When It's Too Much and Not "Good Enough:" Time for Change
The Change Principle, Part 1
Around 4:30, I would start wrapping up the official work day, while psyching myself up for the next unofficial work day of ushering my children through transition from daycare to the exhausting evening routine. There were days that the fatigue I felt at 4:30 weighed me down in my office chair like concrete, and I had to summon every ounce of willpower to move myself from that chair through the daycare doors to start my next job.
The years of parenting in early childhood while my partner and I worked demanding, inflexible jobs at an academic medical center will forever be burned in my brain as the years I moved through the world as a shell of myself. I loved my job. I loved my children. I loved my husband. I “had it all,” but was missing myself and my well-being in the process.
From Acceptance to Change
I have most recently been promoting acceptance of ourselves and our children, leaning into imperfections and flaws rather than resisting or trying to fix. So, when do we shift from an acceptance life approach to a fixing approach? When do we know how we are doing is in fact not “good enough,” and we need to strive for change?
When we are drowning, when we have hit and surpassed burnout, when we are not the human or parent we know we can be, or want to be. When we are suffering, it’s time for change. The reality is we can so gradually get to these extremes, that we have lost perspective and cannot remember what “normal” feels like.
In this post, I offer some guidance for how to think about your own stress levels and mental health to know if your answer is that indeed it’s all “too much” and undoubtedly not “good enough.” I also hope to answer the question of what exactly to do about it, or at least how to start doing something about it.
When Is It “Too Much?” Stress and Its Consequences
A dark secret of academic psychology is its hypocrisy. As mental health professionals, we work in the world to improve psychological well-being, while our workplaces often demand unrealistic and relentless productivity metrics (billable hours, scholarship in our “free time”) that put our own well-being at risk. It feels even more hypocritical in my specialty, health psychology, where we study and educate about the effects of stress on the mind and body, while we never take lunch breaks and even delay going to the bathroom for hours because we can’t find a minute (or was that just me?).
In health psychology, we know well the high physical and psychological toll of chronic stress. Biologically, a steady stream of high cortisol coursing through the body affects inflammatory responses and immune system functions. While a normal amount of stress benefits us because it activates us to stay alert and engaged, overwhelming stress wreaks havoc on our systems. So, how do we know when we are at “overwhelming” instead of “normal?” A few key signs:
Physical:
Disrupted sleep
Muscle aches
Headaches/stomachaches
Appetite changes
Getting sick more often
Mental:
Difficulty concentrating
Negative thoughts feel more pervasive and harder to control
Easily distracted
Memory problems (layered on typical, multi-tasking, over-taxed “mom brain”)
Emotional:
Crying more easily
More irritable, on edge
Losing temper more often
May feel depressed, anxious, or both
Mental Health and Stress
Everyone’s mental health exists on a continuum, and depending on what’s happening in our lives, we move around on the continuum between healthy and problematic. Each of us carries our own vulnerabilities, that when overwhelmed by high and chronic stress, could push us toward the unhealthy end.
It helps to know your own vulnerabilities – do you have a predisposition to negative and self-critical thinking that could blow up into depression? Are you wired as a worrier, which could escalate into uncontrollable anxiety? The more you know about yourself, the more vigilant you can be about the mental health signs of escalating stress.
“Throw out the ‘have it all’ illusion if its pursuit leaves you feeling like a shell of your real self, and declare that this current way of living is not good enough. This liberates you to find what is good enough, which is the real version of ‘having it all.’”
In service of helping you explore your needs right now, I will give you a peek at how mental health professionals deem symptoms as meeting criteria for a diagnosis. The two key elements are the symptoms themselves, including their frequency, intensity, and duration, and the level of impairment in functioning.
For a mental health diagnosis, symptoms typically represent a change in functioning, often after a certain life stress or event (this can include having a baby by the way), but not necessarily. The second requirement, “significant impairment in functioning,” includes impairment in relationships (parenting counts), work, and health. In real life, this one is tricky because many well-functioning people suffer with clinical depression or anxiety and know how to compensate, which often leads them to suffer in silence. I do not have statistics on this, but I would guess mothers would be well-represented in this category of experiencing a high level of emotional symptoms, but continuing to meet demands of daily life.
Mental health diagnoses can give us helpful treatment pathways (eg, certain medications or therapy approaches), and human nature always likes a good system of categories. But when overwhelming stress is the culprit, there are more similarities than differences for what to do about it, and the exact diagnosis is not as important as knowing you need help at some level.
What Next: Tips from Treatment
To be very clear, this blog post is not a substitute for psychological treatment, but I offer you some nuggets about how to actually make change after deciding you need it for the sake of your well-being and your relationships. I also want to explicitly state that you do not need to reach clinical, diagnosable levels of symptoms before changing! In fact, it’s often easier when you start before you get deeper in the hole of “it’s all too much.”
You can start by asking yourself the following questions:
*Where are your biggest stress pressure points? It could be feeling totally disconnected from your partner, attempting to do your job in a toxic work environment, or being 100% in charge of the morning routine every day. Whatever your stress pressure points, they need to rise to the top of your priority list of what to change. In fact, make that list on real paper, because we know what happens when we try to store anything in our brains.
*What about your current lifestyle falls in the category of changeable, and what does not? This gives you a clearer picture of realistic possibilities, while letting go of what cannot be modified in this current season of life. Even if the best answer is “quit my job, spend half the year in Tahiti, and never drive in the carpool lane again,” those are likely not feasible. However, maybe there are options within “quit my job.” For example: Are hours negotiable, like a version of part-time to free up afternoons? Or a similar job with a more flexible company? Maybe you can at least plan a couple days at a beach somewhere, even if it’s a lake version of “beach” (hello, fellow Midwesterners).
*What lifestyle habits can you take charge of changing? Examples include: more/better sleep, more physical activity, less alcohol (sorry, but no way around this one, especially seeing the skyhigh rates of drinking in parents during COVID!), less time on work emails, even more vegetables! As any regular reader knows, I’m also always preaching the benefits of a meditation practice. I speak from experience that even a few minutes a day over time helps us be less reactive, which helps us and our children, and anyone else who may be a target of our exploding emotions.
You can start exploring and changing on your own, but the support of a professional therapist can be invaluable. There’s only so much you can do in your own head, with your own perspective. The benefit of a professional, neutral person is they can see dynamics and possibilities you would never see, and help you address the inevitable barriers that pop up on your pathway to change. Although sites like Psychology Today are great resources for finding a therapist in your area, I always recommend getting personal recommendations if possible.
Hope-y, Change-y
Remember my 4:30 dread? Fast forward 5 years to a drastically different reality with older kids (officially surpassing “early childhood”), long removed from newborn/nursing fog brain, and a daily existence with more flexible work schedules.
To be honest, I still fight guilt when I can sit down and read a good book, even for 15 minutes. With time, however, I have improved at embracing this different, less “productive” pace because I can tell you the old way was going to break me. My body is better. My mind is better. My spirit is better. Not surprisingly, my parenting is better, too. More present, less reactive, even more fun. That’s why it hurts to look around and see so many parents who look like me that lifetime ago. When you’re in it, it’s impossible to see a different way, let alone know how a different way will shift you in profound directions.
I also want to acknowledge that not everyone has the luxury of choice for the kind of lifestyle to live and many sources of chronic, high stress fall well outside the family unit locus of control. This is why I consistently point out how our flawed systems contribute to parents’ high stress, and the mandate to make change for healthier children and families. These flawed systems include the pervasive and chronic stress of racism experienced by parents and children of color, which has demonstrated negative physical and psychological health effects. The pursuit of healthier families has to include collectively working against the racism entrenched at all levels of society. We can hope that our society will finally start moving toward better infrastructure for families and true change in systemic racism, and we can be part of the work to make it happen.
For you right here and right now, explore if and why you need change, identify what you can change, and start taking steps. Throw out the “have it all” illusion if its pursuit leaves you feeling like a shell of your real self, and declare that this current way of living is not good enough. This liberates you to find what is good enough, which is the real version of “having it all.”