Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:16 Hi, I'm your host, Justine Aksoy, and this is The Pleasure Hood Podcast. A podcast where we explore what it means to be a mother, a leader, and an all around badass from a place of pleasure, empowerment, and turn on. I am here to revolutionize how humans experience sex, pleasure, and motherhood by normalizing self-care, normalizing mothers having desires and normalizing mothers as sensual and sexual beings. Quick side note, you don't have to be a mother. In order to listen to this podcast, though I create my work with mothers in mind. This conversation is truly for everyone. I believe that pleasure is one of many paths of healing, and I'm here to highlight how to walk that path no matter who you are. It is my deepest desire that wherever you find yourself on this amazing journey we call life, you can experience your power, your turn on, and of course, orgasmic pleasure.
Speaker 1 00:01:49 Hello, hello, hello and welcome to another episode of the Pleasurehood podcast. This episode is a little different. It's an impromptu episode because I want to talk about something that is super prevalent in motherhood and parenthood, especially now. And I feel like it's getting a little bit of attention, it's getting more attention than it has been in the past, but I feel like it is just really, really relevant right now. And that topic is motherhood and burnout. And I had written a article, a Medium article about this, and this podcast episode is inspired by that article. And I start the article out saying like as if you need another listicle to tell you that you're burned out, right? But sometimes we need a little insight from the outside to see that what we're going through and what we're experiencing shouldn't be normalized. Because sometimes we're walking around like zombies, so exhausted and tired, and we think that it's a normal way to feel that it takes something from the outside of us and to reflect back to us that we are actually feeling the way that we feel.
Speaker 1 00:03:44 And when we see it on the outside, we can finally admit that the exhaustion that we're feeling, the disconnection that we're experiencing and the anxiety that is running through our bodies isn't a figment of our imagination. It's real as fuck. And I wanted to get into it and talk about it a little bit and share my experience of navigating exhaustion and burnout as a mother. And also just talk about some things that I personally do that help navigate my burnout and exhaustion. And it's been super helpful for me probably in the past few months. And yeah, I just wanna get into it and talk about it and have an open and honest conversation about what it truly means to be burnt out as fuck as a mother. And also just to let you know that if this is how you're feeling currently, you're not alone and it doesn't last forever. This feeling does not last forever. I can't wait to talk about it. So let's just dive in. You ready? Cuz I'm ready. Let's do it.
Speaker 1 00:05:27 After having my son who is now two and a half years old, a huge piece of me wanted to go back to business as usual, I wanted to override the system that was saying, no, stop. You just had a baby <laugh>. And continue to grow my business, show up fully for my husband, of course, show up fully for my baby, somehow show up fully for myself. And then everything that's in between, right? But as I started to show up fully for every aspect of my life, I realized that you can't give a hundred percent to everything all the time. You know why the math just doesn't pan out. But our good old society would have us believe that once our babies arrive, we need to start losing the baby weight. Be snatched as fuck. Be the perfect mother, be the perfect partner. Bring home the bacon, cook it too.
Speaker 1 00:06:41 And of course, look flawless while doing it. When the truth is you can barely shower, feed yourself, clean your house, wear anything that doesn't resemble yoga pants and go days without brushing your teeth. All right? I don't know about you, but that definitely happened to me. <laugh>. And the truth is, this can go on for a while. Burnout can and will continue to follow us if we're unwilling to recognize burnout can and will continue to follow us if we're unwilling to recognize it for what it is. If you're not willing to stop yourself and say, Hey, I feel shitty right now, you will continue to try and give a hundred percent of your time, energy, and effort to every part of your life. And then wonder why you keep coming up short. So a lot of times because we're so checked out or numbed out or disconnected from ourselves and how we're feeling, it's really hard to pinpoint what burnout or exhaustion looks like or feels like.
Speaker 1 00:08:06 Just most of the time it just comes out like, oh, I'm super tired. I feel like shit. I'm just gonna have another cup of coffee. Or you just kind of ignore it and just keep going and burn through it. Like burn through that feeling. So the question is, how do you know when you're experiencing that? What I like to call mommy burnout. So in my personal experience, here's a few things that have come up for me. Once I really take a moment to step back and realize, oh shit, like I'm burnt out. And the first one is having a hard time asking for support. And you know, I get it like we're expected to do everything by ourselves. Sometimes it's just way easier to do it ourselves than to explain how to do it to someone else. But the truth is, you will need support wherever you are in your postpartum journey.
Speaker 1 00:09:09 And I don't care how postpartum you are, you're gonna need help and support. You can't keep burning the candle at both ends technically. I mean you can, but eventually the two ends meet and fizzle out. And I can't speak for everyone, but I personally don't want you fizzling out. Okay, <laugh>, I really don't. And maybe you already have and haven't realized it yet cuz you're so turned off by everything that you feel numb and maybe possibly a little just dead inside cuz you're just so disconnected. So the next way of knowing that you're burned out is you've fizzled out. Literally. You've fizzled out, you've fizzled out creatively, sexually, sexually. You feel super disconnected from your life force. You don't feel inspired by much. Most of the time you're just going through the motions. I've been there multiple times. It feels like life is happening without you.
Speaker 1 00:10:21 It feels like life is just passing you by. It's just floating on by time seems to drag. You wake up and it feels like groundhog day. You are missing that spark. You once had that twinkle in your eye, that pep in your step. You begin to reminisce of the days when you were young, single, and everything felt super easy and possible. You find yourself thinking of the past more and feel that the good old days are behind you. I promise you, they are not my love. You are just burned out. So the third thing is your sex drive has all but left the building. You're like, what? What is sex? What is that <laugh>? Okay, it's been a while since you touched yourself, touched your partner or your partner has touched you, and the guilt and shame have settled as you realize you're living in a sexless relationship.
Speaker 1 00:11:36 You want to have sex perhaps, but you'd actually rather sleep, rest, watch Netflix, read a book, feed the baby. Okay? Anything but have sex with yourself or your partner or even take care of the kids, you kind of miss the afternoon romps you used to have. You kind of miss being able to have sex any and everywhere in the house. But the truth is, it takes way more energy to get the energy up to have sex than it does to just avoid it. But the more you avoid it, it becomes clear that avoiding it takes up energy too. It becomes this giant heavy elephant in the room, one that takes all the metaphorical air out of the room. It becomes a hefty burden for you and your partner and you begin to think something is wrong with me. But again, nothing wrong with you, you're just burned out.
Speaker 1 00:12:45 The fourth thing is self-care has become a mythical creature. You no longer have run-ins with. And I know self-care has become this huge buzzword that almost means nothing nowadays, but it does because when you take care of yourself, when you begin to restore the energy that has been lost, and when I say self-care, I'm not talking about bubble baths and fa face masks, which are nice, but I am talking about the basic care of oneself. You may have found yourself skipping things important to your physical, mental, spiritual, and sexual health. Perhaps you used to have a meditation practice that has gone by the wayside, or you used to go for a run on the daily and now you can't seem to find the time. Maybe you used to do yoga paint, have random dance parties while cleaning the house or fix your favorite food that made you come alive.
Speaker 1 00:13:42 But now all of these have become abandoned on your to-do list and it seems easier to put them on the someday back burner than to make an effort to integrate them into your life. You begin to tell yourself the story that you're lazy and that if you had more self-discipline, you could return to that budding yoga practice that you had before you had children. You beat yourself up repeatedly and it becomes this perpetual cycle. But this little belief that you've concocted isn't true my love. Again, you're just burned out. And number five, you feel like you're running un empty all the time. Maybe you have been able to start taking care of yourself daily. Maybe you've created time to exercise, eat healthy, read that book and connect with your body, mind, and soul. But you still feel like you're running on empty. Everything still feels like a huge struggle.
Speaker 1 00:14:49 And you feel like if one card is pulled, your entire house will come crashing down. You feel like you're running off fumes and refuse to acknowledge that you genuinely feel empty because we are taught to ignore this feeling, to believe that it is what it is. And this is just a part of motherhood or parenthood and being a human with responsibilities is to feel like you're running on empty. We're expected to run off fumes. And if God forbid you're not and you do have a pep in your step, then somehow it's turned into this narrative that we're being selfish, neglectful to our children, to our family and self-centered. It's almost like a rite of passage to run on empty all the time. But deep down you desire to stop feeling so tired all the fucking time. But when you have that thought of like, oh, I just want to feel vibrant and alive again, it might be accompanied by a feeling of guilt.
Speaker 1 00:16:02 Like how dare I want to be a mother, a parent who feels super turned on by their life? Can you imagine wanting to feel good in your body, in your life to really love it, to feel supported, for it, to feel spacious, for you to feel vibrant and turned on? I can't imagine. Why would someone want to experience their life that way, right? So as I went down this list of figuring out if you're burned out or not, I wanna know where are you on the burnout spectrum? Are you a one out of five, a three out of five? Or did you hit a home run and you're a whopping five out of five? But honestly it doesn't really matter. I created this list as an opportunity to get in touch with your feelings because one of those must have hit you or you resonated with pieces of it.
Speaker 1 00:17:22 And just really checking in with how you feel, taking a step back and understanding that what you're feeling is real and you'll have to feel guilty or ashamed about it, that it's all about becoming present and perhaps for the first time becoming present that you're not feeling as good as you thought you were. And that's okay. So now that you know you're burned out, you must be wondering now what? And in my experience, whenever I'm feeling overwhelmed, hopeless, burned out, even complacent, the best way to process this energy and channel it in a empowering way and sometimes take that energy of overwhelm and transmute it into a more life-affirming energy, a more vibrant energy. I do three things. I breathe, I move and I ground. And when you breathe, it's all about just stopping for a moment. Taking three deep breaths, a breath like your breaths, go past your diaphragm and deep into your belly, expanding it as big as possible.
Speaker 1 00:18:57 Doing it three times or as often as it takes to bring you into the present moment and center your energy. Or maybe to change that energy, you need to move your body. Cuz when the sensations of overwhelm and helplessness flood your nervous system, it flood your nervous system with hormones that can cause your flight, fight or freeze response to kick in. Moving your body allows you to move those responses through your body, bringing it back to homeostasis, enabling you to act from a space of clarity instead of survival. So move your body. Maybe it looks like dancing. It could also just look like jumping up and down, doing jumping jacks running in place so you can get that energy moving up and out and circulating in a way that doesn't feel like it's nervous or anxious energy that is just going to cause you to shut down even more.
Speaker 1 00:20:10 I personally love dance because it puts me into a place of playfulness, sensuality. It just has like this quality of fun to it that really transmutes my energy into a more vibrant energy. So just explore there. Just play with what really feels good to you and what resonates with you and what feels most nourishing to your, your body. And then the last thing is grounding. Standing with your feet planted firmly on the ground is so powerful because it, when you do it in a way that's intentional and mindful, it reminds you that you are supported. You are being held constantly by the earth, by the universe, by something powerful that is a part of you. And if you can, I highly recommend you doing this outside with the grass or dirt supporting you in filling yourself, being held and supported by the earth's energy. And I invite you to release sensations and feelings and thoughts that are not serving you or feels good to you in your body into the ground.
Speaker 1 00:21:44 And let the earth's energy replenish or energize you with just warm and loving and nourishing vibrations, knowing that you are not alone, that you are deeply held. And whether you do this outside or even in your bedroom, just know that the grounding process is powerful no matter what you're setting. And also as you ground, I invite you to pay attention to how you hold your body. Like really like root into the floor, into the earth, and wherever you find yourself. And then hold your body like it is just a sturdy tree or a mountain. And tapping into that sturdiness energy reminds you of your power and just how powerful you are. And when you remind yourself of how powerful you are, it gives you a sense of confidence. It gives you this sense of like, I've got this. It gives you a sense of a deep connection to yourself and that no matter what, you've got it.
Speaker 1 00:23:11 And at the same time, you don't have to do it alone. You are supported. These reactions are very simple but powerful and they can bring you back to your center, bring you back into the present moment when you feel overwhelmed or like your life has gotten way out of control. When you feel like everything is falling apart, remind yourself that you can stop, breathe, move and ground. Now navigating burnout and exhaustion can feel like a neverending rollercoaster because it like life throws us stuff all the time. I love this saying life, be life in because it does. Like you might just find yourself in a rhythm, in a groove of life. Everything is feeling good. You've got your your self care routine, you've been taking care of yourself, you've been exercising, drinking the water, all the things. And then something happens that can, the rug can be pulled from underneath you because life continues, right?
Speaker 1 00:24:27 But when you have tools in your toolbox that bring you back into your center, bring you back into the present moment, allow you to tap into a clearer state of mind and make choices, powerful choices from a place of clarity, and then take action from a place of clarity. It really transforms everything. Now, you're not gonna do it perfect every single time, and that's not the point. You'll never do it perfectly. And that's not the point. There is no such thing as perfect. But the more that you practice, the more that you use the tools that I just gave you. You are able to trust yourself, trust the decisions you make, trust the choices that you make. And as you build your toolbox out and you build a toolbox that feels super supportive for you, you're gonna be able to ride those ebbs and flows that come your way and ride them as smoothly as you possibly can instead of being overtaken by the waves that are sure to come. So you got this my love. I have no doubt. Like I said, burnout and exhaustion are not forever. You now have three tools that can support you when everything feels like it's falling apart and you can remind yourself to breathe, to move, and to ground, bring yourself back to your center, back to your source of power and your deep sense of self.
Speaker 1 00:26:35 Thank you for joining me for another episode of The Pleasure Hood podcast. Catch new episodes every other week on Spotify, YouTube, and of course, apple Podcast. If you're an Apple Podcast user and love the stories, practices, musings and nuggets of wisdom I share, you can show your support by leaving a review For more of my musings on pleasure, motherhood, and sex, head over to Instagram and follow me at Justine Aksot, or pleasure.hood. And if you're ready to take your pleasure hood gain to the next level, sign up for my newsletter where you'll receive words of love, encouragement, and support as you take your pleasure, practice a little deeper. That's all for now. Radiant ones. I can't wait to go deep with you on this path. Recall, pleasure. Until next time, stay wild, sexy, and free!
