Why Paying Attention to Your Feelings is Important for Stay-at-Home Moms

Are you wondering how you got to a place of spending your days checking items off a to-do list instead of actually enjoying your kids the way you’d always imagined?

When you first made the decision to become a stay-at-home mom, you chose this path for yourself because you believed you’d feel a certain way living your life at home. I know I always pictured myself having so much fun spending all my time with my babies.

But in reality, I got myself stuck in the belief that my focus would always have to be on my to-do list and I ended up feeling totally overwhelmed…for seven long years. I told myself would never be able to get control over my day no matter how hard I tried and that it was impossible for me to be present with my three daughters the way I wanted. 

The problem with this sort of thinking is that our beliefs - and the emotions that come with them - are always creating our experience of life. 

So how exactly do we successfully create positive feelings such as joy in our lives at home?

Look back to your past

The first step to creating more joy is to become more aware of your feelings. An easy way to do this is to go back in your past to a time when you remember feeling strong emotions.

Take a moment to close your eyes and ask yourself when was the last time you can remember feeling joy. What were you doing? Where did you feel the emotion in your body? Can you feel yourself experiencing that same emotion now as you remember that moment?

It can be surprising to learn just how easily a memory can give you the exact same experience of a particular emotion (similar to how smells can quickly transport you back to another time). When you realize this, you start to see just how much power you have to create the experience of life that you want for yourself because you can choose to revisit this positive memory and the positive emotion any time you want.

Next, you can take a look at the thoughts you were having when you felt this feeling back then. This awareness of your thoughts and of the emotion you felt as a result of thinking this way also gives you a nudge to take a look at the thoughts you’re having in this moment right now. 

And when you then look at what actions you took back then - driven by those thoughts and feelings - you can see that a strong, positive feeling such as joy is like rocket fuel for creating all the things you desire in your life.

Following this process and becoming more aware of the feelings in our body can help us not only to grow and meet our goals, but also to improve our relationships and solve our current problems as we open ourselves up to possibility, rather than staying stuck in the same old thought patterns that often shut us down.  

Process the emotion you’re feeling right now

When you find yourself feeling negative emotions that are creating an experience for you that you don’t want, try focusing on the feeling for a few minutes rather than resisting it or telling yourself you’re just too busy to allow it.

Because we know that when we resist an emotion, it will only come up again and again until we pay it the attention it deserves.

You can do this by first asking yourself where in the body you are feeling it (or where you’re feeling any kind of vibration if you’re not sure what the emotion actually is). Then ask: How big is it? What shape/color? What temperature? What texture? Does it move? Is it vibrating? And finally, ask yourself if the emotion you’re feeling has a message for you in that moment; whether there’s something it wants you to know.

And as you’re taking note of everything that comes up for you, do your best to be open and accepting of yourself without letting judgmental thoughts such as “I shouldn’t be feeling this way” take over. Allowing yourself to be exactly as you are is a way to cultivate a deep, loving and intimate relationship with yourself that then enables your growth to happen naturally. 

Know which emotions to ignore

Some of the emotions we feel, however, are never going to be useful to us and are best ignored. Unfortunately, these are often the ones that we are most comfortable with and that we feel most often! 

Confusion, worry, doubt, and indecision simply don’t serve us at all, and when we allow them to drive our actions, we often find that we create results in our lives that we don’t want for ourselves.

As stay-at-home moms, we tend to indulge in doubt quite often - we doubt our ability, our decisions, and more often than not our own instincts too. But all this ever creates is staying stuck exactly as we are because we don’t want to try new things - mostly out of fear of the unknown and our false belief that we’re keeping ourselves and our families safe by sticking to what we know and by doing things the way we’ve always done them.

So ask yourself: What are the emotions that you're indulging in right now that aren’t serving you? For me restlessness and impatience come up a lot so when I experience these familiar emotions, I ask myself whether I’m falling back into old thought patterns and challenge myself to create a different emotion in my body to help get me to where I want to go.

If you’d like help with this, sign up for a free consultation call below and I will walk you through processing your emotions and give you tips on simple and effective ways to deal with your feelings as they come up throughout your day.