Why taking care of yourself feels so hard as a mother
Spoiler alert: it’s not your fault
You’ve heard all the great advice for new mothers, and you KNOW it would help you to:
· go to bed early
· eat more nutritious food
· drink more water
· scroll less
· make your bed in the morning
... but somehow you just CAN'T seem to do these seemingly easy, simple things.
Instead, you find yourself reaching for a quick (but highly processed) microwave dinner in the evening, scrolling or watching “just one more episode” on Netflix after you finally get your baby to sleep, before falling into a messy crumpled bed much later than you had promised yourself you would, while vowing that tomorrow will be different.
You think you're not doing the things you know would help you because you're:
· too busy
· too exhausted
· too overwhelmed
· don't have enough time
And while these things are undoubtedly true, there are other far more impactful and wide-reaching reasons why it is so difficult for you to prioritise your self-care, and the bottom line is – it is absolutely not your fault.
So I am not here to join you in your self-judgement and self-blame. I know there’s plenty of mean girl internal chatter going on about this: “I should XXX”, “Why can’t I just YYY”, “Everyone else seems to be able to ZZZ”. But if you know me at all, you'll know by now that I'm firmly team self-compassion, and if you’re reading this blog, I’m guessing you’d like to tap into some of this too.
This is why I’m offering Motherhood Matters Moments from 17th- 19th February, a free self-compassion-based series of daily emails along with a supportive WhatsApp community, to help you to take steps to prioritise your own self-care.
More about that later, but for now my aim with this blog is to lift you out of your self-blame by helping you to understand that why it can be so challenging to prioritise your own self-care. The element of self-compassion I'll be leaning into heavily to help you to understand what is happening to you is "I'm human", and I'm going to explain the biological and evolutionary factors at play. Science geeks, you're going to love this one... and even if that’s not your thing, I think you'll feel better when you get a glimpse of what's actually going on.
As a new mum, there are three factors influencing heavily influencing your ability to care for yourself:
1. You are in survival mode: And it’s survival mode on speed, because it’s your baby's survival that you are responsible for. In response to perceived threats, our body goes into fight, flight, freeze or fawn, depending on which is deemed necessary for survival. These primal responses are made unconsciously in the primitive hindbrain, and our frontal lobes shut down to facilitate this. Our frontal lobes are responsible for logic, reasoning, decision making and memory. THIS is why you often "can't think straight", and "feel like you're losing your mind”.
2. Another thing your wonderful brain is primed for in early motherhood is attunement: being aware of and responding to, your baby's needs to facilitate bonding. This is why we feel their cries so physically, why we cannot sleep when the baby sleeps, and why we so often don't notice if we're hungry, thirsty, tired or need to go to the toilet. Not-to-mention why we can’t remember where we put our keys, figure out how to work the new remote control, or decide what to have for dinner.
All of these adaptive changes to our brain which naturally occur postpartum are often dismissively and disparagingly referred to as Baby Brain... stay tuned for another blog coming on that!
3. At this point I can hear you asking: “Why would nature design mothers in a way that we lose sight of our own self-care? How am I supposed to care for my baby if nature seems to be working against me being able to care for myself?”. But nature didn't abandon you - nature intended for there to be a village to support you. We are social mammals, and the natural order of things is that we would raise our young with the support of a close-knit tribe around us. This was once the case in Ireland and we hear stories about it from just a few generations back, and it's still very much the case is so many other cultures around the world.
Evolution has not caught up with our western capitalist, patriarchal, individualistic society, and that is why it feels so deeply uncomfortable and often just plain wrong, and unfair, when you are overburdened with doing and everything for everyone. The isolation and overwhelm feels unbearable sometimes because it is, you haven't evolved to bear it, it's not natural.
This is why my upcoming 3-day series, Motherhood Matters Moments includes a community element (more on that below). It is essential that we normalise these challenges, so that we can stop blaming ourselves for them. When we are in a state of self-judgement and self-blame, we cannot move towards solutions.
Summary: It is not your fault if you find it difficult to prioritise your self-care as a mother. Your brain has altered to facilitate focusing on your baby’s survival and to ensure bonding, and nature intended for you to be surrounded by a village to support you with raising your baby and caring for yourself.
Motherhood Matters Moments (running from 17th – 19th February) is a FREE series designed to raise your awareness and understanding of these physical and evolutionary influences on your ability to prioritise your own self-care, via short daily emails. There is also an opportunity to join a supportive WhatsApp community to share your experiences and receive encouragement from myself and other mothers in overcoming them.
This easy-to-implement yet highly impactful series is open for booking now. If you ever find yourself saying to yourself “why can’t I just drink more water/ stop scrolling/ go to bed earlier” you can’t afford to miss it. Save your spot here.
