Parenting may be the most important and rewarding experience in a person’s lifetime. Yet, it can also be the most stressful. How can we be more resilient in these times? In other words, how can we respond more calmly and skillfully, and recover more quickly from life’s difficult experiences? How would this kind of resilience change the trajectory of your life? Becoming more resilience begins by understanding the nature of stress and stress-response. In the mist of chaos, there is a space between stress and your reaction. It is this space that can be expanded to enable a more clear, calm, and skillful response. This is a trainable skill that can be learned on your own, or more systematically with a coach. We will look at common stressors for parents, then understand a bit about our stress-response. Finally, I will describe how to become more resilient based on my understanding of neuroscience and my experience coaching clients.

Stressor, Stress-Response, and Resilience

The Stressor: Difficult Aspects of Parenting

In a profound way, a parent is their child’s first love, and the child is the parents last love. This deep bond enables parents to do some difficult things that otherwise may not be possible. During infancy, new parents often don’t get enough sleep, are growing into parents themselves, and experience more conflict from competing demands, such as work and family (3, 4). In middle childhood parents often face challenges facilitating their child’s emotional, social, cognitive, and physical development, all on top of work and family responsibilities (5). When children become adolescence, parents face the added challenge of guiding their growing independence, risk-taking, and peer influence in a healthy direction (6, 7). Just the cognitive demands of parenting itself, e.g., coordinating complicated schedules, anticipating and addressing the child’s changing needs, making infinite number of decisions for the child daily, and keeping track of everything, can deplete cognitive and psychological well-being (8). Some of the most common and difficult stressors include economic instability, lack of time, worries about the child’s health and safety, parents feeling isolated and lonely, ensuring safe use of technology and social media, and pressures from one’s culture (2). As often the case parents that are marginalized economically, culturally, socially, or politically tend to struggle disproportionally more (3, 9).

Exercise: Noticing Your Stress Response

Bring to mind a mildly stressful situations with  your child and notice your body’s reaction. This stressor should be mild enough to allow you to work through without getting overwhelmed. This way, it is easier to build the skills you need to work through increasingly more difficult stressors. For example, you may be struggling to adjust to parenthood for the first time and managing work. Or you may be feeling exhausted from frequent disagreements with your teen over curfews, social media, or dating. Whatever the mild stressor, now consider your stress response last time this happened. How did you react? How did it feel in your body? Did you emotionally shut down or over-react? Did you get too upset to think clearly or use the parenting skills you already have? Did you reactively do the same thing that your parents always did with you? Keep in mind this mild stressor and your stress-response as you continue reading. See if the following concept and suggestions for resilience could help you respond more effectively with less energy in the next time you face this stressor.

The Stress Response

During the stress-response, your body gathers the energy to address the stressor by borrowing energy from maintenance functions such as replenishing neurochemicals, digesting food, and fighting infection, to expenditure functions such as increasing the glucose, heart rate and blood supply to your muscles, and heightening your mental arousal. The brain tries to optimize energy and time by deploying more instinctual habitual reactions. Ideally, the stressor is addressed, and the body returns to recovery and maintenance. This way you actually get better at responding to that stressor. However, if your stress-response is triggered more frequent or for longer periods than the body can recover from, the body eventually deteriorates at its most vulnerable point for the individual. This can include experiencing  symptoms of depression, anxiety, cognitive impairment, heart disease, and autoimmune disorder (1). Like a bank account, if you spend faster than you can earn, you will eventually go broke, even if you delay this by using credit cards.

Stress-Resilience

Since the stress-response is costly to the body and not sustainable for long periods, the more optimum use of your energy, the easier to recover from the stress. Resilience is the ability to expend enough energy to respond to a challenge without over- or under-reacting, then being able to return to baseline. After the event, it’s important to return to a state of calm awareness rather than staying activated unnecessarily. Overthinking or worrying causes unhelpful tension. Similarly, being unable to move past a difficult event waste limited energy, leading to imbalance and potential burnout. I am not suggesting to restrict your stress-response, but to use it more intentionally and skillfully and less habitually and indiscriminately. I am suggesting to be more responsive and less reactive. This is a trainable skill.

Becoming More Resilient

Psychological Experiential Description

In a stressful situation, there is a space between the thing that stresses you and your reflexive response. In this space lies an opportunity to be more resilient – to remain calm and curious enough to see more of the situation and see it more clearly, to have fuller access to your strengths and best judgement, and to respond more effectively, wisely, and intentionally. This skill can be developed by practicing paying attention to your experience in a curious, open, accepting, and loving (COAL) way (10), and by discerning and trusting your best judgment from your different streams of experience before responding to the stressor. Much like with a camera, the more you can stabilize your viewing position, the clearer your image. And the more light you collect from this still view before closing the camera shutter (judging the situation) the higher resolution your image (your best judgement). Remaining curious, calm, non-judgmental, and open to what is really happening makes the mind more still and allows more of your experience to be sensed and observed before responding. In other words, this attitude allows a more grounded, clear, perceptive integrated sense of what your body and mind is telling you. And it also makes it easier to respond with your best judgement and not just your snap judgement, dominant emotions, urges, or thoughts. This enables you to respond in the most skillful way you can at that point.