How to Help Your Mom Friends With Their Issues This Year
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After the past year’s events, you might be one of the many feeling a bit battle-fatigued. The pandemic and widespread unrest made things challenging for those with mental health issues, and even those who didn’t have problems before found themselves struggling. Unfortunately, women, especially mothers, bore the brunt of the challenges.
Therefore, it’s up to the sisterhood to lift each other up and rebuild with love and support. Here are eight creative ways that you can help your mom-friends with their issues this year.
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1. Join Their Support Team
Has one of your friends had a particularly rough go of it lately? Why not schedule a check-in for just the two of you? Please select a private and comfortable space where your pal can open up about their feelings without fear of the wrong person overhearing.
If you suffer from mental health issues or substance abuse, you can be a lifeline for your mom-friends. Building a community of moms dedicated to recovery can help you all reach your goals. You can share your triumphs and celebrate each other as you achieve your healing milestones.
2. Make a Weekly Date
You don’t have to have the money to buy gifts to help your mom-friends with their issues. Sometimes, the best present of all is your presence.
Schedule a weekly get-together with your BFF. You don’t have to connect in person if time constraints or ongoing COVID-19 fears make doing so inadvisable — safety first, please. Your time together can take place on the phone or via Facetime, and it provides a necessary mental break while easing loneliness during isolation.
3. Coordinate Your Shopping
When you work and raise kids, a simple trip to the grocery store can become an undertaking. Your 2-year-old refuses to put on their shoes, and the 4-year-old can’t stop darting away from the cart.
Why not coordinate your shopping excursions. You can download an app such as OurGroceries that will allow you to share your lists for various stores across devices. Such methods work particularly well if you live in a rural area, and it takes you three hours for a single Costco run.
4. Try a New Fitness Class
Do you want to help your friends stick to their fitness routine while reaping perks yourself? Why not commit to fit together with a friend? It’s much more challenging to skip the gym when your BFF awaits you at spin class.
Doing so could help you both with your goals. A 2016 study published in the journal Obesity revealed that overweight people lose more when they spend time with fit friends. Plus, it’s much easier to muster the courage to try that fun-looking Zumba class for the first time
5. Hit a Yoga Class
Yoga is a fabulous way to get in tune with your body. It can help ease the pain of various physical disorders, such as fibromyalgia and chronic low-back pain. Better yet, if you and your mom-friends feel traumatized by recent events, this ancient practice can help your mind heal.
Researcher Bessel van der Kolk, founder of the trauma center at the Justice Resource Institute, shows a yoga model designed for inter-relational trauma survivors increases activity in the brain’s interoceptive regions, decreasing PTSD symptoms. Even if you don’t have a confirmed diagnosis, hitting the mat can help you recover from DisasterCon 2020.
6. Find a New Go-To Spot
If you and your friends share your recovery journey, you might feel a little lost when you no longer frequent the same watering hole. The pandemic may have helped you break that habit, but you’ll still need to find a new go-to spot when things return to normal.
Prioritize finding a new meet-up location now before things heat up once more. Maybe you’ll decide the local park makes an ideal spot, or perhaps there’s a cute and alcohol-free coffee shop you can explore.
7. Educate Yourself
If some of your mom-friends have physical or mental health conditions that you don’t share in common, educate yourself about their disorder. This advice goes double if they have a rare or poorly understood disease.
However, please don’t do so in an attempt to “fix” your friend. Chances are, they’ve read every self-help article you discover and can become understandably defensive if you insist your suggested treatment should work when they know that it doesn’t. Please remember, you aren’t a doctor, nor do you live in their body — respect them if they say that yes, aromatherapy might help some, but it does nothing for them.
8. Ask What You Can Do to Help
Finally, if you want to help your mom-friends with their issues, why not ask them what they could use assistance with the most? Someone who hasn’t had a date night with their spouse in forever might appreciate your offer to babysit for a night to let them enjoy some intimate time. Conversely, the single mom who’s constantly darting from the office to soccer practice might need a hand picking up the kids when she works late.
Remember that it’s vital to set healthy boundaries on what you can do to prevent burnout. An occasional 3 a.m. phone call might be okay in an emergency, but if it happens night after night, it can affect your health.
Help Your Mom Friends With Their Issues This Year With These Tips
It’s safe to say that nearly everyone could use a little extra TLC after the chaos of 2020. Help your mom-friends with their issues this year with these tips.
