Whether you’ve recently found out you’re pregnant or are already holding your infant in your arms, becoming a mother can be a roller coaster ride. While being a new mom comes with its share of joy and excitement, it can be difficult to admit that many moments are frustrating and downright exhausting.

Pregnancy and birth are both times of rapid transition, and the days and months after having a baby can come with a wide range of emotions. While your little one may bring a lot of excitement and love, it’s also normal to feel stressed with your new role and responsibilities. Hormonal changes, sleep deprivation, and physical changes to your body can make you feel like a shell of your former self.

As a student who just completed her first year of college under virtual and pandemic circumstances, I have learned about the difficulties of maintaining motivation and finding the right balance of working and taking breaks. With our two mental breaks during a very long semester, I found myself counting down the days until I would no longer have to open my computer and join a zoom call and study for more time after. I realized quickly that I was not the only one to have these difficulties and learned about how many of the people around me were struggling with burnout.

There is growing awareness of postpartum depression in the medical community, within mother-baby support communities, and in the recent years, it is even screened for 6 weeks after delivery at Ob and Peds follow up appointments. There are however, a host of other postpartum disorders that often present themselves in the postpartum period that are lesser-known and lesser-diagnosed though they can be as impactful as depression in the perinatal period. We will cover some signs and symptoms of postpartum anxiety, postpartum obsessive-compulsive disorder and more rarely, postpartum psychosis.

Having a baby is an intense and exhilarating time in a woman’s life. There are so many expectations, dreams, hopes, fears, changes both logistically, physically and neurochemically. Women often find their moods after giving birth to be wildly fluctuating. One moment can be joy staring into a new little face and another moment terror at all the things to come. Sleep deprivation and shifting hormones can feel like a bit of a roller coaster. Lets talk about where post-partum blues end and post-partum depression begins.

Welcome back! Ok, let’s get to the how. How else was I to infuse my life with sustainable self-care aside from identifying the “who's.” While I love schedules and routines, I found it incredibly difficult to “add” things in. Bubble baths and manicures sounded wonderful but really aside from bathing our kids in our bathtub, I have not actually taken a bubble bath in our fancy new master bathroom even once since we moved into our house, over 1 year ago! While I love, manicures, pedicures, and massages as self-care, I found it wasn’t regularly sustainable. So, I decided I would have to make use of the things that I already had in my life and upcycle them.

“Self-Care” is a new buzz word these days. As someone who takes care of other people for a living (psychiatrist) my therapist often asks me at some point in session, what are you doing to take care of yourself? It used to feel this was an enormous weight. In addition to running the household, earning a living, taking care of kids, of struggling patients, working out regularly, preparing perfectly balanced healthy meals, all in the middle of a pandemic, there was yet another responsibility on my plate. I wondered often, how exactly is this accomplished? Who are the super women who have unlimited resources to get it all done and more? Seemed like a setup for yet another area I could count on underperforming in the early stages of my self-care journey.