Burnout – The Nutrition Doula

Sometimes, #momlife sucks. I said what I said.

You get stuck in a rut. The groundhog day of never ending snack making, butt wiping, mess cleaning, tantrum bearing, fight stopping, UGH.

You wake up before you feel rested. Usually by a toddler with so much energy they’re already bouncing off the walls and whining for breakfast.

So you move like a zombie out of bed and throw on some clothes (nevermind the inner dialogue about nothing fitting your post baby bod and never looking cute). Down to the kitchen to make something for the kiddo. Hopefully you get a bite to eat too, or at least a sip or two of cold coffee?

Then it’s an attempt to wipe the kid’s faces and hands before they track jelly all over the living room. And a frantic 5 minutes of cleaning up the kitchen and putting away food before you’re called to take care of something else.

During the week, we’re packing lunches and backpacks and rushing off to daycare and work. We’ve already gone through a mental workout before we’re even in the car, making sure we didn’t forget one of the 100’s of things needed for school, daycare, or our own jobs. (Pump parts, check. Bottles, check. Bring a stuffed animal to school day, check.)

Then spend the day doing more at work in fewer hours than most. Trying to stay professional and not get mommy-tracked because we have to take pumping breaks. Missing our kids and vowing to be more patient when we get home. Wondering “what happened to the woman who was totally on top of her shit?”. Wondering if there is something really wrong with us, because we know our brain is just not firing on all cylinders like it used to.

By the time we’ve finished underperforming for the day, we rush home to cranky and overtired kids. Rush through the daycare and after school care pickups. Break the vow to be more patient by the fifth time you have to repeat yourself about doing homework or picking up toys.

Too tired and brain dead to make a “good” dinner, so you throw things together and hope for the best. Kids complain. Great.

Then it’s the rush through the bedtime routine. Hopefully we aren’t too irritated with everyone to enjoy the 5 minutes of storytime and snuggles before the kids get in bed. Hopefully they stay in bed and it doesn’t take an hour+ to get the baby to sleep.

Maybe at this point we are so done we crash in bed ourselves. But more likely, we push through and get to cleaning up the dinner mess, pay some bills, or take care of some more work stuff.

Maybe we actually get a glass of wine and stay up too late scrolling through social media or watching a TV show.

Then we get in bed, full of regrets for how the days go, how we didn’t “enjoy” every moment with our kids, how we are not the mom we want to be and not the employee we want to be. Don’t even start on the friend and spouse we want to be…

Just to do it all over again when we’re woken up too early tomorrow. Groundhog Day, repeats.

Yeah, going through this definitely sucks. And admitting that doesn’t make you a “bad mom.” It doesn’t make you ungrateful. Wondering “is this it? Cause I don’t think I like this life” makes you human, not evil.

You know that things should be less stressful and more joyful than this. But you really can’t seem to get your head above water. You feel guilty for not being able to figure it out.

Here’s the deal. It’s always harder to find your way out when you’re in the thick of it. A mouse has a hard time finding its way out of the maze when the walls are taller than it is.

But someone who is above the maze can clearly see the way out, and call out directions to the mouse to get it out faster.

I’m going to call out directions for you.

It starts with food.

Yup the food you’re eating. (Probably don’t like that answer, huh.) Your overall nutrition is the key to getting out of the overwhelm and getting control back in your life.

Food. Not pills or supplements.

When we’re in the rat race, stuck in the overwhelm, and always feeling a step behind, we’re in a constant state or reactionary stress. And that low grade, chronic stress does a number on our bodies. We deplete several essential nutrients faster when we are under a chronic stress load.

When you layer a less than nutritious diet on top of that, you end up with a recipe for some serious problems. Leaving your body without the nutrients it needs to function amplifies the exhaustion, the overwhelm, and the inability to think straight.

All of which feed into the overwhelm cycle, keeping you stuck.

So focusing on fruits and veggies may seem like a counterintuitive path out of the overwhelm maze. But it’s the fastest way to the finish.

Start with food. Focus on as many whole veggies and fruits that you can. Focus on high quality protein sources and whole food carbohydrates. Cut back on the packaged, processed, and sugar foods.

You have to eat. It’s literally the one thing that you can’t not do. So why not make it work for you instead of against you?

If the thought of changing your diet to something that is more nutrient rich is overwhelming, that’s ok! I have so many moms tell me they just have no idea where to start.

If you want directions out of the maze, I’m here to call them out to you.

I’m here to help moms figure out how to make this a seamless and effortless part of their lives. Because it actually does take a village, and supporting other women in becoming the badass moms they know they can be is what lets us all live better lives.

I am more than willing to chat with you and get you on the right track. So feel free to contact me and I’ll give you 30 minutes to figure out the right first step for you.

We’re in this together. Let’s make things suck just a little less.

Around this time every year, it seems like “life” gets the better of me and all of a sudden time begins to fly by. (Hey March, where did you go???) This is also the time when most of our New Year New Me endeavors (or resolutions, whatever you want to call them) start to fall by the wayside. You’ve been going hard for the month of January, but the initial glamor of your idea or new habit has worn off. In February, you may be able to dig down with determination and power through maintaining your change, but old easier habits begin to sneak in. “One slip up won’t hurt” turns into “once in a while is ok” which them morphs into “well on the weekends, I deserve to relax” and by this time of year, we’ve either stopped entirely or we are feeling totally burnt out with this Healthy Habits All Day Every Day thing.

So the question is: why does this happen and what can we do about it? I actually blogged about this (on my old platform) last year and these thoughts still hold true for me. It’s helped me to avoid the complete Burn Out that I’ve had in years past, so I thought it would be a good read for you guys too. Here it is:

“Around June of 2016, I hit a low point. It wasn’t tied to any particular event. There was just a slow decline over time where more and more dissatisfaction crept into my life until I was incredibly unhappy and burnt out. I knew that I needed to make changes, but they seemed to be too hard to do.

Taking the first step towards self-improvement is always the hardest. I think of it in terms of inertia: when you’re stuck in a place it takes a huge amount of energy to start moving. Think of how hard it is to push a huge rock that is sitting in the dirt. (Or even better how hard is it to start flipping that tractor tire over at the gym?) But the thing about inertia is that once you get going, the law makes it just as difficult to STOP the object you just had trouble moving. If you do manage to get that huge rock rolling, you definitely don’t want to be at the bottom of the hill to stop it! (Or using the gym example, have you ever tried to catch a weight before it hits the ground?)

In July 2016, I (unknowingly) took the first step to overcome my “stuck and miserable” inertia by signing up for a nutrition coaching course. I thought I’d be learning about macronutrients and serving sizes, but this course had so much more to it. They really dug into the lifestyle reasons for poor eating, as well as the emotional components that lead people to cyclically diet and regain weight. This course showed me how interrelated nutrition and the rest of your life were. You can eat all the kale in the world, but if you are miserable in other areas, you still won’t be healthy. Suddenly, I was confronted with admitting that I was unhappy and had the power to change that. And like they say “You can’t unlearn this stuff.”

Flash forward to January of 2017 and the inertia behind all of my self-improvement actions was really beginning to build up. I began to see all of the areas in my life that I wanted to change and fix. There were so many things I wanted to do: change jobs to something that I enjoyed, change my relationship with my kids to be better, work on relationships with friends, work on my health and fitness, make our house more organized and functional, let go of things that were no longer helping in our lives; the list goes on and on and on. I was suddenly beginning to feel overwhelmed with it all. I began to wonder, “is there such a thing as self-improvment burnout? Cause I’m totally there.” I wanted a break, and a small part of me wished I could just go back to not knowing that things could be better, because “ignorance is bliss.” HA!

Everything can’t be fixed instantly. It’s often a slow process, but we tend to see the end goal clearly and then get impatient when we can’t get there immediately. Then we get to the point where I was in January and our self-doubt kicks in. We see the long road ahead of us and decide that it’s just too hard. We end up with Self Improvement Burnout. We quit. And then we are doubly dissatisfied because not only do we know that we aren’t where we want to be, we’re down on ourselves for quitting. And the cycle continues.

So I began to measure progress differently. I committed myself to taking as least one SMALL step each day towards any of the goals I had. And it’s working. Here’s why: it made making progress sustainable, since I gave myself permission to not have to do everything all at once. It keeps the inertia going, so I won’t get to a place where it is a considerable effort to start again. AND by having so many areas that I know need work, it made finding a small step to take relatively easy and dynamic. If I ever don’t really know what the next step under the “Change Careers” goal is, that’s ok because I can take a small step towards another goal that day (like declutter a junk drawer for the “Functional House” goal). I’ve still progressed while giving myself time to figure out the next best step for the career change goal.

The important thing is to just keep moving forward. It doesn’t matter if it’s slow or fast. It doesn’t matter if it’s a fraction of an inch or a huge leap. Just be relentless with your movement. One action per day is progress, and for me progress is the new measure of success.”

Now here we are in March 2018. I look at where I was 15 months ago and there is so much that is different (for the better) now. All of those time steps each day have added up to a large change. They were the grains of sand that have turned into a 30lb sand bag. Looking back at this process helps me to keep going with the “just do one thing every day” path. Because in the end, I can see that it is working.

Tag: Burnout

#momlife Sucks Sometimes and I’m Not Afraid to Say It