Cranky Mom Syndrome (CMS)

Cranky Mom Syndrome (CMS)

I’ve had cranky mom syndrome for the last 6 years. Let me tell you how to overcome it.

This week my CMS was acting up. I found myself walking around seeing everything wrong in my home. The unfolded laundry, the pile of kids schoolwork papers I still hadn’t gone through, the fact that I had put off cutting the boys hair and that it had to be done, there fingernails needed to be clipped (again), I had to freeze all that meat in the fridge that we didn’t use and is going to spoil it if I didn’t cook it, and the floor that still hasn’t been mopped after my 7 year old spilled apple cider on it.

Everywhere I turned I saw things that had gone wrong or I saw the kids behavior that reminded me I have to work on with them. Like helping my 5 year old learn to use his words and deal with his emotions. Or I have to re train my 3 year old to clear his space when he’s done and follow through when I ask him to do something or how I really feel like I’m messing up my 7 year old because I micro manage him all day and nitpick how he does everything and I just paralyze him because I don’t let him just be him.

Maybe this is something that flares up for you on occasion.

First of all let’s take a self diagnosis test. Are these some thoughts that you suffer with?

“My kids are driving me crazy”

“They are out of control”

“They just don’t listen to me”

“I don’t know what to do with them”

“They’re just trying to push my buttons”

If you suffer from these thoughts then you might just have CMS. Here are some home remedy’s that can help.

First thing you need to know is that thoughts are optional. Yes what we are thinking is totally voluntary. We can choose to think anyway we want about our home and our children. When we choose the above thoughts to think we are creating more pain for our CMS. What I ask my clients is, “ Do those thoughts serve you?”

So the next thing you need to know to soften some of the emotional pain is that our thoughts create our feelings. So if we are choosing thoughts such as “I’m doing a bad job” or “everything is going wrong” or “this is out of control” those sentences in our mind create emotions in our bodies. Hence cranky mom syndrome. My top emotion this week was crankiness, I was filled with it.

And when we are cranky what do we do mommas? I’ll tell you what I do…

Stomp around

Yell at my kids

Spin in circles because I’ve convinced myself I’ll never be able to catch up

Not laugh at the adorable things they say because I’m just pure cranky

Keep finding more and more evidence why my life is out of control

Buffer and eat chocolate

Not be productive

Yup these are the side effects of cranky mom syndrome. So this is the most important thing I can prescribe to help you with CMS…. You CANNOT change your behavior without changing your thoughts.

Yup, can’t be done.

I remember one time my my Cranky Mom Syndrome was acting up years ago and I thought….okay I’m just going to be more patient. I’m just going to enjoy my kids and stop trying to micromanage them. I found myself crying all day. Why? Because I was still thinking how frustrated I was, and how they weren’t behaving the way I thought they should. The tears were just running down my face because I was totally conflicted and confused!? Why couldn’t I just act more patient? Something was wrong with me!

I called my sister and was just a wreck about it, I told her what had happened and she said “your thoughts create your feelings” and it was the most powerful earth shattering statement I had ever heard.

No wonder my CMS was still raging, I couldn’t just slap on a bandaid and act differently and pretend I was happy. I had to go to the root of the problem and look at my thoughts and what they were creating in my life.

So my friends the most important remedy for dealing with CMS is to remember your thoughts create your feelings. We dictate whether we will have flare ups or not, we create our own pain and discomfort in our lives.

That thought stings a bit doesn’t it?

Ugh, I wish there was another way. It’s so much easier to blame the kids, or our husband or the cleanliness state of our home on our emotions. We think that because our house looks a certain way or our kids are behaving a certain way is why we’re feeling a certain way. I’m sorry to tell you that’s not true, it’s because we are thinking a certain way.

And guess what that’s the best news ever: because you have TOTAL control over your thoughts. It is not a simple task, because we have on average 40,000 of them a day 😮but we just take one thought at a time, look at it and you’ll quickly see that maybe that thought isn’t serving me. Maybe that thought is triggering my CMS