How Your Brain Shapes Your Reactions as a Mom (Ep.6)

A bead spill in Target. A child pushing limits. A mom instantly flooded with embarrassment. Sound familiar?In this episode, we explore why these everyday moments hit us so hard — and what neuroscience, cultural expectations, and spirituality reveal about the emotional load mothers carry.We break down:🧠 How your brain predicts emotions before you choose them📊 What the Good Mother Myth is — and why it triggers instant shame💛 Why we feel watched, judged, and responsible for perfection✨ How to rewrite your reactions through identity in ChristIt’s a mix of relatable mom stories, practical insight, and spiritual grounding to help you shift from reactivity to presence.Motherhood isn’t about performing — it’s about transforming. Let’s unravel the pressure together.Thank you for listening! Please Subscribe, Rate and Review to help me reach more mommas!💖And, for more weekly inspiration, you can follow @GracefullyUnraveledPodcast on social media:🔗Facebook🔗Instagram<>I was in the store shopping recently when I overheard a mom tell her young child, “You want a toy, right? Then you have to behave.” And listen… as moms, how many of us have been there? Trying to convince — or let’s be honest, bribe — our kids to do the right thing.I have definitely been there. And, if you know anything about an Enneagram Eight… well, taking an Eight child shopping is a death match. Mine will clown and act out all over that store, subconsciously believing it’ll get him to the toy aisle faster. And when it instead results in a 'no, why would I reward you for this behavior', he acts shocked and turns to negotiation and applied guilt.But enough of my pity party; let’s get back to my role as mom observer.Sure enough, a few aisles later I end up in same vicinity as this mom again, but this time I hear a crinkle…a ripe...and then the unmistakable sound of what had to be a thousand tiny beads plinking off the cart and scattering across the floor. Followed by the mom’s desperate voice: “You’ve got to be kidding me.”Yep. That’s motherhood.I didn’t even have to see her to know exactly how she felt. Because as a mom, I felt it with her.“You’re listening to Gracefully Unraveled — a podcast about the honest, soulful, and sometimes edgy journey through motherhood. I’m your host, Kelli Lynch, and every other week I explore how this path reshapes us — not into someone new, but into a deeper awareness of who we are. Through reflection, spiritual wisdom, a little research, and just enough comedy to stay sane, we’ll navigate this messy, beautiful unraveling together.”Wouldn’t it be nice if we could reach a mental space where the bead grenade in aisle 12 actually made us laugh — instead of causing our whole body to tense up while our brain debates whether to scream or cry?Kids see hilarity in these moments. But we — the adults — instantly shift into embarrassment, fear, frustration, maybe even anger. Often before we’ve even stopped to ask:Did my child chew through the package or was it actually defective and an unavoidable accident?So where do these automatic reactions come from?Why are they so fast?And what do we do when we don’t like the mom we become in those moments?Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made, explains that our brains have “multipurpose networks” for making all mental states like emotions, thoughts, perceptions, and memories - and these networks don’t react in real-time as much as they predict what's going to happen.According to scientific theory, she notes that our brain uses past experiences, and current sensory input to guess what’s happening and how we should respond.So when the beads hit the floor, your brain fires:loud noise →public setting →broken item →people watching →parent responsibility →“This is bad.”But, if we all trusted Shakespeare we'd know that there is nothing good or bad, only thinking makes it so. However, most of us aren’t quite that evolved. Yet.Dr. Barrett further explains that the brain does this because prediction is metabolically cheaper than waiting. Our brains are expensive organs that consume a significant portion of our metabolic budget — so it’s more efficient for them to guess in advance and then correct, rather than wait and react. And if we perceive something to match the brain’s prediction or we reject the evidence that suggests otherwise, the brain doesn’t bother evaluating it any further. It just runs with the guess, because that saves energy. In short: we don’t always see the world as it is… we see it as we believe it to be.When it comes to parenting, we don’t show up as blank slates.We carry:memories of our own parentscultural messages about what “good moms” should look likejudgement we’ve absorbed from TV, social media, and other momsour own insecurities about being “enough”All of this sits on standby, ready to inform the brain’s ...