Stressed moms are at their breaking point between caregiving demands, working from home, little time for themselves, skyrocketing inflation rates, and the constantly changing COVID-19 landscape. However, moms can better learn to cope with these many daily stressors by focusing on what they can control, learning to say “no,” and caring for their needs.
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Common Stressors Mothers Deal With
Stress for mothers stems from multiple and intersecting categories, including how little time they have for themselves, shouldering the logistical demands of a household, and often being the family point person for decisions, big and small.
Moms may also struggle with working from home, lack of childcare access, and medical stress related to fear of illness. A combination of these stressors may even lead to burnout or depression for stay-at-home moms or mothers working a job (or multiple) inside or outside the home.
Common motherhood stressors include:1
- Lack of alone time
- Feeling a need to “get it at all done”
- Juggling work-life balance as a primary caretaker
- Mom burnout
- Income concerns due to lack of care for children
- Relationship issues
- Caregiving for both children and aging family members
- Caregiver burnout
- School/daycare closings and childcare logistics
- Feeling like there is much to do and not enough time
- Frustration or anger at a lack of resources or support
- Social comparison to other moms
- Lack of time for physical activity
- Over-scheduled children/family demands
- Unrealistic demands and expectations from supervisors/career
9 Strategies to Help a Stressed Mom Cope
Just like becoming a frazzled mom did not happen overnight, relief from feeling this way doesn’t happen immediately. However, incorporating small and actionable steps to manage stress can help you start feeling better and more in control.
Here are 9 practical tips to help moms manage stress:
1. Get Comfortable Saying “No”
Setting boundaries is crucial when navigating stress as a mother. Learning to say no is a great way to establish healthy boundaries and stop you from feeling excess stress. Spend time deciding what you are and are not willing to tolerate, and evaluate if you can change your current situation to suit these limits and reduce mental load.
2. Identify Stressful Activities
Identify what activities/daily routines create stress and find one way to make them less stressful. For example, make lunch the night before or have your kids help if this morning always makes you late. Sometimes, moms take on tasks others or their children can do because they know they can get the work done faster or “better.” Identify the tasks that stress you out and rework or assign them to another family member.
3. Create a Mommy “Do Not Disturb” Sign
Even if your children cannot read, you can hang up something similar to a traffic stop sign. Indicate that this sign means mom is unavailable. Setting this visual, external boundary signifies to others that you need a moment and models they can do the same when necessary. This way, everyone in the family knows your boundaries, and you can take time to rest and recharge.
4. Evaluate Where YOU Want Work & Family Life to Intersect
Since the pandemic, work-family balances have drastically shifted, often without deliberate protocols or conversations with employers. Carefully evaluating where your work and family lives intersect and deplete you is a joint employer/employee exercise that can be helpful.2
Perhaps this means you adjust your hours for logging on for telework, or you perform work-from-home duties for a set number of hours per day–delineating how you’ll spend your time can help.
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5. Find Another Mom Who Feels Your Pain
Data supports better outcomes for parents of young children who join support groups. However, you don’t necessarily need group involvement to achieve the same goals.3 An abundance of online groups are available for moms struggling with maternal stress, but identifying another mom friend nearby can be helpful because this person can empathize with you, and you can offer the same to her.
6. Ask for Help at Home
Parental satisfaction and parental stress correlate with shared household responsibilities.4 Do an honest assessment of household responsibilities, shifting them to ensure fairness. If appropriate and accessible, assign some tasks to older children or hire others to ease the burden of household management. Moms often act as the family gatekeepers for all things household-related–changing this dynamic can help reduce undue stress.
7. Make Time to Move
Exercise can improve mental health, but you don’t need to train for a marathon, join a gym, or hire a physical trainer to reap the benefits. Making time for a walk with a friend or taking the stairs rather than the elevator can be basic and easy ways to stay physically active each day.
8. Try Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)
When stressed, we don’t cope or sleep well and are highly reactive to our environment. Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) opens our awareness of our experience, allowing us to identify our physiological stress response and respond accordingly.5 Moms who incorporate mindfulness into their daily practice report better sleep.
9. Get Involved Socially
Social support is undeniably linked to lower stress and higher levels of empathy.6 Whether you volunteer, join a mom’s group, teach a class, or schedule a recurring happy hour date with friends, humans need other humans to “coregulate” and destress one another. Find a time each week to be with other adults in a social relationship, ideally outside your home.
When Therapy Can Help
If you find yourself tearful, numb, aggressive, or excessively irritable, consider therapy to help reduce stress. These feelings can indicate depression or anxiety that require professional support. When stress management isn’t helping, you may need to acknowledge that mom stress has become something more. Finding a therapist, preferably one specializing in maternal mental health, can be an excellent next step. An online therapist directory is a great place to start looking.
In My Experience
Additional Resources
To help our readers take the next step in their mental health journey, Choosing Therapy has partnered with leaders in mental health and wellness. Choosing Therapy is compensated for marketing by the companies included below.
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