Ambitious & Anchored

When the triplets turned one, something finally shifted. The fog of new-mom survival mode lifted just enough for me to look up and ask the question every working mom eventually has to face: how am I supposed to do this–hand my babies, all THREE of them, off to a new caretaker? Keep recovering physically AND mentally when it felt like an insurmountable mountain? Reclaim some version of who I was before they arrived? And somehow find balance, let alone sanity, in the middle of all of it.

Here’s the spoiler: I didn’t do it all at once, and I don’t think anyone can. None of what I’m about to share is rocket science, and you’ve probably heard most of it before. But the magic isn’t in the tips themselves–it’s in how slowly you start, how you stack them over time, and how you stop trying to overhaul your whole life on a Monday morning.

In this article, I’ll walk through the routines and structures I built, one small step at a time, that helped me recover from burnout, integrate my new identity as a mom, and ease back into work without losing my mind.

---

1. Build a self-care routine that actually sticks

For me, the keystone habit became a morning walk before anyone in the house was up: usually between 6-6:30 am. Not because I’m a morning person (I’m really not), but because that quiet sliver of the day was the only thing that was reliably mine.

Here’s why this particular ritual worked so well:

Morning sunlight in your eyes. Andrew Huberman talks a lot about getting outside within the first hour of waking, not staring at the sun (please don’t), but letting natural light reach your eyes. It anchors your circadian rhythm (which translates into better sleep) and triggers a healthy early-morning cortisol spike that lifts mood and creates alertness for the rest of the day.

Walking calms your nervous system. As you walk, your eyes scan across the environment in what Huberman calls “optic flow.” The research he points to suggests this visual motion quiets activity in the amygdala, your brain’s threat-detector, which is why a walk so often takes the edge off anxiety in a way that just sitting still doesn’t.

The quiet creates space to reflect. Shawn Achor’s positive psychology research suggests that small practices like recalling three good moments from the day before or naming one new thing you’re grateful for, can measurably raise your baseline happiness over time. The walk gave me a built-in window to do exactly that.

How to actually start (without quitting by week two)

The biggest lesson I’ve learned about new habits as a postpartum mom is this: start so small you can’t fail. Habits form over time, and trying to layer on three new ones at once is almost a guarantee you’ll drop all of them.

So if you want to walk every morning at 6 a.m., don’t set the alarm for 6 a.m. tomorrow. Wake up five minutes earlier than usual and walk for five minutes. The next day, six minutes earlier and a six-minute walk. Then seven. Then eight.

This is the Kaizen method — tiny, almost laughably small improvements, stacked over time. It will feel too slow at first. That’s the point. You’re not trying to be impressive; you’re trying to build something that survives a teething baby, a sick toddler, and a 3 a.m. wake-up.

2. Get ruthless about priorities

Yes, this one is obvious. It’s also genuinely hard.

Prioritizing requires you to know what your priorities actually are– and then to accept that you can’t do it all. I know, I know. Despite the Instagram moms who somehow seem to have nailed the job, the kids, the marriage, the workouts, and the flawless kitchen island, every honest mom I’ve talked to (plus the successful moms I follow, plus my own lived experience as a triplet mom) keeps telling me the same truth: you have to choose your priorities based on the stage of life you’re in.

Kids under five is an intense season. It’s loud, it’s exhausting, it’s beautiful, and — in the scheme of a whole life — it’s short. The sooner you accept that you’re going to be busy and probably overwhelmed for the next several years, the sooner you can stop fighting reality and start prioritizing accordingly.

The hardest part is saying no

The reason prioritizing is so painful isn’t really about figuring out what matters — most of us know what matters. It’s about saying no to everything else. And FOMO is brutal, especially because we’re wired for it. Wanting to please people and fit in was a survival mechanism back when we depended on the tribe to literally not die.

For me, “no” has looked like:

• No to drinks with friends after 9 p.m., so I can actually sleep and make my morning walk happen.
• No (or “in a minute”) to my child, so I can finish a workout or grab an extra hour of sleep.
• No to weekend brunch with my single, childless girlfriend, because I need that window to meal prep — or just be with my kids.
• No to volunteer commitments and the hobbies I loved pre-kids.
• No (for now) to the promotion that would have me traveling three times a month while the triplets are still tiny (“Balancing” work and life deserves its own post).

Each one of these has stung in its own way. They get easier with practice, but they don’t stop costing something — and I think it’s important to be honest about that, instead of pretending the trade-offs are clean.

A simple tool: the One Thing question

The single most useful prioritization technique I’ve found comes from Gary Keller and Jay Papasan’s book The ONE Thing. At the start of your day — for work, for home, for anything — you ask:

“What’s the one thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

It sounds almost too simple. But every time I actually sit with the question, the answer surprises me. Sometimes it’s “meal prep three salads so I’m properly nourished for the week.” Sometimes it’s “post an ad for a date-night and weekend nanny so my husband and I can get a real break.” And sometimes it’s the one I’ve been avoiding for months — “finally publish the About Me page on my website so I stop feeling weird about telling people what I do.”

The point isn’t that the One Thing is glamorous. It usually isn’t. The point is that finishing it tends to make the next ten things either easier or unnecessary — which, when you have triplets and a job, is the closest thing to magic you’re going to get.

3. Rebuild your confidence before you walk back through the office door

There’s something about “mommy brain” that happens when you haven’t had a real adult conversation with anyone other than your husband in months — when most of your daily vocabulary is baby-babble and your most analytical task is decoding which cry means hungry versus tired. Your brain doesn’t actually turn to mush (the research on the postpartum brain is more interesting than that — it’s quietly rewiring for caregiving), but it can absolutely feel that way when you’re staring down a return-to-work date.

The good news is that your brain is built for exactly this kind of pivot. Neuroplasticity — your brain’s lifelong ability to form new connections and rewire itself — means the “I haven’t been in a meeting in 6 months and I’ve forgotten how to talk to humans” feeling is temporary. The concept deserves its own post, honestly. But for now, here are two practical ways I’ve used to walk back into work feeling more like myself.

Keep a running list of your wins

Real confidence doesn’t come from telling yourself you’re great. It comes from remembering, in actual detail, the hard things you’ve already done — and most of us are weirdly bad at this. We forget our wins almost as soon as they happen.

The fix is surprisingly simple: keep a running list of things you’ve accomplished in your career and look at it often, especially when you’re feeling shaky. In Peggy Klaus’s book Brag!: The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn Without Blowing It, she calls these your Brag Bites: short, specific receipts of your badassery that you can pull up whenever you need to remember who you are professionally. Sometimes the work isn’t believing in yourself; it’s just remembering.

Affirm before bed (no mirror required)

I am, for the record, allergic to the “stand in front of the mirror and tell yourself you’re a goddess” version of affirmations. It feels contrived and, frankly, a little obnoxious.

What I do instead: right before I fall asleep, when my mind is quiet and unguarded, I say a couple of affirmations I’m working on. The thinking here is that the drowsy, just-before-sleep state is when the mind is more open to suggestion, so the message sinks in more deeply than it would if you’d been repeating it a hundred times in the middle of a chaotic day. Whether or not that’s strictly backed by neuroscience, my clients and I have found it dramatically more useful than the mirror routine.

A few I’ve used:

• “I am thriving at work.”
• “I am worthy of success.”
• “I am confident, powerful, and unstoppable.”
• “I am capable of achieving any goal I set for myself.”
• “I am enough.”

Pick the ones that feel true enough to matter, and uncomfortable enough to mean something.

4. Set up the logistics that quietly run your life

Not sexy. Still crucial.

The honest truth I had to swallow is this: going back to work doesn’t actually fall apart because you’re not “leaning in” hard enough or because you haven’t read the right book. It falls apart on a Wednesday at 4:47 p.m., when the nanny calls in sick, there’s nothing in the fridge, and your 5 p.m. meeting just got pushed. The unsexy, behind-the-scenes infrastructure is what keeps the whole thing from collapsing; it deserves real attention before you ever set foot back in the office.

Two pieces of logistics that made the biggest difference for me:

Childcare: expect to get it wrong a few times

Finding the right nanny is one of the most exhausting things I’ve done as a parent. It is not an interview-once-and-done situation, and the first person you hire is, statistically speaking, probably not going to be the right fit for your family. I went through five nannies before we landed on the person who’s now genuinely part of our family. I wish someone had told me that in advance, letting me assume that my instincts were off.

Here’s what I’ve learned from tons of nanny-hiring of trial and error:

• Call references before you invite anyone over. Not after. Not as a final sanity check. Before. A 15-minute phone call with a previous family will save you a two-hour trial that goes sideways.
• Build a ruthless must-have list. Mine included: age 50+ (strong grandmas were my ideal), prior experience with multiples or toddlers, kids grown (young kids = more nanny sick days), bilingual (I found immigrants tend to have stronger work ethic), calm energy, and do they actually like small children.
• Do a trial—actually, do a couple. Invite the candidate over to spend a few hours with your baby in real conditions, not as a polished interview but as an actual afternoon. You’re watching for a few specific things: how they connect with your child, how they handle the normal day-to-day chaos, and how they handle the unglamorous parts of the job. Build cleaning and tidying into the trial too; you want to find out now, not three weeks in, whether picking up after the baby (and sometimes you) comes naturally. If the first trial goes well, bring them back for a longer one before you make the offer.
• No drama. Life with little kids is chaotic enough; the nanny is supposed to be the eye of the storm, not another tornado. Pay attention to how much she talks about her life or complains.

Meal prep: cook once, eat twice

If you’re the primary cook in your house (I am), batch cooking is the single easiest hack I’ve found for buying back hours.

My basic system is to cook double of anything that freezes well, and stash half for a future weeknight. The meals that hold up beautifully are hearty soups, pasta with sauce, and Indian curries — basically anything deeply flavored that gets better sitting overnight. The Instant Pot has been a low-key MVP for cutting down standing-at-the-stove time, which on a weeknight with three toddlers is the difference between actually cooking dinner and ordering takeout for the fourth time that week. Another time-saving appliance is the air fryer, which I’ve used to perfectly cook frozen fish and veggies, making a whole meal in under 30 minutes.

Check out my favorite go-to recipes that my whole family actually eats, including the ones the triplets have all simultaneously approved, which is a small miracle.

One degree at a time

If you’ve made it this far, you might be looking at this list and feeling the exact thing it was supposed to prevent: overwhelm. Self-care, priorities, confidence, childcare, meal prep—all while keeping tiny humans alive and going back to work? Yeah. It’s a lot.

So please hear me on this: you don’t do all of it. Not at once, and maybe not ever. You pick one, the smallest, easiest, most doable one, and you start there. A five-minute morning walk. A single Brag Bite scribbled on a Post-it. One text to your network to look for a nanny referral. That’s it. That’s the move.

Here’s the image I keep coming back to: if a ship adjusts its heading by just one degree, you’d barely notice from the deck. The boat looks like it’s going the same direction it was a minute ago. But over the length of an ocean crossing, that single degree lands the ship hundreds of miles from where it was originally headed. A 1% shift in your life this week: one habit, one boundary, one tiny “no”, won’t feel like much. Compound it over a year, though, and you end up somewhere completely different from where you’d be if you’d kept waiting for the perfect moment to overhaul everything.

So start small. Be patient with yourself. The goal was never to become the version of you who had it all together before the babies, it’s to slowly, deliberately become the new version of you that your kids, and the work you love, get to grow up alongside.

One degree at a time. You’ve got this.