153. Simple Ways to Feel Better When You're So Tired- Busting the Self Care Myth

If you have ever taken time for yourself, the bath, the show, the quiet trip out alone, and still come back to your family feeling completely depleted, you are not doing self-care wrong. In this episode, we look at why so much of what we call self-care never actually refills an overwhelmed, tired mom, and the difference between numbing and soothing that changes everything. I walk you through the gap between the stressor and the stress your body is still holding long after the hard moment has passed, and the small practices that actually complete the stress cycle and calm your nervous system. If you're tired in a way that ordinary rest hasn't fixed, this is the gentle nervous system reset that will finally help you feel better.

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Transcript

Why Self-Care Still Fails

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You can check every box on the self-care list the bath, the treat, the night out, your shows, and still wake up the next morning feeling like you never rested at all. If that's ever been you, this is the conversation I want to have with you today. This is Leadership Parenting, the self-care myth, what actually refuels you. Did you know that resilience is the key to confidence and joy? As moms, it's what we want for our kids, but it's also what we need for ourselves. My name is Lee German. I'm a therapist and I'm a mom. Join me as we explore the skills you need to know to be confident and joyful. Then get ready to teach these skills to your kids. This is Leadership Parenting, where you learn how to lead your family by showing them the way. Welcome back to Leadership Parenting. I've been doing a lot of thinking and talking with moms about their own restoration, their own sense of feeling better, of having their own, literally what we would call the care that they give themselves. And I know self-care would be that term. And oftentimes that is a really interesting phrase. Self-care has had a lot of definitions, a lot of ways that we look at how we give ourselves time, I guess, ultimately to restore. And what I've been having these conversations with women around is that they are doing the things that they thought would restore them, right? Like maybe it's a bubble bath. I guess that's the kind of traditional one that we talk about. I don't know how many people actually take bubble baths anymore, but it's that pampering yourself, maybe getting a pedicure, doing something that you feel is kind of luxurious, or watching your shows after your kids are finally asleep, or even having the freedom to sit and scroll and not be interrupted. And a lot of times women really crave that because of how it feels for them. It's a double-edged sword, but these are the things that I see women doing to try to take care of themselves. And the thing I want to talk with you about is whether you ever find that when you're doing some of these things, you notice that not a lot has changed for you after you have this self-care time, right? Maybe you feel the same as when you started, maybe even a little worse, maybe even a little foggier, right? You follow the advice to take time for yourself, but somewhere underneath it, maybe you find that the tiredness is still sitting there, exactly where it was when you tried to relieve it. Well, if you felt that, I want you to know it's not necessarily because you've been taking care of yourself wrong. It's because a lot of what passes for self-care was never really going to refill you or restore you in the first place. And I think it's easy for us to get genuinely confused about this because when we're trying to do everything that we've been told we're supposed to do, like get the occasional pedicure or have a standing night where we watch our shows after kids go down, or we get to go out by ourselves to a store and kind of wander the aisles. I think that those are the ideas that seem easy for us to take care of ourselves. And what moms are telling me is that these things are not working very well. A mom I talked with recently said that she takes time for herself to do some of these things and she comes back to her family feeling like she has nothing more to give than before she left. And that was really kind of a panicky feeling for her because if taking care of herself wasn't restoring her, then it felt a little hopeless. And she started to wonder if maybe something was seriously wrong with her and that she was just a person that, you know, maybe wasn't well matched to mothering and that she couldn't get filled up. So I don't know where you are in this, but I just want to address this because I think we can come at self-care in a different way. You know, there's nothing wrong with us as moms that we get tired and that we feel depleted. And when we don't feel restored, I think it's normal for us to feel a little bit panicky, a little bit unsure, like, am I ever going to get restored? And I think it actually comes down to a technical difference when we look

Soothing Vs Numbing

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at self-care. It's the difference between soothing our bodies and numbing or kind of distracting our bodies and our minds, I would add. And those two things can look almost identical from the outside. They can even feel similar in the moment, but they do completely different things to our minds and our bodies. And only one of them actually restores you. And I bet you can guess, as I give them the names, soothing and numbing, which one actually restores you and which one just kind of delays your stress. And if you guess that numbing is the thing that isn't working well, you would be right. Numbing is anything that helps you not feel what you're feeling or delay what you're feeling. It can kind of press pause on your discomfort. So whenever we're scrolling on our phones, unless we're purposefully going to get some information, that scroll is usually masking or distracting us from some uncomfortable feelings. The shows that we binge sometimes do the same thing. Wandering aisles, just looking at stuff, these are ways of stepping out of our life experience for a little while. And there's nothing wrong about that, nothing shameful about wanting to step out. I think we need to do that. And I'm not against any of those things I just listed. All of those really do give you a break out of your normal life's process. When you're depleted, you're kind of checking out and it can feel like relief. And it is briefly. But this kind of distraction or this numbing doesn't discharge anything. The stress that we carry when we sat down to do the scroll or to watch the show is often still in our body when we stand up. We didn't actually process the stress. We just paused it or we covered it or we distracted from it. And a paused feeling doesn't disappear. It just waits. It waits for us. Soothing is different. Soothing is anything that helps your nervous system actually come down out of activation and return to a sense of safety. It doesn't take you out of your body. It brings you actually more back into it. It doesn't take you away from your emotions. It actually gives you strength and courage and kind of capacity to feel those emotions and let them settle. And that distinction, whether a thing pulls you out of your experience or settles you back into it, that is the whole difference between self-care that drains away after you do it, and self-care that actually heals and supports you. Now, this is kind of a novel concept. We don't talk about how we care for ourselves very much, period. But oftentimes we go so superficial that we don't look at this deeper difference. So I invite you to put on your glasses, your nervous system glasses, and look at it through that lens.

Stressor Vs Stress In Your Body

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There's a piece of research that reframed all of this for me when I really began to understand it. It made a distinction between two things that we tend to treat as the same thing. One, which is the stressor, and two, which is the stress itself. So let me explain this. The stressor is the thing that causes you stress, the calendar that's packed, right? The having to get somewhere at a certain time, get a project done, the kids that fall apart in the car when they're upset about something or they don't want to go to school or they're pushing back, the arguments that we have sometimes with our partners. The stress is what happens inside your body in response to those things, the flood of activation of that nervous system where you feel it in your chest, maybe that tightness of your muscles, that sense of kind of discomfort in your belly. This would be how we hold the response to the stressors. Okay. So two things, the external things that are happening that we call stress, and then the internal ways that we respond to it that we also call stress. Okay. A little crazy making there, a little bit difficult for us to distinguish it because we use the same word for two different things. So I'm asking you to start to delineate that and separate them. And here's the part that I think impacts us. So the situation is over, but the stress cycle in your body is not. So you know what most self-care advice tells us to do? It's mostly aimed at dealing with the stressor. Take a break from the thing, get away from the kids, escape the house, do something that you don't normally do so that you don't have to deal with all those stressors. Well, those breaks are great. I'm all for them. We need them. But if all we do is step away from the stressor and still carry the stress within us, meaning all of the adrenaline and the cortisol is still coursing through our body, then we really haven't completed the process. We've just gone somewhere quieter and keep carrying it. So I'm all for going somewhere quieter and getting away. But we also have to remember that we're dealing with managing that stress that we are carrying. That's why I think we can take our Friday nights and our store trips and our pedicures and still feel depleted. So we get distance from the stressors, but we don't help our body finish the stress that it's holding.

How To Complete The Stress Cycle

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So, what actually lets us kind of finish that stress cycle and discharge it? Well, this is the part I love because it's so much more available than the version of self-care that requires a babysitter and a spa and a free afternoon that oftentimes we just don't often get. The thing that completes a stress cycle in the body, it's mostly physical and mostly small. So movement, that's a big one. When your body is flooded with the chemistry of activation in your nervous system, physical movement is how you can tell it that the threat has passed and it's safe to kind of relax and move into a parasympathetic nervous system state. So going on a walk, dancing in the kitchen, shaking your hands out, like literally shaking the way an animal shakes off after a fright. That's one very powerful way that you can discharge the stress from your body. Literal self-care. Breathing is another big one. Specifically, that long, slow exhale. When we talk about taking a deep breath, most of us focus on the long, slow inhale, but that's not what turns the nervous system down. The long, slow inhale prepares us for a much longer, slower exhale. Because that long, slow out breath is one of the few direct signals that you can choose to send your nervous system to tell it that it's okay, that it's safe, that it can turn down. What else? A good cry. A good cry does it. Do we try to avoid crying? I think most of us probably do. It's it doesn't feel like it's productive or protective or beneficial in any way. But honestly, letting your body discharge something if you've been feeling pent-up emotions, letting yourself cry, not a problem, not a bad thing. We could also go the other end. Laughter. Finding something that amuses you or that tickles you or that feels legitimately funny, interesting, that can send safety signals to our body as well. And I know you've heard me say this over and over again, but connection, that is perhaps one of the most powerful ways that we can calm our nervous systems. And the things that I've just been talking about are ways that you connect with yourself, right? You're choosing to move your body, and that helps you in your choice to connect with your stress system and let it discharge. But connection with other people, where you feel seen and you feel heard and accepted and loved, that can soothe your body as well through co-regulation. So none of these things that I listed require you to leave your life. They actually ask you to come back into your body and let it work through the stress response that you are feeling to all the stressors

A 90-Second Breath And Shake

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that are around you. So the first thing you can ask yourself before you reach for whatever your go-to is when you're having a hard day or you're feeling all those stressors coming at you, it's this. Am I about to soothe myself or am I about to numb myself? I don't want you to go into judgment around this. I just want you to get some information. Start asking yourself that question. What do I really need right now? And if your answer is, I need to distract, I need to numb out for a minute, then I think that's okay. What we want to do is have you choose something that isn't going to be dangerous to you, something that will not go against your values. Some nights, numbing is what you only have capacity for. And I would never tell you to just white knuckle your way out of the one thing that gets you through. But even asking the question starts to wake up your awareness of the difference and you get to notice which things leave you a little more like yourself and feeling more powerful and which things just kind of get you through. That noticing is the beginning of everything. The second is a body-based practice that I want to walk you through. Very helpful when you do this. It's a breathing practice. If you stand up, take a breath in through your nose for the count of four, and then hold it for two or three seconds, and then let it out slowly through your mouth for a count of six to eight. So the exhale is longer than the inhale, like we talked about. And do that three to four times, maybe even up to six times. And this isn't something I want you to be hyperventilating around. Take your time, see what feels comfortable. But on each long exhale, let your shoulders drop, relax a little bit. And if you have it in you, add some movement. Roll those shoulders, let your arms gently shake and sway side to side. Now, you might think this looks a little funny, and it does. It's not something we do every day, but this is actually doing the work for your nervous system. We have so much cool research on this, on calming that vagus nerve, helping you move from sympathetic nervous system to parasympathetic nervous system. You're physically discharging the activation that your body has been holding all day. You guys, this is what we're trying to get away from. We're trying to distract from this pressure, and we're using the wrong tools to do it. So we want to signal to our nervous system through our breath and through our movement that it's safe to calm down. This process takes probably 90 seconds, and it does more than getting a babysitter and scrolling on Instagram and doing things that try to kind of make you feel better, but never get deep into soothing that nervous system, telling your body that it's safe. Okay, third thing.

One True Refill Every Day

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I want you to build in one true refill a day and make it something very basic, not a self-care routine, not a morning of solitude that you're probably never gonna get, right? One small thing that settles you rather than just distracts you. And this is where you're gonna have to do some research on yourself. See what it feels like to go for a walk around the block. 10 minutes of music with your eyes closed, a phone call with a friend that really makes you laugh, something that brings you back into your body, into your life, into your sense of peace and calm. And I don't know exactly what that is for you, friend, but you will know what it is when you start looking for it. You'll stumble over it, you'll realize I got out for a walk and that felt amazing, and I need to do more of that. Or I sat outside on the porch for a few minutes and it was quiet, or I watched some birds and I felt like everything was so peaceful for just a nanosecond. Your resilience, your recovery, your soothing is not going to be built in grand gestures. It's gonna be built on these small, repeatable ways that you return to yourself. So we're not looking to change our schedules radically. It's what we do with the tiredness that we feel inside when we notice it. We want to check in, notice where the stress is in our body, whether it's in our shoulders or in our breathing or like that little bit of a tension that we feel. And instead of reaching for something to cover it, we want to tend to it. Talk to somebody that we care about, pick up the phone, have a quick conversation, lie down on the floor and stretch and breathe until our body finally starts to relax. And once again, you want to watch your shows, do it. Go to Target by yourself and wander the aisles. All of those aren't bad things. We need those things too. But notice that if you're not letting your body calm and soothe, that stress stays with us even when we do those other things. We can't afford to do this just once or twice. This is like eating daily and breathing daily. We don't just breathe once and then we're good, or have one meal or one glass of water and then we're good. Soothing ourselves is a day-to-day self-care activity. We actually need it to live and be healthy and well. So if you're trying these other ways of self-care and wondering why you still feel so empty, I hope you can hear that the problem is never you. It's just a version of rest that isn't really built to completely restore us. It's only part of the equation. So we can't blame ourselves if it's not working. It was really never meant to work that way. It's the wrong tool. The right tool is much smaller, much closer, much more available than anyone really knows. This week, I want you to notice the difference between what distracts you or numbs you or just kind of covers up the stress and what actually attends to it, what refills you, what lets you settle back into this sense of calm. Ask yourself, what does my body and my mind need right now? And how can I soothe rather than distract? That's all I have for you today. I hope that this gets your mind turning. Next week, I want to take it a little further. We're gonna look at how you actually build restoration into a normal mom life. This is such exciting work to know that the things that our body needs and our minds need more than anything else is available to us. It doesn't cost anything, and we can start to become experts at soothing and calming our bodies. Thanks for spending time with me today. I look forward to talking to you all next week and continuing this conversation. Take care.

Medical And Legal Disclaimer

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The information on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition, illness, or disease. It's also not intended to be legal, medical, or therapeutic advice. Please consult your doctor or mental health professional for your individual circumstances. Thanks again and take care.