7. Constant Vigilance and Your Nervous System

Hey Everyone,

If you have a young child, you know what it’s like to be on alert 24/7. At different phases of our kids’ lives, we look out for their sleep safety, make sure they don’t ingest something that could make them choke; we keep them from toddling into swimming pools, and firmly grip their soft little hands around moving cars.

Now, if your heart rate is up just thinking about these things, you’re not alone. And if your mental health has taken a hit from the first couple years after having a baby, this episode has in store a perspective and a practice that can help you recover. 

Let’s begin by validating the struggle. 

You probably didn’t have the same level of vigilance before having a child. As an adult who was familiar both with your surroundings and how the world works, risks to your safety were mostly within your control. But after giving birth, you learned that commonplace things could harm your child, and that their safety came down to your supervision.

For survival sake, our bodies have adapted to being watchful of our children’s safety. Under ordinary circumstances, our nerves can settle once a threat to our child’s safety has passed. As Moms with young kids, however, we may stay preoccupied such that we don’t fully recover from stressful episodes. Instead, we stay in fight-or-flight, even when the threat has passed. 

The response we have to our child being in danger is a physical event with real consequences to our well-being. Fortunately, we can train ourselves to be responsive when it matters most, and to relax when it’s safe. Unlike some things in life, this balance in our nervous system is in our control, and it’s something we can return to any time, any day.

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Welcome to Yoga for Mom-Life. I’m your host, Susana Jones, and I help Moms raising children under five who find it hard to replenish, because everyone else’s needs come first. With therapeutic yoga and the wisdom of the ages, I help Moms make good use of limited free-time so they can live full, vibrant lives.

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As we know, little ones can be unpredictable, and when they first reach new milestones in their development, we might find ourselves scrambling to keep up with what they’re suddenly getting into, like pulling everything off the countertops, or climbing up on bookshelves.

Children under 3 keep us especially busy on the life-saving front, but I’m sure every Mom can attest to the feeling of their child doing something dangerous. It’s a full-stop moment for a Mom’s nervous system, and our entire body experiences it. 

Biologically, it makes sense that registering a threat to our child’s health is a visceral experience for Moms. When our child is in danger, we feel endangered. They are, in most cases, extensions of our own bodies, so what they go through, we go through.

I think this is an important point for us to remember, and to make clear to the people closest to us. In a moment of stress about our child’s well-being, it’s not necessarily that we “need to chill.” The unease you feel when something isn’t right with our child is a physical response, and it’s part of the healthy bond you share with them. 

Describing your worry as a physical phenomenon, rather than a mental thing, may help the people around you to respond to your child-safety-related stress in more caring, proactive ways than you might be used to. 

I’ve found, in dealing with postpartum anxiety and depression, that speaking about it with my family in terms of what I am physically experiencing helped them understand that processing this kind of stress isn’t always a matter of personal will, or dependent on my mood that day. 

For example, I grew up with asthma, and suffered several asthma attacks through adolescence. When my son had shortness of breath with wheezing after getting a cold, I felt like I was distressed, to a degree, and I couldn’t fully relax until he had received the treatment he needed, and was sleeping soundly that night. 

It takes life-force to respond to our children’s needs, some of which are more taxing than others. So if you ever feel less resilient than “you should be,” you can give yourself some grace. Your body and mind are working really hard to problem solve for a helpless little person who you love with all your heart. 

When most of our life-force goes towards protecting and taking care of them, we don’t necessarily have the internal means to rise above stressful situations with grace.

Am I right?

And yes, emotional regulation is important. And relaxing is good for our health, and the health of the people around us. And yes, those are possible, even for Moms. And incorporating little things that add more life-force to your weekly routine can really help you get through those harder moments with more ease. 

But it’s OK to not be OK when your kid’s not OK.

Ideally, once we catch our breath and register that everything is OK, we return to equilibrium, get some sleep, and start the next day feeling reasonably well-rested. This flexibility within the autonomic nervous system is measured by things like heart rate variability, which shows that we’re able to navigate  temporary stress, rather than feeling like we’re in a constant emergency.

However, factors other than small objects being ingested by an infant are also at play. We’re still navigating a massive life change with our partner, keeping the household running smoothly, and making financial ends meet, among other joys of adulting. All while being overly, or insufficiently, stimulated.

At certain points in early motherhood, our nervous systems might get stuck in a gray area, in which we’re mildly freaking out a lot of the time, but we’re also really tired. It’s like being “tired and wired” to use my teacher Durga Leela’s phrase. 

Luckily, as I stated earlier, this kind of imbalance is in our control to change, with things like breathwork and physical exertion. And the good news for us Mamas is that these can be easily integrated into your life now. 

But why do this again? Because the perpetual stress of watching out for our little kids’ physical safety ripples throughout the body and mind of a Mom. This warrants extra attention for the sake of our immediate well-being, and our long-term health.

So what do we do that’s supposedly so simple?

We excite ourselves on the heart-beating sympathetic side,  

(by running up a flight of stairs, having a dance party with your family after dinner, or chasing your kids for real around the back yard)

and we repair ourselves on the mellow, parasympathetic side 

(by observing nature, snuggling with our kids, getting a massage, etc.)

Both sides of the autonomic nervous system need some action in order to keep us feeling alive and well, rather than the walking dead, which a lot of moms can relate to at given points. Again, the whole point is to not get stuck in any particular mode, but to flow between activity and rest.  Even to flow between good times, and sucky times, rather than just staying “meh” about everything.

How far we go into sympathetic activation determines how deeply we can relax and how well our bodies can repair themselves. In other words, we need to get our heart rate up during the day in order to actually chill out at night.

I learned this from Tom Myers, a postural therapist who developed “Anatomy Trains”, like meridians of myofascia.

He basically said we need to kick our own butts a little bit to get the rest and repair that we need. Otherwise, we slowly corrode from oxidative stress, and feel tired and rusty from being in that gray-area between stress and relaxation.

So, let’s say you spend a low-key day at home with your child. Throughout the day, you tend to their needs, play with them, and stave off some tantrums and hanger. Maybe you go to the park so they can run around. You make dinner, do bedtime, and put your feet up when they’re asleep at last. Looking back on the day, it seems like you didn’t do much, but you’re spent. The next day, you wake up a little on edge, unsure as to why, and tired, though you feel like you shouldn’t be.

Here’s an alternate scenario of the day, spent much in the same way:

During your low-key day at home with your child, you lie on your belly, propped up on your elbows in a kind of sphynx pose while they play with stuff on the floor. It perks you up a little and helps counteract the sitting you’ve been doing for work and relaxation lately. When it’s time to get to the park so your wild child can roam free, you chase them around until you’re breathy, and your heart is pumping. After getting them to bed, when you’re about ready to collapse from the day, you think back to redirecting their fits with your parenting superpowers, while the theme song from their favorite show plays in your head. You take 4 box breaths (which I’ll guide you through momentarily) on the side of your bed before lying down, sleep mostly through the night, and wake feeling, ah, pretty good.

I want that for you.

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Even just considering the sensory impact of a day with young kids - the sights and sounds, and accidental head-butts, and how it feels for us when they meltdown we can see how stimulating a “low key” day can be. And just like our kids, who need to run around when they’re restless, and then focus on something mellow when they’re all over the place, we also need that full range between energizing activity and chill time. 

If we live for too long in the gray area between the two, we get physically weaker, and mentally more strung-out, which is a poor combo for longevity. It also makes us feel vaguely dissatisfied with things that are otherwise pretty good, if not great.

We need to kick our own asses a bit to get out of the gray zone. Running up a flight of stairs while your partner takes the elevator with baby, or really chasing your three year old to the point where you need a water break is good for you. It trains our body’s systems to operate outside of that unrestful, unmotivated blah space. And it helps our rest be more restful.

To help you get this kind of range into your days, try this breathing technique, which I learned from Richard Miller. All forms of breathwork have a direct impact on the nervous system in ways that give prompt relief, and build ongoing vitality. 

One name for this is box breathing, and it goes like this:

Seal your lips and empty out the lungs with an exhalation.

INhale on your own count of 4

REtain the breath in, without straining, for 4.

EXhale for 4.

SUspend the breath for 4.

DO this 4x, or more. If retaining the breath in, or holding the breath out feels bad, skip it, and just do 4 count Inhales and Exhales.

After a few rounds, pause and notice the feeling in your body and your energy level.

For more individualized support, reach out to me for a 1:1 yoga therapy Session, where I make personalized recommendations for yoga that changes your life from the inside-out.

When in doubt, ask your pediatrician what is really worth stressing about. They know the stats, they’ve treated the illnesses, mended the injuries, etc.