Adventurous Mom

Posts Tagged ‘Mom Stress’

Wel­come back!  This is the 2^nd post of 3 in my Tips for Stress Reduc­tion.  I cre­ated these posts when I real­ized that Stress is the num­ber one epi­demic in our coun­try, which leads to many life-threatening med­ical con­di­tions such as car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease, dia­betes, obe­sity etc…

Yet, as I have per­son­ally expe­ri­enced, doc­tors will diag­nose your con­di­tion as “stress related” but then just hand you a nice lit­tle pill to take.  I’m not dis­count­ing the neces­sity of med­ica­tions in cer­tain instances, hav­ing been in the health­care field for as long as I have, I com­pletely agree med­ica­tions in cer­tain patients are a neces­sity.  But what if your con­di­tion is cre­ated in your own real­ity? What if the lit­tle pill doesn’t cure the under­ly­ing problem?

This is the ques­tion you can ask yourself.

So in Part 1, the idea was to get you to iden­tify that you, as a par­ent, need to take care of your­self first.  We talked about iden­ti­fy­ing your energy lev­els, and slow­ing down your speeds.  Step 1 was to bring into your aware­ness WHEN you noticed that you were stressed out.

Now in Part 2, we iden­tify 3 Sim­ple Steps to get into action to reduce your stress.

Step 1 — Do Less

What? Do less? ….I can hear all of the “yeah but” com­ments now.  So let me clar­ify: Just Do Less.

This step in its sim­plic­ity can some­times be a dif­fi­cult step to rec­on­cile to your­self because you will argue for your stress.  Doing less is a sim­ple deci­sion you can make.  Let me ask you these ques­tions: Do you need to attend every birth­day party for every child in your son or daughter’s class?  Do you need to have your child enrolled in every extracur­ric­u­lar activ­ity leav­ing you run­ning from base­ball to bal­let to piano lessons?

Doing less can extend to spend­ing less money and pos­si­bly elim­i­nat­ing the need to work so much!  Sim­plic­ity is a very free­ing feel­ing. We were able to man­age as humans in a sim­ple world before there was money, can we not man­age now?  Leo Babuta writes a beau­ti­ful blog at www.ZenHabits.net that focuses on sim­plic­ity.  Check it out, you may learn that there exists another real­ity about a sim­ple life.

Doing less can also mean instead of hav­ing to take the fam­ily to the lake, or ski­ing, or on activ­i­ties to feel like that is what proper fam­i­lies should do when spend­ing time together.  Doing less can sim­ply mean, stay at home, read books, have mean­ing­ful con­ver­sa­tions, be still and enjoy your time together.

Step 2 – When you have a lot to do, then con­sider Batching

Per­haps you’ve heard of batch­ing as some­thing that peo­ple do when they send out large amounts of mail.  At least that’s what I think of when I think of batch­ing.  I first learned about batch­ing from Tim Fer­ris, author and Lifestyle designer.  I have been employ­ing the idea of batch­ing for a while now.  It is some­what against what my mother taught me grow­ing up, but it allows me to focus my atten­tion and my time on pro­duc­tiv­ity rather than menial tasks all day long.

Here are some exam­ples of how you can employ batch­ing in your life today:

1. Laun­dry – The dreaded laun­dry!  My mother always used to say that it was eas­ier if I did a lit­tle bit every day, but hav­ing to think about laun­dry every­day was a men­tal drain, and a time drain.  Instead we batch our laun­dry once or twice a week.
2. Bill Pay­ing – If you don’t already have a great sys­tem set up, per­haps bill pay­ing can be batched weekly or bi-weekly.
3. Gro­cery Shop­ping – Mak­ing daily trips to the gro­cery store not only drains your energy and your time, but can inevitably drain your pock­et­book as you are more likely to spend over your bud­get with fre­quent trips.  Instead batch your gro­cery shop­ping into a weekly task.

I am sure you can come up with other ideas for batch­ing.  The con­cept is that you get to allow your­self to tem­porar­ily for­get about a task know­ing that you’ll get back to it at a pre-determined time. You are not ignor­ing the task; you are just defer­ring it and instead putting your atten­tion to get­ting other things done.

Stress is some­times a prod­uct of multi-tasking.  New research on this phe­nom­e­non shows that peo­ple are most effec­tive when they can UNI-task, and their stress lev­els are lower.  So focus on ONE thing at a time.  Other, more mun­dane tasks can wait!  So batch on!!

Step 3 – Elicit Teamwork!

I was recently coach­ing an over­worked an over­stressed mom that had 3 teenage boys at home!  She says, I’m so tired when I get home, but there’s so much to be done!  We came up with a plan to elicit team­work from her fam­ily so that she does not feel that all of the work needs to fall on her shoulders.

I owe this solu­tion to my dad, a per­fec­tion­ist with house­work, retired Navy and raised Navy brat, he was a stick­ler for a clean house.  When I was 9, he sat my sis­ters and I down, and asked us to out­line every sin­gle chore that had to be done in the house.  When we were done, we divided the chores into 3 areas.  One was kitchen/dishes, then there was the bath­room and linens, lastly was the liv­ing area.  We were then each respon­si­ble for our areas each week, and we rotated once per week.  It was easy for my dad to keep track of who’s area of respon­si­bil­ity it was that week, and then he was able to be the house­hold man­ager, instead of the custodian.

Can you pull together your team?  Who is your team? Your fam­ily, kids, grand­par­ents?  As the man­ager and leader of your house­hold, you can elicit their team­work.  Gain their inter­est, ask for their involve­ment, and get their feed­back.  It is eas­i­est to get buy-in for chores and duties when it is THEIR idea, not yours.  But they will want to be a part of this great team.  Team mem­bers as young as 2 can also take part in con­tribut­ing to the house!!

Thank you for fol­low­ing along!  Please feel free to post any ques­tions or com­ments below!  I’d love to hear how you get into action to get out of Stress!! ~Makenzie

Part 1 of 3 of the Stressed Mom­mies to Suc­cess­ful Mom­mies Series

I recently read mul­ti­ple post­ings by moth­ers that are so stressed out, that they would likely sell off one or both kid­neys to be able to cre­ate more time and have more money to devote to them­selves and their family.

These were just a hand­ful of the situations:

“I’m a sin­gle mother, I work full time, I have a 7 and 4 year old, I’m exhausted when I get home, but then I have to do school work, laun­dry, make din­ner, clean the house and then get ready to do it all over again!  I have no time for myself!”

“I have three kids, I work full time, go to Grad school and still feel like I can never get ahead!”

“My hus­band is in the mil­i­tary and gone half the year, my son has lost all abil­ity to potty train, and my daugh­ter does exactly oppo­site of what I tell her to do!”

My heart just ached when I read all of these stressed out Mom’s post­ings.  They were scream­ing for help onto a ran­dom forum post­ing, not know­ing where to go, just hop­ing that some­one would lis­ten to their cries for help!

Are you this mom?  Are you burn­ing the can­dle at both ends?  Are you cry­ing for help and think­ing that no one can help you?

1. Lis­ten to the flight atten­dant:

The first rule here is just to be aware that if you are at this point in your life where you are hang­ing on by a thread, do what every good flight atten­dant sug­gests in the event of cabin pres­sure fail­ure: “Put the Oxy­gen Mask on your­self first before you put them on small chil­dren.”  Eas­ier said than done?

If you con­sider the rea­sons, you are like the HUB of the WHEEL of your fam­ily. You are what keeps the fam­ily together, ungreased, the wheel doesn’t turn well, it’s squeaky and sticky.  With a well greased HUB, the wheel turns smoothly, effort­lessly and can do more rota­tions than an ungreased hub.  Con­sider your goal to be as smooth as a greased hub.

Tak­ing care of your­self means doing what you need to do to stay healthy. Eat well, take time for your­self, exer­cise, med­i­tate etc…  Imag­ine what your fam­ily would do with­out you? If you are not tak­ing care of your­self, you may con­tinue down the road to sick­ness due to stress.  So first things first –You are first!

2. Slow down to ½ speed!

It is easy to feel that because we have more to do, we need to do it faster, more hur­ried, and feel rushed.  Yet, when we delib­er­ately slow down the speed of our life, we are able to think more clearly and specif­i­cally about the task at hand.  It really is a funny para­dox! You may not actu­ally be doing less tasks when you slow your reac­tion speed down, it just feels like it!  What hap­pens often is you feel more delib­er­ate, your aware­ness comes into the present, and you can con­cen­trate on the NOW task and not the FUTURE task.

3.Notice How Your Vibra­tions are Felt Through your House­hold Like ShockWaves:

Do you notice that when you have a bad day, and you are stressed, the moment you walk in the house, all of a sud­den the kids are fight­ing and argu­ing, the dog is bark­ing, there is chaos spread­ing like wild­fire? Believe it or not, our energy lev­els have cer­tain vibra­tional fre­quen­cies.  Chil­dren are very sen­si­tive to these fre­quen­cies and react in strange and curi­ous ways, and usu­ally ways that tend to sound like nails screech­ing across the chalk boards.  Notice when you walk into your house calm, cen­tered and peace­ful?  The house can sense your “cen­tered­ness”, and mim­ics this energy level.  Its one of those mys­te­ri­ous uni­ver­sal prin­ci­ples.

4.Use your tran­si­tional Times and Take Men­tal Health Minutes:

When time is a pre­cious com­mod­ity for you at this time in your life, it is imper­a­tive that you use small por­tions of time to re-center, recharge and reju­ve­nate.  You prob­a­bly know this, but don’t mind­fully prac­tice this.  So, now I chal­lenge you to mind­fully prac­tice this.  When you are dri­ving home from work, put in peace­ful calm­ing music (I like to call it yoga music, eas­ily down­load­able from i-Tunes).  When you take a bath­room break, take 5 min­utes, close your eyes and do some deep breath­ing exer­cises and pos­i­tive think­ing.

5. Design Your Day:

This was a new con­cept recently intro­duced to me.   At the begin­ning of the day, spend 2 min­utes, grab your jour­nal and decide con­sciously HOW you want the day to go, and HOW you want to feel.  For exam­ple, “I choose to hap­pily drive to work, I will use the free time in the car to relax.  I choose to have joy­ous inter­ac­tions with my cowork­ers.  My meet­ings will go eas­ily and I will have easy res­o­lu­tions to my chal­lenges today. When I leave work, I will hap­pily use that time to tran­si­tion and be pre­pared and cen­tered for my fam­ily.  I con­sciously choose to be present with my fam­ily in the evening, turn­ing off my email and my phones.”  This only takes a cou­ple of min­utes, but you can see the impact that this has on your con­scious and sub­con­scious mind.  One of the beau­ties of this exer­cise is that you will not script your day to say “I wish work is dif­fi­cult, I wish the kids will be bad, and I want to be angry and stressed!”  It just doesn’t work like that!

Do not expect that you will imme­di­ately prac­tice all five steps right away.  Take one step a day and prac­tice.  A mommy’s job is so impor­tant and vital to the health of the fam­ily.  So mind your thoughts, mind your health and have fun!

Stay tuned to Part 2 Tips for Stress Man­age­ment – Mov­ing into Action to Reduce Your Stress