Gratitude Practice: Stop Signs
Listen to this blog post as a podcast:
I am excited to share another gratitude practice I find super valuable — I think having many different ways of practicing gratitude regularly Helps boost your brain’s rewiring, but I’m not a Neuroscientist!
I do know from experience, that noticing our body states, acknowledging when things are difficult, and labeling our emotions all contribute to becoming O.K. with making mistakes and skipping the Mom Guild on our way to a more grounded and healthy life.
We live in a world constantly begging for our attention, pulling us away from our bodies and from what we are feeling at that very moment. When we live inside our phones, we have stepped out of our bodies — if we are looking at quotes that lift us up, well then phew, but if we are scrolling through clean house after gorgeously clean house - then it’s a setup! This out-of-body experience can make it seem like the present moment is not important.
And even if we aren’t on our phone, maybe we are walking the dog or driving down that same stretch of road, our mind is a BUZZ with ideas and thoughts about landscaping designs or that annoying way our neighbor parks his car. After all, sometimes it feels really relaxing to think! At least for me, my imagination has always been a place to let my thoughts run wild and free, but when our thoughts become judgemental or repetitive or stuck in “planning” mode - they have officially taken control of our moment AND of our life’s story, which is made up of moments upon moments.
My 9-year-old son just recently said to me: “Mom, when I am in class, sometimes I can’t stop counting like I will count to 1000 if I let my brain do it!” Wow - what a machine we have at our fingertips. And sometimes it feels good to count or to plan a big event – to give our brains something to do. To be out of our body, to not feel the sticky emotions left from a tough morning or week - yes, please! However, when we settle into that cozy thought pattern, we are not in control things like cultural expectations, parental modeling, habitual thinking, and survival instincts well they take the reins so to speak.
But being in the present moment is your greatest ally as a parent.
Noticing how we feel, where we are, and what our expectations are, immediately makes parenting a solvable puzzle. It boils down to how we think, feel and behave.
How we feel in any given moment can be the key to unlocking new and more beneficial habits. It can be the key to feeling satisfied in a world that keeps telling us we aren’t.
Noticing how we think also accesses the same out-of-body skills we already have when we zone out – just for good instead. We can rebrand this zone-out time as awareness time because awareness is something you have already. It’s just noticing. You are aware of where your phone is right now, right? How about your toddler? (fingers crossed...) How about when the dog has to go out next? Hopefully, that too. You have the awareness to know you are reading this and if you wanted to you could become aware of your right foot or nose right now, yep they’re there.
If this is your first practice post, I will get back to the basics here. We can notice things as pleasant and unpleasant or neutral. We can bring a soft mindful touch to those moments and they in turn can keep us rooted here in the present. Why exactly would we want that?
Because another name for when we freak out or lose ourselves to yelling or other things that feel like inner betrayals - is what neuropsychologist, Rick Hanson, Ph. D. calls “Reactive Mode”. This is a mode of living in which we spend all our mental and physical energy coping and nothing is left for healing or growth.
This mode of living causes us to lose control over our actions and get caught in the cycle of our learned behavior and habitual/primal responses: like if we hear a crash in another room instead of running to our child and scooping them into our arms to make sure they are ok – we yell “What happened!!? What did you do!?”
Living in this constant reactive mode can lead to an overload of both our physical and emotional systems. The stress of it may lead to a seemingly permanent shift in our perspective (like everything is always wrong) and in turn, cause the strong urge to self-medicate to soothe our guilt (mommy wine time anyone?). And if we live in that reactive mode for too long Dr. Hanson says there are risk factors for depression and other mental issues that may begin to occur.
When it comes to our physical health I’ll let Hanson share the bad news:
“The reactive mode assumes that there are urgent demands, so its not concerned with your long-term needs...bodily resources are depleted while building projects such as strengthening the immune system are put on hold, adrenaline and cortisol course through the blood, and fear, frustration and heartache color the mind.”
I live with both anxiety and depression as many of us do these days. I am very aware of the diligence it takes to keep myself from slipping into suffering, whether it’s due to the past or the future at any given moment. I have grown tired of the days lost to depression, the loneliness of living in the future worrying about it all, and so mindful awareness is not just a practice anymore, now it's a way of living.
Teaching my brain to be more mindful and present helps me to stay out of reactive mode, and I can respond to my children instead. A consistent state of mindful awareness helps me to notice when I have taken the first steps toward rumination or fearful anticipation. Sometimes it’s just noticing that I have fallen into a depression on the first day it hits versus after a full week or so - but wow I will take it.
Typically mindful awareness is introduced with meditation. Take 5 minutes and notice your breathing and watch your thoughts go by like clouds. I think there are many things we ask of parents in this day and age and taking 5 or 10 minutes to meditate just feels like one more big “Ask” I’m not willing to request. I know that what you get out of these podcast episodes is that time to look inside and ask yourself the tough questions you need to ask.
And if you meditate already - yes it’s amazing and you know the benefits. You understand the levels of calm and ease that can come from sitting still. You may have even discovered some things lurking under the surface that needed to be felt and released. These are all the good parts of meditation. But if you are stressed out because you can’t even pee alone then just forget about it for now.
So we find ways for you to build this muscle without having to squeeze in another 10 minutes by waking up earlier or taking over your precious naptime. This is the true self-care - when you can care for your children by first caring for yourself - for valuing your life so much that you choose to live it in the present.
So our mindful self-care for today is an exercise that I like to call: Building In Stop Signs
Let’s be clear, pressuring yourself to be “mindful” all day will make you miserable. You will not notice enough, or you will be too conscious of all the negative emotions, etc, etc. No. The key to beginner's mindfulness is to build “Stop Signs” into your day. And the second key is using gratitude to give your mind a job to do while you reflect.
We all shuttle our kids to and from music classes and school and sports, no matter what age they may be, so car time offers a great opportunity for us to weave mindfulness into our day. I love to drive and used to take huge long road trips alone before I had kids. This was pre-podcast so I would listen to books on tape or NPR for hours on end, but what I was really doing was thinking, letting my mind go wild! I would drive for 2 hours and not even notice how far I had gone. The car was not a very “aware” place for me. So making a place where I checked in with myself felt like a steep climb at first, but it wasn’t.
I didn’t realize it at first, but I have a place on the highway I tend to arrive at that breaks me out of my car-driving stupor. It's the mountain near my house. The largest thing on the horizon so it’s tough to ignore and when I reach it I am typically woken up from my thinking trance. At first, it was an innocent “oops, I forget I was driving for a minute” realization. But it has grown into a purposeful “Stop Sign” now.
When I get to the mountain I use it to check in, to notice different things about my present moment. Any number of inquiries can run through my head at that point pulling me back into my body and the world around me:
Oh man, was I zoned out the entire time I went to grab takeout?
How are you doing Stef, what’s your body like right now?
Can you think of one thing to be grateful for right now?
Have you noticed the song on the radio? How does it make you feel?
Look at the light on the mountain, isn't it gorgeous today?
You get it. The more I do this, the earlier on the highway I can catch my zone out and look around and, more importantly check-in. This Stop Sign is usually the place where I discover I have been carrying a headache around all day. I can unclench my teeth and let the realization seep in that the pain most likely contributed to my mood or feeling a little off or impatient around my kids that day. And I allow myself to release a bit of tension.
Seeing the mountain sometimes inspires me to dive into what makes me happy. I'll finally notice the song that is on and do some deep listening, finding each individual instrument in the background, following them as they weave in and out of the melody. Or if it's a day that I need a release, I will crank it up and sing so loudly that the part of me that wants to yell is freed — before I get home.
And so, I would encourage you to find your Stop Sign this week to incorporate more noticing and gratitude during the day. We can put our noticing skills to the test here, asking ourselves (sometimes multiple times a day) what we are grateful for. And remember, this is not an opportunity to criticize or even change what is going on - I can’t fix my headache in the car, after all, I notice it and accept that, yep I am in pain, and it sucks.
Choosing to notice the fog around the mountain or if you choose folding laundry as your Stop Sign — then the soft texture of a towel as you fold it — may seem small, but these are the compounding practices that make a big difference to our brains rewiring. So even if the stresses of parenting send you to places that you have no choice to go, you still have a choice: you can simply notice the present moment use your gratitude anchor to find something good, and allow the rest to just be - because a bit of reactivity or a lot of reactivity doesnt make you a bad mom, it makes you human, and I know you are Good As Fuck. - Stef
