Useful self-care tips to support your mental health and wellbeing while you balance your busy schedule as a parent
Having children is exciting, challenging, and rewarding all at the same time and becoming a parent comes with a lot of changes to your routine. As well as play dates, trips to the park, and entertaining days out, you might also be dealing with lack of sleep and have less time to focus on yourself.
So, it’s no surprise that all this disruption can affect your mental health. Taking time to focus on self-care can help to support your mental health and wellbeing so you can make the most of the time you spend with your little ones.
Managing stress
Managing daily stress is a great way to practise self-care. Did you know that reducing your daily stress can actually have a positive impact on your overall mental health?
Take the time to unwind
To help manage everyday stress, you could unwind by doing something you enjoy for a short period of time each day, whether that’s reading a book, taking a bath, or spending time on a hobby. While this isn’t always possible, any time spent on something other than your parental responsibilities can make a big difference, even if it’s just five minutes.
Spend time with others
A great way to manage daily stress is to spend time with other people. You could see friends and family or meet new people by joining groups for parents and children.
If you have a partner, try to make time to do things together, even it’s just watching TV.
Talk about how you’re feeling
Talking about your feelings with others can help relieve daily stress and help you find solutions for your problems if you’re struggling. Even talking to your friends and family in a casual setting can really make a difference.
If you’re still struggling to cope with stress, speak to your GP and they can help you access professional support.
Ask for help
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, why not ask your loved ones for a little help with daily tasks like your food shop? Accepting help from your community, whether that’s from your friends or family, or through support services, you can ease some of the stress in your day-to-day life and give yourself more time to focus on you.
There are lots of different support services available so whatever you need, you can find help online, through your local council, or via your GP.
Maintain a healthy lifestyle
By eating a healthy, balanced diet and exercising regularly, you can really help to improve your mental health as well as your physical health.
Diet
Eating well and making sure you aim for at least five portions of fruit and veg a day is important for you, as well as your whole family. But it can be difficult to find the time to cook if you’re operating on such a hectic schedule.
Cook easy meals, ask family and friends for help, and meal prep ahead of time if you can to give you more time day-to-day. Fruits and vegetables can even be incorporated into your diet using frozen, tinned, or raw produce to cut down on prep time.
Exercise
Exercise can be an important act of self-care because there is evidence that it can help to support mental health as well as physical health.
By fitting exercise in throughout your day, from short walks outside with a pram to postnatal exercise classes or playing with any older children you might have, you can get active and reduce everyday stress without added pressure.
Getting enough sleep
Getting enough sleep when you have children to look after can be challenging, but sleep is also a key part of self-care. We have plenty of tips for helping to improve your quality of sleep, as well as how much sleep you’re actually getting, from stress management to exercise and relaxation.
Sleep when the baby sleeps
This age-old piece of advice still rings true today and, even though it can be helpful to do housework while your baby sleeps, sometimes rest is more important.
Get an early night
Getting an early night can be an effective way to catch up on sleep. You might want to try going to sleep earlier than you normally would at least once a week and it can be helpful to spend the 30 minutes before bed doing something that relaxes you, such as taking a bath.
Share the nights
If you have a partner, it can be beneficial to share caring for the baby through the night. If you’re bottle feeding your baby, your partner can take over some feeds during the night and, if you’re breastfeeding, they can take over nappy changing and dressing in the morning, so you have more time in bed.
Ask your friends and family to take your baby or older children for the day, or even for a few hours, so you can enjoy some alone time and catch up on some well-deserved sleep. There is nothing wrong with asking for support – you don’t have to do everything by yourself.
Identify your baby’s sleep patterns
When your baby gets older, they will sleep for longer periods and will eventually settle in a sleeping pattern that is normal for them. By organising your day around your baby’s sleep habits, you can catch up on other things, like work, chores, and most importantly, sleep.
Nurturing relationships
Having a baby is enjoyable and rewarding but can also take up a lot of your time, meaning you aren’t able to see your friends, family, or partner as much as you’d like. It’s normal to feel left out, when you have less time to do the things you enjoyed before becoming a mum. Nurturing your relationships can help to make you feel more like you after having a baby and improve your mental health in the long run.
Make it clear to your friends and family how they can support you while you’re caring for your children and how they can make it easier for you to spend time with them.
If you have a partner, doing little things to make each other feel cared for during this busy time and communicating your feelings with them can help to improve your emotional wellbeing.
Looking after your mental health
For the first week after you give birth, it’s normal to have the ‘baby blues’ where you feel low, irritable, or anxious but these feelings should only last a few days. It’s thought that this is caused by the sudden hormonal changes the body goes through after you have a baby.
Postnatal depression
The ‘baby blues’ might set in fairly quickly after you’ve given birth but they shouldn’t last more than two weeks. If your symptoms set in after two weeks or last longer than two weeks, then you might have something called postnatal depression.
Postnatal depression is fairly common and is thought to affect about 1 in 10 people who have given birth. It can also affect partners. Symptoms can start gradually, or come on all at once, at any point in the first year after your baby is born.
Symptoms of postnatal depression include:
• Loss of interest in things you used to enjoy
• Feelings of hopelessness
• Not being able to stop crying
• Feelings of not being able to cope
• Memory loss or not being able to concentrate
• Excessive anxiety about your baby
You may also:
• Feel extremely tired
• Be unable to sleep
• Feel anxious
• Lose your appetite
• Have general feelings of being unwell
If you think you may be depressed, it’s important that you speak to a healthcare professional as soon as possible. This could be your GP, midwife, or health visitor and they can help you access the support you need. There are lots of effective ways to help treat postnatal depression and your GP can help you identify what might work best for you.
Juggling your busy schedule as a mum can be just as tiring as it is fulfilling. Taking that extra time to focus on self-care can help to improve your mental health and support your emotional wellbeing, so you can enjoy the fun parts just that much more.
