Anxiety about Children

One of the things that began to catch up with me immediately was the anxiety I had about my daughter getting sick. Every cough I panicked and thought she was choking. My fight or flight reflex would kick in and my heart would race. I didn’t know what I should and shouldn't be worried about, so I worried about everything. But as with everything to do with kids, as soon as you get to grips with the phase they are in, they change again. I found myself lurching from stress about one thing to the next. Breathing, rolling over, beginning to move around and put things in her mouth. It was all too much for me, I couldn’t relax about anything.

I was always on edge and after a while of living like this my body had had enough. I started having panic attacks (I’ll write something about these specifically). My body was constantly in some kind of fight or flight mode. So anything that happened to me or around me was hard to deal with. My breathing was shallow and my chest was always tight. I went so far as to think I was having a heart attack and ended up going for an ECG on my heart. That came back all clear. Then my doctor asked me, ‘have you been under any stress lately?’ Well, now that you mention it.

The first thing to remember is that you don’t want to be anxiety free. That’s unrealistic, anyone who tells you that they don’t have any anxiety is lying. We need a bit of it, it serves a very real purpose in our lives. Being able to foresee dangerous situations is a reason our species has survived. There is stuff in life that is definitely worth acknowledging as a real danger. We don’t just step out into traffic, or watch someone walk into something dangerous that they can’t see and we can. So like I said, the aim isn’t to be anxiety free. The aim is to understand anxiety's purpose and recognise when it’s not helpful for you. I didn't get this at first. Which is why I'm labouring the point here a little. But it's important.

Babies and small children will give you lots of cause to be anxious. You should worry about them putting things they can choke on in their mouths. As well as leaving forks out by electrical sockets. Being able to recognise those situations and then stop something bad happening to your child is a good use of anxiety. That leads me to my key reflection on anxiety.

Can I do something about the thing that I’m anxious about?

That’s the difference between helpful and unhelpful anxiety. What you can do about it.

I started to get anxious every time my daughter coughed. I didn’t know what a baby struggling to breathe sounded like. So everything that wasn't normal became an anxious moment for me. Because it was something I couldn’t actually do anything about I had nothing I could use that anxiety to solve or do.

I want to take a quick detour into a bit of science. Only because in my opinion it’s helpful to understand the context for this when dealing with it. The physical feelings of anxiety come from our autonomic nervous system. The same system that does all the things we do but don’t ‘think’ about. Breathing and digesting food etc. So these physical responses to anxiety are coming from a system that isn’t linked to our logical thinking.

Why's that important? I’ve learnt that once I let a situation make me anxious, the way I respond is out of my control. The process is set off by my body's auto-pilot system. That means if I want to do something about it, it needs to happen on a logical level.

If you find yourself getting too anxious about things the best exercise I do is an anxiety audit.

Think about one thing that is making you anxious. Don’t group things together. Focus on an individual thing.

Now, can you actually do anything about that issue other than worry about it? For example; if you worry about electrical sockets. Get socket blockers and insert them in all the sockets that your child can reach. You have taken your anxiety and done something with it. In my case, I was worrying about coughs and sounds my baby was making. I couldn’t do anything about that. But what could I do? I asked our midwife and doctor, they told me those sounds are normal. Sometimes learning, or gathering information is a great way to relieve anxiety. When our imagination runs wild with worst case scenarios, we ignore the simplest answers.

The idea here is that you’re trying to process this logically in a different way. Before you trigger that anxiety reaction, how can you think about the situation? Is there a different way to frame it in your mind? One that allows you to think before you trigger that anxiety reaction.*

*One thing I will say about this, is that it’s a difficult skill to build. It takes work and focus to be able to change the way you react to situations. But I can honestly say it’s worth persevering with.