The Therapy Edit - On why the loud parenting chaos feels stressful

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

Here's why the noise of parenting can sometimes have you wanting to run to a quiet corner! I share my experience and thoughts along with some amazing insight from my ear surgeon friend @earsurgeonjoe

Hello and welcome to the Therapy Edit podcast with me, psychotherapist Anna Martha. I'll be bringing you weekly 10 minute episodes to encourage and support your emotional well-being. Hi everyone. I hope you're okay whether you're walking the dog or on the way back from the school drop off or having a, you know, trapped on a sofa with a sleeping baby. today I want to talk about something that has really been a fuel for guilt over the years until I got a bit of clarity on it and I must say it was actually quite life-changing for me so I guess my desire is to impart a little bit of that in you and hope that and know that there will be people that have a lot of guilt around this same thing and every time I talk about it over on Instagram

or mention it in anything that I do for the mother-mind way I get such a massive response and I get people tagging in their partners and say look I'm not the only one and I always love that because I think when we start

chipping away at these things that tend to fuels guilt you know it gives us it frees us up to get some tools to find some ways to help ourselves so um noise noise my my house is incredibly noisy um i've got three kids i've got two boys um often just careering around the place lots of toys that make noise

they're very keen on these kind of electric toy electric guitars and there's a lot of noise often someone running a hot wheels car over radiator, moving chairs around, slamming doors, televisions on, music on. And it's, sometimes it just feels too much. And I think the response I feel sometimes to when things are so noisy is really physical. It's a stress response. I can feel my nervous system kind of just, oh, just bracing itself. And it, and it, it, it, it, gives me that kind of that irritable, rageful feelings sometimes where I just want to go quiet. Everybody, stop, stop shouting.

I'll sell off and say to one of my kids, I'm like, I'm literally here. I can hear you. There is no need to shout. And sometimes things can just feel so noisy. And it's a real stress trigger for me, sometimes more than others. I definitely find it harder when I'm overwhelmed,

when I'm tired, when I'm hormonal, I definitely notice that my tolerance for noise is less. And sometimes I just have fantasies of shutting myself away somewhere quiet. You know when someone says, oh, what would you like for your birthday? Sometimes we go, oh, you know what? I just want to go away on my own

somewhere quiet and absorb the quiet and absorb the silence. So you're not alone. You are not alone. but I think for a long time I really felt like I was. I felt, I felt, I wasn't, I felt annoyed with myself. I was like, I'm so intolerant, Anna, why are you so intolerant? Why are you so irritable? You know, sometimes even the happy noises of my kids, even the happy playing,

it was just too much, it would still give me this stress response, whereas sometimes I'd feel a lot more tolerant of it. Sometimes car journeys, I felt like, you know, those, those treasured quiet moments where you walk from the, from the kids, put the kids in the car around to the driver's seat and it's just, oh, it's so good, isn't it? It's just that quiet. You know, sometimes those moments in the car are just so stressful and I want everyone to be quiet. I can't focus. And there are times when I sit in the car and I listen to things and there are times when actually I just need the silence. So yeah, I really berated myself for that.

I really berated myself for that until I read about, now I don't know, I might say this wrong, but misphonia. So it's the, it's, it's not a phobia as such, it's just a stress response. Almost sometimes, and I know some of you will be able to relate to this, like a panic response to too much noise. It's this, it's a stress triggering response to noise. Now when I realized it was actually a thing, isn't it so good when you know that something is actually a thing and it's not just you. It's not just you being irritable. It's not just you lacking any resilience. It's an actual thing. It's an actual known thing. So misphonia is a thing. It's people who have a stress response or a panic response triggered by sound. Now, as I talk about this quite a lot on my Instagram, I found my ways to help myself.

I sometimes wear noise reducing earplugs, the ones that I wear. Now, where did I get them from? They are Flair by Karma Audio. And then I also have, or Karma Audio by Flair, and then I also have some other ones from Loop. I've got a pair that are actually quite strong. So they really do block out sound. Now, I use those in moments perhaps where one of the kids is just tantruming. and the other day I put them in when my son was having a really hard morning and it enabled me

to hold him whilst he was screaming now he was a refluxy baby so there is often a bit of a stress response that comes to me when it just takes me back to those moments when I held him and he screamed and screamed so there are reasons why I find that stressful as well and I think sometimes that can be helpful to identify because then we can bring compassion into that but I find those earplugs really helpful in enabling a kind of just softening that stress response so that I can be there and I'm more likely to respond in a way that I want to and in that moment I wanted to hold him I wanted to support him I wanted to be there and that would have been even harder for me I think had I not had those had I not had those

headphones so anyway that's one of my techniques to deal with that but I spoke about this the other day and my friend Joe who I've known for many years he is an ear surgeon and he he messaged me on Instagram and he said you know Anna I've got some reasons as to why this happens so always interested in in knowing a little bit more about the why I said I invited him to share a blog post and he did and he wrote a blog so that's on anamatha.com you can find it by Joe the ear surgeon and in the blog he wrote many different reasons as to why we can find noise so triggering, so overwhelming. But one of the things that I found particularly helpful was this. He said, there's such thing as a cognitive reserve. And he said there was a

study in 2013 in Sweden where they examined 140 men and 208 women. And they discovered that women with high levels of emotional exhaustion. I mean, do you relate to? emotional exhaustion? Is that not part of parenting when we are just absorbing the emotions of our children and we're spending time and effort trying to respond in a way that we actually want to? So these women with high levels of emotional exhaustion, i.e. most likely you, definitely me, became more sensitive to sound after an acute stress task. Now, I think many tasks of parenting can be acutely stressful. You know, some mornings, we've got, you know,

we've got challenges in our, in our home that I think many people do. But I've got one child that really struggles to regulate his emotions. So many of our mornings can just be. They can begin with screaming and tantruming and door slamming and shouting. And I think, you know, I would call that an acute stress task, trying to get the kids ready when one child is really struggling. I would call that an acute stress task. So I'm sure that you will be able to identify

many different acute stress tasks in your parenting. But women with high levels of emotional exhaustion became more sensitive to sound after these stressful moments. And he said this, your brain spends all day processing the inputs of your senses. Now this is vision, hearing, smell, taste and taste. touch and how often are we touched? How much do we hear? How much do we see? Even in those moments where we go for a quick scroll or, you know, we're at a busy playgroup, which is just there's a lot of visual processing going on, a lot of hearing processing going on, audio processing. There's a lot

of smells definitely in my house with one still in nappies and the taste and the touch. Now when your cognitive reserve is low, when you're when you're feeling depleted, your emotional, reaction is heightened. And I found this so helpful because instead of just being annoyed with myself, you know, what we can take from that is what can you do to refill your reserve? And often we do have to be intentional and creative about this. But how can you refill and refuel and replenish your reserve? What do you need? Do you need calm? Do you need space? Do you need to swap some scrolling with just closing your eyes and sitting down and absorbing the quiet for a moment? So if you're feeling shame around, the noise irritation, if you're feeling triggering your

stress response is triggered by that noise, how can you, instead of criticizing yourself and writing yourself off as just irritable, how can you, how can you acknowledge that as a little flag to say you need to refill and refuel that cognitive reserve? What can you do? What quiet can you get? What support might you get? Can you get out on a walk? What are those things that just refuel you a little bit? So I hope you find that as helpful as I did. Go gentle on yourself and I wish for many quiet moments amidst the chaos so that you can top up that cognitive reserve. Thank you for listening to today's episode of The Therapy Edit. If you enjoyed it, please do share, subscribe and review.

You can find more from me on Instagram at Anna Martha. You might like to check out my two books called Mind Over Mother and Know Your Welfth. I'm also the founder of the Mother Mind Way, a platform full of guides, resources and a community with the sole focus on supporting mother's mental and emotional well-being. It's been lovely chatting with you. Speak soon. Thank you.