I know we’re not supposed to play favorites, and as a maternal mental health professional, I’d love to tell you that I don’t. But if I’m being honest? I do.
I care about all of my emotions, truly. Each one has a purpose. But to pretend I love them all equally would be misleading. Sure, I adore joy, excitement, and those rare pockets of serenity. But deep down, my favorite emotion is actually… anxiety.
Hear me out. Anxiety works hard. It keeps me organized, motivated, moving. It reminds me to finish the assignment, send the email, clean out the backpack, schedule the dentist appointment, and answer the text I forgot three times. And when you’re a mom juggling invisible labor, mental load, and everyone’s emotional temperature, you sometimes need that little jolt.
So yes, I have a soft spot for anxiety. I’m genuinely grateful for the ways it supports me.
But here’s the thing: when anxiety over-functions, when it shifts from a helpful nudge to a relentless push, it stops being my favorite. It stops being protective and starts feeling like pressure. And that’s where the real conversation begins.
To understand why mom anxiety can feel like both friend and foe, we have to look at what anxiety is actually designed to do.
Allow Me to Reintroduce Anxiety: A “Functional Emotion”
All emotions serve a purpose. Anger helps you keep danger and threats away. Jealousy helps you maintain partner bonds and, from an evolutionary standpoint, keep procreating. Sadness brings others toward you to buoy you during a difficult time. And anxiety helps you detect and respond to threats by activating your “fight and flight” response.
When a threat appears, anxiety is the first to alert you. It will sound the alarm bells and your nervous system will respond. You’ll feel the racing heartbeat, the rush of adrenaline, your muscles might get tight or tingly, and your thoughts will focus on one thing: how to neutralize the threat.
This is great in times of crisis. When your child is sick, when the other room is too quiet, when your deadline is approaching and you need to deliver. Anxiety gives you the vigilance you need to respond quickly. But when the anxiety won’t calm down after the crisis is handled it goes from vigilance to hypervigilance, which can range from counterproductive to deeply exhausting, painful, and debilitating.
Starting in the prenatal period and lasting throughout the motherhood journey, your entire system becomes attuned to the baby’s needs. I remember calling my mother during pregnancy (after loss) and saying “I just can’t wait to have the baby, then I can stop worrying.” Her response? “Oh honey, you’ll never stop worrying, welcome to the rest of your life.”
The truth is, you’re biologically wired to notice every sound, silence, and cue from your baby and prioritize their safety above all else. Unfortunately, this hyperattunement leaves little room for rest, pleasure, or presence.
Simply put, when your anxiety functions it’s a gift; when it overfunctions it’s more of a burden.
The Mental Load and Invisible Labor
While your nervous system is busy scanning to keep everyone safe, there is also the reality that societal expectations and the demands of a modern family are A LOT. The mental load is a term that has come into recent popularity to describe the phenomenon of carrying multiple schedules, to-do lists and emotional needs of a family in one’s mind. It’s what it means to be the project manager of the household, a role that often falls to the default parent. And if you are the default parent, you know just how exhausting it can be.
And the mental load risks getting heavier and heavier because it’s often hard to tell how much is on that list thanks to invisible labor. Invisible labor is exactly what it sounds like: the multitude of tasks that a functioning household requires that are done unceremoniously while no one is looking; scheduling appointments, filling out forms, cleaning the messes, anticipating needs before the melt down happens, tracking the grocery list. I always remind myself that if you would pay someone else to do it, it’s work.
These stressors place a toll on an already taxed nervous system (thanks, anxiety!)… We all know the feeling of being less resilient on less sleep. After a sleep deprived week, you might feel one traffic jam away from screaming at the top of your lungs. If you can relate to feeling always on call, the gnawing sense that you must be forgetting something, or like one mistake equals failure, you have experienced the emotional toll of carrying the mental load.
How Anxiety Responds to the Mental Load
Our friend anxiety loves a job. When the weight of the mental load becomes too weighty and the hypervigilance becomes too hyper, anxiety steps in and says “I’ve got this.” It overplans to make sure you don’t drop a ball, it catastrophizes to prevent disappointment, it works harder to protect you from the failure you’re sure you’ve become.
It’s a well-intended system that becomes a vicious cycle.
So what’s a mother to do? Calming down your nervous system might not seem possible, if you relax how will anything get done? It also takes time and frankly, there’s not a lot of that to go around. The good news is that anxiety can still be our favorite, we just need to help it go from boss to ally.
Reframing Your Relationship With Anxiety
Remember what we said about all emotions serving a purpose? If you’re busy judging yourself and your emotions, it’s much harder to learn what that purpose is. If you shift from a space of judgment (“it shouldn’t be this hard,” “I should be able to cope,” “why can’t I get this done better/faster/like everyone else?”) to a stance of curiosity, you can actually learn from your emotion and maybe even befriend it. This is when we turn to acceptance… far more effective than control.
In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, there is a metaphor of the unwanted party guest. In it, the host of a party is desperately trying to keep one unwanted guest out. But he soon realizes that by putting so much effort into gatekeeping, he’s not actually able to enjoy the party at all. It’s only once he invites that guest into the house that he can truly relax, connect with other guests, and ultimately come to realize the unwanted guest isn’t as bad as he feared afterall.
All of your emotions are your party guests. Sure, you’ll like some more than others. But the harder you try to keep any of them out, the more the pain of the emotion turns into the suffering of managing, avoiding, and gatekeeping.
Anxiety is one part of you, one part that works hard hoping you won’t have to. Even when it’s right, your anxiety is not all of you and it most certainly does not define you.
Once you let it into the party, you can identify what anxiety is trying to protect you from and give it some compassion, assuring it you’ve got this. Because at the end of the day, you do- even if the results aren’t what you expected along the way.
Tools for Calming an Overfunctioning Anxiety System
With this in mind, your anxiety might actually be open to you helping it calm down. And once you’re regulated, that’s when actual problem solving can happen.
In a recent article detailing somatic therapy, I listed some useful regulation strategies that might come in handy here:
- Simple grounding: notice your feet on the floor. Take a moment to plant your feet on the ground. If it’s available, feel all four corners of the feet and press down through each toe. On your inhale, you can lift all of your toes up and as you exhale, see if you can place each toe down one at a time (maybe you can, maybe you can’t- really it doesn’t matter either way, just see with intentional awareness). Taking a non-judgmental stance, simply notice what you notice
- Orienting: looking around the room to re-establish safety. As you feel ready, notice where you are right now. If you are seated, allow yourself to feel your seat beneath you. Then begin to scan your environment. First, I invite you to look for items that feel neutral to you and notice how you feel that in your body. Then begin to look for items that are positive, or create a sense of warmth, safety, or joy and notice how you feel that in your body. Then begin to scan for items that feel negative; perhaps a book out of place or a crooked picture. These items make you feel unsettled, anxious, or distressed- notice how you feel that in your body. Now give yourself a choice, if it is something within your power to change, do so. If it is not, acknowledge the emotions and sensations it evokes. Finally, rescan your whole environment, giving a bit more attention to the things that bring comfort or joy. As you’re ready, take a gentle inhale and exhale and allow your attention to return back to the task at hand.
- Breath awareness: using a slow exhale to calm your nervous system. The autonomic nervous system has two branches, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. These are like the accelerator and brake pedals of the body. The sympathetic is the gas pedal, and when you inhale you activate the sympathetic branch. The parasympathetic is our brake, and when you exhale, you start to slow things down. The breath is our key to regulation and you have it with you wherever you go, better yet- it’s free! Drawing your awareness to your breath is a helpful first step. Without judgment, simply begin to notice your breath with no attempts to change or manipulate it. Then, if it feels available, perhaps begin to slow your breath down; 3-4 counts on the inhale, 3-4 counts on the exhale. Notice what you notice. And then, if it feels accessible in your body, experiment with lengthening the exhale 2-3 counts longer than the inhale; 4-5 counts on the inhale, 6-7counts on the exhale with a brief pause between breaths. Continue this for at least ten breaths and up to 10 minutes. And then, as you’re able, allow your breath to return to its own natural pace and rhythm and simply notice what you notice yet again.
- Gentle stretching or shaking to release tension. As we’ve said, we store tension, emotions, memories and more in our body. To release and soothe, we can go right to the source. One of my favorite at home exercises is to shake it out and then gently stretch the body. If you feel up to, from a standing or seated position, take your right arm and shake ten times (bonus points if you count out loud). Then do the same with your left arm, right leg, and left leg. Then start again shaking for nine counts through your arms and legs repeating all the way down to zero. When you get to zero shake it all out and maybe even add some vocals- sing, scream, whatever feels right. Once you’ve gotten all the way through, gently notice what your body needs and allow yourself to roll out the neck, twist the spine, or stretch the hamstrings. As long as you are safe and mindful to back away from pain, there’s no right or wrong choice to make.
With compassion, curiosity, and regulation, now we’re set up to use our interpersonal effectiveness skills to make the invisible load visible and get the support we need. If you are parenting with a partner, this might be a good time to look into relationship therapy, parent coaching, or a workshop designed to help you open lines of communication and get on the same page. If you are single parenting, communicating with your support system openly and honestly is an act of self care. Taking that to-do list from your brain to the page and then prioritizing and delegating might be more possible than your over-active anxiety would have you believe. And when you do feel ready to rally the troops, go ahead and be assertive. You are allowed to ask for help! And (no matter what the inner critic says) it doesn’t make you any less of a rockstar.
Perfectionism is the sneaky sibling to anxiety and boy-oh-boy, does it do the most. It will try its best to convince you time and time again that if you aren’t doing it all and doing it at 110%, you just aren’t good enough. And that is not only not true, it’s not even a helpful goal. Remember- your kids are watching you and the more you accept yourself for who you are, the more they will be able to as well. Perfect is a rotten goal because it doesn’t exist. As the old adage goes: perfect is the enemy of great.
Why Good Enough Really is Good Enough
Motherhood demands a lot. “Good enough” isn’t settling, it’s sanity. It’s the reminder we all need that perfect doesn’t equal love, being there does. Anxiety might be your hardest-working friend, maybe even your favorite one, when it can stay in its lane and be your ally instead of your boss. My invitation to you is to let your anxiety come along for the ride, hold it with kindness, and let it guide you without controlling you. If you’re curious about how befriending your anxiety can bring you closer to the mother you want to be, reach out to Wildflower’s intake team at 312-809-0298 or by filling out an online inquiry form.
