Early in parenthood, I encountered parenting advice to count to 10 to calm yourself before you responded to whatever bananas thing your kid was doing. I was also teaching kids to do this during my day job as a child psychologist. It seems like maybe counting to 10 is not something that has stuck for many of us. Perhaps pausing is more complicated than just counting to 10.
I’ve written before about how mindfulness gives us choices, or more accurately allows us to see the choices. Sometimes the choices still suck but seeing them clearly is helpful in moving forward intentionally. Pauses are great to keep us losing it with our kids but they have a lot of purpose in other ways too.
Imperfect pauses
The dictionary defines a pause as a temporary stop in action or speech. Just a temporary stop, nothing fancy. No gadgets to buy. It’s something we can do for ourselves, but at the same time it is so hard. There are multitude of reasons pausing is hard and it’s certainly not rewarded in our modern world. The focus on efficiency and doing more doesn’t help. So much to do, who has time to pause?
Pausing doesn’t make glitter rain down and flowers bloom. No, sometimes the sole purpose is to keep us from collapsing or combusting. Sometimes it involves a colorful exclaim and a fist shaking at the sky. Pauses are not always zen.
We can pause with a breath…before you respond after you children created a worm habitat by dumping out the flower pots.
We can pause by stopping…before scrolling on instagram when we want to feel better but it has never worked before.
We can pause by slowing…down to see if our kids can resolve their squabble on the ownership of a scrap of paper.
Pauses give space—the space to touch autonomy. It will look different depending on the how, where, when and why. It’s a curious paradox, stopping to move forward.
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
-Viktor Frankl
Small pauses and bigger pauses
Little pauses feel like tiny stitches that can help us hold the day together. But is there something else to these little pauses? Are they more than a tip or trick? I think they have a role to play in the tapestry of life. Little pauses have a way of adding up and providing a model for accessing our well-being.
What is the maximum capacity?
In
’s Wellbeing is about capacity: A Conversation with Emma Gannon, author explained her perspective on well-being:“I know that I’m in a good place mentally when I have capacity. Capacity for others, for myself, for a friend in need, for my work. I can respond to a text, or take an unexpected call, or take an impromptu walk without feeling like something is being taken from me.
I like the word ‘capacity’, it makes me think of a wide airy space, an open sky, lungs breathing in fully, or a calendar with blank slots. When I have no capacity for a short walk, bath, journaling, or reading, and I start to feel panicky, I know that something has to change and this often means sacrificing something else.”
In response to Emma’s formulation of well-being, writer, artist and mother
, of Follow your gut, wrote:” Last year I suffered from post-partum depression and anxiety. I’d be up at night drowning in sweat and a drumming heart as the silence around became increasingly oppressive.
For a period of time I had no capacity to do anything but survive.
There was no option to think about being creative, new ideas, productivity, self care…
Petronella goes on to highlight how current ideas of self-care “involve more doing and less caring.” Petronella suggests that real care may be more “not about what we do for ourselves, but rather what we allow ourselves to NOT do.”
Less is care
The term self-care is thrown around a lot these days. It’s often marketed as a pause you can use to refuel so you can manage everyday stresses. As Petronella highlights, most of the self-care discussions these days is not about moving us towards well-being. All the doing it involves keeps us still. If you back out of the flames only to jump back in, where does that leave you? Are you well?
In
’s book, Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care, she explains,“The wellness industry stepped in to fill a void created by unreasonable expectations that torment us. Self-care promised salvation, deliverance from the evils of stress. But if it’s a toxic workplace, a meditation program isn’t going to fix it. A fitness app won’t solve the uneven distribution of housework in your marriage; CBD gummies will not enforce better childcare policies; bath salts won’t stop late night work emails.”
I will admit that I meditate, prioritize movement, read a lot of books about being a human and drink tea with a nibble of dark chocolate daily. These are things I love. However, I can not expect meditation to find me reliable childcare. The definition of care is the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something. To care for you, is to look after and provide for the needs of yourself.
What can it look like to really care for ourselves? Author
highlights four principles of real self-care in her book, Real Self-Care (Crystals, Cleanses and Bubble Baths Not Included):Boundaries and moving past guilt-prioritizing your needs and desires by learning to set boundaries
Treating yourself with compassion-looking closely at how you speak to yourself
Bringing you closer to yourself-knowing your core values, beliefs and desires
Assertion as power- giving yourself permission to practice real self-care and making decisions from a place of reflection and consideration
The real self-care Lakshmin presents is an inner process, less doing and more being. It’s imperfect with trial and error.
Setting boundaries feels beautifully compatible with determining capacity. Lakshmin writes in her book about advice from her mentor to not answer her phone, let it go to voicemail and then decide on a course of action was boundary aligned with real self-care:
“The idea that I not only was allowed to take time, but that in that space I could decide the best response, was nothing short of revolutionary to me. It didn’t matter whether the caller was the front desk staff telling me they had paperwork they needed me to sign or a patient who needed to reschedule an appointment. When I picked up my phone, I felt pressured to say yes and react. Not answering my phone and letting it go to voicemail gave me time and space to craft my response and be strategic about my time and energy.
My boundary was in the pause.”
Lakshmin goes on to emphasize that the pause gives her time to respond instead of react. If there is an emergency, she can better prioritize and respond to those needs. Pauses are powerful not in isolation but because when you choose to take them, you connect with your ability to care for yourself and others most effectively.
Learning to pause
And here is some good news—you already pause. No one is moving constantly. It just doesn’t usually land in most memorable moments of your day to day. Always start where you are and expand from there. The intentional pause is available to us all.
Here are some little pauses for practice:
Always start where you are— Acknowledge when you paused today?
Notice—Pause to notice _______, you pick. The sounds, light, smell, touch, tastes and so on.
Look—Up, down or around. Pause and take a look.
Stand Up—Pause to move your body from your seat.
Sit Down—Pause to rest your body.
Breathe—Take that breath-it’s a pause.
Stretch—Pause to feel your body move.
Talk to yourself—Sometimes we need some words, “I am going to stop here to…”
Write a note—Remind yourself—I will pause for you.
I have to think about that—I don’t like “parenting tricks” but this is a way I pause with my kids when they are asking about something and I am at risk of being reflexive instead of responsive. I slow down my response by telling them I need to think about it or I am not ready to respond yet.
More explorations on pauses, capacity and self-care
Below are a variety of different avenues to think about pauses, determining capacity with parenting practices and other outcomes of caring for you.
Want to read a familiar story? Everyone But Myself: A Memoir by Julie Chavez is a book that many can connect to, it’s a book about a mother and how she found herself separated from herself and how she found her way back.
“This book is about the consequences of that self-neglect. For me, the result was anxiety, depression and on obfuscation of the habits and practices that provided sustenance, rest and joy. I was lost inside my own beautiful.”
Family dinner anyone?
has written a beautiful guide about family dinner and fabulously demonstrates determining capacity within the context of how to feed your family.“The more I come to view food labor as an immovable fact (unless you can outsource the work completely to a private chef), the more firmly I believe that any feeding strategy has to be vetted for how it adds or subtracts from your mental load and physical labor. And if something is going to be more work, it’s worth considering how much extra value it will add to your family meal experiences.”
In the article, Show Up for Yourself First from
, the book The Art of Showing Up by Rachel Wilkerson Miller, is discussed. Interestingly self knowledge and caring for yourself are important in how to show up for others. Who would’ve thought?“Self-knowledge. You can’t possibly take care of yourself,” Miller writes, “if you don’t actually know what your needs are.”
Not knowing your needs makes it hard to cultivate relationships where others will be able to understand and fulfill those needs. And if you haven’t done the work of learning how to like yourself, it makes it a lot harder to cultivate the skills necessary to show up for others. As Miller puts it, “there’s not much space for generosity, confidence, or vulnerability when you’re constantly worried about whether you have enough and are enough.”
Just a little reminder: The content on Mindful Mom in the Mud posted by Dr. Kathryn Barbash, PsyD on the Instagram account (@mindfulmominthemud), Youtube Channel (@mindfulinthemud) and newsletter (mindfulinthemud.substack.com) or any other medium or social media platform is for educational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for medical, clinical, legal and professional advice, diagnosis or treatment. Reliance on any information provided by Mindful Mom in the Mud is solely at your own risk. Always seek the advice of your licensed mental health professional or other qualified health provider.
Ahhhh. The not doing is so important. And such an excellent response when your capacity has been breached. Mothering is such a challenge. Rather than continually failing at being perfect, I made the decision long ago that part of mothering was demonstrating imperfection to my daughters, and modeling how to apologize. My “kids” are now 40 and 33, and turned out pretty well despite (or maybe even because of) my blunders.
I’m working to build a more inclusive workplace by taking into the account the needs of internal processors, like me. We generally conflate leadership with being “decisive,” which of course means making fast decisions. I always need a pause, sometimes a long one, before figuring out how to react or proceed. But that doesn’t mean I’m not a leader, and often we all benefit from some more time to reflect.