5 Ways to Cope with Anxiety as a Parent

Have you ever experienced excessive worry as a parent? My husband and I have both felt anxiety like no other as parents. Excessive worry can look like many things, including difficulty controlling the worry, feeling restlessness or on edge, muscle tension, sleep disturbances, difficulty concentrating, or several other symptoms. We all experience anxiety, and we all experience anxiety differently. Sometimes, anxiety symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in different areas of our lives and might meet the clinical criteria for an anxiety disorder. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (2022), an estimated 19.1 percent of adults were diagnosed with an anxiety disorder in the past year. That’s almost 1 in 5 people, so whether the anxiety you are experiencing meets clinical criteria or not, know that you are not alone.

Anxiety disorders require diagnosis and treatment by a mental health professional.

Below are five ways to cope with anxiety as a parent.

1. Identify your triggers. I had so many new triggers that I was unaware of as a parent. Keep a journal of the times you felt your anxiety increase. Write down where you were, what you were doing, how you felt, and how you reacted. Use this journal to create awareness about your anxiety and to reflect on the changes you would like to make for yourself. Remember, mental health is never linear. Mental health goes up and down and all around. If you notice an increase in your anxiety, that’s normal. Come back to this step and repeat. Just by reading this, you are already creating some awareness for yourself.
2. Practice mindfulness. If you are looking for a coping skill for anxiety, this is a great one. I like mindfulness techniques because you can practice them anywhere, at any time. My favorite mindfulness technique requires using your five senses (sight, sound, taste, touch, and feel). Start with a few deep breathes (breathing in for 4, holding breathe for 4, releasing your breath for 4), then go through the list of senses naming a few things for each of your senses. For example, name three things you see, three things you hear, three things you can feel, etc.). Customize this technique to what works for you. Repeat it as many times as you need to. This technique allows you to bring yourself back to the here and now, the present, which is what mindfulness is.
3. Practice self-compassion. Self-compassion acknowledges our pain and responds to it with kindness and understanding (Germer, 2009). I first heard about self-compassion when I was in graduate school and wondered why I hadn’t heard this term before. Self-compassion is an essential part of emotional healing and allows us to free ourselves from destructive thoughts and emotions (Germer, 2009). If you are interested in learning more about self-compassion, The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion by Christopher K. Germer, Ph.D., is a great read.
4. Learn and practice the 3 Rs. Dr. Bruce Perry introduced the 3 R’s, regulate, relate, and reason, to the world. The 3 Rs help our children and can also help with our anxiety. The first R, regulate, means we help the child regulate and calm their fight/flight/freeze (or anxiety) response. From personal experience, I know that I also need to regulate myself when my child is experiencing big emotions, so why not regulate together. The next R, relate, means we must relate and connect with the child. You can do this by acknowledging how they are feeling and how you are feeling. As you are doing this with your child, practice self-compassion with yourself. The final R, reason, means that we support the child by reflecting on what happened and how we want to learn from it. As adults, we also need to do this to continue growing and learning how to manage our anxiety.
5. Talk or write it out. Whether you talk out loud to someone else or yourself, external processing can be beneficial. If talking to yourself feels weird, you can write it out. Sometimes things can be tangled up in our minds, but talking through the situation aloud can help us untangle it.

Some of these skills and techniques might work for you, and some might not. It is important to try them and keep trying them before dismissing them. Keep building your coping skills toolbox, and know that you are not alone. Parenting is hard, anxiety is hard, but the above skills can help.

References

Germer, C. K. (2009). The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion. The Guilford Press

National Institute of Mental Health. (2022). Any Anxiety Disorder. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disorder#:~:text=Prevalence%20of%20Any%20Anxiety%20Disorder%20Among%20Adults,-Based%20on%20diagnostic&text=An%20estimated%2019.1%25%20of%20U.S.,than%20for%20males%20(14.3%25).