Navigating the Chaos: Understanding and Coping with Mom Anxiety
If you’ve clicked on this blog post, “Mom Anxiety: Symptoms, Causes, and Ways To Help,” you may be experiencing a heightened sense of anxiety after becoming a mom. Maybe you’ve always had a sense of anxiety throughout your life that got worse after becoming a mom. Or maybe you’ve been a mom for a while now and it still seems to seep into parts of your life.
It’s important to address the underlying causes of why we’re experiencing anxiety as mothers and understand what mom anxiety is.
What is Mom Anxiety?
While it’s not an actual scientific term, it’s an extension of regular anxiety disorder that happens after or during your motherhood journey. Hence: mom anxiety.
Anxiety is described as our nervous system in constant fight or flight mode. Anxiety is our body’s response to stress or perceived threats. This looks like feelings of worry, fear, and unease. While a normal emotion, it can range from mild to severe. Symptoms can include restlessness, irritability, rapid heartbeat, difficulty concentrating and even sweating.
This anxiety disorder manifests itself in our lives in a few different ways. Some symptoms of anxiety when being a mother can look like:
- Overwhelming feelings of worry or despair
- Constantly questioning if we’re a good mother/partner
- Intrusive thoughts about something happening to our children
- Chronic sleep issues
- Irritability to our children and those around us
- Feeling shame
- Not feeling worthy or “good enough”
- Panic attacks
- Social anxiety
While there could be more symptoms, these are just a few main symptoms and physical symptoms of mom anxiety.
What Causes Mom Anxiety?
Stay-at-Home-Moms and New Parents Have Higher Risk Factors
Being a mother comes with a plethora of responsibilities. This can be extremely overwhelming. Especially if you have multiple children to take care of, a new mom, a stay-at-home mom, a working mom, or you lack support from family members.
Research studies performed by the Journal of Family Psychology and the American Psychological Association found that the daily life of stay-at-home moms may be at a higher risk of developing mom anxiety and postpartum depression. Compared to mothers who work outside of the home. The study found that stay-at-home moms felt more isolated, had little social interactions, and had constant caregiving responsibilities.
Additionally, stay-at-home moms also faced financial security struggles and limited opportunities for personal growth and development. This heightened the chances of developing anxious feelings.
While individual experiences may vary, these factors played a significant role in determining the likelihood of developing mom anxiety.
Research also shows that new parents, especially new mothers during the postpartum period, face high anxiety levels compared to mothers with older children. As a first-time parent, the transition into motherhood is scary. It’s a significant life-changing experience.
The hormonal changes, lack of sleep, baby blues, social isolation, breastfeeding challenges, and lack of experience as a new mom can leave us with anxious thoughts, and maternal anxiety.
Working Moms Can Also Experience Mom Anxiety
Stay-at-home moms are not only at risk for developing mom anxiety. Working moms are also at risk for developing some type of anxiety disorder. Some factors that contribute to mom anxiety include:
• Guilt: working moms may experience feelings of guilt from leaving their children to go to work and not spending enough time with them.
• Work-Life Balance: the pressure to excel in both their role as a mother and working adult.
• Lack of Support: working mothers may find themselves without support from their partners, family members, or coworkers.
• Societal Expectations: especially in the United States, mothers are often told to work like they don’t have kids and raise kids like they don’t have to work. This creates pressure to over-excel in all aspects and thus creates burn out.
Social Media
I’m sure we have all found ourselves comparing our lives to what we see on social media at some point. Now exacerbate this when becoming a new mom, and it opens up a plethora of feelings that can lead to anxiety, depression, and comparison.
Social media is a highlight reel. It promotes unrealistic standards of perfection. Most parents aren’t showing the sleep deprivation, fights with their spouse, and the nitty-gritty of everyday life when you have a new baby.
This puts pressure on new moms to meet unattainable standards, which leads to higher levels of mom anxiety and stress. Research shows that frequent social media use was associated with increased feelings of envy, and decreased life satisfaction.
Constant exposure to curated content can distort your perception of reality which leads to feelings of inadequacy.
The best advice on social media when you’re a new mom? Get off of it! Or at least curate your feed to follow accounts that show raw, realistic perceptions of motherhood. You shouldn’t feel bad when you open your social media accounts.
Curating your feed to what inspires, motivates, or helps to relate to your new journey can be helpful when you’re navigating all these life changes.
How Mom Anxiety Can Present Itself
Mom anxiety can look like various things for different women. These ways include physical, emotional, and behavioral symptoms. This is our body trying to tell us something.
Physical symptoms can look like but are not limited to:
- Chronic fatigue
- Headaches
- Changes in appetite
- Digestive issues
- Muscle tension/aches
Emotional symptoms can look like but are not limited to:
- Irritability
- Difficulty concentrating
- Excessive fear & worry
- Constantly feeling on edge
- Feelings of guilt or shame
Behavioral symptoms can look like but are not limited to:
- Avoidance of social interactions
- High criticism
- Obsessive-compulsive disorder behaviors
- Difficulty relaxing or unwinding
- Lashing out at your children
It’s important to understand if you’re experiencing any of these symptoms, seek support from professionals or family members.
Find the Root Cause of Your Mom Anxiety
Finding the root cause of where your anxiety is coming from is the key to effectively managing and addressing the underlying issues that contribute to your own anxiety.
Do you catch yourself lashing out at your kids often? As mothers, we don’t want to lash out and be reactive towards our kids. Who would? With mom anxiety, there’s usually a deeper cause as to why we’re being so reactive.
It could be you have unresolved childhood trauma that is being presented in your new role as a mother. The stress of a new baby could be causing problems in your relationship with your spouse, or other family members.
By identifying our specific “triggers” and factors that lead to anxiety, we can better understand coping strategies and interventions to address these root causes.
When anxious mothers lack a support system, or “village,” we can feel lost, alone, and overwhelmed in our journey. Our nervous system is at a constant height of fight or flight, and we have to find the right tools to combat these feelings in a healthy way.
Coping Strategies For Mom Anxiety
Seek Professional Help
If you think you have been feeling any type of symptoms of mom anxiety, the best thing you can do is to seek professional help from a mental health professional. Know that you’re a good mom, and we all have our own experiences in this motherhood journey.
Talk to your OBGYN or healthcare provider about your feelings of anxiety. To be the best mom to our children we must prioritize our own health and mental well-being.
If you find that it’s hard to go to in-person therapy, try online therapy. There are a few different avenues to find the right support.
Find a Support Network
In my own experience as a mom of 2, once I found a supportive group of moms, it truly shifted a lot of my perspective. These are women who live similar lives as you and can relate to you. There’s a mutual understanding that raising children is hard, and we shouldn’t do it alone.
If you find that you lack mom friends or a support group, check out my blog post HERE on 3 easy ways to make mom friends in your area. Finding a support group can make a huge difference in your motherhood journey.
Practice Gratitude
It can seem hard in the moment, but practicing gratitude helps shift our focus on the positive things in our lives. I know it’s easier said than done, but this shift in perspective can help reduce feelings of anxiety and promote a sense of calm and well-being.
Overall, practicing mindfulness and gratitude can help you reframe perspectives while strengthening connections. This can contribute to lower levels of anxiety and emotional well-being.
You might also enjoy:
• Understanding Postpartum Depression
• 10 Easy Ways To Support a New Mom