Do you believe that motherhood equals exhaustion? In today’s episode we’re going to talk about your body’s natural rhythms. When you start working with these rhythms, you can optimize your energy levels during the day and optimize your sleep at night. If you’d like to learn natural ways to manage your energy aside from caffeine this episode is for you…
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
Connect With Toni Hench on IG @tonihench
Learn More about working with Toni Hench
Submit Screenshots of Simply Freeing Podcast Reviews to Jackie@whole9family.com
This Episode Discusses:
4 foundational ways to optimize your energy and sleep.
How to train yourself to work with your body’s natural energy rhythms and optimize your alertness in the morning.
A new way to think about exercise
How caffeine might be suppressing your body’s natural energy levels.
How to breathe in a way that calms you down or gives you that boost of energy you need to get through a task.
DON’T HAVE TIME TO LISTEN? HERE’S THE EPISODE ALL TYPED OUT:
Today’s episode is the first part in a 2 part series with Toni Hench, an energy coach for moms. Today we talked about 4 ways to manage your energy naturally. I’m excited for you to hear it…
Lets face it…Being a homeschooling mom who also works from home can be pure chaos! As you’ve probably already noticed, despite the occasional laugh track, life isn’t a sitcom and everyday struggles are rarely resolved in 30 minutes with commercial breaks to keep your sanity in check so the right strategies and mindset are vital for becoming more productive and less overwhelmed with all the things life throws at us. Enter the Simply Freeing Podcast…Episodes for the highly passionate, busy work at home, homeschooling mama ready to break away from cultural norms and raise life long learners. So let kick stress to the curb, throw chaos out the door and order in some peace and simplicity…with a cup of coffee, or 3.
Hi Toni! Thanks for coming on the show today! Tell us about yourself and what you do!
Yes! I’m an energy coach for moms. As a mom, I was working at the time outside of the home as a teacher and I noticed that there was always this struggle around energy. Everyone would say, “Oh you're gonna be so tired. It is what it is.” And I realize that we just kind of created this mindset that motherhood equals exhaustion and there's a lot of stuff that goes on in our day but the story where I really decided it had to change was, I was looking at at home at the time and the realtor was playing with my daughter and she just made this kind of off the cuff comment that she wished she remembered her kids when they were little and she said “I just look back at photos and I was so tired. I don't even remember what was going on in that photo. I don't remember being there.” That kind of hit my heart so hard. I actually went to the car and cried and I was like this can't be the way that we're going through motherhood. Sometimes it's the newborn stage where you're super super exhausted and sometimes it's just at that stage where you just kind of feel like you're trying to get through the day instead of enjoying the day. You're just trying to make it through the day. With my clients I realize that it could be just some very simple shifts in how we set up our day to make our day work with the way that our brain and our body is supposed to work instead of the normal like 9 to 5 kind of schedule. How we get up really doesn't jive with our biology and at the time I was at anatomy teacher and I was like the way I'm doing this doesn't really make sense for how our brain and our body are supposed to work.
That makes perfect sense and I can kind of relate to that. I feel like there's so much of the beginning days of motherhood that I actually don't remember and I talk about this a lot with my husband that my memories just aren't there. I think it was because I was so overwhelmed trying to do too much. I always relate energy levels to food and I know that's part of it but I'd like to hear different reasons why energy levels might be down and how to manage it better too 'cause I think that there's just a full package you have to look at not just one piece and I feel like I focus a lot on health, which I know is important especially the foods that you eat but there's gotta be more.
Yeah there's so much more! The way that our brains and our bodies are set up is that we use a lot of external input to set our energy rhythms. We were talking about this before we hopped on here…We have two main ones that are going throughout the day and the first one is your circadian rhythm and that's just your day night rhythm kind of tells your body even if you were you know completely dark room or you didn't have a clock your body would still know like I'm hungry at a certain time or I start to get tired at a certain time because it has its own internal timing system.
You also have a little bit shorter of a system called an ultradian rhythm. This rhythm is about 90 minutes to 2 hours a day and it goes through a cycle…You'll wake up and that starts your first ultradian rhythm. As you go throughout the day they kind of vary in lengths depending on what you're doing, depending on you individually. But when we start to work with these rhythms and we start to give ourselves the right input when we wake up to tell ourselves it's morning, to optimize that energy level, we start to do this in the evening so we can maximize our sleep.
So one of the things that I always tell my clients is I talk about the foundational four. The first one is light. Most people don't realize that light is your body's most basic energy input. When it’s dark your body shuts down that energy level and you get tired so much quicker. I think we all feel this during daylight savings time. A lot of us do this in our morning. Especially as moms we’re trying to be quiet in the morning and won't turn on that many lights but this low level light will kind of delay our energy and all of the right chemicals and hormone releases so that we are carrying that kind of groggy sleep inertia throughout your day. So you feel like your morning starts really slowly and it takes a lot of energy to get going so you're starting feeling that further into your day.
Is there any specific type of light that is best? I know I like to have the sun come through the window so I have all the shades pulled up but if you live in a house that's more dark and you don't really get much sun in the window in the morning is there any type of light that you could purchase that would help?
Yes and this one I always say is huge with you know like when you're feeding the baby at night or stuff like that. You can get the lowest energy light possible and those are your red and orange lights and you can even get like blue light filtered for the evening. And then in the morning you want those daylight bulbs or those blue and yellow bulbs. So we hear a lot about like blue light. Maybe you've heard about blue light is bad for you and that's halfway true. It's that blue light about three to four hours before bedtime is bad for you but you need it in the morning to actually set and optimize that circadian rhythm and get you all awake and alert.
That's interesting!
You want natural daylight bulbs in your home and you want them to be overhead so if you think about looking at a sunrise or the sun during the day, it's overhead and so your eyes actually measure the angle of where the sun is in reference to you so when you have that bright overhead light…you'll see this like in a lot of classrooms. They've started to get better at lighting in classrooms. We actually even had a lighting technician come in. You'll see it in a lot of workplaces because we've found that it has so much to do with productivity. If you have those bright overhead lights during the morning and then as it gets toward the evening, you want to switch to those red and orange lights and you want those to be below high level, so like the lamps and the things that wouldn’t be directly overhead.
That's really interesting! Do you think that it's better 'cause I've heard of families especially families that live on a farm they like to go to bed when the sun goes down and they like to wake up right when the sun rises and I just find that very hard for our family to do 'cause it doesn't come natural to us. We tend to be more night owls. Is that the best way you think to keep your energy up by really going to bed with the sun going down?
As much as you can. I think that like a lot of our modern schedules are kind of like that and everyone energy is different. You kinda have to test it because there are some people who have different chronotypes. So there are people who are night owls and those who are better in the morning. I think when you work with whatever is optimal with you, it's really just timing that light as best possible. So if you wake up and the sun is already up, if you can get out and view that or at least pull the shades up and turn on some bright overhead lights that would would optimize you schedule. So what I teach is more working with that and some people will say, yes you've got to get up with the sun. Yes you’d better go to bed when it goes down but I feel like that really doesn't work for a lot of our schedules and quite honestly it's not going to work for every person because energy rhythms are individual to you.
But if you want to train yourself to be able to get up earlier, let's say you're going back to a job or even, this works really well with kids, is timing that morning light. I do this with my daughter…right when she gets up and then right before nap time, we go out on a walk or run in a bright lit area. That will really time your sleep because your body is paying attention to when you have that first light input and how intense that light input is. That controls your release of cortisol which we think of it as a stress hormone but it's actually, in the right quantities it’s an energy and alertness hormone. And then melatonin, which helps your body rest and go to sleep.
And did you say that the morning you takes a couple of hours for you to fully regulate the fact that it's morning after you wake up?
When you first see light it takes about 90 minutes. How long it takes you to start to feeling energized and alert is a lot dependant on that first light you see. First you get a little pulse of cortisol and that shuts off your body's production of melatonin so when you were sleeping you had this hormone melatonin keeping you asleep and slowing down your brain waves slowing down your body functions but that pulse of cortisol fully shuts that off and we call that like sleep inertia. I think we've all, especially as moms, felt that like when you're just awake but you're just not functioning…you're trying to get there but you're not alert. You don't feel energized and ready to go for the day. When you get that full light support it will shut down that melatonin and break your brain waves out of that like sleep state into a fully functioning awake state and that's when you start that first ultradian rhythm so it's really important to track this so that you know…am spending the first two hours of my morning barely functioning? There are some tweaks that you can make, even just with the light.
Another foundation is movement…so the timing of movement when you do your first movement if you can do a little bit in the morning and I say movement instead of exercise 'cause we're kind of trained to think that like exercises this event like or going to the gym or putting on a workout DVD. It doesn't need to be an event. It can be you know I'm just like turning on a song and getting ready like and I'm making sure that I'm really moving my body with that song as I'm getting ready in the morning. Or just you know stretching really quick or maybe you jog up and down the stairs 10 times, just something that's putting your heart rate up and letting your body know, I'm awake now. I'm moving. That will also start to sync all of your other energy rhythms.
This is really interesting 'cause I think most of us tend to go to the caffeine in the morning and that's going to get our energy up so this is like a whole new way of thinking. I've heard that morning exercises are good and make sure the sun is coming through your window in the morning but I just feel like as a society, we're very caffeinated and that's really all we care about! That’s just what we turn to in order to wake up in the morning and that's just what gets us going. It makes me wonder if maybe we can delay the caffeine a little bit longer we might actually see our energy levels come up naturally before we even get a cup of coffee in the morning or tea or whatever.
That is so because actually getting that happen in the morning suppresses our natural cortisol production and our natural energy rhythms. Caffeine pulls up the adrenaline side so we get more of the energy burst from there suppressing the other more natural rhythms so if you can delay your caffeine even like an hour or two into your day but when you start to delay that just a little bit, it's really helpful to let those energy rhythms come up. One of the things that people don't realize is that actually hydration is really important for that so when you get up in the morning if you can hydrate that will be really helpful for your energy levels even if you are doing the caffeine, sometimes hydration will actually help you not need that caffeine and that's how I was able to bring that caffeine down. I actually don't even start my morning with caffeine anymore. It took me about three years but it really is crazy that when you you stop with that your body's natural energy rhythms take over. Anything can really maximize that.
This is so helpful! Is there anything else that can help?
Light, movement and hydration you can add those to your morning like super easy and then the last one people don't realize is deep breathing because oxygenation and our breath rates change when we sleep. As our energy changes you'll notice like you're starting to get tired, you're probably breathing really shallow, you’ll probably even notice like your shoulders will start to hunch, w hen you're really calm, you breathe at different levels and because oxygen is so important to our brains, our brains tune in really quickly to our breathing changes so a simple thing you can do in the morning and I know this is crazy…my clients look at me like I'm crazy but you can switch out a cup of coffee with five minutes of breathing, it will change your energy levels that much. So there's so much that goes into this but I start off with doing a longer inhale and a short exhale like really quick, that will be more energizing and then like a longer exhale on the out and shorter inhale will be more calming. You can use these throughout your day to regulate your energy levels. I'll do them at the end of a productivity session. I start to feel my energy kind of like dip and I'm like no I need to like finish this and then I will just start to take those breasts and it will kind of give you that last little bit of energy to to get you through. When you wake up in the morning breathing is a great way to start your day and it's a great way to calm down if you have trouble sleeping.
This is really interesting 'cause like I said before all of these things I've heard of in bits and pieces but I haven’t heard it put together in this way. This makes me feel like I can actually have other go to things that will really really help. I feel like I've just kind of pushed them aside as yeah those are extras that may help but just give me all the caffeine!
I feel like it's over complicated a lot of times and I started reading about this and I was like a science nerd and I love it and I understood all of it as anatomy teacher but as a new mom you're like I don't need the textbook, I just need the tool! What I try to do as an energy coach is to just break it down into easy tools you can put into your day because I think when we work with that it's so important to just understand how your brain and your body are set up because then you're working with them instead of against them and quite often the caffeine and we’ve all felt it…it works for like a tiny little bit and then you crash because it's really working against your energy rhythm at that point the way we're using it. That’s kind of my driving force is that I want to break it all down into tools and use the science so that you can really enjoy your day and allow you to be present with your littles.
Yes! That's so true and it's so sad just the way we are so busy and not really there like I mentioned before and it's very sad and it's important for us to be present for them.
Thank you thank you thank you to those of you that took the time out of your day to write a review for this podcast. It helps me get this podcast in front of more moms! I’m running a giveaway for the month of march 2022. If you take the time out of your day to write a review here on apple podcasts, please email me a screenshot of it at Jackie@whole9family.com and you’ll be entered to win a Target gift card. I truly appreciate you and hope you are enjoying this podcast as much as I enjoy recording them for you.