Creating a Values-Driven Motherhood: Principles By Which To Live for Navigating Challenging Emotions

How values-based living is the key to unlocking consistent emotional wellbeing

Becoming a mother is a journey of profound transformation, where emotional landscapes shift dramatically. I want to share with you a simple framework for navigating this complex terrain, designed to help you reconnect with your core values amid stress, anxiety, and intrusive thoughts. When we make choices based on our values, and not based on what thoughts or feelings are present, we are freed from the insidious cycle of fear that seems to hijack our lives.

Understanding Values in Motherhood

What do you value? For some, the answer seems obvious. But for many mothers, confusion arises. There’s often a sense that their values have changed since becoming mothers, but it feels difficult to articulate exactly how. This shift in values is one of the factors associated with the feelings of anxiety that often emerge when a woman is making the identity shift from maiden to mother.

Take a moment to reflect on what you believe contributes to a meaningful life. Presence, perhaps? Integrity, love, living by faith? Kindness, acceptance, trust? Learning? Personal growth? Resilience? There are no wrong answers here. However, it’s important to make the distinction between the values that you want to build your life around and goals or societal expectations that you’ve internalized. Goals are destination-focused, whereas values are journey-oriented. Values tend to be the underlying motivation behind your goals. For example, if you have the goal to breastfeed your baby for six months, the underlying motivation might be because you value nurturing (notice how there are many ways to live in alignment with the value of nurturing that are unrelated to breastfeeding). Values cannot be “completed”, unlike goals.

Societal expectations are the things we’ve been conditioned to believe are what need to be or achieve in order to be viewed as acceptable. Let’s say you value authenticity, but you have inevitably absorbed the idea from our society and culture that “good” mothers are always happy and have endless patience (LOL). Do you see the conflict here? Your mind struggles to reconcile what it believes society is expecting of you (all the while trying to manage it’s desire for you to fit in and be seen as acceptable) with your true value of authenticity. Societal expectations are prescriptive, whereas values are descriptive of individual meaning – what YOU believe is right and important, consistent across time and situations.

How your mind tries to disconnect you from your values when you’re experiencing anxiety, fear, and other challenging emotions

Believe it or not, your mind is actually trying to help you. It has a good heart, but it goes about “helping” in very limiting, counterproductive ways. For example, let’s go over some typical patterns that show up when we are experiencing the emotional energy of fear and anxiety:

• The mind tends to engage in automatic, fear-based decision making
• The mind likes to generate worst-case scenarios
• The mind often will suggest that you engage in both physical and mental safety behaviors, such as avoidance as a means to feel a sense of safety and certainty (which is not actual safety and certainty, btw)
• The mind tends to say things that feel discouraging and like it’s undermining your sense of confidence

Anxiety is a temporary experience.

Language is important. “You” aren’t anxious. You are experiencing anxious energy in your body. Those are very different things. The first is totalizing, fusing yourself with an emotional energy that happens to be active within you. The latter is a more accurate reflection of reality, which is that all thoughts and emotions are temporary experiences that are not “you”. If you want to break free from the cycle of feeling like anxiety, fear, and other challenging emotions are running your life , you must start changing your language.

Thoughts and emotions are signals, not commands.They also are NOT necessarily reflective of your values – most of the time, they aren’t. The thoughts that our minds produce are junk and out of alignment with our values 95% of the time. What do I mean by signal? I mean that the presence of fearful thoughts is an alert that you’re experiencing the emotion of fear in the body. Are you surprised? It’s unlikely that when your nervous system is activated and you have a ton of stress and fear in your body that your mind would be conjuring up thoughts of cookies, unicorns, and rainbows!

Remember that no thought or feeling commands an action. Thoughts are merely reflections of what is going on within us on an emotional level. We also don’t have any control over what thoughts our minds generate or what emotions surface in our bodies. Therefore, we can begin to let go of the constant judgment and assessment of our internal experiences.

Thoughts are not facts. Again, the mind will simply mirror what’s going on in our bodies on an emotional level. When we are experiencing fear and anxiety, the mind comes up with thoughts and images consistent with that emotion. It’s often our assessment and judgment of the fear-thoughts that causes the most distress – such as when we get caught in a spiral of trying to figure out what it meant that we experienced a thought about an unwanted scenario.

We have the ability to notice the anxiety, notice fear-thoughts, and not be controlled by them. Noticing and taking advantage of the space between these internal events and your subsequent behavior is the key to sustained emotional wellness. When you make choices about what to do based on the things you ACTUALLY value, and not based on the thoughts in your mind or the feelings in your body, you find freedom. And the even cooler thing is that when you engage in this way of living, the mind quiets down and you experience an overall decrease in the frequency of unwanted thoughts and feelings of anxiety.

Let’s go over some strategies that will help you

• Clarify your values! In order to engage in values based living, you must develop an idea of what those are. Begin to align your behavior with your core values.
• Recognize that thoughts are simply mental events that you have no control over. The mind is lawless – it will come up with literally any scenario. It knows no limits. Again, it believes that if it can get you to think about an unwanted scenario, then somehow you’ll be more prepared for it if it were to actually occur. The reality is that a thought does not translate to reality whatsoever – thoughts aren’t facts. Thoughts only “mean” what you are making them mean.
• Name the voice of your mind. Call it Karen, Brenda, Ursula, Pam, Bruno – whatever you want. Attribute all that chatter in there to them. For example – it’s Pam who’s wondering if everyone secretly hates you but are just pretending to be your friend and you ultimately end up alone (Pam has a core fear of rejection). Doing so will help you to reinforce the truth that your mind’s voice is not your voice.
• Create space between thoughts and behaviors. Slow down. Think about what behavior is most in alignment with your values. You don’t have to do whatever your mind is telling you to do, you know. Remember, no thought or feeling demands or requires action.
• Practice acceptance. Pain is a part of life. Unpleasant emotional experiences are part of being human. Experiencing uncomfortable, unwanted thoughts is natural, particularly during periods of stress.

Values – based living is not about living perfectly, but rather living with intentionality. By embracing these principles, mothers can take back control over their mental health, and no longer feel at the mercy of the human (ever-changing) emotional climate. Unpleasant emotions and thoughts becomes transformed from a barrier into an opportunity for growth, clarity, and deeper connection.

In Conclusion…

Our emotions ebb and flow like tides shaped by circumstance, hormones, and lived experiences. To be human is to inhabit this ever-shifting emotional landscape – sometimes turbulent, sometimes painful, sometimes serene. Just as nature cycles through seasons, our internal weather patterns change moment to moment, day to day. In motherhood especially, these fluctuations intensify as we navigate profound transformation. The heart that feels deeply enough to worry is the same heart capable of boundless love. Your changing, sometimes very intense emotions aren’t a flaw in your motherhood – they’re evidence of your humanity, your deep capacity for feeling, and your commitment to this transformative journey.

© 2025