Do you ever find yourself trying to rest or relax and get this nagging voice telling you that you are being lazy? As moms, this can be a nightly experience, when we finally get the kids down and would like to unwind. Instead, our R&R gets hijacked by this notion that if we aren’t doing chores, hobbies, exercise, etc then we are being lazy.  But, odds are you are NOT a lazy mom, rather you are overwhelmed. 

In this episode we cover some of these topics (and related links you might like):

• The original blog post When I realized I wasn’t a lazy mom, I was just overwhelmed


• Naming our experience
  
  
  
  • The power of naming our emotions (how affect labelling can improve your emotional intelligence)
  
  
  
  


• Societal expectations on moms
  
  
  
  • 188. Motherhood & Instagram Culture (how online communities impact your motherhood experience)
  
  
  
  


• Self-definition (limiting identities)
  
  
  
  • 76. Why it matters what you think (limiting mindsets in motherhood)
  
  
  
  


• Three ways we are exhausted during the day
  
  
  
  • Physical exhaustion
  
  
  • Emotional exhaustion, mirror neurons, our kids’ emotions
    
    
    
    • 117. Emotional Intelligence 101 (and by Enneagram Type)
    
    
    • 119. Tolerating tough emotions in our kids (and ourselves)
    
    
    • 113. Why you aren’t thriving in motherhood (stress and surviving)
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Mental exhaustion, mental load, decision fatigue
    
    
    
    • 144. How to lighten the mental load of DECISION FATIGUE
    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  


• The counter-argument of ‘just be more organized’
  
  
  
  • 11 Things That Make My MomLife Simpler
  
  
  • 133. 4 simple habits that make my momlife better
  
  
  
  


• How do we handle this voice telling us that we are lazy
  
  
  
  • Window of tolerance
    
    
    
    • understanding how the window of tolerance impacts your stress in motherhood
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • 153. How to move from ambivalent to ambitious (making change takes more than just willpower)
  
  
  
  


• Knowing when you are overwhelmed and when you are feeling lazy
  
  
  
  • 180. Self-care, self-comfort, self-love & what we have learned from our mothers
  
  
  • 129. Does your ‘to-do list’ overwhelm you? Expectation overwhelm and how to handle it.
  
  
  
  

Get the wallpapers for the Beautiful Words Episode right here 

All of the Simple Christmas posts are right here 

FULL TRANSCRIPT

0:00

Hey it’s Shawna, you’re near to go find a counselor from simple on purpose.ca. Welcome to the Simplon purpose podcast.

0:17

So it’s December guys we made it is December. And today when I’m recording this, it’s snowing in BC, which I know what’s going to make it beautiful here, except I have to drive out of town for a hockey tournament. So That’s never fun to be driving through these kinds of conditions. But hey, that’s the life of a Canadian parent with a kid in winter sports, traveling through all the conditions, bringing all the snacks and the vitamins and the gear is just like a whole thing, isn’t it?

0:42

So we’re in December, many of us are thinking about Christmas planning for it, whatever you’re celebrating, we’re thinking about it. And I do like to share content that is seasonally relevant. And often I would share a lot of posts about Christmas. But I’ve shared so much in the past that I’m not going to rehash all of it. Again, I’m just going to lead you to the archives of all of the posts all of the episodes about all of the things when it comes to simplifying Christmas, and having your Christmas be intentional and purposeful in something that you just show up for and enjoy. So stop by the link in the show notes for a little landing page for all of that.

1:19

I’m going to talk about a well loved post that I shared a few years back called I stopped calling myself a lazy mom. And when I wrote it, I was writing it from that experience of feeling like I was momming hard all day long, three small kids.

1:34

Just reminder, my kids now are 12,11, and nine. So when they were all at home, they were all like close in age and it was like hot, hot and heavy situation. So I would be home with all these kids momming hard and then at the end of the night, you get them to bed, you sit on the couch, and suddenly, when you should be kind of like feeling like Oh yeah, I’m like come check out. What happens instead is this feeling of being flooded with the expectation that I should be doing something I shouldn’t be doing something I should be maybe meal prepping a freezer meal or folding this perpetual basket of laundry on my couch. Or I should take up a hobby because I haven’t been creative enough and use my brain in those ways. Or I should definitely exercise goodness knows I’m overdue or calling a friend catching up whatever felt was necessary to be more balanced and more productive as a woman in the world. That feeling that should do that expectation contrasted with the desire to just sit on the couch with my husband and my little bowl of ketchup chips, and enjoy something interesting on TV together.

2:46

And the contrast matters here because we have two camps on one camp is who I should be I should be productive. I should be doing all these things. And the other camp is who I am currently being which is lazy, being lazy,

3:01

lazy and complacent. Man, that is a word I used against myself for years. And when I boil it down to where I got that self definition from it was really due to the fact that I was not a morning person. It was kind of this determining factor, this default result that if you hate mornings, you’re lazy. If you want to sleep in you are lazy.

3:26

So what do we do when we give ourselves any kind of identity, we inadvertently and sometimes inadvertently perpetuate that identity. And I’m going to link to an episode on that in the shownotes.

3:38

So this post about stopping calling myself a lazy mom, it came at a time where I had this big aha moment that maybe I wasn’t who I thought I was, at least not in all of the areas of my life. I might be lazy at some things. But I didn’t feel like I was lazy at all of the things. after all. We were eating meals of food that I made, we were wearing clean clothes that I put through the wash. We were generally getting the dishes done most of the time. And that made me think if it wasn’t entirely true in all of the areas of my life. Maybe it’s not even true. Maybe I wasn’t lazy.

4:15

So on one of these nights when we got the kids to bed, and I’m just sitting on the couch beside that emotional support basket of laundry scrolling on Pinterest, instead of cleaning the kitchen, I came across an article and the article open with this line. Are you really lazy or Are you overwhelmed? And you know in the last episode when I talked about the power of naming things, how it feels validating informative, that’s how I felt right then validated. Overwhelmed. That was the word for it. I wasn’t lazy. I was overwhelmed.

4:46

And of course I was overwhelmed. I had three small kids, and every single day was like a circus that was on fire and I was just trying very, very hard to lead it well. The amount of physical energy emotional energy and mental energy it takes to be A mom is un