6 Truths About Making Time for YOU

As a busy mom, there’s so much you dream of doing for yourself and yet every time you think you’re finally going to get to it, something else gets in the way. In this episode, I share a recent struggle I had that exemplifies the challenge EVERY mom faces anytime you wants to steal away and do something for you. Through it all, there are six ultimate truths that you should expect to encounter so they don’t throw you off when (not if) they arise.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

•  How common it is as a mom to feel like you never have time for everything you need (let alone WANT) to do
•  The many ways your brain offers unhelpful thoughts that just make hard situations worse
•  How to talk back to your inner critic so you don’t spiral into harmful mind drama
•  Why it’s so important to uphold your values and priorities, even when that conflicts with what you desire to do—and how to stay in integrity with the identity of the person you aspire to be
•  How moms’ emotional stability and regulation affects everyone else’s in the family

FOR SO MUCH MORE:

Curious to learn more about your body’s four natural energy rhythms? Listen to Episode 10 (“Why Everything Always Feels SO Hard: 2 Culprits You Can’t Ignore”)

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HOMEWORK:

Your homework is to think of the last time you wanted to do something and just couldn't make it happen. Why? Who or what did you blame? How did you feel? Did you let yourself spin out in unhelpful mind drama. What impact did that have on your family? And most importantly, what did you learn from that experience? How can you find that elusive balance between prioritizing yourself & what you love with maintaining your sleep & wellbeing and being the wife & mom you want to be for those you love?

COMING UP NEXT:

Join me back next episode to talk about the greatest gift you can give your kids and why it is sooooo important that you do.

CONNECT WITH AMBER: Website | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn

Ready to finally get to the root of your problems and change your life FOR GOOD? Book your free 60-minute consult to learn more about working 1:1 with Dr. Amber.

Transcript

0:00

Ever intend to do something, especially something you want to do, and then get derailed when the rubber meets the road? This is one of the most common issues moms face, and yet your brain is gifted at making things even worse in the moment. Today, I'm sharing one of my recent struggles that exemplifies this conflict and brings up all the big identity work that I have not only been doing myself, but want to help you with as well. Welcome to More Time for Mom, where overwhelmed moms get science-backed strategies to overcome the hidden sources of stress stealing your time and joy. I'm your host, Dr. Amber Curtis. Ready to make more time for you? Let's dive in. If you're a busy mom who feels like you never have time for the things you want to do, you are not alone and for good reason. You have the best of intentions. You make a plan that seems feasible in the moment. Maybe you even expect it's going to be a challenge and try to solve for that ahead of time. You commit to pushing through and doing what it takes to get done. And yet, sometimes it's still too hard and doesn't happen. You're in a constant moment-by-moment battle, not just with your brain that's often your worst enemy, bringing up doubts and squashing your motivation, but between your desires and your responsibilities, your real-life vocation that inevitably comes first. Some seasons of mom life are easier, at least I hear. But if you've got multiple young kids like I do, things are always unpredictable. The tension is vicious between what you want on one hand and what you have the actual time and energy for on the other. It is so easy to put off the actions you need to take to make traction on your goals. There's always something more urgent and sometimes more genuinely important that needs done. But then you berate yourself for not doing that thing you desire. Every day, your brain is going to offer you all kinds of unhelpful and often harmful thoughts about how you use your time and how it's never enough and how far out of reach your dreams are because you feel like you're never making a dent. I am here to normalize that inner dialogue and give you some practical tools to talk back to your brain when you're struggling. I want to help you stay in alignment with your values by making time for what you love without sacrificing your dedication to your primary vocation as a wife and mom. I want to help you love and honor yourself throughout, not demean and criticize yourself for struggling to stay consistent. Here's a really silly, personal example. You would not believe the mind drama I went through this past week over something that is so small in reality but felt so huge in the moment. Now, I bet you didn't even notice, but I was two and a half days late releasing last week's podcast episode. and oh, the way my mind wanted to beat myself up about it. There are so many valuable lessons to extract here, and I want to break it down for you because this isn't about a podcast episode. It's about any time you, as a mom, have an intention and desire to do something but then get derailed. Here's the backstory. As you might know, having a podcast was a dream on my heart for years. When I finally launched it a month and a half ago, I went in eyes open about how crucial it is to be consistent so that you, my listeners, can depend on valuable new episodes being there every Tuesday at 5 a.m. Eastern. I made a commitment that I would keep that schedule, and because I want us to develop trust and rapport with each other. It means so much to me that you are here, and I so desire to be a dependable source of help and encouragement. Side note, I have a running list of over 98 and growing different topics I want to record episodes on, and you can already tell I like to talk. So there's no shortage of things I want to say on this podcast. Like anything busy moms want to do, it's more a matter of making time to do it. Notice I said making time, not finding time. We have to make time for what brings us joy, which is what I was successfully able to do with this podcast until a week ago. So many factors played into it. One was that the week before that, my husband was out of town and I was solo parenting our four boys, which went surprisingly smoothly, except of course meant I had significantly less time and energy to devote to work because I was on kid duty 24-7. I didn't love that I was pushing recording a podcast episode off, but in the back of my mind, I was sure I would get to it Monday before it was supposed to go live on Tuesday. Except things got hectic when my husband got home late Saturday, Sunday was Father's Day, and a lot of other things necessarily got pushed off till Monday. One of them was advertising a big masterclass I was running that Wednesday. So in my limited work time on Monday, when a babysitter was covering the kids, I needed to focus on that because it was more urgent. We'll come back to that urgent versus important discussion later. Monday evening, my intention was to record the podcast once my littlest went to bed, but I wanted to go on a nice long walk with him and my husband, and that pushed his bedtime later than usual. The later it got, the more antsy and cranky I was getting. And I know this about myself. I love raising awareness of your body's four natural energy rhythms, one of which is your circadian rhythm. My sleep chronotype is such that my peak performance windows are in the early to mid morning. The more the day goes on, I'm like a battery that's been drained all the way down and is no good until it gets recharged. Even thinking I was going to record a podcast episode late in the evening was already violating my natural energy rhythms and was an uphill battle to start. My husband very sweetly took over the 3-year-old's bedtime routine, so I started directing my 7, 10, and 11-year-old sons to get themselves ready for bed. But they were completely absorbed in their tablets and not going to do what they needed to do without direction and oversight. I mean, why should they, right? They're kids. Even us adults don't often do things unless someone or something is holding our feet to the fire. So I do find that the more I just expect my kids to push back, the better things are. But in this instance, with every minute that went by, I could feel my body getting more tense and stressed. All I wanted was to do what I wanted to do. Inside, my nervous system was throwing a temper tantrum because I wasn't getting to do that and it was feeling so far away. Here's the crazy thing, which really isn't that crazy at all. If you are a mom, I know you've experienced this before, even if you haven't been cognizant of it. The more you know about how the nervous system works, the more you too will come to expect this exact thing to happen. But the more frazzled I got about the situation, the more desperate and graspy I became, wanting to escape to my office and delve into my podcast, the more resistant and needy my kids became. Everything became a battle. I started to feel that urge to raise my voice and, you know, yell at the kids, and I was trying so hard not to do that. Meanwhile, the clock kept ticking from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. to close to 10 p.m. Finally, I let it go. I had to really coach myself through the moment, but I was well aware of the added stress my situation had brought into our home. Rather than be frustrated and blame or play the victim like my brain wanted to do, I reminded myself of my very legitimate reasons for not getting the episode done sooner and the choices I had made of how to use my available time for other things well before this podcast got so last minute. Most importantly, another one of the many hard things I have learned the hard way over the years is that nothing works if you don't work, so nothing is worth sabotaging your sleep if you can help it. As a busy mom, sleep is so hard to come by as it is. So often, nighttime or early, early morning feel like the only times you get for yourself. But all the more in perimenopause, sleep is crucial for your mental and physical health. As important as this podcast and you are to me, sleep needed to take precedence. What was crazy was how once I made that mental shift and reconciled myself to the reality that I was just not going to get the podcast out on time, everything improved. My body relaxed. My kids settled down and finally went to sleep. I was exhausted, more from the mental gymnastics than anything. The next day, Tuesday, I woke up feeling tired and, as my husband and I often call it, dead in the water because Tuesdays in the summer are a designated mom and kids day where I don't work. and strive to spend special time doing something fun and out of the ordinary with my kids. I was so tempted to cancel my plans to take my kids to the movies, which they would have been fine with because they love just hanging out with neighbor friends instead. But I knew that wouldn't make me feel good in my soul because it wouldn't be being the mom I aspire to be. If I say one of my top values is family first, I have to keep my word and follow through with that, uncomfortable as it can feel when I'm behind on something work-related. I had a really great time with my kids at the movies, but the whole time my brain was offering me thoughts like, You're totally letting your podcast listeners down. You didn't keep your word to release a new episode every Tuesday. Shame on you. And your podcast is never going to be successful now. Whether those are true or not, they just made me feel worse and would have robbed me of more mental and physical energy, crowding out my ability to be present with my kids, if I didn't have the skills and tools that I do to coach myself through it. I had to work really hard to remind myself that this was probably bound to happen sometime. Better to get the first hiccup out of the way now before the stakes feel even higher. I am in control and intentionally choosing what I am every moment. No one was making me do this and I could have made a different choice if I felt it really mattered more. Nothing is more important than taking care of myself and my family. trusting that my ideal listeners will be thrilled to hear from me whenever I get a new episode out, even if it's not exactly 5 a.m. on Tuesdays, and reminding myself that this struggle isn't unique to me, but rather something all moms wrestle with, which is why I'm dedicating this whole episode to talking about it. Wednesday was also a zoo for me with other work commitments, so it wasn't until Thursday that I finally got a chance to record and edit the podcast episode. And you know what? I hated it. I so didn't love the way it came out. It felt forced, rough to listen to, Just off. I don't know if that came through the airwaves, and you felt that too if you listened to it, but my brain wanted to start over and re-record it. It even offered me the thought, you should just quit the podcast altogether, you're clearly no good at it. Have you ever had those kinds of thoughts about something you care about? Seriously, whose voice is that? Maybe it's our inner critic. Maybe it's more than that. Either way, I purposely chose to go ahead and release the episode as it was and just trust that whoever needs its message will appreciate it and that I've got plenty of future opportunities to do things better and, quote, get it right. Why am I rambling on about this? It's because I know you have goals, dreams on your heart, things you aspire to do for you. Because of that, here are five truths we all run into. Truth number one, things are never going to be easy or perfect. Do them anyway. But truth number two, know which fights are and are not worth fighting. You can do anything if you want it badly enough. But in the same breath, at what cost are you willing to go for it? You want to find that Goldilocks balance of pushing yourself to do hard things, but not killing yourself in the process. Your mental and physical health must come first. Trust me, voice of experience here. Truth number three, sometimes what you want to do will conflict with a higher value you have. And you have to choose in that moment. Always choose to stay in integrity with the person you want to be. Again, I hate that I let you down. But for me, that meant choosing sleep and family. And I hope you can appreciate that. Truth number four, it's only a matter of when, not if, you fall off track. The key is to get back on the bandwagon as quickly as you can and not make it mean more than it does. I was late getting the podcast out one week. The probability that I will be late again sometime in the future is not zero. It's possible. At the same time, I have renewed my commitment to being on time and batching a bunch of episodes early so I have plenty of content to pull out as needed if I'm not able to record in the moment. That leads to truth number five, which is the never-ending message of this podcast. Nothing you do or don't do changes how wonderful and worthy you are. As a recovering perfectionist and people pleaser who was brought up to believe I had to earn love and belonging by performing and achieving and keeping other people happy, I still have to repeat that to myself all the time, which is why I'm so passionate about reminding you as well. Let me quickly add a sixth truth that I didn't think of until just now, which is that, like it or not, you are the emotional regulator of your household. Everyone else's emotions really revolve around you as the stable rock and foundation. It's such a blessing because you know the nuances of all your family members and you know how to handle each of their feelings in their respective ways, but it means you then have to be that much more mindful when you start to get dysregulated because it is going to throw everyone else into dysregulation too. For example, The more you ache to get away and do something for you, the more resistance you will face from your kids. It's like a law of nature. Again, this is just one example. For me, it was the struggle to record a podcast episode. For you, it may be wanting to find time to work out, to take a bath, to go out with a friend, to have uninterrupted reading time, or even just to go to bed. Whatever it is, I don't want you to get discouraged. There are going to be times when it doesn't happen. But don't make that mean anything about you or your future success. Just keep coming back and trying again until you finally do get to do it. Your homework for today is to think of the last time you wanted to do something and just couldn't make it happen. Why? Who or what did you blame? How did you feel? Did you let yourself spin out in unhelpful mind drama? What impact did that have on your family? And most importantly, what did you learn from that experience? How can you find that elusive balance between prioritizing yourself and what you love with maintaining your sleep and well-being and being the wife and mom you want to be for those you love? Email me through the link in the show notes or DM me at solutionsforsimplicity on Instagram and let me know one thing you want more time for. I am here cheering you on every step of the way. Join me back next episode to talk about the greatest gift you can give your kids and why. It is so not what you think and I can't wait to open your eyes to why it's so important. Until then, remember nothing you do changes how wonderful and worthy you are. Have a great day.