How to Rest as a Stay-at-Home Mom

If the early days of motherhood felt like plunging headfirst into survival mode as you learned to breastfeed and pump and bottle feed and clean and sterilize at all hours of the day and night, when do you think you came out of it?

Or do you feel like you’re still stuck there, always doing, doing; always rushing from one thing to the next, and never feeling like you can allow yourself to stop and rest in case everything falls apart?

Why rest feels so hard

If you’ve been pushing yourself to keep going non-stop for years now and have managed to keep yourself safe and your kids pretty much thriving, it’s going to feel horribly uncomfortable when you first try to start resting again.

Resting as a mom is something new and unfamiliar to you, so your primitive brain is going to detect danger in it, and try to push you right back into doing things the way you’ve always done them. Our brains are wired for survival, not pleasure, so it makes sense that rest represents a risk because it goes against every behavior that’s so far kept us alive.

But it helps to remember that we also have plenty of evidence from our past that we are able to transform our behavior - one obvious example of this is becoming a mom in the first place! Other examples, such as learning to drive, or learning to cook without a recipe, or learning any new technology or a new language, also provide excellent proof that we’re not trying to do anything here that we haven’t done before, and that we can certainly do things that seem difficult - if not impossible - at first.

What makes our struggle to rest perhaps slightly more baffling, is that it seems rest should be something we’d naturally WANT to do - precisely because it’s supposed to be easy and enjoyable. And so when it doesn’t feel that way, we automatically think that there must be something wrong with us.

Letting go of the idea that there’s something in us we need to fix

But we can choose to let go of this idea that not wanting to rest means anything has gone wrong, and instead see struggling to slow down as completely normal, especially when you’ve spent an extended length of time barely pausing for breath!

Your nervous system is now so used to operating continually under low (and occasionally high) levels of stress that it, of course, makes sense that rest and “doing nothing” for even just a few minutes at a time can feel horribly uncomfortable in our bodies.

It can also be the case that we don’t actually want to slow down because there are thoughts and emotions we simply don’t want to experience - that we know we’ll be forced to endure once we stop distracting ourselves with everything else.

I love this quote from ‘Untamed’ by Glennon Doyle: “We’re like snow globes: We spend all of our time, energy, words and money creating a flurry, trying not to know, making sure that the snow doesn’t settle so we never have to face the fiery truth inside us - solid and unmoving.”

When I read this two years ago it quite literally took my breath away because I’d spent seven years barely pausing for breath - without ever questioning why I was doing it. I’d always just believed there was simply not enough time for me to do everything I had to do as a stay-at-home mom, not realizing that my busyness was a choice I was making to prevent me from noticing how lonely I felt when my pilot husband was gone.

How to slow down

So if you want to start resting more, understand that it may not feel safe to you in your body to simply stop and just rest for long periods of time. In fact, it may feel like you’re forcing yourself to endure something your body is rejecting.

Instead, start taking short, two minute breaks that gently allow your nervous system to gradually get used to slowing down. 

I love many of the short practices recommended by Shirzad Chamine in the book ‘Positive Intelligence’, which can be used at regular intervals throughout your day to take you out of your thoughts and into your body. For example, if you’ve just finished washing dishes, rather than immediately moving on to the laundry, take a moment to look out of the window and focus your attention entirely on an object outside - to really notice all the shapes and colors you see in front of you. Or if you’ve just finished lunch with your kids, you could take a few moments to really feel all of the pressure points on the soles of your feet as they make contact with the floor. Or, after brushing your teeth at night, try rubbing two fingers together whilst noticing all the tiny ridges on your fingertips.

These practices get you used to moving out of your head and into your body for short periods of time, and give you the opportunity to see how you feel doing something new and entirely different with the sole intent of prioritizing you.

And if these exercises feel good to you - if you notice yourself feeling safe in your body and calm and connected when you’re doing them - really allow yourself to experience what that feeling is like in order to intentionally increase your desire for more of the same.

Or if everything in your body is resisting these attempts to rest for a few minutes, know that you can allow yourself to feel that discomfort and that you will be ok, however unpleasant it initially seems. We don’t have to comply with our urges to give up and get on with something else, and we don’t have to believe our thoughts about rest being frivolous and a waste of time. We can instead be willing to experience discomfort in the short term in order to create the space we want for our minds and the rest our bodies need in the long term.

Rest can look like anything you want 

Also remember that rest can look any way you want it to - it doesn’t have to mean sitting and drinking a cup of tea outside, or having a long bath, or reading a book, or even doing short, simple practices like the ones I’ve mentioned here.

For me, the most enjoyable form of rest is dancing to music I love! It instantly takes me out of all the things my brain is telling me I have to do, and all my misleading thoughts about my worth being tied to my productivity, and instead allows me to just be for a few minutes, enjoying feeling profoundly right in my body, and loving who I am in that moment.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can introduce rest into your life in a way that feels right for you, come and work with me in my six-week 1:1 coaching program. You can create the life you want for yourself as a stay-at-home mom with my support (one hour of coaching once a week) plus 15-minutes of daily exercises in the Positive Intelligence app, customized to you.