Mum As You Are

How a line I heard in a comedy sketch has me thinking about negativity bias, doom scrolling and why we click on those sad dog videos that YouTube recommends. 

I query how long it takes our brains to 'come down' from the anger, frustration and stress hormones that are getting fired up every time we pick up our phones looking for distraction.

You can reach me: [email protected]

Books:

More Than a Healthy Baby: Finding Strength & Growth After After Birth Trauma

https://amzn.to/3PbdohA

Birth Trauma: Tools to Cope

https://amzn.to/3Ri67i8

Courses:

Birth trauma training for birth workers the online course has over 2700 students from 42 countries

https://doctorerin.com.au/btt-full-sales-page

More Than a Healthy Baby: How to Cope With Birth Trauma is perfect for people who are navigating their own trauma.

It’s an a la carte menu of some of my best tools and strategies. It’s not a replacement for therapy but it’s a starting point.

https://erinbowe.mykajabi.com/offers/2LTwuM4W

Course Creation for the Caring Professions - how to make your own online course!

https://doctorerin.com.au/course-creation-full-sales-page

21 Day Social Media Detox – coming soon!

12 months ago, on International Women's Day I decided to quit social media. Or, at least I decided to stop using it until Mother's Day 8 weeks later and see what happened. As I've spoken about before on my blog, the impact on my mood, attention and general sense of well being was huge.  https://doctorerin.com.au/i-quit-social-media-as-a-psychologist-an-author-and-a-mum-heres-what-i-learned/ 

At this stage, I still can't see myself going back to it. Once I was consistently no longer using  social media it kind of became dramatically apparent how little I was actually getting out of it - in terms of financial, social and happiness/joy. 

My advice is to really set your own goals and do your own research. These platforms were always designed to get people addicted, and I feel like exhausted, overwhelmed mums are perfectly primed for spending more time than they'd like on them. 

Be kind to yourself if you're planning a break and set something specific and measurable. A weekend of not using socials won't really make that much difference. True behaviour change takes longer - like 21+ days. Find replacement strategies and then be even kinder to yourself when you realise you feel twitchy or weird for not picking your phone up all the time. It takes time, but personally I've found it really freeing. 

Pre orders for my new book, Social Media Detox for Mums is open!

Booktopia (21% off)

Angus & Robertson (20% off)

Amazon Australia

Amazon US & REST OF THE WORLD

Book Depository for UK/EUROPE

I've had a massive week where my sense of safety and feeling in control has been challenged more than a few times! Here's a strategy I find helps ground me back into feeling better.

As we begin season 2, I wanted to talk a little about seasons of motherhood and what it's like going into the end of summer phase. A stage where you know you don't want more children, the cot and pram have been packed away or sold and yet you're not quite at peri menopause or menopause. Your kids might be out of nappies and no longer napping, but not exactly sleeping through the night and still little enough to need a lot of you. It ight feel like an in-between phase where you're still trying to work out what your family routine will look like and what work will look like. Pause for a moment to refelct on which season you might be in.

If you follow my work, you'll know I'm a fan of Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies. Knowing that I have a Rebel tendency has helped me understand parts of my personality and why I show up the way I do in a way that other personality tests haven't explained. 

She's released the Happier App - it provides personalized strategies to help you become happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative. 

This is not sponsored or anything, it's just a tool I've been reviewing for myself and thought it could be useful for other people. We're all on our phones too much, seeking numbing instead of true, genuine, belly laugh fun. Using an app to get ideas on five minute happiness boosting activities that are personalised is pretty cool I think

https://gretchenrubin.com/

An exercise in checking in with your body, mood and what you actually need before you pick up your phone to start scrolling. When I started doing this for myself, I discovered some interesting things about myself! Note that all my work about social media use and mental health comes from a place of kindness, self-compassion and encouraging you to make your own choices. No one likes being patronised or told what to do, especially not me! (A Rebel personality type according to Gretchen Rubin's 4 tendencies). 

When anxiety, anger, overwhelm and all the unpleasant feelings start to spiral it's often because we've slipped into THINKING our feelings instead of naming, describing and allowing the feelings. I'll teach you an exercise that helps the spiral to feel back in control. 

My daughters turned 4 and 6 this week, so it's also 4 and 6 years since my traumatic births. I took a few minutes to reflect on how things have been in that time - the growth I've seen, the 3 courses, a book and a podcast I created on birth trauma. What it's like to be in a place where I'm now feeling as complete as I can with (a) my own personal work and (b) the birth trauma content I've put out into the world to help others. 

It's not really been time that 'healed' my wounds. It's been a lot of deep work. Hard work. But the growth has been pretty phenomenal. I share a few tips and insights for anyone else who finds themselves in the position of celebrating a birthday/s but also being faced with traumatic reminders of birth. Our society's is ALL about the baby and less about the Mum who birthed that baby. Know you are not forgotten and there are amazing tools to help

My book, More than a healthy baby

My course that complements the book, More than a healthy baby

e-book of coping strategies for birth trauma

Episode 22 explores the question “is Mum brain real?”. I have a quick chat about some of the research I reviewed when writing my book, Motherhood, Mental Health & Social Media and share one of my own gloriously embarrassing moments of "What happened to my brain...? I swear my PhD isn't just printed off the internet :D"

This week I chat about something I think they got wrong on the show Maid. It's an amazing, moving, show however, I think they missed an opportunity to validate and normalise one particular aspect of parenting. 

Motherhood is massively overstimulating. We need to normalize it, validate it and be compassionate in our communications that EVERY single parent on the planet struggles with this.