E211: Is Your Mom Guilt Actually Well-Founded? The Hidden Cost of Hormone Imbalances & PMS

Ever replayed the day in your head and thought, “Why did I snap like that?”. You love your kids with everything you’ve got—so why is it so hard to show up the way you want to?

If you’re stuck in a cycle of mom guilt, irritation, and exhaustion, there’s a chance your hormones, not your parenting, are the real culprit. This episode goes beyond the surface to unpack how burnout and hormone imbalances are silently shaping your motherhood experience, and what to do about it.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• The key difference between guilt that keeps you stuck, and guilt that can spark real change
• Why burnout doesn’t just “happen”—and what your guilt is actually trying to tell you
• Why “survival mode” feels normal, and how to finally break out of it without giving up everything you love

If you're ready to stop ending your days in self-blame and start creating more capacity for joy, presence, and patience, you’ll want to hear this.

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Disclaimer: Nothing in this podcast is to be taken as medical advice, please take informed accountability and speak to your provider before making changes to your health routine.

This podcast is for women and moms to learn how to balance hormones naturally in motherhood, to have pain-free periods, increased fertility, to decrease PMS mood swings, and to increase energy without restrictive diet plans. You'll learn how to balance blood sugar, increase progesterone naturally, understand the root cause of estrogen dominance, irregular periods, PCOS, insulin resistance, hormonal acne, post birth-control syndrome, and conceive naturally. We use a pro-metabolic, whole food, root cause approach to functional women's health and focus on truly holistic health and mind-body connection.

If you listen to any of the following shows, we're sure you'll like ours too!
Pursuit of Wellness with Mari Llewellyn, Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark, Found My Fitness with Rhonda Patrick, Just Ingredients Podcast, Wellness Mama, The Dr Josh Axe Show, Are You Menstrual Podcast, The Model Health Show, Grounded Wellness By Primally Pure, Be Well By Kelly Leveque, The Freely Rooted Podcast with Kori Meloy, Simple Farmhouse Life with Lisa Bass

Transcript

[00:00:00] Today I'm talking about one of the hidden costs of hormone imbalance and how it impacts your motherhood.

[00:00:00] Ugh, mom. Guilt. It's like one of our worst enemies and nightmares as a mom, right? Where we are constantly questioning if we are doing enough, doing things well enough, making sure that our kids are gonna turn out okay, is really what it comes down to. And I wanna dive into this a little bit more today because I think that mom guilt can be really.

informative to the life that we want to live and how we wanna show up as moms. We're gonna go into the difference today between mom guilt that is unfounded, and mom guilt that is founded.

And is helping you see clearly what could change for you to become the mom that you actually want to be or closer to her. When we're thinking about motherhood, it's so easy for it to become quickly overwhelming, and we can [00:01:00] just see the things that we're not doing right, essentially. I see that a lot in myself.

So I'm gonna start by playing devil's advocate. Maybe literally when we're sitting down at the end of the day and we think about. How we showed up that day and we think about the way that we maybe thought it was gonna go versus the way that it wants to go. What are those things that come up for you over and over again?

So imagine you're sitting down on the couch. At the end of the day, maybe the house is still a mess, the kids are finally asleep, and you just think about. What your day looked like.And you remember, at lunchtime, your toddler was jumping all over the place instead of sitting down to eat and they spilled their drink and they wouldn't wash their hands and they were fighting you for nap time.

And the mom that you want to be [00:02:00] would be able to handle that calmly. But when you're in that moment. All you can really do is get so frustrated and maybe yell, or maybe just be impatient. Maybe just do something that honestly, like you see it wipe the little grin off of their face, and then you have that immediate hit of guilt and you're like, Ugh, I hurt their feelings again.

Or maybe it's your bigger kids and. They asked you all day long can you do this with me, mom, can you do this with me, mom? And you're like, yeah, okay. Yes I can. Let me just do this first. Let me, finish this one more thing. And you've gotten distracted. You ended up scrolling for however long, five minutes, 30 minutes, whatever that looked like, because you're feeling so overwhelmed by everything you're already trying to do that sometimes you just feel like you have to check out.

[00:03:00] Or you're feeling so tired and so irritated with everything that is requested of you that maybe you didn't even say yes. Maybe your intentions were not even good in the moment where you're like, no, I don't have time for that. And you are sitting there at the end of the day thinking about that child who you love and who.

Is only a child for a little bit longer and just feeling that ugh, I wish I had done that differently. I wish I had done the art project with them, or I wish that I had said yes to more, or I just wish that I hadn't been so annoyed all day long. 'cause now when I look at their adorable little angel faces while they're sleeping, all I can think is how much I love them.

And all I can think is how much I want to do better for them. But in those moments where you're struggling, it's so hard to make the change. It's so hard to change that reaction [00:04:00] because even when , you have the best intentions and you want. To be able to show up and not feel so overwhelmed and not feel so exhausted and not feel so irritated, and annoyed and snappy in those moments when logically, you know, you could do different when your body is used to reacting a certain way and when your body is running on empty, sometimes it's nearly impossible to change the way you're acting in the moment.

And sometimes those patterns. A really, really hardship break, which is what leaves you sitting on the couch at the end of the day just thinking like, how did I get here? And why do I keep repeating these patterns over and over again? Even if you don't have context on them, even if you're not like their monthly patterns or their weekly patterns or any of those things, you're just like, man, I keep running.

Myself into the ground, I can't seem to get ahead, [00:05:00] right? I can't seem to get the energy to get ahead of my kids to do better with them. I can't seem to get the emotional stability to feel like I have the mental capacity to do better. And that is all so valid. But when you're sitting there and that voice of guilt is showing up for you.

It is really important not to listen to it in a way to just beat yourself up, but it's important to listen to it because your ability to change as a mom is limited to what you believe is possible. And if you are telling yourself over and over again that you're stuck and you can't change, then that's going to be true.

But if you use the knowledge that you really don't want it to be this way as a catalyst for change and to ask better questions, [00:06:00] it makes a really big difference. And when we think about, you're sitting there on the couch and it's easy to make this list in your head of what is this costing you?

When you're feeling so all over the place with your mood, when your energy sucks, when you're overwhelmed all the time, it's costing you time with your kids. I would imagine it's also costing you time with your husband. It's probably costing you your libido if we're being honest.

It's costing you fun because when you're in overwhelm and. Anxiety and depression, and you have no energy for anything, then you're not going to have the capacity to be creative, to have fun, to make plans. All of these things are symptoms of your body being drained, and it's costing us more than we realize because it's been so normalized in our society that.

We're gonna be tired as [00:07:00] moms, it's been so normalized that women are just moody because we're women, right? It's normal to have PMS. It's normal to snap at your kids. It's normal to be irritated and overwhelmed because we're too busy and we just have too much going on. And essentially, we're victims of being a mom.

We're victims of our families, is what we're taught to believe. And I think when we're sitting there. In these moments where we're in shame and in guilt, we're also in this victim mentality that somehow we're stuck where we are and we're stuck because we're women. 

We're stuck because X, Y, Z has been put on us. When, to be honest, probably most of this is what you've always dreamed of, which makes it that much more painful that you're sitting there regretting. How you've acted in the midst of so many blessings in the midst of these children that you probably really wanted in the midst of this [00:08:00] family that you probably always dreamed of in the midst of having a marriage that you know as a teenager or twenties like you dreamed of that and maybe even your job or your career or other things that you pursue on a daily basis.

Truly line up with your dreams, and yet you're still sitting there wondering like why it doesn't feel good, why you're not able to show up as the person you want to be, and really wondering if you'll ever get out of it. And so much of this is really deeply rooted at a societal level because we've been told that it's normal.

You can find proof on social media that motherhood is hard and we make jokes about it, but it really deeply affects how we believe we can change. It's so dangerous to get stuck in this mindset. Whether we're conscious about it or not, that it is normal to feel like crap. It [00:09:00] is normal to be burned out as a mom and to not wanna admit that because it feels terrible to admit that you are not happy with the things that you originally wanted.

And it feels also really terrible to feel stuck in this cycle of low energy and moodiness and. Being irritated when somebody asks you for something or when your husband comes home because you just don't have any more to give. But when we're believing that this is normal, then we can't change it. That's where I really wanna shift our mindset here and peel back the curtain about why this is common, not normal,

how we can actually change it. So when you're in this scenario, like you're feeling guilty and you're burned out and you're just not showing up as the mom that [00:10:00] you want to be, there are so many underlying physical causes that make this so prevalent

When you're in this place of depletion in your body where your energy coming in does not match the energy coming out, not only do you have nothing left to give and it makes perfect sense that you would easily snap.

Or that you would not be able to show up in the way that you wanna show up, but also your hormones are not going to have what they need to be able to balance, every single month. And so you're going to be stuck in this cycle where you don't have enough physical energy to have the mental and emotional presence that you want to have.

And the good news about this is that this is something you can fix, and it doesn't even just start with mindset work and changing everything about the way that you think. [00:11:00] It truly is about nourishing your body in a different way so that you start to have more energy coming in than energy going out.

You start to fill up your cup slowly so that when someone asks for a drop from you, it's not the last drop . And that's where you've been is that you're on your last drop all the time. And so of course it's easy to be anxious, it's easy to be moody, it's easy to be irritable and to snap and to yell when you're giving your last drop all the time.

And that's why I want to shift this focus and remind you. That it doesn't have to be that way, and it doesn't have to be hard to start filling your cup in a way that will allow you to have enough energy for the things that you want to do and have enough emotional and mental capacity to be able to say yes to something without it being a sacrifice, because you actually have what you [00:12:00] need as a firm foundation to stand on.

Your body is not broken, but your body is telling you, screaming at you probably that something is not right, and that you do not feel the way that you should, and that is pouring over into your relationships, into your motherhood in a way that is costing you. When we look at that, when we look at the cost short term and long term, How can we possibly think that it's worth it to keep putting our.

Nourishment off to keep putting our health off for someone else's benefit because truly it's not helping them, especially if that's your kids. And it's not helping you. And the more that you are burned out, the less you are the mom that you want to be, and the more you're gonna be piling on that guilt and shame that only make all of this worse.

So the truth is. This can shift for you, and it doesn't have to take very [00:13:00] long. All you have to do is start to put the right steps together in the right order to start to refuel your body. And that's exactly what I do in coaching and nourish your hormones, is we teach you to nourish your body in a way that.

Increases your mental and emotional capacity as well as your physical capacity. When you have the ingredients you need to not only make hormones well, but to make energy well, and you have the ingredients you need to detox your hormones. This is where we see a pretty quick shift in your energy ability and your energy storage, that you have the energy.

To do the next thing versus feeling constantly burned out. We see a difference in the way that your cycles show up, where they're not tearing you down so much, they're not draining you so much emotionally or physically, so that energy cup stays a little bit more full and that emotional cup stays a [00:14:00] little bit more full.

And we do this in a way that is absolutely doable for moms and women who are doing all the things , because that is the women who are gonna be burned out, to be honest. We have been there and we want to support you in the most specific and simple way possible so that you can actually start to see those changes within the next couple weeks.

And that is why we do what we do. To be honest, it's not just about better periods, it's about increasing that capacity and showing up in your life in the way you actually want to, and it's all possible when you're not. Giving your last drop all the time.

So if you find yourself stuck in that nighttime cycle of mom guilt where you're sitting on the couch and you're just replaying those moments that you regret and you're thinking about the things that you didn't have the energy or the capacity to do, and it's making you feel like you're really honestly failing in [00:15:00] motherhood, deep down, I know that this is not what you want and that is why I do what I do.

This is truly why I created Nourish Your Hormones in the first place so that you can have a shortcut for better energy, calmer reactions, more stable moods, and more connection with your kids without feeling like you're giving your last drop and running yourself into the ground every day.

If that sounds like the shift that you need in this season, head to the show notes and click the first link you see, so you can book a call with me. Or visit leishadrews.com/nourishyourhormones , and I would love to talk to you about how we can help you feel like yourself again, but better.