Tired & Stressed? These Simple Habits Will Change Your Life

Routines have been a fundamental part of my life since I got married (25 years ago!) and especially during times when I’ve had a young child and/or a dog at home (the last 16+ years). Here are some of my favorite sources of my favorite routines. The challenging part is to not try to do them all at once! Pick one or two to start with! Break things into small pieces, and if you need some support, read out to me and let’s chat!

Remember DEER:

Drink water

Eat something nutritious

Exercise

Rest

DEER: Drink water, Eat something nutritious, Exercise, and Rest. I learned this acronym from GriefShare, and I use it pretty much all the time. I ask my body: Body, what do you need next? Do you need some water, food, movement, or rest? Then I read Healthy Kids, Happy Kids by Dr. Elisa Song, and she calls it the “5 Things Challenge” for gut health. Part II of the book is: Create microbiome magic with the 5 things your child does every day: hydrate, nourish (what we eat or don’t eat), move, breathe, and prioritize sleep. Can you see how these 5 things are exactly the same 5 things as DEER? Rest is just broken down into two pieces: breathing and prioritizing sleep!

Once the DEER basics are in place, I would take a look at relationship routines. For that I would go to the Gottman Institute for the 6 hours a week to a better relationship. While 6 hours seems like a lot, many of them are things that take less than 10 minutes a day, and truthfully you are probably doing many of them without even realizing it. For example, we can create routines for kissing hello and goodbye to our partner or for giving long hugs to our kids. We can create routines for physical affection, for the “how was your day?” conversation, and for expressing appreciation and fondness to one another. The key is to turn them from unconscious and inconsistent to conscious and growing in consistency.

To me, routines are important because they help us to break tasks into smaller pieces and reduce overwhelm. One of the first ways that I learned to do this is with FlyLady.net way back as a newlywed. She says “I can do anything for 15 minutes!” I tend to say “I can do anything for 3 minutes!” but the concept is the same. Her work was influential for me to learn to reduce perfectionism and all or nothing thinking and to do one baby step at a time.

Welcome, 2025!

As I’m getting into the groove of things in the new year, I’m excited to look forward to what is ahead in 2025.  Three things that I’m focusing on for 2025: celebration, self compassion, and guts.

Celebration.

A huge focus for this upcoming year is to really focus on celebrating wins. I’ve created a wall themed with ocean animal themed Post-it notes where I am writing down daily things that I am celebrating, such as:

• a child whose iron levels were low, and taking supplements is helping him to feel more calm and able to manage when he hears the word no.

• a child whose pom-pom jar is filling up because of all the good things that he is doing during the day (focusing on what we want more of by focusing on the good things rather than on the bad ones!)

• siblings who used to bite each other every day and it went down to only once in the last month

• A child who received the Slumberkins yak for Christmas with two books about making mistakes and being enough. He loves them and is being reminded regularly that he is enough even when he makes mistakes.

• A testimonial from a mom who says “I needed support on finding strategies to help my son sleep better. I felt like I had tried everything and nothing was working. My fear at the time was that my son was never going to go to sleep early or sleep through the night. At that time I thought I had tried everything with my son but you provided us with more tools. The suggestion of the weighted (vest before bed) and magnesium powder were the things that stuck. The vest helped regulate and tire my son out a little before bed and the magnesium powder has gotten him to sleep throughout the night. I appreciated you always being eager to find ways to help. We accomplished my son and I getting a better nights sleep. With better sleep comes better days for both of us. I feel great and relieved that we found something that works for my son. You also gave me an understanding that not every night will be the same but no matter what to always keep trying.”

• Another testimonial from a mom who says “I was feeling pretty good about how we were managing our family life overall but we hit a major snag with bedtime. My daughters (ages 5 and 2.5) were getting out of bed repeatedly after we put them down and riling each other up in their shared bedroom. It made for a chaotic end to days that were sometimes already stressful and I was worried that my girls weren't getting enough sleep. We eventually got our five year old accustomed to settling down at night but our almost-three-year-old was still struggling. That's when I decided to reach out to Lara. Lara had a wide variety of tips and tricks we could try. A few I heard before as a parent who has been in the sleep struggle trenches before but many that were new to me as well. I was excited to try them out and see which ones worked for us. When Lara suggested letting my daughter listen to recorded stories at night as she drifted off to sleep that stuck in my head as something that would likely work for her. My hunch was correct and while she still may need a couple additional supports to settle on some nights it has largely been extremely successful and our evenings have been much calmer as a result. (After working together, I feel) great and I am keeping my notes handy from our talks to refer to later in case we need to try other strategies in the future.”

• A number of families who don’t need to see me anymore because they are sleeping better and no longer need me! Woot woot!

These are awesome wins, but not everything in life is a win. Therefore, my second focus for 2025 is:

Self compassion.

Ya know, losing a kid is hard. 

Caring for an anxious rescued dog is hard!  Keeping him out of the emergency room is hard! Teaching him that the world is a safe place is hard some days! Finding help that is congruent with my values and supportive of me as a person has been WAY harder than I hoped it would be! I have been SHOCKED!

Running a business is hard!  Learning to do discovery calls in a way that is effective but doesn’t feel pushy or salesy is hard!  I am passionate about selling prevention, and it’s HARD!  Honestly people usually aren’t that passionate about preventing problems that they can’t feel.  And in order to teach people concepts that can change their lives and their marriages and help them to sleep better, I need to be able to sell my classes and services.  I need to sell enough to be able to cover my expenses, and honestly I would like to build an abundant business that does more than just cover basic expenses while also serving people at a variety of income levels and in a way that feels congruent and equitable (blog post coming soon!).  All of that is hard. 

I just got an email from one of my mentors, Stasia Savasuk, that “the key is not to measure SUCCESS by outcomes, but by our faithfulness to the labor”.  And as you know, I am a lover of all things improv, and celebrating failure is a key component of improv and therefore of my life! 

So this is a year for celebrating the wins and showing myself self compassion for the losses, continuing to be faithful to the labor. 

I have been faithful to the labor.  I sold my first Gottman Bringing Baby Home class on October 3, 2016, so it’s been over 8 years of business learning so far.  Over 100 families have taken Bringing Baby Home from me as of January 2025. And in all things, there will be wins and losses.  At the end of 2023, I was not at all sure that I could keep this business going.  Yet in 2024, I supported over 100 families to feel more rested, connected and thriving. Finally as we start 2025, I have a steady flow of clients and am starting to get more regular referrals. 

I am creating a world in which parents are experts in their children, and they trust that they can come to me to build their toolbox and to work collaboratively and with respect. I have largely shifted to focusing on sleep support rather than preventing relationship problems, although I am happy to support relationships anytime I get the chance. 

This year I am focusing on helping families to feel rested, connected, and thriving, and that feels really really good.  The outcomes are starting to happen, but either way I am celebrating faithfulness to the labor and self compassion while also focusing on guts: my guts, Charlie’s guts, and my clients’ guts.

Guts.

The theme of gut health is showing up in all sorts of places in my life.  I am doing gut health support with Oshi Health for my endometriosis.  My dog Charlie is doing gut health support to help with his behavior (test results are still pending, but his poop successfully made it through customs to the testing company in the UK!), and then he’s signed up with the Shouty Barky Dog Lady to look for hidden pain.  At the end of 2024, I completed my pediatric sleep certification with Palm Pediatric, and a core principle is the link between gut health and sleep (and everything else!). 

The gut is our second brain.  “Our gut is home to over 100 trillion microscopic organisms. In recent years, emerging science has made significant strides in understanding the role these gut microbes play in our and our children’s overall health—and it’s more significant than you might realize. Our children’s gut microbiome is responsible for not just how our kids digest and absorb food but also how their immune systems function; how they think, feel, and behave; and even how their genes work for or against them!” Excerpt From Healthy Kids, Happy Kids by Elisa Song M.D.  

Our gut health influences our behavior, our attention, our sleep — everything!  What fascinates me too is that during my grief classes years ago, I learned about the importance of DEER: drink water, eat something nutritious, exercise, and rest.  And now I am reading Healthy Kids, Happy Kids by Elisa Song, MD.  What does she say influences gut health?  Drink water (hydrate), eat something nutritious (nourish), exercise (move), and rest (breathe and prioritize sleep). 

Recently I was talking to a dear friend about DEER (ha!), and her response was that it sounded overwhelming to have to do all those things all the time. As part of my self compassion mission, I’ve been listening to the audiobook for Meditations for Mortals, and I thought that it addressed this beautifully:

“Treat your to-do list as a menu. In the striving-towards-sanity mindset, a to-do list is always something you’ve got to get to the end of before you’re allowed to relax. But in any context where there are more things that feel like they need doing than there’s time available in which to do them – which is the normal state of affairs, after all – a to-do list is by definition really a menu, a list of tasks to pick from, rather than to get through. And operating from sanity means treating it that way: starting with the acknowledgment that you won’t complete everything you might wish, then making your selections from the menu. Obviously, not every task on every to-do list will be as appetizing as the restaurant analogy suggests. But it’s surprising how many things do become more appetizing once you’re encountering them not as chores you have to plow through, but as options you get to pick.” (excerpt From Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.) I encourage you that when you pause to decide what you are going to do next, consider using a menu mentality that includes DEER on your list of options, and listen to your body as you pick something from the list! And what might be something from the DEER menu that would benefit someone else in your family?

Join me on the journey!

So this year I am focused on choosing from a menu that includes celebration, self compassion, and guts (including drinking water, eating something nutritious, exercising, and resting). What are you focusing on this year? Who is up for joining me on the celebration, self compassion, and guts journey?

Who do you know who would like to be included on my “wins wall” to celebrate feeling more rested, connected, and/or thriving? Text me before you get distracted, and let me know! 916-579-4013. (Just tell me who you are and how you found me, because I don’t answer to just “Hello?” That’s creepy!)