Knowing your triggers

Before Postnatal Depression I had never uttered the word ‘trigger’. When I first started having Counselling my Therapist would refer to my triggers and at the time I wondered what she meant. She explained that when it comes to mental illness, triggers are the things that can cause you to have a meltdown. Things that can cause you to become overstimulated and things that can have you going from zero to rage in seconds.

I realised that everyone has their own triggers. Things that cause a reaction or even just as simple as something that makes you nervous. For some people it might be hearing a dog barking or being somewhere new but for me my triggers are very specific to Little A.

I have two huge triggers.

The first being lack of sleep. Thankfully Little A is a very good sleeper. After the initial 12 weeks when he would rarely sleep he now loves bedtime. He generally sleeps through from 7/8 to 7am. When all my friends babies were sleeping through the night very early on I was surviving on an hours sleep so we consider ourselves very lucky but we didn’t get here without struggle. The anxiety that goes hand in hand with the depression keeps me awake at night. I don’t think I’ve slept solidly for a very long time. People mean well when you’re pregnant telling you to get as much sleep as you can now before the baby comes. I developed pretty bad insomnia whilst I was pregnant and the sciatica that I had towards the end meant that the last time I got any decent sleep was probably on our Honeymoon in November 2018.

I assumed that being a shift worker of 10 years I’d be able to cope with the lack of sleep when I became a parent. I used to fly to Egypt there and back (roughly a 14/15 hour day) on sometimes only a few hours sleep. Being a parent with a screaming baby in the middle of the night is very different.

18 months after giving birth and whilst Little A sleeps soundly, I unfortunately don’t. I put it down to the anxiety that cripples me some days. I often try and do a brain dump if I know I have lots on my mind and it helps to get my thoughts onto paper but often it is the subconscious thoughts that keep me awake. Things I didn’t even realise I worried about. I lay there in the darkness with my brain ticking away. Is Mr N going to leave me if I continue in this state? Does he still fancy me after all the weight I’ve gained? I don’t sit there in the daytime and think about all those things but at night they scream loudly and I cannot switch them off. The more of a state I work myself up into the harder it is to go back to sleep.

I think this is the same for everyone but on very little sleep everything is made so much harder. I have less patience and less tolerance and I know after a bad night that the day ahead could be a struggle. I always try and warn Mr N when I have a

particularly bad night. It’s as if I get a prior warning that there may be a lot of shouting and there may be a few meltdowns ahead.

My second biggest trigger is Little A’s crying and moaning to the point that even when I’m out and I can hear another child crying I feel my stress levels rising. This is something I’ve never really been able to control or deal with which is why I began avoiding baby classes. There is something about the tone and pitch of the noises Little A makes when he’s grumpy that can send me into a full on rage. I can go from zero to full on screaming in seconds which can be absolutely terrifying. The rage completely consumes me and when I’m in a rage it can be hard to see through it. There’s no reasoning with me either. I need to let is pass and I can breathe again.

Little A has always been a whingy baby. When we were living our lives as normal it was obviously hard to deal with but I could go out and do things and see people so it wasn’t always such an issue. Being stuck at home in lockdown, Little A gets so frustrated and bored and I run out of things to do very early on in the day. All of Little A’s friends go to Nursery and they get a lot of stimulation there but he doesn’t. This has lead to lots of bad days when Little A moans from the moment he wakes up all the way through to bedtime and I shout lots. I hate myself for that. I never saw myself as a shouty Mum but being stuck in lockdown with a toddler has not been easy.

I’m not good with going somewhere new; somewhere I haven’t been before. This can cause a lot of anxiety and leave me on edge. I also find crowded places a bit overwhelming. Even in the playground sometimes when there are lots of people I feel myself getting stressed and it is easier to take Little A out of the situation. I think this comes back to a lack of control which if you’ve read some of my earlier posts I don’t do well with. I cannot control how Little A will behave in the playground or what he’ll do and I cannot control other people which leaves me feeling exposed and vulnerable.

It’s on the bad days when I feel as if I’m being triggered by everything that I wonder if I’ve gone crazy. That I’ve fully gone mental. It’s as if someone has come along and re-wired my brain. The things I could cope with before having Little A now cause extreme anxiety and that makes me so sad. Sometimes I feel as though I have been forever changed and I constantly have to remind myself that Postnatal Depression is an illness and I can get better.

I hope that as lockdown eases and I progress further with my Counselling that the triggers won’t control me like they do now. I won’t be held a prisoner by them. In the meantime, I’m lucky that I know my triggers and I’m in tune with them. At least there is some control in knowing that and knowing how to deal with it when I’m feeling overwhelmed.