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Hard days happen. It’s something that we have to accept as human beings. But hard days don’t have to derail you. You can still be productive, efficient, and kind even when you’re not having the best day. In today’s episode, I want to share with you 3 key things you can do to help care for yourself on a hard day so that you can still show up as the mom, leader and person you want to be.
Topics in this episode:
Personal story about my hard morning and what I did to show myself self-kindness
Why you should stop resisting “hard” emotions (like disappointment, sadness or failure)
How your brain catastrophizes when you’re having a hard day
The inner-critic voice increases on hard days and what you can do about it
3 key steps to care for yourself on a hard day and why they work
Show Notes:
Learn to manage your self-critical voice in order to feel confident and show up as the best version of you. Click here to learn more and schedule a free call here: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book
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Transcript
Intro
Hard days happen. It's something that we just have to accept as human beings. But hard days don't have to derail you. You can still be productive and efficient with your time and kind and not snappy, even when you're not having the best day.
In today's episode, I want to share with you three very key things that you can do to help care for yourself on a hard day so that you can still show up as the person and as the mom that you want to be. You ready? Let's get to it.
Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it.
Hello, working moms. I want to jump right into our topic today, caring for yourself when you're having a hard day. Now, I'm going to be honest. I'm having a hard day today, and so it makes this the perfect topic for me to chat about.
Now, I'm having a hard day because I had a long weekend of entertaining friends and family as we celebrated my husband's birthday. But really, all of that led to my daughter sort of waking up on the wrong side of the bed this morning and taking it out on everyone in the family. And so there's just a lot of emotions flying around this morning for her, for me.
But there could be a lot of reasons for your hard day. It could be hormonal. Could be that there is a stressful or difficult situation going on at work or with a friend. It could be that you have a deadline approaching, and so there's just a little bit of anxiousness or stress about that.
Could be that a loved one's going through something hard illness or something like that. Or there could be a big parenting struggle like I'm dealing with right now with my daughter and my family. There could be all sorts of reasons why you might be having a hard day.
What is a ‘hard day’?
And just to be clear, when I say hard day, what I mean by that is a day that has a lot of heightened emotion. It's a day where you might be quick to cry or to get angry or to snap. It's a day that you might daydream about canceling all of your plans and just curling up into a ball and watching Netflix and kicking everybody out of the house so that you could just be alone. So that sort of a day.
So there are a lot of reasons why you might be having a more emotionally charged day. And sometimes we don't know the reasons, right? I think there's a lot of times we just are in a funk for no apparent reason.
I was having a conversation with one of my clients just not that long ago, a couple of weeks ago. And she told me that she was having some hard days and she wasn't really sure what was going on and she was having a hard time figuring it out and she really wanted to figure it out and she felt like she wasn't going to be able to find rest and relief until she did. It was like her brain really needed to know why. It needed a justification.
And I remember asking her why she felt she needed to understand. Could it just be okay to have a hard day without any explanation? She wrestled with that one for quite some time because it really feels like if you're going to have some big emotions that there needs to be a really good reason. You can't just have big emotions to have big emotions, right?
So we actually took some time in that session to debunk this idea that she needed to have a justifiable reason to have a bad day or to have some hard feelings.
Big feelings and hard days are completely normal.
I like to say that we're poking holes in your thoughts when we do that. I believe, just to give you a little bit of my own personal understanding of this, I believe that big feelings and hard days are completely normal. We actually experience a range of emotions and I believe that all of them are okay.
Anger, sadness, frustration, guilt, overwhelm, stress - these are all emotions that don't really feel good. And many of us as humans try really hard to never experience them. And yet I believe that these emotions are really useful to us. They're meant to be felt.
Life is not always meant to be happy or rosy. And I know most of us believe this, that we can't be happy all of the time. Like that makes sense to us, right? That life happens and we have emotional responses to things. We can't always be happy. It's sort of just the way it is.
Difficult emotions that don't feel good to us are meant to happen.
But what I want to suggest is not that it's just okay that it happens. I want to suggest that it is meant to be that way. It's meant to happen. Big hard emotions, difficult emotions that don't feel good to us are meant to happen.
This weekend my kids picked out the movie Inside Out to watch. As a coach, I love this movie. This is such a great movie and I think it does such a fantastic job of explaining how our mind and our emotions are interconnected and what happens when different emotions are in the driver's seat of our decisions.
Just to give you some quick context, the movie is about an eleven year old girl named Riley who moves from Minnesota to San Francisco. But really the story is about five emotions: anger, sadness, joy, disgust, and fear that are all at this control panel in her head trying to control how she feels and how she responds to all of these various things going on inside of her eleven year old brain and body.
And there's such a beautiful moment in this movie where the emotion of joy and the emotion of sadness are talking about their favorite Riley memory and they realize that they both share the same favorite memory. Joy talks about this memory from the angle of how Riley's whole hockey team rallied around her and lifted her up on their shoulders and raced her around, and how good it was to have friends and a community that loved her and supported her and her parents were there. Such a fun memory of celebration.
And then Sadness talked about that same memory, but from the angle of how Riley had lost the winning goal in the game and how she felt so bad that she wanted to quit playing hockey. And then the memory goes on to describe how her team rallied around her and lifted them up on their shoulders and so forth, right? But it's the same memory, just remembering it from a different angle.
If we never experience negative feelings, we wouldn't experience positive ones either.
And it's such a beautiful moment in the movie, particularly for Joy, because she realizes that joyful moments in life are often intertwined with sad ones. And the experience of joy is possible because we also experience sadness. It's so good. It's such a great movie.
And it's so true. If you never experience sadness or anger or fear, you wouldn't know what joy and peace and confidence feels like. All emotions are okay. It doesn't need to be for a specific reason. Hard emotions happen and hard days happen. But what happens when you find yourself in one of these really hard days? That's what I really want to talk about.
Because just like, if you have a kid who's having a hard day, you might give them extra snuggles or extra hugs, or you might just be extra patient and loving with them. We want to do the same thing for ourselves.
Now, there are a couple of things that I notice happen to both me and my clients when they're having hard days. The first thing I notice is that our brain likes to catastrophize on these days.
So, for example, I had a rough morning with my daughter, right? And after she got to school, I cried and I had some really big feelings. But I also noticed that my brain wanted to take this one little moment from today and say things like, you don't know what to do. You're not a good mom. You're always going to struggle with this. You're never going to figure it out. You're messing her up. And then as I walked through my really messy house, my brain wanted to add on to things like, see? You can't even keep her house clean. You're such a mess. Right?
All of these are catastrophizing thoughts whenever your brain says something like, always, never, you have no idea - these are all very black and white catastrophizing thoughts. They're thoughts that often send us further down the rabbit trail of emotion. None of these thoughts are actually true.
Of course, I know something about what I need to do with my daughter right now. I'm not totally in the dark. Of course, this one little moment of parenting and this one experience with my daughter does not dictate how good of a parent I am and it certainly does not erase the last eight years of parenting my child. And of course, having a messy house after entertaining all weekend with family and friends is not indicative of how put together I am or I'm not. These thoughts aren't true, but our brains like to offer them to us on hard days.
Now the second thing I notice about this is that our self critical voice kind of dials it up a notch on these days. It gets really loud and strong. Now this sort of goes along with catastrophizing. But our self critical voice is speaking very directly about who we are as human beings. It likes to tell us all of the things that we're doing wrong or that we could be doing better. It sort of fixates on the negative. The negativity breeds more negativity. So we catastrophize and we have a self critical voice that increases.
And the third thing that I've noticed is that we like to fixate on trying to fix our emotions as if they are a problem to be solved. How do I stop feeling this way? Becomes the driving question. And oftentimes it leads very quickly to how do I never feel this again? How do I never get to this place again? There's a lot of self judgment that happens on these days.
And knowing that these hard days and seasons happen and knowing that our brain likes to play a lot of tricks on us. It likes to focus on the negative. It likes to take things to the extreme. It likes to sit in self judgment and fixate knowing all of this. What do you do? What do you do when you find yourself having a hard day or in the middle of a hard day or in the middle of a hard season?
Normalize and accept you're having a bad day.
Now I want to talk about three things with you, three things that I want you to do. The first thing to do is to normalize and accept that you're having a hard day. For whatever the reason, it doesn't really matter. This is very important because it's going to be very difficult for you to move past this hard day and these big feelings and to process them all. If the whole time your brain is thinking you shouldn't be dealing with these emotions or having this hard day to begin with.
You have to normalize and accept that you're a human being that experiences a wide range of emotions for a lot of different reasons. And it's okay.
I want you to think about how differently you handle challenging moments and experiences when they feel normal and acceptable versus when they shouldn't be happening to begin with.
I think parenting is a really easy example of this. Your acceptance of your newborn crying really early on in motherhood was probably very low. Whenever they cried, you wanted to fix it. They shouldn't be crying. Something must be wrong. And there's this kind of franticness to try to figure out what's going on with them and fix it so they stop crying.
But then as time goes on, you get a little bit wiser, you have a little bit more perspective and experience as a parent, and you realize that sometimes your baby just cries and it's totally normal. It doesn't mean that you don't want to fix that or that it's not hard, but there's an acceptance to it. And so instead of being, like, in total frantic mode, there's more of a patience and a calmness as you problem solve for how to help them with whatever they might be crying about.
The same is true for you. I want you to feel much calmer and much more in control on these hard days. And your ability to do that will be so much greater if you're accepting that days like this just happened and that seasons sometimes are hard.
And once you're in a place of acceptance, the next logical question to ask is, so now what do I do? Do I just cry uncontrollably? Do I sit on the couch and eat cookies all day? Like, what do I do? And of course, the answer to that is no. Just because you accept that there's hard days and days with hard emotions and hard seasons, it doesn't mean that you have to indulge in a box of cookies and Netflix and wine. Right? Though there might be some immediate gratification to that, it does not actually help you in the long run. It's not helping you care for what needs to actually be cared for right now, which is ultimately your mind and your heart and your body.
Giving intentional space to our emotions.
So after I sent my daughter off to school today, the door closed as she walked out. And I just let the tears fall, because that is what I needed in that moment. I could feel all of these emotions inside of me. And even though it was a busy morning, there were lots of things to do. I knew that I needed to give some space to some of these emotions that I was experiencing.
So I cried. I sort of wandered the house aimlessly for a while, just staring at the mess. And even though I didn't want to, eventually I grabbed my journal and I sat outside and I just wrote down some of my thoughts.
And this is the second thing that I want you to do on a hard day. I want you to give yourself space. But I want to be clear that this is intentional space. It's space to process whatever's going on. And that's why a box of cookies and Netflix or a glass of wine or indulging in an hour of scrolling on your phone doesn't really work or count because those activities, although, okay, they're not a problem, but they don't actually intentionally give you space to process whatever's going on.
Intentional space could look like a journal and a pen. It could look like going for a walk or a run. It could be calling a friend. It could be a long soak in the bathtub. It could be a lot of things. But the most important thing is that you're not distracting yourself with something else during this time. You are actually letting your brain think about what's going on. Cry if you need to, naming your emotions and your thoughts and sort of just purging them out of you.
I did an episode a while back around doing a thought download and purging your thoughts on days that are hard. I'll link to that in the show notes if you want some ideas on how to purge and how to give some of this intentional space.
But today what I did was I journaled and it wasn't very long. It was maybe five minutes, seven minutes of actual writing down of thoughts and emotions. And then I probably took another maybe five to ten minutes to write a Facebook post in this parenting group that I'm a part of. And even that process was me processing it out, right? I was breaking down what was going on and sharing what was going on in my heart and with my daughter and how I was feeling. That was all a part of the purging processing experience.
So number one, accept that hard days happen and get out of self judgment.
Number two, take some intentional space to process what's going on.
Be compassionate with yourself.
And then the third thing I want to offer to you on a hard day is that I want you to be extra kind and compassionate to yourself and your body. This might be the moment that you decide to watch a little bit more Netflix than you usually do instead of clean the house. Or it might be a time that you decide to order takeout instead of cook. This might be a time when you decide to put on a movie for your kids even though it's not movie night, so that you can sit and connect with your spouse or do something for yourself. It might be a time that you decide to not be on a video call at all that day and just wear your sweatpants and not wear makeup.
This is about compassion towards yourself, like really taking care of your body, your nervous system, and what it needs. You're not pushing yourself to get more done. In fact, you're probably stripping away tasks and obligations that don't really need to get done today and just giving yourself some space.
A conversation I often have with my clients when we start really talking about processing hard emotions and emotions that don't feel really good is we talk about caring for yourself. And I apologize if this is somewhat triggering for you, but I like to have my clients think about the compassion and the kindness that they give themselves and others when a loved one has passed.
If someone very close to you dies, there's a period of grief. And during that period of grief, many of us have extra compassion towards ourself. Now remember, grief is an emotion. It's something that we feel. And during a period of grief, during a time that we're experiencing this emotion, we often will be kinder to ourselves than other times. We give space for those feelings. We're very cognizant of the fact that we're not going to get over the loss of a loved one very quickly. And so we allow ourselves space and time to experience the hard emotions. We will even shift around priorities during that time. Let go of some of our obligations. We don't judge ourselves for having these feelings of grief.
And I just want you to imagine that it's not dissimilar to what I want you to do on a hard day to just let yourself have big feelings. To know that this season and these days happen and big feelings happen. To let yourself off the hook from your to dos and your priorities so that you become top of the list.
So three things: accept that there are hard days, give yourself intentional space to process whatever you're feeling and thinking, and show yourself extra compassion and kindness.
What I love about this is that you can actually pre plan for hard days. A lot of times our hard days are planable because you might always feel stressed out when there's an upcoming deadline, or you might always be a little anxious just before a day where you're going to have a one on one with your boss. Or you might always feel a lot of urgency right before you go on vacation or right before a weekend of birthday parties and entertaining. Almost half of our hard days are foreseeable. They seem to always happen with the same circumstance and the same triggers.
And so what I want to offer to you is that you can actually plan to do these things when you know that hard triggering moments are going to happen. You can put it on your calendar, you can actually block out time for intentional space to process.
You can clear your weeknights, clear your commitments, or not commit to doing things in the evening when you know that you're going to have a hard week that has some stressful triggers. You can let your partner know that you likely are going to have some big feelings this week because you have this and this and this going on and you know that usually there's big feelings during this week, right? You can let your kids know that you can decrease the amount of meetings that you accept that week. So you just give yourself a little bit more space, a little bit more buffer.
I want you to take a moment and really consider the foreseeable trigger moments for you and to think about what you can do to give yourself some extra compassion, some extra space during those times.
After I finished journaling and writing and crying, I went inside and I fixed myself my favorite breakfast, which is a parfait with strawberries and blueberries and granola. And intentionally, I did not put makeup on. And I decided to treat myself to some coffee and go on a walk to prepare for this podcast.
Emotions are not something to be fixed, they're something to be felt.
Now I feel drained. Right now. I sort of feel down. Maybe I would say I feel a little bit sad. And I want to make a point to share that with you, because what I see from a lot of my clients is that what they think happens at the end of this three step process is that they're over it, that they feel better. And I do, on some level, feel a little bit better, because I've purged some of those thoughts and emotions, and I have a good cup of coffee in my tummy. But your emotions are not something to be fixed. They're something to be felt.
Coming back to my example of grief, everybody understands that you don't just move through grief instantaneously. It sticks with you for some time, and for some people, it sticks with them a really long time. Again, the loss of a loved one is one of these moments that most of us really allow and give a good amount of space for the hard days and hard emotions.
So my emotions aren't fixed. They're still kind of this undercurrent of sadness. And that's okay, because it's okay to have hard days and hard emotions. I am capable of experiencing them. In fact, I welcome them into my body.
So even though I am still experiencing kind of a lowness of my emotions and my energy, what I also know is that everything that's going on with me right now, I have a much better ability to move past this, to have a more connected and thoughtful response to my daughter when I see her after school.
I'm more able to get through my tasks that I have to do today in a more efficient and productive way because I've given some space for my emotions earlier on. If I hadn't done that, then all of them would still kind of be buried inside of me. My brain would still be probably reeling or thinking about the interaction with my daughter in the morning. They would have a hard time letting that go. When I saw her in the afternoon, I'd probably still have those emotions somewhere inside of me. I'd be more likely to snap at her or to have a response that I don't want with her.
I know that even though there's still an undercurrent of sadness within me and kind of hard emotions within me, I know that I've given myself the best possible chance of moving through my day in some effective, productive, and intentional way, because I've given myself that space.
The point is not to fix it. The point is to experience it and to feel it so that you can show up as the intentional person, the best human being that you can possibly be.
Okay, working moms. It's okay if today's not your best day or this week is not your best week or you're just having a really hard season in life. It's okay, because you're still an amazing human being, a wonderful mom, a dependable and excellent employee. Those things never change. If you need some help believing that, I encourage you to reach out to me. Schedule that free breakthrough call. I will help you remember and deeply know your amazingness even when there are hard days.
You can go to rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book to fill out a quick form and then sign up directly on my calendar for a free call. I cannot wait to connect with you and talk to you. It's okay. You're okay. In fact, you're more than okay. You're amazing. All right, Working Moms, let's get to it.
