Take three deep breaths. It’s scientifically proven that taking three deep breaths has a calming effect on your nervous system. How to take a deep breath: Place your left hand over your heart and your right hand on your solar plexus. Inhale through your nose and make sure your right-hand moves out. As you inhale, I want you to count to four. Hold your breath for a beat, then slowly exhale through your mouth for the count of four. Repeat this three times.
With all that’s going on in our country, our economy, the world, and on social media, it feels like so many of us are under a great deal of stress. Parenting, in particular, can be stress-inducing. We know chronic stress can be as unhealthy as smoking a quarter of a pack a day. It is also challenging to be a present parent when your relationship is under stress. What are stress management strategies that parents use to become “Stress-Proof? What are some great tweaks, hacks, and tips that help reduce or even eliminate stress? In this interview series, we are talking to authors, parenting experts, business and civic leaders, and mental health experts who can share their strategies for reducing or eliminating stress. As a part of this series, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Holly Hughes.
Holly is an award-winning author, speaker, and intuitive healer who infuses her unique personal style, intuitive gifts, and personal healing stories to guide clients through a step-by-step process to help them claim their voice, passions, and self-worth. Her book REAL, NOT PERFECT How To Become Your Happy, Authentic Self will help you to stop hiding behind people’s expectations and discover the version of you, you want to be.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to know how you got from “there to here.” Inspire us with your backstory!
My backstory has got plenty of ups and downs, twists and turns, magical moments, and incredibly stressful times. My experiences include stories of loss and learning how to manage my stress responses to achieve my dreams. Fire took my home when I was only seventeen, then an earthquake came six years later and took the one I was living in then. Growing up with an alcoholic parent, at a young age, I learned how to read a room and how to please people. Those skills served me while living in LA and working in film and television until I realized that my life wasn’t healthy. So, I began a healing journey that led me to my new life as an award-winning author and healer. Along the way, I became a wife and mother.
What lessons would you share with yourself if you had the opportunity to meet your younger self?
If I could talk to my younger self, I’d tell myself to skip the starter marriage. I’d hold the younger Holly and tell her she doesn’t have to power through and do it alone. I’d tell her to enjoy the creative process and open herself to kinder people. I’d repeat, “It’s not your fault.” there’s help and a happier version of me living a life I never imagined.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think it might help people?
I have a super exciting project now. It’s my Real, Not Perfect Academy. It’s an eleven-week program for those ready to change their lives. It’s for people who lost themselves along the way. It’s for the woman who made herself smaller in a marriage, the caretakers who feel invisible and exhausted, and those who can’t say no to anyone. It’s for individuals who play a role in their family, at work, and with their friends but bite their tongue, keeping their true thoughts and feelings hidden. The Real, Not Perfect Academy provides: A step-by-step process to regain your voice, passion and self-worth.
- It helps you break free from limiting beliefs.
- It teaches you self-care.
- Provides guided meditations.
- Defines and creates healthy boundaries.
At the end of the program, you will stand firm in who you are and have a new certainty in all your relationships, personal dynamics, and career choices.
Ok, thank you for sharing your inspired life. Let’s now talk about stress. How would you define stress?
Stress is an energetic vampire that steals your mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical energy.
In the Western world, humans typically have their shelter, food, and survival needs met. So what has led to this chronic stress? Why are so many of us always stressed out?
We’re stressed out because our culture tells us we must consistently achieve. Social media has created a comparison culture where we pit ourselves against carefully curated images and are pressured to look, earn, do, and achieve every moment of the day. The idea of resting, unplugging, and not monetizing ourselves became foreign.
What are some of the physical manifestations of being under a lot of stress? How does the human body react to stress?
Stress manifests physically as:
- Anxiety
- Obsessing over the things out of your control
- Headaches
- Back pain
- Neck pain
- Cramps
- Loss of appetite
- Larger appetite
- Nausea
- Teeth grinding
- Nail biting
- Irritability
- Loss of focus
- Cleaning
- Inability to finish tasks
- the list goes on and on!
Is stress necessarily a bad thing? Can stress ever be good for us?
Stress is an excellent indicator if you pay attention to it. Stress can tell you that you’re not in a safe place. It can be a powerful early warning if you listen! If people or situations stress you out, it’s a sign that you need better boundaries.
Is there a difference between being in a short-term stressful situation versus an ongoing stress? Are there long-term ramifications to living in a constant state of stress?
Asking yourself what kind of stress you’re experiencing is a great tool. It allows you to check in and identify what’s real, imagined, temporary, and what needs to be addressed immediately. Short-term stressors include traffic, deadlines, and perhaps a dental visit. Long-term stress includes finances, mental health, emotional safety, and abusive work or home environments.
Long-term stress changes your subtle body energy, physicality, your mental and emotional wellness. It fundamentally changes you for the worse. It’s been proven to manifest illnesses and diseases. Seek help to manage your stress! You don’t have to keep living in a high-anxiety environment, but you may require assistance knowing how to leave.
Let’s now focus more on the stress of parenting. This feels intuitive, but it is helpful to spell it out in order to address it. Can you help articulate why being a parent can be so stressful?
Parenting is stressful because you are responsible for nurturing, protecting, teaching, loving, and guiding another human. The old saying that your child is your heart walking outside your body is true. Many parents fear making mistakes that will cause pain to their children and have more significant fears for their children’s safety. I want to advocate for letting children fail and allow them to develop compassion, empathy, and resourcefulness, so they learn how to process failure while gaining the skills to do hard things.
Can you help spell out some of the problems that come with being a stressed parent?
I want to address a specific kind of stress. It’s the stress people-pleasing parents face. These parents think they must fill every moment of every day with activities, enrichment, goals, controlling child and teacher interactions, and child-coach interactions, and they also endlessly tell their children how important they are. These people-pleasing parents don’t want their children to miss out as they did. They’re making sure everything is PERFECT. Parenting like this is an endless list of things to do and leaves no time for the parent’s interests, growth, or self-care. The helicopter parents are people-pleasing their children, which is a dangerous dynamic. The unsaid lesson of enmeshed parents to their children is that they don’t think the child can do it independently. Yup, it creates anxiety for everyone in the home, and it’s exhausting and stressful!
Here is the main question of our interview: Can you share with our readers your “5 stress management strategies that parents can use to remove some of the stress of parenting?” Please share a story or example for each.
5 strategies to help parents manage stress:
1: Take three deep breaths. It’s scientifically proven that taking three deep breaths has a calming effect on your nervous system. How to take a deep breath: Place your left hand over your heart and your right hand on your solar plexus. Inhale through your nose and make sure your right-hand moves out. As you inhale, I want you to count to four. Hold your breath for a beat, then slowly exhale through your mouth for the count of four. Repeat this three times.
Stressed-out people rarely breathe deeply. You can quickly check this by seeing how tense your shoulders are. Many clients walk into my office carrying stress in their bodies, especially their shoulders. Why don’t you check yourself right now? Lift your shoulders to your ears and then drop them. See what I mean? Now try the breathing technique and notice how different your mind and body feel after.
2: Create Space. It’s okay to step away from a stressful situation and give yourself or your child the time and space to process. When a child is tantrums, I suggest this strategy. Tell your child to go into their room until they’re sweet. This strategy may take a few times to get the hang of. I’m asking the parent to breathe deeply and calm down when you say it. You’re not in a reactive state. If your child comes out, walk them back in. Allow your child to do what they need to self-regulate and calm down. If they make a mess of their room, don’t address it until after they calm down. Then clean it. “Stay in your room until you’re sweet” sets a healthy boundary, too. Be the one in charge.
We moved when my child was young, and she did not enjoy the experience. She was confused that she didn’t recognize her surroundings and hated that the park was “wrong.” She asked where her friends were and let me know with her screaming and crying that she was displeased. I sought help for her growing unhappiness and tantrums. I learned this phrase. “Go to your room until you can be sweet.” My child even began going to her room to calm herself and feel better before her emotions exploded. It changed our lives for the better.
3: Be Real, Not Perfect: How many hours a day do you spend worrying about how an event, lunch, practice, game, meets, and meals will go for your child and family? Does the idea of letting things go cause you more stress? I want to suggest that you’re hiding from unhappiness or trauma inside perfectionism. A sure-fire stress relief for you is to stop making every moment perfect for your child.
Try being real, instead. You’ll free up mental, emotional, and physical energy when perfection is not the goal. And who could use more time? You! Being in charge is a continuous electric current of energy and anxiety, and I bet your body is tired.
I’m a reformed type-A overachiever who used my work and home responsibilities as excuses to escape my feelings. I felt like I had to help everyone and do things because it was easier to do something than explain the help I needed, outperformed to prove my worth, and be the most dependable person so I didn’t have to heal my traumas. I bet you’re so used to living with anxiety that you’ll feel uncomfortable without it. But to be stress-free, you must let go of what you know because it isn’t working. When you get real about your heart, you’ll be happier, and the things you felt compelled to do will no longer rule your life. You’ll have less stress and more joy in your world.
4: Say No: Stress buster four is learning to say no to the things you don’t want to do to make room for what you do want. As a parent, you first said “No,” to your child to protect them. That two-letter word, no, carries baggage. So let’s back up.
“No, don’t put your hand on the hot stove. No, don’t put the crayon up your nose. No, don’t run with scissors.” When they grow up and become teens, you may say, “No, you can’t have a phone. No, you can’t be in a car with people I don’t know. No, you can’t stay out until midnight.” These No statements are boundaries made to keep your child safe.
No is a tool for your stress management. Use it to set expectations with your child. Create boundaries around what is and isn’t acceptable. Your child(ren) doesn’t have to like it or agree. Being a parent means making choices your child won’t always like.
You can also use the word no to protect your time and energy. Say no to the things you don’t want to do. You don’t have to be a room parent, and you don’t have to attend every neighborhood event, you don’t have to be the one who drives carpool, and you don’t have to partake in every practice. How does the idea of saying no make you feel? Are you excited? I hope so!
5: Make Time for Self-Care Every Week: Once you get the hang of saying no, you’re set up for the best stress management tool there is self-care! Self-care is more than mani-pedis or a salt bath. Self-care makes you lose your sense of time, reinvigorates your spirit, and brings energy and happiness to your life. If taking time for yourself causes stress, please refer to steps 1–4.
Self-care doesn’t have to be expensive. Here are a few simple and fun self-care tips:
- Play your favorite songs in the car, not music your kids like. Sing out loud!
- Learn a TikTok dance.
- Walk the dog without your phone.
- Unplug from your phone at 9 PM and charge it in the kitchen.
- Learn something new, to sew, knit, cha-cha.
- Try something you once loved.
- Read.
- Listen to a comedy podcast.
- Spend time with your partner, and don’t talk about the kids!
Dancing will forever be my favorite form of self-care. I love everything about it, from the skills it requires to watch and learn, the physical exertion, and the joy of expressing myself. I feel free because I’m not in charge, and there are no expectations or monetized outcomes to gain. It’s pure joy.
At first, when I started dancing again after becoming a mom, I felt guilty for leaving my family. But the guilt swiftly changed because my family noticed how happy I was when I returned. And they became my biggest advocates to make sure I made it to dance classes. Self-care is a win-win.
Do you have any favorite books, podcasts, or resources that have inspired you to live with more joy in life?
some books that I love, Mitch Albom Five People You Meet in Heaven Esther Hicks & Jerry Hicks, Ask and it is given
Podcasts- sooo many….Bernadebt Joy Crush Your Money goals, Divorce and Beyond with Susan Guthrie, and 3 Books with Neal Pasricha…and a completely shameless pug for my work:
Real, Not Perfect How to Become Your Happy Authentic Self by Holly Raychelle Hughes
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I would love everyone to share one compliment per day with someone. It can be a stranger or someone they know. If we flood our world with more love and less hate, it will be a much better place to be.
What is the best way for our readers to continue to follow your work online?
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent on this. We wish you only continued success.