Every January, the conversation turns to what we’re going to start doing. The new habits we’re going to build, the goals we’re going to chase, the better version of ourselves we’re going to become by February — or, more realistically, by next January when we make the same list again.
But what if the whole premise is wrong?
What if, instead of layering more things onto an already overloaded life, the most transformative thing you could do this year is stop doing things? Specifically, the things that are draining your energy, consuming your time, and quietly making you a more stressed, more depleted version of the mom you actually want to be.
The concept of a “stop-doing list” isn’t new — author Jim Collins of Good to Great first wrote about it as a serious alternative to the annual goal-setting ritual. The idea is simple: what you choose to stop doing is often more powerful than what you add. For moms, this idea is genuinely radical — because the cultural pressure is almost entirely in the other direction.
Here are 10 things that, when I finally stopped doing them, made the biggest difference to my happiness as a mom. Not a prescriptive list of what you should do — just honest permission to consider what you might be ready to let go of.
1. Stop Putting Yourself Last
This is the one that sits underneath all the others — and it’s the one most moms resist most fiercely, because the narrative around selfless motherhood runs deep.
But here is the simple, practical truth: when you consistently put yourself last, you burn out. And when you burn out, your family doesn’t get more of you. They get less — a depleted, resentful, exhausted version of you who has nothing left to give because she gave it all away without refilling.
There is a version of self-prioritisation that is genuinely selfish — the kind that neglects real responsibilities and real people who depend on you. That’s not what this is. This is about recognising that your physical health, your mental health, and your basic sense of personhood outside of parenthood are not luxuries to be squeezed in after everything else is handled. They are the foundation that makes everything else sustainable.
What putting yourself first actually looks like is different for every woman. Maybe it’s reading for twenty minutes before the household wakes up. Maybe it’s running three days a week without guilt. Maybe it’s working at something that brings you joy and identity beyond motherhood. The specifics are yours to define. The commitment is non-negotiable.
2. Stop Trying to Keep the House Constantly Clean
Think for a moment about everything that society routinely expects of mothers: hold down work, engage meaningfully with children, restrict screen time, ensure nutritious meals, tend to the marriage, practise self-care — and also, maintain a clean and presentable home at all times.
Something has to give. And for many moms, the thing that will make the biggest difference to daily stress levels is releasing the impossible standard of perpetual cleanliness.
This doesn’t mean living in chaos. It means making a conscious, deliberate decision about what actually needs to stay on top of and what can be let go. Perhaps the kitchen gets cleaned at the end of each day and everything else is maintained on an as-needed basis. Perhaps certain rooms get deep-cleaned weekly and others are left to their own devices. The specifics are up to you — but choosing a sustainable standard, one that doesn’t require constant vigilance and energy, and then genuinely letting go of the rest, frees up a surprising amount of mental and physical bandwidth.
A tidy enough house where the people inside it feel relaxed is infinitely more valuable than a spotless house where the person cleaning it is perpetually frazzled.
3. Stop Living With Clutter
The direct connection between clutter and stress is not a lifestyle blog concept — it’s a well-documented psychological reality. Visual clutter activates the brain’s stress response. It constantly signals unfinished business. It makes every room feel heavier and every task feel harder than it needs to be.
Decluttering — genuinely removing the excess that has accumulated without a plan to simply refill the space — gives you back time and mental energy that you didn’t realise you were spending. Less stuff means less to clean, less to tidy, less to manage, less to replace, and less to make decisions about.
This doesn’t require becoming a radical minimalist. It requires an honest assessment of what is genuinely adding value to your home and your life, and a willingness to let go of what isn’t. Done gradually and thoughtfully, the cumulative effect is transformative — and the most immediate payoff is typically a calmer, more spacious-feeling home that is far easier to maintain.
4. Stop Shopping Recreationally
The clutter problem and the shopping problem are the same problem wearing different clothes. You cannot maintain a calmer, less cluttered home while continuing to bring in a steady stream of things you don’t need.
Recreational shopping — the Target run that was supposed to be for one thing and turned into six, the online browsing that turns into a cart full of things that seemed urgent in the moment — is not just a financial drain. It’s a time drain, a mental energy drain, and the primary engine of the clutter that stresses you out. Recognising shopping as a habit rather than a necessity — and then actively working to break that habit — addresses the source rather than perpetually managing the symptoms.
The practical side effects are also significant: less money spent, less time spent on logistics, and a growing resistance to the consumerist messaging that tried very hard to convince you that your life needed all of it. Every unnecessary purchase you don’t make is time and money and mental space reclaimed.
5. Stop Remaking the Same Decisions Over and Over Again
Decision fatigue is real, and it is quietly exhausting. Every decision you make throughout a day — no matter how small — draws on the same finite pool of cognitive resources. By the time evening arrives, the quality of your decisions has deteriorated not because you’re incompetent but because you’ve simply used up the available supply.
The solution, beautifully articulated by author Kendra Adachi in The Lazy Genius Way, is to decide once. Decide once where you grocery shop. Decide once what you’re making for breakfast most mornings. Decide once how the kitchen gets cleaned and when. Decide once what the laundry routine looks like. Make the decision carefully and thoughtfully — and then stop making it again every single week.
This principle scales to almost every area of domestic life. The more you can systematise and routinise the ordinary, recurring decisions of running a household, the more mental energy you preserve for the decisions that actually require fresh thought. It sounds almost too simple — but the cumulative effect of removing hundreds of small, repetitive decision points from your week is genuinely significant.
6. Stop Policing Your Children’s Screen Time
This one tends to provoke strong reactions — because the cultural messaging around children and screens is almost uniformly alarming. But it is worth sitting with the actual experience of families who have moved away from rigid screen-time enforcement, rather than defaulting to fear.
Managing screen time is exhausting. The constant monitoring, the negotiations, the enforcement, the guilt when you give in, the resentment when you don’t — it consumes an enormous amount of parental energy for results that are far less clear-cut than the alarm around screens would suggest.
Many parents who have experimented with relaxing or removing strict screen limits report something counterintuitive: given genuine freedom, children don’t actually want to be on screens all day. Like adults, they naturally seek variety — movement, creativity, social interaction, outdoor time — when they’re not in a constant battle to get more of the thing being restricted. The battle itself is often what intensifies the desire.
This is a deeply personal parenting decision, and the right answer looks different in every family. But it is worth questioning whether the energy currently going into enforcing screen limits is producing the outcomes you actually want — and whether that energy might be better spent elsewhere.
7. Stop Giving Your Kids Elaborate Chore Charts
The parenting guidance to involve children in household tasks from a very early age is well-intentioned, but the execution — detailed chore charts, multiple responsibilities per child, weekly enforcement conversations — is genuinely exhausting for many mothers, particularly when the resistance and the follow-through management falls almost entirely on them.
Teaching children to be capable, contributing members of a household is a real and important goal. But there’s a significant difference between gradually and naturally teaching children to do things as they’re developmentally ready, and running a complex chore management system that adds more to your plate rather than reducing it.
A simpler approach — one age-appropriate task per older child, centred around an area that genuinely helps the household, with more responsibility added as they grow naturally into it — accomplishes the underlying goal without the overhead. Children do learn capability and contribution. You don’t have to make it a full-time management project to make it happen.
8. Stop Slaving Away in the Kitchen
The pressure on mothers to produce nourishing, varied, homemade meals three times a day while also doing everything else on this list is completely unsustainable — and for many families, the kitchen is one of the most draining sources of daily stress.
Simplifying your approach to food is not failure. It is pragmatism. Identifying a few simple, easy food staples that your family will reliably eat and keeping them consistently available removes the daily burden of creative meal planning. Accepting that dinner doesn’t need to be a production five nights out of seven frees up enormous energy. Using prepared foods, batch cooking, an air fryer, or a slow cooker is not cutting corners — it’s making sensible use of the tools available.
The goal of feeding your family is nourishment, not performance. A simple, relaxed family dinner with easy food and a present, non-frazzled parent is worth infinitely more than an elaborate meal prepared by someone who resents every minute of it.
9. Stop Doing Things Just Because You Think You Should
This is the item that underlies all the others — and it’s the most difficult one to act on, because the “shoulds” of motherhood are everywhere and they are loud.
They come from parenting books and parenting blogs, from well-meaning relatives, from cultural norms about what a good mother looks like, from fear about the ways your children might turn out if you make the wrong choices. And because they come from concern, they feel like truth. They feel like responsible parenting. They can be almost impossible to question.
But any time a parenting decision is primarily fear-based — I must do this or something bad will happen — it is worth pausing to ask whether the fear is proportionate and whether the evidence actually supports it. Because fear-based decisions, made reflexively rather than intentionally, accumulate into an exhausting, joyless way of living.
Questioning the “shoulds” doesn’t mean abandoning your values. It means making sure your choices are genuinely yours — based on your knowledge of your own children, your own family’s rhythms, and your own clear-eyed judgement — rather than a defensive reaction to external voices. That distinction changes everything.
10. Stop Caring What Other People Think of Your Parenting Choices
This one will always be a work in progress. For most of us, the desire to be accepted and understood by the people around us doesn’t disappear simply because we’ve decided to do things differently. Making parenting choices that diverge from those of friends, family, or mainstream culture means navigating judgment — sometimes from people we love — and that is genuinely hard.
But here is what helps: remembering that they don’t have to live your life. They don’t wake up with your children, they don’t know your children the way you do, and they are not responsible for the long-term relationship you’re building with your family. You are.
The relationship between you and your children — the trust, the closeness, the specific way your family works — is built in the private, ordinary, daily moments that no one else sees. It is built on your instincts, your attention, your willingness to keep learning and adjusting. No one outside your home has the full picture, and no one outside your home needs to approve of the picture you’re creating.
Trust yourself more than you trust the noise. Your instincts, refined by love and attention, know more than the opinion of anyone who doesn’t have to live your choices.
So What’s Going on Your Stop-Doing List?
The idea of a stop-doing list isn’t about doing nothing — it’s about doing the right things. The things that genuinely matter in your specific life, with your specific children, in this particular season. And letting go — deliberately, without apology — of the rest.
Every item on this list started as something that felt mandatory, until it didn’t. Until the energy spent on it was weighed against what it was actually producing, and found wanting.
Your list will look different from this one. That’s exactly the point.
Take one thing. Just one. Something you’ve been doing out of habit, out of fear, or out of someone else’s expectation rather than your own considered choice. Consider what it would feel like to stop.
And then, maybe, stop.
