Journey Back to Power – Day 9

Today is the first morning of my week back with my kiddos and the last week before school starts. As I usually do on these summer week days, I spent the early morning hours multi-tasking.

I was watching stock charts, making the occasional stock trade, cooking bacon and bagels, reading game instructions for Netherlee, and just generally balancing all the work life and Mom life duties.

Honestly it went great. I made it into the afternoon hours having had a very successful trading day, and still being able to be present and available with the kids.

As so often happens in the afternoon hours, though, I crashed shortly after.

Life in our busy culture and households is VERY stimulating. Sometimes my attention is being pulled in 5 different directions at once. That’s not even an overstatement.

Part of remaining powerful, I’ve realized lately, is not just a day or two of self care here and there (like I spoke about yesterday), but rather intermittent self care throughout the entire day.

In order to keep up with 3 kids, my household, an at home business, and learning the stock market, I’ve had to become very aware of my emotional/mental state in any given moment.

Yesterday I spoke about the importance of self care and taking a day off or taking a break when necessary.

Today, I’d like to touch on the importance of intermittent self care throughout the day.

Over the past month, I’ve realized that I simply can’t stay in an energized, powerful place throughout my entire day with kids without taking about 30 minutes in the afternoon to reset.

Usually around 2-3pm, I find myself mentally crashing. I feel super tired and mentally foggy, and I’ve learned that those feelings are my indicator to give myself a moment to reset mentally.

So I’ll set my kids up with something to keep them entertained, and I’ll withdraw to my room for a short reset.

Usually this looks like a 30 minute meditation, 15 minutes of breathing, playing guitar or reading a book. Basically, it consists of anything that helps me to turn off my brain. In allowing my energy to be single focused, I settle more deeply into my center again, and then I can come back to finish the day with a clearer mental state.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments….

I LOVED hearing about your methods of self care yesterday. Now I’d like to hear…. what do you do for self care in the middle of a busy day? What do you do to reset when you can’t take a day off or disappear entirely?

Following along with my Journey Back to Power? Catch up with Day 8 here.