Welcome. To midlife with Brooke, I am your host, Brooke Oniki. I am a disciple of Jesus Christ, a wife, a mother, a grandma, and a certified life coach. On this podcast, we talk about all things mothering, health and emotional wellbeing, and I share practical tools and examples for my life and from the lives of my clients to help you navigate this season of midlife. Today I want to talk about something that quietly drives so much of our stress, our discouragement, and even our disconnection in our relationships, and that is all or nothing thinking. This is when our brains offer us two options and only two options. It tells us things like it's either this or it's that. It's either good or it's bad, it's working, or it's a failure. And here is the problem. Real life doesn't actually live in those two places. Real life lives somewhere in the middle. Now this kind of thinking isn't because anything's gone wrong with you. This is not a midlife problem. It's a human brain problem. Our brains like things to be simple. They like clear categories. they like to feel certain. So they offer us things that are very clean and also very extreme, but those options often don't actually serve us They create pressure and discouragement and confusion. So I wanna walk through what it looks like in real life, and as I do just notice, where does your brain tend to go? Let's look at parenting adult children. One side might be, I always help my kids. I'm always available. I always say yes. I always show up no matter what. Underneath that can often be a little bit of fear. Fear of damaging the relationship, fear of losing connection, On the other side is the extreme of I never help my kids. I need boundaries. I am done with overgiving. I don't wanna help anymore. I don't babysit. I don't pay for things. Right? Where we have another extreme, but neither of these actually works very well. The middle sounds more like I help my kids sometimes in ways that feel aligned. I consider their needs, and I also consider mine. Sometimes I babysit when I feel like I have the energy and the capacity to do that, and sometimes I say no when I don't feel like I can or I actually want to. So I learn to say yes sometimes and no sometimes. Here's another one. This happens to me sometimes mothers will tell me, I felt like I did such a good job with my kids, and now as their kids have grown up and they're making some decisions that they don't really like, then they tell me things like, I don't know, maybe I should have never had kids. Right? One extreme is like, I'm doing so well, and the other is like, I should never have done this. These are very different thoughts and they're both extreme and neither one of them gives you a grounded, honest view of your experience. The middle ground sounds like this. There are some things that I've done really well and there are some things that I'm still learning. I am a human mother raising human children. Sometimes it looks like this with marriage. When we get married, we might think we are so compatible. We have everything in common. He meets my every need. And then when that isn't happening, we think, oh, we are completely incompatible. How did I ever end up marrying this person? This isn't working. We're too different. And again, the truth is usually somewhere in the middle. We have areas that we connect on easily, and there are areas that require more effort and understanding. This is an easy one to do with food. On one side, we tell ourselves, I'm going to eat perfectly, no sugar, no flour. Everything is dialed in, and then something happens and we swing to the other side and we say, forget it. I'm just gonna eat whatever I want. The middle sounds like I pay attention to what my body needs. I eat in a way that supports me most of the time without needing to be perfect. I love this example from Emily Watts. She's an author. She wrote a book called Being the Mom, and in it she tells a story about when her son was in kindergarten and she was assigned to bring something that represented 12 drummers drumming for a Christmas party for the kindergartners. So she decided the night before, I'm gonna go all in, and she decided to make gingerbread. Cookie drums, and she stayed up late into the night crafting a pattern and they were bigger than she thought they were gonna be. And then of course when they baked, they didn't look as much like drums and she realized that she'd spent all of this time and Hadn't really gotten the product that she had envisioned in her mind. And she realized in the morning, you know, I could have gotten hostess, ding dongs and given each kid a couple of toothpicks, and That would've represented drummers drumming just as well. The kids would've had the same experience. The connection would've been the same, but the effort would've been completely different. So the difference between having the perfect treat and deciding, I'm not gonna volunteer 'cause I don't have time to make the perfect treat, right? Somewhere in the middle is what we wanna look for. this is such a perfect example of how our brains go to extremes. We think we have to do something amazing or it's not worth doing it all. It has to be perfect or why even try? But what was she really trying to create? She was trying to contribute. She was trying to create a connection with these little kids or with her own child, and the level of effort didn't actually determine the value of that experience. So often we confuse effort with value. We think more time, more energy, more sacrifice means something, matters more. That's not actually true. Sometimes the most aligned choice, the most grounded choice is just something simple. Simple is good enough, and that's in the middle. This is the pattern our brains offer extremes, and then we tend to swing between them. The one thing I want you to notice is what happens in your body when you're an all or nothing thinking. There's often urgency. There's often tightness or pressure or discouragement, sometimes even shutdown. That's your nervous system getting activated. And when your nervous system is activated, your brain looks for simple solutions, either I gotta do it exactly right, or I gotta get outta here. This is too hard, it's too scary. people aren't pleased with me, right? when your nervous system is activated, That's when all or nothing thinking gets louder. If, my efforts weren't received well, I should never have done it at all. We go from one extreme to the other. So instead of trying to force better thoughts right away, I want you first to notice, am I safe? Do I feel safe? And if I don't feel safe, then I want to gently support my body. I wanna slow my breathing, soften my shoulders, give myself a minute. Maybe I need to take a walk around the block. Because when your body feels more settled, your brain has access to more flexible thinking, more nuanced thinking, more middle ground thinking. I want to bring you back to this idea of the continuum. All or nothing thinking puts you on the ends, but your life actually happens in between. So when you notice your brain offering extremes, you can ask what might be true in the middle. What am I not seeing? Because I'm focused on the extremes. When I think to myself, I'm not compatible with this child, or I'm not compatible with this spouse, or I'm not compatible with this person I'm working with at church, right? We might feel like, oh, I've gotta get out of this situation, but if I can calm myself down, I can bring myself back into the middle. Sometimes the middle isn't as clean. It requires you to think and to tolerate a little uncertainty and to be more flexible with the behaviors of others. But it also is where peace lives. This is where you can stop swinging from overgiving to shutting down. From trying to do everything perfect, to giving up from feeling amazing, to feeling like a failure, and instead, you can become steady, you can become someone who can hold both things at the same time. If my husband comes home and he's grumpy, I can hold that without thinking, oh, we're not compatible, or, he's always mad at me, or, this is so hard, right? I can just allow for him to have his own feelings and not get extreme in my feelings. You can be growing and still be enough. You can care without losing yourself. You can show up without overextending. This week, I want you to notice where is your brain offering you only two options. And gently ask yourself, what might the middle look like here? It's not perfect, it's not extreme. Just a little more honest, a little more grounded, a little more you.