Episode 8: Your Brain Gets A Boarding Pass Too

Have you ever found yourself thinking, "I just need a vacation"?

I know I have.

In this episode, we explore a surprising truth: changing your location doesn't automatically change your experience. You can escape the schedule, the laundry, the responsibilities, and even fly thousands of miles away, but if you're carrying the same stressful thoughts, they'll come with you.

Using a recent family trip to Hawaii as the backdrop, we talk about why so many women postpone peace until a future season of life. After summer. After the move. After the kids are easier. After the project is finished. After life finally settles down.

But what if peace isn't waiting on the other side of your circumstances?

Together we'll explore the trap of "I'll be happy when..." thinking, why forcing positivity often creates more frustration, and how the stories we practice shape the way we experience our lives.

In this episode:
• Why changing your circumstances doesn't always change how you feel
• The hidden cost of postponing peace until "later"
• Why forcing gratitude and positivity can backfire
• How to recognize when you've become a victim of your circumstances
• The question that helped me stop suffering through a beautiful season of life

If you've been carrying the weight of everyone else's happiness, waiting for the next season to finally exhale, or feeling disconnected from your own life while taking care of everyone else's, this episode is for you.

Because no matter how far you go, your brain gets a boarding pass too.

I actually think this version is stronger because it positions the episode as a lesson for the listener rather than a story about you. The Hawaii trip becomes the vehicle, not the headline.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Have you ever had one of those days? The laundry's piling up, somebody needs something from you every five minutes, dinner isn't planned, and you're pretty sure if one more person says, Mom, you might lose it. And somewhere between the chaos and the carpool line, you think, I need a vacation. Believe me, I get it. But I am currently sitting in Hawaii with a story that might surprise you. As it turns out, you can fly all the way to paradise and still bring your stress with you. This is episode eight. No matter how far you go, your brain gets a boarding pass too. Hi, I'm Mary. I'm a mom, and I'm riding this season of life with you. This is just breathe. Reset and come back to yourself. Feeling calm, steady, and confident again. Less panic, more peace, and real conversations. I'm writing this while on a family trip in Hawaii. My husband planned it over a year ago. My kids have been beyond excited. The anticipation for beautiful beaches, snorkeling, and adventure has been a beacon of hope for them. However, for me, in the chaos of what I lovingly call May Sember, this trip is transformed in my brain. It became less of a vacation and instead another week in the schedule, another thing to manage, another event to attend, until it finally became another obligation. Now before you roll your eyes at me, trust me, I have already done that for you. I hear how ridiculous this sounds, and yet I've spent five days in and out of enduring my family time. We're talking about it because here's what I know. The details may be different, but the pattern is universal. Maybe your version isn't Hawaii. Maybe for you it's summer break, a family reunion, maybe it's a house full of teenagers, different circumstances, same pattern. For five days I've watched my family snorkel, laugh, explore, and have a wonderful time. And I spend a lot of that time managing my frustration, mentally managing everyone else's experiences, feeling like it was my duty to make sure everyone else was okay, staying on the shore and watching my family be playful together. The whole time trying to keep the peace on the outside while internally swimming in criticism. Does that sound familiar? There are a lot of mothers walking around carrying responsibilities nobody actually handed them. Responsibilities they silently assign to themselves. Like making sure everyone's okay, that nobody's disappointed, policing everyone to get along, deciding that for their family to enjoy the moment, someone had to be a sacrificial lamb. And meanwhile, mom is nowhere to be found in her own life. All this happening while meanwhile, the mom is nowhere to be found in her own life. That was basically me. And by day five, I had had enough. Not of my family, not of beautiful Hawaii, not of snorkeling. Well, a little bit of snorkeling, if I'm being honest. But enough of myself. I was sick of myself. I knew I was carrying around these thoughts that weren't serving me, and I couldn't seem to put them down. I was being served an endless supply of stories to back it all up. So I called 911. Well, the coaching version anyway. I called my friend and fellow coach Emily. Because I knew that when you can't find solutions, sometimes you need perspective outside your own head. I texted her, I'm miserable in paradise, and I'm sick of it. Then, in a voice memo, I unloaded every thought I was carrying. Twenty minutes later, she had responded back with reflective questions from a new vantage point, and I'm not kidding, the fog immediately began to lift. Within that brief interaction, I had more relief than I had found on my own in the previous five days. Not because Emily fixed my vacation, not because Hawaii changed, not because my husband and kids shifted a single thing, but because she showed me a map of the thoughts creating my experience. And here's where this gets really interesting. For five days I had been trying to be happier, trying to be more grateful, trying to get a better mood, trying to enjoy myself, trying to appreciate what was right in front of me, and none of it was working. Have you ever done that? Tried to force yourself into a better mood. Try to gratitude your way out of resentment. Try to convince yourself you shouldn't feel the way you feel. Why doesn't it? Because every time it doesn't work, we heap on more criticism. What is wrong with me? I should be enjoying this. I should be grateful. I should be happier. And that's the linchpin. I wasn't just frustrated. I was frustrated about being frustrated. And that was creating a second layer of suffering. And then a third and a fourth, and it compiled. The breakthrough wasn't learning how to be more positive. The breakthrough was realizing I was exhausted because I was actually practicing negativity. So what really changed? My newfound awareness dissolved the thoughts away that I was tangled in. It honestly felt like it melted away. By the time I walked back to my family on the beach, I was done with complaining, done criticizing, done rehearsing the same story over and over. You see, Emily helped me unwind all those thoughts. And the reality I now understood was I had become a victim of my vacation. Which sounds absurd, but before you left, ask yourself, have you become the victim of your life somewhere, of your schedule, your circumstances, your teenager, your marriage, your health, your season of life? Not because those things aren't hard. Believe me, I get it that some of them are incredibly hard. But because you've started telling yourself a story that leaves you powerless inside of them. I had convinced myself that everyone else's happiness depended on me, that my job was to keep the peace. Meanwhile, I wasn't at peace with myself. And a lot of women know exactly what that feels like. We become experts at managing the emotional temperature in the room. We know who's frustrated, who's disappointed, who's overwhelmed, who's hungry, who's struggling. We can feel it all, and somewhere along the way we lose track of ourselves. I focused on everyone else's experience and I stopped participating in my own. Then came the aha moment that hit me the hardest. I had fallen into I'll be happy when thinking. I'll be happy when everyone else settles down. I'll be happy tomorrow. I'll be happy after this vacation. And it was starting to turn in, I'll be happy when the summer ends and I don't have to be around my family. We can fill in the blank with anything. And I had unconsciously decided that peace lived on the other side of this trip. Not during it, but after it. After everybody got what they wanted. Then I'd relax. Then I'd enjoy it. Then I'd breathe. And isn't that what so many of us are doing? So many women are waiting to breathe deeply until the next thing is over. After the kids are easier, after life settles down, we keep making these agreements with ourselves. I'll be okay when, I'll relax when, I'll enjoy my life when. And before we know it, we've put all of our contentment on layaway. Waiting for some future version of life to finally give us permission to exhale. That's an important perspective to consider because the only thing I can promise you for sure is life is happening right now. Our kids are growing up right now. Our marriage is happening right now. This season of your life is happening right now. And we will keep missing pieces of it as long as we're mentally standing at a future finish line. You see, in hindsight, I thought I was making my family suffer. I was criticizing myself for the mood that I thought was affecting everyone. I thought my frustration was ruining this trip. But when I was able to look at it, honestly and with perspective, the only person suffering was me. My family wasn't carrying my story. I was. And that's the question I want to leave you with today. What story keeps traveling with you everywhere you go? What have you decided you need to suffer through before you're allowed to breathe deeply again? Because we all have a story like that. This season of your life isn't the problem. Sometimes the thing creating the most suffering in our lives are the stories we've practiced for so long that we accept them as reality. Awareness doesn't magically solve everything, but it gives us a choice. And that is exactly where peace can begin. Because no matter how far you go, your brain gets a boarding pass too. Oh hey, before you go, notice one last thing with me. In the middle of everything you're carrying, you gave yourself a moment to breathe. Congratulations. That matters. Keep showing up. A pause changes more than you realize. One moment at a time, one reset at a time. I'll see you here next time.