Episode 104: Why "Survival Mode" Is Costing You More Than You Think (And What to Do Instead)

ITUNES | SPOTIFY

If you've caught yourself saying "I'm just in survival mode until June" — this episode is for you. We're digging into why survival mode isn't just uncomfortable, it's a strategy with real costs to your health, relationships, and sanity. And it's one most of us fall into without even realizing it.

The busyness this time of year is real — the calendar conflicts, the invisible labor, the mental load of holding it all together. But there's a big difference between being reactively busy and intentionally busy, and this episode walks you through exactly how to make that shift before Maycember swallows you whole.

You'll walk away knowing why a Maycember audit is the first step to getting ahead of it, how to protect your real priorities, and how to give yourself permission to say no without the guilt spiral. And if you want to build your actual game plan together, the Maycember Made Easy workshop is happening April 22nd — grab your spot at themothernurture.com/maycember.

Links and resources mentioned in this episode:

•  Get your ticket to the Maycember Made Easy planning workshop on Apr. 22

• + Click here to read the full episode transcript

  You are listening to the Life Coach for Working Moms podcast, the show where we are talking about what it actually takes to make life work as a working mom. I'm your host, Katelyn Denning, a full time working mom of three and a certified life and executive coach. I'm so glad you're here and I hope you enjoy this week's episode.   Hey, welcome back to another episode of the podcast. This is episode 104, . We're gonna talk about being in survival mode. I've been hearing this so much lately. We are mid-April. It is technically not May yet, but if your schedule's anything like mine that may, December. Chaos is creeping earlier and earlier each year. In fact, just this morning, a text went out to a group of girlfriends about a last minute invite for next weekend, and I was the first to respond. We are already booked back to back that whole day, and it was like I opened the floodgates and everyone else just replied after, you know, I'm sorry, we've got this, or we're already booked and we have all these things happening. We can see it. The calendar is filling up , and yet I'm also hearing so many women walk around. Wearing almost a badge of honor about how busy things are and being in survival mode. It's like an identity that so many of you take on this time of year. Oh, I'm just in survival mode until June. Oh, we're just surviving. We're just getting through right? One day at a time. We just gotta survive this week. Just gotta survive this weekend. Just gotta survive this month. Does that sound familiar to any of you? Well, I wanna talk about why that phrase. In turn that strategy, because it is a strategy you might be thinking, no, no. A strategy is something that you actively choose and you implement. But there is choice here to be in survival mode to just get through it. So I wanna talk about why that strategy is costing you more than you think. So I'm curious if you have told yourself or said these phrases out loud at all, especially as we come into this time of year. What about the thought? It's only a few weeks. I can push through it, may is technically four weeks long from now until the end of the school year. My kids are out at the very end of May. I know some of you go into June. It is, let's see, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. It's seven weeks. I don't know. As I count out seven weeks, I'm like, that's a really long time. But, but for so many of you we're just thinking, oh, it's just a few weeks. I can push through it and yes. You absolutely can. I have been there. I know you have too. You can push through it, but what are the consequences for what's happening at work, your work performance, what's happening in terms of how you relate or connect with your kids or your partner, your friendships? Certainly those sit on the back burner during a season like this. What about your health? I can already feel the nudge to let go of my daily steps or my workouts because I'm tired, or we have a full weekend, or I'm not sure how to squeeze it in. And again, it's just a few weeks, or at least that's what we tell ourselves. But what is the cost that will happen over those few weeks, or actually those seven weeks? What about this thought? Everyone is busy. That's just how it is. That's just what May is. That is why we call it December, and yes, it is busy this time of year. That is real. A hundred percent, absolutely. But there is a difference between being reactively busy and being intentionally busy. Intentionally busy is when you go in with your eyes wide open. You understand what's coming. You're not surprised by it. Reactively busy is still busy, but it feels so different. It has that frenetic energy to it. It's often accompanied by anxiety, anxiousness, and overwhelm. Because we are surprised by so many things, or we knew about them, but then we forgot and now we're surprised again, so yes, everyone is busy. That's what this season is true, and not all of us, are the same kind of busy. Then this third phrase, I. Hear this a lot year after year, and it is this idea that I will just handle things as they come. I'm good at multitasking. I'm actually good in high pressure last minute situations, I procrastinate regularly. Maybe you're thinking that, oh, I'm already good at, you know, getting things done right before the deadline, and so again, I know you can handle that. If you have proof of that in the past, you certainly know that you can as well. And it is a strategy, , a choice that you maybe unintentionally or unconsciously are making when you have a season like this one where there are 47 micro decisions that you're making each day. When weekends do have the potential to be triple booked when there are so many moving pieces. Handling things as they come is a recipe for a meltdown. And what does that cost all of the other areas of your life. If all of your time and energy is going toward just handling things as they come, there is no margin, no white space, no room for anything else. There is always a cost, often a hidden cost until we're in the middle of it to winging it. There's decision fatigue, which maybe you. Get through all of the big more meaningful or impactful decisions, and then you're sitting, you know, in front of a bag of chips at the end of the night, or you're adding more things to cart, or you are accidentally hitting reply all on that email instead of just sending it to the one person, right? Those are symptoms of decision fatigue, overspending out of convenience. Saying yes to things that you didn't actually want to do. But , when you're in the moment handling things as they come, we're not often discerning and we're definitely not discerning when we've already made 30 decisions. And what ends up happening or what I see happen so often at the end of these busy seasons like Maycember, is this sort of slow burn of resentment. Maybe it's resentment toward a partner if they're not carrying the mental load that you are. Maybe it's resentment toward the extracurriculars that usually are so happy for your kid to participate in, but we start to resent the coaches , for the schedule, or the teachers for the extra assignments we resent the school and all of the things that they think are so fun to put into the end of the month. We resent our calendar, we resent our work, we resent the deadlines. We just start to resent all sorts of things. And again, it's a slow burn until we get to the end of the season and wow, are we angry at a lot of things? So sure it's only a few weeks you could push through. Yes. Everyone is busy. That's just what this is. And sure, you can handle things as they come if you want. But let's just remember before you choose any of those as a strategy for this season. Let's just remember everything that you are holding during Maycember. You don't just have your work calendar, the meetings, the deadlines, the work that needs to get done. You have the family calendar that includes all of those extracurriculars and field day, and the field trips and the celebrations. Neither calendar consults. The other one, that's what's so hard about this time of year work. Doesn't care about the family calendar, and family calendar doesn't care about what's going on at work, and yet they both have to move forward and we have to hold them both. We are the ones doing the cross checking to find where the overlap is. And it's a lot of logistical work, pre-planning decisions in advance coordination, figuring out what fits and how it's going to fit. And then just like we're feeling this. Energy surge in spring with more social invitations, more extracurricular things on the calendar. We also are feeling that at work professionally. I don't know how things are going for you and for your team and your work, but for so many of my clients and so many listeners and the working moms that I'm talking to, there is a lot going on this time of year. We're starting to feel that the year is well underway, and so how are we doing toward those goals? How are we doing as we're coming into, or driving toward the end of the second quarter, which is the halfway point of the year? Oh, let's go get some new clients. Let's, update this new process. We have AI coming into everything, which is taking up a lot of mental bandwidth for. For so many of you not just learning new tools and how to implement those and what the rules of engagement are, how to ethically use these tools, but there's also this underlying question and uncertainty of how is this going to impact my work? And so you're navigating all of that while also driving everybody everywhere and sending in potluck items and signing forms and managing both sides that don't stop. There's of course the invisible labor and the mental load that happens when you are anticipating so much of this, you're managing big emotions. Is anybody else feeling some big emotions at home with kids? , the seasonal shifts can impact us all. You are holding not just the deadlines and the to-dos that everyone else can see, but all of the things that no one can see . You are the one thinking about all of that. Just this weekend, my husband was stomping up the stairs with a big case of toilet paper and he was like, how are there no extra rolls of toilet paper in any of the bathrooms? I'm like, well, there's so much to manage. The toilet paper was just one thing. Too many, and it fell off the list. Thank goodness we had a backup stock in the basement. Right? So stock up on toilet paper and all of those things. 'cause the last thing you wanna do is be running out of the basics while you're in the thick of this. And when we think about, again, both worlds moving forward at this breakneck speed right now, work and home life, there is a very specific tension that happens, especially for working parents. There are so many conflicts, this time of year. I am seeing them already and it feels like there is no good answer. I can leave work and sacrifice the progress there or have to work into the evening late at night or over the weekend, and instead go to the school thing, or I can miss out on the school thing because. Work has this big deadline or it feels really important there, but I'm gonna feel guilty because I can't be there for my kid. I'm grappling with this right now. There's a field trip coming up in a couple of weeks. I can, and I have in the past signed up to be a chaperone. And I have so much going on right now professionally that I know to go in and to volunteer is signing myself up for multiple late nights of work and probably a weekend session as well. You are not alone if you are feeling that as well. So what does it look like to get ahead of this? What does it look like to choose intentionally busy over reactively busy. Well, just like I would prescribe for any client, whether you're working with me one-on-one or in my group, beyond balance, we would start with a Maycember audit. So can you set aside just a little bit of time, 10, 15 minutes, pull out your calendar. Map out everything before it starts, even if it's already feeling like it's starting. Think back to your experience from years past. Pull out any calendars that you have access to. Think about what's coming up at school testing and field trips and celebrations. What activities are going on, what maybe birthdays or holidays are coming up in this season. What's on your work calendar? What did the logistics of all of this look like? The transitions, the. Chauffeuring the kids around what's coming around the corner, even with your summer camps, that transition will be right on the heels of Maycember for so many of us. And if you're tired from doing all of the things in managing all of the calendars, it would be so great for your future self to know what's coming around the corner. Now, the reason this audit works so well. Because your brain can stop holding everything. It can stop looping or spinning around how busy this time of year is and how will we remember it all and get to all of the places that we need to get to when it's on paper or digitally in front of you. When you can see it clearly, you can actually think more logically about it. You can answer the questions of how will this fit? What are we going to do? What do I need to do now in advance? , the goal isn't to eliminate the busy. I cannot do that for you. I would need control of some much bigger systems to be able to help you with that, but the goal is to see it coming. To know what's coming so you can make decisions in advance instead of reactively in the moment or the night before or the morning of when decision fatigue is already setting in. If you listen to last week's episode, you know that I have a planning workshop coming up all about Maycember, and this audit is something that we are going to do together. It's outlined step by step for you in the workbook that we're going to walk through. We're gonna go through all of the categories that I've thought of. I will certainly be leaning on the group to help crowdsource and brainstorm and make sure that there's nothing else that we're forgetting. The goal is for nothing to slip through the cracks for you to have full visibility into what is coming. Now once you have everything on this list, when you are seeing all of the things that are coming, it is important to note that not everything on the list is equally important. But , if you just wanna survive it, if you just wanna figure it out as you go, when you are in that survival mode, it is harder to discern what is more important and what is not. Because in those moments when you're already in a heightened. Overwhelmed, anxious state. Your nervous system is feeling a little bit hijacked by everything that's coming at you. All of the things on that list feel urgent. They all feel important, and it is so hard to get that perspective of what is truly a non-negotiable versus what is just a nice to do. So that is another step in this whole process is for yourself going into the season to define what's a non-negotiable, what's a nice to do or a want to do? If we have the capacity, if we have the energy and the space, and what are the obligations that actually are not serving you. And how do we give ourselves the permission to let go of those? What does saying no actually sound like? What does that look like? Saying no in May, especially in Maycember. It's not a failing. This does not mean you care any less. Saying no is protecting your capacity to show up for the things that. That do matter and that you've decided from a more regulated place before you're in the thick of Maycember, that these are non-negotiable for me or for my family. It can be hard, I know to say no. There's the guilt that comes up. The social pressure from others. We see everybody else doing it or what will they think, right? What does the teacher think of me if I don't send in a good enough gift for teacher appreciation day? It's real. I get it. I grapple with it myself, and I still allow myself and support myself to say no where I know it's going to make a difference. So , we are gonna walk through all of this, not just the audit and putting things on the calendar and getting your to-do list in order so you can start chipping away at it now before you're in the middle of it, but also this decision making framework so that you can more confidently decide. What is important? What is just nice to have and what is something that you could let go of? And then how to gracefully, tactfully opt out of those things that you know would just tip you over the edge and. Put you into that reactive state. So the shift that I wish for each of you as we head into Maycember, is to not just survive it, to not wing it, to not just get through it and figure it out as you go, but to go in with a strategy. To go in with your eyes wide open and your list of priorities already in order. The workshop, Maycember Made Easy is happening on April 22nd. This is where we will actually build your plan together. It's 90 minutes of focused time. Which is so hard to set aside when you don't have that accountability. Trust me, it's why I do this with all of you. I need it just as much. It's a step-by-step workbook and you are gonna walk away with your own Maycember game plan. Everything you need to know is in the show notes of this episode, but you can also head right to themothernurture.com/maycember, all one word. M-A-Y-C-E-M-B-E-R. I really hope to see you there. It's gonna be so much fun and it's going to be so, so helpful for you as you head into and continue into this. Season that rivals December for most working parents. So until the next episode, I hope that you visit that link. Grab your ticket, and I will talk to you soon. Take care. Thank you for listening and as always, for being a part of this working mom community. You can find everything related to this episode in the show notes at themothernurture.com/podcast, you can also find information about how I support working moms just like you through one-on-one, and group coaching, as well as access a number of resources and articles all on my website at themothernurture.com. I will see you again next week for another episode of the podcast.

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