The Stress Nanny with Lindsay Miller

Ep 204: How Boundaries, Rest, And Asking For Help Rebuild A Burned-Out Family

• Lindsay Miller • Season 12 • Episode 204

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Ever feel like you’re carrying the whole village on your shoulders? We sit with Dr. Melanie Gray—nurse, trauma-informed wellness coach, and leadership consultant—to map a practical route from constant overwhelm to a sustainable rhythm of care that honors you and strengthens your family. This conversation is a masterclass in reading your body’s signals, setting boundaries that stick, and turning everyday routines into reliable rest stops.

We start by naming the signs of burnout too many of us normalize: short tempers, sleepless nights, headaches, gut issues, and that sinking feeling that we don’t like how we’re showing up. Dr. Gray connects the dots between chronic stress, immune function, and long-term health risks, then shows how small, consistent actions rewrite the trajectory. Think simple anchors like phones down at dinner, an hour of quiet after, and signature family norms—Help Mama Monday, protected date nights, slow Sundays—that signal to kids and community what your household stands for.

We also unpack the emotional load: how “exhaustion Olympics” keep us stuck, why clear non-negotiables reduce anxiety, and how a trauma-informed lens helps you see beyond old chapters without denying them. Dr. Gray shares strategies to ask for help loudly and widely—church bulletins, neighbor groups, EAP programs—and to protect your bandwidth by limiting repetitive venting and doom-scrolling. Her take on trade-offs is refreshingly doable: redirect a small weekly spend to outsource laundry or cleaning for a season and buy back hours for true recovery.

By the end, you’ll have language to teach your family how to treat you, tools to regulate your nervous system, and a vision for legacy-level self-care—more health, more presence, and more capacity to lead with calm. If this conversation gives you a breath of relief, tap follow, share it with a friend who’s stretched thin, and leave a quick review to help more caregivers find these tools. Your calm can become your family’s culture.

Lindsay Miller is a distinguished kids mindfulness coach, mindfulness educator and host of The Stress Nanny Podcast. She is known for her suitcase tricks and playful laugh. When she's not cheering on her daughter or rollerblading on local trails with her husband, you can find her using her 20+ years of child development study and mindfulness certification to dream up new ways to get kids excited about deep breathing. Having been featured on numerous podcasts, platforms and publications, Lindsay’s words of wisdom are high impact and leave a lasting impression wherever she goes.

To sign up for Lindsay's "Calm & Collected" Newsletter click here.

To review the podcast click here.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Stress Nanny, the podcast where we take the overwhelm out of parenting and help kids and parents build calm, confidence, and connection. I'm your host, Lindsay Miller, Kids Mindfulness Coach and Cheerleader for busy families everywhere. Each week we'll explore simple tools, uplifting stories, and practical strategies to help your child learn emotional regulation, resilience, and self-confidence, while giving you a little more peace of mind too. I'm so glad you're here. My guest today is Dr. Melanie Gray. She's a registered nurse, trauma-informed wellness coach, and leadership consultant with over 20 years of experience guiding women, especially those in caregiving and healthcare roles, toward healing, clarity, and purpose. With a PhD in nursing and a deep background in nursing education and leadership, Dr. Gray blends clinical insight with heart-centered coaching to help women break cycles of burnout, stress, and self-neglect. As the founder of Melanie Gray Solutions, she teaches women how to regulate their nervous systems, regain their voice, and reset their relationships, starting from the inside out. Whether she's coaching one-on-one or speaking on stage, her message is clear. You can lead and care for others without abandoning yourself. On today's episode, Dr. Gray will share trauma-informed strategies that families can use to reduce stress, build emotional resilience, and create rhythms of rest and restoration that honor every member, especially the women who hold it all together. Dr. Gray, thank you so much for joining me today.

SPEAKER_02:

Lindsay, thank you so much for the warm welcome. I feel so privileged to be with you today.

SPEAKER_00:

As we were talking, you know, before I hit record, Dr. Gray started dropping some wisdom. And I said, we have got to just stop the conversation right now and hit play because I hit record because I need every bit of this to go to our audience. I just love the focus of your work on helping the caregivers care for themselves. Can you help us just get a glimpse of why that was the route you took when it came to who you wanted to serve, the populations you wanted to work with?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, as a nurse and as an educator, I work with a lot of women, right? And my husband always laughs. He says, I think you have this light on your forehead that says, tell me everything. So even in my life where I wasn't seeking to be, you know, the sage or the listener, I just am, I am a good listener. And so I hear common threads from people, women, all the time, about their stress, their anxiety, and their burnout. And so I I have a I feel a ministry to women.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah. Well, and again, as we were talking, one of the things you mentioned, I said something about helping moms care for themselves in the midst of caring for kids.

SPEAKER_02:

And you said I said women are caring for everybody anyway. They're caring for their kids, their kids' friends, the neighbor down the street, the sister of the other mom, their spouses, their extended family, their parents. You know, if they're doing any kind of side job, they're listening, they're caring. Women are nurturers. And if we're listening and we're talking, we're caring.

SPEAKER_00:

I love that. And I think that again, your emphasis on these cycles of rest and restoration amidst that deep and heartfelt caring is what's so powerful about your work. So I'm excited to get into that because I think the mindset shifts that you talk about and just the reorientation to self-care, I think is going to serve so many people. So let's start out with the patterns that you see around stress and burnout. What are some of those patterns and how are people tuning into the fact that they're entering or in the middle of one of those patterns?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, it's the short-temperedness, the lack of sleep, the pain in the neck, the pain in the gut, even constipation. You know, I just have to go there. Yeah. When we tighten up and things are not moving, they're not moving anywhere. Yeah. You know, and so it happens when we feel we we find ourselves responding differently, and we look at ourselves and say, I don't like how I'm showing up. Those are signs. We have to listen to our physical body, the joint pain, the neck pain, the gut pain, the headaches, the lack of sleep. We have to listen to our emotional selves. Are we more temperamental? Do we feel more cheerful? I'm not talking about those times of the month if we have a movie, but you know, because that can happen too. But if we're really noticing that we're spinning and we're in a cycle, we have to respond. You know, part of it for me is that women have to scan. We have to take a moment to sit down more longer moments, a day, an hour, to listen, and then to tell ourselves the truth. You know, because we're good at denying them. Oh, it's not that bad. You know, and then when we get with a group of other women, there's almost this competition. Oh, well, how tired are you, Lindsay? Well, Lindsay, you might have been working for 40 hours, but I did 40 hours plus 20 hours of laundry, plus I cared for my mother. And my sister asked me to show up for and keep her kids. And we go on. Well, then you might say, Well, Melanie, if you're thinking you're tired, and then this is this whole cycle, you know, that this competition and what has happened that we're in this exhaustive competition of how tired we can be.

SPEAKER_00:

No, it's a good point. And I think that the damage comes when we recognize that over time all that stuff adds up, right? And sometimes yes, sometimes we're faced with that in a really harsh way, and other times we can tune into it as it's happening and and kind of write the ship, right?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, and we have to be, you know, aware that young moms are not going to be young moms forever. They're going to be middle-aged moms, and then they're going to become older women. So how you treat your body at 20 and 30, how you listen to your stress and how your body is showing up will shape who you become later. So the self-care, the commitment to it is not just important for this moment, but it's important for your future.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And that's such a gem because I know in my 20s I was not well versed in self-care practices, nor was I particularly attuned to this body and its limitations or needs. And in my 30s, I had to really take a few solid years to reset some things that I had set in motion a decade earlier, right? That I didn't recalibrate along the way, and that showed up as an autoimmune condition, tons of inflammation, systemic inflammation that really took some to bring back down.

SPEAKER_02:

I'm so glad that you're sharing that because stress, dust, and exhaustion by the research has been scientifically proven to impact the immune system.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

And we have colds and we have flu and the autoimmune systems issues can be triggered. And so it's stroke, heart attack, cortisol levels increasing, chronic disease, all of these things are associated with stress. So we have to listen. When I was in my 30s, I thought I was on the rise to be a really high-powered executive, healthcare executive, right? And then my father had a stroke, and I had to make a choice between do I care for my father or do I go this path? And I said, well, 20 years from now, when I have to ask myself and reflect, what can I live with? And I decided that I was going to take care of my father, and that in caring for him, I wouldn't have the capacity to do this executive role. But that's when I pivoted to higher ed. You know, so I still have been able to do both. But what I'm saying is sometimes we have to pivot.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Sometimes even in your career, in your caregiving as a mom, you have to be willing to make hard choices that change. Because you know what, Lindsay, we're teaching people how to treat us. And you're teaching your children how to treat you if you never let them help, if you don't set boundaries. We're teaching people how to treat us. And if we sometimes don't like the response we're getting, it's because we told them it was okay.

SPEAKER_00:

Talk to me more about that because that's a reclamation, right? I mean, that's something we have to pull back, recognize, and then shift, pivot, to use your word, into a different orientation to what we need, deserve, and maybe ask for or demand from those around us.

SPEAKER_02:

Our needs do change, right? So a woman at 20 has a different energy and capacity to do some things and accept some things than you are going to do at 30. I mean, because some things get old. You know, it gets old. It's not cute. You know, the clothes left everywhere, picking up behind everybody all the time. It's not cute. When you're 20, you think, oh, I love, I mean love, and I can do it. It's not feeling, but you're 30, you're like, no, I'm tired. You know, y'all need to help too. But there's nothing wrong with saying I'm in a different space, and this is what I need, right? The world evolves around us. We have to allow ourselves to evolve as well and not feel bad about it. We should not feel bad about it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, no, I agree 100%. One thing I'm thinking of right now is last week my grandmother, she's 89, she went into the hospital. And it's in part because she's been caring for my 95-year-old grandfather, you know, for the past, I mean, his their whole marriage, right? But particularly in the last five years or so, his health has been steadily shifting as he's getting older and, you know, is capable of different things at this age than he used to be. And we were having conversations just this past week. And it was interesting because we have my 89-year-old grandmother, right? My 65-year-old mother, and then here I am in my 45-year-old self. And then I'm talking about it with my 16-year-old daughter, and just the level of awareness around self-care that we all kind of contribute to that conversation. It was so interesting because my grandmother, it's hard for her to ask for the help. It's hard for her to not give the care. It's hard for her to accept that at 89 she's capable of different things than she was at 85, right? But to your point, this is just a generational conversation we're gonna have with ourselves and the people around us for our whole lives. And so we may as well get good practice at it now.

SPEAKER_02:

And it's so wonderful that you have your 16-year-old daughter able to see the generations because she's gonna care for you and for herself based on what she sees you do because your life is always teaching, Lindsay. You know, all of us are teachers. We're all teaching because we're somebody's watching our life and they're learning from it, they're taking notes. So, what notes are your daughters taking? You know, you've watched your mother, right? And your grandmother. What notes have you taken? And it's not that the whole book is bad, it's just that we might need to change some chapters in it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that's such a beautiful way to put it. Change a few chapters. And I think that out of necessity, my life has required or invited me to a different level of self-care decades earlier than put, you know, potentially my forebears navigated, which in some ways has been challenging, but in so many ways is a gift, right? And so that self-care chapter is written differently in our family, and it still is amended and added to all the time, but I don't necessarily have a choice. If I want to have a functional body, I know what this one needs to be functional, right?

SPEAKER_02:

So and we have the resources for anyone with an autoimmune disease or whatever to be able to do that. Where in times past they might and have had those opportunities and resources. I do think sometimes that, well, maybe life was harder for my mother, but she was able to go to work and come home. And work, email, texting, didn't follow her. You know, PTA wasn't trying to text her and send them an email. You know, they waited till the next PTA meeting or something. Yeah, or that they saw you at the school.

SPEAKER_00:

Next time they saw you. Or they called you between the hours of 5 and 9 p.m.

SPEAKER_02:

And you know it was disrespectful to talk to somebody, call somebody after nine o'clock. You know your mama told you don't you call anybody after nine o'clock. That's disrespectful. Now you go for things, you know, the social norms that we probably grew up with together, Lindsay. That I know those norms have changed because now we can text into midnight and nobody.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh my gosh. It's so funny to think about something simple like that. Like when you received information from other people, it was it was definitely more contained than it is.

SPEAKER_02:

And you waited. And the social norms that we used to have, the boundaries, the social boundaries did give us some time for rest, right? Or to sit with ourselves, even if it was at six o'clock, we watched the news. We were all sitting. I don't know about your family, but we weren't supposed to talk. I was supposed to get a book and be still. You know, do we ask our kids to be still? Do we stop? Do we so I think there were packages, pockets of opportunities and how maybe we used to live life that allowed our parents and grandparents to pause, and now we're just going all of the time. And we now have to take the reins of our lives and set boundaries for ourselves that society no longer honors so that we can be healthy.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that was so well said. Talk to us about how you do that because I know one of the things you encourage families to do is tether those reset moments to things that they're doing every day regularly, kind of just build onto existing routines or patterns. Talk to us about what you recommend for that to build in those moments of reset.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I think, for example, when you're having dinner, put your phones away, we're eating, and then an hour after dinner, we're doing nothing. Everybody, we can talk, we can have a book time, we can have puzzle time. Then maybe you have Monday's Mama's Monday, and mother doesn't cook on Mondays, mother doesn't wash dishes, there's nothing on Mondays. Everybody helps Mama. Help Mama Monday. Then maybe we have, you know, take care of Father Friday. You know, then maybe Saturday is your day where we sit and hang out together, you know, whether it's breakfast, you know, we do a lunch. But I think we have to find times where we as a family are doing nothing. We have cultural boundaries. Like my husband and I, my Friday night was date night. We've been married 37 years, and everybody will tell you, don't call her on Friday. Don't ask Melanie to do anything on Friday because that's her date night. And they know if there's something special, they would call him. All right. So you need to ask Victor if he's okay. You know, and Sundays was our time. I don't do anything on Sunday. That's our time for service, and the world knows that. So I think that we have to, as families, be willing to set the character and the tone. As the what is the Miller family known for? What does the Miller family do? You know, what is the Williams family? What do you do? I think families have to frame who they are and their identity and build quiet time, reset times around it so that we can stay connected.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. It's such a fun way to think of it because I think a lot of times we might get pushback from building those types of boundaries, right? Maybe internal pushback from the children who would like a different boundary. But if we can get the buy-in and have the conversation, right, and create a fun family identity around it, that creates a little bit of a different feel than an imposed external boundary. It's a hey, when do we want to have our downtime? When do we want to connect? When can we all unplug? Recognizing these are just important pockets of time we need throughout the week. When do we want to have them? And then if you can create a scenario where everybody can buy into the general structure, you can build momentum from there, right?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I think yes, you can. I think it's also important. Now you might say, Melanie, you old school girl, you know, you're way out there. But look, I believe that parents have to be honest and authentic with their children.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

I like to paint and I need some time to do that. I need you to not bother me during this hour. I am a human being. I like to sing, I like to draw, I'm tired. I need your help. This is how you can do it. We're all in this together. We have to be authentic and human with our kids so that they can learn soft skills that will carry them in life of empathy and caring because it's all part of their character. And now I'm old school, like I said, Lindsay, I'm gonna just tell you that. But when my mother told me to sit down, it was not a discussion. My mother said, This is what we're doing, and my dad says what we're doing, it was not a discussion. You know, and I do believe that we can engage with our kids and we're part of a community, but in life, there are tears. In life, everyone is not equal. And in some things, we're equal in humanity. But when you're the mother and you're charged with caring, you have the right to say, I this is what I really need you to do because I'm your mom. You know, it isn't, but that's what happens in life. You can't hold a job and tell every boss you have this is what I'm gonna do now. So we have to teach our kids how to receive. No, yeah. I can't wait so that they're not in all of this social anxiety when they have to face adulthood. That's a whole other discussion, you know, these young people who are afraid of adulting. It's it's true, it's true.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, and I think it's such a good point. The communication, it can be thorough in helping people understand the why or helping people connect with the context. And also sometimes it needs to be just more direct in terms of this is what I need, and I need it right now, you know, and I think the balance of those things builds really strong family culture when we can say, This is what I need, and this is actually a non-negotiable for me. So I'm gonna need everyone else to recalibrate around this because this is where I'm not moving from. And then other moments when maybe we can be more flexible about, you know, a certain aspect of the screen time downtime, or when we can be flexible about something else that's going on, and then recognizing the shift between the two and making sure that there's space for us to say, no, I'm not gonna do that.

SPEAKER_02:

So what about earning some trait? Why can't moms tell a kid you have to earn that screen time? You know, what do your grades look like? But what happened to making them earn and reach and stretch? You know, because we can't all get an award for 99th place. It's a good point. You have to learn. It's a good point. You know, I think in the stretch to let everyone feel value, we've not let people fail. You know, and I think we're now seeing a generation that is struggling because everyone's not at the pinnacle all the time. You know, so I think it's fair for them to care for themselves by setting boundaries, by being authentic, they are helping their families and they're building great individuals that we're gonna need in our world in the future.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's a great way of looking at it. Uh, talk to us about how your background informs the way you work with parents and kind of the way that you see some of these things. Because I know the nursing and the trauma-informed care, I mean high, high stress, constant, right? There's unrelenting stress in those scenarios. Talk to us about how that has shaped the way you coach women through this sense of being stuck in a constant state of stress.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, you have to understand that the world is stressed. There's over 67% of all Americans pretty much have had. Some kind of adverse childhood experience, emotional experience, divorce, community violence, you name all those things. And so in dealing with women, that means everywhere we go, at the grocery store, at church, at the gas station, we're running into people that may have been traumatized. So the people have to be sensitive in how they speak to others, but also to be sensitive in how they speak to themselves and how they reflect upon their own history, because we all have a story. And we have, as women, the choice to build on our history, to move past the past so that we begin a new present. And that's what I try to help people, women do to have the confidence to say, sometimes, yes, some hard things have happened in my life, but I'm not going to give it power over the next 20, 30, 40 years of my life. I'm going to build a new present. And so that encouragement and confidence builds to reset their destiny and their future. They are then also able to reset how they see themselves so that they're seeing themselves in their potential, not just through the lens of their trauma.

SPEAKER_00:

That was so well put. And it makes me think of what you said to me earlier about rewriting a chapter and keeping the whole book. And how certain chapters we may want to go back and rewrite. Sometimes we can't rewrite maybe what the start of the chapter looked like, but we could rewrite how it ended, that particular chapter, right? And so I love the idea of seeing ourselves in our full capability as opposed to seeing ourselves in the thick of the distress that we faced.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, and we don't always know our full identity until we begin until we allow ourselves to grow and expose ourselves to different people and different opportunities. And that's why I do encourage mothers to find something that you're going to teach yourself, a new experience once a month. If you've never taken a basket even class, you don't have to like it. Just take it and see who you meet. You might find something. Take a knitting class. Everything isn't forever, but it exposes you to see life and people through a different lens. I'm first generation, college. I had to work my way through. My parents were raised in the depression, Jim Crow, all of those things. Both of my parents had significant trauma and did have some depression, mental illness, challenges. But I learned not to define my life through my experience with them. But sometimes I need that story of having had parents with mental health issues because I can help somebody else. I don't have to lean always on my story of having to be self-sufficient and on my own at 17. But sometimes I need to use that story to help somebody. You can push, you can do it, you can eat popcorn and ramen noodles for a few years. It's all right. You know, you won't do it forever. You know, so we need them. We can rewrite our story, but sometimes those chapters are rewritten, and sometimes we just bring them out when we need them.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. No, thank you for sharing that. I think there's so much power in being able to approach those seasons of life that were particularly challenging for us. And then bring them out in that neutral way, like you're describing. And I can appreciate that from your perspective, that took a lot of work to be able to take that story back out and to be able to approach it with the level of neutrality that you just described it. But that's the power of the work of self-care, right? Is that we can take those moments and we can transform them into something that serves us, that serves other people. And it doesn't negate the extremity of them. It doesn't negate the heart-wrenching moments that were a part of that particular chapter, but it does make them useful in a new way.

SPEAKER_02:

I bet a lot of moms that are listening are working through all kinds of challenges, whether it be an illness of their own, taking care of their parents, they might have a child newly diagnosed on the spectrum, having a child with a chronic or even a you know really significant illness, and helping them understand that this feels awful right now, but it isn't going to be your entire story. And encouraging them to know that and to also provide space for themselves to get help when they need it.

SPEAKER_00:

So wise. Yeah, so well put. I think the recognition that the extremity won't last forever, and that there's support out there if we seek it and acknowledge that we're worth whatever level of support we need to access at the time are such important distinctions because sometimes, and you see this and I see this, where moms are already carrying so much of the emotional labor of the house, of the neighborhood, like you said, of the whole community, that asking for help feels sometimes like adding one more thing, like I have to find someone who can help. As sometimes it almost feels easier to just keep carrying all of the things by yourself. But that little bit of effort it's gonna take to find the support you need is gonna alleviate so much energy, right?

SPEAKER_02:

It will, but there are people around you who are probably who are sometimes better at finding help than you are. We just don't talk enough. You know, we think, oh, I told one person that needs some help. No, no, you need to tell, text it out to 50 people. You need to go to your church or wherever your faith house is and say, I need help. I had someone call me last week, a gentleman, his wife has severe dementia. He said, He really wanted somebody to help her. I said, Well, have you talked to your pastor to make an announcement and tell a whole bunch of people at one time that you need some help? He called me back the next week. He said, Thank you for that. He said, I have a whole list of people now to do all these things for my wife. But we don't often say it enough and to the right people. Sometimes asking for help is like you're gonna throw it until it sticks. You know, you're just gonna keep throwing them until they stick because you will find that person that hears you and has the resource. And they might not be someone we ever thought of. It might be you told your sister, who told a friend, who told another friend, who said, Oh, I have the exact resource that you need. We cannot give up, we cannot give up on asking and actually excavating the information that we need, because needing help is not a failure. Yeah, needing help is not a failure. I believe that we were created to live in community and families for a reason. Because we're better together.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I agree. I think as we navigate those moments, we alluded to this earlier, but one of the things that I would tell myself when I've been in the thick of really deep struggles, and I'm excavating, the more that I need. I tell myself, like you said, it's not gonna last forever. And also I tell myself that this can be useful for me, right? I can use this experience for myself and other people down the road because this gives me empathy for a whole different group of people. And I think as women, like we alluded to, we naturally care, right? And so if you getting help in this moment, if that means you can help someone else later, sometimes for me that was the motivation I needed. And I know it sounds silly, like I'm gonna take care of myself now so I can help someone else later. But whatever it takes for you to figure out where that inflection point is, where getting the help or making the investment in yourself or really figuring out what it's gonna take to get you through and get that reset for you, whatever that looks like for you is the thing to focus on in those moments, in addition to the fact that it won't last forever.

SPEAKER_02:

You know, it could be a small thing, like I like Starbucks, okay? Don't judge me. Five dollar Starbucks every day over a course of a week is$25. Over the course of a month, I realized I could shift some of those dollars to having somebody do my laundry. So that's what I did. That didn't take a lot, it just made me shift what I was doing to give myself three hours, four hours back a month for myself. You know, that's three or four hours where I might carve out to read a book or to binge on Hallmark, Christmas movies, but whatever it was gonna feed me in that moment. Just shifting and giving myself an okay. You don't have to do laundry every day if you don't want to.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, and it harkens back to what you said earlier about giving yourself the boundaries or giving yourself the setup that you need in different stages of life and recognizing maybe my self-care looks really different right now. You know, maybe the Starbucks is great, but right now the laundry is the thing that's gonna help me out. I know for me, there have been seasons when having somebody to come clean it's been really important. And then maybe that passes and I'm okay, you know, kind of doing it on my own and using those resources elsewhere. But accepting and acknowledging that whatever is supportive for you in that moment is the worthwhile use of those self-care funds.

SPEAKER_02:

My mother didn't do any of those things for herself. She would have, she would never have had a massage, she would never have had anybody do her laundry, she would not have nobody clean for her, you know, because my grandmother was a domestic Lindsay. And so I would think, oh, I couldn't possibly, but then I would say, yes, I can't.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

And you know, it's just about resources, not about saying I'm better and I'm a leader or anything. It's just that I need to find some time for something that I want to do, and I really don't enjoy laundry. If I enjoyed it, that would be one thing, but I don't. I don't mind cleaning. When I was younger, I used to really enjoy it. At this stage of my life, where I'm on my third cycle of being 29, you're like, I don't enjoy it so much.

SPEAKER_00:

I hear that. What are some of the ways we've talked about a lot of them, but are there any more ways that you see women carrying the emotional labor for the people around them that maybe they're not even mindful of?

SPEAKER_02:

I think one of the things women do to themselves that they aren't always aware of, they listen to too much junk. They take on, they let people have a catharsis on them with all their complaints and all of their unhappiness. And I think that is a weight, an emotional weight that we take on. Or we mean to be in the group where there's conversation and there's just complaining. And I think women being selective and what they listen to, who they allow to speak to them, what they take in is one aspect of self-care that we sometimes miss. Sometimes you have to cut people out. You do not have to listen to that. You know, if I heard your complaint about your husband last week, I don't need to hear it again. Every time I talk to you, I don't even know what Bob did. You know, if you're frustrated with your daughter, I want to help you get some help. But I don't need to hear you berate your daughter all day every time I see you. No.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. That speaks to me because I think there was a phase in my life when I felt like that was service and that was helpful. Me constantly listening to everyone else's struggle. And like you're saying, it was the season where I didn't recognize that some of those things weren't going to shift and that I had to be the thing to shift, right? I thought if I listen long enough to this person, she's gonna be able to figure out this thing with her husband. Or if I listen long enough to this person, she's gonna be able to come to the end of the emotion that she's trying to unload. And I realized after a while that I could listen all day long and I would be taking so much of it with me.

SPEAKER_02:

Wasting your time, too. Wasting your time. You can never get that back.

SPEAKER_00:

It would be the same thing the following week or the following time I saw them, and I realized that the change had to be with me because I was waiting for a change that I didn't have control over, and that was actually costing me quite a bit at the time. And I think giving ourselves permission to not engage in those types of situations or to have the boundaries, like you're saying, where that's just not something that we're offering anymore is okay.

SPEAKER_02:

You can say very nicely to someone, you know, Sally, I can really empathize with the challenge you're having. But girl, we talked about that last week. What else would you like to talk about? Or, you know, have you tried the EAP program at your husband's job? Maybe they can help you. But I'm really not a professional, and in off-theaters, I just can't hear that anymore.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

You know, you don't you don't have to be a whipping post for everybody's bad feelings.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. No, it's true. And I think I was just talking to a guest earlier, and we were talking about how sometimes when you're a listener, the stories just find you. And they find you from every which way and from every person. And I think that one of the things that was powerful for me too was recognizing that if I said no, they would find someone else. When I started saying no, or when I started saying I'm not able to do that, or I'm not able to be there for that, or listen to that, there would be someone else they went to, and there really wasn't any negative consequence.

SPEAKER_02:

No, sometimes they come to you first because you said yes first, but if you'd slow down, they'll buy somebody else. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00:

Yep. Nope, that's a good way of putting it. Any other things that you want to point out or like a closing idea you want to leave with listeners about the long-term benefit of this type of self-care. Like you said, 10 years from now, the starting the self-care wherever you are, it's gonna equal what?

SPEAKER_02:

If you start caring for yourself now, it is going to result in the legacy that you are able to leave yourself in terms of having better health energy to be able to fulfill your destiny into the other stages of your life. Because while your mom and you're caring for your kids now, one day they will leave and one day they will have families, and you want your grandchildren to be a part of your life. But what is the legacy? Are you gonna be sick and broke down where they can't spend time with you? Are you gonna be so broke down that you can't do live, fulfill other dreams in your life? So what we do today is going to impact tomorrow. And we don't know all of our own stories. We can't see the future, but we can make space for the future by how we care for ourselves. And remember, your lives are always teaching. You're teaching your family, you're teaching your sisters, you're teaching your children, your neighbors, and most of all, you have to teach yourself how valuable you are, what a gift you are, and the difference that you make in the world. So you've got to take care of that gift, which is you.

SPEAKER_01:

That's so powerful. So, so much wisdom there. Thank you for that.

SPEAKER_00:

In closing, you brought to mind an experience that I had when I was learning this in the thick of having a small child. So trying to figure out self-care with a toddler is tricky, right? And one of the things that I worried about constantly was how this looked different than what I was used to. This wasn't how I envisioned it going. I didn't want to have to need to care for myself in this way, right? Because it took quite a bit of effort. And I stewed over that a lot and I felt selfish and I had to work through a lot of different ideas that I had about self-care in the middle of a very, very busy and a very, very sometimes chaotic time, right? Where with the toddler, you don't always get the sleep you need, and you have to make up for that somewhere else. At the time, it felt like so heartbreaking to me in some moments that my body was failing me in this way. I reflect forward now a decade, right? And I watch my daughter, and I'm gonna get a little teary here because it's what you said about the legacy, but I watch the way that she's able to care for herself without a thought, you know, and the way that she knows that her body needs certain things. And it's not like she knows she can steamroll over those needs, she just knows that her body needs them, and it's a very clear equation for her in a way that it just is so moving to me because that wasn't something that I had. And in the time I thought it was a liability that I was passing on to her, and it's only been in this last little bit that I've realized it's more of a legacy. So I appreciate the way you phrase that because it really rings true to my own experience.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I'm so glad that resonated with you. It's such an important message for all women and all the moms that are listening that you're leaving a legacy. And you know you want to leave a legacy for yourself. As a nurse, I've taken care of many older people. And one of the things that I've always noticed is this sometimes the regret that older people have in not having cared for themselves, of not and not having gone on that trip or that vacation or taken that time. So I tell everyone make the time for yourself, make a list. Intention, a goal without a plan is just a wish. I want every woman out here to set goals, even if it's just to have one vacation, a dream, follow it and make a plan, execute a plan to make that happen for yourself so that the legacy that you leave yourself as well is one that is not one of regret.

SPEAKER_00:

I love that. Well, you have shared so many rich ideas, and it's blessed our audience today and me personally. So thank you so much, Melanie, for being here.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you, Lindsay, for having me.

SPEAKER_00:

Can you share more about where folks can find you? How to connect?

SPEAKER_02:

Yes, they can go to Dr. Melanie Gray, theconfidencecoach.com, and I'm also on LinkedIn, but primarily Dr. Melanie Gray, theconfidencecoach.com.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. Thank you again, Melanie. I've loved our time together today.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you so much, Lindsay. It's been a precious gift for me to be here.

SPEAKER_00:

You've just finished an episode of the Stress Nanny podcast, so hopefully you feel a little more empowered when it comes to dealing with stress. Feel free to take a deep breath and let it out slowly as you go back to your day. I'm so glad you're here. If you're a longtime listener, thank you so much for your support. It really means the world to me. If you're new, I'd love to have you follow the podcast and join me each week. And no matter how long you've been listening, please share this episode with someone who is stressed out. If you enjoyed the show, would you please do me a favor and go to ratethispodcast.com slash the stressmanny and leave a review. The link is in the show notes. I'm so grateful for all my listeners. Thank you again for being here. Until next time.