00:00:00
Speaker 1: You don't always have to follow the path that you think is set few and what everyone else is doing. If you feel like smashing someone in Mario Cart's going to make you feel better, go for it.
00:00:09
Speaker 2: There's no right or wrong.
00:00:10
Speaker 1: It's just about what works for you, because at the end of the day, weird works if it makes you well, and we are all a little bit weird, So try something different. Hello, Legends today's episode, I feel like my friends need to be listening to you right now, because I don't know about you, guys. I feel like everyone I talk to you lately, everyone is just going through it right now. I don't know if mercury is in the microwave again, but I just feel like a lot of people, like honestly some of my best mates, everyone is going through a really tough time at the moment. And I think this episode is very, very well timed because as someone I've suffered with anxiety in my whole life, and I you know, in the past, I would shame myself into stillness and I would literally try to meingir my way into meditating, and it really does defeat the purpose.
00:00:55
Speaker 2: If you're someone like me, when you're stressed or anxious.
00:00:57
Speaker 1: You can't physically sit down and meditate like you couldn't if anything worse, And all the other ways that people are trying to tell you to work on your mental health just don't work for you. This episode is going to save your life, and it's also going to make you realize.
00:01:11
Speaker 2: You're not broken, you're not weird. We're all just so different. Look.
00:01:15
Speaker 1: I've been working on, you know, personal growth and everything for a long time, but there was a time where I would just force myself to sit there and meditate when it just did not feel right for me. And that's because I thought that's what healthy people did. I thought, this is what everyone's raving about, this meditation thing, Like why isn't it working for me? And obviously, over time meditation I really looked into it, and the way I do it is going to be different from other people. But a lot of my problem with it was the pressure I was putting on myself. I thought my brain had to be blank, but apparently it doesn't, which is great to know. That's an episode for another time, But you know, I genuinely thought if I could just like be breathing deeply enough and like sit on the floor long enough, I would just become zen and my anxiety would disappear. And sure, like with that can help. But I remember there was this one day where I was just so highly strung, I was so anxious, and I tried to sit down and meditate and I just wasn't feeling it, and I stopped the track. I got up, and I decluttered a drawer and I felt so much better. You know, for many of us with anxious minds, we need to move that energy. And I think, you know, there's this big misconception of what you know, mindfulness.
00:02:25
Speaker 2: Looks like that it has to be still, you have.
00:02:27
Speaker 1: To not be moving, you have to have a blank mind, and that's just not the truth, and that's not the reality of it. Sometimes listening to a woman on YouTube saying release what no longer serves you doesn't service as well as maybe playing guitar or playing Mario Kart. And I'm going to say that honestly, because for me, over the years, I've just stopped fighting. I've stopped fighting and this is I'm going to work with my brain and not against it.
00:02:50
Speaker 2: So this episode is for you. If you just.
00:02:53
Speaker 1: Have tried every traditional method of mindfulness, you're trying to work on your mental health. But for you, you just can't think of anything worse than sitting down and meditating and worrying about the emails you need to send, the lunch boxes you still have to pack, and you just need to try something different. This is for you, and I'm going to be giving you my seven weird things I do for my mental health that you probably won't hear in therapy. And again disclaimer, I'm not saying don't go to therapy because that is so important, but I think sometimes we just need to like realize that the way everyone else seems to do it on TikTok isn't the way that you need to do.
00:03:26
Speaker 2: It as well.
00:03:27
Speaker 1: And I think with these I actually posted these tips a little while ago on Instagram and they went off, and I think for me, I wouldn't have posted something like that years ago.
00:03:38
Speaker 2: But the older I get, you.
00:03:39
Speaker 1: Know, I'm realizing that maybe mental health isn't forcing yourself into routines that look good online. Maybe it's about understanding your brain and instead of constantly trying to fight it, you just do the little things that you know to the outside world look odd, like sitting in your car for thirty minutes after drop off. But if you feel lighter afterwards, then do the thing. And to help back up my claims these weird systems and habits, I'm going to be sharing the science behind some of them as well. So I'm actually not insane and I actually do have a valid argument over here. I think, just like with health and fitness, we've just been sold this version of mindfulness and mental health that looks beautiful on the outside, but it also feels impossible in real life, because honestly, my nervous system has been more healed by playing Mario Karte and guitar than you know meditation ever has on a hard day. Look, I think the sooner you realize self care isn't always about bubble baths or touching grass, which are also great and very good for you, Sometimes it's muting your group chats and reorganizing the spicetraw.
00:04:43
Speaker 2: Not speaking from experience or anything. But before I.
00:04:45
Speaker 1: Get into it, a little life update now. I feel like, you know, when the moment you decide you want to become a mum and have children, you tend to think of like the baby stage. You don't really think about, you know, as they get older, and it really is true, like I'm starting to understand the saying little people, little problems, big people, big problems. And you know my girls now they're eight and ten and they're just their own little people and they literally actually I brought them into work today, so they came into the studio here at Nova, and I really would love to interview.
00:05:16
Speaker 2: Them one day.
00:05:16
Speaker 1: I think it would be really funny, and I know they would definitely out me on a lot of things, but I think they would help us get a bit of a reality check as well, because you know, the way kids view the world, it's much more simple and they can actually see.
00:05:28
Speaker 2: The solution to a lot of our problems.
00:05:31
Speaker 1: Like, for example, one of the girls said to me the other day, like, Mum, why are always so stressed about the washing and the cleaning. I said, oh, because like it needs like I have to do it, and it's like it just Mummy always has to do those things. And they said to me, but there's always got to be more to do, and I was like, that's right. And then afterwards when I felt a bit more defeated after hearing that, and then she turned to me and said, remember that your nance said to you that time. If you can't control it, don't worry about it. I was like, that's so true, Like you're never going to get to the end of your emails, You're never going to get the end of your to do list, you never unfortunately going to ever finish your cleaning and washing.
00:06:11
Speaker 2: So the more I'm.
00:06:12
Speaker 1: Stressing about a task that just doesn't that has to be done each day, it's just like energy wasted.
00:06:18
Speaker 2: And that really did give me a bit of a brutal wake up call as well.
00:06:22
Speaker 1: Speaking of one of the girls, which obviously I'm not going to name, who has been, you know, struggling with a bit of anxiety lately, and as myself, like I remember being in kindergarten and having anxiety attacks over going to your six Like I really really hoped that the kids wouldn't have to deal with the level anxiety that I have. But you know, genetics and things, but it can feel a little bit defeating sometimes, like when you know you'd think someone like myself, I've had anxiety in my whole life.
00:06:52
Speaker 2: I've done a lot of work on myself.
00:06:53
Speaker 1: I'm literally on a podcast like I'm at Nova with my podcast talking about mental health hacks. And here I am really struggling to help my own child with her anxiety, and I think, you know, we might not have all the answers, but just having being like that soft place for them to land is the most important thing. And I'm not going to go into parenting and all that stuff right now, but I think we need to do the same for ourselves. We might not always have the answer to our issues or our problems, but as long as we are gentle enough with ourselves to just let it out and let it be. And that a lot of the time, like think about you know, the times that you maybe go to someone with an issue. And I know, like a lot of people's partners and husbands and that. And I'm not being sexist, but men typically tend to be fixers. They just want to fix things, whereas as women, we tend to want people just to listen. We want to just offload. And that's where a lot of relationships can have, like some struggles because the woman just wants to talk it out and the man wants to fix. And then I found myself as a mum doing that to my kids with their anxiety, Like I'm like, okay, let's try this, but like if I could just listen and I let them have their say and like validate them and say like, oh that would be really hard, that really did help them move it out of their nervous system. So it's the same with us. And a lot of these points do relate back to that that sometimes we don't have to force ourselves to be still or find the answer. We just need to move the energy out of our body and have somewhere that maybe someone can just listen and validate us if we need that. And I've got a literally very important and you need to stay to the end of this episode because that one specifically is one of the biggest ones. And I have a very important hack and tip that you need to do with that, so you're not always going to people for that, and it's actually going to be more beneficial for you. And I'm not saying not to talk to people, but you just need to stay to the end to hear what I'm talking about.
00:08:47
Speaker 2: All right, So let's talk about the weird.
00:08:49
Speaker 1: Shit I do for my mental health and my nervous system. But first I want to hit you with something I wish I realized a long time ago, and that is why we are all quite on edge, overwhelmed, anxious, Like when you think about it, you know, many people we know they have some form of anxiety or mental health issues, and when you think about it, we kind of don't have it, like much of a chance of not having it. You know, we live in a modern life where like our modern world is wrecking havoc.
00:09:17
Speaker 2: On our nervous system.
00:09:19
Speaker 1: And there was a study done It says the average woman has between six thousand and sixty thousand thoughts a day, and most of them are repetitive, and most of them are stressful. And also women are two times more likely than men to be diagnosed with anxiety and ADHD, and women are also, as we know, massively undiagnosed because we present differently. Now I'm not like, I know, everyone's got different opinions on this. I was diagnosed with my ADHD when I was six, so I kind of knew that I couldn't concentrate in things like that, but I didn't get a whole lot of help with it, to be honest with you, Like I got the diagnosis, but I didn't really get the tools to help me. But now like there's all these women who were finding out, Oh my God, I've got ADHD and this makes so much sense. Why I've got like, you know, there's like a a million different thoughts going on at once, and why I can't start tasks and why I can't concentrate, and you just feel like you're just you've lived your life feeling different. But there's so many of us. And it also doesn't help that, you know, smartphone notifications literally will spark our cortisol and we're always with our smartphone, we always have our phone on us, and you know, researchers actually measured it that every notification is a micro stress response in our body to process like our brain every time our phone goes off, it's like our brain thinks we're going to be eaten by tiger, not that we need to reply to an email. So here's the thing that finally clicked for me is that it's not that I was weak or that I didn't have the willpower to sit still and do the things. It's that my nervous system was running on the wrong settings for the life.
00:10:44
Speaker 2: I was living.
00:10:45
Speaker 1: So for me especially and women like me, when we have our smartphones on all the time and having like all these access to ourselves, which is I'm going to go into my my rules in a minute. You were literally putting gasoline on the fire. We're not going to do that anymore. And it's going to make sense very soon. And again I disclaim, I'm not a therapist. I'm just a woman who has lived a life of different.
00:11:09
Speaker 2: Mental health issues. I have ADHD.
00:11:11
Speaker 1: I'm a hot mess, and I'm here to help you, to tell you what helped me. But of course I never would recommend doing these things like in place of therapy. Therapy is so important. I go to therapy and I have for a long time. But I think this is just a bit more about giving yourself permission to try different things and talk to your therapists about these things as well. All right, The first one is my phone has been on silent for six years. You know how sometimes you have to hit rock bottom in order to make changes in your life. Well, this is kind of what happened with me when I first turned my phone on silent six years ago. I had started SPP and it was running for a couple of years. By that point, it was, you know, amazing, it was thriving. I didn't expect it to become what it is now. If you guys are knew here. I run my own brand called staff Based Planners. I make planners for messy minds and the type B girlies of the world who have a brain that wants to be Type A because you need to be organized because you get anxious, but your actions are Type B.
00:12:09
Speaker 2: So that's pretty much my thing.
00:12:11
Speaker 1: So it was dinner time and the girls were little, so I had Harper was a toddler, Whill there was baby.
00:12:16
Speaker 2: I'm trying to cook dinner. Harper was crying.
00:12:19
Speaker 1: I was replying, I was fixing someone's Shopify order, and then I was doing emails at the same time.
00:12:24
Speaker 2: And I suddenly, amongst all.
00:12:26
Speaker 1: That I was trying to help Harper and do all the things, my phone went off with an email and I just burst into tears. I just felt like I was in a pressure cooker, and I just knew that if there was one more thing, I was going to explode, and that thing was an email notification. I just felt in oudequate, like I just couldn't keep up. I just constantly felt like I was chasing my tail. And I placed Willow down and I looked at the scene in front of me. There was a washing basket that I had been folding fifteen minutes just beforehand.
00:12:56
Speaker 2: The dinner's on.
00:12:57
Speaker 1: The stove, I've got the two little kids. I've got my phone still going off. I've got my laptop open up on Shopify. And then my phone went off again, and I went over to it, and I went into settings and I turned off my email notification and I turned it on silent, and I haven't turned it back on since.
00:13:15
Speaker 2: Now.
00:13:17
Speaker 1: I will go into this a bit more because you're probably thinking, what about the kids' school, what about emergencies. We'll go into that in a second. But that was the day I realized that every notification, like I said, was like a little fire going off in my brain. I was always accessible. And what's hard is especially with kids. And that's what worries me about social media with the kids is they don't have an off switch either. They go to school and maybe there's bullies, and they bring the bullies home with them in their phone in their pocket.
00:13:47
Speaker 2: And that they don't get They don't get a break from that.
00:13:49
Speaker 1: They don't get a break from maybe masking all day or putting on a front. Even if you have ADHD or you don't like you're always do. It's technically we're performing. Think about how you act with like your family versus your friends, or your you know, people at work versus someone you've just met, Like you always kind of feel like you're kind of performing in a way, and that's exhausting over time, So you do need that time to switch off.
00:14:12
Speaker 2: And we're not humans.
00:14:13
Speaker 1: We're not meant to be accessible twenty four seven, Like, that's not how we were meant to be. We were meant to be in our little village with two hundred people, and we were not meant to have a phone with millions, millions and billions of people, and most of them are hot because they're genetically blessed, and we see them all and then we feel inadequate. We're not meant to have access to that many people. You know, I was living in a state where by nine o'clock in the morning I had already gotten forty notifications because you know, I had the shop, I had so many things going on.
00:14:41
Speaker 2: And that was me with a business.
00:14:42
Speaker 1: But even without a business, think about all the different notifications your phone gives you. It's a lot you need to, like think about how much you need to protect your peace and that is not protecting your peace. Is it really that urgent that you need to apply to an email that is a you know, the school's fundraiser in two weeks at nine pm at night.
00:15:04
Speaker 2: That can wait.
00:15:05
Speaker 1: The thing is this is where I started to live by the saying their urgency is not your emergency. Unless you're a doctor saving lives, you do not need to like be on call.
00:15:15
Speaker 2: All the time. So what I want you to do.
00:15:18
Speaker 1: Our phones have settings in them where even if people call you twice, if there is an emergency and they call you twice, it will actually ring through.
00:15:25
Speaker 2: There is settings for that. You can do so much now.
00:15:28
Speaker 1: You can make sure your kids school that always comes through. You can set focus modes for work so from nine to five you have your certain notifications on. People can call you and then it goes off automatically so you don't have to think about it. Nothing is that urgent when you think about it, there is nothing that could possibly be that urgent. You know, and people might panic, think like what if I miss something? You know, you check your phone. You can check your phone, and I know I think I did. I think I did a tech dtox. I think it was like a tech dtox blog or something thing ages ago, and I said, any emails that are older than three months, just archive all of them. And people were like, oh my god, whates if I can't like ones if I need something, I'm like, you can still search them, you know. Like I think we're just so used to being on and we're so heightened that everything feels much bigger than what it is. Again, if someone needs you, they can call twice. If you're scared you're going to miss something, you can check your phone like no one's taking it away from you. And this is where I, you know, really implemented some pretty strict rules. And then even within my business in SPP, like with marketing and stuff.
00:16:36
Speaker 2: Guys, the e commerce world is wild.
00:16:38
Speaker 1: You have so much going on, but you know, the team, we're all emailing each other, and it was just like a larger effort because I feel like an email there comes a certain expectation to be like, say certain things, you have to greet each other. So then what I did was and so we had proper trails. I set a hard rule within the company that everyone has to only use Slack. So Slack is like it's kind of like an instant messaging thing, but like business, but it's much better and it's much more informal. It's small, chill and anything internal now is through slack and it has been for years, and that just saved the abundance of emails. So emails are for external communication. Slack is internal. And that was the hard rule I said, and I've never looked back, and now you need to kind of view it. Your life is the same. External communication you need to have a hard rule. Internal communication is people who actually live in your house that you're together. The internal communication needs to be the focus for you. And even then you still are allowed to hide, which i'll go into an a minute.
00:17:35
Speaker 2: So what I want you.
00:17:36
Speaker 1: To do right now, which I know it sounds scary. I want you to pull out your phone and go to settings. So this is for iPhones. I want you to go to settings and then you're going to go to your focus modes. So you're gonna go to focus and then you can click on like personal or whatever it is, and then you can click this thing now that it's called intelligent breakthrough and silencing. So when it's active, it allows priority notifications to interrupt you and silence other ones. But you can also pick these. You can also I pick certain people that can always come through and call you. And there's also settings in there where you can make sure that if they ring.
00:18:06
Speaker 2: Twice, it comes through.
00:18:08
Speaker 1: And even like in terms of for me, I used to always sleep with my phone next to my bed, which admittedly I hadn't been doing that again.
00:18:15
Speaker 2: But you know, when you're asleep, everyone puts.
00:18:17
Speaker 1: Their phone on night mode or silent, you know, or do not disturb and you're not worried then, but emergencies can happen during the night, you know what I mean. But just remember, like you've got the choice, and you've got so much cool settings in your phone where you can activate that. So I want you to go to settings and go to focus and now we're going to go into our focus filters so you can actually add app focuses and things like that. And there's now there's like AI and stuff in our phone, so it actually can do it for us. But you can even set a schedule for a location. So I've got one where it turns my personal focus mode on when I arrive home, and that means only certain people can contact me. I only get certain notifications like I don't get email notifications. I actually turned my email note vacations off my phone altogether, which I'll get into later. And it's all automated, Like you don't have to think. You can just do these things and set you know, you can even have one for like a morning routine. So I've got a morning routine focus mode where I can only access certain apps, so I can access like my meditation app, I can access all this other stuff like Spotify and that. And because obviously in this episode I'm going to talk, it sounds like I'm ragging on meditation a lot. But meditation is great, but you just need to find the one that works for you. So I can do another episode on that. But it only allows me to look at certain things, so I'm not like scrolling Instagram like allows me to go on like substack and stuff. But you can do so much now. So if you do one take one thing from this episode, I want you to hop into your phone settings and just block off yourself from the world. It's going to be fine. And this is linked to my next weird thing I do for my mental health, which is I rarely reply straight away. Now look, I won't see her and pretend that this is all on purpose. Again, I have ADHD. I forget to to pretty much everyone. I'm terrible, but remember their urgency is not your emergency. That is our new slogan for life like And since I turn my email notifications off my phone because hey, when I actually want to be intentional and do my work, I'll be on my laptop anyway. That's when I'm going to be able to write the best replies and actually understand. Like half the time, i'd be reading emails at midnight and I don't even know what they're talking about. And I remember my cousin, My cousin, Sammy, you still work with me at SPP, And she'd always say to me, Steph, you only reply to half the questions in my email, and that's because I wasn't bloody paying attention. I know that sounds really bad and I should be more professional, but I'm also like, it's families, okay, But you need to be more intentional with your time and where you're putting your time. Research actually shows that every distraction, every time, like you're focused on a task and you get pulled away by a notification, by a little human, by anything, it takes you thirty minutes to refocus. So every time your phone goes off, every time your kids come in and you get into erupted, you were wasting thirty minutes. So imagine if you get a couple of those, that's like hours a day is gone. So now what I do in terms of my emails and communications with the outside world, I have two windows a day. I have one in the late morning because for me, when I wake up and I'm sitting down to work, I need to do the hard thing first, and that's when my brain is at its best. So you bet I'm not wasting that time, that power hour on emails. And I honestly recommend everyone does the same. So late morning I'll do an email check, do my comms, check, reply to things, and then I do it again in the afternoon. Some days I'll do it once a day because again, I'm not saving lives here, I'm really not saving lives. And you can group all your coms together for these two parts of the day. You can do your text messages, you can do your emails, you can do your slack, you can.
00:21:48
Speaker 2: Check your kids like school thing. It can be like your full.
00:21:50
Speaker 1: Comms like thirty minutes, you know, and By batching the tasks that are similar together, it's going to make it a lot easier for your brain. Because if we're doing something a bit more creative or like we're cleaning and then we're trying to do emails, we're task switching constantly, and that is a lot of pressure on my brain and we're not going to do it well. So be more intentional by time batching, and that in itself, Yes, it's a productivity hack, but it's also like a mental health hack. Is batching like items together. Do you addmin in one section, If you need to do creative stuff, do that in another section. If you need to clean, do that in another section. That's why, like even now when I'm creating my social media posts, when you're making a post, there's a lot of phases, like you got to do the right like you got to do the ideas, You've got to write it, then you got to like maybe take photos or film it, and then you've got to edit it, and then you got to do the caption.
00:22:39
Speaker 2: Like there's a lot of different phases.
00:22:40
Speaker 1: And I used to try to make myself do all of them together, but then I started batching them, so I'd write all the content for the week in one slot, and then I would do the filming for it, you know what I mean. And then it just was like so much easier on my brain. But by doing this it gives me a sense of control because you know, usually with our mental health, we feel pretty helpless at times that we can't fix it or we can't change it, we can't control it. But what can we control. We can control when we are accessible. We are in control of when other people can contact us. That is yours and that is something that you need to protect so fiercely. Moving on to weird thing I do. Number three is I wear noise canceling headphones in my own house with nothing playing.
00:23:21
Speaker 2: Now it's not because I don't love my family.
00:23:23
Speaker 1: I love them dearly, but they do say the word mum too many times a day and they think I have the answers for everything in the universe and I do not. But I, especially in the afternoon, I get over stimulated as hell. And you don't love my family, love my children, but they're loud, and they say a lot of words that we don't need to say. And look, it might make me sound like a bad mum, but look, guys, we are getting so much, you know, input from the outside world in our body, and that along with technology and all the sounds and stuff. It's no wonder why we are constantly overstimulated.
00:23:55
Speaker 2: As parents. Think about before kids, I thought I was stressed. I was not streng like.
00:24:00
Speaker 1: I look back and I look back at my old Facebook statuses of me winging about sleep.
00:24:04
Speaker 2: And I was like, twenty two year old stuff.
00:24:07
Speaker 1: You shut your face, you shut your beautiful, youthful skin, you shut your beautiful jewey skinned, youthful face.
00:24:13
Speaker 2: Okay, uh, it's just wild.
00:24:17
Speaker 1: And then you become an adult and you have all these extra factors that you can't control, which is, you know, our sleep and how many times someone.
00:24:25
Speaker 2: Touches you a day, like you just get touched out.
00:24:27
Speaker 1: So if you can reduce the amount of inputs you're getting from the outside world, which includes notifications and sounds, it's going to help. And there's the science behind this is Duke University did a clinical trial and they're doing this right now apparently, and they're measuring where the noise canceling headphones improve cognitive performance and reduce stressing people with ADHD. And there's a board that already recommends them as a sensory aid because research already shows that, you know, people with ADHD we have a reduced top down control from the prefrontal cortex, which means we can't filter background sound the way neurotypical brains do. So every sound competes for attention. So for us, it's just like everything's turned up twenty dollars and it's hard for us to just focus on one sound or one conversation. Like I know, for me, I used to go into the warehouse five days a week, but now I only go a couple because I cannot get anything done. I love my team, but the problem is me. It's not them, Like I want to know where they're talking about. I'll hear them talking, I'm like, what are you talking about? I'm so distracting. I'm the worst boss ever, but I just can't deal. Like I can't focus even visually. If if I see something in my field of vision, I need to see what's going on. So I need to just I'm like a child and I have to parent myself. So most of the days of the week, I'm locked in my office working with my headphones on and look with this, with this headphone hack. You don't need expensive Apple ones. You can get really cheat ones on like Amazon and things like that. There's even actually a brand if you are not wanting your if you still know about to hear your kids decently enough, there's a brand called like Loop. I think Loop headphone like earphones, but basically they lower the volume enough to be able to hear your kids still, and they're very discreet.
00:26:09
Speaker 2: They're like clear, so like say, if.
00:26:10
Speaker 1: You don't want to, like maybe your kids don't like you wearing headphones or something, or maybe they.
00:26:14
Speaker 2: Get upset about it.
00:26:15
Speaker 1: They're clear, so you wouldn't even know that you're wearing them. Or maybe if even in an office or something, you don't want to be rude, you can get these clear little ear plugs that muffle the sound enough and you can do different attachments and things like. It's wild, actually, like you are allowed to be in a room without being fully available to everything in it and every sound in it. Speaking of parenting, this next one I feel like every mother does on the planet, and that is I sit in my car for two minutes before I go inside. You know, when you arrive home after work or after school drop off, and you know you're sitting there, you turn the engine off and you just start to either stare off into the abyss and your eyes just feel very relaxed and focused.
00:26:58
Speaker 2: Or you start scrolling.
00:27:00
Speaker 1: You feel like your ass is glued to the seat and there's nothing that could be happening in the world that's actually going to make you get up out of the car and go inside. Now, this is actually a core sign that you are overstimulated and your nervous system needs some love.
00:27:13
Speaker 2: But there was a time I.
00:27:14
Speaker 1: Remember years ago, I was sitting in the car and I realized I was sitting in the car for forty five minutes, and I caught myself getting very angry at myself, a bit agitated, frustrated that I, you know, didn't get up and go inside and do the things. Though then I realized if I didn't have my driver's seat solo time, I would go back inside to the kids and likely be cranky, be overstimulated, and not be showing up as a best parent.
00:27:38
Speaker 2: You know, Ryan had to cover it. He was fine.
00:27:40
Speaker 1: So wherever you could just take these micro moments and pockets of time where you can just be just take it. Like I've seen on Reddit, I actually read some things on Reddit because sometimes for these episodes, I like to see what other people do if they do similar things to me. And there's people that actually, when they like mums, will say I need to go get groceries, I'll go to the furthest wior worse like book an appointment that's far away.
00:28:02
Speaker 2: Althy'll book a fake.
00:28:03
Speaker 1: Appointment, like we shouldn't be having to book fake appointments to take time for ourselves.
00:28:07
Speaker 2: And I feel like I've said this before, but it's true, you.
00:28:09
Speaker 1: Know, And there's actually this is actually called a transition ritual because your brain doesn't flip between identities instantly, so you might be trying to switch from work mode to mum mode, and you actually need something to do that, and that requires cognitive load, which is basically brain power. And without like a buffer and a transition, you will go into the next thing, but you're still half loaded with the previous role. So you might come inside from work, but you're still you're still in like boss mode or work mode, and then you might find your shorder with the kids and you don't have like you just don't have it in you to be like the best.
00:28:46
Speaker 2: Mum right now.
00:28:47
Speaker 1: So let yourself sit in the car. Sit in the car. If that means scrolling, do that. You know, if you need to look up Chris hemsworth Instagram to perv on his photos, you do that.
00:28:58
Speaker 2: Sorry, my stomach just rumbled.
00:29:00
Speaker 1: But here's like a little mini mental health hack that you can do before you go inside after your little car time. I want you just to set the two minute timer where you pull into the driveway. I want you to put your phone face down and.
00:29:11
Speaker 2: I just want you to sit there.
00:29:13
Speaker 1: We just want you to like just sit there and if your brain's ticking away, just let it. But just let yourself have that time without any you know, stimulation, anything going on, so that you can then get yourself into the next role that you're about to step into. Because you know, we all have so many roles in our life. We are moms, we are carers, we are wives, we have so many things, and we never have like, when's the time we're just us? Where is a period of time during the day when we are just ourselves And that is when we're in the driver seat of our car, Because sadly, we don't feel like we're in the driver's seat of our life with how busy the world is, and we do need to just stop feeling guilty and take these moments for ourselves.
00:29:55
Speaker 2: And even science.
00:29:55
Speaker 1: Says the best way to transition over to the next role or just regulate is reducing sensory input and also give your vegus nerve a moment to reset, so a small space that's quiet, even just like ninety seconds just to shift over. That is called a micro reset, and that's what you need to do more of, just a quick pause if any of this stuff is hitting you. I go through all of this stuff in my book Mastering My Messy Life, and I talk about the Mum Guild. I talk about, you know, me becoming a mum for the first time and just realizing how I had this need for so much control and I didn't realize how much it was really affecting my mental health.
00:30:32
Speaker 2: So that's all in my book.
00:30:33
Speaker 1: You can grab it from your favorite bookstore or Amazon or anything like that. Now, this next point is kind of like a kind of a contradiction from the first, but in a different way, and that is I don't sit still to calm down.
00:30:44
Speaker 2: Now.
00:30:44
Speaker 1: I'm not talking about always, but a lot of the time when we have anxious energy.
00:30:49
Speaker 2: We need to move that now.
00:30:51
Speaker 1: Some people like to move it through being still and just like you know, relaxing and zending out. But for me, I tend to need to do things.
00:30:58
Speaker 2: Now.
00:30:58
Speaker 1: This is a little bit morbid, but when my dad and my Naan passed away, I just felt like I was sitting with so much pain. I couldn't bear to just sit there because I'd be thinking about everything and how much I miss them. So what I did was I got really into craft. So I was doing like embroidery. I was doing this paint by numbers, which I still haven't finished because I've only got the white bits left and that's not dope. Meine hitting that sucks. But I was doing that, so I had to be doing things. I read a lot of books because again it was like taking me somewhere else. So that was the only time I was probably very still. But when I say I don't sit still to calm down, I don't mean like I have to be running around sometimes definitely, like I'll get into that in a minute, but I need to kind of be doing something with my mind now.
00:31:41
Speaker 2: Last year I.
00:31:42
Speaker 1: Started learning to play guitar, and I love that and that was a really good one for me to be able to be focusing on something that's just fun and it's got nothing to do with work, nothing to do.
00:31:50
Speaker 2: With life, and it really is the type.
00:31:53
Speaker 1: Of rest I needed. And there is seven types of rest, and we need to be making sure we're doing each one, you know. And for me also, I love reading, I love guitar. I like playing Mario cart things like that that I just like. They call it like cozy gaming. There's all these cool games, like there's like Animal Crossing and things. I bought myself a Nintendo switch that my kids literally have stole. They're actually in the green room right now and they're playing the Nintendo switches. But yeah, my hands do need to move for my brain to be quiet. Now other things that need to be moved sometimes is offloading our thoughts that brings me to weird hack or weird things I do. Number seven and that is I put my feelings on paper not people. Now, it is so important to have people in your life that you trust, that you can confide in. And I'm not saying don't confide in anyone, don't talk to friends, because that is obviously so so important, Like therapy, all that stuff like talk therapy is insanely important, but sometimes we do need to go inwards. In order for us to go outwards, we need to be able to make sense of things ourselves. So before I spiral text a best friend who's already going through a hard time, or you know, offload something to a family member, I do open my journal first, because seventy cent of the time I just need to offload the thoughts in my head, not reply to another message, and also not later feel possibly guilty for maybe spiral texting a friend and going on a huge rant. Which, look, our friends are there for reasons, and they are there for those things, but sometimes it is good to just get it out yourself. And that also can really help your relationships, like for example, you know, as I mentioned before, like sometimes partners they like to fix things and you just want to be heard, and that's fine. But once you've made sense of like your thoughts on paper, you can then really be able to be in a state where you can communicate what you need from them. And then I feel like a lot of fights would be avoided between a lot of couples. And of course we've got the science. A psychologist from the University of Texas has been running expressive writing studies since the nineteen eighties, and his research found that just fifteen to twenty minutes of writing about what you're feeling four days in a row measurably reduces stracts, lowers blood pressure, and improves immune function. And it also even reduces doctor visits for the following six months, which is actually insane. That's good because like that shit costs money, and that's not journaling about your day. That's not a gratitude list. It's just writing the emotional, messy stuff that actually doesn't make sense, and it's just circuling in your head. Like it's just if you read it or someone else read it, they wouldn't even know what you're talking about. And that's just helping your brain get it out. And that's also cognitive offloading, so you're not carrying that mental load around anymore. Now here's how to know when to offload onto paper versus onto people. So it's paper first when you know it's circuling your brain at two am and you feel like you're starting to get quite negative and spiraling. It's also paper first when you've already told the same friend the same thing twice this week. It's a feeling about a person that you haven't slept on it yet, so you know that's again that can really affect your relationships. Maybe your friend said something that didn't sit right with you and you're really sitting on it, and instead of texting them and just kind of offloading it onto them without trying to understand it, first go to paper and usually by the morning you'll be feeling much better and also clearer away. If they have done something that has upset you, you will be able to communicate that much more clearly and not in a way that's like attacking them. And also turn to paper if you'd feel guilty later for dumping it, or you're about to send a text that you might regret, So just go to paper first with those things. And again, we need people, We need people in our life, we need our talk therapy, but sometimes it's better just to make sense of it yourself on paper. Now, go to people next. When you feel like you need a decision, not event. The thing is happening to more than just shoe. So something's going on and it's happening more than just shue, and you need to connect with somebody. Maybe you need to be witnessed or not just processed, and your journal already and it's making the thing bigger, not smaller, or you just are like ready to go to that next step and go to people if you need advice or if you just want that connection piece as well. Now, what I want you to do is I want you to keep a little bedside journal next to your bed obviously, and it just lives within arm's reach. So when the noise hits at night till my brain gets really really busy. So instead of going on your phone and scrolling and just like pushing it down and pushing it down, You're going to want you to let it out and don't worry about the spelling, don't worry about like what it looks like. If you're worried someone's going to read it, just rip it out and throw it in the bin and it's fine. And then by the end of it, I want you to ask yourself, do I still need to send that text? Do I need to still have that conversation? Because we need to remember, like paper is just so effective for you when your brain is spinning. Which also leads me to my last weird thing I do for my mental health is when my brain is spinning, I clean one thing. Now, have you ever caught yourself rage cleaning? You know when you get like maybe you're angry or like you annoyed with your family because they live in your house making a mess, and you start rage cleaning. And that's because you've got a lot of anxious energy you need to move. But it's also because you are feeling very much not in control of your life. So the thing that you can control is your environment. So we start to clean the house. Now, now maybe instead of cleaning the whole house, Like, look, go for it if you want to, but if I do that, I tend to be absolutely wrecked after and then I'm cranky.
00:37:06
Speaker 2: So when you start to.
00:37:07
Speaker 1: Feel that energy building up, I want you to pick one little thing. It could be a draw, it could be the spice rack, and just spend five minutes organizing it. Because what you find is you're probably in an overwhelmed phrase. It's like when everything feels urgent, so you don't know what to do with yourself, so you do something completely unrelated and you know at times it's not great for work and things, but action leads to more action. It's momentum building. You're building momentum by doing the thing. So if you go and do something that's unrelated like the spicetraw, you're going to see that you've accomplished something from start to end, and that's going to build self confidence as well.
00:37:41
Speaker 2: So not only you're getting.
00:37:42
Speaker 1: To move your anxious energy, you're also feeling like an accomplishment and an achievement, and you also kind of feel like you're in control of something in your life. And they actually call this behavioral activation, which is a therapy technique which has a massive evidence base for depression and overwhelm and it actually is their first line treatment, which WHI The research example they use is if clean the kitchen feels overwhelming, start with clean the counter. So action breaks the freeze and small action breaks it without triggering the avoidance response that do the whole thing creates.
00:38:12
Speaker 2: So whenever I've ever talked.
00:38:14
Speaker 1: About decluttering guys or organizing your house, I've always said it. I've said this for like nine years now. If you want to organize your house or declutter, I don't want you to think of the whole house. I want you to think of that draw, that table, that surface, and this is the exact same thing. Because if you're thinking of doing the whole massive house, like the big picture, that is overwhelming and you're not going to start anything.
00:38:35
Speaker 2: We don't have Marie Kondo.
00:38:36
Speaker 1: To come to a house and overhaul our house on the weekend. This is the same thing. We're breaking it up into a small, realistic step that creates movement and it creates you know, that dopamine as well. So instead of maybe feeling sad, you're suddenly feeling accomplished and that's going to move your energy. So when you're feeling frozen, I want you to ask yourself, what is the smallest thing I can do right now? Don't think what's important, what's productive. I want you to just think of something like very small that you know you'll feel better about. Because when you can't fix the big thing, fix the smallest thing, the smallest thing is allowed to count. Now, those are the things I do in my life that really help me and stop me from spiraling, which I still spiral.
00:39:13
Speaker 2: Let's be honest, I'm a human.
00:39:16
Speaker 1: But you don't always have to follow the path that you think is set for you and what everyone else is doing. That's my main message behind this if you feel like playing, like smashing someone in mariocart's going to make you feel better, go for it.
00:39:28
Speaker 2: There's no right or wrong.
00:39:29
Speaker 1: It's just about what works for you now, because at the end of the day, weird works if it makes you well, honestly, and we are all a little bit weird, so try something different. So I would love to hear like message me on Instagram or like, I love if you guys could leave me a review. I would love that as well. But let me know out of these what really resonated with you and what you're going to take away from this episode. Now, to wrap it up, I want you to pick one thing from this episode, one weird thing for your mental health, whether it is chucking on your headphones and ignoring your family or sitting in the car, pick one thing, and I would love love if you guys could send me a message on Instagram or even leave a review.
00:40:09
Speaker 2: It would be awesome. But let me know what you use.
00:40:11
Speaker 1: And if you haven't already, please subscribe to the show you were going to want to hear.
00:40:14
Speaker 2: Next week's episode and I will see you then. Bye.
Speaker 1: You don't always have to follow the path that you think is set few and what everyone else is doing. If you feel like smashing someone in Mario Cart's going to make you feel better, go for it.
00:00:09
Speaker 2: There's no right or wrong.
00:00:10
Speaker 1: It's just about what works for you, because at the end of the day, weird works if it makes you well, and we are all a little bit weird, So try something different. Hello, Legends today's episode, I feel like my friends need to be listening to you right now, because I don't know about you, guys. I feel like everyone I talk to you lately, everyone is just going through it right now. I don't know if mercury is in the microwave again, but I just feel like a lot of people, like honestly some of my best mates, everyone is going through a really tough time at the moment. And I think this episode is very, very well timed because as someone I've suffered with anxiety in my whole life, and I you know, in the past, I would shame myself into stillness and I would literally try to meingir my way into meditating, and it really does defeat the purpose.
00:00:55
Speaker 2: If you're someone like me, when you're stressed or anxious.
00:00:57
Speaker 1: You can't physically sit down and meditate like you couldn't if anything worse, And all the other ways that people are trying to tell you to work on your mental health just don't work for you. This episode is going to save your life, and it's also going to make you realize.
00:01:11
Speaker 2: You're not broken, you're not weird. We're all just so different. Look.
00:01:15
Speaker 1: I've been working on, you know, personal growth and everything for a long time, but there was a time where I would just force myself to sit there and meditate when it just did not feel right for me. And that's because I thought that's what healthy people did. I thought, this is what everyone's raving about, this meditation thing, Like why isn't it working for me? And obviously, over time meditation I really looked into it, and the way I do it is going to be different from other people. But a lot of my problem with it was the pressure I was putting on myself. I thought my brain had to be blank, but apparently it doesn't, which is great to know. That's an episode for another time, But you know, I genuinely thought if I could just like be breathing deeply enough and like sit on the floor long enough, I would just become zen and my anxiety would disappear. And sure, like with that can help. But I remember there was this one day where I was just so highly strung, I was so anxious, and I tried to sit down and meditate and I just wasn't feeling it, and I stopped the track. I got up, and I decluttered a drawer and I felt so much better. You know, for many of us with anxious minds, we need to move that energy. And I think, you know, there's this big misconception of what you know, mindfulness.
00:02:25
Speaker 2: Looks like that it has to be still, you have.
00:02:27
Speaker 1: To not be moving, you have to have a blank mind, and that's just not the truth, and that's not the reality of it. Sometimes listening to a woman on YouTube saying release what no longer serves you doesn't service as well as maybe playing guitar or playing Mario Kart. And I'm going to say that honestly, because for me, over the years, I've just stopped fighting. I've stopped fighting and this is I'm going to work with my brain and not against it.
00:02:50
Speaker 2: So this episode is for you. If you just.
00:02:53
Speaker 1: Have tried every traditional method of mindfulness, you're trying to work on your mental health. But for you, you just can't think of anything worse than sitting down and meditating and worrying about the emails you need to send, the lunch boxes you still have to pack, and you just need to try something different. This is for you, and I'm going to be giving you my seven weird things I do for my mental health that you probably won't hear in therapy. And again disclaimer, I'm not saying don't go to therapy because that is so important, but I think sometimes we just need to like realize that the way everyone else seems to do it on TikTok isn't the way that you need to do.
00:03:26
Speaker 2: It as well.
00:03:27
Speaker 1: And I think with these I actually posted these tips a little while ago on Instagram and they went off, and I think for me, I wouldn't have posted something like that years ago.
00:03:38
Speaker 2: But the older I get, you.
00:03:39
Speaker 1: Know, I'm realizing that maybe mental health isn't forcing yourself into routines that look good online. Maybe it's about understanding your brain and instead of constantly trying to fight it, you just do the little things that you know to the outside world look odd, like sitting in your car for thirty minutes after drop off. But if you feel lighter afterwards, then do the thing. And to help back up my claims these weird systems and habits, I'm going to be sharing the science behind some of them as well. So I'm actually not insane and I actually do have a valid argument over here. I think, just like with health and fitness, we've just been sold this version of mindfulness and mental health that looks beautiful on the outside, but it also feels impossible in real life, because honestly, my nervous system has been more healed by playing Mario Karte and guitar than you know meditation ever has on a hard day. Look, I think the sooner you realize self care isn't always about bubble baths or touching grass, which are also great and very good for you, Sometimes it's muting your group chats and reorganizing the spicetraw.
00:04:43
Speaker 2: Not speaking from experience or anything. But before I.
00:04:45
Speaker 1: Get into it, a little life update now. I feel like, you know, when the moment you decide you want to become a mum and have children, you tend to think of like the baby stage. You don't really think about, you know, as they get older, and it really is true, like I'm starting to understand the saying little people, little problems, big people, big problems. And you know my girls now they're eight and ten and they're just their own little people and they literally actually I brought them into work today, so they came into the studio here at Nova, and I really would love to interview.
00:05:16
Speaker 2: Them one day.
00:05:16
Speaker 1: I think it would be really funny, and I know they would definitely out me on a lot of things, but I think they would help us get a bit of a reality check as well, because you know, the way kids view the world, it's much more simple and they can actually see.
00:05:28
Speaker 2: The solution to a lot of our problems.
00:05:31
Speaker 1: Like, for example, one of the girls said to me the other day, like, Mum, why are always so stressed about the washing and the cleaning. I said, oh, because like it needs like I have to do it, and it's like it just Mummy always has to do those things. And they said to me, but there's always got to be more to do, and I was like, that's right. And then afterwards when I felt a bit more defeated after hearing that, and then she turned to me and said, remember that your nance said to you that time. If you can't control it, don't worry about it. I was like, that's so true, Like you're never going to get to the end of your emails, You're never going to get the end of your to do list, you never unfortunately going to ever finish your cleaning and washing.
00:06:11
Speaker 2: So the more I'm.
00:06:12
Speaker 1: Stressing about a task that just doesn't that has to be done each day, it's just like energy wasted.
00:06:18
Speaker 2: And that really did give me a bit of a brutal wake up call as well.
00:06:22
Speaker 1: Speaking of one of the girls, which obviously I'm not going to name, who has been, you know, struggling with a bit of anxiety lately, and as myself, like I remember being in kindergarten and having anxiety attacks over going to your six Like I really really hoped that the kids wouldn't have to deal with the level anxiety that I have. But you know, genetics and things, but it can feel a little bit defeating sometimes, like when you know you'd think someone like myself, I've had anxiety in my whole life.
00:06:52
Speaker 2: I've done a lot of work on myself.
00:06:53
Speaker 1: I'm literally on a podcast like I'm at Nova with my podcast talking about mental health hacks. And here I am really struggling to help my own child with her anxiety, and I think, you know, we might not have all the answers, but just having being like that soft place for them to land is the most important thing. And I'm not going to go into parenting and all that stuff right now, but I think we need to do the same for ourselves. We might not always have the answer to our issues or our problems, but as long as we are gentle enough with ourselves to just let it out and let it be. And that a lot of the time, like think about you know, the times that you maybe go to someone with an issue. And I know, like a lot of people's partners and husbands and that. And I'm not being sexist, but men typically tend to be fixers. They just want to fix things, whereas as women, we tend to want people just to listen. We want to just offload. And that's where a lot of relationships can have, like some struggles because the woman just wants to talk it out and the man wants to fix. And then I found myself as a mum doing that to my kids with their anxiety, Like I'm like, okay, let's try this, but like if I could just listen and I let them have their say and like validate them and say like, oh that would be really hard, that really did help them move it out of their nervous system. So it's the same with us. And a lot of these points do relate back to that that sometimes we don't have to force ourselves to be still or find the answer. We just need to move the energy out of our body and have somewhere that maybe someone can just listen and validate us if we need that. And I've got a literally very important and you need to stay to the end of this episode because that one specifically is one of the biggest ones. And I have a very important hack and tip that you need to do with that, so you're not always going to people for that, and it's actually going to be more beneficial for you. And I'm not saying not to talk to people, but you just need to stay to the end to hear what I'm talking about.
00:08:47
Speaker 2: All right, So let's talk about the weird.
00:08:49
Speaker 1: Shit I do for my mental health and my nervous system. But first I want to hit you with something I wish I realized a long time ago, and that is why we are all quite on edge, overwhelmed, anxious, Like when you think about it, you know, many people we know they have some form of anxiety or mental health issues, and when you think about it, we kind of don't have it, like much of a chance of not having it. You know, we live in a modern life where like our modern world is wrecking havoc.
00:09:17
Speaker 2: On our nervous system.
00:09:19
Speaker 1: And there was a study done It says the average woman has between six thousand and sixty thousand thoughts a day, and most of them are repetitive, and most of them are stressful. And also women are two times more likely than men to be diagnosed with anxiety and ADHD, and women are also, as we know, massively undiagnosed because we present differently. Now I'm not like, I know, everyone's got different opinions on this. I was diagnosed with my ADHD when I was six, so I kind of knew that I couldn't concentrate in things like that, but I didn't get a whole lot of help with it, to be honest with you, Like I got the diagnosis, but I didn't really get the tools to help me. But now like there's all these women who were finding out, Oh my God, I've got ADHD and this makes so much sense. Why I've got like, you know, there's like a a million different thoughts going on at once, and why I can't start tasks and why I can't concentrate, and you just feel like you're just you've lived your life feeling different. But there's so many of us. And it also doesn't help that, you know, smartphone notifications literally will spark our cortisol and we're always with our smartphone, we always have our phone on us, and you know, researchers actually measured it that every notification is a micro stress response in our body to process like our brain every time our phone goes off, it's like our brain thinks we're going to be eaten by tiger, not that we need to reply to an email. So here's the thing that finally clicked for me is that it's not that I was weak or that I didn't have the willpower to sit still and do the things. It's that my nervous system was running on the wrong settings for the life.
00:10:44
Speaker 2: I was living.
00:10:45
Speaker 1: So for me especially and women like me, when we have our smartphones on all the time and having like all these access to ourselves, which is I'm going to go into my my rules in a minute. You were literally putting gasoline on the fire. We're not going to do that anymore. And it's going to make sense very soon. And again I disclaim, I'm not a therapist. I'm just a woman who has lived a life of different.
00:11:09
Speaker 2: Mental health issues. I have ADHD.
00:11:11
Speaker 1: I'm a hot mess, and I'm here to help you, to tell you what helped me. But of course I never would recommend doing these things like in place of therapy. Therapy is so important. I go to therapy and I have for a long time. But I think this is just a bit more about giving yourself permission to try different things and talk to your therapists about these things as well. All right, The first one is my phone has been on silent for six years. You know how sometimes you have to hit rock bottom in order to make changes in your life. Well, this is kind of what happened with me when I first turned my phone on silent six years ago. I had started SPP and it was running for a couple of years. By that point, it was, you know, amazing, it was thriving. I didn't expect it to become what it is now. If you guys are knew here. I run my own brand called staff Based Planners. I make planners for messy minds and the type B girlies of the world who have a brain that wants to be Type A because you need to be organized because you get anxious, but your actions are Type B.
00:12:09
Speaker 2: So that's pretty much my thing.
00:12:11
Speaker 1: So it was dinner time and the girls were little, so I had Harper was a toddler, Whill there was baby.
00:12:16
Speaker 2: I'm trying to cook dinner. Harper was crying.
00:12:19
Speaker 1: I was replying, I was fixing someone's Shopify order, and then I was doing emails at the same time.
00:12:24
Speaker 2: And I suddenly, amongst all.
00:12:26
Speaker 1: That I was trying to help Harper and do all the things, my phone went off with an email and I just burst into tears. I just felt like I was in a pressure cooker, and I just knew that if there was one more thing, I was going to explode, and that thing was an email notification. I just felt in oudequate, like I just couldn't keep up. I just constantly felt like I was chasing my tail. And I placed Willow down and I looked at the scene in front of me. There was a washing basket that I had been folding fifteen minutes just beforehand.
00:12:56
Speaker 2: The dinner's on.
00:12:57
Speaker 1: The stove, I've got the two little kids. I've got my phone still going off. I've got my laptop open up on Shopify. And then my phone went off again, and I went over to it, and I went into settings and I turned off my email notification and I turned it on silent, and I haven't turned it back on since.
00:13:15
Speaker 2: Now.
00:13:17
Speaker 1: I will go into this a bit more because you're probably thinking, what about the kids' school, what about emergencies. We'll go into that in a second. But that was the day I realized that every notification, like I said, was like a little fire going off in my brain. I was always accessible. And what's hard is especially with kids. And that's what worries me about social media with the kids is they don't have an off switch either. They go to school and maybe there's bullies, and they bring the bullies home with them in their phone in their pocket.
00:13:47
Speaker 2: And that they don't get They don't get a break from that.
00:13:49
Speaker 1: They don't get a break from maybe masking all day or putting on a front. Even if you have ADHD or you don't like you're always do. It's technically we're performing. Think about how you act with like your family versus your friends, or your you know, people at work versus someone you've just met, Like you always kind of feel like you're kind of performing in a way, and that's exhausting over time, So you do need that time to switch off.
00:14:12
Speaker 2: And we're not humans.
00:14:13
Speaker 1: We're not meant to be accessible twenty four seven, Like, that's not how we were meant to be. We were meant to be in our little village with two hundred people, and we were not meant to have a phone with millions, millions and billions of people, and most of them are hot because they're genetically blessed, and we see them all and then we feel inadequate. We're not meant to have access to that many people. You know, I was living in a state where by nine o'clock in the morning I had already gotten forty notifications because you know, I had the shop, I had so many things going on.
00:14:41
Speaker 2: And that was me with a business.
00:14:42
Speaker 1: But even without a business, think about all the different notifications your phone gives you. It's a lot you need to, like think about how much you need to protect your peace and that is not protecting your peace. Is it really that urgent that you need to apply to an email that is a you know, the school's fundraiser in two weeks at nine pm at night.
00:15:04
Speaker 2: That can wait.
00:15:05
Speaker 1: The thing is this is where I started to live by the saying their urgency is not your emergency. Unless you're a doctor saving lives, you do not need to like be on call.
00:15:15
Speaker 2: All the time. So what I want you to do.
00:15:18
Speaker 1: Our phones have settings in them where even if people call you twice, if there is an emergency and they call you twice, it will actually ring through.
00:15:25
Speaker 2: There is settings for that. You can do so much now.
00:15:28
Speaker 1: You can make sure your kids school that always comes through. You can set focus modes for work so from nine to five you have your certain notifications on. People can call you and then it goes off automatically so you don't have to think about it. Nothing is that urgent when you think about it, there is nothing that could possibly be that urgent. You know, and people might panic, think like what if I miss something? You know, you check your phone. You can check your phone, and I know I think I did. I think I did a tech dtox. I think it was like a tech dtox blog or something thing ages ago, and I said, any emails that are older than three months, just archive all of them. And people were like, oh my god, whates if I can't like ones if I need something, I'm like, you can still search them, you know. Like I think we're just so used to being on and we're so heightened that everything feels much bigger than what it is. Again, if someone needs you, they can call twice. If you're scared you're going to miss something, you can check your phone like no one's taking it away from you. And this is where I, you know, really implemented some pretty strict rules. And then even within my business in SPP, like with marketing and stuff.
00:16:36
Speaker 2: Guys, the e commerce world is wild.
00:16:38
Speaker 1: You have so much going on, but you know, the team, we're all emailing each other, and it was just like a larger effort because I feel like an email there comes a certain expectation to be like, say certain things, you have to greet each other. So then what I did was and so we had proper trails. I set a hard rule within the company that everyone has to only use Slack. So Slack is like it's kind of like an instant messaging thing, but like business, but it's much better and it's much more informal. It's small, chill and anything internal now is through slack and it has been for years, and that just saved the abundance of emails. So emails are for external communication. Slack is internal. And that was the hard rule I said, and I've never looked back, and now you need to kind of view it. Your life is the same. External communication you need to have a hard rule. Internal communication is people who actually live in your house that you're together. The internal communication needs to be the focus for you. And even then you still are allowed to hide, which i'll go into an a minute.
00:17:35
Speaker 2: So what I want you.
00:17:36
Speaker 1: To do right now, which I know it sounds scary. I want you to pull out your phone and go to settings. So this is for iPhones. I want you to go to settings and then you're going to go to your focus modes. So you're gonna go to focus and then you can click on like personal or whatever it is, and then you can click this thing now that it's called intelligent breakthrough and silencing. So when it's active, it allows priority notifications to interrupt you and silence other ones. But you can also pick these. You can also I pick certain people that can always come through and call you. And there's also settings in there where you can make sure that if they ring.
00:18:06
Speaker 2: Twice, it comes through.
00:18:08
Speaker 1: And even like in terms of for me, I used to always sleep with my phone next to my bed, which admittedly I hadn't been doing that again.
00:18:15
Speaker 2: But you know, when you're asleep, everyone puts.
00:18:17
Speaker 1: Their phone on night mode or silent, you know, or do not disturb and you're not worried then, but emergencies can happen during the night, you know what I mean. But just remember, like you've got the choice, and you've got so much cool settings in your phone where you can activate that. So I want you to go to settings and go to focus and now we're going to go into our focus filters so you can actually add app focuses and things like that. And there's now there's like AI and stuff in our phone, so it actually can do it for us. But you can even set a schedule for a location. So I've got one where it turns my personal focus mode on when I arrive home, and that means only certain people can contact me. I only get certain notifications like I don't get email notifications. I actually turned my email note vacations off my phone altogether, which I'll get into later. And it's all automated, Like you don't have to think. You can just do these things and set you know, you can even have one for like a morning routine. So I've got a morning routine focus mode where I can only access certain apps, so I can access like my meditation app, I can access all this other stuff like Spotify and that. And because obviously in this episode I'm going to talk, it sounds like I'm ragging on meditation a lot. But meditation is great, but you just need to find the one that works for you. So I can do another episode on that. But it only allows me to look at certain things, so I'm not like scrolling Instagram like allows me to go on like substack and stuff. But you can do so much now. So if you do one take one thing from this episode, I want you to hop into your phone settings and just block off yourself from the world. It's going to be fine. And this is linked to my next weird thing I do for my mental health, which is I rarely reply straight away. Now look, I won't see her and pretend that this is all on purpose. Again, I have ADHD. I forget to to pretty much everyone. I'm terrible, but remember their urgency is not your emergency. That is our new slogan for life like And since I turn my email notifications off my phone because hey, when I actually want to be intentional and do my work, I'll be on my laptop anyway. That's when I'm going to be able to write the best replies and actually understand. Like half the time, i'd be reading emails at midnight and I don't even know what they're talking about. And I remember my cousin, My cousin, Sammy, you still work with me at SPP, And she'd always say to me, Steph, you only reply to half the questions in my email, and that's because I wasn't bloody paying attention. I know that sounds really bad and I should be more professional, but I'm also like, it's families, okay, But you need to be more intentional with your time and where you're putting your time. Research actually shows that every distraction, every time, like you're focused on a task and you get pulled away by a notification, by a little human, by anything, it takes you thirty minutes to refocus. So every time your phone goes off, every time your kids come in and you get into erupted, you were wasting thirty minutes. So imagine if you get a couple of those, that's like hours a day is gone. So now what I do in terms of my emails and communications with the outside world, I have two windows a day. I have one in the late morning because for me, when I wake up and I'm sitting down to work, I need to do the hard thing first, and that's when my brain is at its best. So you bet I'm not wasting that time, that power hour on emails. And I honestly recommend everyone does the same. So late morning I'll do an email check, do my comms, check, reply to things, and then I do it again in the afternoon. Some days I'll do it once a day because again, I'm not saving lives here, I'm really not saving lives. And you can group all your coms together for these two parts of the day. You can do your text messages, you can do your emails, you can do your slack, you can.
00:21:48
Speaker 2: Check your kids like school thing. It can be like your full.
00:21:50
Speaker 1: Comms like thirty minutes, you know, and By batching the tasks that are similar together, it's going to make it a lot easier for your brain. Because if we're doing something a bit more creative or like we're cleaning and then we're trying to do emails, we're task switching constantly, and that is a lot of pressure on my brain and we're not going to do it well. So be more intentional by time batching, and that in itself, Yes, it's a productivity hack, but it's also like a mental health hack. Is batching like items together. Do you addmin in one section, If you need to do creative stuff, do that in another section. If you need to clean, do that in another section. That's why, like even now when I'm creating my social media posts, when you're making a post, there's a lot of phases, like you got to do the right like you got to do the ideas, You've got to write it, then you got to like maybe take photos or film it, and then you've got to edit it, and then you got to do the caption.
00:22:39
Speaker 2: Like there's a lot of different phases.
00:22:40
Speaker 1: And I used to try to make myself do all of them together, but then I started batching them, so I'd write all the content for the week in one slot, and then I would do the filming for it, you know what I mean. And then it just was like so much easier on my brain. But by doing this it gives me a sense of control because you know, usually with our mental health, we feel pretty helpless at times that we can't fix it or we can't change it, we can't control it. But what can we control. We can control when we are accessible. We are in control of when other people can contact us. That is yours and that is something that you need to protect so fiercely. Moving on to weird thing I do. Number three is I wear noise canceling headphones in my own house with nothing playing.
00:23:21
Speaker 2: Now it's not because I don't love my family.
00:23:23
Speaker 1: I love them dearly, but they do say the word mum too many times a day and they think I have the answers for everything in the universe and I do not. But I, especially in the afternoon, I get over stimulated as hell. And you don't love my family, love my children, but they're loud, and they say a lot of words that we don't need to say. And look, it might make me sound like a bad mum, but look, guys, we are getting so much, you know, input from the outside world in our body, and that along with technology and all the sounds and stuff. It's no wonder why we are constantly overstimulated.
00:23:55
Speaker 2: As parents. Think about before kids, I thought I was stressed. I was not streng like.
00:24:00
Speaker 1: I look back and I look back at my old Facebook statuses of me winging about sleep.
00:24:04
Speaker 2: And I was like, twenty two year old stuff.
00:24:07
Speaker 1: You shut your face, you shut your beautiful, youthful skin, you shut your beautiful jewey skinned, youthful face.
00:24:13
Speaker 2: Okay, uh, it's just wild.
00:24:17
Speaker 1: And then you become an adult and you have all these extra factors that you can't control, which is, you know, our sleep and how many times someone.
00:24:25
Speaker 2: Touches you a day, like you just get touched out.
00:24:27
Speaker 1: So if you can reduce the amount of inputs you're getting from the outside world, which includes notifications and sounds, it's going to help. And there's the science behind this is Duke University did a clinical trial and they're doing this right now apparently, and they're measuring where the noise canceling headphones improve cognitive performance and reduce stressing people with ADHD. And there's a board that already recommends them as a sensory aid because research already shows that, you know, people with ADHD we have a reduced top down control from the prefrontal cortex, which means we can't filter background sound the way neurotypical brains do. So every sound competes for attention. So for us, it's just like everything's turned up twenty dollars and it's hard for us to just focus on one sound or one conversation. Like I know, for me, I used to go into the warehouse five days a week, but now I only go a couple because I cannot get anything done. I love my team, but the problem is me. It's not them, Like I want to know where they're talking about. I'll hear them talking, I'm like, what are you talking about? I'm so distracting. I'm the worst boss ever, but I just can't deal. Like I can't focus even visually. If if I see something in my field of vision, I need to see what's going on. So I need to just I'm like a child and I have to parent myself. So most of the days of the week, I'm locked in my office working with my headphones on and look with this, with this headphone hack. You don't need expensive Apple ones. You can get really cheat ones on like Amazon and things like that. There's even actually a brand if you are not wanting your if you still know about to hear your kids decently enough, there's a brand called like Loop. I think Loop headphone like earphones, but basically they lower the volume enough to be able to hear your kids still, and they're very discreet.
00:26:09
Speaker 2: They're like clear, so like say, if.
00:26:10
Speaker 1: You don't want to, like maybe your kids don't like you wearing headphones or something, or maybe they.
00:26:14
Speaker 2: Get upset about it.
00:26:15
Speaker 1: They're clear, so you wouldn't even know that you're wearing them. Or maybe if even in an office or something, you don't want to be rude, you can get these clear little ear plugs that muffle the sound enough and you can do different attachments and things like. It's wild, actually, like you are allowed to be in a room without being fully available to everything in it and every sound in it. Speaking of parenting, this next one I feel like every mother does on the planet, and that is I sit in my car for two minutes before I go inside. You know, when you arrive home after work or after school drop off, and you know you're sitting there, you turn the engine off and you just start to either stare off into the abyss and your eyes just feel very relaxed and focused.
00:26:58
Speaker 2: Or you start scrolling.
00:27:00
Speaker 1: You feel like your ass is glued to the seat and there's nothing that could be happening in the world that's actually going to make you get up out of the car and go inside. Now, this is actually a core sign that you are overstimulated and your nervous system needs some love.
00:27:13
Speaker 2: But there was a time I.
00:27:14
Speaker 1: Remember years ago, I was sitting in the car and I realized I was sitting in the car for forty five minutes, and I caught myself getting very angry at myself, a bit agitated, frustrated that I, you know, didn't get up and go inside and do the things. Though then I realized if I didn't have my driver's seat solo time, I would go back inside to the kids and likely be cranky, be overstimulated, and not be showing up as a best parent.
00:27:38
Speaker 2: You know, Ryan had to cover it. He was fine.
00:27:40
Speaker 1: So wherever you could just take these micro moments and pockets of time where you can just be just take it. Like I've seen on Reddit, I actually read some things on Reddit because sometimes for these episodes, I like to see what other people do if they do similar things to me. And there's people that actually, when they like mums, will say I need to go get groceries, I'll go to the furthest wior worse like book an appointment that's far away.
00:28:02
Speaker 2: Althy'll book a fake.
00:28:03
Speaker 1: Appointment, like we shouldn't be having to book fake appointments to take time for ourselves.
00:28:07
Speaker 2: And I feel like I've said this before, but it's true, you.
00:28:09
Speaker 1: Know, And there's actually this is actually called a transition ritual because your brain doesn't flip between identities instantly, so you might be trying to switch from work mode to mum mode, and you actually need something to do that, and that requires cognitive load, which is basically brain power. And without like a buffer and a transition, you will go into the next thing, but you're still half loaded with the previous role. So you might come inside from work, but you're still you're still in like boss mode or work mode, and then you might find your shorder with the kids and you don't have like you just don't have it in you to be like the best.
00:28:46
Speaker 2: Mum right now.
00:28:47
Speaker 1: So let yourself sit in the car. Sit in the car. If that means scrolling, do that. You know, if you need to look up Chris hemsworth Instagram to perv on his photos, you do that.
00:28:58
Speaker 2: Sorry, my stomach just rumbled.
00:29:00
Speaker 1: But here's like a little mini mental health hack that you can do before you go inside after your little car time. I want you just to set the two minute timer where you pull into the driveway. I want you to put your phone face down and.
00:29:11
Speaker 2: I just want you to sit there.
00:29:13
Speaker 1: We just want you to like just sit there and if your brain's ticking away, just let it. But just let yourself have that time without any you know, stimulation, anything going on, so that you can then get yourself into the next role that you're about to step into. Because you know, we all have so many roles in our life. We are moms, we are carers, we are wives, we have so many things, and we never have like, when's the time we're just us? Where is a period of time during the day when we are just ourselves And that is when we're in the driver seat of our car, Because sadly, we don't feel like we're in the driver's seat of our life with how busy the world is, and we do need to just stop feeling guilty and take these moments for ourselves.
00:29:55
Speaker 2: And even science.
00:29:55
Speaker 1: Says the best way to transition over to the next role or just regulate is reducing sensory input and also give your vegus nerve a moment to reset, so a small space that's quiet, even just like ninety seconds just to shift over. That is called a micro reset, and that's what you need to do more of, just a quick pause if any of this stuff is hitting you. I go through all of this stuff in my book Mastering My Messy Life, and I talk about the Mum Guild. I talk about, you know, me becoming a mum for the first time and just realizing how I had this need for so much control and I didn't realize how much it was really affecting my mental health.
00:30:32
Speaker 2: So that's all in my book.
00:30:33
Speaker 1: You can grab it from your favorite bookstore or Amazon or anything like that. Now, this next point is kind of like a kind of a contradiction from the first, but in a different way, and that is I don't sit still to calm down.
00:30:44
Speaker 2: Now.
00:30:44
Speaker 1: I'm not talking about always, but a lot of the time when we have anxious energy.
00:30:49
Speaker 2: We need to move that now.
00:30:51
Speaker 1: Some people like to move it through being still and just like you know, relaxing and zending out. But for me, I tend to need to do things.
00:30:58
Speaker 2: Now.
00:30:58
Speaker 1: This is a little bit morbid, but when my dad and my Naan passed away, I just felt like I was sitting with so much pain. I couldn't bear to just sit there because I'd be thinking about everything and how much I miss them. So what I did was I got really into craft. So I was doing like embroidery. I was doing this paint by numbers, which I still haven't finished because I've only got the white bits left and that's not dope. Meine hitting that sucks. But I was doing that, so I had to be doing things. I read a lot of books because again it was like taking me somewhere else. So that was the only time I was probably very still. But when I say I don't sit still to calm down, I don't mean like I have to be running around sometimes definitely, like I'll get into that in a minute, but I need to kind of be doing something with my mind now.
00:31:41
Speaker 2: Last year I.
00:31:42
Speaker 1: Started learning to play guitar, and I love that and that was a really good one for me to be able to be focusing on something that's just fun and it's got nothing to do with work, nothing to do.
00:31:50
Speaker 2: With life, and it really is the type.
00:31:53
Speaker 1: Of rest I needed. And there is seven types of rest, and we need to be making sure we're doing each one, you know. And for me also, I love reading, I love guitar. I like playing Mario cart things like that that I just like. They call it like cozy gaming. There's all these cool games, like there's like Animal Crossing and things. I bought myself a Nintendo switch that my kids literally have stole. They're actually in the green room right now and they're playing the Nintendo switches. But yeah, my hands do need to move for my brain to be quiet. Now other things that need to be moved sometimes is offloading our thoughts that brings me to weird hack or weird things I do. Number seven and that is I put my feelings on paper not people. Now, it is so important to have people in your life that you trust, that you can confide in. And I'm not saying don't confide in anyone, don't talk to friends, because that is obviously so so important, Like therapy, all that stuff like talk therapy is insanely important, but sometimes we do need to go inwards. In order for us to go outwards, we need to be able to make sense of things ourselves. So before I spiral text a best friend who's already going through a hard time, or you know, offload something to a family member, I do open my journal first, because seventy cent of the time I just need to offload the thoughts in my head, not reply to another message, and also not later feel possibly guilty for maybe spiral texting a friend and going on a huge rant. Which, look, our friends are there for reasons, and they are there for those things, but sometimes it is good to just get it out yourself. And that also can really help your relationships, like for example, you know, as I mentioned before, like sometimes partners they like to fix things and you just want to be heard, and that's fine. But once you've made sense of like your thoughts on paper, you can then really be able to be in a state where you can communicate what you need from them. And then I feel like a lot of fights would be avoided between a lot of couples. And of course we've got the science. A psychologist from the University of Texas has been running expressive writing studies since the nineteen eighties, and his research found that just fifteen to twenty minutes of writing about what you're feeling four days in a row measurably reduces stracts, lowers blood pressure, and improves immune function. And it also even reduces doctor visits for the following six months, which is actually insane. That's good because like that shit costs money, and that's not journaling about your day. That's not a gratitude list. It's just writing the emotional, messy stuff that actually doesn't make sense, and it's just circuling in your head. Like it's just if you read it or someone else read it, they wouldn't even know what you're talking about. And that's just helping your brain get it out. And that's also cognitive offloading, so you're not carrying that mental load around anymore. Now here's how to know when to offload onto paper versus onto people. So it's paper first when you know it's circuling your brain at two am and you feel like you're starting to get quite negative and spiraling. It's also paper first when you've already told the same friend the same thing twice this week. It's a feeling about a person that you haven't slept on it yet, so you know that's again that can really affect your relationships. Maybe your friend said something that didn't sit right with you and you're really sitting on it, and instead of texting them and just kind of offloading it onto them without trying to understand it, first go to paper and usually by the morning you'll be feeling much better and also clearer away. If they have done something that has upset you, you will be able to communicate that much more clearly and not in a way that's like attacking them. And also turn to paper if you'd feel guilty later for dumping it, or you're about to send a text that you might regret, So just go to paper first with those things. And again, we need people, We need people in our life, we need our talk therapy, but sometimes it's better just to make sense of it yourself on paper. Now, go to people next. When you feel like you need a decision, not event. The thing is happening to more than just shoe. So something's going on and it's happening more than just shue, and you need to connect with somebody. Maybe you need to be witnessed or not just processed, and your journal already and it's making the thing bigger, not smaller, or you just are like ready to go to that next step and go to people if you need advice or if you just want that connection piece as well. Now, what I want you to do is I want you to keep a little bedside journal next to your bed obviously, and it just lives within arm's reach. So when the noise hits at night till my brain gets really really busy. So instead of going on your phone and scrolling and just like pushing it down and pushing it down, You're going to want you to let it out and don't worry about the spelling, don't worry about like what it looks like. If you're worried someone's going to read it, just rip it out and throw it in the bin and it's fine. And then by the end of it, I want you to ask yourself, do I still need to send that text? Do I need to still have that conversation? Because we need to remember, like paper is just so effective for you when your brain is spinning. Which also leads me to my last weird thing I do for my mental health is when my brain is spinning, I clean one thing. Now, have you ever caught yourself rage cleaning? You know when you get like maybe you're angry or like you annoyed with your family because they live in your house making a mess, and you start rage cleaning. And that's because you've got a lot of anxious energy you need to move. But it's also because you are feeling very much not in control of your life. So the thing that you can control is your environment. So we start to clean the house. Now, now maybe instead of cleaning the whole house, Like, look, go for it if you want to, but if I do that, I tend to be absolutely wrecked after and then I'm cranky.
00:37:06
Speaker 2: So when you start to.
00:37:07
Speaker 1: Feel that energy building up, I want you to pick one little thing. It could be a draw, it could be the spice rack, and just spend five minutes organizing it. Because what you find is you're probably in an overwhelmed phrase. It's like when everything feels urgent, so you don't know what to do with yourself, so you do something completely unrelated and you know at times it's not great for work and things, but action leads to more action. It's momentum building. You're building momentum by doing the thing. So if you go and do something that's unrelated like the spicetraw, you're going to see that you've accomplished something from start to end, and that's going to build self confidence as well.
00:37:41
Speaker 2: So not only you're getting.
00:37:42
Speaker 1: To move your anxious energy, you're also feeling like an accomplishment and an achievement, and you also kind of feel like you're in control of something in your life. And they actually call this behavioral activation, which is a therapy technique which has a massive evidence base for depression and overwhelm and it actually is their first line treatment, which WHI The research example they use is if clean the kitchen feels overwhelming, start with clean the counter. So action breaks the freeze and small action breaks it without triggering the avoidance response that do the whole thing creates.
00:38:12
Speaker 2: So whenever I've ever talked.
00:38:14
Speaker 1: About decluttering guys or organizing your house, I've always said it. I've said this for like nine years now. If you want to organize your house or declutter, I don't want you to think of the whole house. I want you to think of that draw, that table, that surface, and this is the exact same thing. Because if you're thinking of doing the whole massive house, like the big picture, that is overwhelming and you're not going to start anything.
00:38:35
Speaker 2: We don't have Marie Kondo.
00:38:36
Speaker 1: To come to a house and overhaul our house on the weekend. This is the same thing. We're breaking it up into a small, realistic step that creates movement and it creates you know, that dopamine as well. So instead of maybe feeling sad, you're suddenly feeling accomplished and that's going to move your energy. So when you're feeling frozen, I want you to ask yourself, what is the smallest thing I can do right now? Don't think what's important, what's productive. I want you to just think of something like very small that you know you'll feel better about. Because when you can't fix the big thing, fix the smallest thing, the smallest thing is allowed to count. Now, those are the things I do in my life that really help me and stop me from spiraling, which I still spiral.
00:39:13
Speaker 2: Let's be honest, I'm a human.
00:39:16
Speaker 1: But you don't always have to follow the path that you think is set for you and what everyone else is doing. That's my main message behind this if you feel like playing, like smashing someone in mariocart's going to make you feel better, go for it.
00:39:28
Speaker 2: There's no right or wrong.
00:39:29
Speaker 1: It's just about what works for you now, because at the end of the day, weird works if it makes you well, honestly, and we are all a little bit weird, so try something different. So I would love to hear like message me on Instagram or like, I love if you guys could leave me a review. I would love that as well. But let me know out of these what really resonated with you and what you're going to take away from this episode. Now, to wrap it up, I want you to pick one thing from this episode, one weird thing for your mental health, whether it is chucking on your headphones and ignoring your family or sitting in the car, pick one thing, and I would love love if you guys could send me a message on Instagram or even leave a review.
00:40:09
Speaker 2: It would be awesome. But let me know what you use.
00:40:11
Speaker 1: And if you haven't already, please subscribe to the show you were going to want to hear.
00:40:14
Speaker 2: Next week's episode and I will see you then. Bye.
