If one more person tells you to just take some time for yourself while you're drowning, this one's for you.

In this solo episode, I go off on the self-care industry and why taking a bath is not the answer to your rage, your burnout, or your lack of capacity.

Self-care has become another job on the to-do list, dressed up as wellness and sold back to us. And underneath it all? A whole lot of unexamined beliefs about why women can't put themselves first in the first place.

I get honest about my own early motherhood and why 'just relax' was never going to cut it. I digs into boundaries and how bloody uncomfortable they are to hold, the people-pleasing conditioning that follows women into motherhood, and the mindset work that actually moves the needle not another bubble bath.

Plus: the wellness industry is worth $224 billion in the UK alone, and women's mental health is still in crisis. Sam breaks down why those two facts are connected, and why the answer was never a spa day.

In this episode:

• Why self-care so often means another job, not a break
• The link between the wellness industry, beauty standards, and money
• My own postpartum story - anxiety, undiagnosed ADHD, and why baths never worked
• The mindset and beliefs that stop women putting themselves first
• What it actually takes to hold a boundary and why it hurts
• Why the fix was never a spa day

If you've ever felt guilty for resting, exhausted by self-care, or like you're failing at looking after yourself no matter what you try, this one's for you.

If you're back at work and even thinking about looking after yourself feels exhausting on top of juggling everything else, this one's for you.

Ready to stop over-giving and start reclaiming your own boundaries? Book a no-obligation Clarity Call with me and find out what working together actually looks like. Book here

MOTHERS’ HOOD

If this episode or any other resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. Email me:

[email protected]

Or come and find me here:

www.mothershood.co.uk

Instagram: @mothers.hood

Facebook: @mothershoodtribe

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samantha-murrell-03966132/

Hello and welcome to another episode of You've Had a Baby, Not a Lobotomy. This is another solo episode — the third of three I've put in this season — where I do a bit of a deep dive into things I've been talking about on socials, where it's hard to get the nuance in and where I like to put more information into what's behind them, and have a bit of a rant about a particular topic.

This episode is called "If someone else tells me to have a bath, I'll scream", and it's about self-care and mothers — something that really frustrates me.

Self-care and wellness for mothers is such a big business. Without going too much into things I've talked about before: we're telling mothers to look after themselves so they're not a "raging mum" or an "angry mum" — but we're not given the resources and support to actually do that. So it feels like another thing women are having to take on. Think about the planning, getting the kids ready, organising someone else to have them, all the prep involved. When we have so little capacity as it is, having something else on the to-do list just feels like too much.

So many of the things called self-care are prescriptive, grounded in patriarchy and misogyny. Often it's about telling women what they need to do to feel good — and to feel good you apparently need to look good. I'm not dismissing that there's a connection there completely, but it's making women feel like they need to keep up with certain beauty standards. So it's self-care wrapped up in a bow, really about making women spend more money on things they don't need, or feel like they should need, without ever diving deeper into why.

A bit of background on my story: I remember when Luna was really small and I didn't know how to relax. I was highly anxious, and we know now a lot of that was undiagnosed ADHD combined with an unsupported postpartum. And when I say unsupported — I have an amazing husband and an amazing family, but at the time Luna was born, my dad was in hospital with an ongoing heart condition, so in those first couple of weeks we didn't see them much.

We need so much more than one other person, because there's so much a woman needs to recover from — and often it's just them and their partner at home, which was the case for us. We were literally running around not having a clue what we were doing, like headless chickens, so anxious that if we stopped watching her she'd stop breathing. All the funny newborn noises we didn't understand. She wouldn't sleep if we put her down — I understand why now, looking back — so we'd take shifts holding her while she slept and the other one would try to sleep. But I wasn't really sleeping properly. I was very hypervigilant and didn't know how to rest at all in those in-between moments. Even when my husband was looking after her, I'd be hovering around feeling like I should be involved, because surely it should be me looking after her.

I really didn't know how to look after myself in those moments. I hadn't built my own toolkit for that, because before Luna I inevitably had time to myself — I didn't have to plan it. I had a full-time job, but the rest of the time was my own, and I didn't know how to regulate my nervous system.

I was very much a people pleaser, the "good girl" — I didn't have great boundaries, I'd do things because I thought other people needed me to, or because I didn't want to be seen as selfish. So when I did have more time and space in my life I could do those things, but I didn't really know how to look after myself in a way that would carry me through into new motherhood. And of course, different seasons call for different ways of looking after ourselves — with a newborn you can't really be away from them for long. I remember being anxious if I wasn't near Luna, so it's not as if someone could've come in and let us both sleep, because I just couldn't do that.

I remember when my dad came out of hospital, my mum and dad came round and mum cooked us a big lovely brunch. My husband went off for a nap, and I just sat with them — I think I wanted the comfort of being near my parents, and I'm really grateful they were there. But I couldn't go and sleep on my own, partly because when you have a new baby you're wired to be close to them — I physiologically felt it when I wasn't near her — but also because I believed I should be the one looking after her.

We don't look at the mindset and beliefs behind why women find it hard to look after themselves — we just throw "look after yourself, take a bath" at them, and it's not that simple. It's just another thing for women to put on their list, another thing to feel like they're failing at. We're told to take time for ourselves so we're not an angry mum, yet we're not resourced to do that logistically. Then we feel guilty when we do take that time, because we feel selfish, or like we should be the one looking after our child. And then it's just another thing we're getting wrong — a perpetual cycle.

Coming back to mindset and beliefs around being a woman, and especially a mother — as women we're socialised to look after other people, to put others before ourselves. There's a difference between being communally focused — and I think many women are, and we work brilliantly together collectively — but we're not taught to look after our own needs first, because we're taught that's selfish. We're taught to abandon ourselves and our needs for other people. And that perpetuates into motherhood.

That's a lot of the work I do — it's one of the pillars of it. The women I work with are brilliant. High-flying, high achievers, big powerful jobs. Motherhood comes in and brings such a different lens to their lives. They don't need me to give them strategies — they know what they need to do. But sometimes it's someone else giving them permission. I hate that that's the case, and I've needed it too. Sometimes it's seeing someone else model it, or literally being given the words to say: why can't you do that for yourself? And then we go deeper — into the mindset of why they can't say no to that person. It's not just "put a boundary in place" — okay, what does that boundary actually look like? Why do you want it there? What happens when someone pushes back on it — because inevitably they will? How do we deal with the fallout? How do we deal with the physical discomfort of that?

It can be excruciatingly physically painful, I've found, to hold a boundary in place — even a loving one — and deal with the pushback. And before that, even recognising you need the boundary in the first place. Like over-giving at work when someone asks last minute, "can you just stay late and do this" — we say yes to prove we're capable. Especially as mothers, we're trying to prove we're still capable, still committed, still ambitious. Or not blocking out your diary on the days you don't work, and people still put meetings in it — or you miss important meetings because people assume you'll dial in even when you're not working. Putting those boundaries in place is scary, because it means asserting our position — other people will feel uncomfortable, and so will we. A lot of this comes back to mindset and beliefs about over-giving.

So when we tell women to look after themselves, take more time for themselves, we're often shown the image of a nice bubble bath. I absolutely hate baths. I remember having one when Luna was small — lying there, feeling more and more anxious, staring at the ceiling while I could hear her crying downstairs. I'd will myself to stay in a few more minutes and then just couldn't wait to get out. That wasn't a break for me. That wasn't self-care. It wasn't even a physical break, really — I could feel it in my whole body.

We have so much more work to do on what it means to look after ourselves — and to look after each other, as a community — because right now we're putting that burden entirely on the individual. And when it comes to mothers, we don't always have the capacity to put it in place. We don't always even know what we want, because in different seasons of our lives we want different things, and we don't know what will fill our cup — that can take time to figure out. That's part of the work I do too: building a different toolkit for connecting to yourself, figuring out what feels good for you, what nourishes you, what's accessible in that season of your life. It's trial and error. What works for me won't work for someone else. The women I work with are brilliant — they know what they like. Sometimes it's just giving them permission to do it.

I want to finish with some stats that are pretty telling about where this messaging is coming from, and why the wellness industry keeps driving women to spend more money on themselves — telling them they need to fix something, rather than just look after themselves because you're worthy of being looked after, full stop.

Despite that growth, there's still significant unmet need in women's health — perimenopause, fertility, pregnancy, motherhood. Millions and millions of pounds are being spent on self-care, on things we've been told will make our lives better, when actually we need access to proper resources and support.

So we've gone from self-care to maternal mental health and suicide, which can be an outcome when poor mental health isn't treated. But you can see the link: our money is being directed in the wrong places. This isn't about blaming women for spending money on these things — I like getting my nails done, I like doing different things, and I'm in a season now where I have more choice in what I can do. But when you're not supported, not resourced, and don't understand why you're over-giving and over-pleasing — because we're told a good mother self-sacrifices and is completely fulfilled by motherhood — that's rubbish. Those expectations are unrealistic and unachievable, and that's where we need to start: looking at the conditions we mother within, and why they're unsustainable, and why so many women are feeling the strain on their mental health.

It's more than just taking a bubble bath or going for a spa day.

Thank you for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it, and I'd love to hear your thoughts — and if you do love a bubble bath, I'm happy for you, but for me, it really used to wind me up! Thanks for listening.