Motherhood is a challenging journey. There are days that can be difficult and draining. It’s even more challenging when these days stretch and turn into weeks and months – all uphill! On such downcast days, your challenge is to build energizers so that you can get through the day easily.
Energizers are practices to sustain you when you’re not motivated or can’t summon a positive attitude on demand! Such practices will help you save time when you have less time, bring you energy when you’re tired, and clear a bit of the stress load when you’re constantly overwhelmed.
Going Easy On Yourself In Motherhood
These exhausting feelings are a little too common in all mommas, even before you add on some work or projects to the existing demands of motherhood. But, what is uncommon are better strategies – other than dreaming about a vacation that’s not in the near future – for mothers to gut it out one day at a time.
Raw enthusiasm does work but only for a while. What you need is to bring more clarity and understanding on what works for you and what doesn’t – what makes your life easier. Feeling good about your body isn’t enough. You need to find a balance in your mental and emotional well-being as well. For this, you need to be guilt-free about finding easier ways to deal with the day-to-day grind.
Creating A Mind-Body Balance
Are such ambitions even achievable before the kids turn 35? Yes, they are. Here are 5 simple steps to balance your body and mind and create positive energy in your everyday life during motherhood.
1. Start A Nightly Ritual
Before passing out fully clothed at the end of the day, take 5 minutes to pause and reflect on how tomorrow will go. List out your intentions in a diary. How would you like the day to start? How do you want to feel during the day? Make your intentions clear, explicit, and put them in writing before you go to sleep.
Don’t spend more than 5 minutes before bedtime on this new nightly routine. Afterall, you don’t want to lose any more sleep! Soon, the forced habit will turn into an unbroken nightly routine and you’ll notice improvements in your day-to-day life. Your subconscious will work more efficiently to ensure that you reach your goals. In time, you’ll feel less frustrated and the day will go by in a jiffy.
You might notice an increase in positive energy and an increased flexibility and ease in activities like booking appointments, scheduling playdates, and doing routine chores. Once you get used to this, incorporate some restorative yoga poses, like legs up the wall, as an added tonic. These poses will relieve stress-related migraines and also improve blood and hormone circulation.
2. Practice A Morning Routine
Starting your day well goes beyond aligning your subconscious the night before. And this involves active engagement upon rising. You can help set your own stage for positive mood and hormonal balance throughout the day with ease and grace by adopting early morning routines. Do this before you start worrying about everyone else.
A wonderful addition to any morning ritual is diffusing essential oils in your home. Essential oils, a proven science, positively influence the mood and mind.1 Inhaled aromas cause our olfactory bulbs to activate the limbic brain region, stimulating memories and emotions.
The limbic system supports a variety of functions, including adrenaline flow, emotions, behavior, motivation, and long-term memory. Our emotional life is largely housed in the limbic system, and it has a great deal to do with the formation of memories. The only way to get to the limbic system is through smell, and it takes only 22 seconds for an inhaled oil to stimulate our emotions. This is the perfect way to give your day a positive start.
3. Seek Inspiration
As mommas, we don’t ever have enough time – until we make some. Give yourself space and time to be inspired, both as a mother and as an individual for your daily practice. Dedicate a sliver of time to get inspired by whatever brings you joy in your work. Plan weekly meals, figure out everyday hacks, organize events, read magazines, blog, or even write articles or books! Or, simply flip through the home magazines you enjoy to motivate you to clean up the clutter.
4. Impose Clarity
Ever find your mind so full of ideas and tasks that make you feel constantly overwhelmed? One way to reduce those feelings is to get all the ideas, tasks, and feelings you need to remember out of your head by writing them down. You can use apps on your phone that sync with your computer to dump your to-do lists in.
Moving swirling thoughts onto paper or digital media can help you relax your mind and eliminate feelings of powerlessness amid chaos. Seeing things written down not only forces clarity but also reveals what is and isn’t worth doing. You’ll be shocked to discover that most of your thoughts are just worries and not really tasks that need your attention.
Keep exploring until you find a system that works best for you. It might be a spiral notebook or index cards kept in your purse – use anything that keeps ideas from clogging your thinking and creativity.
5. Celebrate Success
A small shift makes a big difference when it comes to your own happiness. Whatever great challenges you are struggling with, find ways of chunking it down into bite-sized pieces so you can be encouraged by small victories.
Happiness studies show people are most happy when they have small successes each day.2 Contrary to popular belief, lottery winners and grand victories that are few and far between actually lead to less happiness! Some days, success in getting a shower under your belt or a quick run to the grocery store can be enough – celebrate that victory!
Finding and celebrating all small gains is good practice and helps cultivate long-term happiness. As we all know, motherhood is a balancing act; there is always more to do. However, our joy doesn’t come by “getting it all done” but in our moments of not being too hard on ourselves and always when resting. So give yourself more of each of these moments as often as you can with these five steps. Have any other tips in mind that might encourage moms to relax a little bit more? Do share with us.
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