Whenever you start to shift away from “hot mess mom” culture. You’re actually going to feel more in control by relinquishing control of so many things.

*This is a modified transcript of an episode from my podcast, The Nourished & Thriving show. This episode is titled “Is Hot Mess Mom Culture giving you a Hot Mess Gut? Here’s how to know …” (published February 2024), which you can find on your favorite listening platform here.

*This is not medical advice.

This is My Campaign to Cancel Hot Mess Mom Culture…

Did you grow up watching your mom put her health and well-being on the back burner so she could care for everyone else around her? And now that you’re a mom, you find you’re in the exact same place. You’re definitely not alone. This is what I call “hot mess mom” culture. You’ve probably heard this term before. I didn’t coin it; It’s a whole thing.

Honestly, it’s kind of funny, right? Have you ever said, “I’m a hot mess mom. I’m completely out of control. My kids are out of control. It’s a circus. This is my circus. These are my monkeys,” with a laugh? We’ve all been there. This type of situation helps us bond and feel a sense of comradery as a busy mom and human. It helps us laugh at this feeling of “too much” and that sense of failure. As women, this was something we’ve had modeled to us for generations.

Maybe you’re not even a “hot mess mom”. Maybe you don’t have kids, and you’re just a “hot mess person” but you understand how the demands of life and overwhelming to-dos pile up making us feel inadequate and unable to put any extra effort into bettering ourselves.

Let me note that this is a balance. I’m not saying that, as a mother, you should not have sacrificial love for your family.  But there is a distinction between “hot mess mom” and sacrificial love. There’s a difference between putting your family’s needs before your own, and completely not caring for your own body and yourself. The second greatest commandment Jesus gave was to, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” He didn’t say, “Love your neighbor instead of yourself.” So yes, you should still love yourself. You should still care for yourself. It’s not one or the other. It’s both.

So much of the time we almost martyr ourselves, which ultimately leads to bitterness and resentment. That is the exact opposite of what we’re trying to do. This stress leads to you feeling bloated, fatigued, you can’t lose weight, and your whole body hurts. Maybe you tell yourself, “it’s just part of being a mom” or “you just have to power through it.” I understand, because it doesn’t really seem like there’s even another option. It often feels like you’re on this hamster wheel of life, but friends, this is a lie. Everyone around you—your friends, your family, your coworkers—needs you to be at your best. So to my point… I really just want to cancel “hot mess mom” culture. Let me explain further…

Society’s Conditioning of the Hot Mess Mom Culture

We need to be able to care for ourselves so that we can do the work we are meant to do. I commonly hear something like, “I wish I had six more hands to carry all that I’m carrying”. This statement is literal and figurative. We joke about it. But I think it goes a step further from just being overwhelmed, over committed, or over extended. In today’s USA culture, we accept and celebrate when we are overwhelmed and are doing a million and one things! I don’t think it’s something we as a culture should accept and celebrate…

Now being a “hot mess mom” or feeling overextended is absolutely a part of life. In certain seasons, things are going to feel a little bit out of control without a way to calm the storm. That’s okay. Sometimes there’s a big life change, like new family additions, really busy work schedules, or a couple of weeks where extracurricular activities overlap—where one season is ending and one is already beginning and you are overextended for a short period of time. Even an occasional day may feel like a hot mess day, where nothing went according to plan. This should not be the norm! You shouldn’t be constantly putting out fires! It’s too exhausting.

Yet these expectations of us come from our society. It’s not even intentional… It’s just happened. We expect moms and women to carry the burden of everything. More and more women are working outside of the home. 70 years ago now, the societal roles were more clearly defined. In an earlier era, the husband would go out of the home, work and provide the money, while the wife would stay home as the main caretaker and manager of the family and house. She would take care of the kids, meals, cleaning, etc.  Fast forward to today, and the mom and wife still does all of those things, and she also works outside of the home. There’s not been this transfer of responsibility. Moms are typically the ones who are managing the mental calendar and the task list of who needs to be where and when and what groceries we need to purchase. Mom is the one who knows when school dress up days are, what projects are going on right now, what family birthdays are going on, not to mention most of the home management and maintenance tasks, like laundry and cleaning. To be clear, our partners are absolutely stepping up and helping out more and contributing more. My husband and I really view each other as a team and a partnership in a different way than generations in the past have. (On the plus side, I think that is something our generation is actually doing a really great job at.) But it can still feel imbalanced at times. On the flip side, I don’t think the tables are always slanted to where women are always taking on more. Maybe the man is taking on more. I do work with some men who express these feelings as well, saying things like, “I feel like I’m the only one planning meals and trying to make changes.” There are men who need to get their wives on board, too.

If you’re in this space and you’ve been thinking, “I feel like I’m a hot mess” every day, and it’s not just a season… If you feel like what I said about running around, putting out fires constantly and never really getting ahead has resonated with you, I actually have a few tips to help you find more of a balance within life and your health.

4 Tips to End the “Hot Mess Mom” Feeling

My Experience as a “Hot Mess Mom”

Why am I an expert on “hot mess mom” culture? Why can I share my perspective on this? I don’t want to claim authority here, but I can speak from my experiences. I have three young-ish kids. I have a very old, sweet dog who requires a lot of care. I am president of a volunteer organization in our community. My husband is our precinct chair politically, so he’s busy with that. We go to church. We’re in a home group. We volunteer. Our kids are in a lot of activities. I run my own business. My husband also works for himself. We have a lot going on. And in seasons, it has felt overwhelming. So I have had to do all of this work on myself. I’ve walked these steps, and I’ve seen what a huge, positive improvement it can make on the quality of our lives.

Am I perfect? No. Do I have it all figured out? No. Does it change? Yes, things need to be adjusted over time. It’s a process; you’re never going to be able to do these tips one time and be set up forever. These tips are really something that need to be consistently incorporated into your lifestyle so that you can find change!

Tip 1. Ask yourself, “Why now?”

Tip number one is asking the question, “Why now?” If you’ve been around for very long, you’ve heard me say this before. It’s important to ask this for gut health and general well-being. Ask yourself, “Why are these things happening?” so you can really understand the context behind life’s stressors—or in the case of gut health—digestive symptoms. I like to call a problematic gut a “hot mess gut”… See the parallel? Asking the question why can be a really powerful starting point to identifying the motivation behind this and the reasons why you’re here in this place, which in turn can help you put effective strategies and solutions into place.

Why are you carrying this load? Why is it happening? Why? is such a great place to start.

The answers to this question may vary. It could be that you’ve just taken it on as a default without really thinking about it. Maybe you lived by yourself, your spouse lived by himself, you moved in together, and you both fell into a routine. Maybe tasks were divided evenly or maybe it was imbalanced from the get-go. Maybe it became imbalanced for a certain season while he was super busy with work or traveling a lot, but now that’s changed and you guys never intentionally changed your systems to match the current situation.

Maybe you got yourself into this situation. As a default, women tend to be action takers. We’re the ones who are pretty quick to jump in a lot of the time and fix problems. So you noticed something needed to be done and you did it and you continue doing it. In this way, all these tasks just became something you took on yourself. If that’s the case, you really need to think about everything that you’re carrying and have a conversation with whoever you share your house with. Maybe it’s a roommate. Maybe it’s your spouse. Maybe it’s only your kids, if you’re a single parent. Really think through how you can delegate and divide house chores and mental tasks to where it’s more evenly split.

Maybe you were in a season where you were staying at home, but now you’ve returned to work. Therefore, you can’t continue to manage all that you were managing before. Changing situations calls for reevaluation of tasks and responsibilities.

Whenever you’re asking yourself why, make sure to check yourself—is your pride or your ego keeping you in the “hot mess mom” category? Are you subconsciously believing that you’re the hero who has to do it all? Do you identify as a super mom? As parents, we hear those phrases a lot, and maybe you’re feeling like you’re rising to that occasion a little bit. Do you keep your “hot mess mom” identity on your plate as a way to grasp at security or control in a world that can feel very out of control? Do you maybe believe that nobody else can do it as well as you can do it, so they shouldn’t do it at all? Do you subscribe to a “My way is the right way” mentality? These are really tough questions, but I urge you to pause and consider. All of those things can be part of the root causes of this “hot mess mom” epidemic that are keeping you from being your best and healthiest self. The overwhelm and stress can cause very real physical symptoms. Remember, everything has a cost. So your need to control, or your lack of planning and delegation, or lack of really being thoughtful about the systems you have in place are costing you something. The cost might be quality relationships, your health and well-being, career, all of that. So it’s really important to revisit these questions and dive deep into the why.

Tip 2. Set up systems

My second tip is to set up systems. Start by thinking through your days in a week… Where do you typically fall off the rails? What tasks seem to lead to a spiral of chaos in your house if they go undone? For us, it’s the dishes. There’s five of us in this house; my husband and I are home all the time. If the dishes get behind, everything else falls apart too. If I didn’t run the dishwasher the night before or I don’t unload the dishwasher in the morning, it causes a breakdown in our systems. It causes us to accumulate dirty dishes on the counter throughout the day. Then when we go to cook dinner in the evening, we have a dishwasher full of clean dishes, a sink full of dirty dishes, a cluttered kitchen counter, etc. This means that before we can even make dinner, we have to clean the kitchen.

It’s as simple as spending 5 to 10 minutes in the morning to unload the dishwasher that will set the rest of our day up for success.

Think through what those “make or break” tasks are. These are the “if this doesn’t happen, everything else falls apart” to-dos. Then create a system or build a new habit around these responsibilities. How are you going to make sure that this one thing gets done every day so that everything else doesn’t spiral?

Tip 3. Delegate

My third tip is to delegate. Do you have kids? If you have kids, you might need to give them some responsibility and teach them how to do these tasks. It’s not going to be perfect at first. It’s actually going to take 5 times as long, and it would have been easier in that moment for you to have just done it yourself. I promise you that. But eventually, it will be faster than just you within a couple of weeks. Your little ones are going to be so proud to be contributing to the home maintenance. They’re going to start doing it a lot better. They’re going to start to be more responsible for other things, and they’re going to notice when the house is unmaintained on their own.

For example, my five-year-old, Adeline, has been really into picking up their bathroom. (The kids’ bathroom is also our guest bathroom.) There’s often dirty clothes thrown all over the floor, or maybe someone took a shower in there and didn’t close the shower curtain all the way. Now there’s water all over the floor. They got toothpaste on the counter. It’s a mess, right? But she has started to really take pride in picking up the bathroom. And if somebody makes a mess on the counter after she has just cleaned it, or if her sister goes in there to shower after she’s just cleaned up her sister’s dirty clothes for her, she’s the one telling that person, “Hey, I just cleaned that counter and you got toothpaste all over it.” This helps remove the mental burden from me. Now I’m not the one who’s harping on this bathroom situation. Adeline is because she’s invested and holding others accountable. This then makes the other kids invested in it too, and relieves some mental burden of having to be the “nagging mom” for me.

The other bonus to delegating is that your kid is not going to be the one who goes to college and doesn’t know how to do their laundry or cook themselves a meal. We’ve all had a roommate who didn’t know how to use the washing machine or how to cook themselves a meal. We’re really preparing our kids to be adults. We don’t want to just raise good kids. We want to raise independent, highly-functioning, well balanced kids who know how to care for themselves. So by you holding everything tight and wanting everything done a certain way, you’re really not giving them the opportunity to do all of that.

Again, delegation might require a lot of patience in the beginning, but it’s so worth it.

Tip 4. Set priorities and stick with them

Chances are that your family doesn’t realize how you’ve been feeling or they don’t realize that they can do things differently. To adjust this, set some family priorities and some self priorities here. I suggest you call a family meeting. I think this is really fun to do! You can do it any time of the year, but it’s easiest to do it at the beginning of the year, around new year’s where everyone’s already setting goals. You can also do it quarterly.

During these family meetings, ask the following:

• How are we doing?
• What are our priorities right now?
• What do we want to try this year?
• What do we want to let go of activity-wise that we’re just not enjoying as much?

It’s going to go a lot farther if you really bring your family together in this and invest in this time together.

Remember, we can’t do everything. We live in a world where there are more and more opportunities than we’ve ever had before. If you don’t have your priorities to guide you, then you’re going to say yes to way too many things and naturally be overwhelmed and overextended. So once you have your priorities set, saying no to things that aren’t in line with those priorities becomes a lot easier. You then have a clear reason to say, “No, it’s not a priority for me right now.” That’s not really anything you can argue with, right?

Knowing your priorities and sticking with them, will reduce resentment. If you only focus on priorities, you will improve where you want to and also have joy when you show up! It will create a ripple effect, helping other moms realize they can also have priorities! They can also say “no” to things! And together we’re gonna cancel “hot mess mom” culture!

Ending “Hot Mess Mom” Culture for Better Health

When you start to shift away from “hot mess mom” mode, you’re actually going to feel more in control by relinquishing control of so many things. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but it’s so true. You’re going to be less stressed and no longer in that fight, flight, or freeze mode. That actually means good things for your gut health and overall health.

Here’s a quick science lesson: Your gut and brain are connected through one giant nerve system in your body, called the vagus nerve. Your vagus nerve is based in the part of your brain where this fight, flight, or freeze mode is housed. That nerve than travels from your brain down and all throughout your gut to where it controls gut motility. The most surprising part: The vagus nerve can actually transmit stress and overwhelm from the brain down to the gut. So getting out of this “hot mess mom” culture and into a more restful state is going to help improve your digestion and reduce unwanted gut symptoms.

On top of that, with a reduced mental burden and more free time, you can then incorporate other habits that are beneficial for your gut health and overall health—if that’s a priority for you. That means you could focus on getting enough sleep, meal prepping healthy meals, and more exercise.

As always, I hope you are feeling inspired and empowered to take bold action towards your health goals.