Stress, motherhood, and the window of tolerance
Stress and overwhelm are common themes that come up with the moms I work with.
And I get it, I’m a mom too. I know the experience of carrying so much tension in body and mind, just getting through the day with a short fuse.
It is worth exploring what happens to us when we are feeling stressed.
STRESS RESPONSE
When we meet a stressor, our body instinctually starts the stress response. This happens fast and often without our awareness.
We are flooded with stress hormones that are there to prime us to take action.
Our heart rate increases, our breathing increases, and our senses heighten.
Our digestion slows down, our immune system function is lowered.
The part of our brain designed to handle stress comes online, the limbic system.
What also happens is the part of our brain designed for long-term planning and rational thinking, the prefrontal cortex, goes OFFLINE.
Stress hijacks the calm and rational brain, this is why we feel so reactive and maybe out of control.
The stress response has an important function.
We are wired to feel stress for a reason. That is, to keep us alert, to prompt us take immediate action, and to prepare our bodies for the resources it needs to expend.
The stress response (flight, fight, freeze, fawn) have helped us stay alive for centuries.
However, the things we used to be stressed about (predators, perils, warfare, etc.) are no longer a threat for most of us. Instead, we have more modern stressors like work, money, technology, children, marriage, social situations, etc. These stressors don’t necessarily put our lives at risk, but our brain interprets a threat and triggers a stress response.
CHRONIC STRESS
Chronic stress rewires the brain.
It becomes part of how we think and view life. Constant stress means constant use of the limbic system, these neural networks get stronger. The stress response becomes habitual.
Many of us know how it FEELS to carry constant stress. . .
clenched jaw
tense stomach, stomach aches
headaches
muscle aches
tiredness, low energy
trouble sleeping
Stress, whether acute or chronic, often feels very uncomfortable in our bodies.
But we also know that constant stress makes us think differently about ourselves and our lives.
When we feel stressed we often feel/think….
Shame - “I shouldn’t be stressed” “I must be doing it wrong” “If I could figure out how to manage this all and balance this all, I wouldn’t be so stressed”
Embarrassment - “I don’t like how I am acting” “People probably think poorly of me”
Frustration - With ourselves, with our life, with the people around us
Overwhelm - “How can I get out of this?” “I don’t know what to do”
Defeat/Hopeless - “Will it always be like this?” “I can’t figure it out”
This is all felt in context to how our culture views stress.
We have a cultural attitude that stressed out people are people who are ‘doing it wrong’.
This cultural attitude is especially true for moms. The stressed-out mom has become a trope '(Hot Mess Mom’).
People don’t like seeing a stressed-out person. We hear people try to solve it for us by saying things like, ‘just smile’, ‘these are the years, enjoy them’, and ‘don’t stress about it’.
Overall, it has made us very intolerant of stress, and when stress shows up we get panicky and just want it to GO AWAY.
HOW ARE WE COPING?
How do we deal with the stress? Often we turn to instant gratification, something that just makes us ‘feel better now’.
Sometimes, the things we do to ‘cope’ (shop, drink, eat, avoid, use substances, over control, over-think, social media, develop a martyr mindset, hyper-focus) can cause secondary problems for us.
Window of Tolerance
When talking to clients about stress, we often also talk about the WINDOW OF TOLERANCE.
Our window of tolerance is about our capacity, how much capacity we feel we have to deal with life (which, naturally, comes with stressors).
If you feel like you are snapping easily, or shutting down, you can consider that you are out of your window of tolerance.
(Many women tell me that they ‘crash and burn’ and it is often being a state of hyperarousal, burning out, and moving to hypoarousal)
Consider the things you notice that shrink or expand your window of tolerance.
Remember, we move in and out of our window of tolerance all the time. The goal is not to constantly stay in the window but to
1)increase the window
2)increase coping and capacity to move ourselves back to the window of tolerance if we are dysregulated.
I think this is a helpful concept to learn because you can now pay attention to where you might be throughout the day (and side note, everyone else in your house is moving up and down and their window of tolerance is shifting throughout the day too)
Some work I like to do with clients on this topic:
helpful stress and unhelpful stress
thought traps and cultural expectations
recalibrating our view on stressors
coping strategies
the stress scale and how to support yourself
moving from panic to purpose
