Coming into my first pregnancy, I’d been warned about postpartum depression. What I wasn’t prepared for was the postpartum anxiety that engulfed me for months after I had my baby. I had experienced anxiety plenty of times throughout my life before pregnancy, but adjusting to being responsible for the well-being of a fragile little baby coupled with a potent mix of hormones was enough to send me into a tailspin more frequently than I’d like to admit. For months, I felt trapped and overwhelmed, feeling the need to control everything, but eventually I realized my constant worrying was unhealthy and unsustainable. I knew I had to make some changes, both to my routine and to my perspective, in order to preserve my own well-being.
But perhaps the most insidious and constant manifestation of my postpartum anxiety were my attempts to control things.
As a first-time mom, my anxieties would sometimes be a one-off worry spiral: Did she stop breathing? Is this rash a serious problem or just baby eczema? How would I manage to get her to her doctor’s appointment if she was still fast asleep 20 minutes before we had to leave the house?
Often, it was the anticipatory sense of dread that would creep into my brain around 5 p.m. as the sun set, like a flock of anxiety crows coming home to roost. I’d spend her last nap of the day bracing myself for the possibility that I might have to endure hours of crying before my baby would go down for the night.
But perhaps the most insidious and constant manifestation of my postpartum anxiety were my attempts to control things. When you become a parent, your life as you know it goes out the window. You switch into survival mode. Your brain is literally in a constant state of fight-or-flight, sensing danger in the fact that your normal grounding habits and routines get ripped from you overnight. You’re sleep deprived, you’re dealing with the physical stress of hearing your baby crying out, and—especially if you become a parent in the midst of the global pandemic, as I did—you’re extremely isolated from your network of friends and family who could otherwise step in to help or even just remind you that you have a life outside of your new role as a parent. It’s completely brutal. In survival mode, so much is out of your control. So you look for little things you can claim some semblance of ownership over.
The area I thought I could exert some control became wake windows and nap lengths. I began tracking all of my baby’s sleep using an app called Huckberry. At first, it was meditative, but soon I found myself spending way too much time comparing one day to another, obsessing about how to replicate success or avoid failure. It became a data prison, one I’d willingly locked myself into before throwing the key through the slats.
I realized it had all gotten so hard lately because I’d been shouldering my burdens alone — keeping everyone except my husband at arm’s length.
Still, it wasn’t until my baby was around three months old that it began very seriously affecting my daily life. Having exited the infamous “fourth trimester,” my husband and I were in many ways out of the woods. We’d kept her alive for 12 long yet rewarding weeks, but instead of feeling relief at her progress, I found that I just had more time and space to worry and spin out.
It all came to a head one night when my baby was about 14 weeks old: She was fighting bedtime, and I wasn’t giving myself any time to breathe or take time to myself, even to eat dinner or to drink a glass of water. Eventually, I got her down and collapsed onto the couch, truly exhausted and depleted from the stress of the bedtime routine. My husband could see I was struggling and came over to talk it through with me. He helped me see that my overwhelm had become a pattern lately, that this was the fourth night in a row I’d ended the night feeling trapped by my emotions and on the verge of tears.
I realized it had all gotten so hard lately because I’d been shouldering my burdens alone—keeping everyone except my husband at arm’s length. I hadn’t been honest with my parents, worried they’d feel bad they couldn’t do more to help from so far away. I didn’t want to bother my mom friends with my problems, knowing they had their own difficult schedules and were probably just trying to keep their heads above water. And I hadn’t been honest with my childless friends, because I’d decided they wouldn’t know how to help because they couldn’t empathize with my specific pains. So when anyone asked how we were doing, I’d send a cute picture of my baby, say everything was going pretty well, and leave it at that. In the moment, it had felt easier. But now I was suffering the consequences of going it alone.
What am I doing — or more specifically, what have I stopped doing — to look after my needs?
I knew I couldn’t go on like that. It wasn’t sustainable, and it wasn’t healthy. Starting the next day, I made a number of big important changes to my routine:
- Talking it out
I had honest conversations with my parents and a few of my close friends so I could better leverage my support system to take some of the emotional pressure off myself and my husband. It felt good to say out loud that I was struggling, and to hear my friends and family say they were glad I was honest with them. Each of them assured me they’d be more than happy to talk it through with me whenever I needed an ear.
- Cutting out caffeine
I had grown attached to my morning routine of starting my day with a cup of coffee. But I know caffeine exacerbates my anxiety feelings. To keep the ritual of my routine intact, I switched to decaf.
- Walking outside
Exercise was essential. It offered me solo time out of the house to step away from my responsibilities and build some endorphins. Some days, I’d have my husband watch our baby in the afternoon so I could get out and have a nice break before bedtime routine. Others, I’d start off on the right foot by getting out for a morning dose of sunlight during my baby’s first nap of the day.
- Going to bed earlier
Knowing how important it was to recharge my batteries at the end of the night, I moved my bedtime up so I could be more in sync with my baby’s schedule and get more sleep at night to wake up feeling more refreshed and ready to take on the day.
- Reinstating daily meditation
I’ve long had a sporadic meditation practice, but recommitting to breathwork has been really helpful for me when my baby cries nonstop or I find that intrusive thoughts are taking over my brain. I turned to breathing exercises and guided meditation to help me through rough moments and to ease me to sleep at the end of the day.
- Embracing creative projects
Consider it meta, but setting aside time to write about my pregnancy and postpartum experience has been incredibly cathartic. Writing has always been a creative outlet for me, so setting aside time to work on writing projects became an essential part of reacquainting myself with a part of my pre-motherhood identity.
Putting these practices in place made a world of difference. Lately, I’ve started feeling more and more like a real human again. The important thing has been to maintain. The minute I feel myself slipping into another period of overwhelm, my first question to myself is: What am I doing—or more specifically, what have I stopped doing—to look after my needs?
Postpartum anxiety is not something you wake up one day “cured” from. Anxiety maintenance is a constant practice. But thankfully these days, I’m feeling much better and more at peace with what I cannot control. And that’s made a world of difference—for me and for my baby.