Maternity Stress

When it comes to stress and ways to manage it, many people think of yoga, meditation, rest and relaxation. But imagine being a mother to a newborn baby and noticing that stress is starting to disrupt your life. Such a situation can be difficult to manage without sufficient know-how and a support network to ask for help. Today, we are talking about what maternal stress is and how to cope with it.

Up to a certain point, becoming a mother would be a good and informed decision. However, this is not always the case, and many new mothers have to go through this whole new situation without being prepared well enough and without the skills to manage the stress that motherhood brings with it.

The many faces of stress

Stress is not something you should worry about too much. It is a completely natural reaction when we experience greater pressure than normal in our lives, either mentally or physically.

However, stress becomes a serious matter when a mother finds herself in a situation where she finds that she is no longer able to control her life or some particular situation due to stress, or when the stress brought on by motherhood affects other family members.

Children learn from their parents’ example how to control their own stress in the future as well. Ideally, you should recognize the signs and symptoms of stress right away, and learn how to use quick and healthy aids to relieve stress. This will prevent the negative effects of stress at home and in your immediate community.

Maternal stress can cause physical symptoms

Normally, symptoms of stress include a faster-than-normal pulse, frequent breathing, high blood pressure, and muscle tension.

In addition, stress can cause symptoms in the digestive system, and even weaken a person’s resistance. Gastrointestinal problems commonly include heartburn, constipation, or diarrhea.

Maternal stress can contribute to fluctuations in sleep rhythm and thus to a decrease in energy and resources. Often stressed mothers describe feeling exhausted all the time, even after they have slept well the night before.

Many of the problems of stress can also manifest in women as irregular menstruation, it can cause a person various pains and aggravate virtually all pre-existing diseases by weakening the immune system. In addition, controlling emotions is difficult under stress, so various outbursts of anger are normal symptoms.

Ways to reduce maternal stress

Undeniably, motherhood is an extremely grueling job. This makes it so important to know some of the strategies that will help you relax when you find yourself in a stressful situation.

Jeremy Lehrer talks about an option that teaches you to calm your mind in a situation where stress strikes while you should focus on raising a child.

This option encourages a complete presence and focuses on calming the mind by investing in being in the moment, i.e., practically talking about meditation.

Jeremy Lehrer also encourages living always here and now. Although the ideology is not entirely the freelance writer’s own, but is based on technology used around the world for hundreds of years, she has written three-step guidelines to help any mother living in stress succeed in living in an instant.

1. Conscious breathing

To take advantage of conscious breathing technique, you need to pay full attention to how air accumulates in your lungs as you inhale and exits your body as you exhale.

To strengthen your concentration, it is recommended that you close your eyes during these breathing exercises. This makes it easier to avoid external distractions. However, the most important thing is to stay relaxed so you can do the exercises with either your eyes open or closed, whichever just suits you better.

When you breathe calmly and deep in and out, count to ten.

Counting your breaths will help you focus, as well as notice if and when someone who doesn’t belong there gets lost in your mind. When you find your mind wandering elsewhere from this present moment, Relax again, and focus again on lowering your breaths.

Thoughts come and go, and at the latest with these exercises, you will find that your mind is restless. It is for this reason that living in the present moment and focusing only on it requires exercise and mind training through breathing exercises.

You will find that with repetitions, even this exercise becomes easier time and time again. The secret lies in conscientious training and staying in routines. If you do this breathing exercise every day, you will find yourself calmer and more relaxed, and you will find new enthusiasm for yourself in front of various tasks.

2. Observing one’s own feelings

Another technique to fight maternal stress is to observe the feelings of your own body. To achieve conscious relaxation, pay attention to the sensations of your body.

To succeed here, start by watching your breathing again. Take a deep breath and exhale until you feel your mind relax, and you can feel different areas of your body.

The purpose of this exercise is to become aware of the different sensations in your body, not to judge anything of them, just and only to recognize and feel how your body responds to stress and anxiety.

Your mind and body should be in sync with each other. You can achieve this by paying more attention to your body’s sensations.

You can also do this by listening carefully to the different sounds around you. The intention is to notice even the smallest changes in the sounds. Sometimes our minds are so full of negative thoughts, anxiety, anger, or frustration that we completely forget to connect with our neighbors,

3. Conscious relaxation

This technique, according to Lehrer, is especially effective when you are either annoyed or angry.

When you find yourself feeling irritated or even angry, look for a separate room or place in the house where you can leave yourself to calm down and gather your thoughts. Ask yourself ten minutes, without any outside stimuli.

When you are in a quiet environment or in a room alone, lie down on the floor. Close your eyes and focus once again on your own, calm breath. As you breathe in and out, try to feel each part of your body individually, one at a time and in order.

Start with your feet. Focus on feeling your feet, and only your feet, and then focus on relaxing your feet first from the ankles down, and slowly move your mind point by point up in your body, relaxing each one individually. Knees, thighs, and upwards.

Alternatively, you can start from the top down, and focus first on relaxing each muscle of your face, lips, tongue, neck, shoulders… All the way down to the toes.

Once you have completed this relaxation exercise in peace, slowly and calmly get up from the floor.

There are a lot of instructional videos on the internet for doing exercises like this, so by searching you will find the right exercises for you. When you exercise regularly, you will be able to gradually ease the stress of motherhood and ease your daily struggles.