News flash: moms are stressed.
Big surprise, right? Whether you stay at home full-time or put in a solid 40 hours at the office, there are a hundred little obstacles you have to overcome every day to keep your work and family humming.
Those little obstacles can quickly turn into mounting stress. Day after day, week after work, your difficulties pile up and really start to affect you — your happiness, your emotions, and your health. If you don’t manage it properly, it can affect your life and your relationships with your family.
Moms are more stressed than dads.
Every year, the American Psychological Association releases a Stress in America™ survey, asking questions about what’s stressing us out and how we’re handling it. Year after year, the results show a widening gender gap with women reporting higher levels of stress than men. And 55 percent of women say family responsibilities are a significant source of their stress.
Women are also more likely to experience emotional symptoms of overwhelming stress, or at least admit to it. They’re more likely to feel nervous, anxious, sad, depressed and fatigued. As if these emotional issues aren’t enough, stress can also present itself in physical symptoms:
- Tension headaches
- Pain in your neck, jaw, back and other places you tense up
- High blood pressure
- Stomach problems
- Racing heartbeat
- Shortness of breath
- Dizziness
- Chest pain
Most of the time, these symptoms fade away as your stressors do. You either resolve your challenging situation or time helps heal the wound. That’s called acute stress. But some stressors, like the burdens of motherhood, never leave. And your stress can turn from acute to chronic.
Chronic stress puts a serious strain on your health.
When you’re always stressed out, your body is constantly releasing the stress hormone, cortisol. That changes the natural state of your body. Tension headaches, anxiety, fatigue, and depression go from fleeting symptoms to long-term problems. The high cortisol levels put you in a constant state of arousal, which makes you irritable and more likely to lose your cool with your kids. It also makes it harder to get a good night’s sleep as you suffer from insomnia and sleep deprivation.
That’s not all. The longer this goes on, the more damage the stress does to your health. Chronic stress weakens your immune system, making you more susceptible to illness and increasing the time it takes to recover. That makes it difficult to be the caretaker of a brood of germ-collecting children and makes it easier for illness to spread throughout your family.
Health Consequences
There are more serious health consequences of chronic stress.
- Cardiovascular disease– That racing heart keeps your blood pressure up, leading to hypertension and increasing your risk of heart attack and stroke.
- Obesity– Eating is a common coping mechanism and high cortisol levels from chronic stress have been linked to weight gain.
- Substance abuse– For some, it’s food. Others turn to alcohol, smoking, drugs, or prescription medications to help “manage” their stress, putting them on a path to addiction and abuse.
Stress can take its toll on your health, but you there are a number of techniques you can try before it gets to that point.
Ways to handle stress
Remember, acute stress is fleeting. You can take steps to manage those moments before they turn into bigger issues. While you can’t shed the difficult times and responsibilities of being a parent, you can make some changes to help you and your family feel less stress:
- Make sleep a priority. Half of all women report that stress keeps them up at night. The sleep habits you enforce for your children are good for you too. Keep a regular bedtime, get enough sleep (seven to eight hours) and avoid screen time before bed.
- Get out and get active. Exercise is a proven stress reducer, releasing endorphins that counteract the cortisol. It also helps you sleep better at night, accomplishing the first goal.
- Set a schedule. Bedtimes and exercise are only one part of a routine that can relieve tension. A solid schedule can help you manage all the chores, events, activities and the overwhelming amount of family responsibilities. You can organize your life with a family calendar, weekly meal plans, chore charts, and anything else that can take the challenge out of everyday activities.
- Make time for yourself. This is the hardest part for moms. You put everyone else’s needs above your own and run out of time in the day to focus on you. Even if it’s not part of your daily routine, make room in your schedule at least weekly for healthy stress relievers like reading, visiting with your friends, listening to music, meditating or pursuing a hobby.
- Ask for help. Other moms understand what you’re going through and can make your situation feel less futile. You may just need someone that you can relate with about your problems. Your fellow moms may also have some tips and remedies to help you handle whatever’s bothering you.
- Share the load. Talking to your support team is great, but you must have the same conversations with your partner. Moms carry just as much of a mental load as a workload. Talk to your partner about your stress and find solutions to help more evenly distribute responsibilities to take things off your to-do list and your mind.
Get help when you can’t handle it.
Finding stress relief can be a real struggle. Those moments of relaxation can feel too infrequent to make meaningful progress. If you feel yourself failing to manage your stress and the symptoms are sticking around, help is available.
You can start by talking to your primary care provider or another health professional you trust. Stress and the health issues it causes are interconnected and related to other conditions. Your doctor can assess your health and your symptoms to get to the root cause, whether it’s stress something else or a combination of things. From there, they’ll help you better manage your stress and your symptoms.
How do you cope with stress?
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