Stop Calling It 'Just Mom Life' — It’s Slowly Killing You

Scottie Durrett  0:00  
Scott, welcome to the momplex Podcast. I am your host. Scotty durrette, my passion and purpose is to help other moms just like me rediscover their joy and step into their confidence as their kids grow up. Join me as I share my own experiences, my own mistakes and aha moments as I navigate this incredible journey of motherhood while trying not to lose my identity. If you are a modern day mama who is ready to live for herself, not just for her kids, and knows that is the best possible gift you could give, then you are in the right place. This is momplex. Hey, my beautiful mama, welcome back to the podcast. We're diving right in because I'm gonna call some shit out today. I really, really want to empower you to make the decision right now that today is the last day you're gonna put up with feeling like shit or just accepting that living fine is how motherhood is supposed to look. Truthfully, you do not have to feel like shit to live your best life and to raise kick ass kids. I don't know where that equation came from, but we are gonna leave it in the rear view mirror. We're gonna put this in a drawer and close that sucker up, because it's not a requirement that you feel like shit. You can actually feel fucking amazing. You can live your most bad ass life, and actually that will help you make the most of life for yourself and for your kids, that bone deep exhaustion, that brain fog that's so thick you actually forget why you open the refrigerator. You lose your keys every day. You keep feeling like a chicken with your head cut off. You just open the refrigerator and just stare at looking for the oat milk that's right in front of you. Maybe you're having a hot flash and standing in the refrigerator just feels freaking good. Maybe you're forgetting things that you promised your kids you would pick up or do. Maybe you're forgetting to get back to your coworker. It feels like your brain has 47 tabs open all the time, and you're not even sure which tab is the one you need to be on in the moment, you're snapping at your kids because they asked you for a snack, you're literally rolling your eyes at your partner behind their back, because they just do not help you at all the way you need to be helped. And then after a long ass day of keeping it all together for everybody, you end up lying in bed replaying the whole day, wondering, Did I screw up? Did I say that thing the right way? Or you're up until two o'clock in the morning watching a show, because it's your only me time, and it's the, literally the only time somebody's not asking you for anything. This is not just, I'm putting air quotes, just mom life. This is not what we all have to just resign to accept. This is just how I'm supposed to feel, especially now, because our generation, Gen X is who I'm talking to, specifically, because we're in our late 40s, things that we're sandwiched between raising our kids and our aging parents. But we also are incredibly resilient. We're so strong, we're so driven, we're breaking a lot of generational shit every single day, and I don't want us to just stop right here because we're fucking tired and we have some brain fog and we keep telling ourselves this is just mom life. It's not, it's not, it's this is not how we have to live. I promise you that I'm proof of it right now. But if those symptoms are relatable, I also want you to stop saying this is just mom life, and actually start noticing the symptoms, because it's really your central nervous system, your body's Main Control Center. It's waving a white flag right now. It is saying, Please, please help me, and if you've been powering through, because this is just how motherhood is, or that's how every other mom is in the carpool line. This is not your forever. You can learn how to regulate your nervous system, and when you do, everything changes, and you will love the changes, because you don't have to run on empty, you don't have to ignore your body, you don't have to feel like shit to be the best mom and build the life you want. You can have the life of your dreams, and you can feel good doing all of the things in your life. It actually makes living your life for you and your kids, easier. I get it. I used to think it was normal to live on the edge, to wake up already tense, to wake up exhausted. Every single day, there were mornings I woke up with tears in my eyes, and I used to drink a pot of coffee all day long, well, until like three o'clock in the afternoon, because I knew I was going to stay up till three watching TV, and I would spend my day literally eating the leftover halves of my kids PB and J's or their grilled cheese, and then. I would collapse at night, but I never was really getting great REM sleep or great rest. And I was definitely pulling off the revenge procrastination at night and scrolling or watching shows until two or three in the morning. I mean, I literally finished Game of Thrones months before my husband, because he was passed out and I was laying in bed, literally finding my only alone time, right? And it's also it was the only time someone wasn't freaking touching me. I would actually forget what I was saying mid sentence. I would not hear when my kids were talking to me, they would tell me. They would say over and over again, Mom, mom, mom, mom, and I wasn't present. I couldn't hear them, and then I would snap at my kids over the littlest things, you know, if they would ask me, what's for dinner, I would literally let out the deepest sigh, like this could not be more annoying to me than I have to make dinner. I had constant headaches. I had a jaw that could barely it cracked every time I opened it. I couldn't turn my head all the way from left to right over my shoulders. And I mean, I think I constantly was living in fight or flight. My body was inflamed. And for a long time, for a dozen years, I told myself, well, this is just the season of life. This is just what it's like to have toddlers. This is just what it's like to have elementary age kids. This is just what it's like to have kids who are learning how to drive. It'll get better someday. Except it didn't. My central nervous system was completely dysregulated. I was stuck in stress mode, and that's how I was running my life. I was actually running, not like a manager, but literally feeling like I was sprinting from thing to thing to thing to thing. And I remember a friend who's a client, also told me she felt like being a mom was a whack a mole. Life like you're standing at that game, just trying to react to everything coming at you and trying to address it as fast as possible, not with thought, not with attention, not with presence, but just reaction. But this is the part we don't like to think about how we live becomes the blueprint for how our kids live. We don't live in a vacuum. We are not hiding. They feel it. They see it. They learn it. They're affected by it. They absorb it. All of it, your fears, your insecurities, your racing, your your beliefs, all of it, it's enveloping the house. So if you're constantly fried, that's what they're learning to be too. And if you're going through life saying, I'm fine, I'll deal with me later. That is what is going to be programmed into their subconscious mind. But once I learned how to reset my nervous system, the most amazing things happened. The first thing I started to notice was I just felt better. I didn't feel like I was dealing with heavy allergies every day. You know, when you wake up and you just kind of feel like you're always battling something as a mom, you're battling some sort of head cold, some sort of cough, some sort like your immune system is not working for you. The first thing I noticed, I started to wake up and not feel sick. I started to feel like I had some energy again. I had some strength back. And that was incredible feeling.

Scottie Durrett  8:14  
And then all these other incredible things started to happen. I started to get my patients back. I wasn't yelling at my kids as much I wasn't being triggered by things that historically never triggered me before, like a red light, or my kid asking for a snack, or my husband coming home late, or somebody texting me. I started to get my joy back. Creativity started to come back. I started to slow down. I had enough awareness that it was I realized it was okay to slow down, and I was enjoying walks and grounding and sleeping. I started sleeping like a baby, and I did all of this without running away from my life or waiting for my kids to change, or waiting for my husband to become a different person. I didn't have to go to a $7,000 retreat in Costa Rica. I'm not saying that's a bad thing to do. Never been to one of those. I'm just saying I didn't have to wait to be rescued. I started to heal myself, and that felt incredible. I wasn't living off of Advil Allegra and coffee. I was starting to live off of my own self love. And you know, something I do want to just quickly touch on when we talk about self care and talk about self love before I learned how to take care of my nervous system, and I was just living in constant burnout. Self Care was fleeting and very sporadic. It was a little treat here, a little alone time here, but it was never really fully healing. It was just little, tiny moments spread out now, self care is just my way of life. Everything I do is now funneled and filtered through. Is this self care? Is this gonna drain me, or is this gonna leave me feeling more energized? Right? It. Starts to become a mindset, a reframe, a mindset filter. Now let me I'm just going to drop a little science, because I want it to make sense. The truth is your central nervous system. It's your brain and your spinal cord. They run the show. It is the boss of your stress response. It is the boss of your how you repair, your rest, digest, heal, it's in control of your mood, your hormones, your digestion, your immune system, basically everything that makes you feel human, and its number one job is to keep you alive. When I talk about the central nervous system, your brain and your spinal cord, I'm not just talking about biology. I'm also talking about your subconscious mind. I'm also talking about your mindset and your physiology, because it's all connected. It is all tied in. We are not a separate head to body. It's a connected energy. Our own thoughts are affecting our physical, biological, emotional, human form, and so we want to understand the impact that our brain, our subconscious and our spinal cord, our central nervous system and nerves, they're all connected. When you're living in constant Go, go, go. The notifications on your emails and your texts are nonstop. The mental load you're carrying about your own stuff, your partner, stuff, your kids, stuff, that schedule you have everything that you want to get done today and everything that you want to get done in the next five years, and thinking about all the stuff you haven't done yet, the emotional labor, the emotional love, you know, we are a sponge for the things and the people that we love, and then the never ending to do's in order to actually not have to crawl into the corner in a fetal position. Your nervous system is trying to keep you alive and keep you safe. So it sticks you in survival mode, because it's the only way it knows how to keep you alive when you have that much triggering you and stressing you out in a day. So your stress hormone, cortisol stays high, your body stays braced for impact, and your brain rewires to expect danger as normal, so you start to overreact. You start to feel numb most of the time, and catching yourself midday with your shoulders so tense they are practically touching your ears, and this means non stop cortisol is pumping through your system, which Fun fact, it's like running your car down the highway with every light on in the red all the time. Eventually the car is going to break down, and the same thing is going on in your body. Eventually something is going to give this isn't about willpower. It's not about being lazy or weak. It's biology, and it's good to notice the signs and respect your body's signals so you can choose to do something about it. And I'm really talking about those signals and symptoms, because that's where you start. It's not just about waking up and acting different. You've got to go back and heal the symptoms and then start to build the foundation of your long term sustainable health. All this info means that you don't have to wait until later or walk around feeling like shit. You can gain some awareness right now and then start to make decisions that help you feel the way you want and deserve to feel you are burned out and you want to feel fucking bad ass. We want to define what does bad ass mean to you, and then help yourself heal so you can go do that. This is only going to help you in your work and your business and your growth, raising your kids, in your relationships, your life, your results. You are the key. You're the difference creator. You are the difference maker. So let's chat about those signals that are coming from your body letting you know if your central nervous system is deregulated and you need a little nervous system detox. So I want you to just if you've been brushing these off as just being a mom, let me throw out a few, and then you can tell me which one's hit chronic exhaustion. You wake up exhausted, dreading the day, even when you've slept 789, hours, even after a quote, full night of sleep, the brain fog. Brain fog is your best friend, and you keep trying to take all these supplements to help you with brain fog, but nothing is actually happening. You still feel like you're forgetting your best friend's kid's name mid conversation, and you forget why you walked into a room. You forget why you're driving you forget to pick up that trombone for your kid's music class number three, the mood swings. It's like you're a ping pong ball. You can't even explain it, and you're noticing that things used to light you up, don't light you up anymore. Digestive issues, bloating, like you're five months pregnant, having constipation, having diarrhea, not having an appetite, just noticing your digestion compared to your pre. Is digestion, right? Sleep struggles. You have trouble falling asleep. You have trouble staying asleep. You can't remember any dream you've had in the last five to 10 years, and you wake up at three o'clock every morning or almost every night. You can't fall back asleep. Anxiety, if you feel like there's a low hum of anxiety and everything is going to be bad news, like you are on the edge of your seat just waiting for the other shoe to fall. And I mean this in comparison to how you used to feel or how you want to feel, frequent sickness, catching a cold every time the kids bring something home or not being able to knock a cold out for at least two to three, sometimes four weeks, and then physical tension, tight jaw, headaches, tense neck, shoulders, somewhere up near your ears. And it's not something that is going away with a hot shower Advil. It feels like it's like deep, deep inside. And just caveat, because of our age, there's also the hormonal shifts happening, which can start in your mid 30s. And so while way the way that we live could be causing our central nervous system to be completely tapped out and fried, you're also going through perimenopause, and that is also putting a ton of stress on your physical, emotional, mental, spiritual body. So it is a huge part that could be controlled. So just actually think about that you are not as strong as you used to be because of the hormonal imbalance. Yet you were asking your body to live as if there have been no changes in your body for the last 10 to 15 years. What we want to do is have awareness about what is going on in our body right now. Forget what you felt like at 25 forget what you felt like at 35 I'm talking about right now. What are the most pressing symptoms that are wearing you down and understand you're not as physically strong as you used to be because of the way you've been living. And because of our age, doesn't mean that we have to throw in the towel. It means we need to actually find out what our beautiful body needs right now, give it to it, heal it, and then we can go live our most bad ass lives ever. And I mean, I'm talking bad ass like you don't give two shits what anybody thinks about you. I'm talking about you wake up with so much energy, so much excitement about your life. You don't even think about a vacation or a break or your kids going back to school, because you don't need that. You already have your own healing and relief that you are creating yourself. You don't compare yourself to other moms. You don't second guess your outfits. You don't second guess what you say. You don't second guess how you're raising your kids. You feel so unbelievably calm inside your body. You feel fucking energized. You feel so freaking powerful,

Scottie Durrett  17:50  
energized, unshakable, unapologetically. You Calm Mind, Strong Body, living on purpose, not autopilot. You are confident, and you are in charge of your life. That is what is possible for you, and it's what is really important for us to understand. It's not about I'm not here to shame us. I'm here to just let you know everything that your body is sending to you is feedback, and you get to respond to that feedback and decide how you want to address it. And when you take that feedback seriously and you start to address it, you will start to heal that dysregulated nervous system, and you will start to build the foundation of your health, which means you are one step closer to living your most bad ass fucking life. I mean, I know that's what you want, right? And I know that's what you want for your kids, right? I know how busy you are. I also know how you have a lot on your plate, and the idea of slowing down to figure out, what the hell is my body saying to me? What does my body need? Right now, it can be incredibly overwhelming. That is your ego and your brain talking out of fear. I want you to just take a deep breath and tell your brain it's okay to be scared, but I've got it. I'm worth it, because ignoring these signs are only going to make me drain and make life harder down the road, when you choose to learn how to regulate your beautiful nervous system and manage your stress, your hormones in perimenopause will start to balance, and your mood will lift. Sure you still might need hormone replacement therapy, but let's give our body a double support system. It's one of the best remedies to getting yourself on the path to really managing your perimenopause. Also your sleep. You will sleep deeper. You will wake up feeling like a functioning human being, and I know you want to wake up feeling more energized and being able to tackle everything in your life, right? You start to respond to life in a way that feels really good to you, not just reacting so when life or your kids throw you a curveball, you're not just like hitting the gut with it. You actually. Catch it and you get to throw it back. You get to then respond. So much about life is responding so that if you did this, think about if you could start responding every single day from a place of calm, rather than a place that creates more chaos. How good would that feel? Close your eyes and just imagine walking into the kitchen your kid telling you, Mom, we're supposed to bring 600 cupcakes today for the welcome back to school party, and it needs to be done in 30 minutes. Think about how you wish you could handle that. Close your eyes and imagine that bad ass version of you. How would she manage that situation? That's what's possible for you. Also when you learn how to manage your sin, when you learn how to heal and manage your stress, your kids feel your calm, and they learn it for themselves. That, to me, is some of the best mothering in the world. When you learn how to heal, when you learn how to prioritize yourself and take care of yourself, you're then telling your kids, it's good to take care of yourself. This isn't selfish. This is health, and this is how you do it. Also you are protecting your long term health when you really start to address the symptoms your body's sending to you, so that your future is vibrant and it's strong and it's full of joy, and it doesn't get worse and worse and worse, right? Excuse me, I am having allergies right now, so I do have to take some Allegra when you can when you continue to ignore the symptoms that your body is sending to you, your body will age faster thanks to inflammation. You will hold on to weight. No matter how much you cut your calories or how much you work out your body, it will be in self preservation mode. It will not release weight. You will develop even worse, chronic insomnia and a slew of other health issues. Your stress starts to become normal in your household, which means stress becomes normal for your kids, which means your kids are living in fight or flight, and they will learn how to respond to life from a stress state, not a calm state. And if you know, if you keep allowing stress to guide your life, your brain hard wires anxiety as your default setting, you burned out, and you'll always feel disconnected. And it doesn't matter how many spa days, how many mother's days, how much help you have around the house, no amount of external things are going to heal what is going on internally. You have to go the other direction. We've got to heal what's going on internally, and that will directly impact what's going on in our life around us, right? So how can you regulate your nervous system, even if you're busy as shit? These aren't tips like I'm not going to tell you that you need to go live in a cabin for six months or wait till your kids head off to college. These are real life tips that I have implemented in my life, and also have given these beautiful tools to all of my clients, because what we want to do is to help you show up and live your life right now so that you don't have to count on back to school or Christmas or holiday breaks before you start to feel better. Number one is conscious breathing. It is going to be the fastest and easiest way for you to turn off stress and get into a non stress state. When we are living in stress, we cannot heal, we cannot think logically, we cannot problem solve, and we cannot digest food or information. When you breathe in deeply through your nose, it's incredibly healing, and you exhale through your mouth, you are literally turning off fight or flight. Okay, I'm talking more than just oxygen in and carbon dioxide out. I'm talking about your breath is your bridge between mind and body and our external influences on our state of our life, right? It is so powerful. I wrote some notes. So I want to make sure that I don't miss anything. Because I know people talk about breathing, but if you really understand that the majority of your life, you're probably breathing very, very shallowly. You're not really fueling your cells with the oxygen that it needs. Your deep breath can turn off fight or flight, and it affects cellular function. I'm talking about your mitochondria. I'm talking about the shit that's going on in your body that you cannot see, but has a massive impact on your results. It directly affects your autonomic nervous system. It re can reduce depression and anxiety. It can improve your sleep, and it can help concentration and helps manage your stress and your central nervous system, just in your breath. So one of the ways that you can do this, which is really easy and applicable to your life right now is to habit stack deep breathing into stuff you're already doing. I love when I'm at a red light. I turn off my podcast and I just do some deep breathing. It helps me move my road rage. It helps me with my patience, and it turns off fight or flight. And how important is that when. Behind the wheel when you pull up to your house, take 60 seconds before you walk into the door. And just take 10 deep nourishing belly breaths, not just in your chest. I wanted to fuel all the way down into your body. Do it before you get out of bed. In the morning, take three to five deep breaths. Do it at night before you fall asleep, you can say your affirmations. You can turn on your you know, sunset, light, whatever you need to do, but take some nourishing belly breaths before you fall asleep, you will notice a difference. Breathing is incredible. It's free, and you can do it today. Number two, movement, I'm not talking about exercise, but exercise, I know everybody's like, don't say exercise, because it's super triggering. I mean, motherfucker, you are a strong, capable, bad ass human being. You can handle it. When I say exercise, what I'm talking about is movement to shake out stuck emotions. Get a freaking treadmill for your desk. Take one of those calls on a watt, like, don't just get stuck in a chair behind your desk without natural light. Stand up, shake your arms out and legs like you're trying to fling, you know, snot off your hands or something. Turn on some music when you're cooking, and shake that ass. Go outside and listen to some music that makes you happy, and roll around on the grass. Get a treadmill and walk while you're taking a call, or book some of your zoom calls and tell them your camera is going to be off and go for a walk around the neighborhood. Shake your ass. It helps move stuck emotions and it helps activate your parasympathetic nervous system. Okay. Number three, grounding, grounding scan. Notice five things you see. Notice four things you feel, three things you hear, two things you can smell and one you can taste. It's just getting out of your fucking noggin and back into your primal, beautiful, smart as shit body, okay, singing and humming.

Scottie Durrett  27:01  
There is so much regulation and magic in singing and humming and connecting to the vibration of your own voice. This is why there's a lot of singing in prayer. There's a lot of singing in meditation and music and meditation, it is connecting to the rhythm of your heart. It is connecting to your central nervous system. And it's also entertaining. And then many, many pauses, hand on your chest, take a deep belly breath and just say out loud, I'm safe and I'm here before you react, I'm big into Kabbalah. You don't have to be into Kabbalah. But one of the things they teach is to say, pause, what a gift. When you're feeling like life is throwing a curveball at you before you immediately respond to that text, to that email, to that person, to that before you flip off the person in traffic. I want you to just take a deep breath, and I want you to say, pause. What a pleasure. And then I want you to put your hand on your hand on your heart and say, Okay, how do I want to respond? I'm telling you all of this because I'm trying to break these default habits and this belief that this is just mom life. Because if we keep saying this is just mom life, we're losing a lot of time, and we're losing a lot of days we can't get back. It's draining your energy, it's draining your health, it's draining your joy, it's draining your connection, and you're losing time to take care of your body and enjoy the life that you have right now, because honestly, that's all we have right now. Don't forget, your body keeps score when we keep pushing through. It doesn't mean those moments, those challenges, are going away. They're getting shoved down. You will pay for it later. So when you learn how to regulate your nervous system by listening to the specific symptoms that your body is communicating with you right now, that's going to help you feel good today, but it's also going to help you be very strong and you can thrive years from now. We can't control the chaos, but we can control our response to the chaos, and that is where your power lies. That's what's so incredible. You are working so hard to build the life of your dreams. I want you to actually be present and live the life of your dreams. So here's how you can start one. I want you to notice how your body feels today. Just do a body scan, write them down, let me know you can actually send your symptoms to me, and then you and I can start figuring out what's the best first step for you to take. Also, I've created a free Seven Day Nervous system reset challenge, no special pills, no hormone shots, no overpriced retreats, just seven days with seven science backed Scotty explained tools that fit into your real, messy, busy, beautiful life. Every day, you'll get an email from me with one simple nervous system regulation practice that takes a couple of minutes. By the end, you will feel. Calmer and more grounded and more at peace and more in control without changing everything about your life. I'll drop the link in the show notes so you can join that. But I really just want you to know that where you are right now, if you do not feel as good as you want to feel, you do not have to stay here. You can do something about that, and you can start by joining my reset challenge and just paying attention to what your body is saying to you. I want to help you heal this burnout, help you feel like you again and enjoy your beautiful life. I want to throw just a couple of 10 like these are nervous system triggered mom moments that again we might think are just mom life, but could be a sign that your nervous system is deregulated. Number one, the snack rage, the moment when your kid asks for a snack while you're already making dinner and you feel your blood pressure spike like they just ask you to build, you know, the pyramids. Number two, the what did I come into this room here for walking into the laundry room and forgetting why you're there, standing like a statue when someone's yelling, mom and then snaps you out of it, the email, heart rate test, your phone pings with another school update, another invitation, another to do, and your chest tightens before you've even opened it Right the invisible mental load realizing that you know you've got to remember the teachers gifts, the birthday party, the backpacks, the school supplies, the vet appointment, the socks, getting the laundry done. But you forget to eat your own lunch. You forget to go the bathroom. You can't remember the last time you had a glass of water. Number five, and this one is tricky, and it's really hard for us to let go of the late night next Netflix, revenge, procrastination, staying up until 123, o'clock in the morning, binging that show that you're madly in love with. You know you're exhausted and you should go to sleep, but it's the only time that you have alone time and that no one's asking you for anything. I did an episode on this. I'll link it in the show notes so you can listen to it. It's fascinating and completely relatable, okay, the overreaction regret. I've had many of these, when you snap at your kids, when you yell at your partner, when you yell at yourself, and then realizing five seconds later, wait, this is not this is not me. This is not typically how I like to respond. And you feel really guilty all night. Maybe it keeps waking you up. Actually, super stressed shoulders, like you can't turn your head from left to right, or you're always just feeling so it's like the pain in your neck. It's almost so normal and been there for so long, you almost have scar tissue building up, and your chiropractor can't pop it, and no massage has ever made it fully go away. Number eight, a ton of digestion issues, bloating, even if you eat healthy or not healthy, you're wondering like, Why in the world is my body not responding the way that I'm used to having it respond waking up every single night at 3am and wondering, why in the fuck am I sick again? And like catching your kids cold and never being able to get out of it. Look, all of this is just to bring awareness so that you feel empowered to make the best choice for yourself. No one else is coming to fix anything about you. You're not broken, you are whole and you are wonderful, but your environment is triggering you, and the way that you are choosing to show up every single day is exhausting you. I want you to still show up every single day for this beautiful life that you've built, and feel fucking amazing doing it, if you are ready for that, want you to raise your hand. I want you to click the links below, grab my free central nervous system detox, send me a message and let me know the symptoms that your body is sending to you right now. And let's get this beautiful body regulated so you can heal your burnout and feel fucking badass. Hey, Mama, thank you so much for listening before you dive back into the beautiful chaos of your life, please take this with you. You're doing better than you think. You are not alone, and you do not have to do this on autopilot. If this episode helped you in any way, please share with a mom who needs to hear it, because we grow faster when we do it together, and if you have a second, leaving a five star review helps momplex reach more mamas who need this kind of real talk and support. If you want more support and guidance or just someone in your corner, be sure to visit scottydirt.com to learn more. Get in touch with me or dive deeper into this work until next time mom trust yourself. Trust your gut. You already know what to do, and you are exactly the mama your kids need. I love you. I'll see you next time you.