You don't need permission to catch your breath

Buy new slippers for daycare. Confirm the paediatrician. Take something out of the freezer for tonight. Reply to the teacher. Remember the present for Saturday's birthday party. It's 6:40 a.m., Nadia hasn't yet set a foot on the floor, and her day has already started in her head. The list is spinning. It has been spinning for years.

The mental load is not the sum of the tasks. It's being the one who thinks of them. The invisible organiser, the family's memory, the lookout. To the nervous system, this permanent watch looks confusingly like a state of alert: the brain endlessly scans the horizon for whatever might be forgotten. The result: shallow breath, light sleep, patience in shreds, and that feeling of never quite being there.

The heaviest part isn't always the list. It's what happens when you try to set it down. Five minutes sitting still, and the little voice arrives: "You could use this time to put a load of washing on." Many mothers no longer know how to stop without feeling at fault. As if rest had to be earned, once everything was finished. But everything is never finished. It's an endless queue, not a finish line.

I won't lie to you: three minutes of breathing won't empty the list. But they change the person carrying it. Slow breathing, soft belly, long exhale, brings the body down a few notches. The rest of the day is no longer lived on the same floor of tension. You respond instead of reacting. You are there, truly, in tonight's bath time instead of already being in tomorrow's.

A simple ritual to start with: pick a gesture you already make every day, the coffee machine running, the engine switched off in the car park, the bathroom door closing. Attach three slow breaths to it, hand on your belly. No need for a slot in the diary: the ritual slips into what already exists. And if the little voice of guilt comes back during those three breaths, don't fight it: let it talk into the void and keep breathing. It tires far faster than you'd think.

And then there's the next step: two hours entirely your own, lying down, guided by a voice and carried by sound. Two hours where nobody asks anything of you, where there is nothing to organise, nothing to prove. Many mothers cry at their first immersion, I see it at every session. Not sadness: release, the kind they had been denying themselves for years. If those two hours seem impossible to take, that's probably the sign they are necessary. Come and live them at one of our workshops.

Keywords: mental load, mothers' mental load, maternal guilt, maternal exhaustion, catching your breath, breathing and stress, taking time for yourself