You’re Already Rehearsing the Hard Parts of Motherhood. What If You Practiced Something Else?

Think about tomorrow morning. You have an important meeting at 9:00. Before that, you have to get your child dressed, fed, out the door, and dropped off at daycare. And lately, drop-off has been rough.

Now notice what happens when you picture tomorrow.

If you’re like most of us, your brain probably doesn’t show you a neutral little movie. It shows you the movie. You know the one. Your child clings to your leg, sticky fingers and all. They start crying. You feel that familiar tightness in your chest and you try to reassure them. They cry harder. You start worrying that leaving is going to hurt them in some way. You look at the clock, and now you’re late. Your child is hysterical and you’re panicking. And you haven’t even left your house yet.

Welcome to mental rehearsal.

Your brain is constantly predicting what comes next

Our brains are prediction machines.

One of the ways they try to keep us safe is by using what has happened before to anticipate what might happen next. In fact, some of the same brain systems involved in remembering the past are also involved when we imagine the future.

This makes sense, doesn’t it? Your brain has to build tomorrow out of something. So it reaches backward. What happened last time? What was painful? What surprised me? What should I be prepared for?

If bedtime has been awful for the past three weeks, your brain is unlikely to casually assume that tonight will be delightful. It remembers. And then it rehearses.

The problem is that this rehearsal doesn’t stay inside your thoughts. Your body gets involved, too.

Your body can respond to something that hasn’t happened yet

Picture yourself standing outside your boss’s office before a difficult conversation. Or imagine your child falling from the top of a playground structure.

Notice what happens in your body. Maybe your stomach tightens, your heart beats a little faster, or your shoulders rise. Nothing is actually happening, and yet your physiology has begun responding.

Research on mental imagery helps explain why. Imagining an experience isn’t identical to living through it, of course, but imagery can activate some of the same neural systems involved in perception and action. Mental imagery can also create measurable emotional and physiological responses.

This is why mental rehearsal has been studied extensively in sports, rehabilitation, and motor learning. Many athletes mentally practice movements before performing them. Physical rehabilitation sometimes incorporates motor imagery alongside physical practice. Extensive research has found physiological changes in strength following certain forms of repeated mental imagery over and over again. It’s pretty mind blowing.

Your brain and body are not indifferent to what you repeatedly imagine.

Which brings us back to bedtime.

You’ve been practicing bedtime before bedtime even starts

Let’s say bedtime has become a battle. At 4:00 in the afternoon, you start thinking about it. Oh God. Tonight is going to be awful again.

You picture your child refusing pajamas. You picture them begging you to stay. You picture yourself getting frustrated. You remember last night’s 90-minute ordeal.

By 7:00, your child hasn’t done anything yet, but your body is already preparing for battle. You’re tighter and you’re watching more closely. You’re less tolerant of the first sign of resistance because your brain immediately thinks: Here we go.

And your child experiences you in that state- they begin to borrow your nervous system..

Children are exquisitely sensitive to the adults around them. Your facial expression, voice, movements, attention, and behavior all give them information about what is happening. So now two nervous systems are entering bedtime. And yours arrived expecting trouble.

This can become a powerful cycle.

But it also gives us an opportunity because what if we practiced something different?

I’m not asking you to imagine that everything goes well

This part matters.

I’m not suggesting that you close your eyes and picture your child happily announcing “Mommy, I am emotionally prepared for our separation now. Please leave so I may sleep.”

How freaking amazing would that be?!

But that’s not the point.

We cannot mentally rehearse our children into behaving the way we want them to behave and trying to do that would just be another form of control. Instead, I want you to rehearse yourself.

Imagine your child crying. Imagine the uncertainty. Imagine the moment that usually sends your nervous system scrambling to fix, convince, control, or escape. And then imagine yourself staying right here in the moment. Present.

This is relational intelligence.

You aren’t rehearsing a perfect outcome, you’re rehearsing your capacity to remain present when the outcome is uncertain.

A different kind of mental rehearsal

Before a moment you know is difficult for you—bedtime, daycare drop-off, leaving your child with a babysitter, getting everyone out the door—try this.

1. Picture the actual hard moment

Don’t make it perfect. Picture the moment that usually activates you.

Your child says, “Don’t go!” They cry. They refuse to get into bed. You feel the familiar discomfort beginning inside you.

Let yourself imagine it without immediately racing all the way to catastrophe.

2. Rehearse your body

Now picture yourself in that moment.

Feel your feet on the floor. Drop your shoulders. Unclench your jaw. Slow your breathing.

Imagine noticing the discomfort in your body without treating it like an emergency.

You might even quietly remind yourself: This is hard. And I can stay. My child’s distress doesn’t mean something has gone wrong. I don’t have to make this feeling disappear. We can both handle this moment.

Notice what we’re practicing. We’re not practicing calm for the sake of calm. We’re practicing capacity.

3. Rehearse who you want to be

Finally, ask yourself: Who do I want to be when this gets hard?

Then picture her. Don’t picture some imaginary perfect mother. Picture you. Steady enough to stay, able to hear your child’s distress without immediately becoming consumed by it, trusting the relationship enough to tolerate a difficult goodbye, and able to offer warmth and reassurance without needing your child to stop crying before you can believe they’re okay.

You’re giving your brain another possible pathway. You’re providing another experience to anticipate. You’re teaching your nervous system another response to practice.

Practice staying, not succeeding

This is what I love most about mental rehearsal. It isn’t positive thinking and it isn’t pretending everything will be fine. It definitely isn’t a promise that your child won’t cry tomorrow. It’s practice.

Your nervous system has had plenty of opportunities to practice urgency, catastrophizing, and fixing. And it’s probably spent tons of time practicing the belief that discomfort means something has gone terribly wrong.

We can also practice something else, though. We can practice feeling our feet underneath us. We can practice breathing. We can practice allowing someone we love to have a difficult feeling without immediately needing to change it. We can practice trusting ourselves inside uncertainty.

And then, when the real moment arrives, the response we want isn’t quite so unfamiliar because we’ve already been there.

We’ve practiced.

And our nervous system has begun learning: There is another way I can meet this moment.