All About Exhaustion: Emotional and Physical

Work with Me

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Today we're going to talk all about exhaustion, both physical and emotional exhaustion that happens raising neurospicy kiddos. We're going to talk about what it looks like, what causes it, and what we can do to fix it. Welcome to the Autism Diagnosis to Confident Mom podcast with Kira from Kira Brown Coaching. I'm a mom of Neurospicy Kids and a life coach. I'm here to share real tips and support to help you feel confident as a parent. Do you ever feel like you just want to give up? Like it's too much to handle. You're so tired, or maybe you don't have motivation. You just can't carry on. Let's talk about that and how to solve it. What it is, where it comes from, and how we can fix it. Um that feeling that you're feeling is called exhaustion. It can be both physical or a mental mental, emotional exhaustion. Um, let's talk about the difference between the two. You might have a combination of both, you might have one or the other. Um, let's talk about physical first. Physical, you're feeling more tired than normal. You might have heavy limbs or weak muscles, you might have more frequent headaches, you might have body aches and pains. You might be getting sick more often. You have low energy, or you're realizing that you need more caffeine to keep going. It's difficult to get yourself to exercise or to recover after exercise, and you're falling asleep the second you sit down or stop moving and going, you just could fall asleep. Those are all signs that it might be physical exhaustion that you're experiencing. Um, but what if you're saying that's not really me? I still feel exhausted, but that's not me. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about if it's emotional exhaustion. This is one that I didn't really think about until, to be honest with you, a few months ago. I was just um overwhelmed by everything that I normally do. I was feeling snappy and irritable. Um and I realized I was just emotionally exhausted. Um, here are some other symptoms. You might feel numb or disconnected from others, you might cry more easily than you usually do. You might feel like you're lacking motivation to do things, making decisions is hard. Um, you might feel like you have nothing left to give. You are give out. Um, you still gotta also be touched out, right? Um, you have more anxiety or worries than you normally do. You're dreading things that you used to be fine doing, or you're emotionally checked out. Those are all signs of emotional exhaustion. Um, a question you can ask yourself if you're not still not sure which one you're experiencing is if someone gave me a full day to myself, what would I want most? Are you answering sleep or are you answering quiet time? Or both. If you're answering sleep, you probably have physical exhaustion. If you're answering quiet and peace, time to yourself, that's probably emotional exhaustion, and you can be experiencing both of them at the same time, so you might want both. Um let's go over the causes of physical and emotional exhaustion. Physical exhaustion, I don't know why that's such a hard word for me to say today, but it can come from sleep issues, so interrupted sleep, not getting enough hours of sleep, getting woken up too early, not going insomnia, whatever. Um, just sleep issues of any kind. It can also be caused by constantly going. Go, go, go, go, go. We, as parents of neurospicy children, we tend to be hyper-vigilant. We are always looking for the next meltdown. We're trying to like anticipate every need. That is a lot of physical work to be aware and to be constant. Like when you go to a play date, you don't just turn them loose and help it's okay. Even when they're eight or nine or ten years old, you're still constantly like watching them. How are their conversations going with their peers? Those kinds of things. So you're constantly going all the time, and you might be managing all the things. Does that sound familiar? Are you managing the therapies and the routines and the sensory load that they're experiencing at the moment? Like, are you managing too many things? Um, some things you can do to help with physical exhaustion is get some more sleep. Can you sneak in a nap? Can you go to bed as soon as your kiddos go to bed rather than scrolling on your phone or reading a book or watching on Netflix or staying up and doing those dishes? Are you nourishing your body? Are you getting healthy food? Are you drinking enough water? Um, can you buy pre-cut fruits and veggies that are easier to eat? Those kinds of things. Um, a big one is to minimize our energy drains. I think we have a lot more of these than we realize. So let's talk about some of them that you could minimize. Can you simplify your meals? I used to have a bigger menu, a bigger selection that I offered my family to eat. But I have cut out things like meatloaf or sweet and sour chicken or some of these things that take me a little bit longer to cook because I just don't have it, I don't have the physical energy to do it. And so instead I make things that are quick and easy, like spaghetti or alfredo, or um a salad, or whatever things that I can make in five or ten minutes. I do those things instead, and we eat those on a repeat. Can you simplify your meals? Can you lower your expectations about your house? I think a lot of times we think we need to have the perfectly clean house, and really we don't need to. Is that really necessary for it to be perfect all the time? Um, or I would believe that I needed my house clean, all clean, my whole house, and then I could rest. But I have learned that I can clean parts of my house. So, like maybe today is the kitchen. We're gonna do a deep dive in the kitchen, and we're gonna let the living room stay messy so that I can have some physical rest during throughout the day. I can take a seat and just breathe and rest my body. So I have lowered my expectations. You can lower your expectations for how social you're going to be, or I mean, you can lower expectations in every area of your life, and it doesn't mean you're failing, it means you're taking care of yourself. And if you take care of yourself, you show up better for your children. It just is the way it works. Um, can we delegate? I know for me a huge one that I delegated was it's not my problem to solve all of their problems. Our therapist taught me that, and I was like, but it seems like my problem when he has a problem, but it's not really my problem to solve his problems. Like, I can give those back to them. What do you want to do about it? How can we fix this? Let them help them think through how to solve their own problems, help teach them to solve their own problems rather than just doing it for them. Um, I can say no to activities. I can just say no, and no is a complete sentence. That's not gonna work for us. Thanks for the invitation. Nope. Um, I find some of the the hardest ones for me to say no to are my neurospicy kiddos. They want something, they get fixated on it, and they just keep coming back and coming back. But I find that clear is kinder, and if I just say no up front instead of I'll think about it, my older my neurotypical kids are like, Oh, that means no. They don't understand that, so they keep coming back and they keep asking me again and again and again and again. So if the answer is no, just say no. If clear is kind, be clear. Um, and you don't have to do everything. Everybody in your family is a member on the team, and everybody deserves to be physically and emotionally healthy. So, no is okay to say. And then another thing that might help you is if you move your body gently. I'm not saying go get on a heavy workout, I'm saying let's get out and walk for 10 minutes. And you know what? It might be really good for our neurospicy child too to get out and move. It might help re-regulate them, it might, you know, help them deal with things better to get some endorphins going. So, can we move gently or some stretching or whatever you like to do? Um, personal favorite of mine is Pilates. But what can you how can you move gently? Not extreme, so that your body has to recover a lot, but just enough to get a little bit of endorphins going to help you out. Okay, let's switch back over to emotional causes of emotional exhaustion. You are constantly advocating for your child, you are constantly educating others, you are constantly worrying that things might go wrong and how we might fix it, and how can I prevent it? Um, all of those things. We are often feeling misunderstood. Things we just feel misunderstood, whether it's by family, friends, teachers, professionals, the honorary lady in the grocery store, whatever. Um, along with all of this physical work is the mental load of navigating it all. Who needs to be where? When? How are we getting there? What how are we paying for it? How are we this mental load can be immense? How can we um share that mental load a little bit? But that can be causing it as our mental load. Um, and I find that sometimes, even just sharing that mental load, even though I still take it on, if I share it with my spouse or my best friend or whatever, it lessens the intensity and the heaviness of it. Um, and then we also have our own emotions to manage in the middle of all of this. We're tired, we're exhausted, and you're trying to manage your own emotions so you can co-regulate with your child when they're having a meltdown, you have anxiety that you're managing because you're worried about a meltdown happening. We that can also um emotionally drain us. Okay, so let's talk about how we can work on fixing emotional exhaustion. Um, the first thing I want you to ask yourself is do I want to continue to do this? Do I want to continue to be in my child's life? Did you know that that's a choice? You have a choice every day whether you want to be. A lot of us think it's horrible that parents leave, but there are parents that leave their children, right? Think about that. You really don't have to stay. Like you could you could pawn your kids off on somebody else. You can have your parents raise them, you can give them up for adoption. You you do not have to do this. This is an option that you get to choose every day whether you want to be here or not. And you get to choose the degree that you want to be here. So it's empowering if you realize that I choose to do this for my child. It's not, I'm not a victim. This isn't something that happened to me, but I choose to love my child and be here and show up for them. It's amazing how that little mindset shift can free up so much energy in our bodies. So you get to choose every single day whether you want to be here or not. And on a lesser scale, let's say you don't want to give them away, you don't want to abandon them, but you can be like, I want to be here for them, but I want to break. You can choose that too. So then you find a babysitter, right? Like you get to choose to what degree you want to be here today. You can choose it and own it, and when you choose, you become empowered rather than a victim, and that will, like I said, create so much more energy for you. What can we delegate? Can we delegate some of the mental load? Can we delegate uh some of the problem solving? Can we delegate some of the household chores? Can we delegate what can we delegate? It might look like paying a housekeeper, it might look like having our kids clean and being okay with a lesser quality job, right? But what can we delegate? What can we ask our spouse to help us with? What can we ask our friends or neighbors for help with? What can we ask our extended family for help with? What can we delegate? Or just cross off the to-do list altogether, okay? Um, let's reduce our fatigue. How can we reduce our fatigue? What can we pre-plan? Some of our fatigue is decision fatigue. The more decisions we have to make, the more tired we are. So, what can we pre-plan? What if we have a meal plan that we just put on repeat? Every two weeks I make these same meals. I have the same grocery list every two weeks. Um, what if I wear the same thing every day? What if I make myself a uniform? For me, it's jeans and a top. Maybe you like dresses, maybe you like leggings. What's a uniform? Like you just know that this is what you're gonna wear unless it's a special occasion. How can you make it easier on yourself? Um to go along with that, we can declutter. So I can reduce this decision fatigue by having one pair of tennis shoes and one pair of sandals for my kids. Is it a sandal day or a tennis shoe day? Perfect, and if they can decide, that's even better, right? Um which jacket am I gonna wear? Maybe I just have one jacket. Maybe I have a heavy one and a light one. Decluttering can go a long way in um helping with decision fatigue. But if you are in the middle of emotional exhaustion, now is not the time to declutter. It's more of a preventative. Um get yourself feeling a little bit better first and then because decluttering is a lot of decisions. Uh if you want help with decluttering, check out the minimal mom on YouTube. She's amazing. Um, how can we simplify our routines? What things can we put on repeat? Think about that. What can we repeat or simplify to reduce fatigue? And um, another thing we can do, a big thing we can do to overcome emotional exhaustion is to process our emotions. We as a culture tend to bottle them up inside. Emotions are scary and we don't want to deal with them. We don't want to cry in front of people, we don't want to become angry, we we just we might feel like it's inappropriate to be angry, or that if you're angry, you have to yell and scream and hit things, and that's not the truth. The truth of the matter is if you can be angry and sit here calmly. Um, we can feel and process those emotions, and that will help a lot with emotional exhaustion. Some ideas for that might be journaling. Maybe you journal for five or ten minutes a day about anything. Your prompts can be what am I feeling today? What emotions am I tired of packing around? Just write five minutes, crumple it up and throw it in the trash. Getting it out on paper, and there is something about physically writing it over typing it or speaking it that is so helpful. Writing helps us clear our minds. Um, talking to a friend or a loved one about what's going on can help process emotions. Getting some life coaching, that is uh my whole job as a life coach. I would say 90% of it is helping people process emotions and learning how to deal with them. And when they learn how to deal with those emotions, they get different results in their life. So if you want help processing emotions, hire a life coach. I'd love to help you. Um, you can go to my website, Kira Browncoaching.com, and click on work with me. Schedule a time to meet with me. Um, some other things that you can do are prayer meditation. That is processing those emotions once again. Um, another one is feeling or allowing those emotions. Where do you feel them physically in your body? Are they as scary as you think you are, as you think they are, if you just allow them? A lot of a lot of times, most of the time, the resisting of the emotion is more intense than just allowing the emotion itself. And my final tip for overcoming emotional exhaustion is what can I do to restore myself? I'm not asking you to be more protective. I want something that's gonna make you feel like you again. Do you like reading? Do you like listening to a favorite song? Do you like gardening? Do you like sewing? Do you have a hobby? Do you like going for walks? Do you anything? Underwater basket weaving, whatever it is that makes you feel like you. Do you like laughing? Do you like watching a comedy show? Do you there are lots of things? The sky is the limit, but what can I do to make me feel like me? And I want you to remember the goal is to renew ourselves, not to accomplish something. So let's say you're gonna go garden. The goal is not to get the garden weeded, or to plant the whole garden, or to whatever. The goal is to feel renewed afterwards. So go work for a while, and if you start feeling tired, then stop and just ask in feeling like you again. You are important. You can always ask yourself, what do I need right now? What do I want to do right now? Um, and it doesn't have to be in huge chunks, you don't have to have three hours to go garden if that's your thing. You can go spend five minutes. Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but your child can scream for five minutes because you're not there. But if you come back calmer and more refreshed, it's going to be for their benefit. So um take care of yourself, mama. You're important, it's not all about your child. We do a lot for our neuro spicy children, but we have to take care of ourselves too. If you need help working through your emotional exhaustion, give me a holler. I would love to help you through that. Until next time, you're doing better than you think you are. Thanks so much for listening to Autism Diagnosis to Confident Mom. If this episode helped you feel a little more seen or supported, please take a moment to like, follow, or subscribe to the podcast. And if you know another parent who needs to hear this, share it with them too. We're all in this together. You're doing better than you think, mama. You've got this.