3 Quick Tricks to Shut Down Anxious Mom Thoughts

What if the tree in my front yard is struck by lightning, and it falls right on the house, crushing my daughter who is peacefully asleep in her crib?

Just one example of a super irrational, anxious thought I have had in my time as a mom.

I’ve also worried about the floor boards falling apart under her feet, branches falling off of trees and landing on her head, and aggressive wild animals emerging from the bushes in our backyard to gobble her up.

Noone warned me about the strange, irrational fears that would come with motherhood.

Not all moms experience this, but I know I’m not the only one.

Maybe it’s an adaptation to help our babies survive, a remnant of a time where mothers had to be on high alert against warring tribes and saber-toothed tigers. Maybe it’s a totally natural result of caring about a tiny, vulnerable being so much. Maybe it’s just sleep deprivation.

Whatever it is, I’ve learned a few tricks to shut down these types of anxious thoughts. These tricks may not work on more general types of worry, but for me, they definitely work on these strange, middle-of-the-night type of thoughts.

Here are three things I do to immediately shut these thoughts down before they cause me too much unnecessary stress.

1. Externalize anxious thoughts

Our brains lie to us all the time! They are pranksters. They tell us to worry about things that are very unlikely or even impossible.

We can externalize our worries by casting our brain (or the anxious part of it) as a sort of character and then blaming them for the anxieties.

When you have anxious thoughts, realize that that’s not you, or the rational you at least. That’s your brain trying to trick you.

Sometimes it’s as simple as noticing that it’s happening. Real example of my thoughts when I get tired.

What if my daughter falls down the stairs tomorrow and breaks her back?

Hmm… My prankster brain is trying to trick me into fearing something very unlikely. Nice try, brain!

This often works to shut down anxieties before they spiral out of control.

2. Just add an OR

Sometimes we tend to catastrophize, or think of the worst possible scenario or outcome. A quick trick when you notice yourself doing this is to think of a positive or neutral outcome that is probably just as likely.

Example: My daughter seemed fussy tonight before bed. What if she’s coming down with a terrible virus?

Yes, that could be happening… OR she was just worn out from the busy day and tomorrow she’ll be her happy, healthy self.

What if the reason my husband is late getting home with my daughter is that they were rear-ended at a red light and they’re being taken to the hospital right now?

Yes, that could be happening… OR they just left the library later than expected because they were having so much fun playing with the puppets.

Think or a different outcome. It also helps to visualize the neutral or positive outcome in your head.

3. What are the chances?

For me, actually thinking of the likelihood of the feared outcome helps a lot.

Take the thunderstorm, tree-falling example, which is a real worry I had at one point last year. My daughter was upstairs sleeping and I was on the couch imagining lightning hitting a front yard tree and having it fall on her.

Here’s how I fought it in my head:

Well, this house has been here 100 years, and based on the tree’s giant size, it’s probably been here close to that whole time. Each year, I bet we get 7-10 thunderstorms. That means that out of 1,000 thunderstorms over the course of a century, the tree has never been struck by lightning, and even if it was, it would have to fall in a very precise position to actually hit the house where my daughter is sleeping.

We can talk ourselves out of irrational fears by trying to calculate their likelihood.

I hope these simple ideas help you! If you have any tricks that work, leave them in the comments.

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