Slow Down! Lowering Impulsivity and Sensory Overload with the Power of the Pause #155
When was the last time you said something you wish you hadn’t?
Your impulsive tendencies affect you in more ways than simply putting your foot in your mouth…again.
Even when it may seem impossible, you can build in the practice of slowing down. Why does this matter for busy ADHD brains? Let’s discuss why you crave peace in your turbo-speed brain and how it helps both you and your family when you sloooooooow down.
When your brain goes non-stop, how do you create calm in chaos? We’ll dive deep into this discussion at our ADHD Moms retreat in October. You deserve a weekend to rest, focus on you, and learn how you best slow down to take care of yourself (and not snap at your kids every day.)
Join us here: https://www.patriciasung.com/adhd-mom-retreat
Patricia Sung 00:02
Are you overwhelmed by motherhood and barely keeping your head above water? Are you confused and frustrated by how all the other moms make it look so easy. You can figure out how to manage the chaos in your mind, your home, or your family. I get your mama, parenting with ADHD is hard. Here is your permission slip to let go of the Pinterest worthy visions of organization and structure fit for everyone else. Let's do life like our brains do life creatively, lovingly, and with all our might. When we embrace who we are and how our brains work, we can figure out how to live our lives successfully, and in turn, lead our families. Well, at the end of the day, we just want to be good moms. but spoiler alert, you are already a great mom. ADHD does not mean you're doomed to be a hot mess mama, you can rewrite your story from shame spiral to success story. And I'll be right here beside you to cheer you on. Welcome to motherhood in ADHD.
Patricia Sung 01:08
Hey there successful mama. It's your friend Patricia Sung. So this morning my seven year old had ice cream at breakfast. Yes, at 6:45am he was eating ice cream. Why? Let me tell you. I forgot last night that I told my son that Yes. Wheat when he asked me very pointedly if he could have dessert. Now unfortunately, he did not remember that. I said to wait until being in bed and like practically asleep. He pops up. And he's like, use it. I can have dessert. I'm like, Well, no, I can't do that. Now. It's too late. Cue overtired meltdown, like he goes on and on about how I'm the worst one ever. I forget everything. I never helped him win it, you know, not sure how that was related. And I do not care about his feelings at all. No, no, true. I do not help him win, you know? And am I forgetful? Yes. But knowing that I hurt his feelings because of my ADHD? Hmm. Not good. What I should have done in that moment was pause and come up with a different answer. Like, why don't you ask your dad, he's not doing anything right now. Or let me think about it. It's my favorite phrase. Or this isn't a good time we're playing a game. There were many things I could have chosen besides what I don't actually remember my specific words. But in some way I did indicated that he could have ice cream, just not right now. So he got so hyped up, which made me hyped up because also, I was talking to patients at that point that I stormed out of the room grumpy that my husband had to go in and calm down. He's like, Oh, hey, no, you got to go back in and repair. And I'm like, I don't want to repair but I did. And this again should have bought as I had offered in the melee, you can have breakfast ice cream, as a peace offering after actual breakfast. And here we are after multiple errors of not pausing my kids eating ice cream at 645 in the morning.
Patricia Sung 03:13
This is why the pause matters. Our brains literally go nonstop. We are the anti pause. And that is exactly why the pause is so good for us. One, it lowers our stress. When we are constantly in go mode. We're always ramping up and we have to slow down to decrease our stress. frenetic never equals calm. So in order for us to downgrade our stress response, we have to slow down. We also have to slow down to decrease our irritability when we're in sensory overload. What brings us out of sensory overload is taking away all the stimuli that is driving us crazy, right? That's how we lower the overload is over. We got to go under. So taking away all that stimulus we have to slow down we have to decrease everything that's coming in. Second, it lowers our natural impulsivity when we pause. So when we pause we're not making snap decisions like saying yesterday scream love, you know when it's right before bed when we shouldn't, or saying yes to that volunteer commitment when we don't have the capacity to do that things like impulse buys or snapping in our kids is because our brain did not catch up with our mouths. We didn't have time to process that before the answer came out or we just blurted the first thing that came to mind because we didn't have time to slowly process it because a lot of times we need extra processing time. So slowing down and pausing is what lowers our natural impulsivity. Next pausing allows us to see clearly recently I was working on a volunteer project and the leader ran through what he wanted After we go through the meeting, Am I alright? I take all these notes and I sit down to make the plan and realize, okay, that's not possible like this is not feasibly logistically possible in the time given to do this level of the project. And it's not until I paused to make the plan that I can see one, this isn't going to work this way. And two, what are some options that I could have instead? But in the moment in the meeting? I'm like, Yeah, sure, we'll figure that out. No, what I figured out is that it wasn't gonna work.
Patricia Sung 05:29
Fourth, pausing gives us space for gratitude, especially as a mom, especially when you have ADHD, we're so busy trying to do all the things that need to be done, that we don't ever stop to realize what we have already accomplished. Appreciation doesn't happen in the frenetic in the running around like a squirrel collecting nuts here, they're everywhere, in order to have gratitude and to appreciate what we have what we've done, we need space. Otherwise, we don't recognize those things, we don't see those things because we're so busy doing. And number five, sometimes we need a life pause, we need a season of slow when you take all those things that I mentioned in one through four, and apply them to like your whole life and like a season, not just in the moment, all of those things matter. Sometimes we need a season of pausing and slowing down. To lower our stress, we need a season to pause and make fewer decisions volunteer for less things. Sometimes we need a season to allow us to see clearly sometimes we need to pause for a season to see what we have and appreciate things and have gratitude for what we have accomplished and done. Sometimes it's not just in the moment, sometimes it's for a while. And in those seasons of pause. That is the time that allows us to be proactive instead of reactive.
Patricia Sung 06:53
The same thing in the moments of pause. They allow us to be proactive instead of reactive. Now I talk a lot about the three steps of being successful with ADHD, one learning by your brain to putting your oxygen mask on first and three asking for support and help. Well, the pause is a key ingredient to step two putting on your oxygen mask first, because in the panic, we'll start shoving masks on everyone else we won't put our own on, we require that pause to put our own mask on so that we can help everyone else so that we can make good decisions. And because we have busy brains, we have to choose to slow down. Now a lot of times because this is not our natural tendency, it feels really hard. Like why?
Patricia Sung 07:37
Why? I think it's combination of things, we have so much more stimuli than we had, like 100 years ago, or 50 years ago, even 30 years ago, there's so much more coming in to our brains into our space between technology, and a lot of moms working. And if you're not working, you're probably volunteering and doing a lot of stuff or you have some other extenuating circumstance, which is putting far more weight and responsibility on your plate. And life just has a lot more stimuli coming in creating that sensory overload than it did just a few years back. So it's not that we were made wrong, that we can't make this pause. But we were made differently. And we have to adapt to the environment, just like you think of like peregrine falcons. They're now city dwellers, that obviously they did not start out as city dwellers, they adapted to their environment. And now they function quite fine. In the city. We also have to adapt to tech to motherhood, everything that gets thrown at us, we don't have a choice, because the other option is failure. And that's the kind of people we are so we adapt to the new environment. How do you stay in a lower stress state when there's all this stimulus coming in? Things are overwhelming the sensory overload, you have more things to keep track of and more humans that rely on you. How do we adapt to this new way of motherhood? Because we are not meant to be stressed out all the time. We are not meant to go through life feeling like is this really yet we're meant to enjoy our lives, we are meant to enjoy our motherhood, but how? Because I know that this is such a huge part of feeling good in your life. And feeling like you can be successful and knowing you have the ability to succeed is it this is what we're going into depth on as the key point in the conference portion of our retreat. So we're going to meet on saturday together and dive into the pause. So that's the theme of our conference.
Patricia Sung 09:46
The theme of our retreat is the power of the pause. How do you create the pause in your life? How do you pause in the moment and pausing the season would just rest look like for you and I'm not talking about going to sleep the whole day. First thing I'm talking about when you're awake, what does rest look like for you? How can you implement the pause in your life? How can you implement rest into your life? How can you appreciate what you have already done? How can you like not be at the end of the day and be like, Oh, I didn't get anything done. I know you did a bazillion things. How do we focus in on what you did? Do what you have accomplished? How do you create whitespace in the different seasons of motherhood, that feel like they are the opposite of whitespace? They're just full, full stop. How do we still create space for rest, and pause and taking care of ourselves? In the different seasons of our life, you will leave this conference feeling refreshed from the exhaustion that has been weighing you down. Because you will have time to breathe, you will have time to focus on you. You'll have the community like real in person, real life people, real live women and moms who understand you and how your brain work, you will understand your brain better, you will have plenty of time to ask me as many questions.
Patricia Sung 11:07
One floating around your head, like Is this normal? What do I do about this, like, we're gonna dig into those things. And then on top of that, I'm taking away all the responsibility of planning and cooking and cleaning and organizing and timekeeping. All you have to do is you arrive and take care of the rest. I am taking you to eat delicious meals at some of Houston's best restaurants and I'm taking care of you, you will have lots of time to hang out and build community. But you'll also have plenty of time to rest and relax in your luxury hotel room, cuddle up in your robe and sit in your bed and the peace and quiet or if you don't want to sit in the solitude you can explore the area in downtown. This weekend is a time for you to work on you to focus on you. And the beauty is that all of these skills that you learn on how to take care of you and your ADHD. These are the skills the life skills that we're then teaching our kids teaching them how to take care of themselves. What does it look like for the grownups in their lives to take care of themselves? How can they do that as grownups and as kids?
Patricia Sung 12:16
So join me in Houston next month. It's October 7 through ninth here in Houston, Texas to figure out the power of the pause in your life to spend time in community with women like you to rest and relax and have no one kick you in the middle of the night while you're sleeping. And enjoy this time to pour into you and your well being in learning. How do you care for you? What does that look like for you? So join me at Patricia sung.com forward slash ADHD dash mom dash retreat to reserve your ticket. That's Patricia sung.com forward slash ADHD dash mom dash retreat and I will see you in just a few weeks successful. For more resources, classes and community head over to my website motherhood in adhd.com