Читать книгу Zero to Five - Tracy Cutchlow - Страница 13

Stress less

Are you thinking you’ll move to a new city, start an intense new job, buy a new house, and finish remodeling just days before your new baby is born?

Here’s a better idea: weekly massages, lazy weekend mornings, and dinners spent laughing with friends.

That’s because toxic stress during the last few months of pregnancy transfers directly to baby. Excessive stress can

• make baby more irritable and less consolable;

• inhibit baby’s motor skills, attention, and ability to concentrate;

• damage baby’s stress-response system, causing fight-or-flight hormones to stick around too long; and

• shave an average of eight points off baby’s IQ (the difference between average and bright).

How to identify toxic stress

Not all stress is bad, of course. And not all people react to the same stress in the same way. For example, at nine months pregnant, I was racing to finish editing a book. I found the late nights, tight deadlines, and clashing personalities invigorating. Friends thought I was crazy.

The problem is when you feel you have no control over the things stressing you out. Unrelenting stress is the main culprit. Our bodies just aren’t built to handle a sustained assault of fight-or-flight stress hormones. An overly demanding job, a chronic illness, poverty, losing a job, an abusive relationship—these are examples of toxic stress.

Pregnancy does create a buffer against stress. Women, pregnant and not, were exposed to the same stressor, and the pregnant women had lower heart rates and cortisol levels. But if you’re experiencing chronic stress or anxiety, especially starting in the second trimester, make it a priority to remedy your situation.

If you can’t manage to lower your stress during pregnancy, focus on creating a trusting relationship with your newborn baby (see page 38). This has been shown to mitigate the effects of prenatal stress.

THE RESEARCH

Ice storm babies fall behind

When a freezing rain fell on eastern Canada in 1998, more than a million people lost electricity for up to forty days, and a hundred thousand families were shuttled into emergency shelters.

Women who were pregnant during all this were, understandably, stressed in a toxic way. It turns out their children were, too: at age 5½, the kids had lower IQs and poorer language abilities than kids whose mothers weren’t affected by the storm.

List any areas causing you toxic stress.

What big or small steps can you take to regain control?

What will you do for yourself to reduce stress in general?