Sarah Ashton OT on Sensory Overwhelm in Motherhood
Do you feel totally overwhelmed in motherhood? Sarah Ashton, Perinatal Occupational Therapist helps us to make sense of overwhelm from a nervous system and sensory system perspective and gives us some tips about how to regulate ourselves in these moments.
Sarah Ashton is a Perinatal Occupational Therapist and a proud mother to two spirited little kiddos.
She is a Matrescence Reveller & an OT for Mothers – supporting women reorient, make meaning and adapt to motherhood – because matrescence matters.
Sarah moved into this practice 12 years into her profession after experiencing a deeply complex and unexpected challenge in adapting to motherhood. She’s walking the walk alongside you!
You can find Sarah here:
https://www.sarahashtonot.com.au/
Instagram: @matrescencematters
Email: hello@sarahashtonot.com.au
Hey Mama, I have a Sleep Guide for you! For birth to 18 months, this guide is steeped in evidence and laced with compassion. And you can download the first chapter absolutely free HERE.
Are we Insta pals? If not, why not? Come and hang out at @mamamatters.au!
As always, thanks for being here- if you enjoy this poddy I would LOVE if you could give a rating and a review. It means the world to me.
xx
TRANSCRIPT
Fiona Weaver 00:09
Hello love and welcome to the Manage chatters podcast. If you're keen to ditch all of the parenting shoulds and want to uncomplicate sleep and parenting, you are in the right place, through honest conversations with experts and each other, we will help you to cut through all of the noise and to love the heck out of your imperfect and authentic parenting. I'm Fiona, a social worker by trade. Now supporting families with sleep and parenting through my business mama matters. I'm passionate about parenting psychology, biologically normal infants sleep and infant mental health and attachment. I'm also a parent and I am on a mission to normalize the shitshow that can be parenthood. I know that right now you might be trapped under a sleeping baby. Or maybe you've got your headphones in to soften the blue of the afternoon witching hour, wherever and whoever you are. I want you to know that you belong here. Now, let's have a chat Hello, my love and welcome back Today I just wanted to remind you that for the month of June, anybody who leaves me a rating and review on Apple podcasts will receive a special little thank you gift in the mail in the real life mail. So if this is you, thank you, I appreciate you. And could you please send me your mailing address and I will get something out to you. So slide into my DMs at MAMA matters.au or send me an email Hello at MAMA matters.com. Today you and we will go from there. Today I am speaking with Sarah Ashton, who is a proud mother of two spirited little kiddos and a passionate perinatal occupational therapist. She is a mature essence reveler and an OT for mothers, supporting women to reorient make meaning and adapt to motherhood because my presence matters. Sarah moved into this practice 12 years into her profession after experiencing a deeply complex and unexpected challenge in adapting to motherhood. She's walking the walk alongside you and today she is here to chat about overwhelm in motherhood, which is something that I know that we are all going to be nodding along I will listen to this and to feel validated and heard and also to come up with some practical strategies in managing the overwhelm that is motherhood. So I hope you enjoy this chat. Sara, thank you so much for coming on. I'm so happy to have you here.
Sarah Ashton 02:34
Hi, Fiona. Thank you for having me. Gosh, I feel so privileged to be here.
Fiona Weaver 02:39
Our stop I feel privileged to have you. I went to your overwhelm in motherhood workshop the other weekend just after that I was like she has to come on my podcast because I love what you're doing. Oh, well.
Sarah Ashton 02:53
Thank you. I think the feeling's mutual.
Fiona Weaver 02:56
I would love to invite you to tell us about yourself who's in your family and about the work that you do.
Sarah Ashton 03:03
Yeah, we'd love to. So thank you for the introduction. I'm Sarah. I'm a proud mom of two very expressive little kiddies, I've got a five year old boy named Ali and a three year old daughter named Grace. And together with their dad and my husband, we live in the Pilbara in sunny WA. I'm an OT an occupational therapist. So I'm in the profession of promoting and supporting anyone's engagement and participated participation in their meaningful activities. So primarily, I work in the motherhood support space that might be prenatally or postnatally. So helping women and their partners prepare for parenthood, or postnatally, working with women who are experiencing any of the perinatal mood disorders, or working with women who just simply feeling challenged, have difficulty with or simply just feeling a bit unsatisfied with their role in motherhood, and helping them kind of navigate that find and make meaning of it. And yeah, a lot of that work involves working through overwhelm, which is what I think we're going to talk about today, we were just talking
Fiona Weaver 04:21
before we started recording about how OTS aren't really super understood in the wider community they are. As I was saying, I feel like there's a gap in knowledge of what you guys do. And a lot of us think OTs, you know, for kids or OTs, with elderly and the disabled. So can you speak to the work that you do around this motherhood space when you're saying you support mothers in whatever they're experiencing? Challenging and motherhood? What does that look like?
Sarah Ashton 04:54
Yeah, okay. Well, I guess you're exactly right. Like people come across OTS in pediatrics. They come in So OTS in aged care facilities, essentially no matter where you work with no matter where you work with an OT, our primarily primary goal is supporting clients and doing the things that are important to them, and feeling satisfied with doing those things. So what an OT does is they together with their clients look at a couple of different areas, we understand that in order to do the things that are important to us, we have an interaction between what our personal factors are, what our environmental factors are, and what our occupational factors are. And so the interaction of all of those things really influences how we perform and participate in the things that we need to do and want to do. So in motherhood support, for example, if a mother is experiencing some difficulties, upset some discomfort, we're looking at all of those different areas, and setting goals and intervening within each of those areas. So those personal the personal factor area might be things like working with a mom helping her with coping strategies, mental health support sensory systems support, if they have a birth injury, and they're needing to, I guess, do things a little bit differently as well, because of their physical capabilities. We're looking at the environment. So what social systems they have, what supports they have? Where are they doing the things that they need to do? Who are they surrounded with? big one for me is the context in which they're doing the mother into and I love Sophie, Sophie Brock's work around that. And then looking at their occupations as well. So the demands of what they're doing, how many occupations they're trying to do, whether you can change the occupations, particularly motherhood, working with their children, and helping them to understand their kids and their kids needs. And so it's, yes, this is why it's misunderstood, because it is such a it's such a broad profession, but it's so holistic. So we would look at each of those different domains, and set goals and intervene within each of them to help an overarching goal, which is supporting function in what's important to us. Does that make sense? Yeah, that
Fiona Weaver 07:25
makes sense. It sounds like such a great resource, it is potentially underused in this space.
Sarah Ashton 07:31
Yeah, I think that's, I think that's certainly that's certainly changing. For sure. It's nice. Yeah.
Fiona Weaver 07:39
Yeah, that's awesome. So what we are going to talk about today is this overwhelm in motherhood. And as I mentioned, at the beginning of this episode, I attended your workshop on overwhelming motherhood the other week, and I thought it was so fantastic speaking to the nervous system, and our sensory challenges and what comes up for us when we do become mothers or parents and how our, how we are so prone to that feeling of overwhelm, particularly at the, at the end of the day, or when our resources drained. And so I'd love for you to speak to this. Yeah, overwhelm in motherhood and what's happening for us in that?
Sarah Ashton 08:20
Yeah. Okay. How long have you got?
Fiona Weaver 08:24
I got time, honey. Yeah,
Sarah Ashton 08:26
we can actually really talk about it from those, those three different areas that I spoke about before from an IoT perspective, which is nice. But I guess in a nutshell, our bodies are wired, a nervous system, I like to think of our nervous system as our wires. But our body is literally wired to search for and protect us from threats and our bodies are constantly scanning and responding to the environment around us. So what I perceive as a threat will be different to what you perceive as a threat threat, so very much in the eye of the perceiver. And so each of us will find different things threatening. When I talk about overwhelm, I talk about it from a psycho sensory perspective and you get you can't really have one without the other they both kind of interact. But what I mean when I talk about that is that our thoughts that we might have maybe amplified in motherhood, such as the perfect mother me the guilt or expectations versus reality, and the mental load or the psychological load, the stresses that we experience in motherhood as well. Combined with the environment, so our sensory system, that sensory perspective in overwhelm, our sensory system is actually what scans the environment constantly processes all of the environmental stimuli through our eight senses, processes that and makes sense of what to do with that information that we are receiving. So we've got both of these systems working pretty hard constantly. So Throughout the day processing that information. So when we become a mother, our brain goes through a series of little upgrades. Some of the areas in our brain that are responsible for sensory processing have a little upgrade motional intelligence has a bit of an upgrade. Dr. Oscar Cerelac talks about it a lot as the care and the aggression areas of our brain upgrading, getting our brain ready to start to think of think of life in ways rather than in AI. And so, no longer are we scanning the environment alone for just our own safety. But we're also concerned with the safety of our offspring and our children, as well. So there's that that component, we're actually able to take in and process more of that sensory information, and responsible for the care and protection of our kiddos. And then in motherhood, generally speaking, so we'll talk about these occupational changes, right, we are more sleep deprived were possibly taking on a greater mental load off and multitasking. And so whilst we have these upgrades in our brain, these three things that I'm talking about can actually impair our brain function can make it more difficult for our brain to process or reduce the capacity that our brain has to process, more sensory information that is around us in the environment. And so then there's a sensory information or the environmental input that we have in our role as a mother in our mothering. So we're constantly processing sensory information throughout the day, we're sensory beings, everything comes in, everything goes out, and that helps us make sense of the world. We too hot or too cold is it noises or to inquire is our body safe, our sensory kind of system is trying to make sure that our body is safe. So sensory information in motherhood is typically a lot more than what we are used to, I'm sure you can relate when you need to process more noise, we need to process possibly more visual input, possibly more taste, different smells touch movement. And each of us have really unique thresholds for sensory information, and each of those different senses. And so when we are approaching that sensory threshold, our bodies also recognize that as a threat to think this is often why you mentioned at the very end of the day, but it's often why it is a sensory trigger that makes us feel this overwhelm because we're already processing processing a lot of that psychological information. But by the time we we kind of hit that sensory threshold, we're no longer able to process anymore. And that's where we kind of flip our lid, so to speak, we just spoke about. So within our nervous system, we have our central nervous system, which is our brain and our spinal cord. And then there's our peripheral nervous system, which has all the nerves kind of coming and going in, in from out and in and in and then out. And then within that peripheral nervous system, we've got our autonomic nervous system. So within that other areas that are responsible for our fight or flight response, our rest and recuperation response, it's very automatic, think of your breathing, your heart rate, your pupils, all that kind of thing. And we have our somatic system, which is our sensory nerves coming in, and our motor nerves going out. So when we are threatened or when we have a trigger, our sensory system might be overloaded or overflowed. It triggers our sympathetic nervous system, which is that fight off, which is the part of our nervous system responsible for fight or flight, it triggers it triggers that automatic system to increase our heart rate, reduce our fast and our breathing rate, our body is literally getting ready to fight or flight whatever that threat is. When that happens, our brain, Dan Siegel talks about it, we flip out, we flip our lids. And so when we flip our lids, we're no longer our brain is no longer able to function from this really smart outer cortex responsible for problem solving, reasoning, emotional regulation, and we're operating from this emotive primitive center of our brain. So overwhelming is basically when our brain and our sensory systems so our Psycho and our sensory systems are overloaded with the information, we literally flip our lid and are impaired in our ability to think and act clearly and reasonably. Does that make sense?
Fiona Weaver 14:50
It was such a great explanation Thank you. And then I think leads into a little bit of rupture and repair there doesn't it when we do flip our lids and behave in ways that We don't particularly want to and then the repair comes after that. What I am wondering is, so you were saying that our senses become more hyper vigilant when we become mothers, right? And we are also experiencing a lot more sensory input that we can't control anymore. Can you give us a little bit of a rundown of what are our sensory systems?
Sarah Ashton 15:24
Yeah, yeah. So there are there are eight of them. So I guess I'll maybe talk about those, each of those sensory systems and perhaps what that input additional important hours mothers might be. So you've got your visual input, that's that sight, what you see. So think about what we're looking at in the day, there might be brighter colored toys around there might be kids running around us fast, they might be mess and more clutter than we used to, we might be looking at the same thing over and over and over again, if we're spending our time in a different environment, then there's the auditory input. So what we're what we're hearing, as mothers we might be hearing, laughing, talking, crying, screaming, fighting, toys, TV, lots of different auditory information that's coming in. olfactory system is what we smell, we might be in the midst of toilet training, we might be changing nappies all day, we might be preparing different foods, we might be in the kitchen a little bit more frequently, that kind of coincides with taste as well, we might be eating more frequently, putting different things in our mouth, different textures, more frequently than usual, touch is what we feel. So you know, we might have a baby on us for a lot of the day, we might have kids climbing on us throughout the day, we're getting a lot more of that touch, input, proprioception, and vestibular input is all concerned with our our bodies. So proprioception is like our joints in space. So you think pushing, pulling up and down, we might be doing a lot more of that in playing with our kids getting up and down off the ground with our kids or our babies, carrying our babies around. Vestibular input is like our head in space. So our balance, so like you thinking, swinging, rocking, bouncing, or that type of thing. And then the final one, which I think is really important, but underrecognized in motherhood is our interoceptive system, which is how the internal sensations that we have, recognizing what our body needs, are we hungry, and we thought, you know, like your kids, when your kids are having a bit of the moment, sometimes the first thing you do is Are you hungry, thirsty? Are you tired? What is it? Well, it's exactly the same thing in the wild in anybody really. But I think particularly in motherhood, sometimes that's the thing that gets left to the bottom of the list, but it's actually up our body is monitoring that sensation as well. And so if we are thirsty, if we need to go to the toilet, if we're hungry, if we're tired, for too hot or too cold, our body is actually working in overdrive processing that information as well. So you can know like there is a lot more that we are taking in that our nervous system is having to process constantly throughout the day. And often like you said, when it gets to that end of the day, we have well and truly hit or exceeded our threshold. Where you know, I agree with you, it's the same I call them the witching hours. You know, kids have witching hours. I think we have witching hours too, because we can't function optimally, then we're not thinking clearly reasoning, it becomes a bit harder.
Fiona Weaver 19:05
It's so validating when you're speaking to all of these sensory systems plus the you know, societal cultural challenges of being a mother the expectations of the perfect mother myth and all of that. The mental load the division of labor, all of that is so much like, how could we not be overwhelmed. And it's so interesting, because I remember as a kid, just laughing at mom, because you come into a room and you have a big frown. Don't just turn that off. There's too much on the what who turn the lights on, turn the TV off, and my mom chill your jets. But I am I am her. I am mom now. And I walk into a room and if there's too much going on and something has to stop. I actually just wanted to just believe everyone inside and I want to go outside and put my feet in the ground and look up at the sky. Sort of cast my eyes to the horizon. That's my way of sort of regulating what I feel really overwhelmed but There's just a lot isn't there?
Sarah Ashton 20:02
Oh, yeah, there's a lot. And like you said that you something has to stop. And that is exactly what that is, you're literally your body being like Warning, warning, it's not safe. Yes, something needs to change, hear from the noise or whatever it might be for you.
Fiona Weaver 20:22
And it's tricky, isn't it? Because you can't, you can't stop all of it, all of these coping strategies that might have worked before motherhood, before children, probably no longer work, they're probably no longer appropriate. And you probably never needed them as much, because you could control your environment a little bit better. But having the kids and they're around all the time, they're always they're nipping at your heels, it's quite challenging to even if you are feeling overwhelmed, like what can you do if you feel yourself getting worked up? Or what are those sort of early warning signs that your nervous system is getting overloaded? And how can you nurture that
Sarah Ashton 21:00
all really great points. And I think it's harder to regulate from a state of dysregulation to. So I guess, some of those physiological symptoms that you might experience when you are approaching that fight or flight response are quite clear, you might feel your heart rate increasing, you might feel your breath fastening, you might feel yourself getting hot, you kind of like feeling irritable, having a bit of difficulty focusing that like I just need to, I just need to get out of here, like I just need to escape, those are all signs that you are kind of in a state of overwhelm. What I like to encourage anybody to do really is to get really clear on their own, I guess, sensory preferences. So what different senses and sensory kind of tools that people can use to help calm or alert their sensory system and not not waiting until getting to that state of overwhelm to implement some of those tools. But like, for example, if sound and sounds a really common one, but If sound is something that really triggers us towards the end of the day, or we know it's at dinner time, and that's where we usually flip our lid is where can we kind of I say empty our cup, I know we talked about, we need to fill our cup a lot through the day, but our sensory system is like a cup. And when the cup gets full, it overflows and you can't get any more sensory information in. So I like to say that like if you can, taking some of those moments throughout the day to actually empty out some of that sensory input. So you know, it's stepping away from the mess in the house, perhaps stepping away from the bright colors or looking at something that is really common, you know, sometimes I screen savers on computers can do. Getting away from the noise, like you said, stepping outside listening to nature, some people really like, like sensory information. So you know, smelling something beautiful essential oils, or a candle or something like that. Eating something delicious and nourishing. Touch can be another one like if you feel like you need like a big hug, give yourself a big hug, kind of everyone's thresholds for each of those different senses are very different. So getting curious around what your own are. So you can kind of give yourself what you need throughout the day. But really importantly, to do that mindfully to you know, when you're taking those moments to reduce the noise or to reduce the visual input. It's not just stepping out side, it's actually I'm stepping outside now, I'm physically emptying my cup a little bit, which is going to give me a bit more capacity to be able to handle what is to come more to feel regulated in what is to come kind of give that little ritual a bit of purpose, a bit of meaning, I think and a bit of self compassion with it, too. But it's it like I said, it'll be different for everybody. So wherever you can throughout the day, emptying your cup a little bit. If you know particular times throughout the day, we usually do feel your lead, always make an effort to 10 to 15 minutes before around about that time to actually empty your cup even further and get your mind and your body kind of grounded into a better ability to be able to handle what's to come. Breathing loss is another one I do didn't mention that before. But when we breathe deeply, we're actually telling our nervous system that our body because we're breathing deeply, we're making our nervous system calm down a little bit, we can kind of trick our parasympathetic nervous system to think, Ah, this is this is safe, I can kind of dial down my fight or flight response. So, there's a bit of science behind the debriefing,
Fiona Weaver 25:24
too. Yeah, for sure. And I think it's so important to speak to how unique our own sensory preferences are, isn't it? So what one person can find super calming and regulating another person can find stimulating? So how do we get to know our sensory systems? Is it just getting curious, like, you know, writing down what lights us up? What gives us energy? What drains our energy? Or what makes us feel excited? What makes us feel calm?
Sarah Ashton 25:50
You can do that. So yeah, getting curious is the first thing that I would always suggest are triggers are our biggest teacher. So where we find our trigger will generally tell us what threshold were hitting what we might be a bit more sensitive to. In the overwhelm workshop, there was a workbook that has some checklists that you can go through to kind of prompt your thinking around it to like what might alert your nervous system might what might calm your nervous system. And then if you wanted to take it a step further, and I know I worked with some clients that think like, Yeah, I kind of feel like I'm in overwhelm. But I really don't understand where it's coming from, I don't know what I like or what I dislike, then OT is trained in sensory profiling can kind of do a bit more of a thorough, standardized assessment with you, that can really unpack your sensory profile. So some people are more sensitive, some people are sensory seeking, some people are sensory avoidance, some people have lower registration to sensory information. So you can find out kind of where you see it in the profile, but the questions that are used can help to unpack where those preferences and thresholds are,
Fiona Weaver 27:05
as well. And so it's also relevant to our kids, isn't it, they sort of seek and avoid in terms of sensory input. And in our work, we use it a lot around sleep to help them to regulate for sleep, is that something that we should automatically go and get, you know, a bit of input around? Or is it something that we can just get curious on? Or where do we go to for our kids to
Sarah Ashton 27:31
for our kids, I think it's always something that you can just get curious on. I think you where you kind of look to get support from a pediatric OTs, if you feel like, like sensory seeking, or sensory avoidant behavior in kids is impairing or impacting their ability to function in kind of play or in school, you know, in those those two main roles, and that's where you would look for some professional support. But kids, it can be really obvious, you know, does your son or daughter love jumping on the couch? That's their proprioceptive system? Do they love the swing? That's their vestibular system? Are they always eating? Are they always got something in their mouth? If they're, you know, if you're putting perfume on, are they always coming up and smelling? You know, like, if awareness is power, and awareness is no, if you can just keep in mind all of those eight senses, then you can kind of start to see it a bit more clearly in yourself and your kiddos
Fiona Weaver 28:36
to remember your story that you told during your workshop about your daughter's backpack that was smelly. Oh, yeah. And it was interesting. The story was that she was becoming quite dysregulated, wasn't she and you realize that this backpack that she adored was like a centered one, right?
Sarah Ashton 28:53
Yeah. So smell is a big thing for my daughter, like she either loves it, or she hates it. So and that's what's so interesting about our sensory system too, right? Like different senses can be alerting to our sensory system, offensive to our sensory system and come into our sensory system. So first, like for her sleep, for example, she has a comforter and she smells it like that's what she does to sleep. She smells a comforter. She has this little bag that has soap in it that she carries around with her when she's feeling a little bit nervous about something. This backpack was so offensive. Because it was just it was a very strong smell. It was very sweet smell. You know, I couldn't handle it after a little while too. So, you know, it was interesting because I thought that the perhaps the backpack was going to be a good thing to do to help her with school because it was centered but yeah, far too much for her. Yeah,
