Surviving Motherhood: Post-Partum Anxiety

I honestly cannot pinpoint when the anxiety started. Maybe it was right away, maybe it took awhile to set in. I truly can’t remember.

But what I do know is as a first-time parent, you are going to be anxious and worry no matter what. And that is completely normal! I assume most first time moms check to make sure their baby is breathing and have a million “what if” thoughts that run through their head. So for me, it was hard to distinguish if what I was feeling was “normal” for being a first time mom or if it was a little exacerbated. I imagine this is similar to post-partum depression and thinking it could be the normal “baby blues.”

I honestly felt pretty great the first month post-partum. My daughter had some feeding and weight issues, more on that and exclusively pumping here, so naturally, I was stressed and worried. But aside from the weight gain specifically, I felt good. I did have some crazy mood swings and felt like anything could make me cry but I do believe it was the hormones doing their thing the first few weeks.

I have absolutely no evidence of causation so I won’t make that claim, however, I did realize that once I started the “mini pill” after my 6-week checkup, the anxiety started creeping in and over time became significantly worse. Like I said, I have no proof that was the cause but I do believe there was a correlation. I will share more on this below.

Like I stated above, having worries as a first-time Mom is totally normal. But feeling panicked and anxious when nothing negative or stressful was happening… not so normal. It certainly felt normal at the time and took me a few months to realize that this level of anxiety probably wasn’t “typical” after having a baby.

I started having the worst nightmares filled with horrible, horrible scenes related to Kennadi, my husband being at work, and just safety in general. It was so bad that I made my husband go in to my daughter’s nursery at 3 am to remove the name sign above her crib because I kept having nightmares that we would have an earthquake and it would fall and hurt her.

When Kennadi was about four months old, our whole house alarm went off in the middle of the night (on a night when my husband wasn’t home) and my app was telling me the back door had been opened. I cannot even explain the amount of fear and panic I felt in that moment. Thankfully, it turned out to be a false alarm (faulty door sensor triggered it) but the fear in that moment and figuring out what to do made the anxiety even worse.

It was after that night that my husband and I talked more about the anxiousness. Over the next few months, it got a little better with the help of certain things (more on that below.) When I was a little past 6 months post-partum, I had a spa day with my best friend and the topic of birth control came up and how it caused her to feel crazy emotional.

This is when I started to think about the “mini pill” birth control I was taking and started to wonder if it played a role at all. I talked to my husband and we both agreed it felt right to have me stop taking it and see if it made a difference. Well, to sum it up, it did. Within a few weeks, the nightmares and excessive worry completely stopped and I felt a million times more like myself. Again, I am not going to say the birth control caused the post-partum anxiety. But, I do believe maybe it was a side effect that exacerbated the first-time mom anxiety.

It took 8 months to figure out what the answers were for me. I wanted to share a few things that helped me personally aside from just stopping birth control, as that was the very last thing I tried.