More Time for Mom

6 Hidden Sources of Stress (& How to FIX Them)

• Dr. Amber Curtis • Episode 57

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You already know mom life is stressful. What you DON’T know are the real underlying reasons why. It’s not just the kids, the house, your job, your marriage, your to-do list. It’s the subtle ways your brain tries to sabotage you through six hidden factors: decision fatigue, procrastination, the planning fallacy, inefficiency, ineffectiveness, and overwhelm.

In this episode, I break down each of these six hidden sources of stress, where they really come from, and (most importantly) how to FIX them. Punchline? What you think is the problem is merely the symptom. Each of these six stressors is coming from something way deeper.

 

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

  • How decision fatigue drains your energy before you ever get a chance to be productive.
  • Procrastination isn’t laziness; it’s emotional avoidance.
  • Overestimating what you can do in the short-term while underestimating your long-term potential keeps you miserable.
  • Ineffectiveness comes from working against your body’s natural energy rhythms.
  • Overwhelm is rooted in tying your worth to others’ perceptions and feeling a constant need to earn your worth.
  • My signature “5 Ds” prioritization method to cut through the noise and clarify what really MATTERS most.

 

FOR SO MUCH MORE:

  

HOMEWORK:

Share which of the six hidden stressors resonated with you most via email through the link in the show notes or DM me on Instagram @solutionsforsimplicity. 

 

COMING UP NEXT:

Join me back next Tuesday at 5am Eastern to keep unpacking the hidden sources of stress stealing your time and joy.

Loving this podcast? Please help it get found by more listeners by taking quick minute to leave a rating & review in Apple Podcasts. Take a screenshot of your text review before you submit it, then email that to help@solutionsforsimplicity.com and I'll send you my powerful Happy Mom Protocol™ (a $297 value) FOR FREE!


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.

not choosing is a form of choice. It keeps us stuck and it wastes our time and then we are stressed out. So we're like stressed on all ends of the spectrum. Stressed making the decision, stressed because we haven't made a decision, and then stressed with the decision that we make. 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 are a long-time listener of this show, you know I love going deep, uncovering all the ways your childhood wounds and nervous system patterning are at the root of everything you do, especially how you show up as a wife and mom. This work is so, so important because your emotional repair and regulation is what is going to determine your kids' future well-being. But today, I wanted to step back and share something a little lighter, more tangible, maybe more easy to digest, which is six common things stressing moms out for reasons they're not even aware of, meaning you know these things are stressful. What you don't know is why they keep happening, where they really come from, and how to fix them. I delve into all that. In this presentation, I had the honor of giving to a group of amazing, ambitious, high-achieving moms last week. I am confident in a second, but I did not set out to become a stress expert. I really have struggled hard to balance all of the things, especially family and other life demands, And so for many, many years, I couldn't figure out what was wrong with me, why there was never time for it all, why I was always so exhausted, why it never felt like enough. And I have spent many, many years then trying to get to the root of that. And the common denominator is always that so much of life stresses us out. We'll go through some of the big things that I know you know, but as you are working to juggle your family demands and just prioritize yourself and your own happiness, I want to equip you with a lot of mindset hacks and also tactical tools to combat the hidden sources of stress that steal our time and our joy. We are going to run through what stress is, but I want to especially offer that it's not as bad as we have been led to believe. I really want to get you more comfortable with the idea of stress and then not have the mind drama that we tend to go through when we get stressed out so we can get out of our stress spirals faster and get back to being happy and productive. So to do that, we will unpack six hidden sources of stress, their root causes, what you can actually do to resolve them. I will talk in more detail about my signature prioritization method that is really key for time management and how to figure out exactly where to start when you are bombarded by more to do than time to do it. A little background about me. I am a certified life coach. I'm also a certified neurosomatic practitioner, which is fancy language for saying I specialize in helping you understand how your brain and your body work. particularly under stress, under perceived threat, and how your nervous system is at the root of everything. I'm really grateful that we are living in a day and age where so much more attention is being drawn to this, but the truth is that our nervous system is governing everything about our life experience. And when you know how to work with that and to harness the power of your emotional regulation, amazing things can happen. You can focus. You can get work done. You can enjoy doing everything that you do. But conversely, when you don't understand your nervous system and you let it stress you out, then we always fall into these traps that sabotage our happiness and they definitely sabotage our relationships. So I build on decades of work as a behavioral science professor, again, specializing in neuroscience and psychology. I have four little kids, 12 and under. I am no stranger to stress. The motivation for becoming a life coach was that I actually ended up suicidal several years ago from the stress of trying to do it all and feeling like I was a failure. I sincerely hope no one has ever been in that dark place. But looking back, I can now see how so many little stressors piled up and played on my brain's past programming to trigger this massive life crisis. And if I can prevent that for any other woman, that is absolutely my mission. We are all dealing with stress and stress is not going anywhere. I think a lot of experts and gurus out there make us think that we can just live this zen life and nothing will bother us and we'll never get triggered. I'm here to tell you that biologically that is never going to happen. You are programmed to get stressed out and for good reason. Everybody is dealing with something. So, with that as a given. You also are needing to still show up and perform and not just like slide by and do okay. You want to thrive. You want to maximize your time for who and what you love and you want to be really good at your job so that you can free up your family financially and have time and money to go do the things you want to do. I want to help you harness your stress so that it doesn't sabotage you. Let's define stress. Stress is a state of worry or tension caused by a difficult situation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. More importantly, I want you to think about what stress feels like in your body. A lot of times, we busy, high-achieving women are quick to dismiss the physical sensations that come up. You probably have a whole train of thoughts that run through your mind at any given time. You might have trouble sleeping. You might have tightness in your chest or butterflies or discomfort in your stomach. You are not alone. Stress manifests itself in so many ways, but it is truly what your brain was designed for. Our nervous system, comprised of our brain, spinal cord, and the nerves all throughout the rest of our body, their entire purpose is to detect threat and then to keep us safe, make sure that we're not at risk of losing our physical life or being socially outcast from our tribe, Our brain wants to conserve energy, and our brain is wired to seek pleasure and avoid discomfort. It's never going to feel good to be in a challenging situation or confronted with something where we feel at risk. And yet, this is an everyday part of life. There is a lot of attention that can be paid to big stressors, which we will talk about in a second. But I also want us to think about how stress could be a really positive thing. We naturally resist it. But you also know that amazing things are formed under heat and pressure. Things like diamonds. Diamonds only occur after the carbon has been compressed for centuries in hard rock. The most exquisite meal has taken a lot of time and heat to prepare. A lot of slicing and dicing and sizzling and all the things, but pretty worth it. And then, of course, these gorgeous sculptures have been chiseled away from blocks of marble or stone. And that, if stone could talk, right, probably didn't feel good in the process. But the end result can still be beautiful. I don't want us to fear stress. I want us to embrace it. I want us to see stress as an invitation for growth and resilience. Some things we are willing to experience. Others we naturally resist. I want to introduce you to a concept called anti-fragility. It's not the easiest to say or the most intuitive at face value, but there has been a lot of research into natural phenomena where stress or pressure is applied and something doesn't just bounce back and get restored to the status quo. It is actually made better and stronger in that stress process. And I want to offer that this can be our goal. That we CAN have a mindset of chasing stress, but not fearing it and not pushing it away, I want to help you know how to work with your brain and body so that you can take those big boulders up the mountain and it doesn't feel like as big of a deal. So identifying your stressors and your default stress response is key for overcoming stress in your life. What are some of these stressors? You know the big ones. Any kind of major life change is naturally threatening to our brain because it's new and different as opposed to familiar and well-known. Becoming a parent. Getting married or getting divorced. Any kind of international or national political issue. Economic crises. Losing loved ones. Pressure at work. Even something like being stuck in traffic or having someone be rude to you on the road. Those all evoke a natural stress response in your body. And again, that response is totally normal and just your brain doing its job. You are aware of all the big, well-known stressors. I want to introduce you to some hidden things that are surely operating in the background and we want to help resolve or minimize so that they're not adding to the amount of stress that you feel. So yes, stress is normal, and we want to embrace it. But of course, we don't want stress to take us by surprise. If you let these six hidden stressors run your life without being aware of it, your capacity to handle stress is going to be so much lower than it otherwise would. And something like getting cut off in traffic, let alone a loved one getting a cancer diagnosis, those are going to send you over the edge. When you can minimize these hidden stressors or eliminate them all together, you're much less phased. First hidden stressor is decision fatigue, where we have way too many choices. Our brains are making thousands of decisions a day, and it is stressful to spend cognitive energy on making choice after choice after choice. The more choices we are forced to make, the more the quality of our decisions deteriorates. So we just know that at a certain point, you're not going to have the capacity to think well or use the best parts of your brain because it's too stressed out from making too many decisions. I couldn't believe this number when I first came across it, but study after study shows that the average human makes around 30-40,000 decisions a day from the moment you wake up. Are you going to get up with the alarm or are you going to hit snooze? Are you going to put your slippers on or walk barefoot? Are you going to use the bathroom first or after you go to your toddler, you know, screaming from their room? We are just bombarded by decision after decision after decision. And we don't think about many of them. But research underscores that the more choices you have, the longer any one choice takes to make. We get paralyzed by having too many options, and we end up regretting our choices and then spending all this mental energy worrying about past decisions that are already done and out of our control. If you ever wake up ruminating about something you said in a previous conversation or whether you should have decided something different to resolve a conflict. Maybe you were having a disagreement with your spouse and you handled it one way but you now think you should have handled it another. We all tend to overthink and this stresses us out. I'm not here to point fingers or shame in any way. I want you to understand how natural this is and that beneath every stressor, every cause of stress actually has a root cause that is driving the show. Something that your nervous system feels is at stake. So when it comes to decision fatigue, the real fear is that we will make the wrong choice and the subconscious belief driving the show is that we have been led to think there is only one right way to do life. We want to break free of that. We want you to get comfortable making a choice, even if you later come to wish you had made a different choice, because you can always change course. We also want you to be very crystal clear on your values up front so that you make as informed a choice as possible going into the situation, and then you're less likely to need time to think about it or to regret the decision later. A key practical tip is to get very clear on your personal values and priorities as an automatic filter for what you will decide and how. We can also automate tons of decisions through habit and routine. You're well aware that Steve Jobs, the famous founder of Apple, and even Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Meta, they wear, wore the same thing day after day after day, because they didn't want to waste any brainpower wondering, does this outfit go, right? Not that guys probably worry about that so much, but they were saving brain space for much more important decisions by wearing the same thing day after day. This is why meal planning can be so helpful, because you don't have to think about what's for dinner in the moment. You can also turn to trusted sources to help you make decisions. It's not that you aren't capable of making great, effective ones yourself, but sometimes we can defer to others' trusted judgments, and at a minimum, I want us to be aware that there's no wrong decision in most cases. Nothing huge is at stake. There's little in life that is fully irreversible. And we actually run a greater risk by letting ourselves stay stuck in analysis paralysis because not choosing is a form of choice. It keeps us stuck, and it wastes our time, and then we are stressed out. So we're like stressed on all ends of the spectrum. Stressed making the decision, stressed because we haven't made a decision, and then stressed with the decision that we make. Let's try and cut that out. Hidden stressor number two is our good old friend, procrastination. None of us procrastinates, right? I'm sure we are all right on time, meet every deadline. That is not my life. And I've seen in years of working one-on-one with clients that women tend to berate themselves for procrastinating. Procrastination is like a credit card. It's a lot of fun until you get the bill. We are all pushing projects down the road thinking, I'll do it later, I'll do it later. Maybe we even have good reason why we can't get to that thing yet. But at some point, the deadline approaches and it feels terrible in your body to be flooded with the cortisol and adrenaline and the fear of not getting the task completed or letting other people down. Even if it gets done, it takes a physical toll on us to wait till the last minute. We know that procrastination is really rooted in self-sabotage. We don't intend to do this to ourselves, but our brain is always seeking pleasure. We want the dopamine hit of something that feels more fun and immediate or rewarding in the moment than whatever it is we're procrastinating on, so we naturally choose the fun, easy thing over the big work that we're supposed to be doing. It's not a time management problem, however. Procrastination, despite what many time management or productivity gurus will tell you, is not ultimately a bad thing or even related to your thoughts of time. It really has much deeper roots in big underlying emotions that you might not even realize you are having. Here's the root cause. We procrastinate either because of fear. We're afraid of missing out on something more fun in the moment. We're afraid of disappointing people and we've attached such high stakes to what we're working on that we're like paralyzed because we don't want to get it wrong. And our brain somehow thinks that if we just wait and wait, we'll figure it out. But oftentimes we're also afraid of success. Sometimes we're afraid of what doing this thing is going to mean, and what it will then require of us, or how it will change us, or it might change other people's opinions of us. I want to offer that procrastination is, again, at the root, about our body not being able to tolerate discomfort and fearing that whatever it is we're supposed to do is of so much value that doing it wrong is going to affect our life in such a negative way that we can't even bear to get started. It's very counterintuitive and backwards, but a real big problem. The solutions are to really learn to validate your own emotions. Call out what you are feeling and why you are wanting to procrastinate. We definitely can work to change your identity as someone that is a procrastinator to someone that is using your time for what you believe is the most important in the moment. And we need to work on strengthening our skill of delayed gratification. None of us likes this. Your kids hate it, right? All of us want what we want yesterday. We just want the good things. But there is so much reward when we are willing to hold discomfort and focus and push through anyway. So how can we do that, right? What's going to make you more likely to tolerate the discomfort? Well, definitely having a coach or a support system, having a buddy that is in the trenches with you. You can use all kinds of gamification through apps or reward charts. It's never a motivation problem, but it's really kind of that lack of self-discipline that is rooted in big, fearful emotions. We can overcome that with some of these little things. I also want to offer, then, that as I've gotten older and Theoretically wiser, I now procrastinate on purpose. I don't see procrastination as a huge problem like I used to, and I certainly don't kick myself for waiting until the last minute. I have actually used procrastination as an intentional strategy to make sure that I'm not wasting more time on a task than I can afford to spend on it. Maybe when you were in college, you had this experience of needing to write a paper and you could have spent all term working on that project and revising it and perfecting it. Or it might have been the night before and you had no choice but to stay up late and crank it out. It's not that one option is normatively better than the other. It's about what matters to you and how you feel during the process. So you can procrastinate, meaning wait until the last minute, but then not stress and be flooded with cortisol. you can just choose ahead of time. The time that you want to spend on this project, estimate how long you think it's going to take, and then schedule that in, that amount of time before the deadline, so that you're not letting the task expand and take more time than it should. Things will take as long as we let them. If you have one appointment for the day, you will spend all day thinking about that appointment and not getting to all of the other things you need to do. But if you schedule out your whole day, you will do all of the things and still make it to each appointment. Number three is things taking too long. We are notorious for underestimating how long something is actually going to take to complete. So we underestimate what we are capable of over the course of our life, but we very much overestimate how much we can do in a short time. This is called the planning fallacy. It leads to overcommitting, booking ourselves up, and then not being able to get everything done. We fall behind, things fall through the cracks, people have negative opinions of us, and it feels like the world is crashing down. So we want to overcome this, right? We want to have a more accurate and realistic assessment of how much time and energy something is going to take before we commit to it and certainly when we are scheduling out our day. The way we do this is by addressing the root cause, not just our natural tendency to underestimate the time, but to recognize that when we want things to be perfect and when we are trying so hard to prove ourselves, When we subconsciously believe that our worth is rooted in our performance or in other people's opinions of us, then we will always overcommit and take on more than is humanly possible out of this beautiful desire to make everyone happy and prove ourself. but it totally backfires. This was me for sure. If you would consider yourself someone that is a high-functioning or over-functioning achiever, it's a beautiful thing, but it also causes a lot of psychological and physical damage to us that very much catches up with us over time. So how can we overcome this? There is a lot we can do to get to the root of your perfectionism and help you solidify your worth apart from what you do. However, in a tactical way, you can purposely under-plan and really make sure that you are only taking on a certain number of tasks or working within certain hours you set those guardrails You can definitely lower your expectations so that you're just getting things done. You're not making them 100% perfect every single time. We can get things off our plate by asking other people to do them. And I know this is really, really uncomfortable for us perfectionists that want things done our way. But I want to remind us that we never have a capability problem. We've got to differentiate between what you are able to do what you could do if time, energy, money were no issue, you are infinitely capable. You could do anything. You could learn anything. You could physically perform in any way. There is always capability accessible to you. But our capacity to do any number of things varies through life seasons, and with how full our cup is already. We've got to be so gentle with ourselves that we could do everything, but we also shouldn't because we want to be able to devote the best part of ourselves to what matters most. And there is no shame in honoring your capacity, which naturally fluctuates across times of the day, month, year, and certainly your life seasons, if you've got young kids or caregiving for elderly parents or whatever else. You already know that you just can't do what you otherwise could. And that's okay, but we gotta be realistic about it so we're not expecting to do more than we can, and then we stress out about it. Hidden stressor number four is that we are just not efficient with the time that we have. This is our good old friend multitasking, the illusion that we can get lots of things done at once. To do two things at once is to do neither. All of these brain scans definitely prove that there is no such thing as multitasking. What gives the appearance of doing so is actually the brain sequentially processing one thing and then another very, very rapidly. So this kind of broke my heart. I used to pride myself on my ability to multitask. And I would argue that as a mother, oh my goodness, like you have to hear what your kids are saying while you're thinking of the order you need to place for groceries, while you are changing the laundry out or whatever else, right? You're doing a lot of things at once. But we are also just never going to be our most efficient selves when that is our mode of operation. We also all get distracted with shiny object syndrome. We so inevitably abandon one thing in favor of something brighter, more sparkly, more appealing, more fun, more easy, more dopamine giving. We sabotage ourselves, but we want to be efficient so we don't stress ourselves out. all kinds of harmful effects and ramifications from inefficiency and multitasking. Namely, we are just unproductive, disorganized, and again, people are always going to make their opinions of us based on how they think we are showing up. It's not that we need to care about other people's opinions, but we don't want to let other people's opinions stress you out and so you want to be in integrity with the person you know you are capable of being. The root cause of multitasking and inefficiency is that our brain has this deficit in attention span. Research is crazy and it underscores that we humans now, in the age of TikTok and YouTube shorts and Instagram reels and all the flashy things, We have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. You've got a lot going on. You've got lots of irons in the fire. And this is all just evidence that our brain loves the new hit of something that we can give our attention to. It is uncomfortable for our brain to follow something through from start to finish. We have to overcome that, and we absolutely can. We can set our environment up to help us focus on one thing at a time. All kinds of techniques to do this. Of course, turning off notifications, eliminating distractions, getting a brick so that you don't have Wi-Fi access or something that's going to make you want to scroll. We can also be intentional about communicating to others when we will or will not be available so that they are not reaching out to us in those moments. This is both a self and a social problem. So I just want to normalize it, but I also want us to be building this muscle of tolerating discomfort. It's uncomfortable to focus on one thing more than seven seconds at a time. If your brain has wandered tonight during my talk, if I'm droning on and on and you're wanting to check your phone or you're, again, switching tabs, I get it. You are normal. There's a lot more fun things out there. But when you focus, and you show your brain that you can concentrate and see something through from start to finish, you will get an even bigger hit of dopamine and start to get hooked on that kind of productivity. Hidden stressor number five is similar but different. It is ineffectiveness, meaning that you are focusing, you are doing work, but you're not actually hitting the mark. You're not hitting the target that you need to. We need to be devoting our precious time and energy to where we can actually make a difference. Ineffectiveness is having surprisingly little to show for your time and effort. If you have ever worked 8 hours and then wondered, what did I do? Even when the kids were napping and you wanted to use that time so effectively, your brain was probably offering you all these different things that you could do in that little window And then you might have felt really disappointed that you didn't make big progress on anything because you did a little of this and a little of that and then you got diverted. And we all do this. But when we are not hitting the mark, our performance suffers. We get very stressed because we still have the work to do. We were working, but we didn't actually accomplish anything. So more work remains, which is super depressing. And then everything feels so much harder than it needs to. The root cause is hopefully going to blow your mind a little bit. And this is one of my most favorite things to work with women on. Did you know that your body has 5 different natural physiological energy rhythms that are operating on you at all times? You have surely heard of your circadian rhythm. Maybe you're more of a morning person or a night owl. But there are many others, not the least of which is our female menstrual cycle and how that hormonal fluctuation affects our productivity. There are so many others as well, multiple that operate each day, some that shift with the seasons of the year. The punchline is that each of us is unique. How these energy rhythms operate within us is both unique but predictable. And I want to help you figure out your peak performance windows where you naturally have the most amount of physical and mental energy so that you feel like superwoman. You are literally able to do more than feels humanly possible. Everything is effortless. You're getting so much done. You're in the zone. And then it's not taking a lot of time, let alone effort. Conversely, when you are out of alignment with your peak performance windows, you're on what I call the struggle bus. You are swimming upstream and banging your head against that wall, feeling like you should have something to show for your time, and you just couldn't get it done. It just wasn't happening. Your brain couldn't think. You couldn't physically perform. There is a real, natural explanation. While so many women are down on themselves and mean to themselves because of their ineffectiveness, I'm here to tell you that 99% of the time, there is a natural physiological reason why, and you can totally learn to plan your life around this. Your physical mental abilities naturally fluctuate every day, week, month, and season. So the solutions are to pre-identify what these windows are and then use that knowledge to cycle sync. I would love to work with you on this, a lot there. But when you know your peak performance windows, you can purposely plan what tasks to tackle or avoid at different times. And then you are super effective, and it feels easy. And the more easy things are, the more fun and rewarding they feel, and the more likely we are to stay motivated to keep doing things. Plus, you're going to give yourself so much more grace when you are struggling. You're going to know it's not your fault. Finally, one last hidden stressor that I know every single one of us here is familiar with. Our good old friend overwhelm. Life is a matter of choices, and every choice we make makes us. So, we want to get clear on our priorities so that we are not prey to overwhelm. If we are crystal clear on what matters, then all the other things vying for our attention don't have to overwhelm us because they literally don't matter. Overwhelm is defined as feeling buried or drowning beneath a huge mass. And I like to define it as that frenetic feeling in your brain and body of having more to do than time to do it. Everything just feels impossible. You don't know how you're going to get it done. You don't know how it's going to come together. And you do know it's just going to feel terrible until it is finished. That is, of course, overwhelming. And none of us wants or should have to feel that in our bodies. Overwhelm leads to feeling defeated before we even start, and it definitely plays into procrastination. It leads to some paralysis of having, again, too many choices of too many things to do. So do we do X or Y or Z or whatever? Again, doing a little bit at a time, and so then we're inefficient and overall just feeling pulled in a million directions. Here's the root cause. It goes back to big nervous system patterns that are governing your life without you probably even being aware of it. When I realized this for myself, It's just completely changed my life and now I can't unsee it in all the other women I work with. When we feel overwhelmed, it is because we are tying our worth to other people's opinions of us and we so desire to make everyone else happy and give and give and give of ourselves that we don't feel we have the right or the ability to set and maintain boundaries. We also are not clear on what really matters to us, so we let the world and everyone else that we love tell us what should matter. We're spilling ourselves out in every direction without ever feeling fulfilled. So we do need to get comfortable saying no. And yet, I want you to get very comfortable saying yes to yourself. and really owning your right to set boundaries and to enjoy your life. That you making time for you and what brings you joy is going to do so much more for your marriage and your family than you being a martyr and giving and giving and giving of yourself until you have nothing left. This was again what I had to learn the very hard way with my dark journey and getting suicidal. I was trying so hard to be everything to everyone that I wasn't taking care of myself and then I was no good for anybody. And it was really scary, not just for me, but for my husband and my kids. It didn't have to be that way. It's certainly not as extreme for you, but a lot of women I work with were never led to believe that they can say no. They always had to be the responsible one, the peacemaker, the one that was stepping up and fixing other people's problems, the one that was taking on responsibilities that a parent couldn't do or fulfill. There are so many layers of this, but it definitely all comes from tying our worth to our productivity and again to other people's judgments or validation of our achievements. We want to break free of that. We want to be so secure. in who we are and our unchanging innate self-worth that it doesn't matter what we do, it doesn't matter what we don't do, nothing changes how wonderful and worthy you are. So then what you do do is always coming from love and service, not this subconscious trying to prove yourself or make other people like you. We need to change how we prioritize rest and actually see rest as the most productive thing we can do. I'm going to offer you a special method of how you can organize and prioritize the many, many tasks competing for your attention at any given time. the 5 D's formula. This is my signature prioritization method that is a series of questions so you can take your to-do list and then effectively discern exactly where to start and in what order to cross things off so that you stay aligned with your priorities and your well-being. First thing, For every task, ask yourself, does this thing have to be done? Like, at all, does this really have to be done? My brain, still to this day, immediately says, yes, of course, right? If it's on the list, it has to be done. If it's a possibility, I want to do it. But that is not the truth. And we need to get very brutal with ourselves. Maybe things are on our list that other people have told us we should want or we should do. If it's not something that really resonates with you personally, maybe this is an invitation to set some boundaries. Get it off your list by dropping it. If you can't drop it and it does have to be done, ask yourself for every task. OK, but does this have to be done right this minute? Is this a necessity right now? If not, let's defer it. Tuck it away. Make a note to come back and revisit it next week, next month, next year. And you will soon see that a lot of things that can get pushed off end up not being that important and then maybe didn't even need to be on the list at all. Something that you were attracted to in one week and thought were so important in one moment could be deferred and then later loses its appeal and is no longer needed. Great. If it is, then you can revisit it and bring it back in the future when you do have more time and energy for it. If it has to be done and has to be done now, third question, third D is, does this have to be done by you? I know your brain is immediately saying yes. We, high-achieving women, hate to delegate. We hate to delegate, right? However, many times someone else is the more appropriate person for the job. We can absolutely free up our time and energy. Maybe there is a cost involved, but not always. I think the real trick is that we need to coach our brains around letting other people do the thing their way instead of our way. I've had to really overcome this with things like getting my kids to help with unloading the dishwasher and laundry or all the things, right? And even the bedtime routine of like, oh, I want to do it this way. My husband has a whole different style. It's OK. It still gets done. And look what it's freeing up my time and energy for, right? So if it has to be done now by you, fourth question is, does this task have to be done to the very best of your ability? If you would label yourself a perfectionist or, again, a high attention to detail, really want to get it right kind of person, That is so amazing. That trait has surely served you well. You were a star student. You've got, you know, lots of achievements and people rely on you. They love your excellence. But there are a lot of ways that our excellence actually hinders us and adds stress to our life. Many tasks, easily 3 quarters if not 90% of the things on our to-do list, just need to get done. They don't have to be done at 500% of our capacity. So, the solution would be to dumb them down. Just let done be good enough, good is better than perfect, cross it off, keep it simple, and move on. This is hands down the biggest practical difference or advice that has changed my life in terms of how I am able to do so many different things and still do them very well, but figure out what doesn't need to be done the most well and get it done quickly and simply instead of letting my brain tell me all these extra steps that take so much longer. Finally, everything that is still left on your list would be something that you want to do well. And these are the things that you know require your best attention and energy and are of the utmost importance. You're going to prioritize those things. That's what you're going to start in on when you have time to work. Like, how can you dumb down certain things so that you can prioritize? Not everything requires our perfect attention, we want to get very crystal clear on what does and prioritize those, and then we will feel so good about ourselves for what we have accomplished that we are a lot less stressed by anything that didn't happen. Everyone probably can see that I am a crazy person about this. I love helping you understand stress, understand your nervous system and your brain. And if you are interested, I want to offer you a free quiz that guides you through figuring out your personal default stress response. There are five different F-responses our brain naturally goes to when we get stressed. And we're not just talking about, like, being chased by a saber-toothed tiger. We're talking about the school calling that your child is sick. or your husband's in a bad mood after a hard day at work. Everything stresses us out and I want to help you identify what your innate response to those stressful moments is because these subconscious patterns are what are going to be governing your behavior and sabotaging your life in ways you might not even realize. Our brains are so incredible. We were designed so perfectly And when you know how to work with your operating system, everything is easier and better, even though we still get stressed, we still get triggered, but we handle it so much differently. And we feel completely different in our body. while it's happening. So possible. I just want to say in closing, this bombardment of information can feel stressful and overwhelming. All I want you to do is think of one takeaway, one little nugget that personally resonated with you, maybe one of those six stressors that really hit home and you felt inside could be your quote-unquote problem. Nothing is a problem. It's all just data, information available to you to better understand yourself and then figure out ways that you can work with your brain and body to do different if you want to. As always, I can't wait to hear how this episode landed for you. Your homework is to download the free resources in the description so you can learn more about your body's natural energy rhythms and pinpoint your default stress response. Then email me through the link in the show notes or DM me on Instagram at Solutions for Simplicity to share which of these six hidden stressors spoke to you most. Was it decision fatigue, procrastination, things taking longer than you expected, inefficiency, ineffectiveness, or overwhelm from having more to do than time to do it? I want to reassure you that every mom wrestles with these six things and they are absolutely fixable when you understand where they really come from and how the protective adaptations wired into your nervous system are behind them all. Reach out to book a free 60-minute consult if you want to know more. I can't wait to meet you back here next week. Until then, remember nothing you do changes how wonderful and worthy you are. Have a great day. I know more than anyone how precious your time is, so the fact that you spent it listening to this podcast means the world. Make sure to subscribe, and if you got value out of this show, I would be so honored if you'd leave a review and share this episode with another busy mama who needs to hear it. We've got this.