When You’re Always Putting Out Fires (How To Feel More Calm)

Hi there. Welcome to the Design Your Dream Life podcast. My name is Natalie Bacon and I’m an Advanced Certified Mindfulness Life Coach as well as a wife and mom, if you’re here to do the inner work and grow, I can help. Let’s get started.

Hello my friend. Welcome to the podcast. I am so happy to be here with you today. If you’re a new listener, welcome. I’m glad you’re here. And if you are a returning listener, thank you so much for listening. Week after week, I see you and I appreciate you. And today what I have for you is a podcast on when you’re always putting out fires, can you relate to this? It’s thinking, I’m always putting out fires. There’s constantly a little fire to put out. And of course we’re not talking about an actual fire. We’re talking about problem solving at a moment’s notice with respect to what’s going on in our everyday life, whether that’s at home or at work out in the world, it can feel overwhelming, it can feel stressful.

The likelihood that your stress response system is activated is pretty high if, if you’re describing it as putting out fires. And what I want to offer to you here today is that there is an alternative to thinking and feeling this way that will help you. Not only will it help you feel better, which really is the most important thing, but it will also help you problem solve. And it will help you problem solve from a much more empowered and calm state than if you’re thinking, I’m constantly putting out fires. This is a fire that I need to solve right now. And feeling really stressed and overwhelmed and a little bit panicky. So if you think about the phrase putting out fires, think about how that feels when you think that thought. It doesn’t feel good. Why? Because because of real fires. Um, if you think of an actual fire, if you saw a real fire in front of you, you would immediately have your stress response system activated and your brain would do whatever it needed to do to keep you safe.

A real fire is potentially very dangerous and harmful. So if your brain sees a real fire, it’s going to pay attention to it to make sure that you stay safe. That’s really the brain’s number one job on default is to make sure that you are surviving and staying safe. And this is really useful. It means that when there is a real fire in front of you, your brain is gonna pay attention to it and do whatever it needs to do to make sure that you stay safe. You can obviously see how helpful this is in the case of a real fire, but when we use verbiage that mimics a real fire when it’s not a real fire, when it’s, you know, a lot of stimulation in your environment when it’s multiple things kind of happening at once, and we label that as a fire, it doesn’t help because it still will have you activated and getting into a state of kind of panic thinking that it’s really dangerous what you’re focusing on, and that it needs your immediate attention.

So it doesn’t help you show up in the most empowered way. And when I teach this, it can sound like what I’m saying is so I’m just supposed to stay calm and not pay attention to the, you know, stuff that’s happening in front of me. Absolutely not. It’s not an extreme. Instead you wanna think of it as not real danger and something that you can show up intentionally for when you are clear-minded and you’re not gonna be clear-minded if you’re thinking I’m constantly putting out fires because your brain automatically thinks that’s overwhelming, that’s dangerous, and it’s going to act from that primitive part of the brain.

So while it sort of makes sense in layman’s terms to use the analogy of putting out fires when there’s a lot going on in your life or your home, it’s actually making the experience so much harder for you. So let me give you an example. My house is very loud. It’s crazy. There are dogs and Steve and I and we’re in and out and we’re working from home and there’s babies and kids and we invite our friends over and we like it that way. We like it to be a full house with kids and animals and lots going on. I’ve always wanted a full house like this, so I don’t get activated by it. I never think I’m putting out fires in my home. But I noticed that when other people come over, it can be a little bit overwhelming and overstimulating. And that is because they don’t have the same thoughts as me.

So for example, I like to give my mom a warning that it’s chaos and it’s really loud. And I think that can be helpful so that it, it gives her kind of a heads up and may help reduce that nervous system activation. If you are thinking that your house should be quiet and there shouldn’t be a lot of things going on and everyone should listen, no one should get hurt. And this is not the reality that you live in. Calling everyday life or an average day I’m putting out a lot of fires is not going to be helpful to get to a state of calm and help you show up as your best self. So it is just a thought. Putting out fires is a thought unless of course you are putting out an actual fire, which in this case, that is not at all what I am talking about.

I was recently coaching someone in Grow You about this. Actually. She had moved to a new state without family for her husband’s job. She’s a stay-at-home mom of three. And she said, it feels like I’m constantly putting out fires. What I showed her was, I’m constantly putting out fires, is her thought about her life right now. So of course she feels exhausted, depleted, and overwhelmed. This isn’t to say she’s making it all up in her mind, her experience is real and valid, but the way to take action where she can get the support that she needs is to start with her mindset and getting calm.

The first best step is to stop calling her daily life mini fires that she’s always putting out. So I wanna give you kinda a framework that I think will be helpful if you are used to generalizing in a way that creates more overwhelm and stress, which is always the case when we say, I’m constantly putting out fires or I’m always putting out fires. The first step is to separate out the facts from what your thoughts are. And the way that you do this is you just say what the facts are without adjectives. So you would say, my dog is barking, the doorbell is ringing, my baby is crying. My eight year old just threw her book bag, no adjectives, do not say my untrained dog is barking and won’t stop.

While the u p s guy kept ringing the doorbell, which made my baby cry uncontrollably. And meanwhile, my eight year old is in this phase of being mad and throwing her stuff as soon as she gets home from school. While both of those descriptions seem to be the same, they’re very different in the way that they will feel when you say the specific facts of what’s in front of you. It actually helps you get to a state of calm. Contrast that with when you dramatize it, it feels real, but it activates that nervous system. It’s telling your brain, see, this is really dangerous. This is really hard. And so all you wanna do is just identify the specific facts that are in front of you. Instead of saying, I’m constantly putting out fires. This is just another fire. Here we go again. Say, oh, my dog is barking, the doorbell is ringing, my baby is crying. My eight year old threw her book bag. So there’s no drama. It feels calmer. You’re much more likely to get your nervous system to calm down so you don’t feel as overstimulated and overwhelmed in that moment.

The next part of this is to acknowledge and validate your feelings, but you wanna separate out those feelings from the facts. So it might sound like I’m feeling overwhelmed in this moment. Make sure you have the word feeling in there. I’m feeling stress. I can do stress, I’m feeling irritated. I can do irritation. Whatever the feeling is. Inside Grow You. we have a Processing Feelings course where I teach you how to do this. It’s so important, particularly if you feel like you’re constantly putting out fires, because while that’s a generalization and a thought that’s not going to help you, what you’re really doing there is describing the experience of how you feel. And what you want to do is be able to process and allow your feelings no matter what they are, without making them worse or making it harder for you to move through them and get to a state of calm. And the way that you do that is to name the specific feeling, the one word emotion in your body. I’m feeling overwhelmed in this moment. I like to put my hand on my heart. Physical touch is a form of soothing. So it’s very easy for you to self-soothe with hand on heart and say, I’m feeling stress. And it really gets you to connect with your body instead of thinking that the stress is coming from outside of you, coming from your circumstances. Once you have separated out the facts and you’re processing that feeling, then you can decide how you want to think about it deliberately, because that is the power of mindset. Mindset will help you think about what’s happening in your environment in a way that is supportive of what you want to do next.

So it might be as simple as saying to yourself, this is the part where there’s a lot of stimulation in my environment. I’m still safe and I can stay calm. And having some mantras that you can go to and kinda have in your tool belt for instances where it’s predictably going to be, um, overwhelming for you or in the past where your brain has gone to, okay, this is just another one of those mini fires that I need to put out. Constantly putting out fires, having thoughts to replace that thought with is so important. That’s intentional thought creation where you create your mindset on purpose. But again, it comes after being aware that your circumstances are facts and not creating your feelings. So you wanna make sure you do the first part of acknowledging what the facts are, the second part of feeling your feelings.

And then the third part of deciding on purpose, how you want to think about whatever is going on. If your brain is in the habit of activating your nervous system, when there’s a lot of stimulation in your environment, it’s going to keep you in that cycle until you stop it. So if you just think about someone coming into my home who isn’t used to the chaos of a family and animals and all of that, they might be much more activated and I might be not activated at all. Same exact circumstances. What’s the difference? The way that our brains are interpreting our environment. And particularly if you’re going to be in an environment where you find yourself saying, I’m just constantly putting out fires, then you want to get good at this process of changing how you relate to those circumstances. ’cause of course, you could just change your circumstances, but you take your brain with you. And for most of my clients and most of the kind of brave women who get coached on this inside Grow You, a lot of it is coming from home, it’s coming from motherhood, it’s coming from um, doing all of the things at once. And that overstimulation, unregulated gets that nervous system activated and then the default thoughts kind of start. And I think they, they almost snowball.

I think it’s also helpful to just kind of notice what your thoughts are with respect to what’s happening in your home. So I think that when we should on ourselves and when we should on other people, it can make it seem like there are these real fires that we’re putting out. So for example, if you have thoughts like, my kids shouldn’t be hitting, my kids should be listening, my husband should be helping more, this shouldn’t be happening. When you’re thinking that, just notice how much resistance you put yourself in to what is. I promise you, kids are supposed to not listen. They’re supposed to make questionable choices. They’re supposed to have challenges that we could never expect. So of course it’s supposed to be happening. Now this doesn’t mean that you don’t care. It doesn’t mean you don’t show up confident and sturdy and hold boundaries, but it does mean that you tell yourself the truth.

I really like this framework. This is the part where, this is the part where I have three kids who have different needs all at once. This is the part where my child takes longer to potty train than I thought. This is the part where my adult child makes decisions I wouldn’t make for them. I love the framework this is the part where, and I think it works beautifully because it normalizes what’s happening. A fire is not normal, A fire shouldn’t be happening. We have to interpret that as dangerous so that we survive, we put out the fire, we run from the fire. If you think of a real fire. But when it’s just everyday chaos in our home, everyday life, I promise you it’s not a fire. And when you say this is the part where it normalizes what’s happening, which is the complete opposite of a fire.

Fires aren’t normal, fires are abnormal, but whatever is happening in your home, it’s probably pretty typical if you just think about the season and how long you’ve felt this way. And when you say this is the part where you detach from being in so much resistance to it, you learn to let go a little bit and it allows you to reframe the story in your mind. And from there you might come up with different systems or boundaries or strategies to show up in the way that you want to, but I promise you, you will show up in such a better way for your sake. So if your eight year old is in the habit of throwing her book bag when she comes home from school, the way that you navigate that with her from calm and from connection and from confidence is going to look very different than if you navigate that from being very overwhelmed and stressed, the feeling driving the action that you take matters.

And when you are feeling really activated, you’re feeling really stressed, you’re feeling overwhelmed because you’re thinking, oh, this is just another fire I need to put out one of those fires, this fire, here we go again. It’s not going to lead to you taking the best action for you. So instead of thinking the thought, here we go again. Here’s another fire I’m constantly putting out fires. Remind yourself in the moment to say exactly what is happening without adjectives and then go inward and process the feeling you’re feeling. Separating out feelings from thoughts and actions is so important. You can feel any emotion without acting. You can feel so irritated or overwhelmed without yelling or snapping, but it’s a skill. It’s like riding a bike. Anyone can get up and ride a bike, but the first few times you practice, you’re gonna fall down and skid your knee because you’re learning that new skill.

The same is true with learning the skill of processing feelings, but once you learn how to do it, I promise you it is one of the best tools. And from there you can decide to think empowering thoughts that help you create the feeling you want to create. Whether that’s calm, confidence, feeling empowered, creating your mindset on purpose, particularly in foreseeable circumstances is so powerful. So if you’re used to having a full home as well and thinking about it as full of just chaos and constantly putting out fires and that feels really stressful for you, then I promise you that is going to continue until you stop that cycle. It’s not that you need to get to this other season, it’s not that at all. It’s the way that your brain is interpreting what’s happening in front of you. So you have to stop that cycle, notice it, become aware of it, see what the facts are, process your feelings and decide on purpose how you want to think so that you can think more deliberately.

It’s not about thinking positively, it’s about thinking purposefully. That is always what I want to help you to do. And personally, I have been someone who has been really reactive and had an activated nervous system when I didn’t want to. And doing this work has helped me so much because now I could have people coming in and out and all kinds of stuff going on with lots of kids over. And it’s not activating to me the dog’s barking, the phone’s ringing, the carriers, dropping off packages. I never think the thought, I’m constantly putting out many fires. I just don’t think that thought. And then I can show up in a much calmer state. That is the power of doing this work, my friend. I invite you to join me inside Grow You so I can help you personally and you can get coaching on this because no matter what is going on in your life, doing thought work and managing your mind and becoming more empowered can help you. I’ll talk with you next week. Take care.

If you loved this podcast, I invite you to check out Grow You my mindfulness community, for moms where we do the inner work together. Head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more.