Why we flip our lid and how to be a calmer mum - Sara Campin, Founder of the Nourish app
/Why we flip our lid and how to be a calmer mum
Do you sometimes feel surprised by an eruption of anger that leads to yelling at your children? Six years ago I was like this far too often, and couldn’t understand why. It would go like this: I’m coping fine, and even though the children are pushing all my buttons I’m staying pretty patient and calm, and then all of a sudden, out of no-where, I lose it and turn to yelling.
Psychologist Dan Siegel termed this phenomena, “flipping your lid”. I find it helpful to think of it like a boiling pot of water. When the heat is on, we cannot see the water heating up. We cannot see the bubbles until the heat has been turned on, usually on high, over a period of time. Eventually it boils over.
Parenting often means that we are on a low simmer a LOT of the time. We’re tired, which raises our adrenaline levels, we’re mentally and physically depleted from work and running around after and for our children all day! All of this raises our adrenaline and turns that heat up a little more. When we are dealing with crying, or tantrums from our children, that turns the heat up even more. Until, at some point, the pan is boiling over and we explode.
When we lose it, there are many things that have turned the heat up over the course of the day that we haven’t even noticed - these are our triggers.
What triggers you the most?
“Triggers” are those things that typically prompt an automatic negative response. These might be external stimuli, such as your child’s refusal to drink from the green cup rather than the blue cup, or your child ignoring your warning and speeding towards a busy road on their scooter. Perhaps being interrupted constantly by your toddler provokes a reaction in you.
It’s also helpful to consider the underlying emotion that is ignited by the external stimulus, such as frustration, sadness, disappointment, pride, fear of failure. Although the external stimulus might seem trivial, there is something much deeper going on which adds to the fire.
Starting to tune into our triggers, whether it’s the external stimuli or underlying emotion, can really help us to stop boiling over. Notice over the course of a day, what turns up the heat on that pot of water for you. Noticing is a really powerful first step at shifting us out of automatic pilot and being able to intervene and calm ourselves down.
But what else can we do to stop those triggers overwhelming us? How can we keep that pan from boiling over.
Learning to regulate your own emotions
One of the things I have always found hardest about ‘parenting books / advice’ is that when the advice is to “say this or that” to our child and be compassionate and empathetic with our child. But this can be really hard to do in the moment!
We can only show up with that compassion and empathy when we are able to regulate our own emotions. The less regulated we are as parents, the more likely we will react to our kids and let their emotions overcome us.
Mindfulness meditation is the superpower that can make all the difference in lowering our reactivity longer term. I’m not necessarily talking about a long daily practice, but just tuning into 2 to 10 minutes of relaxation when you do get a break, can make all the difference.
In my own journey with self-care, I can honestly say practicing mindfulness has been a game changer for me – not only in reducing my reactivity, but it has also helped me be more compassionate with myself and more focused at work.
On the Nourish app you’ll find a range of different mindfulness practices from 2 – 20 minutes in length with different styles and voices so you can find something that resonates for you.
How to stay calm in the moment
There are lots of things we can do to support ourselves to stay calm in the moment. Here are just a few examples:
Breathe - when we breathe better, we feel better. And this is because when we breathe well and deeply, extending our exhale longer than our inhale, it stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, sending signals to the anxious or heightened part of our brain telling it that we are safe, we are OK, it doesn’t need to activate the fight or flight response. So when we breathe well we feel more calm and in control.
Move your body - You can use your body to shift your mindset. When you change position, or do a short burst of movement, your mind will change it’s thinking mode. You can quite literally change channels in your mind by moving your body.
Name what’s happening - Naming and communicating your feelings can be really powerful. It sounds so simple, but science shows us that verbalizing our feelings makes our sadness, anger and pain less intense. For example you might say, “Please stop playing that recorder, I’m feeling overwhelmed right now and I really need your help” or you might say to them “I can see you have some big angry feelings you need to get rid of” to help them name and validate their own feelings.
Distract yourself - if you are really struggling to keep calm, find a distraction that will stop you reacting immediately, to buy you a little time to get some perspective. For example, take a sip of water. In the time that it takes you to sip the water, you might find that you feel a little calmer and have found a different way to respond.
It is unrealistic for us to expect that we will never react rather than respond to the difficult situation in front of us. But it’s really important to remember when we do lose it or have an argument with our child, we focus on trying to repair that rupture.
It’s important to not get into a spiral of shame about what’s going on. Feeling guilty is one thing, but shame runs much deeper as a long-term, non-functional, toxic type of suffering. Rather than “I did something wrong” shame says “I am a bad person” and has us believe that we are never good enough.
So when we do lose it with our kids. Remember you are only human. Give yourself a break. Find that compassionate voice and interrupt the shame spiral and try to see it as an opportunity for learning.
Saying sorry and giving our kids a hug can be a great way to model ways to make amends to them. It can be helpful to explain to them how they have triggered you. How you are only human and what they were doing was annoying or disrespectful. These are great life-lessons that we can teach our kids.
Bio:
Sara is a mum of 2, life-coach, mindfulness teacher and ex-IT & strategy consultant. After 13 years as a strategy consultant for the life-sciences industry, Sara founded Nourish after the impact self-care had on her and family’s wellbeing. Nourish is a new wellbeing app for mums offering bite-sized calm & wellbeing in mum’s pocket. The app is a curated library of over 200 meditations, videos and quick reads across mindfulness, yoga, yoga nidra psychology and more all tailor-made for mums by a team of wellbeing experts, who are all mums themselves.
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