Do you know why highly sensitive people often don’t deal well with change, noise, smells – just normal, daily things for moms?
And are you secretly one of these HSP-but-I’m-not-telling-anyone moms?
If you’re scared that your family will think you’re high maintenance, it’s time to tell them the why behind your quirks and help them accept you as you truly are.
Quirks, weird, and all. (High five!)
Know your weird HSP traits
So, what are *your* particular “weird points” as an HSP?
Is it a smell (or multiple smells!) you can’t take, a driving route that has you nail-biting in anxiety before it even starts, or an outside-the-home activity that seems to require way more energy than it actually should?
Start brain dumping every single thing that’s bothering you about your day-to-day life as a mom – things you *know* are cropping up because of your HSP tendences.
Just get it all out. We have to know what you’re doing that’s triggering you first.
Pro tip: Don’t forget to include the chores that you just can’t stand doing! If you’re putting it off every week because you don’t like something about the sensory requirement or noise volume, it goes in here, too.
Know which outings take too much energy
Next, which common family outings do you despise, or set you off, or need way too much recovery time?
For the longest time, I couldn’t understand why the weekly grocery shopping took so much energy. I mean, I felt so drained by the end of it that I wanted to do nothing else productive for the rest of the afternoon!
It was only after I read up on highly sensitive traits and energy management that I realized I was expending a lot of energy going to multiple public places, making lots of buying decisions in a noisy environment, having to split my attention between lots of young children in the car as well as everything on the road, and then needing to deal with all of the unloading, putting away, receipts, and food prep when I got home.
No wonder I was tired!
Once I realized this was going on, and I had a reason for it, I started looking for ways to streamline the process. Because telling myself to “just buck up” was not working – and hadn’t for several years!
When I’m your coaching partner, I’m going to ditch all the socially acceptable, “don’t all moms do that” ways of thinking and help you get down to the bedrock.
- What do *you* do for your kids?
- What do you love parenting them with?
- What drains your energy faster than an untied balloon zipping around your living room?
And once we know *your* starting point, it’s going to be light years faster to get you to that transformation. (You know, the one where you actually love your day-to-day life.)
What drains your energy faster than an untied balloon zipping around your living room?
Know the speed-it-up errand hacks
Finally, what’s the fastest way for you to get through those hated-but-necessary errands?
If you’ve got to go to the store with kids in tow, can you do Walmart pickup for half the order so you only have to grocery shop for half of what your growing family needs?
Can you leave the young ones in the car with an older sibling to keep watch, and zoom through a short shopping list on the weeks when you just needed a couple “oops, ran out of” pantry items?
Can you shift the order of which stores you go to first, so that either the driving route doesn’t bug you as much, or you get the most annoying shop out of the way first? (Or last, if you’d rather work up to it!)
What about making a 2-week menu so that you only have to drive out for that big grocery run every 2 weeks? How would that feel?
Or can you heavily rely on online grocery orders from places that ship ‘em to you, and not set foot in the store at all?
These are all the kinds of questions you need to be asking yourself when your grocery route is the core of what’s bugging you.
You have to eat, which means you have to shop, but it doesn’t all have to be as hard as it is now. So let’s get our thinking cap on and start brainstorming some new ways to do this.
Basically, either quit doing the errand that you hate, or find ways around it that are less burdensome to you.
Then do this with every part of life.
It could be one of your kids’ activities that you dislike driving to (but for some reason don’t mind picking them up from), or the “fastest by 2 minutes” route to church that has a turn you don’t like, or just that you don’t enjoy tagging along to Lowe’s with your husband.
It’s all good. You’re allowed to have store and shopping (and driving!) opinions.
How can you set up your life in a way that works for *you*, and still lets you get all the necessary stuff done?
Think about what *does* work, what you *don’t* mind doing, and build from there.
The answers will appear, little by little.
You’re going to figure it out.
You’ve got this.
