How to develop wellness routines as a stay-at-home mom

Wellness at Home is a podcast for busy stay-at-home moms to learn how to incorporate wellness routines into their lives. The host, Hannah Stewart, discusses the challenges of being a stay-at-home mom and offers tips on implementing routines. She suggests focusing on routines rather than strict schedules to allow for flexibility. Setting up your environment for success is important, as visual cues can impact our habits. For example, placing healthier food in prominent locations can encourage better eating choices. She also emphasizes the importance of having the necessary resources to support your wellness goals, such as having healthy food options available. Welcome to Wellness at Home, your podcast for learning how to form wellness routines as a busy stay-at-home mom. Join me every week as we take the knowledge you already have about wellness and learn how to form routines that actually work in the midst of both the joy and chaos it is to be a stay-at-home mom. My name is Hannah Stewart from wellnesswithhannah.com and today we'll be talking about the basics of implementing wellness routines into your life. So when I'm talking about wellness routines, I'm talking about a variety of things. It could be something as simple as drinking more water, eating more protein, working out on a regular basis, whatever. And one of the biggest challenges of stay-at-home moms is that our time is not our own, right? Oftentimes we have a plan, right? Maybe we have, you know, a plan A and a plan B and then our kids wake up from their naps or they get up early or they don't sleep the night before and suddenly we're thrown into the situation where our plan is not working and it could be easy for our wellness routines to just go out the window. I think one of the biggest myths of stay-at-home moms is that we have all this time on our hands, right? Have you ever had that happen where you're talking to someone and they say, what do you do? And you say, I'm a stay-at-home mom. And they say, oh, what do you do all day? And you're just like, are you kidding me? Like I am so busy. Like I don't even know where to start with answering that question and I'm also slightly insulted that you even asked me such a thing. But in many ways our schedule isn't our own and so we have to try to figure out how do we make it work given that our children are really demanding. How do we make these routines part of our life? So I have several tips for you guys today. My first tip is to try a routine, not a schedule. And what I mean by a routine is an order of events throughout the day that you go through. So the difference between this and a schedule is that a schedule is something where you try to write down, I'm going to do X, Y, Z at a certain time so maybe I decide I'm going to work out at 6 a.m. before my kids get up. Well, guess what? Yesterday my kids got up at 5.30 and they kept each other awake for an hour and a half before I got them out of bed. Okay. But if you are planning on having this time to yourself, at least if you have little kids, that may not happen. It may not be the way you were expecting and that is okay. But if you have that schedule in your mind, like we're eating breakfast at 8 today and then your kid has a huge blowout and you have a tantrum and suddenly it's 9 o'clock and you still haven't eaten breakfast, that can really throw off not only your schedule but also for a lot of us our mindsets are really affected by that, right? So if we had this plan, the plan failed, that can really throw things off for us. Whereas if we had a routine such as, okay, I know every day at breakfast I want to read the Bible to my kids or I know every day I want to work out and I'll work out right after I do devotions for the day, whenever that is. Having something like that as opposed to a specific time where it has to happen can take a really big load off of our minds, honestly, just because we have that flexibility in our minds. So what does this look like in reality? So for me, one of the ways this can look is that we have a breakfast routine. So some days my kids get up at 6, some days they get up at 8, some days they get up at 5.30. I don't know. I should probably talk to someone who's into sleep training or something. But for me that means whenever I decide to get my kids out of bed, we have a breakfast routine, okay? So some days this happens at 6, some days it happens at 8, that's totally fine. But what that routine looks like is we get up, I go into the room, I say, good morning, how are you? I love you guys so much. And then we get up. Usually if I've heard them, I try to light a candle and just have it be a more peaceful atmosphere because honestly, my life is not very peaceful in terms of the ages of my children. So I try to have some external peace. Then we all go to the kitchen. I ask Elliot, do you want yogurt or oatmeal or whatever the options are for that day. And he gets to choose what he would like for breakfast. And then we go sit at the table. I get everyone started. Usually I have my coffee. Sometimes I have my breakfast, sometimes not. And then once we're eating breakfast, that's my cue that we do our short family worship time together. So I get out our Bible, get out our books, all of that, and we do that together. Then after that, I have my cue and we do a little workbook time with Elliot where he's just going to some preschool math, things like that. But just having a routine like that is so flexible because it can be implemented anytime, no matter how crazy my kid's schedule is. We have to eat breakfast. So I know, okay, these things are all being tied into that breakfast time and that's really helpful for someone like me that wants to get stuff done and is forgetful, but at the same time gets really thrown off by specific schedules. Another routine that we have, or that I have, is that when I get up, I read my Bible for a little bit. My kids might be awake in their beds for a while and that's okay, but that's another routine I have. That cue, when I get out of bed, take my meds, read my Bible, and then hopefully work out as well, depending on the day. Having that routine instead of that schedule can be super, super helpful for structuring your life in a way where you're doing what you want to do, but it doesn't always have to be at the same time of day. The second tip that I have for implementing wellness routines is to set up your environment for success. I think it's a huge myth that if you have enough discipline, you're going to be a healthy person. If you're not a healthy person, it's just totally a lack of discipline. I think in some cases that can be the case, but for many of us, our environment actually impacts a ton of our routines. This is something a lot of people don't realize, but what we see visually impacts our routines. There was this example we learned about in a public health class in school where this hospital wanted to impact how much soda people were drinking. They didn't ban the soda from their cafeteria. All they did was move water to a really prominent location and move the sodas into a less prominent location. All of a sudden, the same numbers of people were in their hospital, but they were choosing the water instead of the soda. Often in our own environments, as homemakers or stay-at-home moms or whatever you want to call yourself, we have that opportunity to be able to shape our environment in a lot of ways, and we don't make use of that. An example of a way you could do that is if you have something like cookies around the house, you're more likely to eat them, or if you have your cereal sitting out in a prominent location on your counter, or just anything like that, any food that you're wanting not to eat, but you have that in a really accessible place in your house, you're much more likely to do that, even if you know you want to eat more fruit. Way to reverse that habit would be set out a bowl of apples on the table, or get rid of the cookies altogether. Don't keep them in your house, right? For me, I was really trying to figure this out, because I'm not a huge sweet eater in general, but there would just be these times of the week where I would make food for a college ministry at our church, and every time I would be making these cookies, and I would be snitching cookie dough, and then we'd take them to the event, and all my kids are eating cookies, and then we'd bring them home. We have all these extra cookies, because I didn't want to be underprepared, so I'd make a bunch just in case there were a ton of people there. Then we'd end up bringing a bunch of cookies home, and we'd have them around for several more days, and then the same thing would happen week after week. So I finally decided, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to either, A, make something healthier, like strawberries and whipped cream, something like that, or even if we eat that a few days in a row, I'm not super concerned, not a super high sugar content, not a super heavy dessert. So I could either do that, or some of the other times, what I would do is I'd buy a packaged dessert, and college students loved it, and it would be something like Oreos or Nutter Butters or something like that, throw that in the back of my pantry, I'm not going to go dig those out, and honestly, nobody's going to go, I don't want people to know that I snitched half the package, right? So that accountability is in place for me. And then when I bring them to the event, I leave them there, just something little like that, and then I'm not bringing them home. But just simply shaping my environment has drastically impacted the amount of sugar I'm consuming. So something as simple as that can really make a difference in those wellness routines. Another one that I realized, another thing you should be thinking about is to make sure you have what you need to support your goals. So maybe you have a goal to eat more protein. I had a goal like this for a long time, and I would get super frustrated because I'd get to the afternoon, and I'd just be eating this random food, it was not intentional at all, sometimes it'd be crackers or cream cheese or just random things, and I was like, why is this happening? And I realized I was buying all this food for my kids and my husband that was healthy, you know, the tomatoes, cottage cheese, all this food that I really wanted to make sure they were eating on a regular basis, but I was only buying enough for them. And then I would get to my afternoon, and I'd put the kids down for their nap, and I would just eat something random. So a huge key for me was just stocking my fridge with something easy that I could grab when I was on the run, something like Greek yogurt. I eat that way too much. My kids know that. Mommy has that every day for breakfast right now. I'm boring, but man, just having that in my fridge accessible makes a huge, huge difference. And for a lot of us as busy moms, there may just be some practical things in the way of us pursuing our wellness routines. Maybe you want to go running, but you don't have workout shoes, or you don't have socks, or you don't have shorts that fit because you're, whatever, changing sizes postpartum. So just having some of those practical things in place can make a really, really big difference in terms of implementing these wellness routines. For some of us, they may not be that hard, but it's just having an environment that promotes that success instead of inhibiting that success. The third tip I have for implementing wellness routines at home is to be creative. So oftentimes, we have something called a limiting belief. Examples of these could be something like, I can't work out if my kids are awake, or I can't eat healthy because I'm too busy. I can't implement a Bible time because my kids are being too chaotic. And these beliefs will actually limit us from problem solving. So when we've already ruled something out, when we've already said, this is impossible, we're not going to spend any time trying to implement that habit, right? Because we've already said, this can't be done. So for me, one of the ways that I realized I had a limiting belief is I had this belief that I cannot work out if my kids are awake. So I thought, if one of my kids is crying, if they're awake, if they're running around the house, it's impossible for me to work out. Well, then I was listening to a book called Emma's for Mama. I would highly recommend that book. And she's a mom. I think she has 10 kids now, something crazy like that. I only have two. She has 10. She works out all the time with her kids running around. And it just hit me, oh, that's possible. And then from there, I was able to problem solve. OK, well, this mom can figure it out. What could I do? And so if my kid woke up early in the morning while I was working out, I would just put them in a high chair with some Cheerios, right? And suddenly, they're doing fine. They're eating a snack. They're watching mommy do burpees, super exciting, lots of entertainment, right? And that kid's super happy. Or with my toddler, sometimes if he is up, especially when my youngest child was a baby and I had a toddler, I'd let the toddler work out with me, right? Because I'd been up with the baby for a long time. And I would just let the toddler run around, play with trucks. Sometimes he'd crawl under me. And it probably was, whatever, 2% less effective. But it's way better than not doing anything at all. So just dealing with these limiting beliefs and problem solving instead of just giving up right away, that makes a huge difference if you think that it's possible. And honestly, for a lot of these basic wellness routines, it is possible if you're a stay-at-home mom. But it requires creativity and recognizing it may be different than it was before you had kids. My fourth tip for implementing wellness routines at home is to have a backup plan. For me, this is so helpful because mentally, I could just feel like such a failure if I have a routine I was planning to do and then something happens. So the most common one is the workout for me, guys, right now. So I think, OK, I'm going to get up early. I'm going to do a workout before my kids get up. Well, sometimes my kids get up way earlier than I expected. And for me, I have a backup plan. So I know if I slept in, if my kids got up super early that day and I only had time to do devotions, my plan is to do my workout during the very afternoon nap. Granted, I don't always want that. I would rather do my workout in the morning. But just having that backup plan is really helpful for me in terms of implementing that routine. My fifth tip for implementing wellness routines at home is to pair a difficult wellness routine with something fun. So for me, this comes back to working out again. I just had a lot of figuring out to do with little kids and trying to fit in my workout, I guess. For me, that looks like pairing my workout video with a YouTube video. So I'm a huge learner, guys. I could spend so much money on online courses. I'm working on creating one because I just love online courses. I love learning. I love learning from people that are better at skills than me. But I have a tendency to spend all of my time learning and none of it doing. So I would love to watch YouTube videos, I'm sure, on how to work out or how to fit in your workout, but without actually working out. So for me, what that looks like is, OK, I'm allowed to learn. I'm allowed to watch that YouTube video I want to watch. But I have to do it while doing something productive. So I pair my workout with that YouTube video I've been wanting to watch. Or I pair chopping my vegetables while my kids are napping with that YouTube video I've been wanting to watch. This could be looking like if you're trying to drink more water, pairing drinking water with having the snack that you have every day that you look forward to. So whatever it is that you struggle with, try to pair it with something you really enjoy. And that could be a way to help you implement that wellness routine. So that's all for today. If you like this podcast, if you want to hear more or learn about more resources from me, go over to wellnesswithhanna.com. That's wellnesswithhanna.com. And subscribe so you can never miss a blog post. And you can also follow me on Instagram at wellnesswithhanna24. Again, that's wellnesswithhanna24. And that's the year this podcast was started. So that's where the 24 came from. But thank you all so much for joining me. I hope you'll join me again for another podcast of wellness at home. Thanks, guys.