301. Burned Out, Not Broken

Scottie Durrett  0:01  
Scottie, welcome to the momplex Podcast. I am your host. Scotty Durrett, 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, and welcome back to the podcast. I'm your host and fellow mama, Scotty, and I'm so happy that you're here today. We're gonna just dive right in head first deep end of the pool. Your time is precious. Your energy is more precious, and I want to help you right flipping now we're talking about burnout. Burnout is a word that's getting tossed around as commonly as manifesting, right? But do we ever really spend time understanding what is burnout? What it's doing to us, what are the causes of it? What are the signs of it? Because I think one for everybody, burnout is different and unique, just like every other experience in our body, but it is doing something to us, even if we're not paying attention to it, it's going to cost us a lot of joy, a lot of inner peace, and a lot of days with our kids that we won't be able to get back. And I am proof of that, because I lived in burnout for a long time, and I truly believed the only time I would find relief was when my kids were napping, when they were asleep, when they were in school, or when they got older. So I spent a lot of time future tripping, waiting for a time when I would start to feel better, and that time never came. And all I lost were moments with my kids, and you can't get that back. And honestly, that's one of my biggest missions for coming on this podcast. I don't want you to experience the same thing. I don't want you wishing the days away or believing that you can't create feeling good for yourself, that you can't have both. Both can be true. You can feel good and be a good mom. They work really well together. And so I want to talk to you about burnout. I want to bring it to the attention so that if anything after you leave this episode, you can just have more awareness, more awareness about yourself, what you're feeling, what your body's trying to tell you, and then you get to choose what you think is worth your attention and worth your focus, right? But, I mean, let's, let's dive right in. Have you ever lost your shit over something like maybe your kids spilled their cereal while they were getting themselves breakfast in the morning. Maybe the dog went outside to go the bathroom and we came back in. He tracked dirt all over the rug. I'm not gaslighting you. These things suck, but have you ever lost it and it felt like Whoa. That was a little uncharacteristic of me, not like a meltdown, but I mean a full on. I swear, if one more person breathes near me, I'm gonna scream mode. That's not just you being dramatic. That's burnout, Babe and ignoring it is low key ruining your life. I gotta throw in a few Low Keys, because my 12 year old loves it when he hears language that he's like, Oh, I gave that to my mom. But let's make it personal. I'll tell you about a story. There was one day when I was cooking dinner, and I hate cooking dinner. Food doesn't bring me joy. I'll talk about this in a different episode. I have a really tough relationship with food, and it doesn't bring me joy, so a lot of times I'm eating just a fuel. I'm not really sitting down and savoring the food, except if it's a just a bomb ass burrito, Firebirds burritos in Houston, Texas, that probably is one of my favorite burritos. But here I was making dinner. Kids are all home from school. My husband hadn't gotten home from work yet. I'm making spaghetti sauce, this homemade bolognese. You know, I'm super excited about it, because I've, like, hidden a bunch of vegetables in there. I'm thinking, Okay, I'm a kick ass mom right now. I'm making some good dinner. Everybody loves pasta. This is going to be great. And when I sit down to start serving it my one of my kids was like, oh, no, I don't want that. I don't want to eat any more meat, so I'll just get something else. And I freaking lost it. I think I took that wooden spoon I'd been stirring the spaghetti sauce with and I launched it across the kitchen, not at them, but more just like out of frustration. And it wasn't even something that I was aware of. It just was an immediate like trigger. I was so triggered, but that was so uncharacteristic of me. The second I threw the spoon again, let me reframe my kids were over in one side of the room. I threw the spoon toward the sink. It wasn't anywhere near them. There were no animals, children or. Utensils harmed in this moment, but it was as if something life shattering had happened to me and I, after I threw the spoon, I just stood there completely blank, like I didn't even have a response to it. It was in a moment I realized, Oh, crap, this isn't who I am. That's not me. I don't throw spoons. I'm not against having anger and frustration, but this was a different level, and the response didn't fit the crime, right? And I said, Oh, shit, there's something else going on here. The problem really isn't that my daughter doesn't want to eat. Oh, I just gave her up. Poor thing. It wasn't that my daughter didn't want to eat the meat sauce. It was that. It was like the 18th thing that day that had just melted me down, right? I wasn't just tired. I was fried, burned out, crispy, like a chicken nugget that fell off the silver tray and fell onto the bottom of the oven and got left there, you know. And I think what's so interesting is I have also had burnout looking like collapsing on the floor crying. And it's honestly, it can be the numbness and the losing your shit and the irritability and the constant white noise in your brain, right? And I think that's what's so tricky about burnout. It's not this very black and white this, if you have this, you're burned out. It could be a variety of things. The real underlying sign is that it's saying you need to focus in and we've got to figure out what the frick is going on with you. But a lot of times feeling this way, losing our patience, kind of feeling blah, you know, feeling brain foggy, and just, you know, crying or not crying, having no emotions or having too many emotions. I'm not calling this is not about gaslighting. I love your beautiful emotions. This is when you notice, hmm, that's different than how I've acted before. And probably, you know, one of the best things we can do, not compare ourselves to other people. Compare ourselves to ourselves, right? So when you notice something that seems very uncharacteristic of you get curious, because a lot of times we normalize it, and we slap a that's just motherhood sticker on it, and we keep going. But none of this is normal, none of this is sustainable, and none of it has to be a requirement of motherhood. I think what is so challenging sometimes is we do feel really shitty, and we also were so tired we don't know why we feel shitty and we're too tired to figure it out, but we believe there's this problem. We identify this one thing as our problem. Maybe it's your husband is traveling too much, or maybe you're a single mom, or maybe it's the news, or maybe it's your kids. And we, we kind of attach our feelings to those things, that one specific thing, but those really aren't the problems, right? A lot of times it's much, much deeper below the surface, and that's when, I mean, like, you know yourself better than anybody, so when you start acting and behaving in a way that feels almost unlike yourself, that's when it's really good to get curious and to start figuring out, like, get gain some insight, what is really going on here, right? And you know, it's really this thing where it's, we're not broken. There's nothing wrong with us. We're burned out. And this is my public service message for mamas, right? There is a difference between being broken and being burned out. And you know, it's really if you've been feeling off, overwhelmed, constantly counting the minutes till bedtime, just to finally exhale, if your sex drive has completely plummeted, if you're just feeling blah about everything, especially things that used to make you smile or cry or laugh, it's burnout. Steals your spark. It silences your emotions and your soul, and it turns motherhood into survival mode. And I believe that's way too high of a price for any of us to pay. But burnout is sneaky, so I want to go over some things. I want to go over some signs with you, because I want to give you some just information that you can then choose to apply and see what feels right to you. Because what burnout really looks like in moms, especially high achieving all in got no time for BS. Moms like you and me, it's not going to look the same to other people. It might not look the same to your mom, to your doctor, even to your partner. This is between you and you.

Scottie Durrett  9:43  
So the first thing is you're freaking irritated by everything. You're not just annoyed. I'm talking rage, cleaning, gritting your teeth, snapping over like goldfish package wrappers or lollipop wrappers. That's not bad mom behavior. You're not. Bad mom that's fried. Nervous System, screaming for some help, needing some release, needing some healing. It's like, picture your central nervous system, it's now broken. We got to make it whole again. And it's like, you're not just annoyed, you're the I cracked me up, like you're one dropped cheerio away from losing it. Burnout makes your nervous system flat out raw. So and I know you're super busy, try five minute release. You can scream. You can dance around your kitchen. You can shake you can run to the mailbox and back. You can blast music. You can scream into a pillow. Think of it like boiling water, and there's a top on top of the saucepan, you've got to take that lid off in order for the bubbles in the air to release right? Otherwise it's going to boil over. Scream in the car, blast music, shake it out, let it move. Just think of like, How can I remove that lid, that top, so that some of this can get released? You will feel less irritated and people around you don't have to change, you will be processing your emotions and your healing and allowing your nervous system a break, so you will create more patience and relief from within number two, decision fatigue, I mean, over the dumbest shit, like spaghetti or tacos, I can't freaking decide. Why is this so hard? Like when somebody sends you an email or you get that text, that beep of the text, you're like, shit. No, no one reach out to me. I'm too freaking tired to respond. I can't handle one more fire. I can't deal with one more thing that I have to fix. You're like, I have nothing left in me. I can't even answer this text right? Simple decisions like meal planning, answering text your kid telling you they need something from Amazon. Like, if you've ever literally, like, said, I cannot figure out, you know what milk to buy. Burnout makes tiny choices feel like the hardest thing in the world, because you're spent so give yourself fewer choices, seriously, like, lay out your clothes the night before, put the meal choices back on. Your kids choose two things a day. Like it just it's about putting your phone down and quieting the noise. It's truly it's like your brain is fried simple decisions and just trying to reduce the noise, even if that means just going outside and just listening to the birds, it's just giving your central nervous system a break. Number three, you feel numb. You love your life, but you don't feel like it. Joy feels really far away. You can't remember the last time you woke up feeling like carefree, like you know that feeling when you're driving in your car and the windows are down and your favorite song is playing, that's disconnection, and it's not your fault. Burnout steals your joy and replaces it with apathy. Start small like little joy sparks throughout the day, light a candle, turn on some music when you're making dinner, do something that's just for you today. Order yourself some flowers, go get yourself a Froyo. It's just about remembering. You know that we don't just have to live in extremes. I you know? I think the way we live, we're either on Go, go, go, go, or we're crashing and we're letting ourselves rest. It's like this pendulum never settles in the middle. We're either at high, high, high achievement, or we're literally crawling on the floor trying to get to our bed in order to make those extremes not feel so intense. We need to pay attention to what's going on in the middle, and that's joy that's just living your life for the sake of living. When's the last time you just did something for the sake of it felt freaking good, never for it. Your body feels off. Stress doesn't just live in your mind. It lives in your gut, your head, your libido, your body is talking to you. I'm telling you. The question is, are you listening? Are you paying attention to these signs? Are you taking those signals from your body seriously? The headaches, the heartburn, the stomach aches, the constipation, the diarrhea, the not being able to sleep, the tossing and the turning, all of it. I mean, that's all signs. Stress creates inflammation. Inflammation creates physical ailments in our body. In order to help ourselves feel better physically, we have to take care of ourselves. Think of your central nervous system as like the plumbing in your house. You can't see the plumbing, but it is incredibly important. And if you don't take care of it, it gets backed up, and then it puts a lot of shit into a place that doesn't belong. Your central nervous system is the exact same way. But here's it has like, a line, an assembly line. It's gonna start with really quiet whispers to try and say like, hey, hey, okay, I think we're we need a little bit more rest today. I'm feeling a little sore from that workout and from not sleeping well, and you know, all those meetings you had. So could we just take a little break today and do some deep breathing? When we ignore that, it starts to build, and then you'll start to get these signals like. Like stress, headaches, migraines, heartburn, throat, sore, clenched jaw, heartburn, gas, diarrhea, constipation, less libido, less patience. This is the kind of stuff that starts to show up when we don't pay attention. It turns into physical stuff, real serious physical stuff. So it's starting to try and communicate with us very early, but if we don't listen to it, it's that boiling water. It's just going to keep boiling over till we pay attention. Your body loves you, and it is the most wise resource that you have. Every bit of communication that it's giving to you has a positive intention. When your weight fluctuates, when you can't lose weight, when you can't gain weight, these are signals when you can't get rid of that headache, when you can't sleep, when you can't digest food, when you can't get excited, emotionally, sexually, these are all signs your body is saying something is not working in your plumbing, something is not working below the surface, our central nervous system is tapped. We're burned out. We need some love. The question is, are you listening? Start small, hydrate, stretch, take a walk, put your phone down, do some deep breathing. Okay, your body is incredibly intuitive. It knows what it is that you need that stress is talking through your body so you've got this, okay, all right, you're doing great. Thanks for sticking with me here. Number five, you're always tired, but rest isn't working. The ultimate burnout flag, you sleep, you rest, but you still feel like a zombie in yoga pants, because it's not about sleep, it's about nervous system regulation. You need deep soul, rest, breath, work, stillness, grounding, mindfulness, silence and that inner voice telling you that all of this is good for you and it's okay if you're sleeping. Say you're getting seven to eight hours of sleep, but you're still feeling wrecked. That's a signal. You don't just need rest. You need a different approach, because there's a lot of different types of fatigue. It's not just about actual sleep, even though sleep is numero uno, but silence is incredibly healing. Breath work, anything that soothes your soul, because your body isn't betraying you, it's actually begging you to listen. Okay, now I've given you all the signs. Now, let me give you some practical steps, because I want you to feel I want you to walk away from this feeling empowered and supported. So start with just one of these. Seriously. Pick the one that hit you in the gut the hardest, and give it five minutes today. Burnout doesn't disappear overnight, but each small shift is a step back to you, a step to healing. So examples would be five minute breath work before bed, a three choice dinner rotation to avoid decision. Fatigue, a dance break after school, pickup, rage, scream in the car, no judgment, going on a walk for 10 minutes without a podcast. Just out in nature, okay, all of these things, oh and deep breathing, conscious breathing, actually turns off fight or flight and helps you get back into that parasympathetic nervous state, which helps give your nervous system a break that is a form of healing burnout, when you take these signals seriously, and you decide that you want to honor the burnout, right? Because burnout isn't it's all communication. It's all feedback, letting you know that the way you're living your life, it's draining you and you're not It's not sustainable. So take your power back, stop running on fumes, and start living from the fuel that you can give to yourself, and you show your kids what real self care looks like. I mean, truly, this is like, if you're not ready to be selfish and take care of yourself for you do it for them and remind yourself that you matter and they're watching your needs matter. You're allowed to have needs. You're allowed to meet your needs, right? Your body and your soul deserve peace, and they're really fighting so hard, they are begging you to notice what they're trying to tell you you've got this I can tell you from experience. I've been there. I know what it feels like to be incredibly busy. I know what it feels like to be incredibly burned out. You can heal your burnout and still accomplish everything you want to accomplish, and just not feel like shit. Like doesn't that sound incredibly amazing? So let me know in the comments which burnout side hits you the hardest, and share with a mama who you think needs this. I really appreciate the likes, the shares, the comments, the reviews, and if you're ready to go deeper, check out my clarity readings or click on the link below, and you can find more about my five week one on one coaching program called from burnout to badass. We do not let mama suffer in silence here. Not anymore. I love you, Mama.

Scottie Durrett  19:58  
All right, Mama, that's a wrap on today's. Episode. Thank you so much for listening, but before you dive back into the beautiful chaos of your life, remember this. You're doing better than you think. You are not alone, and you sure as hell don't have to do this on autopilot. If this episode hit home, please share it with a mom who needs to hear it, because we are in this together, and if you're feeling extra generous, please drop a review. It helps momplex reach more mamas who need this real talk until next time, Trust yourself, trust your gut, and remember you already know what to do, and you are the perfect mama for your kiddos. See you next time. Mama love You. You.