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Joined by my good friend Chantal Howard, we talk about the struggles teens face in this modern culture and a powerful new program called Catholic Finishing School for teen girls.
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If the noise in your house is driving you crazy — the screaming, the banging, the constant sound of someone needing something — you are not broken. And you’re definitely not a bad mom.
As a Catholic mom, you were never meant to live in a constant stress state, even if your house is loud and chaotic and full of little kids who don’t understand volume control.
In this episode, I teach you how to actually increase your tolerance to noise so you can stay calm when your home is at full volume.
We talk about:
* Why sensory overload is so common in moms (and it’s not weakness)
* The brain science behind why noise triggers your stress response
* Simple techniques to calm your nervous system in real time
* How to build long-term tolerance without numbing yourself out
If you liked this episode, you’ll also enjoy:
Tired from Overthinking? Mental Rest for Catholic Moms Finding Peace When You Can’t Control Everything Everyone Knows Moms Are Stressed: Here’s What to Do
If you’re ready to stop feeling on edge every day and start building real, lasting calm — that’s exactly what we do inside Mary’s Heart Martha’s Order. It’s coaching, community, and practical tools for Catholic moms who want peace that sticks. Learn more at catholicmomcalm.com/marysheart
TRANSCRIPT OF THE SHOW
Today we’re gonna talk about increasing your tolerance to noise. I had six kids in eight years, and oh boy did I need to learn how to exist in a house that had a lot of noise. Now a lot of you are looking for hacks to decrease the amount of noise in your house, and I have a lot of those too. But that’s not what this video is about.
This video is about knowing that you have right now a level of tolerance for the noise before you yell or withdraw to your phone. Or maybe you actually just go sit in your room or put the TV on, or you know, eat chocolate chips outta the pantry. Whatever your coping mechanism is, you have a set point of a certain amount of noise that you can handle before. You reach for one of those soothing things.
We don’t like it. These coping techniques, most of them are not healthy. And I wanna tell you that you can increase your tolerance to noise, which means you can handle hearing louder noise or noise for more often and still keep your internal thermometer low. And that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth trying to discover the things that decrease noise in your house. I have also done many of those things, but I just didn’t tell myself that I was a person who couldn’t handle it. Well, first of all, I totally did. That’s how I used to live. I used to just go, I have so many kids, there’s so many little kids. I am in little kid land. I can’t handle this. It’s too loud. They’re crying all the time. Right? It was so, so much. And instead I learned, by the way, I forgot what book I was reading. This was maybe 10 years ago. About increasing your tolerance to anything stressful. Okay? And they were talking about how Navy seals do this and Navy Seals the training for that, by the way, is just putting them through super intense situations, psychologically, physically, with each other, so many intense situations. And then giving them coping tools so that they push how long they can cope in intense situations. Right. And so we can wrap our mind around this, let’s say with how long you could go in an ice bath, right? People are always cold plunging these days. They’re like, wake up early and cold plunge. But let’s say you get in the cold plunge thing and you make it 10 seconds so that you get out. You can work yourself up to 30 seconds and then one minute and then two minutes. Right. This is increasing your tolerance, your physical tolerance to handle cold water, and how do you do it? Through talking to yourself in your mind, right? You’re just like, you got this sterling. You can make it two more seconds. You can sit in this cold bath. We want this. This is great. All the people on the podcast say that cold plunging is amazing, right? And you’re just like coaching yourself in your brain to handle. Being in the cold water longer and longer. It’s exactly the same with the noise in your house. Okay. You’re just, they’re gonna start being noisy ’cause they’re dysregulated, little feral beings. Okay. Love those barbarians. Okay. But they are, they’re supposed to be like that. That’s what childhood is for. And then we are supposed to shape them with virtues, but they come out of the oven. Okay. Being feral and dysregulated and loud and so you can listen to them and go, this is okay. I’m totally fine. I’m gonna go to my mind. Palace, you just go in your mind palace, and in your mind you are drinking tea, listening to classical music, and it’s beautiful. Maybe you’re at the beach, maybe you’re in a library. I would love to be in a quiet library. And you’re just coaching yourself while the noise is happening and you go, I love you. You’re okay. You can handle this right now. You are safe right now. I love you. This is a lot. But you’re fine, right? It’s both. We wanna acknowledge like, yeah, this is a lot. They literally torture soldiers by playing the sound of distressed babies, crying. Right. It is real. It is distressing to the body, and yet you are okay. You are not going to die. It is just a moment and maybe we’re counting down to nap time and maybe, a lot of the crying does end pretty quickly. Like it’s your three-year-old and he’s running around the corner and then like clocks himself on the counter ’cause he grew taller, right? That’s one of those ones. But you know, you’re gonna comfort him and he’s gonna stop crying and then at least that crying will stop, right? And so most of them end up being situational. But our overall tolerance for how many people are crying at once. That was a real thing for me because when you have lots of little kids, sometimes three of them are crying at once. That was hard. But then also just if we’re clocking the number of minutes that crying has happened throughout the day, right? That number is climbing, and it’s like, how many minutes of crying throughout the day can you handle before, you know, losing it and turning to one of those coping things. But once you know this concept. It’s so powerful because you just tell yourself, I have the ability all of you do to increase your tolerance to noise. And I got to the place where two of my kids could cry and I’d be like, this is fine. And it’s not like I’m checked out and I’m not helping them, but I’m not screaming at them. Isn’t it so interesting that when we have a low tolerance to noise, we end up screening and creating more noise? It’s wild, right? But it’s. I understand biologically why that happens. We’re not gonna talk about that in this video, but it’s normal that it happens. And yet I don’t want it to happen. I wanna be the kind of mom that can handle a lot of outside stimulus. That’s what the noise is, and still have internal peace, right? I want that Mary internal peace. I want that walking on the water and it’s storming around me, but I’m staring at Jesus and I’m not sinking because I believe that I’m okay. And this is not something that you have or you don’t have. It is a skill. Your set point is here. And we can increase that, which means we can increase the loudness of the noise and the duration of the noise while you still stay calm. All right? I’m praying for you. I love you so much. Have a blessed day.