Why is the mental load of motherhood so heavy? A Q&A with yoga teacher Ashley Stachon

Ashley Stachon is the director of Metta Mama, a yoga studio for new and expecting moms in San Rafael, California. She teaches prenatal, postnatal and fertility yoga, as well as oncology yoga and Yoga for Healing at Metta Yoga San Rafael. She is a trauma-informed nervous system movement instructor and coach, has taught yoga since 2012, and founded But You Are So Healthy.

This conversation is general education, not medical advice.

This is part one of our conversation. Part two covers how to regulate your nervous system when you're overwhelmed.

How did becoming a mother change your teaching?

Kristina: How did you find your calling, your passion to work with the nervous system, somatics, and help people in transitions?

Ashley: I've been teaching yoga since 2012. I started teaching vinyasa yoga. I got pregnant in 2017. I didn't think that I would teach prenatal yoga, but just sort of the circumstances of being pregnant and realizing how much your body, mind, energy changes. I mean everything, your identity changes, becoming pregnant. I was interested first in the physical transformation. What's actually going on? What can I do, not do? How should I support myself? And then as I became a mom of my first child (I have two kids, a daughter who's almost nine and a son who's almost seven), as I went through the matrescence journey of becoming a mom, I realized that this is not just a physical transformation. This is a mental, emotional, energetic, spiritual transformation.

So I really got interested in not only the physical changes and what yoga can do to help stabilize and support you in labor, but also how can yoga become a community for women? How can yoga help us with labor prep, with just the transformation we go through? Yoga can touch on all of the spiritual, energetic, physical, mental, emotional. So I started teaching prenatal yoga. That sort of led me to the postnatal yoga as well. My teacher who I trained under taught prenatal and postnatal, so sort of a natural progression. I continued to teach yoga, started Metta Mama in 2022 when I moved to San Rafael, and then in 2024 I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and that sort of continued my journey to becoming oncology yoga certified.

Through the journey of going through 14 months of breast cancer treatment and everything that goes with that, I started to really reflect on what I'd been teaching. You come to my prenatal class before 2024, and I'm talking about supporting yourself, taking time for yourself, pausing. And I wasn't embodying any of that. I was just barreling through. And once I sort of realized that living in that stress response and not taking any time for rest and recovery had been a reason, one of the multitude of reasons why maybe I'd gotten cancer, I sort of paused and thought, okay, what am I missing here when it comes to what I'm teaching and what I'm embodying? A big part of what I was missing was that rest and recovery phase of just daily life, and the reset, and really finding safety in my body. I started looking at different somatic ways that can happen: changing just the way we move through our day, not only how we practice our yoga or what our exercise movement is.

What I teach through the prenatal, postnatal, oncology yoga, yoga for healing, those are all times of transition, and they're times where people are willing to say yes to new ideas, to give up maybe some limiting beliefs, to come into a yoga practice or a somatic practice with curiosity instead of fear. That's a through line between what I now teach and also through my business.

Why does it take a village to raise a child?

Kristina: You created such a beautiful community at Metta Mama, and it's beyond Metta Mama now, because we're graduates. Through your classes I met so many incredible women. We're still in touch, and our kids are becoming friends at the age of two. I think that's one of your superpowers. We spoke a lot about having a village, raising a child in a village. Why do you think we're struggling so much, and why the need of community, of our village?

Ashley: Well, we're not meant to do any of this alone. In traditional societies, for most of history, we not only raised kids with aunties, cousins, our family members, our moms, our grandmas, we also saw child raising. By the time you had a child, you had seen someone breastfeeding, you'd seen someone pregnant. The odds are you might have even been at a childbirth. And you saw kids, kids were always running around, and you weren't solely responsible for every single moment of your kids' world.

So we're not meant to do this alone. What ends up happening when we are alone, when we're in our homes that have walls, when we drive in our car that is a container, when we're trying late at night to figure out what's right for our kid's after-school program, or if what they were complaining about at school was appropriate, just all alone: we feel isolated, overwhelmed. We don't have the community to know that this is just what children, motherhood is. That community is really important, to find that support and also just to see someone. One of my favorite times, and this is going to sound a little ridiculous, but if I'm in a grocery store and I see someone else having a hard time with their kid because they're taking something off the shelf or out of the cart, I'm like, my God, I'm not alone, because that's what my children did when they were younger. Just to know that what seems like over-the-top behavior is completely normal for these young children who are trying to figure out the world can be really helpful.

Kristina: I like what you said about figuring out the world. They don't know how to behave sometimes, they're figuring it out, and their nervous system gets overwhelmed.

Ashley: Children's nervous systems are being built, just like ours are constantly being built. What's really fascinating about physiological development with the newborn infant and beyond, and this is just one example: when they start to crawl, that's cross-body information. That helps with writing, that helps with developing their nervous system, because crossing the midline helps you feel safe in the nervous system. This is all happening as they're rolling over, laying on their stomach, having tummy time. All of this is developing their nervous system just as much as their strength and lifting their head. So when they're in the market and it's overstimulating and you're saying no and there's a shopping cart, their nervous system is totally overstimulated.

Why does decision fatigue hit mothers so hard?

Kristina: Coming back to the village, I want to add from my own experience. We're a family of three, and I don't always have my mom around. I feel like the overwhelming part is also making too many decisions for your family, for your child. Before, I had to make decisions for myself. Now I make decisions for my family. Is that the right daycare? Touring all those daycares, making decisions for the future. Usually it's the primary caretaker making all of those decisions, or maybe it's shared with a partner, but still someone has to do the research. Someone has to present all the data points, and it can be so, so, so overwhelming.

Ashley: There's so much information, trying to figure all that out. And we're usually making these decisions inside, staring at a computer. It burns us out, it makes our eyes tired, it's more information than we can handle. So on top of too much information, it's also how we're taking in that information. When we used to live outside, and this is just a very simple example, you saw what was right in front of you and then you saw distance, and then you saw trees and you saw the sky. And now we're literally like this all the time. The information is close. We're taking in a lot of information, and then we're feeling like we have to do it all alone. Some people ask, is motherhood different now, is parenthood different? Raising kids is different. Yes, on so many levels. Even how we move through the world and take in information.

How can family values lighten the mental load?

Kristina: Now more than ever, women have this pressure to be a great mom, to be a great professional, to be so many things. It creates so much pressure on one person, and it's impossible to be great at everything.

Ashley: You can't. One of the things that I did, I think it was last year: I felt really overwhelmed with all these decisions, and who do I go back to, and how do I figure it out? And some of them were having to be made at the spur of the moment. So I created foundational values of our family, the Stachon family values, and they hang on our wall. Not only do the kids have a reference point of, these are the values we live by, but it also has taken some of the mental load off my shoulders, in the sense that I don't have to think about some of these decisions from a point of, does this align with my family? For instance, if your foundational values are that you have family time, or you eat dinner every night together, and then your kids want to sign up for ten activities: is that going to come back and serve your values? So you can make some of these decisions a little easier, because you have a foundational value starting point. It takes the heaviness off of each individual decision. It might not answer your question. You might still have to fill out the forms and figure out A, B and C to get it done. But it might make it a little bit easier to not judge yourself if you decide not to do it, or not bring that overwhelm to the table, because you already have a starting point.

Kristina: I have the same for business, but it didn't occur to me for the family. For business it's: what are my values? Maybe I should not work with this person, maybe I should not be doing this project. I really like it for the family because it can simplify so many things. It's almost like having a map.

Ashley: It's a starting point for every decision. And if you can take that pause and even think about, does this align, then you have come to sort of that place of restoration for a minute. That pause might be the space you need to then say, you know what, that's not going to work, because my Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays are overwhelming, so I'm adding something on Wednesday. As opposed to if you don't take that pause and you're just like, okay, well, this is happening, but I'm not going to think about it in the context. So there's opportunity in that.

Why do women feel pressure to have it all?

Kristina: You mentioned our generation of women and the pressure we have. Can you share the story about your mom?

Ashley: I was born in 1980. My mom was a hippie in the sixties who burned her bra, and that's just figuratively, although I think she actually did it. That was to liberate women so that her daughter could have it all, which in theory sounds grand. I remember being given a book in college from a friend. I can't remember the exact name of it, but it was a book that was like, women can do it all. It was supposed to be an honor: you can have a job and raise kids and run a business. The glass ceiling has been destroyed. But we are really the first generation (I'm going to be 46) that was supposed to have it all and be able to do it all. And the downside of that is we constantly are telling ourselves that we're inadequate, because that's just impossible. It is impossible.

A lot of that's [subconscious]. That is what I was doing constantly before I was diagnosed with cancer, and I did not realize I was doing that until I had to pause everything and reevaluate what had gone off the rails. I was trying to start a business, I was teaching, my son was at a co-op preschool, which was quite a few hours a week of commitment. My daughter was in TK and still needed a lot of support. She still does, but it was a different kind of commitment when she was four and a half, five. Running a household. I couldn't do it all. And so when I could not do it all, I would then tell myself I was inadequate at all of it: motherhood, running my business, getting it done, everything.

Why do healthy habits go first when we're stressed?

Kristina: For someone who's very stressed and overwhelmed, why do you think the first things to go are the things that are very healthy for us? Healthy food, sleep, meditation. To me it's a spiral down, almost like betraying myself. I know these things are good for me, but I choose working too much and doing all these other things.

Ashley: I think most people don't decide it as a priority from the very beginning. It's, I should go to the gym today, I should work out, I should make time for a walk. Which, if you are evaluating everything you do in the day, it's not like you're like, I should feed my son, or finish that newsletter that I said I was going to have done today. We don't have time to do everything. So we need to realistically look at our list, and one item on that list should be something that's good for us, that will nourish us, that will take care of us. And we add it to our list so we can check the box off. We can cross it off. It's our non-negotiable.

What is performative health?

Kristina: It brings me to this idea of performative health. So many of us are thinking about how it looks, the check boxes, going to the gym to look good or to lose weight, instead of how we feel. What I really like about your yoga classes is that you help people switch from the performative part, how it should look, should, should, should, into how good it feels in your body.

Ashley: Well, thank you. It's all from lived experience. I was the, let's work out to lose weight, let's look a certain way, let's go harder because that's what I've been told burns the most calories. It did not get me anywhere. It got me stressed, overwhelmed. It was not nourishing. What I use now is: what is going to nourish me, what is going to support my healing and my best self? A lot of times that's slower. That's working on stabilizer muscles, that's doing non-habitual movement, non-linear movement, circular, sort of breaking up the day and how I move through the day with sitting and more linear movement. And stopping and pausing to tune into my interoception, to figure out what sensation this is bringing up for me. Because your body will tell you: this is supportive, this is what I need.

Ashley's family values are the idea I took home from this conversation: decide once what matters, and each decision after that gets a little lighter. Posture works the same way for me. The Etalon Posture Bra's patented scapular guidance system stabilizes and guides the shoulder blades toward their optimal anatomical position, so slouching starts to feel subtly uncomfortable and sitting up stops being one more decision in a day already full of them. That feedback trains the body's memory, even on days I don't wear it.

Links

• Part two: How do you regulate your nervous system when you're overwhelmed?
• Etalon Posture Bra
• Metta Mama
• But You Are So Healthy
• Ashley's Substack