That Time An Instagram Post On Parenting Actually Helped: You Aren't Being Chased by a Bear.
They run as if the very whips of their masters were behind them!
Editor’s Note:
This In-Between post is based on my personal experience with one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever found on Instagram, especially for moms who are always rushing. At Mama’s Here, everyone’s journey looks different; the only thing we all share is that we are trying our best with what we know.
As mothers, it’s quite a norm for us to be overloaded with thoughts and concerns, and usually, the place we find the answers to our questions is on social media. Instagram, TikTok, Google…the hacks, top 5’s, tips and tricks…all the answers at the tip of our fingers. However, we have been warned about what we consume on the internet, because the hundreds and thousands of reels could leave us information-fatigued, sometimes to more confusion, or worse, it could lead us to thinking that we are not doing a good job as parents.
I told myself to take whatever I see online with a pinch of salt. But I came across a post that changed my life. After I tried and tested it, I felt compelled to write about it and to give it a bit of a backstory. So let’s go back to earlier this year, when my husband and I enrolled our daughter in kindergarten.
I had written an article describing the process of finding a school for my daughter to be a daunting experience (if you wanna know more, you can read it here), but what I was NOT prepared for was what actually happens AFTER your kid goes to school. As in, it’s 8.30am, you’ve dropped her off, now what?
Just a disclaimer, I’m a freelancer, and while some parents have offices to go to, most of the work I do is from home. So naturally I’d want to kill as many birds with one stone to be productive, a.k.a. complete house chores and do plenty of work, all before pick up time.
The first week was really about setting a new routine for school days. That looked like:
School bag and snacks are prepared the night before because it saves time.
Wake the child up or see the child waiting for me to wake up.
Convince her to brush her teeth and have a bath, run her one, sing songs and play before setting a 5-minute timer to get out. While that’s happening;
Make breakfast
Convince her to get out of the bath after the timer goes off.
Wrap her in a towel, pick up dirty clothes, and empty the bath water.
Pick an outfit and get dressed.
Sit down and have breakfast while I do her hair and wash the dishes.
Put her socks on
Tidy up her breakfast, wash the dishes and set off for school.
Extensive? Yes. I thought it was something I needed to get used to, so that after drop-off, I would be ready to take on the day with whatever backdated chores or work I could do. After a month of this routine, I started to notice that, due to having completed my old to-do list, I had a bit of “freer” time, and I felt the need to do more. So I was still moving fast and finding things I didn’t necessarily have to do at that moment, but that resulted in me being SO EXHAUSTED by the time I had to pick up my daughter from school. And throughout the day, I either get easily irritated and impatient whenever things don’t move quickly enough. Plus, it stopped being enjoyable, so something had to change.
I decided to switch things up by doing the same routine, EXCEPT by spacing it out throughout the morning till pick up time. It was my way to slow down a little, and maybe that way I wouldn’t feel so irritated if my daughter was taking her own sweet time. There was definitely improvement; mornings became slower and easier, but after drop-off, I would get back into fast mode. The house would get tidied up with great speed, then I’ll start on whatever pending work I have, etc., etc.
I think my logic for finishing everything as fast as possible was really because I wanted to “relax” with my daughter after school. Then 2 months went by, and I started to notice my body going into this weird nervous anxiety. It felt as though at any idle moment I had to force myself to find something productive to do, but by that point I was supremely pooped that all I ended up doing was mentally checking out by doom scrolling, feeling immense guilt for not being productive, not paying attention to my daughter, and there goes the spiral.
Then it ends up FULLY crippling me that all the chores and work pile up again, and my Instagram notification kept popping up, “ You have exceeded your 1 hour on Instagram, do you want to add 5 minutes, 15 minutes or ignore this?” It’s only 10am, and I’ve been on Instagram for an hour??? The self-loathing continues.
Then I came across this reel from BigLittleFeelings (an awesome account for motherhood/parenting btw), and it showed Deena Margolin (a therapist and one of the founders), doing chores, brushing her hair, tying her shoelaces really really quickly, with a caption that says “When you remember you aren’t being chased by a bear” and she proceeds to INTENTIONALLY SLOW DOWN when she’s doing all of those things. Here’s the link to the post.
I couldn’t stop watching that video on repeat because I didn’t realise that’s what I looked like whenever I did things. Like, why was I moving so quickly? Why did I pretend like I was being chased by a bear?
She learned this from Jennifer Ann (@jenniferanncounsellor), who shared this after discussing her client’s favourite coping tools to communicate more safety to their nervous system.
You wot? Nervous system? What’s that got to do with anything?
So apparently, if you are constantly rushing, it could signal danger to your nervous system, almost like your body is being pushed into fight or flight mode.
I didn’t realise how quickly the nervous system responds to urgency. When your body senses stress, the sympathetic nervous system can switch on the fight or flight response, raising your heart rate, sharpening alertness, and tensing your muscles. So when I’m rushing around like I’m being chased by a bear, my body might actually be getting the message that I’m not safe.
I swear it looked like a mirror every time I watched that reel, and it started to make sense as to why I felt that anxiousness. It’s not because I felt like I wasn’t doing enough. It was because I made my body believe that I wasn’t entirely safe because of how fast I was moving for no apparent reason. So I tried doing exactly that, to intentionally slow down every time I catch myself moving so quickly.
I had plenty of opportunities to practice because I never noticed the urgency I placed when doing something as mundane as wiping a table or googling something online. At first, in my head, I thought I was wasting time, but the reality was that I would only be saving between 30 seconds and 1 minute for each task. IS THAT ALL??? It was bizarre how doing this for over 2 months made a real difference, as I became more mindful of my anxieties if they creep up. I’d ask myself, am I actually stressed about something specific, or am I putting myself in a position to make me THINK that I am stressed out?
I even started to wonder, why do we feel the need to be productive ALL the time? Is it the only way we feel like we have control over things?
At the moment, I’m moving at a decent speed, not turtle-like but slow enough that I’m giving grace to my nervous system, and that’s exactly what we all need.
I always thought that when it comes to being hard on yourself, it’s usually to do with the way we think or speak about ourselves. Little did I know that something awesome came out from Instagram that has made me learn that it’s not just about using kind words and thoughts, but it’s also about being kind to your nervous system by slowing down every once in a while.