Hello, welcome back to Live Free Creative Podcast. I’m your host, Miranda Anderson. You’re listening today to episode number 247, all about managing your mental health. If you listened in last week, you know that I’m doing a short summer mini series to buy you some time to be on vacation. I pulled a mini series from season one.

That is so great. Just going back to the basics of physical, mental, and spiritual health. Last week’s episode was all about your physical health. This week will be addressing mental health, and next week will be about your spiritual health. So I hope that you’re enjoying this mini series, that it’s just giving you that back to the basics, vibe, good energy around.

Some of these like baseline things that we can do to care for ourselves, and it’s hilarious to listen back to these episodes myself as the creator and original like recorder and producer of them, and recognize how much of it I need now, even four years later that I’m still, these are things we’re just still always working on trying to maintain seasons of life change, our circumstances change, and if we can circle back around to taking care of ourselves physically, mentally, spiritually.

Everything feels a little bit better. So today we’re gonna be talking specifically about mental health, and I thought a good segment to kick that off. Today would be a mindful moment.

Segment: Mindful Moment

This mindful moment is just a chance for you to sit in stillness and breathe with me for a few minutes. It may be something that you do as a regular practice, and it also might be something you think about and don’t quite get to. So for the next 90 seconds, I want you to just find stillness. If you’re driving, you could pull over or you could save it for later.

If you’re doing dishes or walking, you can do a walking meditation. But also if you can find a nice spot to just plop down for a minute. Start to close your eyes and feel yourself grounding into your seat or your feet grounding into the floor. Find comfort, and then just take your first full, deep, intentional breath in through your nose.

And out through your mouth.

Doesn’t that feel amazing? Let’s breathe together like that for 10 more breaths.

It’s okay if your mind wanders. Just bring it back to the feeling of the air coming in through your nose and out through your mouth.

If you need to relax your head and let it drop down. Or make big circles with your neck as you breathe,

release the tension in your shoulders. See if you can let your whole body relax as you take a couple more big, deep breaths.

One more.

Hold it.

And release. Thank you for breathing with me. Hopefully that gave you just a second to feel centered, maybe the first time in the whole day or the last week that you can remember finding stillness. And if you need to come back to that short meditation at any time, just. Book market so you can come back and breathe.

Sometimes it helps to have someone talking you through it a little bit. Thank you for joining me on today’s Mindful Moment. As I mentioned in the introduction, today’s show is all about your mental health, and I was excited and impressed with myself as I looked back on this episode. Pre-master degree, all about psychology and mental health that I.

Did the research and I got things right here. These are simple suggestions and invitations to help you realign mentally, to help you find some consciousness and some intention in the practices that you have, and to prevent yourself from getting caught in a downward spiral. I hope that listening to this episode today will help give you some ideas to get on top of your mental wellness.

And not just go from bad to okay, but from okay to great. Now I’m gonna trust you too, my past self for the remainder of this Encore episode, and I hope that you really enjoy.

What is Mental Health?

First, let’s just take a step back. What is mental health? Mental health includes your emotional, psychological, and social wellbeing. It’s how your brain processes things that are happening to you. How you think in turn, how you feel in turn, how you act.

Mental health also has so much to do with how we handle our stress, how we cope with situations, how we relate to others, and make all of the different choices that we make in our life. It affects everyone from children all the way up through the end of your life.

And there’s so many factors that go into it: 1) biological factors–things that you’re born with, your genetics, play a role in your mental health, 2) your life experiences and the circumstances of your life and how you learned, from a young age and also as you grow up, how to cope and process the things that happened to you, and 3) your family history.

Types of Mental Health

When I was growing up, I remember thinking about mental health as a negative thing. If you were worried about mental health, that meant that you had depression, or anxiety, or a mental health disorder, psychosis or multiple personalities.

Then I went to nursing school and learned all about the different types of psychological problems that could exist in someone’s system and their lives.

And in the last few years, I mean 10, 15, or maybe even 20 years, this new field of positive psychology has been emerging and it’s something that I’m super interested in and have been fascinated by–not only recognizing mental health as where there are defects in normal, but also what are the things that we can do in our regular daily lives to increase our base level of fulfillment, happiness and satisfaction with our lives. Not just being okay, but being better than okay, feeling great.There is so much research now that shows that there are lots of things that enable us to be better than okay.

Resolve Negative Mental Health Issues

If you are struggling with a mental health problem, a negative mental health problem, if you experienced depression or anxiety–clinical problems–you need to seek help and there’s no shame or guilt in that.

You should contact someone who can help you reach out to a friend, reach out to a therapist, reach out to your doctor and resolve those baseline negative mental health issues. Sometimes with medication, sometimes with therapy.

I think everyone should go to therapy, for one thing or another, just to have a safe space to talk things out.

Being Better Than Okay

Today I wanna share some ideas for bringing our baseline of mental health up for not just being okay, but being even a little bit better than okay.

The things that I’m going to share are not meant to be psychiatric advice. I’m not a trained counselor. These are not things that are going to replace any type of regular mental health care if you need it from an actual mental health provider.

For most of us, you probably just need some tips to stay out of a funk, to stay a little bit more optimistic and to get the mental health break that you might not give yourself naturally.

Taking Your Own Advice

So this is where we come back to the idea of mothering ourselves.

If you had a conversation with a friend who was really stressed out about something and was having a really hard time and had so much on her plate, what would you say?

It’s highly likely that you would recommend or that you would share some advice that maybe she should let one or more of those things go right now–that it’s okay if the dishes sit in the sink or it’s okay to reach out and say, could I extend this deadline on this thing I have do.

You would offer that grace and that balm and that comfort to someone else, to a good friend. So why not to yourself? Why do we think that we have to do it all, all the time, when we recognize that not everyone else has to do it all all the time?

We often have so much grace and understanding and compassion for others. That’s our nurturing, that’s our mothering, and it’s time that we start extending that same love and compassion to ourselves.

A Few Things You Can Do To Mother Your Mental Health

So I’m going to share four specific examples of things that you might do to increase your baseline mental health, to give yourself a mental health break, to give yourself the love and the grace and the compassion that your own mother would give you or that a great friend would give you. Because we can be those things for ourself.

So here we go:

1. Take Time Off

Take time off. Doesn’t that seem so simple? Yet sometimes we get so caught up in planning and scheduling and looking at the calendar, whether it’s our kids activities, whether it’s the baby’s nap schedule, whether it’s our work responsibilities, whether it’s our church or school or PTA or community service responsibilities.

Distance Yourself From Your Tasks

We can get so caught up in doing the things that we always do, we forget that we need time off. We are not wired for continuous 24 hour a day output. We have to take time to rest and recharge from all of our duties.

Taking time off from work to come home and take care of your three kids is not a break. We need time off from everything. Switching up your routine can be helpful, but taking time off from our routine, from responsibilities and from our phones and technology are all very important pieces of maintaining and mothering our mental health.

Everything Will Be Okay

What I have found in my life is that when I allow myself real time off, I discover something fascinating: I don’t actually have to do anything. I don’t have to do a single thing.

The dishes may or may not get done and that’s okay.

The laundry can sit and if people run out of clothes, they can wear dirty clothes for a couple days.

If I don’t post to Instagram today, no one is going to notice it’s going to be fine.

It Will Make Room for New Things

When I was pregnant with Plum, I was working part time as a nurse, I was running a custom sewing business from my home, and I was blogging five days a week. I had just started to pick up some momentum on my blog. I had a great community and I was starting to work with sponsors. I felt like I was on the cusp of something great.

And then I realized I wanted to have a baby. I talked to Dave about this idea of like, “Okay, I want to get pregnant. I want to have one more baby.” And he said, “I don’t know how you’re going to do that. You don’t have any more space, there’s no more space, mentally, emotionally, or physically in your life.” And so I told him, “I’m going to take a break from everything else.” And I quit my job and I stopped blogging.

I had been blogging five days a week for like six years at that point. And I stopped.

I wrote a post that said, “I am pregnant, I’m going to take a break, and thank you so much for being here. I don’t know when I’m going to come back, or if I ever will.”

And I stopped taking those custom sewing orders.

I took a break and I lived this really incredibly present life for our big move to Texas, and having Plum, and building our house, and that space quickly got filled up with other things.

It Will Help You Find Out What Really Matters

I didn’t fret in my head about keeping up all of the plates spinning in my hands at once. I was able to put some things down and let more important things that were more timely for that moment replace them.

It was incredible when I found that no one really cared. I mean, I’m sure that some people missed me here and there on the blog. But my readership didn’t all die off. It just didn’t. It wasn’t this thing that I had built and then leaving it alone made it all disappear. People were still there when I decided to post something–I think I posted two or three times that year. But I was able to still get a job when I wanted one.

And with my custom sewing business, I realized that even though I had thought that I loved it so much, it was such a huge relief when I decided to take a break. That’s something that I never picked back up. I had imagined that I would end up running a custom sewing shop. I had dreams of that. But when I took a break, I gave myself the space to realize it wasn’t actually what I wanted to do.

When we take time off, it makes clear the things that we feel are the most important to us. What we yearn to jump back into and what we don’t.

It Will Make Life More Intentional

There is this principle of physics called inertia. Things in motion, stay in motion. You have to actually intentionally stop yourself from doing the things that you automatically do. It’s the same for habits. It’s the same for scrolling through Instagram. It’s the same for, you know, begrudgingly putting in another load of laundry because it’s the next day and you do a load every day, or you know, whatever the case may be.

Taking time off can be really hard initially because we have to stop ourselves from doing the thing that we want to automatically do. Even if we don’t like it, even if we don’t want to do it, our body and our mind and our routine will just flow us into it automatically unless we’re intentional.

Permission to Take Time Off

So I want to invite you to think of something right now–something that you do automatically that you don’t really want to be doing or you don’t really enjoy–and give yourself permission to take time off. Whether it’s a day, whether it’s a week, whether it’s a month. It could be spending time on social media. It could be constantly picking up after people in your family. Give yourself a break from that. Just give yourself a week that the house is going to get entirely crazily messy and maybe you’ll be surprised to find that other people might start picking things up.

Maybe you’ll discover that you can live with a little bit of chaos if it means a mental break from the pressure to do all of it all the time.

I would love to hear what you decide to take a break from. Feel free to share it on social media and tag me. We can all support each other in taking a much needed break from responsibilities that we feel like we’re the only ones that can handle it.

A Break From Motherhood

I have to mention because we’re talking about mothering the mothers here, how important it is for moms to get a break from their motherhood.

This means leaving the kids with their father or with your partner or with a babysitter. This means stepping away for an hour or a few hours or an afternoon or even a night. If you could get a night away, some time off. You don’t have to do something grand, you don’t have to hire a babysitter because you have some very important thing to do. You don’t have to take a night away because you, you know, have a big project you’re working on.

You can have a break because you need a break. That can be the only reason.

Life will go on without you doing every single thing that you feel like you have to do.

I invite you to take time off and recognize that you don’t have to do anything. You get to choose. Life will go on without you doing every single thing that you feel like you have to do, that you’re holding so tightly to. That is my tip number one.

2. Find a Hobby

Tip number two is probably my favorite and you’ll recognize as soon as I share it. Tip number two is to find a hobby or a couple hobbies and exercise them with reckless abandon. 

A Hobby Horse

As I was getting prepared for this show, I looked up where the word hobby came from. I have a lot of hobbies. I love hobbies, and I had never recognized or known why we call it a hobby. And so I looked it up and it turns out that the word stems from horses, from hobby horses.

A hobby was also a type of horse, but a hobby horse was one of those little children’s toys. Those little bounce on horses–you know the old like wooden horses that a child could ride and not go anywhere because it was on springs in the room. You all know what I’m talking about, right?

The hobby horse didn’t go anywhere. It was activity and movement that didn’t progress you forward. And so hobbies, the idea of hobbies became something that you do just for fun that doesn’t move you forward toward any specific goal or any end product that you’re just doing it for fun.

No Expectations

Wow. What a refreshing view on hobbies. I think we get this idea that every single thing we do has to be so purposeful and you know, move us in the right direction and be on our path to this goal that we want to achieve.

And we forget that the purpose of a hobby, the actual purpose is to do an activity that doesn’t necessarily get you anywhere. It’s just for fun. It’s just to do the activity. The purpose is the process. I say that a lot and I mean it. The purpose of the hobby is the action itself.

You don’t have to become an expert golfer or feel like your investment in golf lessons isn’t worthwhile unless you somehow become like a sponsored golf pro. Nope. You don’t have to. You can in fact pay thousands of dollars to buy really cool golf uniform and clubs and a membership to the golf course, and you can travel around the world to visit amazing golf courses everywhere and you can spend all of that money and not get anything in return except for the experience of loving it.

When was the last time you did something just for fun and no other reason? No ulterior motive.

Being A Beginner

When was the last time you learned something new and you were totally okay with being a beginner?

I love to learn new things and I’m usually okay with being a beginner. I recognize as I take a stained glass class or as I go to a new cooking class or as I visit workshops that there’s always something new to learn and I find that space in the beginning where I don’t have to know everything and no one’s relying on me to be an expert. I don’t have to answer of the questions.

That can be a really, really refreshing place to be, to be in a place where it’s totally okay that you don’t know anything, that you’re learning. The challenge can be part of the fulfillment. There’s confidence that comes when we understand new skills and we are learning things and we’re spending time just for fun.

The Etsy Phenomenon

I mean that idea of just for fun…I have to tell you about something that I call the “Etsy Phenomenon”. I thought about this years and years ago when I was sewing for fun and sewing on my blog and sharing this and I started getting requests to sell the things I was making on Etsy and of course I did it.  It ended up turning into like 10 years of custom sewing for people on Etsy.

The idea though when I started was not to turn it into a job. The idea was that I’d just like to sew. It was a fun hobby and it was useful for myself. I made lots of clothes for myself and for my kids and you know, I enjoyed the whole process. I enjoy looking at and feeling fabric. I love the creativity and the challenge.

Because of the accessibility to turn any type of hobby into a business, we often feel this entrepreneurial pressure that anything we do for fun could also become our business.

And what that also teaches us–the subtle undercurrent of that mentality–is that it’s not okay to do it just for fun. That if you’re doing it and it could possibly be a business, you probably should turn it into a business because then it becomes worthwhile.

Friends, I have to share with you that hobbies are worthwhile because they bring you joy, they make you happy and you’re worth it.  You can pay hundreds of dollars to participate in a hobby that doesn’t bring you any return on that financial investment. The return is mental and emotional and social. The return is psychological.

The return on your hobbies is that you are allowing yourself the space and the freedom to do an activity that doesn’t result in going anywhere.

You’re worth it. You can do that. You don’t always have to be charging ahead.

What is Your Hobby?

So my challenge with this one is to consider this. What hobbies do you have right now? Maybe some of you are great at hobbies and I’m so glad if you are, and I want to encourage you to continue spending your time and investing in yourself. Hobbies don’t necessarily have to apply to any other facet of your life. You don’t have to be the most successful crocheter in the world, you can just crochet just for fun.

If you don’t have a hobby or you’ve gotten sucked up in doing all of the things that require you for responsibility and duty’s sake–and so you’ve kind of lost some of the things that you just used to love–I want to invite you to reclaim something, reclaim an activity fully recognizing that it will not yield business, financial success, acknowledgement, fame, power, anything except for joy except for happiness. It’s hard to put a price on those things.

What hobby are you going to practice this week? What activity are you going to do that doesn’t get you anywhere except into a better mental state?

Mine is getting back to sewing. I spent many, many years working as a seamstress, blogging about sewing, and I know that that was really helpful for people and it was really fun. And now I sew for myself and for Plum. I just enjoy the process and I love having taken the pressure out of it.

I don’t have to be making money at it. I don’t have to be selling it. I don’t have to be sharing a tutorial. I can just sit down and sew for fun and enjoy it and love it and just relish in that moment that I’m giving to myself to do an activity that doesn’t have to be furthering any of my “success”. It just makes me happy.

I invite you to find something like that for you in your life.

3. Keep Your Own Commitments

Keep commitments to yourself. Oh, this is a hard one, ladies! We are so committed often to keeping commitments to other people.

Show Up For Yourself

Have any of you planned on meeting a friend at the park for lunch or for a play date and about an hour or two before you are going to g0, they cancel? And so even though you really would have liked a picnic at the park and spending time outside and doing the activity that you had planned on and we’re looking forward to, because the other person can’t go, you decide to not go either because all of the sudden it’s not worth it.

Have you ever made plans to meet someone at the gym and they can’t go and so you don’t go either?

I know as well as anyone how easy it is to make commitments with other people in order to hold yourself accountable for the things you want to do. It’s really well known that it’s a lot easier to get up at 5:00 AM to go on a run when you’re meeting a friend and it becomes a social conversation as well as you know, the byproduct of having the physical exercise.

But what if you really, really want to exercise? Can’t you just do it because you want to do it?

What if you were a good enough friend to yourself that you could show up for yourself?

I’m still working on this one. I have to admit that sometimes I put things in my calendar that feel really, really important to me and then I change them because something else happens. And of course we need to be flexible and adaptable as circumstances in our life change.

But I’m learning to treat myself as I would a good friend or treat myself as I would if I were my own mom and say, “You need to go to the gym because it will make you feel better. You can sit down to eat your meals. You don’t have to be busy-bodying around the rest of the house eating a granola bar. You can go to bed at 10 because you decided you wanted to. You can work hard at that thing that you said you wanted to do.”

Follow Through On Good Intentions

Writing the book I guess is a really good example of this. I decided at the end of last year that this year the only thing I was going to focus on until it was finished was my book. A lot of you are aware that the book is at the printer right now. It’s finished! It’s finalized! It’s at the printer!

I spent Monday and Tuesday of this week in an incredible recording studio here in Richmond laying down the tracks for the audiobook. That sounds very official. I don’t actually know if it’s even called laying down tracks unless you’re recording music, but that’s what I did.

And you guys! I have said “No” to so many things that I kind of wanted to do this year. I have said no to almost every single sponsored opportunity that has come my way because I knew I couldn’t do both.

I had to be present to write and to revise and to work on the marketing and the launch and this week to work on the audiobook. It’s been really an exercise in keeping this commitment to myself that I am going to follow through completely with something that is hard and long and also exciting and thrilling.

And I don’t know yet what the outcome of all of this is going to be, I don’t know how it’s all going to go. My hope is that it goes swimmingly and beautifully and that it’s well received and that people find some inspiration from the things that I share from my story.

Regardless, I had to do this for me. I had to do it because it was a commitment that I made to myself and I’m following through. And it has been an exercise in learning to do this, in learning to say, “This is what I really want and it’s okay if no one else is showing up with me, because I can show up for myself.”

Make A Commitment and Keep It

So consider for yourself what is one or two commitments that you really, really value that you want to make to yourself and then show up and keep them. Keep them! And as you practice doing this–it requires practice, and you might not do it every time. Maybe sometimes you’ll fail and that’s okay.

Don’t take failure to mean that it wasn’t worth it or that it didn’t work. Take failure to mean that you can try again and you can start over. Imagine you make a commitment to someone else that is important to you, that you love and care for, and then show up for her. Show up. Show up for yourself.

4. Choose Grace Over Perfection

Now the last one here is choosing grace over perfection.

Letting Go of Perfection

I go on and on about this. I know I have this thing about perfection because perfection isn’t real and I feel lucky that I am not under the illusion that it is. I’m not much of a perfectionist. Perfectionists probably hate me because I feel pretty loosey goosey about being okay trying.

It’s about effort over achievement. It’s about doing your best. It’s about understanding that your best might look different depending on how you’re feeling, depending on the weather, depending on what happened yesterday or last week.

I’m okay with doing my best and knowing that’s enough. Something that I heard Jess Lively say on the Lively Show years ago has stuck with me, and I really love to remember this when I need it. It was a mantra that someone had shared with her as she was in the middle of a move and business was crazy and her house was, you know, all in disarray and she was feeling frustrated with that and it came to her mind.

The mantra was: “Nothing about today has to be perfect.”

Just that simple: Nothing about today has to be perfect. We probably hear that and think, “Oh, of course. Of course nothing about today has to be perfect.” But if you readily accept that, if you feel it down to your bones that nothing about today has to be perfect, then when things are not perfect, you’re gonna feel a lot more okay than if you say “Okay, okay, I know nothing about today has to be perfect,” but then you still expect that everything is perfect.

You see the difference there? Nothing about today has to be perfect. Use that if you need it as a mantra. Nothing about today has to be perfect. I choose grace. I choose acceptance. I choose flexibility. I choose creativity. It’s okay. Things are going to work out.

Choosing Grace

I want to take this one step further when we’re talking about mothering our own mental health and creating connection to ourself that allows this grace.

What if we take that mantra and just switch out one word: Nothing about myself has to be perfect.

Nothing about myself has to be perfect. I am imperfect and that’s okay. My body is imperfect and that’s okay. My skill level is imperfect and that’s okay. My home is imperfect. My relationships are imperfect. My children are imperfect. My driving record also imperfect and it’s okay.

Take a deep breath and release perfection as the goal. For those of you and myself who grew up in a Christian culture and participate in a Christian faith, where “perfection” actually is the goal and is the commandment, we can get a little bit backwards in this.

I want to remind you, those of you with whom this resonates, that that perfection was never meant to be independent. You, yourself, by yourself, are never meant to be perfect alone, and that’s okay. That is grace, that is love. That is compassion.

You do not have to be perfect. Nothing about today has to be perfect. If we’re able to get in a place where we not only can say that, but believe it and feel it into our soul, mental health might not be so much of an issue. We will allow ourselves to flexibly flow in different life circumstances than we expect to find the good that’s happening in the imperfection and to be even better than okay with all of it.

A Quick Review

I want to quickly go through my four tips for mothering your mental health.

Are there 500 million other things that I could have shared about? Yes, absolutely. Guess what? I’m not perfect either and this show is just a snippet, just an introduction, just an idea, a spark for you to be able to continue, explore things on your own as well.

So here are my four tips for mothering the mother’s mental health.

1. Take time off. Take time off of your phone. Take time off from your kids. Take time off from your routine and from your responsibility and discover in that time that you do not actually have to do anything that you get to choose.
2. Exercise your hobbies. Understand that having an activity that doesn’t result in going anywhere is a positive thing that doing things just for fun is still totally, totally worth it.
3. Keep your own commitments. Treat yourself as you would your own best friend. You’re worth it. It’s hard, but you can go to the gym, you can sit down to eat your meals, you can put yourself to sleep. You can tackle that project that you’ve been putting off because no one else is there to kick your butt into gear, kick your own butt into gear, keep your own commitments.
4. Choose grace over perfection. Recognize that nothing about today has to be perfect and even more importantly, nothing about yourself has to be perfect. You are enough right now. Today you are more than enough and your life can be better than okay. It can be wonderful.