This May, Izmi is partnering with Nous & Soma to give away trial sachets of my favourite new drink, Second Cup, with all Izmi orders. (While stocks last, so be quick!)
If you’re anything like me, you're probably used to running on broken sleep, busy days, and a slightly overloaded nervous system.
That’s actually what led me into babywearing in the first place - finding ways to make everyday life feel a bit more manageable.
And it’s exactly the same thinking behind Second Cup.
As Nous & Soma put it: Steady energy for overstimulated lives.
Not a spike. Not a crash.
Just something that helps you get through the day without adding to the chaos.
(All the goodness in your box, when you order an Izmi this week! Second Cup sachet while stocks last - free fit checks and safety advice forever 💜)
I recently sat down with Anu (co-founder of Nous & Soma) to talk about all of this - from overstimulation to energy dips to what actually helps. Please do enjoy her deeply thoughtful words below.
. . .
The pause is not
a luxury.
It's the work.
On nervous system regulation, carrying our babies,
and what we reach for when no one is watching.
Nobody tells you, before you become a mother, how alone you will feel in your own nervous system.
You are sleeping in fragments. You are needed constantly. You are extraordinary and quietly, coming apart at the seams. Between the feeds and the laundry and the relentless optimism you perform for everyone around you, there is no moment. There is no pause. There is just the next thing, and then the next.
I know this because I lived it. And I know it because when I met Hannah at Izmi, we spent about thirty seconds on pleasantries before we were deep in a conversation about the nervous system - hers, mine, our children's. Two women who had found a shared language, and couldn't stop speaking it.
A regulated mother is not a luxury. She is the environment her baby lives in.
What I wish someone had told me when my daughter Ariana was born: babies cannot regulate themselves. Not even a little. Their nervous systems are brand new, unfinished, entirely dependent on co-regulating with ours. When we are calm, we send safety cues through our heartbeat, our breath, our touch, the warmth of our body and their nervous systems receive those cues and settle. When we are dysregulated, they feel that too. They are reading us constantly, learning from us what safe feels like.
This is polyvagal science. Dr Stephen Porges calls it neuroception: the way our nervous systems unconsciously scan for signals of safety or danger before our conscious mind has caught up. Infants do this from birth. But unlike us, they cannot interpret or manage what they detect. They depend entirely on the caregiver to do it for them.
If I had known this, I would have carried Ariana so much more. Not because I was failing her. I didn't know what I didn't know. But the carrier is not just convenient. It is regulating. Skin-to-skin contact directly increases infant vagal tone. The rhythm of your breath and heartbeat, transferred through the carrier, tells your baby's nervous system: you are safe, I have you, you can rest.
The carrier is medicine, and most of us are never told.
But here is the part that gets overlooked. That regulation only flows if you have something to give. A dysregulated mother cannot co-regulate her baby. And a mother who has been told that pausing is selfish, that pushing through is strength, that her needs come last is a mother running on empty.
The pause is not indulgent. It is biological necessity. Finding the pause inside the chaos not outside of it is the real work.
This is where Nous & Soma began for me. Not as a supplement brand, but as a philosophy: what we consume shapes how we feel, how we think, how we show up. That 10am moment - the small window between the morning rush and the afternoon stretch - is often the first time a mother has a second to herself. What do you reach for?
Second Cup was made for this. Lion's Mane and Alpinia Galanga, formulated to support focus and cognitive clarity without the spike and the crash. Not a replacement for your coffee, no shame or lecture here. But a conscious choice, especially for those of us navigating caffeine sensitivity. If you're breastfeeding or simply want less, the Lo-Caff option is there for you. It is a pause you can hold in your hands. A signal to your own nervous system:
I see you. I've got you too.
We tell mothers to put on their own oxygen mask first, then hand them a to-do list. This is the oxygen mask.
Carrying your baby. Choosing what you nourish yourself with. These are not separate acts. They are expressions of the same understanding that the nervous system is the foundation, for you and for your child, and that everything you do either feeds that foundation or depletes it.
You deserve to know this. You deserve to be supported in it. You are not alone.
About Second Cup
Second Cup is a caffeine-free roasted botanical blend of chicory, dandelion and carob with high-potency Lion's Mane extract and clinically studied Alpinia Galanga. Designed as a better second coffee, it supports mind, gut, liver and nervous system in one daily ritual. Rather than masking the afternoon energy dip with caffeine, it works with the systems behind steady, sustainable energy. Particularly suited to new mothers, those navigating hormonal shifts, caffeine sensitivity, or disrupted sleep. The ritual stays. The caffeine doesn't.
