MIDLIFE MINDSET TRAPS - INTRO PART III - KEEPING IT SIMPLE
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 137.
Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the Small Jar Podcast, where I'm exploring the mindset traps that plague us in our lives as moms of teens and as we approach the empty nest. In this introductory series, I'm diving deep into the instinctual, subconscious ways our brains work. I think it's really valuable to understand this before I dive specifically into mindset traps, because many of us fall into a trap that I'll talk much more about in future episodes, and that's the trap of labeling.
What we can do is we want to diagnose ourselves. When we don't feel right, when we're experiencing painful emotions, we can want to put a label on it so our brain can understand it. We call ourselves perfectionists, or prone to validation-seeking, or someone who catastrophizes.
Our minds naturally fall into these mindset traps, and because they can become habitual, we then construct this reality around what that means for our identity, what it means for us to be someone who thinks this way or reacts in a certain way. The purpose of this intro series is to truly give you a different perspective about these habitual, and most importantly, very normal and rational ways of thinking. Consider this.
When you think you are a certain way, that this is simply a part of your identity, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You feel this urge to respond in a certain way to certain situations, and your mind almost immediately notices this urge. Let's say it's the urge to go to the worst-case scenario, and it's like you say to yourself, see, I always do this, I'm prone to anxiety, I can't help it, I catastrophize.
And this is not at all to diminish the strength of the urge to worry, or even the pain of feeling stuck in anxiety. But just consider for a minute that engaging in a behavior or a way of dealing with any situation is simply a response. That response does not say anything about who you are as a person or what you're capable of.
All that it means is that you've fallen into a habit. In fact, fallen into a mindset trap that's become a habit. And in this introductory series, I'm diving into why these ways of being, these responses to our mindset traps, are so perfectly normal.
And I'll also be talking about how to break free of these traps. Before I dive in, I want to share a bit about my coaching program, Mom 2.0. One of the main themes of the Small Job Podcast is helping you see how your mindset impacts your emotional experience and the way you show up in your life as a mom, and also how you show up for yourself. I know when I first got exposed to this work, it turned a light on in my brain.
Seeing the connection between mindset and my emotions was, in itself, so powerful. For most of my life, I've let my emotions be ruled by other people. Friends, boyfriends, my parents, bosses.
And of course, once I became a mom, my emotions became highly dependent on my kids, on their moods, how they behaved, how they were doing socially, academically. It's hard not to take responsibility. At the very least, to take all of this personally.
And our kids are the center of your world, really. For decades, when you think about it, your primary focus is on your children. In my life, I've always tried to carve out time for myself.
You know that saying self-care isn't selfish. I've always tried. But at the end of the day, when my kids were hurting or struggling, I struggled.
Add this to all of the ways I tried so hard to get the circumstances of my life to match my hopes and expectations. I found myself stressed and frustrated a lot of the time. When I first learned about Mindset Work, I was like, wait a minute, my thoughts create my emotions? I got it intellectually.
But still, when my kids were hurting, how could I not hurt? And on the one hand, that's still true. When my boys face challenges, there is a part of my heart that's going to care and want it to be different. I wouldn't want to be emotionally disconnected from their experience, even when they're hurting.
But what I learned was there were so many different layers to my own mindset as it relates to my boys, really any area of my life. And what this meant for me is that I was creating so much unnecessary pain for myself. Pain driven by the mindset trap of perfectionism, for example, really the fear of me not doing enough.
Anxiety created by catastrophizing and all or nothing thinking. Guilt because I would default to taking the blame or taking things personally. What I learned and what I'm covering in this podcast series is how normal these mindset traps are, why they exist and how they're a sign that your brain is working perfectly normally, and also what those traps create in our lives as a result.
Stepping out of these traps, it requires not only understanding them, but seeing them in action in our own minds. This is where having a coach becomes invaluable because it's hard to see your own mind. Eckhart Tolle famously said, you are not your mind.
But until you really understand what that means, it's hard to separate yourself. It feels almost impossible to extricate yourself and how you perceive your identity from the sentences running around in your head, creating your emotional experience. You might have some experience or more knowledge of therapy, where you sit and you talk about what's going on in your head, how you're feeling.
In fact, both therapists and life coaches work with their clients to improve their emotional health and well-being and to help them gain a self-awareness about their feelings and thoughts and behaviors. So when you're in emotional pain, it's very appropriate to seek out therapy for support. But I thought I would share the difference between therapy and life coaching, so you can consider for yourself which would be most helpful to you.
Therapists often focus on exploring past experiences to help their clients understand how they might have gotten to where they are right now. Sometimes this involves uncovering and processing past trauma, or it could mean diagnosing a mental health condition. Therapists are trained and licensed mental health professionals who can diagnose and treat psychological challenges.
Many of us have experienced traumatic experiences in our past, and these experiences can imprint themselves on the brain and the body, so that your thoughts and emotional response patterns can feel very automatic. They're unconscious responses rooted in the body's and mind's attempt to protect itself based on past experiences. And it can be really helpful to understand this connection, again because understanding how your brain is responding to protect you can help lead you to develop compassion for these types of automatic responses.
A therapist can help you make these connections and give you coping strategies to manage your emotions. But often women will come to me after having worked with a therapist and they'll tell me I've spent a lot of time working through past trauma. They understand how their past has shaped how they respond automatically to life situations, but they also tell me I got to a point where I felt like I wasn't making progress.
It's like I've learned why I react the way that I do because of this thing in my past, but now what? So I like to think of therapy as a process of understanding and resolving the past, whereas life coaching is about making a decision now about how to move forward in your life. The past is the past. It makes sense that it influenced where you are today.
Of course, it's done that for all of us, but you are now an adult human being who can decide who they want to be right now and in the future, how you might want to approach life differently. You can certainly blame the past for driving who you are right now. And believe me, I spent a lot of time blaming other things and life for my emotional experience in the past.
But there is another way. You can actually learn how to take responsibility for shifting the narrative about who you are and what's possible for you. While the therapist focuses on the past, a life coach is going to focus on who you are right now, in this moment, the decisions you make right now, and how you work towards specific goals, or even simply an emotional experience that's no longer dependent on things outside of your control.
And in our lives with teens and adult kids, so much is out of our control, except for the way we think about all of it. The mindset that we cultivate about who we are as moms, our responsibility, our needs, our expectations. It can be so difficult to see this lens when that's all you've ever known.
This can be especially true when you've worked with a told, this is who you are. But I wonder, could this now be a choice in your control? The coolest thing for me about working with moms is that because every single one of us shares this common superpower of unconditional love for our kids, that becomes the secret door that unlocks every single mindset trap I've ever uncovered. Because no matter how entrenched we are in our anxiety and frustration, what we ultimately believe above all else is that we love our kids.
This is a mindset that each of us shares. And so it also becomes a mindset that you can easily embrace when you're stuck in a mindset trap. In my coaching program, I share the exact process to break free of these traps that we fall into as moms.
And you can apply the simple process to every area of your life. My program is designed to teach you the skill of watching your mind, seeing yourself as separate from your thoughts and your mindset, so that you have the power to create an intentional emotional experience and way of being. So all this to say, consider my coaching program, Mom 2.0, to be the secret door to allow you to not only free yourself of the anxiety, frustration, guilt, and sadness that is so common at this stage of life, but also fueled by these mindset traps, but also consider this program to be the way that you can empower yourself to develop a new relationship with yourself and what's possible for you.
Let's start off the new year strong, my friend. Book a call with me to discover yourself as Mom 2.0. Okay, so back to This three-part introduction is designed to help you understand the motivational triad. Essentially, how our brains are instinctually driven to seek comfort, avoid pain, and conserve energy.
So far, I've covered seeking comfort and avoiding pain in past episodes, and this week, I dive into conserving energy, or said another way, keeping it simple. It's interesting to relate this back to the conversation we just had about therapy, how the past can explain how we've gotten to where we are now, that sometimes past trauma can manifest itself in automatic emotional and behavioral responses. The same is true of this motivational triad.
Talking about the past, from an evolutionary standpoint, there is a very important reason our brains are instinctually designed to seek pleasure or comfort, to avoid pain, and to conserve energy. Seeking pleasure ensured our survival by motivating our ancestors to eat and have sex and connect with others in their community, which kept them safe. Avoiding pain meant that they were instinctually motivated to stay away from predators or other dangerous situations.
And in the time of early man, resources were limited, so conserving energy was crucial for survival. But in another way, as we'll talk about, our brain's instinct to be efficient had a huge impact on our ability to learn and evolve in the way that we were able to take advantage of and interact with our environment. So in short, the motivational triad is this incredibly powerful concept that continues to drive our behavior in today's modern world.
But since we're no longer living in caves and hiding from predators, there are ways that the motivational triad shows up in our lives that don't always serve us. So understanding these instincts is the key to breaking free of these unproductive ways of thinking and responding, very much the same way we might understand the power and influence of our past experience and past trauma. The motivational triad might explain where we are now, but that doesn't have to define the decisions we make or the way we respond in this moment if we learn how to be intentional about moving forward.
Okay, let's talk about the instinct to keep it simple. First, how does that help us in modern life? Well, this instinct promotes routines and habits. Think about the number of things that you do every single day that are simply habits.
You most likely get up every morning and you do the very same things, brush your teeth, make your coffee, shower. When you drive places that you go frequently, like your kid's school or the grocery store, have you ever noticed that you weren't even present while you were doing them? Like you get there and you don't remember driving. The truth is, you don't even need to think about these habitual behaviors, you just do them.
I remember that one year they changed the entrance ramp to the parkway so that it was closer to our house. It took me two full weeks to learn that I needed to turn left before the stoplight instead of after the light. Every single morning my boys would go, mom, don't forget to turn.
Driving to school was such a habit for me that when the course changed, I had to relearn a new habit. Our brain's ability to automate things that we do repetitively frees up our mental bandwidth for more complex decisions. We don't have to get in a car and actively remember how to drive or how to get to school.
Our brains just relegate this activity to a part of our brain called the basal ganglia, and this task then becomes automated. This instinct of our brains to keep it simple also allows us to streamline our decision making. In situations that are relatively low stakes, our brains will default to making a quick and easy decision.
It's why we find ourselves eating the same thing every day or pulling on the same pair of sweatpants. Essentially, our brains want to limit decision fatigue. So again, this preserves our mental energy for bigger challenges.
The third impact of the instinct to conserve energy, really the benefit of the fact that our brain has this ability to go on autopilot, is that it frees our brain up to give attention to solving problems or finding creative solutions. In a related way, this instinct also helps us seek out innovation. Our brains want things to be efficient, so they're always looking for faster and easier and more effective ways to complete tasks.
Think about how many advancements this ability of the human mind has led us to create. Our brain's capacity to focus on strategic things also gives us the ability to learn complex skills and develop new talents because we're not wasting our mental bandwidth on day-to-day tasks. So for many reasons, our brain's instinct to conserve energy and be efficient is incredibly valuable to us.
So it's clear that this instinct plays a big role in creating habits. And of course there are positive and productive habits, and then there are habits that are less productive. Said another way, there are ways of being and showing up in our lives that are productive, and some that are less so.
So all of this is about action and what we do, but our actions are ultimately governed by our mindset. Back to that example I gave you about driving to school. At one point, early on, I had to research the address to the school.
I probably put it into MapQuest or GPS. Did we even have GPS 15 years ago? Anyway, I had to learn how to drive to my kid's school at one point. But once I'd done it for about a week, my brain stopped needing to actively remember how to get there.
The repetitive process of getting there was delegated in my brain, and then I was able to drive there on autopilot. Until, of course, they changed the parkway on-ramp and then that habit became less productive because I kept missing the new ramp. My brain had to take time to relearn the new habit.
So I wonder if we could apply the same thinking to our mindset. What if who you are right now, the way you show up in your life, is largely driven by habit? Consider what might happen if you could intentionally notice the areas of your life where these habitual ways of being are less productive for you right now. And then consider what would be different if you could make a decision to learn a new way of being.
Now, there are a number of hormones that reinforce the instinct to be efficient and conserve energy. First, dopamine and serotonin play a role in reinforcing habit formation. One of the most powerful reasons habits stick is because there's a reward in the form of dopamine that makes that habit feel good.
Essentially, our brain learns that doing that thing, whether it be successfully getting our kids to school or eating a brownie, that doing that thing feels good and that we should do it again. Then hormones like endorphins and cortisol encourage us to develop habits that reduce stress or comfort. Then serotonin and oxytocin make us feel calm and reinforce habits that give us predictability.
It's why many of us will say that we prefer having a schedule. Other hormones like norepinephrine make sure that our effective behaviors are learned and automated. So again, these hormones are why these instinctual patterns are so effective, but also so difficult to change.
But at the same time, our brains have the ability to break habits by disrupting the neural pathways that reinforce that habit and then replacing them with new intentional behaviors. It's essentially what I did when I had to learn to turn left before the light instead of after the light. The first step is basically undelegating that habit from the basal ganglia, that part of your brain responsible for automatic behaviors, and then putting the prefrontal cortex in charge.
This is the part of your brain responsible for conscious decision making. I've done some episodes specifically on habits in the past, so I'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail here, but simply to say that for some of our mindset work, there are some patterns of thought that are really ingrained in our subconsciousness. And so it takes a bit more effort to identify these thought patterns and limiting beliefs as habits and then disrupting those neural pathways.
But this is again why having a life coach as a partner can be so incredibly helpful. So let me talk about how this instinct to keep things simple shows up in our lives as moms of teens and as we approach the empty nest. First, let's talk about routines and habits.
Clearly, we've got a system by now as moms. We have routines for chores and meal planning, the way we run our house. Over the years, I'm sure some of those routines have shifted as your kids have grown up, but you're motivated to keep it as simple and as efficient as possible.
But at the same time, this motivation to keep things simple and the comfort we have in the routines and habits means that change can be hard. We might struggle with letting our kids be independent. I mean, let's face it, when our kids are in charge, things don't always get done efficiently or in the way we'd like them to be done.
And while we know on one level they need to take responsibility for their lives, it's also so much less efficient in the short run. Routines also bring a sense of safety and efficiency. We don't need to think about what to do when we have an established schedule, but the shift to the empty nest means that the schedule we've set while our kids are at home is no longer relevant.
It can feel like there's a lot of time to fill, and that's not only scary, but it seems like it requires a lot of energy to set up new routines and develop new connections and hobbies. So many women have come to me saying, I just don't have the energy to start over. We have this instinct to keep it simple, to not have to exert all of this energy.
So it makes sense if our first instinct is to feel exhausted at the prospect of this major transition and change in our lives. Another way we can default to conserving energy is when we avoid having difficult conversations with our teens or other people in our lives. It might also make us bottle up our own emotions, again because we don't want to have to address it.
Interestingly, we can think about setting boundaries and enforcing consequences as stressful or a lot of work, but in fact, the way we think about these boundaries can cut both ways. Notice this, if you think setting boundaries is going to take a lot of energy and involve conflict, you're going to be inclined to avoid setting those boundaries. But at the same time, if you think about boundaries as simply a decision that you make once and then follow through with the decision or consequence, that this actually is the epitome of efficiency.
Making a decision and simply following through with it. My son, you broke this rule, and now you don't have access to the car for a week. Simple.
It doesn't have to take up any physical energy, but it's the mental effort it requires that might lead us to avoid setting those boundaries. Here's another area where this shows up in our lives. When our kids go through difficult stages, it can feel like it takes a lot of emotional energy to engage with them.
It's totally normal for us to want to retreat. We might even want to avoid our kids. We might dread coming home when they're home.
As much as we love them, there can be times with our kids when we don't like them very much. This is just the honest truth, my friend. You're not a bad mom if you've ever thought this.
Consider that it's your natural instinct to conserve energy that has you retreating, not wanting to engage with your teen, but also potentially missing out on opportunities to support them. Another area where we might retreat is in our social interactions outside of our home. The stage of parenting can again be emotionally exhausting.
Many women come to me feeling like they've lost social connections as their kids have grown up, and I think some of this can be driven by our own actions, tending to stay home more, to reach out to friends less, or to seek out new friendships less. It can feel like it takes too much effort, but then we also find ourselves feeling lonely without a base of support. This instinct to conserve energy can also cause us to shy away from exploring new opportunities.
It can feel challenging to make decisions about what comes next. We can fall into this sense of inertia because the prospect of taking on these big changes feels daunting. But remember that your thoughts drive the way you feel.
If you think the future is daunting, it will feel daunting. If you think meeting new people has to be stressful, it will be stressful. And your natural instinct will be then to avoid this pain and this expenditure of energy.
I was recently meeting with one of my beautiful clients who had been initially feeling really overwhelmed at the prospect of the empty nest and all the changes she was facing. A big move, in a new place, without any of her established routines or relationships. It makes perfect sense that this prospect felt daunting and overwhelming.
I invited her to think about what she really wanted in the transition. How she wanted to feel and how creating that might be possible. She reported back to me that she realized what she really wanted was to feel like she does on vacation.
When she's on holiday, she doesn't have a schedule and she does what she wants. She feels free and at ease. And then she realized very quickly that this experience was available for her to create in her life as an empty nester.
This simple mindset shift and she had changed her relationship with her future. Notice how your sense of what is hard is all a matter of mindset. What if it doesn't have to be hard, my friend? What if setting boundaries with and being intentional in your relationship with your child could be easy? Imagine approaching your next chapter with confidence and ease.
The good news is that if you create a mindset that shifts your perspective about the challenges of your life to find that path that allows for ease, your brain is going to want to move toward it. My friend, this power to supervise your brain, learning how your mindset impacts your emotional experience, and then understanding when your brain's instinct to conserve energy is helping you and when it's holding you back. This is the key to stepping into a more intentional experience of your life.
So I've now covered all three parts of the motivational triad. And next week, I'm going to start diving into mindset traps and how they impact us in our lives as moms and as empty nesters. But for this week, I invite you to ask yourself these three questions.
Number one, what habits do you have right now, either ways of being or ways of responding that allow you to keep things simple in your life? How has this instinct to conserve energy helped you? And how has it caused you pain or kept you stuck in your life? My friends, the way you think about your life creates your emotional experience, and it also leads you to create habits in the way you respond to your kids and the challenges and opportunities of your life. Understanding how your mindset drives these habits in both productive and unproductive ways is the focus of this series. Breaking free of these traps and trusting yourself to move forward in your life intentionally, that is the work I do with my clients in my one-on-one coaching program, Mom 2.0. So let's connect to explore how coaching can help you be the mom and the woman you want to be.
Thank you for joining me in this introductory portion of the Mindset Trap series. Until next time, my friend.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, Mom 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
