Why You’re Snapping, Overthinking and Feeling Constantly On Edge (And What To Do To Stop)

0:01Welcome to Motherkind, it is me your host Zoe and this is a show that is about you, the woman behind the mother and we are proudly sponsored by Wild Nutrition's Women's Supplements. Can I say something that I genuinely don't think anyone is saying to mothers? The reason that you're snapping, the reason you're lying awake at midnight with your brain still going, the reason you're zoning out when your child is talking to you and maybe feeling like you are one small thing away from losing it. it's not because you're failing and it's not because you're weak and it's definitely not because you're a bad mother.

0:40It's because your nervous system is stuck in survival mode and not only does that make complete sense, if you think about it, it's actually expected given what we're asking of ourselves. So if you've tried the breathing exercises and maybe the journaling and you still feel like a bit of a live wire, stay with me because today I want to go a layer deeper than most nervous system content does. And I want to help you understand not just how to regulate, but why you're dysregulated in the first place. Because once you get that, everything else clicks. So I went deep on studying the nervous system for my book Motherkind.

1:24And what I learned, I really think every single mother needs to know. When my eldest daughter was a baby she would cry a lot as babies do and I would find myself almost floating away like a mini dissociation so still in the room still going through the motions but actually somewhere else in my mind entirely and I'll be honest with you I thought I was a terrible mother I thought there was something fundamentally wrong with me, that I couldn't stay like completely present for my own child. It was only when I started interviewing unbelievable experts on the nervous system for the podcast that I finally understood what was happening.

2:09Her crying was triggering my stress response. And that stress response that actually developed way before I ever became a mother. And it was to freeze and to disconnect and to go somewhere else in my head so actually it wasn't a character flaw it was in some ways a kind of survival adaptation and this is what I want you to hear your nervous system isn't doing anything wrong it just learned through the way along the way through experience that certain things are dangerous so maybe if you grew up in a household where you constantly had to read the room or maybe there was a lot of rejection in your life or instability maybe it's just been the relentless drip drip drip of modern motherhood with no real rest no village and a mental load that never ever ends so whatever it is your nervous system adapts to protect you and now that same system is making everyday life feel like a threat and as dr gabor mate said to me on the podcast the precious or modern others are actually beyond the natural responsibility of a human being.

3:20So of course our nervous systems are on high alert. Of course they are. It makes so much sense. So let me just name what this looks and feels like in real life because I think a lot of us are so used to it that we've maybe stopped recognising it.

3:41if you want to hide downstairs maybe in the toilet when the kids are fighting if they are snapping and you are they're arguing and you just want to run away and hide if you find yourself snapping over something tiny and then going into that shame spiral if you feel constantly on edge but you don't know why you may be feeling physically present but kind of emotionally disconnected. You may be lying awake at night, absolutely exhausted, but your brain is just wired. Or you might be touched out, talked out and completely depleted by 5pm. I know I definitely experienced that. Every single one of those is your nervous system stuck in survival mode.

4:21And none of it, none of that makes you a bad woman or a bad mother. It's just your body sending you a signal. Now most nervous system content will give you a list of tools here to breathe or to stretch or to try a supplement and I am a fan of all of those things and we are going to get there but first of all I think it's really important to understand something more useful first because if I only give you the tools without the understanding you will never get to manage the actual root cause so we have to look at what's underneath we have to look at the roots under the tree. So here's the thing that changed everything for me and I want to say it really clearly.

5:00Your nervous system doesn't respond to real danger okay. It responds to perceived danger. So what it anticipates might happen based on what has happened before. So if you're someone who grew up learning that conflict meant someone leaving, your nervous system will treat every difficult conversation like a threat to your survival even if it is with your toddler. If you were praised for achievement and criticized for rest which many of us millennial mothers were then your nervous system literally believes that stopping is dangerous which is why you feel so guilty when you sit down and have a rest so a lot of these things they make sense when you think about some experiences that you've had in your life and the reason I find this so powerful is because it means the problem isn't you.

5:52It's not that you're too sensitive or too emotional or not coping well enough. It's that your nervous system has learned a set of rules and it's still running those rules now, but in a completely different life. At the root of almost every dysregulated nervous system is really this, a lack of trust, trust that you're safe, trust that you can handle what comes trust that things can be okay and here's what that means that the tools that help you in the moment like the breathing and the shaking it out which I am a massive fan of they're useful but if you've been doing all of those and you still feel stuck it's like kind of scooping water out of a leaky boat right we need to patch the hole and you need to think about what could be going on underneath what is the underlying belief that is threatening and that you can't trust yourself to handle and that's actually what we need to address and I talk about this a lot in my book in chapter 10 where to understand our present we really need to understand just a little bit about our past so how do we actually do it I want to give you something practical so the first step is to get curious about what your nervous system believes not your conscious rational thinking mind your body so much of the nervous system sits in the body so ask yourself where in my life do I feel the most reactive where do I feel the most anxious the most out of control that's usually where an old belief is running the show let me tell you some really common ones I see in the mothers that I work with see if you resonate with these first one is if I rest everything will fall apart so we push ourselves to exhaustion because maybe to your body stopping feels genuinely unsafe another one I see in here a lot is if I disappoint people they'll leave so we say yes to everything and then feel resentful and depleted another one is if I'm not perfect I'm not enough so we hold ourselves to these insane standards and feel like we're constantly failing none of these are about you they are beliefs your nervous system formed often very early and the most exciting thing and the thing that i love about this this body of work is that they can change but they don't change through thinking they actually change through experience so we have to act our way into some new responses and reactions so you have to slowly gently and consistently give your nervous system new evidence so if you believe that rest is dangerous start by sitting down just for 10 minutes doing nothing not to prove anything just to let your body notice i stopped and the world didn't end if you believe saying no will make people leave start small say no to something easy or small and notice that nothing terrible happened i talk a lot in my work about the one percents just building up these one percents and this is perfect example of how you do this it took me years to do this so this doesn't happen overnight you chip away at these beliefs and these well-worn patterns until one day you realize oh my gosh I'm resting and I don't feel guilty I don't feel so strung out so I want you to approach yourself and these moments with real kindness like hand on your heart speak to yourself like you would your own child and your nervous system will receive new information.

9:24Really important to say you're not aiming here for like perfect calm all the time that doesn't exist. You're aiming to slowly show your body this is safe. I can handle this. I'm okay. Okay so that is the deep stuff. That is the roots. Let's look at the leaves like the practical stuff. You're in the moment. Okay the first one and I am so passionate about teaching this is called completing the stress cycle. I come back to this again and again because emotional exhaustion doesn't actually come from stress. It comes from not releasing the stress. So you've held the meltdown, you've managed the crisis, you've survived the day, but the stress is still sitting in your body.

10:05You have to move through it. So you have to do, the best way that I know to do it is a short burst of movement. I dance a lot in the kitchen with my girls and it shakes off that stress. You complete the stress cycle. Another one is a long hug with someone that you feel really safe with. Another one is exhaling longer than you inhale. Just tells your body to complete that cycle. And actually on that note, breath is a huge tool that we get to use in the moment. I am such a fan of breath work because it's the number one thing that we can do to change how we feel in the moment. So breath in and then just a long exhale out it really does tell your body that you can handle it and you're safe another one that I love is to just come back to your body so when you're feeling dysregulated overwhelmed like you're about to snap we tend to go into our heads and the thoughts spiral so a really simple interruption is to just put your feet on the floor and name five things that you can see maybe four things that you can touch three things you can smell just go through your senses and start to notice where you are.

11:18You're literally saying to your nervous system, right now in this moment, we are safe. And the last one is connection. And this is so underrated. And I know that I've got this wrong in the past where I've just put my head down. I've got the kids sorted. I've worked, I've got home, I've sorted the kids. And then I've sort of sat down and just sat in front of the TV. No connection. I've forgotten to call a friend or even voice note a friend it is so important our nervous systems are designed to mirror and reflect each other so remember this like even voice noting a friend when you're in the midst of it is so powerful okay so those are some simple in the moment tools and I want to say something important before I go there's a message baked into a lot of wellness content including nervous system content that says do these practices and you'll feel calm and I think that that's missing something because the deepest regulation isn't about managing your reactions better no one is calm all the time it's about understanding what is causing these reactions and your comeback rate right so how quickly can you get into anger or overwhelm and then come back to your baseline that is what I'm interested in not in being Zen monks.

12:34It's not, it's just not real. So this is kind of slow, steady work. You're still going to be overwhelmed. You're still going to be overstimulated sometimes, but now hopefully you have got some new tools to both help you think a bit deeper about what might be going on and some in the moment tools so that you can start to come back to that baseline quicker. okay so I am so excited that I have shared this with you I talk a lot about this in my book and something that I've seen time and time and time again is that when a mother starts to regulate herself when you start to understand your nervous system your children regulate with you so emotions are contagious okay our nervous systems are always scanning each other so your calm is genuinely the best gift that you can give your children.

13:28Dr. Nicola Perra told me that a safe environment actually begins in the nervous system of our own body. And we can give that to ourselves right now, today, having watched this, and that's going to have a massive impact on your children. So please remember, there's nothing wrong with you, you're not failing. And there's so much that we can do to tend to our own systems and reactions. So if this resonated, please share it with a mum who needs it today. Remember to subscribe. There are new videos and podcasts out every single week. Leave me a comment wherever you are listening or watching this and tell me what part landed for you.

14:08And I will see you next time.