Welcome back to Become a Calm Mama. I'm your host, I'm Darlene Childress.

I'm a life and parenting coach, and today on the episode on

the podcast, I am going to introduce you to

a new parenting tool. In many ways, it's a

new and improved parenting tool. It's an

update to the pause break, which is the

main tool I have taught throughout the podcast,

throughout many years of how to get calm.

And the pause break has been a wonderful

tool. It's great, I love it. I've taught it, taught it many, many times

and lots of you have learned it and done it and you're like, oh my

God, it works. It's the primary thing in the Stop Yelling Cheat Sheet.

And the pause break is a step-by-step guide

to stopping when you find yourself yelling at your kids

or overwhelmed or showing up as the parent you don't wanna be.

Delaying the conversation, delaying

consequences with your kid, and then resetting your nervous

system. So the tool has been 3 steps:

pause, delay, and reset. And as I've been

working on the book that I'm writing on raising an emotionally healthy

kid, I am really being

so careful and really wanting to be— to

give complete tools to parents in

the most simple, effective, practical,

accessible way that I can. So I've been sitting

with the pause break, with the connection tool, with the limit

setting formula, with the correction conversation, all the parts

of the connected parenting process, right? Calm, connect,

limit, set, correct. And I'm looking at each of those

pillars of the connected parenting process and thinking,

Okay, if I wanna help a parent get calm, what are

the most essential things that they need and how can

I give them a tool, a mindset tool essentially, to

access that calm? Or with the

connection tool, how do I give you one tool that helps you

connect with your kids and emotionally coach them? How do I give you one

tool to set limits and one tool to

do consequences or correction with your kids. I wanna make

parenting practical, easy, accessible, all of those things.

So I've been sitting with the pause break and thinking about how

it relates to calm, and I recognized that it was

an incomplete tool, that in many ways I

have this wonderful thing, pause, delay, reset,

but it doesn't really tell you what to do.

Exactly. So I sat with the word calm and I thought

a lot about that word, and I decided

to make the word calm an

acronym, a step-by-step

guide to calming yourself, and updating

the pause break and calling it the calm break, and giving

you really easy-to-remember things to do that start

with the letter C. C-A-L-M.

So the calm break is the new pause break,

and I think you're gonna love it. So I'm gonna explain it to you on

this episode, and then I'll probably talk about each of these

things in depth over the next few weeks or months or whatever. But I wanted

to give you the concept right away as I step back

from, you know, the long break as I've been writing the book and giving

you just this Wonderful tool. I'm so excited about

it. So, okay, it's this 4 parts, right? CALM is 4

letters, C-A-L-M. The first is C. So

C is catch yourself, A is align,

L is label, and M is

move. So I'm going to break those down for you

in this episode, but I want to just think for a second.

C is catch yourself. So you are

noticing that you are triggered, or you are

noticing that your nervous system is dysregulated. You

are becoming aware. So that C is catch yourself

and pause. So I've always had a

part of the pause break that was like stop or whatever, but this is really

catching yourself, using that letter C to catch yourself.

If you love the word check-in, you can also use that. I'm

gonna use catch yourself and pause. So C is catch yourself.

A is align. So I love this

because you are gonna align with your values and with your

goals of becoming a calm parent. And if you are not

aligned, you're going to catch yourself and realign with your

own goals. And in the align

part of the calm break, that's when you communicate to

your kids that you're not in alignment, you're

not showing up as the parent you wanna be. So you will

say something very small to your children and say, you know

what? I'm getting upset right now and I'm gonna take a calm break. I

don't wanna yell at you anymore. And so I'm going to take a calm break.

Or you could just say break if that feels okay for you, whatever you wanna,

however you wanna use it with your family. But this align is really about

you kind of getting back online and

aligning your nervous system with goals. It's like

part of the awareness piece is I'm not showing up as the parent

I want to be, and I want to realign and tell my children that

I'm taking a pause break. The L is label. I

wanted to call it label and love, but it's kind of too

cheesy. But essentially, I want you to label

your thoughts and feelings. I want you to narrate

and name, which is part of the connection tool. I want you to

narrate for yourself what you're thinking and what's going

on and name those feelings. So labeling

your own thoughts and feelings, and I want you to do that with love and

kindness. This is the piece where self-compassion comes in.

This is the piece where you get to really connect

with your own heart and your own overwhelm and your

own nervous system and give yourself some love, right? So we have

to label how we are thinking and how we are

feeling and give ourselves a little bit of soothing there for

that. Like, yeah, girl, I hear you. So it's a part of that self-talk

is the labeling with love. And then move

is move your body, move your mind. So in the old pause

break, I really only had the word reset,

and it was not— it wasn't enough information

for you to really understand. You know, you're supposed to reset your nervous system, But

I want to give you the letter M for move your body,

move your mind. So those are moving your body is

how you regulate your nervous system. It is the best way to move

stress juice through your unregulated, your

dysregulated nervous system is by channeling that with

an intentional movement. It can be super silly. And I have a lot of different

strategies in that Stop Yelling Cheat Sheet. So you can get

that on the website under the resources page. There's also another

resource on that resource page that is called

20 Ways to Reset Your Stress Response, and that one

is also just a lot of different tools and grounding techniques

for you as the parent to kind of find your own

way that you reset your nervous system. And I've taught that

many times on the podcast, you know, move your Move your body, move your body,

move your body. And then moving your mind is kind of moving from

that negative thought, that negative feeling. We're not bypassing it.

We're not ignoring our feelings. We're acknowledging them. We're aligning

and going, okay, this is how I'm feeling, but how do I want to feel?

What thoughts will get me there? How can I move

this moment forward with some positive energy?

And that is going to be moving your mindset. Moving

the way you're thinking so that you can move the way you're feeling

and get to a better state of mind. So that's the

calm break, you guys. It's catch yourself, align,

label, move. Isn't it great? I really think if

you kind of practice the letters, you'll go

through the pause break or the calm break in a way that you'll

understand what you're supposed to be doing to even higher degree

than you had before. Like, if you've been practicing the pause break,

like, amazing, and I love it. It's a good tool. But

I wanted to give you, like I said, something that gives you a lot

more specific things in your mind that you're supposed to

be doing. Because pause and delay are just

some words, but now we're having catch yourself, align

with your values, label what you're thinking and feeling,

moving your body and mind. So let's talk for

a minute about why you're not calm and like what

happens that creates that overwhelm or that

dysregulation. I've taught it a lot of times. It's kind of

popular in, you know, neuropsychology. We

all sort of understand the nervous system to some degree, but I just want to

remind you that your nervous system has

these two parts, okay? So you have your sympathetic nervous system

and your parasympathetic nervous system. And

the parasympathetic is really the

calm part. It's like when nothing's activated,

your parasympathetic nervous system is in what we think of as

rest and digest. It's just a state of equilibrium,

a state of balance. And for the most part, you

should be living your life in that parasympathetic nervous system.

You're in that calm part of your, your life,

like you're just going through the flow, things are easy, you know what to be

doing, the stress, the demands, the

stress requests on you are manageable, and you're able

to keep up with the demands, right? It's like you're in

a state of balance, you're balanced, okay? So that's your

parasympathetic nervous system. Now when

something becomes stressful, like

you become too much stress or too much demand or

too much overwhelm, or for whatever reason your nervous system

says, uh-oh, we can't handle this, we need a lot more

adrenaline, we need a lot more cortisol, we need a lot

more epinephrine, we need a lot more to

deal with what's in front of us, and you get that surge of

stress hormones that, you know, trigger your

sympathetic nervous system. That's that fight,

flight, freeze, faint, fawn, right? We all have different

kinds of ways, but in general, you either become activated

or you shut down, right? You become that fight or

that flight. So you need

your stress response, like you need your parasympathetic

nervous system. It is helpful, it is useful. It's an important

part of how to deal with things that come in your

life. Like, we need to have extra cortisol bursts sometimes,

and we need to have a little bit of extra oomph

in our, in our nervous system so that we can deal with kind of all

the stuff that's going on. But we're not supposed to stay

in a state of activated nervous system

all the time. The stressors in our life

aren't supposed to outpace our ability

to manage those stressors. But when you

have kids, especially if you have like, you know,

more than one kid, but even just one kid, a child

creates a lot of extra stressors on your nervous system.

You're constantly worried, are they safe? You're constantly trying

to problem solve, like, what's going on here? Why are they all of

a sudden spitting? Like, why did they just throw all that stuff on the ground?

How come they're screaming for no reason. Like, why is this

such a big deal? Like, they're melting down. Their nervous systems

are immature and they are misfiring all the time,

and they have a lot of trouble staying in that parasympathetic

nervous system. They're, they're like growing, and

so they're kind of learning how to manage going back and

forth between stress response and then parasympathetic. Like, that's just part

of having children around. But then you add the

time, money, relationship drama, physical

fatigue, your period, like all these different factors

that come into place, work demands, a big mess, the dog

takes a poop in the house, like, oh my God, all of a

sudden it can feel so overwhelming and your nervous system is going to

activate. So what would normally, if you have a

parasympathetic nervous system, like somebody spills juice,

or they— you realize they're getting a bad grade, or, you know, a kid

like hits you or something. Half the time, or maybe more than that, you're

fine. Like, you handle it. You're like, don't do that, that's not okay. Or you're

like, oh my God, I gotta clean this up, everyone go wait in the car.

Like, there's lots and lots of times that you're not

activated. Like, I want to just give you credit for the fact

that you're not just a raging lunatic all the time.

But there are moments when your— the stress

response sort of takes over and your

brain tells you this is an emergency, we have to activate our stress

response, and you're not really in your thinking brain anymore,

right? That's when you need that calm break. The calm

break is designed to get your parasympathetic nervous

system back online. To manage the stress

juice, push it through, and then get

back to a state of equilibrium in

real time. Like while you're in the middle of dealing with the,

I was gonna say bullshit, like the stuff that comes up in

being a parent. It is like, especially if they're under 10,

it's just like cuckoo pants all the time. Under 5,

forget it. If you have a kid under 5, especially if you have more than

one, It is like, wait, what is happening right now? You've

got kids climbing and jumping and throwing and spitting and punching and hitting. And

it's just like, you're, you're gonna feel like you're going bananas and you kind of

are. Like, your nervous system is not ready for

those demands. The fun thing is actually you get better

the more you normalize the stage of life that

you're in, the more you tell yourself a better story about the

stage that you're in. The easier it will

be when these really rough times come up. So

being able to remind yourself, like, that's what moving your mind is like.

This is normal, this is temporary, kids are going to act

out, this isn't a big problem, I can handle it.

Like, when you have that positive self-talk and that

coaching of yourself, like, yeah, this is overwhelming,

but I've I can handle it. Like, yeah, this sucks, I wasn't

expecting this, but I can take care of it. That's that

labeling and moving your mind. Labeling what's

true and then shifting your mindset so that you can cope better.

Labeling what's true and moving your mind and moving your body

is how you get back to your nervous system back online.

Moving your body, moving your mind, that's really

all that it is, is to get yourself back online.

But don't be mean about it. Like, I hear moms

all the time like, oh my God, I'm so terrible, I yelled at my kids,

I've been such a bitch lately, like, I don't even know what's going on with

me, you know. And usually I'm like, well, are you on your period? And they're

like, yes. And then like, well, that's why. Um, and then you can have

compassion for yourself. So being mean or

criticizing or thinking I should be better at this or I should be a

better mom, that's not labeling with love. That's

actually just self— like negative self-talk. That's self-criticism.

And that's not going to help you get out of your sympathetic

nervous system. It's not going to help you calm. It's only going to activate more

stress. Now, it might activate more stress that gets

you to like get your shit together, sure. But

long term, that's not going to be stress that you want to

have in your nervous system pumping all the time. That's too much cortisol.

So let's instead learn how to

catch ourselves. So noticing

that you are in a stress response is

probably the most important thing you can do. That's that C

in the calm break. Catch yourself and pause. Catch

yourself. Notice, oh, I'm very

overwhelmed right now. When you interrupt

your stress response, you are retraining your nervous system

to respond differently to circumstances. If you

are able to do this in real time, even if you've already been

like kind of in a parenting temper tantrum for a minute or two or

three or whatever, like if you've already been in

one, it's still fine catching yourself like, oh my God, what am I doing right

now? That's that Catch yourself and align. This is not

how I want to parent. And then you turn to your child

and you say, this is not how I want to act.

I'm sorry, I'm going to take a calm break and I will talk to you

in a minute. I will deal with this in a minute.

I wanna calm my body. So when you are aligning,

you're also delaying parenting.

Like literally not parenting in that moment, because

if you parent from a stress response, it's going to

become chaotic and you're not going to show up as the parent you want to

be. You're going to be punitive, shameful, mean,

or you're going to give in, become overly permissive. Any

of those things that happen when you parent from your

like activated nervous system tend to not go so well.

So just kind of pausing, catching yourself, pausing, right, that

C, catch yourself, align, and delay.

Like, get back online, wait till you are

ready. Wait till you're ready to

show up as the parent you wanna be. And how you do that

is then labeling, right? So saying

to your children, I'm upset and I need a minute to think.

"so I'm taking a calm break." Or turning to them when

you're in alignment, saying, "I love you, I wanna talk to you, and I will

after I take a calm break. I don't wanna say or do

anything to hurt you. I'm gonna talk to you in a few minutes after I've

calmed down." This, you can even say to your

children, "What you're doing doesn't work, but I don't wanna

yell at you, so I'm going to take a calm break."

When you tell your children what is happening in real time,

they will feel less afraid. They will feel less

activated. They will probably start to

borrow your nervous system because yours is starting to get calm. They might

start to calm. So when you get back online, when you

align with your values and you bring your body back into

alignment with your, you know, your nervous system,

your children will actually start to see

your self-regulation, borrow that self-regulation, and learn to do

that for themselves. So alignment is really, really

powerful. Then noticing your

thoughts and feelings, okay? Labeling your thoughts and feelings.

We all have default thoughts. We all have default

feelings, things that we respond to, like

thoughts that we have, like, my kid never listens to me, or this kid

is such a brat. This kid is so entitled. You know, they should

know better. Like, I've already told them 5 times. They shouldn't keep asking

me., right? It's that critical thought that you have

about yourself or about your children.

And those negative thoughts, those are programmed, right?

They come, they're default thoughts at this point. You've practiced

them enough times. You know, this is so like, you know,

people are looking at us, like I'm not a good mom. Any of

those thoughts that you have create emotion in

you. So if you're thinking, "My kid never

listens," label that thought and then label the feeling.

"I'm annoyed." "My kid is so entitled.

I'm feeling resentful." "They should

know better. I'm feeling

discouraged." Most of us are really not great at labeling our

emotion. We think that when we say,

I feel that my child is being a

brat, that that's labeling a feeling, but that's a

thought. The thought is, my child's a

brat, or I'm thinking my child is a brat, or my child's

being bratty, okay, if you want to be more generous. And then

the feeling I have when I'm thinking, God, my child's being so bratty,

is I'm gonna feel annoyed, right? If I'm

like, oh my God, I've taught this 100 times, they should know better,

I'm gonna feel discouraged. So learning how to label your

feelings and then give yourself a little like love pat,

like, ah, yes, this is hard, this is

frustrating, and then start to like, okay, but I can handle

it. I can get through it, I can figure this out. This

is temporary. I know what to do

here, which is move my body. Like,

going into a new set of feelings and a new set of

thoughts requires intentional thinking.

So if, if you need to move your body to get to that

better mindset and like shake it off or do a little

shimmy shake or do some jumping jacks or clap your hands

together or go drink some water, wash your hands, tidy up

some pillows on the couch. Like, doing something with your

body will help you regulate your nervous system, push some of

that stress juice out. And while you're doing that, you can be

coaching yourself to better thoughts and feelings.

So negative thoughts, that's often what triggers your

stress response. So when you start to do

some positive mindset work, when you start to work

through some of your negative thoughts and actively choose

new thoughts, you will feel different. So one

of my favorite thoughts that I love

is, um, this is normal. Like, this

is normal. This is normal for a 5-year-old, or this is normal for a family

with a couple of kids, or this is a normal response

to this situation. A lot of times we

judge our kids or our responses or how

they're behaving, and we think that everyone else is better

or they all know better or they have better kids than us. And it's like,

I work with hundreds of families at this point. Everyone is

pretty much the same. We all get overwhelmed, kids

misbehave, this is all normal. So normalizing

it can help you not be so overwhelmed or angry

or frustrated. Another thought I love is like, this

is temporary. Like, it really helps me

to remember that this is a moment in time and this is a lot, but

it's going to end. Like, this is

temporary. Like, this, this big feeling cycle that the kid is having, it— they're gonna—

it's gonna get They're gonna end it. Like, no child is

still crying like 4 years later, right?

Not even 4 hours later. Like, that— if they are crying for

4 hours, there's probably something physically wrong. Like, most

big feeling cycles end within 10 minutes, even

shorter. But in the middle of it, it will feel like it never will end.

This is your— this is always happening, right? We go to like

those extreme worst-case scenario thoughts, and those get

us stuck. So thinking this is

temporary, this is normal, this is not an

emergency. That's another one I like to think about a lot. Like, nothing is

an emergency here. Like, I have plenty of time. Your brain will

trick you that you have no time, that everything is a rush, everything

is important, you've got to get out the door, like, or

else. And then when I coach parents, I'm like, or else what? They're like, or

else I'll be late. I'm like, and then what happens? Like, the

teacher will get mad. Like, and then what will happen? They're

like, I don't know. I just don't like to be that type of

person. And it's like, well, you're not that type of person most of the time,

but in this moment, you might need a little extra time.

Like, somebody made up that school starts at 8:10. It's made up.

It doesn't really matter. Like, of course, I want you to be respectful and

be on time, and that helps kids be regulated, have smooth mornings, get

them to school in time. They don't feel rushed. They get to join the class

at the same time. The teacher gets kicked off in the right

way. That's all really, really good. I want you to have good morning

routines. But if you feel like you

can't take a pause break or a calm break, I'm going to go back

and forth between the two because I have so many years of calling it the

pause break. When you don't think you can take a calm

break because you don't have any time, Like, believe me, you're

gonna respond to your children in a way that escalates their

behavior, dysregulates them further, and it's gonna cost you

time. Like, you have plenty of time. This is not an emergency.

I can figure this out. So a lot of these thoughts that I'm

offering to you can become your new default

thoughts, and you just practice them. So eventually you won't need to

take calm breaks. That's actually the goal,

is that you become emotionally

regulated and your nervous system is in your parasympathetic

nervous system most of the time, that even when your

kids misbehave or like crazy shit goes down in the morning

or after school or at bedtime or whatever, you're able to be like, okay,

I'm gonna have to deal with this like pattern tomorrow. This is

not going well. What's my goal here? Being calm.

I'm going to stay in alignment. I'm going to move this moment along. I'm going

to practice connection tool. I'm going to practice limit setting. I'm going to

delay consequences for tomorrow. Like, when you are working the

whole connected parenting process, you will feel much calmer

and your nervous system won't activate as much. When you feel confident that you

can deal with misbehavior, you won't find it so

overwhelming. When you know what to do with it, then you don't

panic, you don't get upset. Now, of course, you're still gonna have

moments when your kid— you're trying to regulate your kid and they're just way

too off balance, like you can't get them back online, and you

get frustrated. Then I want you to catch

yourself being frustrated, align with your values,

let your kids know, this isn't working, I'm not going to talk to you right

now, I'm just going to get you you know, in your seatbelt. Or, I'm

gonna close the door for a minute, I'm gonna take a deep breath, I'm gonna

take a calm break. Labeling what the heck is going on for you. This is

so frustrating, I'm so overwhelmed, I wish this was easier, this

is not great, I don't like this. Like, you can have a little rant

in that labeling, and then like, then go to move

though. Okay, I need to move my body, I'm gonna do some jumping jacks, I'm

gonna clap my hands together, I'm gonna drink some water. You You know, you're going

to do something with your body, not all those things, but just do one or

two little things with your body. Just put your hands in the air,

go, then exhale. It will feel so much better. And then go, okay,

I can deal with this later. This is not a problem. I'll figure this

out. Let me get this kid to school. So that's the

calm break. I love it. I'm so excited. I can't wait for you

to get this book into your hands. Uh, it's It's gonna be

so good. I'm really excited. It's like everything,

not everything in my brain, but so much of my

brain and what I carry and like what I've taught on this podcast and what

I've taught in my courses and with my clients is going

to be in this book. And it's probably gonna not be very expensive. So I'm

so excited to be able, like, what if it's $20, right?

Like, here's, spend $20. That's like less than you'd buy

pajamas at Target, right? Here's $20, here's a

book. You can read this and you can learn how to raise an emotionally

healthy kid who's also responsible while not losing your shit.

Like, that's incredible. And I'm writing it in such a way that I

want it to be short, like

pretty succinct and specific and

like accessible so that you don't have to read this like

giant parenting book. I want you to be able to like skim it almost

and get it or be able to hand it to your partner and say like,

can you read these 7 pages? And then they get the

connected parenting process. You can be aligned, you can give it to grandparents, like,

or nannies or housekeepers or, you know, babysitters,

whoever. So anyway, I'm so excited. I still have so much

work to do, um, but as I

update these tools, I'm going to be updating you on the podcast, letting you

know, you know, like, what to expect when you get the book so that you're

like excited about it. Literally have no idea when it's coming out.

But I know it will come out. It will be published and someday you'll be

able to have it in your, you know, hold it in your hands. And I'm

so happy about that. Okay, I hope you practice the calm

break this week and it's really fun to be back

doing episodes and recording again and, you know,

getting back in the groove of that. So yes,

have a great week and I will talk to you next time.