Working Mothers Stress

Working mothers stress is something that can afflict any mom who works outside of the home. There are still all the tasks of running the house to cope with, and a lot less time to do them in! Here are some ideas to help you cope with this stress and find balance.

The likelihood is you made the choice to be one of the many working mothers for one of three reasons:

You needed adult interaction: you felt stir crazy stuck in the house.

You needed to bring in some cash.

You needed the intellectual stimulation and added purpose of an interesting job.

Having work outside the home can be fulfilling and stimulating and financially rewarding.

My Perspective

Personally, apart from when my children were really small, I've needed something other than motherhood to be fulfilled. Working mothers stress was preferable to stay at home moms isolation! I think that being a mom is a really important part of who we are, but it is not everything. We are still women, we are still human beings; each with our own unique set of talents, skills and experience to bring to the world. It is our reponsibility to use those things for the benefit of everyone.

The Downsides

Now, there are clearly downsides to having a job or business, and working mothers stress usually comes down to time pressure! What tends to happen is that despite both parents having jobs, the mom is still expected to be responsible for the cooking, shopping, cleaning and general tasks related to the running of the household. This means that we end up spending less time with the children, and forget about nurturing ourselves. This time pressure leads to a feeling of a lack of control and this causes the stress.

Finding Balance

Overcoming working mothers stress is about finding balance. I think the first thing we need to understand in order to get our lives in balance, is that we do actually have control over our experience. We create our experience with every thought, emotion, word and action. This is a universal law just like the law of gravity, but we in the West have not been told about it as the information was deleted from the Bible during the fourth century edits by Constantine. The Eastern traditions such as Buddism have always known this.

The Law of Attraction

The Law of Attraction states that like attracts like in the energy realm; so as our thoughts and emotions are energy and have a frequency, they attract into our experience like circumstances. If we think we are stressed, we will feel stressed and will start to behave stressed: our life will become stressful!

A New Perspective

I think it's all about taking a different perspective; looking for what we can learn from the causes of our working mothers stress instead of recoiling from them. We need to understand that we have created our current life without realising it, through default. Therefore we need not fear anything in life because we control what comes into ourexperience. We need to learn to change our habitual thought patterns to ones that will give us the life experience we want.

Changing Our Mind

How do we change our thoughts? Basically, the same way that your belief system was built up in the first place: by putting thoughts into your mind over and over again. The important first step is to choose what life you want.

An Ideal Life

A good technique for doing this is to get a sheet of paper and write down a description of your ideal life. If it helps you can write under different headings like:

Where Do i Live?

What Relationships Am I Enjoying?

What Am I Doing With My Time?

How Do I Enjoy Recreation Time?

How Am I Caring For Myself?

Setting Goals

When you have a clear picture of what you want your life to be like, you can begin to set goals that help you move towards the life you want. You will need to break down the big goals into doable action steps so as not to de-motivate yourself. For example, if your goal is to triple your income, set an action step to set up one additional income stream by the end of next month. Then when that's done you can do it again and again. Each action step is easily achievable, but they add up to you achieving your big goal.

Changing Beliefs

You will probably find that you come up against long-held beliefs that dis-empower you and stop you from achieving your goals; beliefs like, "I could never run my own business", "I'll never lose the baby weight" or "I'm not good enough for him". These beliefs can be changed using positive affirmations e.g. I am a healthier weight every day, I love eating healthy food. Statements must be acceptable and believeable or the conscious mind will disregard them. Statements should be positive and in the present tense. Make a list of affirmations to assist you in reaching your goals, write them on index cards or on the mirror and read them aloud often.

Working mothers stress is something that can be overcome with a change of mindset. I was depressed and stressed but now have a much more positive outlook and feel so much happier. Everyone around me benefits too!