Nicky Lowe [00:00:06]:
Hi, it’s Nicky Lowe and welcome to the Wisdom for Working Mums podcast show.

Nicky Lowe [00:00:10]:
I’m your host and for nearly two

Nicky Lowe [00:00:12]:
decades now I’ve been an executive coach and leadership development consultant. And on this show I share evidence based insights from my coaching, leadership and psychological expertise and inspiring interviews that help women like you to combine your work, life and motherhood in a more successful and sustainable way. Join me and my special guests as we delve into leadership and lifestyle topics for women, empowering you to thrive one conversation at a time. I’m so happy that you’re here and let’s get on with today’s episode.

Nicky Lowe [00:00:46]:
I’m Nicky Lowe and welcome back to the Wisdom for Working Mums podcast. This is the space where we talk honestly about building a career you love and a life that actually feels good. Not one or the other, but both and without running yourself completely into the ground to have them. I wanted to start today’s episode a little bit differently. I want you to close your eyes for a second. Well, obviously not if you’re driving or if it’s not safe to do, so please keep your eyes very much open if that’s the case. But if you can just take a breath and ask yourself, when was the last time I genuinely felt like myself? Not just fine, not just like managing, but actually like you. Energised, present, clear headed, like you had something in the tank.

Nicky Lowe [00:01:38]:
At the end of the day, if you’re struggling to remember that, then this episode is for you. And I want you to know before we go any further, whatever you’re feeling right now, maybe it’s exhaustion, that something is just off. Don’t worry. I’m hoping this episode is going to really make sense and help. So I need to take you back about 14 years because this episode really starts there. It was when I got pregnant with my first child and I had quite. I love being pregnant. I always feel great when I’m pregnant.

Nicky Lowe [00:02:16]:
But my pregnancy was quite challenging and at times was quite stressful. And I returned back to work when my firstborn was just before he was one. And from the outside I was doing really well. I’d gone back to work, I was showing up, I was ticking all the boxes. But inside it felt very different. I wasn’t just tired and I need you to really hear that because tired is what people kept calling it and it didn’t come close. This was a kind of exhaustion that lived in my bones. I’d wake up after a full night’s sleep and at that point I was getting Good sleep.

Nicky Lowe [00:02:58]:
My firstborn slept through the night by that point. My second didn’t, but my first did and I still felt like I hadn’t slept. My brain just felt like it was wrapped in cotton wool and I just had this, like, ache in my body that I couldn’t quite explain. And I was irritable in a way that I didn’t recognise because it wasn’t me. And it was almost like I had this constant low hum of anxiety, like something just wasn’t right, even when everything was fine. And I remember going to my doctor and sharing how I felt and they just kept saying, you know, you’re a new mum, of course you’re tired, all new mums are tired. And so I went away the first time going, oh, it must just be me. It must just be that I can’t cope with this motherhood stuff.

Nicky Lowe [00:03:48]:
And it made me feel like weak and incapable. But that feeling continued. And because it felt like every cell in my body hadn’t got energy, I felt like something was seriously wrong. And I kept getting the same response. And this happened about three times. I ended up going back to my gp. I even went back to my original consultant that I had my, my child through because I was a high risk pregnancy. I’d been consultant led and even things, strange things were going through my head.

Nicky Lowe [00:04:18]:
I’d ended up with an emergency C section. I kept thinking maybe they left something in my body and sewed me back up with something because I just don’t feel right in my body. But I kept being told, you’re a new mum or new mums are tired. And the maddening thing is I kind of started to believe it because that’s what we’re told, isn’t it? That this is just what motherhood feels like, that you just need to push through that eventually it gets easier. But I knew in my gut that something else was going on. And it took months of appointments, lots of tears and eventually seeing a private practitioner to finally get an answer. But what I’ve got to say before then, I remember the health visitors coming round for my son’s 12 month check, you know, where they do all of their, like, growth and progression checks. And they did a questionnaire with me which is almost, I think it’s the kind of postnatal mental health check where you have to answer the questions and I wanted to answer them honestly, but I remember that the practitioners looking at me as if like, oh, I think you’re suffering with your mental health.

Nicky Lowe [00:05:32]:
And I remember saying to them, I think this is manifesting in my mental health, but I don’t think that’s where it’s starting. I physically felt so low that it was impacting me psychologically, but I kind of knew instinctively that I wasn’t struggling psychologically as the first step. It was like the, the secondary impact of that. But I remember them looking at me kind of going, you’re the kind of mum we expect to struggle. You know, you’re high achieving. But luckily I knew in myself that that wasn’t the case. And I knew I’ve done enough work on myself to know when I’m in self denial. And it wasn’t me kind of denying that I was struggling psychologically because I knew I was.

Nicky Lowe [00:06:18]:
But it started from. I knew it felt physical. So I ended up going to see a private health consultant and an amazing lady who I’ve had on this podcast called Joe Gamble, who’s a functional medicine practitioner. And she did kind of a whole intake of my whole history, my maternal and paternal family history, really try to understand me. And she decided to do a test that led to me discovering that I’d got adrenal fatigue. Now, today, it’s not called that. It’s. It’s called HPA axis dysregulation.

Nicky Lowe [00:06:57]:
Essentially, my body’s entire stress response had been running on overdrive for so long that it had just hit a wall and crashed. And I learned it was going to take me a long time to come back from that. So literally, the mitochondria, so the little battery cells in my body had got to the point where they weren’t working. And it took me two years, nearly two years, they listened at two years to recover. And I’ll be honest, that period was one of the hardest of my life. But it was also the beginning of everything that has become wisdom for working mums, because it made me fiercely, obsessively curious. Like, how the hell did that happen? And how do I make sure I never end up here again? Because it blindsided me. I didn’t see it coming.

Nicky Lowe [00:07:48]:
So I went into full research mode, like I love to learn, and I, like, threw myself into learning everything I could. So I read as much as I could, I listened to podcasts, I read articles. And one day I came across Gwyneth Paltrow talking about something on her platform called goop. And I know Gwyneth Paltrow is quite, quite polarizing, but I want to tell you about this article because it completely stopped me in my tracks, because for the first time I felt like I was reading Something that described my exact experience in language that I understood and in a way that made real physiological sense. And that article came from A doctor called Dr. Oscar Selerak and his concept of postnatal depletion. And I ended up buying his book, the Postnatal Depletion Cure. And it was like this light bulb moment.

Nicky Lowe [00:08:46]:
I don’t think that actually was more than that. It was like somebody had completely got me. And it was a permission moment. It was a permission to stop thinking I was weak or dramatic or just not coping well enough. And I want to share that with you if you might be feeling the same. So let’s dive into what, what is postnatal depletion? So Dr. Oscar describes it as what happens when a woman’s body has been in a prolonged state of giving. So given nutrients, energy, giving up our sleep, our time, emotional labor without any real opportunity to recover.

Nicky Lowe [00:09:24]:
And the key word here is prolonged because actually we go nine months of giving to build our baby, and then it isn’t just about giving birth. And everything returns. You know, we. We spend years and decades nurturing our children. And he talks about postnatal depletion can last up to 10 years or more after having our baby. 10 years or more. So if you’re sitting there listening to this and you’re maybe a new mum, or maybe Your baby is 4 or 7 or 9 and you still don’t feel quite right, please hear this. You are not being dramatic.

Nicky Lowe [00:10:09]:
You are not failing. Your body may simply be waiting for a recovery that was never given the chance to happen. So I wanted to share some of the symptoms because we can easily dismiss them. So a few of the symptoms Dr. Oscar associates with postnatal depletion. And I want you to notice how many of these you’ve quietly, perhaps accepted as normal. So, brain fog, that feeling of not being able to think clearly, maybe losing your words mid sentence, walking into a room and forgetting why you’re there. The tired but wired feeling.

Nicky Lowe [00:10:50]:
So it’s that exhaustion beyond measure, but also that you’re unable to switch off. You may be lying awake at night even though you’re desperate to sleep. The low level anxiety, that baseline hum of worry that doesn’t have really a specific cause, it’s just always there. Maybe there’s irritability and reactivity, so snapping at the people you love and then feeling terrible about it. Or maybe feeling like you’ve lost yourself, like somewhere along the way you just disappeared into motherhood and work and everyone else’s needs and you’re not quite sure who you are outside of that anymore. And honestly, when I first read that list, I cried because I’d been treating each of those things as, like, separate problems to fix. Like, more sleep, better diet, different morning routine, meditation, exercise, like the latest supplement, and nothing was really sticking. And that’s because Dr.

Nicky Lowe [00:11:49]:
Oscar frames it as, these aren’t separate problems, they’re a pattern, like a system, your system, that has been under sustained load for too long. And there’s a line from his work that I want to come back to because it hit me so hard that I had to capture it. And it’s that insight without capacity doesn’t translate into change. So let me say that again. Insight without capacity doesn’t translate into change. And that was me ready to a tea.

Nicky Lowe [00:12:24]:
Like, I knew what I was supposed

Nicky Lowe [00:12:25]:
to do, to do. I knew I should sleep more, eat more, stress less, ask for help, but I didn’t actually have the physiological capacity to actually do it. Like, my battery was so depleted it couldn’t hold a charge. No amount of, like, willpower or positive thinking was going to fix that. And that’s why I feel so strongly that we can’t just keep throwing productivity tips or mindset hacks at women who are running out empty. It doesn’t work. It never worked. What we need is to actually rebuild our systems.

Nicky Lowe [00:12:58]:
So I want to fast forward to then having my second child. So I ended up kind of recovering from my kind of burnout or my postnatal depletion. And I had my second child, and she’s nearly 8 now. And I knew with what I’d learned through this experience, I had to approach my whole pregnancy and postnatal recovery differently. So I didn’t just prepare for the birth, I prepared for the recovery afterwards. Like, naively with my first child, I was like, once I give birth and everything just returns to normal. But during this journey, I learned the concept of the fourth trimester. And there’s a beautiful book by that name by lady called Kimberly Ann Johnson.

Nicky Lowe [00:13:41]:
And I’ll link this in the show notes along with Dr. Oscar’s book. I can’t recommend it highly enough because the premise is really simple and it’s not radical. But those early weeks after birth aren’t just about the baby. They’re about the mother. It’s about protecting her nervous system, about slowing down and honoring that. This is one of the most significant transitions a human can go through. And I also spent time in her book reading about how that.

Nicky Lowe [00:14:11]:
How other cultures approach the postpartum period. So, so Many traditions around the world have practices built into the idea of the first 40 days, where the mother stays close to home, is fed like warm, nourishing food, is supported by other people, particularly women who support her and essentially give her permission to do nothing except rest and recover. And in many of these cultures, new mothers aren’t expected to do their laundry or answer emails, will be back in their pre baby jeans within six weeks. The recovery is considered sacred. So we talk about the, you know, the, the first, second and third trimester in I think in western culture, but a lot of kind of more ancient or eastern cultures think about that fourth trimester. So those three months after giving birth, like what is it that we need? And in our modern western world, we almost lost all of that. We’re told to bounce back. We measure our worth by how quickly we look like it never happened.

Nicky Lowe [00:15:17]:
And then we wonder why so many of us end up depleted. Like, as I’m saying this, it breaks my heart. So with my second child, I approached this differently. What had surprised me with my first child that I wasn’t expecting is that I’d lost my mum years before becoming a mum. And with my first, I didn’t anticipate how much I would need my mum when I became a mum. Her absence I felt so deeply in those early months. There’s like a particular kind of grief that comes from becoming a mum without your own mum there. And it made me understand in a very visceral way why community matters so much.

Nicky Lowe [00:15:56]:
Like it’s not just a nice to have, but a fundamental human need. So with my second child, I made a decision. I was consciously and deliberately going to build my village. So I actually hired a postnatal doula. Now, I hadn’t even understood what that was and I know it isn’t accessible to everybody and I want to acknowledge that. But for me, this second time round, I invested in that support and my postnatal doula was just amazing. She wasn’t there to take over or like look after the baby. She was there to support me, to make sure I was eating, to hold a space, to help me feel less alone, to play with my firstborn.

Nicky Lowe [00:16:40]:
Because at that point my husband had gone back to work and it was actually the six weeks holiday, so my son was off school and I was there with this newborn. And I say that because we say it takes a village to raise a child, but I genuinely believe it takes a village to support a mother. And in the absence of our traditional village, in kind of ancient times, we sometimes have to be intentional about building one. And I want to speak directly now to the women who are further along in their mothering journey. Maybe the those whose children are in school, or maybe secondary school, or maybe even leaving home, the ones who’ve been quietly carrying this for years because depletion doesn’t have a cutoff date. If your body never got the recovery it needed in those early years, if you went straight back into full speed, if you never slowed down, like if you white knuckled your way through, that debt in your body doesn’t disappear. It just gets carried forward. And there’s a lot of women I work with.

Nicky Lowe [00:17:44]:
They may be five, eight, ten years into motherhood, and by external measures they’re successful, but they’re exhausted in a way that can’t be fully explained. And they’re kind of ashamed of that because surely they should be past that now, like their inner critic says. But you’re not past it. Your body isn’t broken. You just haven’t had your recovery yet. And it’s not too late. Before I get into practical steps about what we can do about this, I want to take a moment to speak to anybody listening who manages people. Because if you lead a team, there’s a real chance someone on it has either recently returned from their parental leave or is quietly carrying years of unaddressed depletion while showing up and doing their job amazingly.

Nicky Lowe [00:18:29]:
And I want to say something clearly, they don’t need to be wrapped in cotton wool. That’s not what this is about. But what they need is for you to understand that they have been through one of the most physically demanding, emotionally complex, and psychologically significant transitions a human being can ever go through. Even if they look fine, even if they’re performing well, even if they haven’t said a word about struggling. The return to work after having a baby isn’t just a logistical challenge. It’s an identity shift happening in real time. And most people are navigating it while sleep deprived, hormonally recalibrating, and trying very hard not to let anyone see how much they’re holding. And you don’t need a formal process or a HR policy to make a difference.

Nicky Lowe [00:19:18]:
You just need to lead with some compassion and genuine curiosity, ask how they’re really doing and mean it, and create the space for an honest answer. Don’t assume that because someone is back at their desk, they’re fully backing themselves. The small shift in how you show up as leader, it can change everything for the person on the other side of it. And I want to end this podcast with something concrete because I know that’s what you need. I know it’s what I needed. Not just validation, though. I hope I’ve given you some of that. But actually things you can do.

Nicky Lowe [00:19:51]:
So the first thing is shift the question. Stop asking yourself, how do I get back to normal? Normal was before. Your body has been through something enormous. The better question is, what does my system need to feel safe and nourished right now? And tune in and listen, because the wisdom sits in our body. If we get our mind out of the way, our mind might say, I need a hiit exercise to lose my baby weight. That often isn’t what the body needs. The body often needs to feel safe and nourished, which means nervous system regulation, good quality food and rest where we can get it. The second thing is think addition, not subtraction.

Nicky Lowe [00:20:35]:
We’re so conditioned to frame wellbeing as cutting things out. Like, less sugar, less screen time, less stress. But depletion needs adding to, not taking away. Like, are you eating enough protein? Like, genuinely enough? And I know I still struggle to get enough protein. Are you drinking enough water before you pour your third coffee? Your nervous system needs actual fuel to function. The third thing is micro moments. So I get that, like, getting really good sleep or getting really good rest just often aren’t accessible to us, particularly as, like, new parents, but even at any point in our parenting journey. But micro moments of rest are real.

Nicky Lowe [00:21:19]:
So that nap may not be possible. An hour of yoga may not be possible, but 60 seconds of slow, deep breathing between meetings, that is real nervous system support. And it counts. Don’t dismiss it just because it feels small. I literally had the compound effect of these micro moments that led to my recovery. The fourth thing is lower the bar on purpose. So where can you delegate? Where can you say, not right now? Where are you holding yourself to a standard that no depleted human being could ever meet? You can’t heal while you’re running at 110%. You just can’t.

Nicky Lowe [00:22:01]:
And knowing that isn’t an excuse. It’s biology. And I always talk about the hardest thing I did was daring to rest. Like, unhooking myself from my overachiever to actually dare to lean into the rest. And the fifth thing I’m going to offer you is get the language. Like, pick up Dr. Oscar’s book the Postnatal Depletion Cure or Kimberly Ann Johnson’s the Fourth Trimester. Having words for what happened to you is genuinely powerful.

Nicky Lowe [00:22:33]:
It kind of changes the conversation. You have, not only with yourself, but with the people around you. And I want to close by saying something I really mean. If you’re feeling what I’ve described, it might all make sense. All of it. Like the the fog, the flatness, the irritability, the sense that you’ve lost yourself somewhere. And it’s not a character flaw. It’s not a failure of effort or mindset or gratitude.

Nicky Lowe [00:23:01]:
It’s a failure physiological reality that has been ignored and dismissed for far too long. When we stop seeing postpartum as like a hurdle to get over or a phase to survive, and start seeing it as a season that actually requires deep support, everything shifts. Not just for us, but for our children, our relationships, our work and our lives. You deserve that recovery. Whether your baby is 6 weeks, 6 years, or 16 years, you deserve it. So if you know a mum who needs to hear this today, please share this episode with her. Sometimes just knowing that there’s a name for it and someone who gets it is enough. Until next time, take care.

Nicky Lowe [00:23:45]:
And really, that’s not a throw a line, it’s the whole point. Take care of you.

Nicky Lowe [00:23:52]:
If you’ve enjoyed this episode of Wisdom for Working Mums, I’d love for you to share. Share it on social media or with the amazing women in your life. I’d also love to connect with you, so head over to luminate co.uk where you’ll find ways to stay in touch. And if this episode resonated with you, one of the best ways to support the show is by subscribing and leaving a review on itunes. Your review helps other women discover this

Nicky Lowe [00:24:19]:
resource, so together we can lift each other up as we rise. So thanks for listening.

Nicky Lowe [00:24:25]:
Until next time, take care.