Energy Management: Protecting Your Mental & Physical Well-Being
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Transcript
Welcome to Dula Tips and Tits, the podcast where we cut through the noise and get real about what it takes to build a sustainable doula business. I'm Kaylee Harrod. I've been a doula informally for 14 years and full time for seven.
Around here, we don't sugarcoat stuff. We talk autonomy, owning your worth, creating a business that works for you. No fluff, no burnout, just the honest truth on how to be your own best boss. Let's get into it.
Hello and welcome back to Dula Tips and Tits. In the theme of simplifying things and making life more sustainable, I'm changing some things up on the podcast and I want you to be the first to know about it.
So if you have been hanging out with me for a while on this podcast, I have done twice a week episodes for almost three years now. And so I've decided recently that going down to once a week is more sustainable for me, given that right now I don't have a virtual assistant or someone who's producing the podcast for me.
And so I'm producing it on my own, which means that I'm doing the podcast production, the podcast recording, and also doulaying my clients and also doulaying the doulots that I coach. So for right now, the sustainability piece is that I am going to mostly be recording and releasing episodes on Wednesday.
So that's going to be our new normal. The plan is to potentially add Fridays back in as a question and answer time. So like, if you have questions for me, then I can answer them kind of thing to get that started because I want to, I want to start that when I have some questions to answer.
I need you to do me a favor. So what I need you to do is wherever you're listening to this podcast, pause it real quick, go to the show notes in the show notes. link that says ask me a question. That requires like two seconds of your time.
Put in your email so I can follow up with you if I need to and so I can let you know when I'm answering your question and then ask a question as many as you'd like. You can ask lots of questions. You can ask one question.
That allows me to have a list of questions so that I can go and start answering them. When I have questions to answer, I'm going to, my plan is to start up that Friday question and answer time. In order for that Friday episode to start, I need you, my friend, to submit a question to me.
Please go ahead and do that. I'm also going to have the link to that question and answer on my Instagram link. My bio site on Instagram. If you hang out with me over there at Haradula, then you'll see it there as well.
But the easiest thing is just to pause and do it now. We're going to dive into today's episode. Now, if you listen regularly, you noticed that I did not put out an episode at all last week. Why was that?
Well, two things. One is I live in Washington, D.C., and to be quite frank with you, the new administration change has been incredibly stressful and traumatic and just incredibly all-consuming. I also had two babies come back to back last week, and so I had kind of gotten out of my rhythm of recording in advance and having things scheduled, and so because of that, I didn't have an episode done, and I didn't have the wherewithal to make an episode,
and that just is what it is. That actually works perfectly with what we're talking about today, because I want to talk about your energy management, and I think as doulas, we have some context for this that other professions don't have because our work requires that we show up in a fairly selfless way, right?
But I think that doesn't have to mean that we show up in a way that makes us vulnerable or that makes us easily stressed, right? I'm a person that does not love when someone says, like, oh, you're probably feeling that thing because you're stressed, like, so stop stressing.
And I'm just like, oh, so helpful, like, thank you so much for telling me to just like stop stressing because that works really well for me. Maybe that works for some people. I don't know. I feel like people who say that have never been stressed, maybe.
I don't know. Maybe I'm just being biased today, but I really hate being told that because I'm like, oh, let me get right on that. Like, I was trying to have a stressful life, and now I'm trying to have a less stressful life, right?
But I think the reality is in Dula work, we have to manage the emotional labor of this work, both during the work after and before in order to have our bodies and mental energy and emotional energy and spiritual energy be sustainable.
And similar to how we talk to our clients about like, okay, labor's coming sometime in the next two weeks, so I need you to rest. I need you to do things that you love, nurture that oxytocin hormone.
Move your body so that you feel good and you're helping the baby get in the right place. Eat delicious and nutritious food. Those are the same things that we need to be doing, but in a really intentional way, right?
So sometimes we have warning that someone's going into labor. Not always, mostly we don't, right? But when we do, how do we manage that? Also afterwards, how do we manage it, right? For me, I think one of the things that I kind of fall into, and actually what I fell into last week, which is why I didn't do an episode, is I go to births that are either emotionally or physically challenging.
And then don't expect myself to need to recover to the extent that I need to recover. And I know that sounds kind of silly. Like part of me is just like, of course I need to recover. But another part of me is like, how do I always forget this, right?
Like, like this isn't, this isn't something that's new. I've been doing this for a while. My first doula baby actually turned eight this month, earlier in the month. So right at the beginning of March.
So I mean, I've been doing this for eight years now, right? I've been attending births, hopping in the car in the middle of the night, go hang out with a family for an unlimited amount of time. And then coming home and crashing, right?
Part of what I do better now is sleep while I'm there. So I had two births last week. One was like, went fairly, not crazy rapid, but it was her second baby. She had a lot of trauma with the first birth.
And so there was a lot of intentionality and a lot of triggers for her. And so emotionally, it was more challenging than it was physically, right? I slept for maybe like two hours there, just like in a chair in the hospital room, you know, and she had an epidural, she was also sleeping, her partner was sleeping.
So I mean, that was that I used to not do that, like I used to not let myself do that. And now I let myself do that. I also ate, you know, like I took good care of myself, they had that that hospital had a Panera.
So I went to Panera a number of times. So I mean, I fed myself well, I made sure that I had some sleep. And I like hydrated really well, right? The next birth was more physically demanding in some ways, because it was an induction, we were trying to kind of get labor to start, but it wasn't starting well.
And it would like ramp up and ramp back down and ramp back up and ramp back down. And we found out later that it was like an anatomy issue. And so So, it sort of was intense, but not going anywhere, right?
What needed to be managed mostly in that one, aside from like, obviously, I still like ate really well, those clients fed me the most amazing food, but I ate really well, I took breaks, you know, things like that.
But mostly, I needed to manage my own emotions, because I also was like, what is going on with your labor, right? Like, why is your labor so weird? So, it was one of those that like, I needed to manage not knowing what was happening, I needed to manage supporting them and not knowing what was happening, and then coming home and having just been at another birth.
So like, managing all of that, coming off of another client, and sleeping in between, but still coming off another client. So, when I got home, the rest time was kind of crazy, because I like got home, I guess like Tuesday evening, pretty late, I also lost my phone on the way home, and thankfully someone found it.
called my husband, then he thought something had happened to me. It was a whole big dramatic event. And I was like freaking out and then forgot that my Apple watch also can let me communicate with the world.
So I was just like, I can't call anyone. I can't text anyone. Then I was like, Oh, I have my Apple watch on. Thankfully, some teenagers found it in Northwest DC and called my husband and had him come get it from them.
So it was all fine in the end. But it was kind of a dramatic end to that day. I got home, I slept. And then the next day, which was Wednesday, I was so tired, like really tired. And then Thursday, of course, I was also really tired.
And then Friday was super tired. And I remember saying to my husband, I just need to get stuff done. Like I need to I need to put my podcast out. I need to get things done. I need to like, you know, send some more emails.
I need to work on scheduling my stuff for the upcoming mastermind. And he was like, or you could go sleep. Because you worked a lot over the weekend and the first two days of this week, and you're exhausted.
And I think in that moment, sleep is actually productive, right? Like sleep is how I sustain this work. Like sleep allows me to be ready for the next baby. Right? Which is coming anytime. Like there's someone else do, you know, so that person's coming at some point soon.
And how I'm ready for that is because I have slept after the last person. But also like, the weirdness about our work is that we sometimes do a normal work week. And I say that with like, quotations, right?
Because there's no such thing really. But like, a typical amount of work we do in a matter of days. So across those three days, so Friday, it was, I went to that birth Saturday evening, and I've been teaching all day Saturday.
So all day Saturday, I was teaching Saturday evening, went to that birth, that baby. came Friday like late morning and I guess Friday at noon so I left that birth around like Friday maybe like 4 and then or maybe a little before that I don't remember for sure and then Friday am I saying Friday see this I'm still I'm still tired so I taught all day Saturday went to a birth Saturday evening like around 8 p.m.
so I didn't sleep that night right Sunday around noon ish that baby came I got home around maybe like 4 and then Sunday night I had another client go in for an induction they didn't need me until the next day early afternoon but I slept like all day in the morning so that I could go to them and then I was with them until midnight I came home to sleep for a while went back to them around 930 a.m.
I was with them until about 6 PM. Didn't get home for a couple more hours and had the whole cell phone losing situation, whatever. But overall, between teaching and working, I slept some in between. But I worked almost straight through from Saturday morning at about 9 AM to Tuesday night at about 6, right?
And so that was like a week and a half worth of normal office hours kind of thing, right? And so if I'm looking at that, obviously it makes sense that I need to sleep. Obviously it makes sense that I need to give myself some days off, like obviously it makes sense that things need to be rescheduled and whatever.
Thankfully, the week, like the rest of the week, I was able to kind of protect my time and not have a bunch of things scheduled and stuff like that because I need to not give all of that rest time away, right?
And I also need to move my body. I also need to like get back into a rhythm of eating what I normally eat. All of those things are really important. And I think part of that balance is of course, like how frequently you're at a birth and when you say yes and no to people and all of that.
But also part of that is like how well you're doing that before and after. And personally right now, I'm not doing it that great. Like I slept a whole bunch last week. But aside from that, like when I get stressed, I get kind of in this free space.
And my stress around the new administration has put me in that space to some extent, right? And so there is this like space that is, that for me can feel like paralyzing, that it's like I don't know what to do for myself and I can't do it.
And the reality is that we have to kind of be dedicated to working ourselves out of that space. We also need people who will work us out of it, right? Like on Thursday of last week or Wednesday or whatever day it was, I would have for sure worked when my husband was like, go back to bed.
And I was like, no, I need to get stuff done. He was like, go to bed, you're tired. And I'm like, okay, fine. So I like slept, folded laundry and slept again. That was my day, right? And part of that was like Thursday, I went to see a friend, but also I had to teach a class at Virginia Hospital Center.
So it was a whole big thing that I, like I had a late night thing. So he was like, you've got to sleep so that you can do that other stuff that you have to do because you can't cancel all of these things, right?
And you need to be sustained in this. So I'm not saying that this is a solo mission. I mean, as you know, you know about me by now, I think that life should not be done solo. It should be done in community.
And so whether that's community that's chosen by you, whether that's family, whether that's other doulas in your life, we need to hold each other accountable to this. especially right now in the midst of the actual threat that is the current administration, right?
And I mean, I have said this before and I'll say it again, if you are or have ever been victim of sexual assault and you have men running the country who are perpetrators of sexual assault, then that is traumatic for your body, right?
And so the stress that your body feels in that is part of what we have happening. Even when we don't realize that that's what's happening. So I want you to give yourself some grace, but also I want you to take some time to sort of touch base with yourself and see what do you need?
Like, do you need sleep? Do you need movement? Are you lacking food and nutrition? You know, do you need to nurture your spirit, your soul in some way? Do you need time with people? Like, what does it look like for you to manage your emotional energy some so that you can keep showing up, but you also don't neglect your own needs and your own processing in the midst of this time right now.
So OK, so one more one more reminder to go to the show notes. Please feel love of all good things. Put a question in the link that says, ask me a question. It will take you two seconds because it's literally just your email and a question and ask me as many questions as you want.
But when I start getting those questions, I will also start answering them on Fridays for our, I don't know, Friday question and answer time. We need a better name than that, but that's what we're going to be doing as soon as I have some questions roll in.
So it's on you now, my friend. I will see you in the next episode. So again, next Wednesday is when you can expect that. And for right now, they're just going to be solo episodes, but we will have guests coming back soon.
OK, all right. Enjoy the rest of your week. Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Dula Tips and Tits podcast. If you learned something today or had an aha moment, we'd love for you to share that on Instagram and tag us at hiradula so we can celebrate alongside you.
If you found this podcast helpful, we would so appreciate you taking a second to leave a rating and a review on your favorite podcast app. That helps other doulas find us as we do this work together.
This podcast is intended as educational and entertainment. It is not medical advice or business advice. Please consult your own medical or legal team for your own needs around your health and your business.
We'll see you again soon.
ASK A QUESTION!!! My plan is to start Friday Q&A (we need a new name, I know!) but first I need your questions! Submit them using the form below:
https://www.harroddoulaservices.com/ask-me-a-question
Right now, more than ever, we need to work on self-care in doula work. We need to protect ourselves and help ourselves recover from trauma - birth related and otherwise. So today come on a self-care journey with me and learn about new things coming on the Doula Tips and Tits Podcast!
Quote from the show:
“The reality is in doula work, we have to manage the emotional labor of this work, both during the work after and before in order to have our bodies and mental energy and emotional energy and spiritual energy be sustainable. And similar to how we talk to our clients about like, okay, labor's coming sometime in the next two weeks, so I need you to rest. I need you to do things that you love, nurture that oxytocin hormone. Move your body so that you feel good and you're helping the baby get in the right place. Eat delicious and nutritious food. Those are the same things that we need to be doing, but in a really intentional way, right? So sometimes we have warning that someone's going into labor. Not always, mostly we don't, right? But when we do, how do we manage that? Also afterwards, how do we manage it, right? For me, I think one of the things that I kind of fall into, and actually what I fell into last week, which is why I didn't do an episode, is I go to births that are either emotionally or physically challenging.”
CONNECT with Kaely on TikTok or Instagram
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Doula Tips and Tits is produced by Kaely Harrod of Harrod Doula Services
It is sponsored by The Doula Biz Blueprint Self-Paced Class for Doulas Launching Successful and Sustainable Businesses!
Music by Madirfan: Hidden Place on Pixabay
