It’s Sunday evening and there’s a list of things to get ready for the week running through my head. Dinner is about to boil over on the stove, and Bluey is blaring in the background. The dog circles my feet, wanting to be fed. From the living room, I hear the toy box dump out. I peek in and see clutter scattered everywhere. Tiny footsteps thunder down the hallway and my 3-year-old appears at my side, tugging on my pantleg. “Mommy look,” he whines, poking me. “Look, mommy. Mom!”
I feel like I’m about to scream. One more sound, one more touch will send me over the edge. I’ll snap, hiss, rage. And then, cue the mom guilt.
In these moments of everyday overwhelm, I’m not the parent I want to be. I’m impatient and short tempered. I feel like I’m going to crawl out of skin. But this reaction isn’t about being an angry mom, experts tell me. It’s about too much simply being too much.
“It’s not actually an anger problem,” says Annia Palacios, a licensed professional counselor who specializes in working with moms at Fort Worth-based Tightrope Therapy. “We can often trace that back to being completely overstimulated. And that is so prevalent in motherhood.”
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Why is mom life overstimulating?
What does it mean to be overstimulated? Basically, it’s sensory overload. It happens when you have too much sensory input—stimuli bombarding your five senses—which becomes overwhelming. It’s that feeling that there are 50 tabs open in your brain, and instead of being able to take in one thing at a time, you essentially just shut down.
As parents, we lose a degree of autonomy over our bodies and senses. Add to this the incessant stimuli that come with kids—and it’s almost impossible to not feel overstimulated.
“We all have a sensory baseline in our bodies,” Palacios explains. “Overstimulation comes from a place where our senses are completely overloaded—with information, with sound, with touch—and they’re not able to continue to function in the way we would need them and expect them to.”
The threshold for what we can handle varies from person to person—some moms might have a smaller sensory “bucket” that overflows more quickly. Parents with attention deficit hyperactive disorder, sensory processing issues or other neurodivergence might experience overstimulation more deeply. But even without those predispositions, sensory overload is just part of parenthood, and for many, having kids is the first experience with this daily tax on the nervous system.
Ever been in the shower and you swear you can hear the baby crying even though you know they are actually sleeping? That’s because in parenthood, your senses are more activated. “From a biological standpoint, our body is designed to respond to our senses as a safety mechanism, to be able to have that discernment of if something is dangerous,” Palacios explains. “In parenthood there’s an additional responsibility for our senses because we are literally responsible for keeping this other little human being alive.”
As parents, we lose a degree of autonomy over our bodies and senses. Add to this the incessant stimuli that come with kids—and it’s almost impossible to not feel overstimulated.
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The common triggers and how they show up
Three of the most typical triggers for parents are auditory, physical and visual stimuli (think clutter). But it’s not always chaos that can be too much; even the pleasant sounds of kids laughing and playing, or gentle touch can put us over the edge.
For local mom Stacie Torres, the nonstop noise of daily life is most overstimulating, though that’s not necessarily yelling or whining. Just hearing her name called over and over all day eventually leads to sensory overload. “I’m a homeschool mom to two elementary boys. I absolutely love it and wouldn’t change it for the world but it’s the constant noise and nonstop ‘mom,’” she says. “It’s like my brain is screaming.”
Other parents struggle with feeling “touched out”—a visceral aversion to physical touch. This is especially common for moms of younger children who may spend hours a day with a baby latched to their breast or a toddler who wants to be constantly held. “Whether it’s a baby nursing, a toddler tapping on your shoulder or even the dog rubbing up against the side of your leg. A partner that’s trying to give you a hug. If we are being lightly touched all day long that can literally have your skin feel like it’s crawling sometimes,” says Palacios.
Parenting a 2-year-old often leaves Alecia Pence, an area mom, feeling touched out. “Today my toddler was climbing all over me, constantly calling my name, following me everything in close proximity, touching me with dirty hands, sticking stuff on my face,” she says.
A flood of sensory stimuli maxes out the nervous system, and the body’s natural response is to go into fight, flight or freeze mode. This might show up as irritability or anger; snapping at your kids or partner or feeling like you’re about to explode. Sometimes it can lead to feeling so overwhelmed that you can’t focus or concentrate, while other times, you might seek distraction.
“Often people will either go to control or to chaos,” says Morgan Myers, a licensed professional counselor at East Dallas Therapy. “Think about it like a river, and life has waves and twists and turns. But when it gets to be too much you go to the banks of one or the other. Chaos would be, the house is a complete wreck and you’re sitting on the couch on Instagram, you’re like ‘I can’t do it.’ Control would be like cleaning everything in sight, even when you’re tired, even when you need to rest or eat, you can’t stop.”
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Constant overstimulation can impact your relationships too. You might feel like you don’t even want to be around your kids, or that you’re not the parent you want to be. And the experience of being over-touched can often lead to intimacy issues. “It’s like, after all I’ve dealt with throughout the day, now my partner wants to have some one-on-one time? And that touching me or even giving me a hug, even something gentle, is the last thing I want,” says Palacios. “A common experience in motherhood is the overstimulation begins to impact our romantic relationship too.”
Are you overstimulated?
Meyers says she sees many moms struggling with sensory overload, though they don’t always name it as such. “I don’t know if they use that word, but definitely overwhelm, brain fog, jumbled thinking,” she says. “Recognizing it first is important, because I don’t think a lot of moms know that’s what they’re feeling, they just think they’re pissed off.”
So how do you know if you’re reacting to feeling overstimulated? And what’s triggering that feeling? Meyers says start by paying closer attention to your body throughout the day. “Where do you feel calm and what point do you start to get tense?” she says. “Tension is your body bracing itself against something—chaos, or noise or an assault by a nerf gun. Starting with that—your own body awareness—what’s going on when you’re tense?”
Palacios suggests a similar playback of your day and determining where you’d put yourself on a scale of 1 to 10. One, 2 and 3 are calm cool and collected, the baseline of where you’d like to stay. At 4, 5 and 6, you’re feeling activated and a little overwhelmed.
“Seven is our tipping point, it sends us into 8, 9 and 10, where we rage, we lose it, we are just so tapped out and overwhelmed that we’re no longer able to communicate our needs and we just snap,” she says. This is where we realize our senses are maxed out, but the overload started happening much earlier. “We want to recognize that at 4, 5, and 6. Because we don’t actually go from 1 to 10 in a snap, our body is building up on that scale. We need more awareness to notice that.”
From there, you can determine what happened in your environment that triggered you. Were there overlapping sounds? Were the kids crawling all over you? Were you overloaded by mess and clutter? All of the above? “Think about what information your senses were taking in before you felt so overwhelmed. Then ask yourself, have I eaten anything today? Have I sat down? Have I had some water? Because all of that is input for our nervous system.”
Coping with sensory overload
Kids are noisy, needy and nonstop so it’s likely that as a parent you’ll deal with overwhelming sensory stimuli on an everyday basis. When you’ve reached your max, try these coping strategies in the moment.
Limit the input:
What your body really needs when you’re overstimulated is less, so look for ways to reduce sensory stimulation. Try noise-reducing earplugs which limit the volume around you, but still allow you to hear your children. Over-touched? Put the kids in the stroller and go for a walk or sit them in a highchair.
And when there’s too much going on for you to process, Palacios suggests leaning or sitting with your back pressed against a wall. “This cuts the experience of taking in sensory input from a 360 perspective. Now it’s cut in half, just what’s in front of you,” she explains. “Then put your hands underneath the bottom of your ribcage [and press]. A little bit of pressure on the body regulates the system.”
Reset your senses:
“In the same way that you’re overstimulated with your senses, you can regulate with your senses,” says Meyers. “Use the senses to bring the temperature back down. Use your body as a shortcut to calming.”
This could be something like drinking a cup of hot tea, and really paying attention to the physical moment—how does it taste and how does it feel? Walking outside barefoot, drinking a cup of ice-cold water or chewing something crunchy or even gum can help reset your nervous system.
Take a breather:
It may sound cliché, but focusing on your breath can help you through a moment of overwhelm. Even better? Take some time—even just a few minutes—alone to just breathe. Go to the bathroom, shut the door for two minutes and catch your breath.
Longer term, think about how you can carve what you need into your day, and how you can avoid the most triggering situations. Palacios calls this “bubble wrap”—bigger picture, preventative strategies that can help reduce your likelihood of feeling overstimulated throughout the day.
“For me it’s bathtime,” she says. “It’s at the end of the day when the nervous system is already doing a lot and the bath just echoes, it’s loud, there’s water splashing on me, I’m trying to wrangle and wrestle a toddler. And so we’ve come to a place where my husband gives almost all of the baths unless I absolutely have to. That’s my bubble wrap strategy.”
These solutions will look different in every family. In the systems within your household, think about how you can set up your environment and your day to reduce the amount of stimulation you get and give your mind and body what it needs.
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Make sure your kids are also getting what they need in terms of release and regulation. Often, this means building in more time for unstructured play. “When the kids feel pent up it creates this kind of intensity in the house,” says Meyers. “So where in your backyard or your neighborhood or in your house can the kids run wild for an hour, and you just let them? Give yourself a minute and also teach them that they can regulate themselves.”
And finally, remember that feeling overstimulated—like it’s all just too much sometimes—is a normal experience in parenthood. There’s no need to add feelings of guilt or shame on top of the overwhelm.
“Many of us have this image where in motherhood we’re these calm, kind, nurturing people and that’s not always our full reality,” says Palacios. “We have moments where we’re overstimulated, we’re overwhelmed, we’re touched out by our kids. It can be this moment where we’re like, ‘this is everything I ever wanted to have this baby, how can I literally be trying to hide in the bathroom from my kids?’ Sometimes that’s a very hard experience to come to terms with. What we can offer ourselves is self-compassion—to know that this is common and normal and that it’s OK that I feel this way.”
Top image: iStock, photo illustration by Sean Parsons
