that when I start burning out, it's usually because I'm trying to get more hours in a day. There are so many things that I need to do that I need more hours to get it done. And that means I'm getting less sleep. So I'm going to bed later at night. I'm waking up earlier in the morning to get everything done. And it's like sleep has almost become this thing that I can negotiate. Who needs eight hours? I can survive on five. And that's when you really start falling behind on your energy and your mood, and everything just starts to fall apart when you're not getting that rest that you need.
SPEAKER_00:That's really important where you said that's what I need to survive. And I think that we need to think about how when we are not getting enough sleep, we're surviving, but we are in survival mode. We are just holding on. And I think about the chronic stress that we're under and in all the time. When we don't have that restful sleep, we never get back to a good baseline to be able to have safety for healing. And we're just like waking up again and it's like time to make the donuts, which yeah, oh my gosh. I'm not sure if anybody else knows that reference anymore.
SPEAKER_01:I do. But we're just like getting up. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And getting up repeating, we just keep on repeating it. Exactly. Exactly. And so we keep on perpetuating the cycle. And so, yeah, we're surviving, but that's all we're doing. And we're getting ourselves trained into this mode that our brains are just like locked on. I'm on fix it mode. I gotta find the fires. And there's plenty of fires to put out all day long. That's all we're doing.
SPEAKER_01:There's lots of fires, and you don't have to put them all out yourself. It doesn't have to fall all on you. It's okay to call on other people to help out with some of them. So, what is one belief that you've completely needed to unlearn about what it means to be a good mom?
SPEAKER_00:Doing it all. I need to do it all. I need to do it all. That is still something that I am unlearning. It takes a heck of a lot of practice. I just have to lay there and close my eyes and just remind myself this is not all mine to do. And for sure. You know, it's something in again with uh early COVID when the world shut down and I was, you know, surrounded by three kids, three teens, uh, who were suddenly on lockdown in my house and they wanted me to fix everything. And I initially was like, okay, how do we do this? How do we move this all around? I'm like, whoa, hold on. Not my job, not my thing, not my role. Like, I can't fix all of this. And so I I think that COVID was the greatest like instantaneous lesson plan or opportunity to really learn about oh my gosh, there is nothing for me to do other than to be right here with them. So being bold was being like, yeah, this really stinks.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And we're here together.
SPEAKER_01:Let's be bored. Yeah, let's be bored together. That's that's that's okay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's not you don't always have to be the one to entertain. You can all just sit and learn to be by yourself. Not my job. Not my job. Exactly. Exactly. Wendy, where can listeners find you?
SPEAKER_00:Well, thankfully, as long as we have the right spelling of my name, there's only one of me. So I I am all over the place with my website, so Wendy SchauferMD. You can also find me on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube, and I'm now on the Tiki Talks. So, and I say it that way every single time because it drives my kids nuts.
SPEAKER_01:But really, my goal in life is to drive my kids nuts.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I am winning it. Totally doing it. And then I also have my podcast, which is Family in Focus with Wendy Schaufer MD. And so if you happen to be in Southeast Virginia, I may also be on an improv comedy stage. So come check it out.
SPEAKER_01:I love that. You're sharing with us your free classes for parenting. Yeah, you can find that on your website.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. Come on over to my website and I have regular classes that I hold for parents that are about understanding emotional eating, both our own emotional eating and what we're seeing for our children and how to be able to help without harm. And so I welcome parents to check that out. It's usually right on the very top of the uh website that you can join.
SPEAKER_01:And you've got a course that comes up that's coming up in January, do you not?
SPEAKER_00:I do. Thank you so much for bringing that up. So, yes, my uh Family in Focus program is a group program for parents to be able to come together and say, you know what, we want to be able to create these relationships with food and body and each other. Meanwhile, decreasing the stress about raising a healthy family. And how do we do that? Sprinkling in, making it easy and fun. Well, that's family and focus. So come check it out. We've got our groups kicking off at the very beginning of January.
SPEAKER_01:Amazing, amazing. I'm gonna make sure that all of those links are in the show notes and make sure that we can uh share them with the uh listeners. So, Wendy, I want to thank you for being here today. I really appreciated your honesty and your boldness, and that's exactly what we need to be good parents and good people. So I'm so grateful that we were able to have this conversation.
SPEAKER_00:It's been such a pleasure, Angela. Thank you so very much for the invitation. And you're welcome. Uh it's that ongoing challenge. How can I just be bold?
SPEAKER_01:And thanks to everyone who's out there hanging out with us. If you enjoyed today's episode, go ahead and hit follow or subscribe so you don't miss what's coming up next. And if you want to keep the conversation going, you can find me over on Instagram at dr Angela Downey. I would love to hear from you. So take care for now. You are doing better than you think. Thanks for spending time with me today. I hope something in this episode resonated with you. If it did, hit follow, subscribe, or share it with someone who needs to hear it today. The codependent doctor is not medical advice and doesn't replace speaking to your healthcare provider. If you're in a crisis, please go to the nearest ER or call 911 or reach out to your local mental health helpline. I'll be back here next week with more support, stories, and strategies because we're healing together.