Here’s a glimpse into the holiday pre-flection we’re doing this year to help us to alter our holiday season to optimize the joy. We’re “Marie-Kondo-ing” the holiday season.

A recent poll by the American Psychological Association found that 7 out of 10 American adults report that the future of the country is a top stressor for them. You aren’t alone. We are close to the end, and we must keep going because the top issues this cycle are ones that will affect families the most significantly: paid family medical leave, childcare costs, maternal health, and reproductive rights.

Even in our world of near instant gratification, there’s no escaping waiting. Life is full of waits big and small. While we can’t discount the frustration of say the DMV, this month we’ve been reflecting on how to survive the particular hell that is waiting when something huge is on the line. These are the waits that come at a crossroads, and we can’t take our next step until we know what direction to go.

These frustrated waits happen all the time in adulthood in big and little ways. You wait for a partner to propose, a diagnosis to come in, the two-week-wait to end, a realtor to call about the house, the job to make an offer, test results to come in, or to finally be a parent. The trap of these in-betweens is that while we wait for more information we are stuck between two futures.

As we run headlong into fall schedule changes and back to school, our office has been chatting about ways we try to cut parenting corners and make life run a little smoother. This time of year can be so challenging for us and our littles as we all get a bit dysregulated during shifting schedules, new routines, and lots of new experiences. It’s a time of year to give ourselves and our kids a little bit of grace as we navigate additional stress.

Here’s our team’s list of our favorite parenting hacks. No guarantees or promises of success. Like most parenting advice, your mileage may vary, and your kids might cooperate. But hopefully one of these ideas helps you save a bit of sanity this year.

If you, too, have been feeling a little extra pep in your step after watching the Olympics, here’s a few reasons why. And if you’ve been in desperate need of a little pick me up, here’s some ways to tap into those happy feelings while engaging in the Olympics this week.

In therapy, we spend a lot of time exploring our concept of self—how we see ourselves, what stories we tell about ourselves, and how we shape and are shaped by our places in the universe.

Of course, parenthood changes all those things and in doing so changes who we are. Parenthood should expand who we are and not define us. You will always be a parent. Being a parent is one of the biggest roles we will have in our lives, but it is not the only one. That piece of who you are will always be with you, but it will never be all of you.

When you are as immersed in the world of therapy as we are, it can be easy to forget that for many people who come to sit on our couches (or do video telehealth with us from their own couch) this is their first experience. Or someone may be a therapy veteran, but they have always wondered what their therapist is really doing and thinking about. Things we don’t understand often make us feel nervous or vulnerable. To combat that, here’s a peek into what’s going on in therapy, what your therapist is thinking about, and what they are hoping therapy can do for you.

To be a woman is to be awash in expectations that twist, contradict, and tie us in knots. If you’ve been feeling like you’re doing it wrong, it’s just because there is no consensus on what it means to do it right. Motherhood is similar—so many competing voices telling us that we aren’t doing it right or well enough.

If we had to write our own monologue specifically about being a mom, it might go something like this.

There are some consistencies in many of the new waves of parenting advice. Many tend to focus on emotional wellbeing and rely on parents to do some heavy lifting in the co-regulation department. We’re all for kids growing up emotionally intelligent, but our work is with parents, so we started to wonder what would happen if we decided to love ourselves the way we try to parent our children. Below are some principles borrowed from several different modern parenting styles and how we can apply them to our own lives.

Hope is born of struggle and challenging times. You need hope on your worst days and not your best. Hope is more than simply wishing things were different or pretending things are better than they are. Instead, it acknowledges and is grounded in the reality of the moment to look toward the future.

Cheryl Beck, one of the foremost researchers into birth trauma defines it as an event happening during labor or delivery involving actual or perceived threat of significant injury or death to mother or baby in which the birthing person experiences intense feelings of fear, helplessness, loss of control and horror.

The important takeaway from that definition is that the trauma is in the eye of the beholder. What is a traumatic birth might not sound traumatic to the doctor, friends, or family. The subjective experience matters not just the outcome. Anyone telling a mom, “at least…” or “could have been so much worse…” to try to minimize the experience can sit themselves right down. Even a birth with good outcomes can be traumatic depending on how it was experienced.

Around this time every year, we start to spend most of our time talking to clients about how difficult the holidays can be.

But the busyness and burdens of this time of year are just one piece of the puzzle as to why you might find yourself in a bit of a holi-daze. This season is a perfect storm of impossibly high expectations and triggers. The nature of tradition means that we are surrounded by reminders of previous years. Many might bring up pleasant nostalgia, but others can thrust us back into painful ghosts of holidays past.

They say holidays make you feel like a kid again, but what if parts of your childhood aren’t something you’d like to relive? Our brains rely on our past experiences to determine how to respond to our present circumstances. Is it any surprise that after we spend weeks eating familiar food, watching the same movies, and hearing those same songs in every store that we find ourselves feeling a bit like our childhood selves?