Why Mothers Worry

You became a mom, and all of a sudden it’s like your mind searches for things to worry about. Is my baby too cold? Too hot? What if she chokes?

Yes, every mom will tell you this is totally normal. Actually, science can prove that too. Our brains are wired to keep us out of danger, and so our mind deliberately searches for it in an attempt to keep us safe. You see, back in the stone age our brain was doing us a service when it would signal that something bad was going to happen. Worrying literally saved our life from bears and stuff. 

Today, however, this is totally not the case. Our worry is very unnecessary and can be rather paralyzing. When we worry, we are actually in a state of action where we do nothing other than worry. You see, worry actually stops us from taking other very useful measures, such as doing. 

Let me tell you a story to make this a little clearer. When my beautiful baby was around five months old I accidentally poisoned her. How, you ask? I used to boil filtered water for her formula, and from time to time I would clean the pot using lemon salt (citric acid). Long story short, I forgot about the citric acid in the water and used that same water for my baby’s morning bottle. Smart girl that she is, she didn’t drink much of the bottle and kept spitting it out. Once I realized what had happened, my brain immediately went into full on worry mode. My heart raced, my thoughts were a mile a minute, and had me second guessing myself as a mother and outright human. What if I just poisoned my daughter? What if she needs to be hospitalized? What if I somehow just ruined her life? I cried while pondering all the ways this incident poses an imminent threat to my baby’s health. This worry lasted around three minutes. What didn’t I do during those three long minutes? Figure out if this was actually a problem I needed to worry about. Only after I calmed down was I able to do the useful thing and call her doctor and poison control. All that worrying I did prior to the call actually stopped me from taking the proper action. 

Let me let you in on a little secret- worry isn’t caused by what happens to you in your life. You cause worry by what you make of the things going on in your life. What I teach my clients is that there are things in life that are totally neutral, those are the circumstances of our lives. Circumstances include things people say, the weather, the fact that they have a baby. All the ‘noise’ around these circumstances are actually our thoughts about it, and not factual at all. This gets tricky, because we are very attached to our thoughts and often really do perceive them as outright facts. News flash – they aren’t. The only fact of my story above is that my daughter drank around 2oz of citric acid infused formula. My brain made that fact mean that this was terrible, my daughter was going to be negatively affected, and I should have known better. That is what caused my worry, and not anything else. 

What I teach my clients is that when we decipher what thoughts cause us so much worry, we and seperate that from the facts of the situation, we are able to be more deliberate in the way we want to feel and react. This practice literally cleans up all the ‘noise’ and allows us to focus on what is really helpful in the moment. If in that same incident with my daughter,  I had separated out the circumstance (my daughter drank 2oz of citric acid infused formula), from my thoughts about it, I could have handled the situation with a lot more grace and whole lot less worry. 

Stop worrying, and start living.  Book your FREE session with me.