Research shows that new dad stress can have long lasting negative effects on your baby. Discover some fool proof ways to relieve your anxiety and up your mental game as a first time father!
“I have to keep doing this… forever?”
It was a few weeks after my daughter was born, and I was having one of those life altering realizations that sent my pulse into orbit.
Not only was it 2 AM, but I had been pacing the floor for hours trying to calm my wailing newborn.
The stress and weight of fatherhood was really getting under my skin, and I even conjured an imaginary friend to converse with in those early morning hours. His name was Clyde, and he was a wise and kindly spider!
Clyde tried his best to lift my spirits, but that moment just seemed different for me.
The idea that I had entered a lifetime contract with my daughter seemed so surreal. This wasn’t like buying a bad pair of hockey skates I could return, or taking a job I despised, but had the option of quitting.
This was f-o-r-e-v-e-r.
As in no escaping it!
Sure, I could have become a deadbeat dad, but I wasn’t going to be a coward and do that to my child.
Therefore, this was in fact an eternal commitment and the anxiety I felt that morning was overwhelming.
I was exhausted as hell, smelled like baby puke, and my body composition was about 90% Pepsi to help keep me awake!
How the hell was I going to keep doing this day after damn day?
This loophole of fear and anxiety had been hounding me since I became an expectant dad, and the only positive was that I was now a pro at quickly talking myself down from jumping off the ledge.
Unfortunately, stress, anxiety and fear are all inescapable and intertwined emotions that every new father must learn to manage and get under control.
Will my baby be able to sense that I’m stressed?
A newborn will continue developing after birth and hopefully start to grow and thrive in his brave new world outside of the womb.
However, your baby’s cognitive development is going to be just as important as his physical growth.
Particularly his emotional development.
A baby will learn all about the world from his parents, and an important part of this learning process is by taking emotional cues from you.
From a very young age (1-2 months old) your baby will begin learning how to read your emotions.
If you are happy, your baby will easily pick up on this and smile back, and this naturally has a calming effect on him.
However, research has shown that he will also pick up on your stress and anger as well. This will make your baby anxious and unsure of how to react.
Most alarming of all, a stressed father makes a poor caregiver for his child.
In a nutshell, your stress can be quite detrimental to your baby!
How do I control my stress when I become a dad?
We all react to stress differently, but our worries are not always created equally.
For instance, the anxiety I felt over becoming a father was vastly different than the consuming tension I experienced when my mother was diagnosed with cancer.
When I was an expectant dad, I had many sleepless nights with great concern about my future, but it would come and go, and I was able to mostly handle it without becoming physically sick.
On the other hand, the stress of not knowing if my mother would live or die made my life living hell. I became an insomniac that had constant stabbing pains in my stomach… day and night these pains haunted me for over six months until she passed.
I could barely function as a normal human being as my mother battled her cancer, and I even ended up in the hospital with severe chest pains.
Most alarming of all, a stressed father makes a poor caregiver for his child.
How you handle stress as a new father shouldn’t be something you feel shame about, but if you have such severe anxiety that it paralyzes your life, I would strongly encourage you to seek out therapy.
However, if you have manageable new dad stress, here are a few tricks to help ease your worries:
- Try to eat well and exercise – this one seems like a no brainer, but when my daughter was born, I was eating anything with sugar to keep me awake and was so dog tired that I stopped working out.
This made me feel like a lazy slob, and I started to get angry at myself for losing all my discipline.
Fortunately, I didn’t repeat this mistake with our second child, and I can tell you from experience, keeping in shape/eating healthy drastically reduced how depressed I felt! - Take a walk – If I was angry or feeling trapped, I went for a walk. If my wife and I started to argue, I went for a walk. If I felt like I wanted to fall over from lack of sleep, I went for a walk.
Walking became my go to weapon against stress, and an invigorating stroll around our neighborhood almost never failed to put me in a better state of mind! - Take a time machine – on days that I wanted to give up fatherhood and felt like it wasn’t for me, I would try to put myself in the future as an experienced and confident dad.
I kept telling myself that the only way across the proverbial bridge to the dad I hoped to be, was for my current self to keep battling.
By always being mindful that the future held better days, I was able to keep pushing on through my fatigue and self-doubts. - Find your gratitude – one effective way I would turn around negative thoughts, was to counter them with things I was grateful for.
I would constantly remind myself that my babies were healthy, that my father was still alive and able to help with our kids, or that I didn’t lose my wife to childbirth.
Even finding gratitude in the little things, like being able to afford clothes for our babies and a roof over their little heads help change my frame of mind and relieved my stress. - Get more sleep – when you are tired, it stresses your body and makes you crusty as hell. The catch 22 is that new parents are cursed to walk this Earth as zombies. However, there are always ways to catch an hour of sleep here or an hour of sleep there.
You need to make getting extra sleep a priority, even if it means taking short power naps a couple times a day!
It will all add up by the end of the week, trust me!
The helpful suggestions above are not going to instantly cure all your baby related stress, and I won’t lie to you and pretend that they will.
However, having a baby is like a war, and you can’t win if you don’t see the big picture – which is survival!
Survive until you can thrive!
Don’t be a martyr who tries to gut it out and lives every day in misery.
That’s not what fatherhood is all about my man.
The secret is to put in the mental work to always find the positive about being a dad, especially on the days you really start to feel sorry for yourself.
I promise you that your perseverance in the early days of fatherhood will all be well worth it, because being a father is one of the hardest, but most rewarding things that you will ever do!
