The Busyness Of Motherhood (And How To Stop It)

Hi there. Welcome to the Design Your Dream Life podcast. My name is Natalie Bacon and I’m an Advanced, Certified Mindfulness Life Coach, as well as a wife and mom, if you’re here to do the inner work and grow, I can help. Let’s get started.

Hello my friend. Welcome to the podcast. I’m so happy to be here with you today to talk about the busyness of motherhood. Do you feel busy? Does your life feel busy? Does it always feel busy? I like to check in with myself and ask myself how long I’ve been feeling this feeling. So ask yourself, how long have you been feeling busy? This is always a telltale sign, if it’s mindset or not, because what you might find is that you have been feeling busy for decades. Can you relate to this? You’re like, I’m busy now with older kids and I was busy with younger kids and I was busy before I had kids and I was busy in college and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel busy.

I love asking myself that question and thinking about it because it’s such an example of how feelings really are created from the way that we see the world. And that’s not to beat ourselves up for feeling feelings that we don’t wanna feel necessarily or that are negative, but it is to bring some awareness to the impact that we can have going forward on our feelings. I don’t ever like to think of the goal being, I want to feel positive all of the time because I’m a human being and so I know that I’m going to feel negative emotion, some of the negative emotion I want to feel sadness, maybe disappointment, um, lots of other emotions, and yet they’re also going to be emotions that aren’t necessarily serving me, that I also will feel. And that’s just because I’m a human being as well, like overwhelm and frustration and defeat, and I’m never trying to escape that human experience.

That’s truly been one of the most profound ways that I’ve changed through using these tools is to allow myself to be human, to feel the feelings and to move on. And I think when it comes to busy, particularly the busyness of motherhood, because it is so ingrained in us, because you know, society tells us that motherhood is busy. We think that it’s a fact and busy is a lot of things, but it is not a fact. So a fact is something that is provable. So I couldn’t go to a judge in a court of law and say, I’m really busy. That would be very vague. It would be an interpretation. We would have to say, okay, what’s really going on here? What are the facts right now? That’s how you know it’s not a fact. Now this doesn’t mean that you don’t have a good reason for thinking the thought.

I’m really busy right now. You definitely do. Or else your brain wouldn’t think that. And yet that’s really not the most useful question. That’s why I don’t really always like to ask the question like, is that a true thought? Because there are so many thoughts that are true. Is that way of thinking helpful for you? Does that mindset help you live a more empowered life? Do you like how you show up as a woman, as a mom when you think, I’m just so busy right now? Typically I think the answer is no, because busyness feels like rushing, like go, go, go energy, like frantic. Like there’s so much that we have to do and not enough time to do it. I think busyness is often in scarcity. Like there are more things quantitatively that need to get done than there is time. And it’s just really interesting to notice because the way that you think about it will determine if that’s the story that you go with.

So thinking, I am busy, I have so much to do, life is busy, I have too much on my plate right now, is an optional way to think about it. And that’s not to say that you wanna think the opposite, like, I have so much free time, I have a luxurious amount of time, I don’t know what to do with all of my free time. It’s not that you wanna go to the opposite end of the spectrum, but instead just get kind of curious about how it feels when you think I am so busy or I have a really full plate right now. I have a like twinge of embarrassment when I think that I’m busy because I try really hard to do this work. And so when I find myself more busy than normal, I think, oh my goodness, I did that. Why did I do that to myself? I don’t want to be in a state of busy and I take a lot of care of managing my mind and managing my calendar to not be busy. I do say that my life is full and it might seem like semantics, but it’s really not. I feel, um, proud and confident and expansive when I say my life is full right now. I want a full life. That to me, feels very abundant. It’s a very different feeling than when I think the thought I’m so busy. So check in with yourself and just notice the way that you talk about time. Notice the way that you describe motherhood. Notice the way that you talk about being busy and notice that it’s all optional. So I like to just take an average day on a, on a typical day when you know there’s not anything really unusual going on when you wake up, what are your first thoughts and what are your thoughts after that?

Are you kind of falling into the busyness of the to-do list and the logistics and the day? And how does that leave you feeling by 8, 9, 10 am I think that without doing thought work, without managing your mind, what can happen is you can be pretty, um, I would say like irritable or annoyed or um, just sort of unsatisfied that early in the morning just from having negative thoughts about the to-do list about the busyness, about what you have to do. And it has much, much less to do with what’s actually on the schedule for the day and so much more to do with what’s going on in your mind.

Because intentionally, if someone asked you, how’s your life going? You know, how are your kids? How’s your family? You probably would answer it that things are going well or your kids are doing pretty good and you, you know, you’re, you’re grateful for your family. Like intellectually you would say that. And yet every day when you wake up by 8, 9, 10 am do you feel good? Do you feel appreciative? And of course you’re not gonna feel good every day, but just think about the top emotions that you feel. Are you feeling busy often? Are you having thoughts that your life is just too busy, I have too much on my plate, I’m really busy. Those thoughts lead to more busyness and more scarcity. Now I want to be clear that when you over plan it is so much harder to manage your mind. This is why I teach.

Don’t use a to-do list. Um, for those of you who are new or haven’t been following that long, I do not use a to-do list. I use a list for grocery shopping or my, my target list. But otherwise, for things that I want to get done or events or anything like that, it’s all on my calendar. Because this is the reason why the brain goes into scarcity and busyness when it sees a long list like that. Because the immediate thought is, I have to get all of this done right now. Instead, if you put it on your calendar in time slots and I teach this calendaring method in Grow You, that you have such an easier time managing your brain. So it’s not that the to-do list creates the busyness, it’s just that it’s harder to manage your mind around. So I say that because the goal is not to, you know, pack your day so full and then try to manage your mind around it.

The goal though, is to get to a place of what I call clean thinking of managing your mind first and then taking different actions. Here’s why this is so important. If you have ever tried to not be as busy as you are, but you do it from the same mindset, the same thinking pattern, it likely doesn’t work at least not long-term because you’re just changing your actions. So for example, you could search right now on Google, or better yet, go to uh, chat g p t and ask for time management tips for busy moms. And you’re gonna get a ton and they’re all gonna be related to actions. And there’s nothing wrong with changing your actions, it’s just if you take your mind with you, you won’t be able to get a different result because the way that you think about your life is what creates your result. So if you are trying to take different action, but the movie playing in your mind, the story that you have about this season of life with your kids is that this is just a really busy season of motherhood. I don’t care what time management strategy or new planner or new app that you have, you will make that thought true because that’s genuinely what you’re believing.

So for me, what’s been really helpful to stay away from kind of this busyness of motherhood is to just notice the glorification of it. Like it’s almost like a badge of honor or a way of connecting with other moms in a way that actually does a disservice to motherhood and to the individual to taking care of ourselves, to mom, right? So it’s almost like this martyrdom, like the busier I am, the more self-sacrificing I am with my time and my energy, the more depleted I am, the better mom I am. And I never wanna send that message. I think that is such a toxic message that leads to making women and moms invisible. And we are human beings that are worthy of taking care of ourselves. And that means taking care of our minds and taking care of our time. And the way that I like to do it and the way that I think is the most long lasting is by doing the mindset work first, managing your mind, and then taking different actions second, so that when you come to use a new planner or calendaring system or you know, time management philosophies that you wanna implement in your life, it’s from a much cleaner place in your mind. So you’re thinking clearly and you’re having more empowering thoughts about your time, about your life, and that leads to having a much better result.

So I think a really empowering question to ask yourself if you feel like your calendar is too full, I would ask yourself why, why is your calendar too full? And then ask yourself why again and why after that and why after that. And what you will find is the real reason why you are overscheduling. Often we like to blame. I think this is just the human condition. I’ve been noticing this so much. We either blame other people or the world or we blame ourselves. So it’s either our kid’s fault and their activities or our spouse’s fault and what’s going on with their work or you know, our community’s fault or the world’s fault, someone else’s fault, or it’s our fault. And instead of looking at it through the lens of someone is at fault for this calendar, I like to just use more compassionate and loving approach to understanding why.

Because if you can understand why your brain thinks it’s useful to plan this way, then you can change it. And the reason why is always the mind, the mindset that you have around your time and around how you spend your time is going to be reflected in your calendar. So for me, I used to value productivity as a sign of my worth. Can you relate to this? I know this is so common for so many moms. It’s like you only feel good about yourself after you’ve gotten a lot done. And don’t get me wrong, I am all for being really proud of yourself and especially when you do things, but not because it makes you better. So the distinction there is that when you do things, be proud that you just did them, not because you needed to do them to be worthy of a break.

I used to be someone who would not feel comfortable just taking rest, just indulging in a break, or even being comfortable, feeling bored. Like I had no idea what that was like, the type a rigidity and I was side of myself that really served me so well. To be high achieving was for me personally, out of balance. And I wasn’t able to, um, figure out how to incorporate more rest and more space and it had nothing to do with what was going on in my life. And so just notice if you are wanting to blame your kids or blame your spouse or blame the house project or the renovation, or blame the move, you know, I have moved across the country now couple times and it’s so stressful because of the way the mind works. It’s so hard to manage your brain with so much, um, uncertainty and lack of routine.

Like it’s much easier to manage your mind when you have routines. And knowing this, it’s not that there’s no stress, it just makes it so much more manageable. I’m like, oh, this is the part that feels stressful, nothing’s gone wrong. I’m a human being moving across the country. So resist the temptation to blame your circumstances on how you are feeling and also resist the temptation to blame yourself. Instead, allow yourself to feel how you’re feeling and know that you can decide to think and feel differently in the future. And what would that be like for you? I think we’re so used to the thoughts and feelings that we’ve had for so long. So I love thinking about how long we’ve been busy because likely it’s for decades and it’s sort of a badge of honor and it is totally present regardless of whether we were in college or we had little kids or older kids or whatever the circumstances are.

It’s always there. And that is such a good visualization and and way to see that really busy comes from the way that you are thinking. So if you want to change that, you absolutely can. And it starts from deciding on purpose that you no longer want to think that you are busy. And what would that be like for you to have a full life that you really like how you’re allocating your time and your energy and your resources and you don’t have thoughts around being busy? And if you don’t have thoughts around being busy, what are your thoughts? So I like the thought my life is full and I like to create white space in my calendar and I like to have downtime and I don’t view my worth based on productivity like I used to. So if there are things left undone, I don’t think that’s bad.

Like I don’t think there’s morality in doing more. Like I think it’s cool to do more if I want to do more, but not because I’m somehow a better woman, wife, or mom if I get more done. And the way that you’ll know if you’re kind of in this space or not is to just, um, notice if you feel comfortable or uncomfortable leaving things undone from your to-do list or your calendar. Notice what you make that mean or are there certain things about your home that really trigger you to do more even at your own expense. So for example, I’ve coached clients in Grow You who have struggled with, you know, leaving the laundry, leaving the dishes, leaving the house kind of a mess so that they can go to sleep like they would rather do more because getting more done is more valuable to them than sleep.

And then they wake up depleted and tired the next day. And of course, you’ve already heard me talk about this, it’s so much harder to manage your mind when you’re tired. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. Maybe you’re nursing or you have a newborn and you’re getting up in the middle of the night. Sure, you want to choose tired so that you can show up for your baby in the middle of the night. But for the times that you have a choice and you want to choose sleep, can you still love yourself and be proud of yourself and not make it mean anything about who you are when you leave dishes in the sink or you leave laundry undone or the house is kind of a mess for me, doing the mindset work, the thought work around a messy home has been so life giving. I have such a better sense of appreciation for this phase of life.

Like I think about, um, there will be a time when when things are different, when things are always put away and things are neat and Benji doesn’t track a bunch of dirt in the home and um, that time will be when Benji’s not in the home anymore or when my kids are grown and you know that that time will come and, and there will be amazing things about that time, but I don’t wanna rush it away. I wanna know that there’s always the 50 50 meaning there’s always the contrast, meaning there’s the positive and the negative of right now and of that time in the future. So I don’t want to spend my time trying to control my circumstances so that I can feel good about myself basing my worthiness on whether I’ve done enough.

And I think having the, the mindset to believe that I am whole and worthy and amazing regardless of what my house looks like, regardless of my kids or my dogs or my spouse, that is the work that is practicing the work so that I don’t create more busyness than I want to. So I like to think that I am always in control of my time. It really feels empowering to me. So if I’m using my time for something that my first thought is no, I don’t wanna be doing that, I always remind myself of the truth, which is I do wanna be doing that. So let me give you a specific example.

I was coaching a client and she was a court reporter and she said, you know, I can’t get up and stretch my legs and um, move around to get that movement during the day when I am working. I have to be sitting. And I told her, you don’t have to be sitting right. You’re not handcuffed to the chair. You have agency to get up. What’s true though is that you actually want to sit more than you want to move around. This is so powerful everyone listening, it’s like the difference between feeling like you’re at the effect of your life and feeling really empowered. So if you’re doing something you don’t wanna do, it’s because you want something else more. So if you think about busyness and you think about motherhood and you think about your calendar, if you have your kids and a bunch of activities that take up the whole week and you are doing other things like working or, or whatever it is, and you have your whole calendar full and you don’t have any time on there for you, the truth is that you value other people’s activities and commitments more than you value creating some space for yourself to do activities.

And I say that because it’s the truth, but I also don’t want you to use it against yourself. Again, there’s not like morality here, it’s really just about awareness. Like, I like to think, oh, that’s so interesting. You know, if if I am giving my time to everyone else and I don’t create time for myself, what I’m saying there to myself is that I’m not worth the time and it’s just a reframe that’s really powerful to getting me to make space for myself and, and getting in touch with what I need. So I’ve talked about this before, definitely inside Grow You How one of my mentors talked about how all the kids in her family, um, each got one to two activities and that included mom and dad, dad and mom and dad’s activities took more time and were more expensive. And if the weeks started to feel too busy, that meant that everyone had to reduce their activities.

And what I love about this is it’s something that I teach inside Grow You in the Motherhood Toolkit in the North Star lesson. Like where are you going? Like what’s the point of all of this? Like what’s the vision? Here is the vision that our kids are the best at producing and the best at, you know, their activities and at what expense? I think that that’s probably not where you’re headed in your family and you care about connection and being together and um, whatever other values that you have. And yet is that what’s reflected on your calendar or does it feel like if you have a night where the family just does nothing, that that’s like a waste of time that you could have gotten more done. And I think having that north star and defining it as a family value and vision for this season of life can be so powerful because it, it’s like a filter through which you make decisions about your time and your calendar.

If you know that connection and the relationships that you have in your family are the north star, then you will prioritize that in your time. And busyness won’t be one of the leading values in your family because you won’t want it to be. So I think that if you know success and performance-based outcomes are the North Star, you could easily see how your calendar would be full of activities and to-dos that lead to making sure everyone is performing at the highest and is successful. And listen, I am all about a good performance and some good success, but is that the most important thing? And just like, if you wanna know what your values are with money, look at your budget, look at your spending in the last month. The same is true with respect to time. So look at your time over the last week, over the last month for yourself, for your family, and look at your calendar and just question if that’s how you want to be spending your time.

Uh, it’s, you know, so much more than this because there’s people pleasing. There’s um, our beliefs about self-care. There’s, um, putting things on our calendar in advance. There’s a lot that you can learn to do to plan more effectively and to live from your values, but it really all does from your mindset. So if you want coaching on this and you want help reducing the busyness that you are experiencing in your life, bring your specific question to me and I will use these tools to help you navigate busyness because I promise you, you can wake up with better feeling thoughts. You can wake up and by eight, nine or 10:00 AM in the morning, feel good about your day, regardless of the number of activities that you have planned. And from a place of intentionally thinking and feeling good, then you can decide how you want to utilize the time management tools to live out your values. It is a combination of mindset and then action. But you have to do the mindset piece first in order to create real change because no matter where you go, you take your brain with you. So come join me at Ask Natalie Anything, head on over to momonpurpose.com/ask. Natalie, register there. I would love to coach you live on whatever challenge you are facing, especially if it is one related to the busyness of motherhood. I love you, my friend and I will talk with you next week. Take care.

If you loved this podcast, I invite you to check out Grow You my mindfulness community for moms where we do the inner work together. Head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more.