Anxiety in motherhood — it's not just worrying.

The clinical word is "generalised anxiety," and the lived word is something like: I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, but my body never quite believes me. The mental load of running a household — appointments, schedules, who needs new shoes, who said something at school last Tuesday — runs in the background of your brain at all times. Every now and then it spikes into the foreground and you can't think about anything else.

On top of that, the perfectionism most of us were raised with collides with the impossibility of being a "good mother." You can't do all the things at the same level you used to do them, and your nervous system holds that tension by tightening — the chest, the shoulders, the sleep, the patience.

That tension might announce itself as the 3am wake-up. Or as not being able to sit through a film without checking your phone. Or as snapping at someone you love over something tiny. Or as feeling sick before a school pickup. None of these are character flaws. They're a body asking for help.

The mental-load anxiety. You're the one holding the calendar, the dietary requirements, the friendship dynamics, the holiday packing list. Your partner asks "what can I do?" and you don't know how to answer because the answer is "carry half of this in your head, all the time, without me asking."

The return-to-work anxiety. You went back at six months or twelve months and the body never recalibrated. You're managing the work and the daycare and the pumping and the guilt. Sleep is still bad. Sick days are the worst.

The perfectionism anxiety. You were the high-functioning one before the baby, and you can't be that person now, and the gap between who you were and who you are right now is excruciating.

The rage that's actually anxiety. You yell more than you used to. You don't recognise the woman doing the yelling. The yelling is anxiety in a different costume.

The "high-achiever" anxiety. From the outside you're managing brilliantly. From the inside you're held together with caffeine and a private decision not to think about anything for too long.

I won't hand you ten coping strategies and a breathing exercise. The internet has those, and if they were going to fix this you'd be done by now. What I do is sit with you in the anxiety long enough that we can actually look at what's underneath it. It's almost never just the surface trigger.

Sometimes that work touches old patterns — what your own mother modelled, what perfectionism cost you growing up, where you learned that being needed was the same as being loved. Sometimes the work is much more practical — what you'd ask your partner for if you let yourself, what you'd take off the list if you weren't afraid of the consequences.

For postnatal-specific anxiety, the postnatal anxiety page goes deeper into the first-year window. For pregnancy-specific worry, the pregnancy anxiety page is over there.

On postnatal anxiety.