How to survive stepparenting stress
I've been feeling stressed and burned out— not specifically because of stepmom life, but because real life lately has been super complicated. I’m doing way too many things at once while simultaneously feeling like I'm making the worst possible decisions on how to spend my time. Yet I yet can’t seem to get out of my head enough to not make those worst possible decisions.
Finally a couple days ago, I just said fuck it and took the day off. Even though I'm behind on absolutely everything, including being so behind on my to-do list that I haven’t even made a to-do list yet.
I took the day off not because I decided I would never get everything done anyway so why bother (although that thought did cross my mind) but because I knew I was suffering from hardcore stress-brain. And, as stepparenting has taught me well, the only way to cure stress-brain is with a complete and total reset.
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Your brain on stepparenting stress
The human body is a miraculous machine. The incredible precision required to coordinate hundreds of minute details so that we can walk and talk and breathe is beyond comprehension. We’re even fully equipped with an amazing capacity for self-preservation: the fight-or-flight stress response.
When our body is flooded with stress hormones, we're at our most physically powerful and our most mentally alert so we can focus completely on dispatching the threat at hand. Everything that’s not needed to fight off/flee from a hungry lion slides efficiently out of the way. Things like sex drive, appetite, digestion, and immune system response all get put on hold.
Short-term, that's fine. But when we're under stress for weeks or months or years, the cumulative effects add up. Chronic stress leads to stress-related health problems — stuff like constant headaches, IBS, insomnia, anxiety, that nagging back pain that just won’t go away. And our bodies can’t heal because we're still in stress mode; our brain says healing doesn't matter while we're fending off hungry lions.
That’s your amygdala talking, the fear center of the brain where our deepest survival instincts live. The amygdala’s job is to look for danger so we can keep ourselves alive — a job that requires constant vigilance. And once our body shifts to fight-or-flight mode, any new stressor can keep that stress response going — even the most vaguely suspicious events get flagged as potentially life-threatening.
So when we're under stress that’s both ongoing and unpredictable — like while becoming a stepparent (especially a stepparent in high conflict) — we literally cannot calm down.
When the amygdala fires up, it shuts down a different part of the brain: the prefrontal cortex, where we daydream and make plans for the future and can see situations from multiple perspectives. Under stress, we can’t make complex decisions. And I mean again, quite literally, we CAN’T. We are biologically incapable, because that part of our brain is offline. So even though the one thing we need to do more than anything else is to get out of stress-brain mode, our stress-drenched brains cannot for the life of us figure out how.
This is the science-based explanation why stepparenting can negatively impact our mental health. It’s not a personal failing folks; it’s just biology.
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My stressed-out early stepmom years
For most of my first decade as a stepmom, I worked a physically demanding construction job, nearly all overtime hours. The entire painting crew kept ibuprofen and Tiger Balm on us full-time. You’ve gotta, when you’re cranking your head backward to paint ceilings for 11+ hours a day.
A nurse friend told me to ignore the directions on the ibuprofen bottle, and instead take half a dose every 2 hours. The muscles contract while you're using them, become inflamed from overuse, then stay all clenched up because that's how the body protects itself from pain. She said that once the body is stuck in inflammation, the muscles forget how to relax. Taking a big dose only blocks the pain for a bit. Taking small doses more frequently breaks the cycle, interrupting the pain response often enough and long enough that your muscles finally decide it's safe to unclench.
I was reminded of this when, after years of court battles and endless conflict and constant crying and crippling anxiety, my new counselor wrote me a prescription for Xanax. When I said I didn’t want to take it, my counselor told me I had developed PTSD from being a stepmom. She said, “You’re so burned out that your brain has forgotten how to relax. Taking the medication reminds your brain what being relaxed feels like. Then the next time when you’re trying to calm down on your own without the meds, your brain remembers and you can get back to that place easier.”
I had forgotten how normal life — as in, not living under full-time stress — felt like.
Why stepparenting is so stressful
As stepparents, we’re bombarded by stress very nearly full-time — and unlike a day job, we don’t have set hours or weekends off where we know we can leave the stress behind.
There’s stress whether the stepkids are with you or not with you; there’s stress whether you're full-time stepparenting or part-time stepparenting. There’s stepparent-stepkid stress, there’s stress with your partner, there’s stress with the ex. And all of this is on top of whatever stress you already have in other areas of your life: your job, your extended family, your friends, your health, your finances.
That's a big ol' stack of hungry lions.
While there are days of less stress as a stepparent, there are no true stress-free days — stepfamily life is like sitting on a crockpot full of stress stew set to a low simmer at all times.
We forget how to relax. We forget what life without stress feels like.
Living in constant stepparenting stress is the emotional equivalent of staring up at ceilings all day: our inner stability gets all cricked up and whacked out. Maybe sometimes we do big things to de-stress, like taking a vacation every once in a blue moon or scheduling a massage, but those rare, grand gestures are not what get us out of stepparenting stress mode.
Taking many small stress-relieving actions regularly is what finally tells our brain it’s okay to relax, that the horizon is free of hungry lions and it’s safe to step down from fight-or-flight mode. That’s the theory behind daily gratitude and mindfulness and self-care.
Let go of what we can’t control; focus on disengaging and accepting and stepping back. Collect positive moments, carve out some space, look for every bright spot we can. And let's see if we can crack open that cloud cover a bit. Like taking half-doses of ibuprofen more often, sprinkling our days with tiny bursts of good has a cumulative effect over time.
We can’t completely prevent grey skies. But if we pierce the storm clouds with enough bits of sunlight, at least we can break through enough to see a blue sky from time to time. And in doing so, we can make room for joy to shine through again.
Then, having felt that light, it’ll be easier to get back there the next time.
