So much of my irritability this summer so far hasn’t been about the juggle or…

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So I’m doing the thing I talk about. I’m taking my foot off the gas in a couple of the ways that I can, so that I can slow…

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It’s coming up to that time again…summer holidays! My kids have already broken up, and we’re a few days in. We’re having a very home-based summer and aren’t going away, but I’m excited to take my foot off the gas after a busy time.

Something I hear a lot from mothers, is a version of this. “I know the kids will love it. I am dreading it.” Or “I’m strugg…

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We’re in a big season of transition in our house. The kids, a new book…..the demands are coming from every direction. I And today I hit a wall. I lost allll motivation and drive.

Not long ago, this feeling would have thrown me into a panic. I used to believe that if I slowed down I wouldn’t be able to s…

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I can’t believe my new book is out. It has been lovely seeing it in people’s hands, and hearing their kind words of feedback. Today I wanted to write about how trying so hard to be ‘nice, kind, giving, easy’, can actually pile on the pressure and find us more snappy, not less!

For a long time, I thought being kind, giving and easy made me a good person. …

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To mark it, I have ten minutes of me reading the opening pages of How to Stop Snapping at the People You Love. Please ignore my husky voice, I have a bit of a virus at the mo and sound like I smoke 40 a day.

Make a cup of something, find ten mins, and enjoy xx

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How to Stop Snapping at the People You Love is out TOMORROW. Order your copy tomorrow and celebrate with me.

Here’s what others have said about it:

“This book invites us to approach our most …

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EEEK! My new book is out on Thursday, so for today’s newsletter, I wanted to share 5 lines from inside the book. They’re just single sentences, little golden nuggets to help reframe irritability, anger and rage, and bring a boatload of clarity and compassion to some of the moments we often feel ashamed about.

Here they are.

1. “Rage isn’t a problem to be …

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You know that busy day that rushes by, a series of needs coming at you from every direction? I’ve had a l…

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It’s about a cancelled caterer, a disproportionate reaction, and what happens in our bodies when life is full and fast.

I hope you enjoy it,

Anna x

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Okay, so if you are anything like me, the answer to the question ‘what do you do after you’ve snapped at someone you love?’ has, at various points in your life, been one of three things…

1. Brush over it and hope everyone moves on.

2. Over-apologise for so long that the other person ends up consoling you.

3. Or apologise quickly, but then carry the guilt and shame…

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I want to show you what was actually happening in that half second, and offer you a different question to ask yourself instead.

I talk about:

• what you’re actually carrying

• …

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Ahh another Monday has rolled around! They seem to be coming quickly. It won’t be long until the Summer holidays are upon us. And I hope that his lands after a sunnier weekend than the washout we’ve just had as I write this!

Monday mornings often have that ‘feeling’ to them. For me, I have to hit the ground running with a day of clinical work, but I often start the day feeling more tired than refreshed! Our weekends are often quite home-based, with the odd cricket match and family gathering. But I want to talk about that Monday feeling today. And why Monday morning often feels harder than we believe it should. Despite having just had a weekend, perhaps you, like me, arrive at your day, desk or your laptop already running on fumes? So why do we often start the week off feeling depleted?

I’m thinking, writing and talking a lot about the weight of the unseen at the moment. My new book is all about irritability and rage, and reframing it not as a character flaw or failing, but a symptom of what you’re carrying. And in terms of Mondays, often we can chastise ourselves for not feeling as refreshed as we should, when often the load you carried into Monday was much heavier than you realised, and a lot of it has nothing to do with what was in your calendar!!

Here are five things I want to share with you…

1. The mental load does not take weekends off!

In cognitive psychology there is a concept called the Zeigarnik effect, which shows that unfinished tasks occupy more of our mental bandwidth than completed ones. It’s like your brain keeps a running, low-grade tab on every single open loop and loose end, until they are either resolved or struck off the list.

So while you were watching a film on Saturday night, your brain was still holding the data about the email you haven’t replied to, the appointment you need to book, the summer logistic that haven’t yet been ironed out (I’ve booke NOTHING - no staycation, no childcare to cover my work) the conversation you’re rehearsing. The weekend might have been a calm one, but your mind was still processing and planning in the background if not consciously.

2. Anticipatory stress is REAL stress.

By Sunday evening, most of us are already mentally living in Monday morning. We’re scanning the week ahead, holding in mind the diary, calculating the demands and bracing for what is coming at us. This is anticipatory stress, and the important thing to know is that the body responds to a stressor we are imagining almost in the same way, with the same energy and cognitive draw as one we are ACTUALLY navigating and experiencing.

So if you wake up on Monday feeling tired before anything has actually happened… it’s because something HAS actually happened. You have been mentally living out the load of the week ahead.

3. The invisible load is heavier than the visible load we carry

Studies on cognitive labour, particularly in mothers and primary caregivers, show that the cognitive load of household and family management is always underestimated by everyone, INCLUDING the very people carrying it.

My husband sees a school email fly in, and maybe scans it. I have to sit at my laptop for a good chunk of time diarising things in, setting reminders (so that the do-do-list is held outside of my head!) and organising the relevant logistics attached to each event and action. All these tasks sit on top of remembering of who needs what when, and they all add an additional layer on top of paid work and the more visible tasks. It’s a heavy bunch!

4. Self-criticism consumes bandwith!

You know when your inner voice pipes up and calls you scatty, useless or behind?? Well that voice consumes the same limited mental fuel you’re drawing from to get stuff done. So every “what is wrong with me” is consuming cognitive energy from the exact system that is already depleted. THIS is why I rave about the importance of self-compassion. Think about how you brace and stress when someone criticises you? When this happens within your own head and heart, it also prompts that same feeling of bracing, and adds to stress.

In the psychology of self-compassion, particularly the work of Kristin Neff, the evidence is very clear. Self-criticism is correlated with higher cortisol, lower problem-solving capacity, and worse follow-through. Self-compassion is correlated with the exact opposite. The kinder voice is not a soft option, it’s the efficient one that helps you move forward, not freeze under self-criticism.

5. You can choose to put something down.

The most useful and beneficial thing you can do at the start of a busy week is not to pressure yourself ‘try harder’. Instead, try and look honestly at what you are carrying and choose, deliberately, to find a way to make the road a little smoother for yourself, to cut a corner or to look at your list and put one thing down. This isn’t the same as abandoning it or pretending it doesn’t exist. It’s about recognising the limits of your human capacity, and thinking how you might make the load that little bit lighter for the week, to lower the bar somehow, and pick it back up next Monday (if it still matters).

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I have been parenting my children with a permission I have never once given myself, and maybe you have too.

In this week’s voice note I go into where that comes from, why so many of us le…

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Oh my gosh, there is a specific kind of exhaustion that arrives in the last few weeks of the school year, isn’t there? It’s like a sunnier version of Christmas where it all feels faster and more fragmented, more demanding of time, juggling and logistics. We’re moving towards endings of terms, towards the summer holiday juggle, endings are in sight and the load increases.

I am writing this with three children in school, an eleven year old who is about to leave primary, a class WhatsApp that pings on the regular, and a new puppy added to the mix.

If you are a parent of school-aged children right now, you are in one of the most under-acknowledged seasons of the year. And if you have a child leaving primary, like I do this summer, there is a whole nother layer going on, whether you have given yourself permission to feel it yet or not.

So, here are five things I want to share with you

1. The logistical load is not in your head.

The end of the school year is a logistical avalanche! You’ve got the sports day, leavers’ assemblies, class trips, residentials, teacher gifts, end of year concerts, the summer fair, the class WhatsApp lighting up with twelve simultaneous threads about who is contributing what.. and the disco (and likely more).

And all of this is happening on top of the normal load of life. Work has not quietened to accommodate for it, dinner still needs cooking, and homework still needs to get done.

If you feel scattered or like you’re treading water, that’s not lack of organisation or love, that is an accurate response to the additional demand, so be kind to yourself!

2. Your child is also fizzy

If your child has been more emotional, more needy, more clingy or more dysregulated than usual in the last few weeks, they are responding to the same season you are. The end of a school year is a big transition for a child, and it’s likely there will be lots of conversations happening in their classes about the changes ahead. Plus, friends will scatter for summer, teachers will be left behind and routines will shift. Some of them are moving schools, which is a change of almost everything familiar.

What we are often seeing in this stretch is the ‘coke bottle effect’ on overdrive. Every day at school is a bigger shake of the bottle than usual, because underneath those normal demands there are goodbyes, the anticipation of what’s to come, and uncertainty of what the new normal will feel like. And then that coke bottle cap comes off at home, in the safest place.

I myself find that often I question my parenting at this point, but need to remember I’m parenting kids who are at the end of something significant, yet they may not have the language for it.

3. Even good transitions are demanding

Even when a transition is positive, and we’re excited about them, transitions can be one of the most underestimated stressors.

It is not just school, it is the end of a community you have been part of, and the end of a chapter of your child’s life (and yours too). It’s a shift in the daily rhythm of pickups and familiar faces and spaces. And there can be a real tangible grief involved as we see our children move and grow, even if it sits awkwardly next to the pride and the excitement.

4. Lower the demand everywhere else.

Something I always have to remember., and want to share with you is that the end of the school year isn’t time to start other new things, or take on new responsibilities and load. The kindest thing you can do for yourself in this busy season is to make the path smooth where you can and lower the load and demand where possible. Order the takeaway, cancel the optional, reduce the cognitive load wherever you have control over it, because the school is currently using all of your free headspace. This is wisdom and compassion!! Finding ways to match your output to the actual capacity you have is so important.

If this is the season you most need to mother yourself, my Mothering the Mother Sofa Session was made for you. It’s a compassionate, practical hour on how to tend to yourself when everyone else is needing you most.

5. Repair will be needed, probably daily.

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I talk about:

• why disappointing someone can feel unbearable

• why disappointment is not the same as failing your child

• why it’s so important to find a way to be okay with dissapointing others sometimes

• how this is relevant in your friendshi…

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On paper, the word ‘no’ is a simple, single syllable. Easy to spell, but sometimes much harder to say. Saying no to others, hasn’t come easily to me over the years, as the fear of disappointing others has been such a huge one to navigate. However finding my ‘no’ has one of the most important things to become confident at. Life changing in fact. If you find it hard to say no, especially to your children, then this is for you!

When it comes to our children. it’s not that we struggle to form the word ‘no’, we struggle to watch our children feel disappointed, knowing that it was our boundary, our decision that has caused the meltdown, the discomfort, the grief, the upset. And the reason we struggle to watch them be disappointed has almost nothing to do with them, and a great deal to do with our own relationship with disappointment.

Here are five things I have found so helpful in holding those boundaries, or decisions, even in the face of disappointment:

1. The difficult thing isn’t the ‘no’, the trouble is managing the resulting disappointment

If saying no had no emotional consequence, it would be easy. No more TV it’s bedtime, no sweets before dinner, no we’re not buying you a phone even though some of your friends have one (my current battle…apparently EVERYONE in my son’s class of 11 year olds has a phone). Done.

The reason it is hard is what comes after…the face, the wail, the body flopping onto the floor, the eyeroll. The fifteen “but why not?s”

We are not really negotiating about the third biscuit, the TV or the phone, we are bracing for the storm of feeling that the no is about to unleash. And on a tired Tuesday evening, it can be much easier to steamroll the boundary than to weather the storm.

The first step is to notice this clearly. The work isn’t about finding a firmer no, it’s becoming someone who can can wether the storm of disappointment that follows.

2. You may have learned, long ago, that disappointment was unsafe.

If in your own childhood, your disappointment was met with frustration, dismissal, impatience, or coldness, you learned that disappointment was a feeling that threatened connection with a vital caregiver. That if you were upset, the people you needed might pull away from you.

So you became excellent at managing it, you learned to want less, to expect less, to not make a fuss, to not be the difficult one. Now, decades later, you are faced with a child whose disappointment is aimed directly at you. Their distress does not just bother you in the ordinary way that watching a loved one struggle bothers anyone, it touches something much older. It triggers a deep sense that disappointment breaks things, risks connection, isn’t survivable. Therefore you need to fix it, fast and make it better, before something bad happens.

So you flatten and flex the boundary. It’s not that you’re weak, it’s that you might be trying to protect your child from a feeling you never learnt to withstand, or one that felt threatening.

3. Your child’s disappointment is not harmful to them.

Your child’s being disappointed is data, not harm. It is them encountering the feeling of what they want, and learning that the world has boundaries. That sometimes want and need are two different things. And I truly believe this is one of the most important pieces of emotional learning!

As adults we whether disappointment often, the job we didn’t get, the holiday that got cancelled, the friend who let us down. It hurts, but it’s survivable. Good, strong relationships can handle disappointment without crumbling, however uncomfortable it may be. And the ability to trust that others around you can handle the feeling of disappointment when you say ‘no’ because you don’t have capacity to commit to that extra role at work, or the friend who needs another favour, the family member who is asking too much…. this is not selfish. It’s one of the most respectful things you can offer the people in your life. Because every no you give honestly and authentically, even if hard, is a yes you can mean elsewhere.

(If you want to grow in more confidence in holding boundaries, you might enjoy my ‘Better Boundaries’ video workshop)

So, you are not breaking your child by saying no. You are introducing them, in small doses, to a reality they are going to have to live in for the rest of their lives. They will learn that even with disappointment, the relationship holds and the disappointment passes.

4. A warm and wise ‘no’ isn’t a withdrawal of love, it is an act of it.

We may have grown up associating no with rejection or coldness. With “because I said so” delivered through clenched teeth. So when we go to say no to our own children, we can brace, as though we are about to do something cruel. However, no can be one of the kindest things you say all day, if it is held with warm confident steadiness.

The script can be as simple as this: “Not now, my love. I know you really want it, I can see how disappointed you are. The answer is still no”

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In this week’s voice note I go into the psychology and the honest practical stuff that helps when life gets demanding and everything starts to feel like too much.

In 12 minutes I cover:

• Why pushing harder through them is the…

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