The Next Phase
I used to be fun. I used to be driven. I used to be sexy. I used to be...young. What happened?
Dear Millennial moms in your late 30s or 40s -- former forces of nature,
Are you burned out, overwhelmed, and wondering where your energy (and your old self) went? You’re not alone.
The Next Phase is the podcast for overachieving moms navigating perimenopause who are dying to take back their energy, their bodies, and their magic. Here, we will not pummel you with hormone treatment plans or talk about perimenopause as if it's a diagnosis. Instead, we're going to celebrate it. We're going to use it as an excuse to really start taking care of ourselves. As a matter of fact, we're going to find ourselves in our perimenopause era.
Hosted by Stacey Hutson—certified health coach, wellness chef, former co-host of the Mother Plus Podcast, and mom of two—you’ll learn how to: Understand what’s really happening in perimenopause and how to work with your changing body, use nutrition, supplements, and sleep as medicine to restore your energy, get in tune with your cycle and learn practical ways to sync your life with your hormones, and create rituals (with a little woo) that help you slow down, listen inward, and reconnect with yourself.
Each episode blends personal stories, expert insights, and actual doable steps you can take right away.
✨ Subscribe now to The Next Phase and join a community of millennial moms redefining wellness in their 40s. Let’s make perimenopause your most magnetic chapter yet.
The Next Phase
#25: Why You Feel Scattered No Matter How Hard You Try
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Do you feel like you’re constantly playing catch-up in your own life?
Like no matter how many times you promise yourself you’ll “get it together”…
you’re still forgetting things, missing things, and starting every day already behind?
In this episode, Stacey breaks down why high-achieving women—especially moms—can feel completely scattered… even though they’re capable, smart, and doing all the “right” things.
This isn’t about discipline.
It’s not about laziness.
And it’s not because you suck at adulting.
It’s because your life isn’t set up to support you.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why being “good at school” didn’t prepare us to run a life
- How constant self-improvement can actually make you feel more scattered
- The hidden reason you feel like you’re always behind
- Why listening to yourself matters more than fixing yourself
- A simple 10-minute “Night Before Reset” to make your mornings calmer and easier
If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed, behind, or like your life is harder than it should be—this episode will help you finally understand why.
🧠 Try This:
The Night Before Reset
→ Take 10 minutes tonight to prepare for tomorrow morning
→ Pack lunches, set out clothes, prep what usually stresses you out
→ Notice how different your morning feels
📩 What’s Next:
If this episode resonated with you, Stacey is building something specifically for women who feel this way.
Make sure you’re on her email list so you don’t miss it.
If you have return packages in your trunk that are way past the return window, if your computer warns you every single day that you're almost out of storage, if you leave your house and come back and leave your house and come back at least three times every morning because you forgot something, and if every day feels like a surprise, even though you do the same things every day, we need to talk. Welcome to the Next Phase Podcast, the show for millennial moms entering parametopause, ready to stop fixing themselves and start listening to themselves. I'm your host, Stacey Hudson, and today, whether you have been diagnosed with ADHD or you just feel completely scattered, we're going to talk about why your life feels like one constant low-grade emergency and what to do about it. Welcome back to another episode of the next phase. I am so excited you're here. And today we're going to tap into something I discovered on the Mother Plus podcast. For those of you who met me there, you will know if you were the kind of girl who was in the gifted and talented program or the honor roll or high honor roll back in the 80s and 90s, there seems to be this odd connection between that and the ADHD or the scattered woman who now really struggles with basic life organization. And this isn't because you're lazy, and it's not because you don't care or you don't want to do better. In fact, you really care. It really bothers you because you've always been the girl who could figure it out. But somehow, life is the one place where we can't seem to get it together. And the question becomes: how can I be so good at school and so good at my career, but so bad at life? This has nothing to do with discipline or intelligence. This is what happens when you are a high achiever, when you are constantly taking in information and trying to do everything well, but you're never actually setting up your life in a way that supports you. And the result is you end up feeling scattered. So, for those of us who are high achievers and did really well in school, school gave us this structure that we loved because it was given to us. Here's the test, here's the assignment, do it, do it well, and here's your perfect grades. That feels great. But we never really learned how to implement that structure on our own and in our life. And as we grew up, especially as we became moms, there was so much pressure put on us, especially from ourselves. And in the past, the answer was always learn more. So we did. We listened to all the podcasts and read all the books and took the courses and learned how to manifest and upped our health game. But we still never actually learned how to run a life. No one actually taught us that part. And our thought process was always keep striving, keep fixing, keep learning. But ultimately, all of that just left us feeling more and more scattered. And I think what was happening here is we like to focus on what is interesting, but not what is important. For example, it's interesting to make a vision board, but it's not interesting to sit down and figure out your bill system so you stop paying late fees every month. I think the best example of this for me is that I have spent the last eight plus years with my AirPods in constantly, listening to podcasts and audiobooks and courses. I've talked about this before, trying to figure out how to eat better, parent better, grow my business, regulate my nervous system after my ADHD diagnosis. I have been doing all of this since I was 13 years old. It just used to be with self-help books instead of podcasts, constantly trying to fix myself. And then at the end of last year, I had this moment. I was looking at my business credit card and I saw this$499 charge. And I had this feeling of like, wait, what? What is that? And then I looked into it and realized that this is a charge I'd been getting every year from this software that I wasn't really using. And I didn't notice. I just overlooked it. And I felt that very familiar wave of I messed up. I dropped the ball again. And I figured it out ultimately, and it wasn't that big of a thing, but it felt big. It felt like shame, that feeling of your heart beating faster, and that icky feeling in your stomach, and feeling embarrassed and frustrated. And it's happened to you so many times before that. And I remember at the same time, I was doing TBM, which stands for To Be Magnetic. It's a podcast and a program where there's all of these meditations and journaling prompts, and it was this special challenge called the Money Challenge. And I was dedicating my mornings to doing the meditations and journaling on money. I was so dedicated to manifesting money, right? In this spiritual realm. But I wasn't spending any time here, down on the ground, in my real life. Here I was getting charged$500 a year for something I wasn't using. And I was spending all of my time trying to up level my way through it rather than just creating a support system so that I'm not constantly going down these shame spirals. What I have is not a motivation problem. It's not even a nervous system, it's not a manifestation problem. It's a support problem. It's that my life has not been set up to support me. I have not set up my life to support me. And I've been listening to everyone else for years about how to live and eat and manifest. And I completely stop listening to what I actually needed. And none of this is a knock against TBM or any sort of woo spiritual practice. You know, I love that stuff. But none of that is helpful until you take like five steps back and look at what's right in front of you. Like your real life right here. To me, that's step one. So I have been creating systems for my life, for my basic life. And as I've started to make these changes, the boring, uninteresting changes that I have been avoiding for so long, I have found that it has been more regulating to my nervous system than any nervous system work I have ever done. So what is really scary about being in the state that a lot of us are in is that it is overwhelming. You look around your house and you look at your car and you look at your calendar and your computer and you just think, where do I begin? It all is chaos. You don't need a full system right now. You just need somewhere to start, a baby step. So I started with something really simple. Something I learned years ago, but have really started putting into practice after taking my life more seriously. And I call it the night before reset. It is ridiculously simple. It's something that you can do tonight. It's not overwhelming. I want you to write down everything that you don't have in the morning that makes it stressful. Everything that you feel behind on every morning. And then I want you to set a timer for 10 minutes and just take care of that stuff the night before so it's ready for you tomorrow. I want you to pack the lunches and put the snacks in the backpacks and fill the water bottles the night before and put them in the fridge so they're ready to go. I want you to put your vitamins out, put the folders in the backpacks and the shoes and the jackets by the front door. And then tomorrow morning, I want you to see how different it feels. See how on top of it you feel instead of starting your day already behind, how competent and capable you feel, and how calming that is to your nervous system. If this one small shift makes your life feel easier, imagine what happens when you start setting your whole life up this way. I'm going to be talking about this over the next few episodes, about what it actually means to be scattered and how it's affecting your life in ways you probably haven't even realized yet. And if you're listening to me and thinking, this is me, oh my God, I struggle with the same things. I am building something right now for women who feel exactly like this. So make sure you're on my email list because that is where I will share it first. And until then, I will see you in the next phase.