Where Did My Brain Go?
Reflections on pandemic brain fog and the need to slow down without giving up entirely.
Reflections on pandemic brain fog and the need to slow down without giving up entirely.
How do you make space for healthier habits when you’re exhausted by family and work? That’s the question I got asked in The Wise Women’s Council this month, and that I’m tackling on this episode of the Ask Sarah Podcast (our premium, private podcast for Patreon backers and WWC members—you can get access for $7/month). “I have a limited amount of discipline and willpower and I’m spending it all on my family and business. How do I keep some for myself in order to make healthier choices and feel better physically?
Anxiety and worry can wear down on you and your nervous system. It makes sense that you will feel exhausted through it all. It’s likely that you all will be hit by waves of exhaustion. Navigating children at home, caretaking, designing new strategies for work, going into overdrive with your businesses, taking care of employees, sprinting on strategies, and everything you’ve got going on is hard. Here’s permission to sleep (or at least take a tiny cat nap).
I don’t think I was prepared for how exhausting and lonely parenting can be. Despite having active young kids and constantly playing with them, I still found myself longing for time to myself. Time to think, and time to talk to other adult humans about things beyond parenting. Then I stumbled across this concept.
This letter is as much a note to myself as to all of you: taking time to nap, to rest, to say no, and to cross things off your to-do list without doing them (or destroying the to-do list altogether!) is about as badass as you can get in a world that glorifies overwork and overdoing.