While there’s the beauty of motherhood, creating life, reinventing motherhood for your suiting, for whatever reason, the postpartum aspect gets heavily ignored, and even now, right in this day and age, it’s still an issue, it’s still being seen as “not such a big deal”. Everyone’s checking in on the baby, and meanwhile, the body is trying to recover while also doing a full-time job that involves lifting, rocking, feeding, carrying, bending, walking the stairs, and basically living in weird positions all day. This isn’t even about the newborn trenches; this can even be the first year, even beyond that.
So then, on top of that, the brain is running on broken sleep and a constant low-level sense of responsibility, because yeah, keeping a tiny human alive is a lot. Now, when pain shows up postpartum, it’s not always some neat little “this hurts, then it goes away” situation. Sometimes it turns into this loop that feels impossible to escape. Pain causes anxiety, anxiety tightens the body, the tension makes the pain worse, and then the worst pain makes the anxiety louder.
It’s exhausting, and it can make someone feel like they’re losing it, even though it’s actually a really normal response to a really intense season.
Pain Makes Everything Feel Urgent
But in what way, though? Well, go ahead and think about it for just a second; postpartum pain has a special talent for messing with the nervous system. It’s not only “my back hurts” or “my hips feel off.” It’s the way pain makes everything feel sharper. Like, a lot sharper at that. So, the baby cries, and it feels more stressful, so then, as you can probably tell, a small task feels bigger, a lot bigger. And so the day feels harder to start. Even resting doesn’t feel restful because the body is bracing, like it’s waiting for the next flare-up.
Then you can just go ahead and add in other things like being sleep deprived, hormones, they’re constantly shifting, and so it’s really easy to see how in the background your mind just shifts, questioning if all of this is even normal or not. So then your brain is scanning for danger.
Anxiety Makes the Body Stay Clenched
The average person doesn’t connect any of this (which makes sense), but anxiety isn’t only mental. As it actually can show up physically, especially postpartum, because the body’s already under load. It’s usually the basic things like shoulders riding up, the pelvic floor is going to hold a lot of tension too, somethings breathing even gets shallow.
And so all of that (and more) means that pain sticks around a lot longer, and it can feel more intense, muscles only get irritated faster, and again, this all just ties into that loop.
But the Loop Needs to be Broken
Well, that’s already a given. Postpartum anxiety does a lot, just the whole body during pregnancy and postpartum takes a hit, and after giving birth, it’s like the hit only gets bigger from there. So no, you can’t just “relax,” and the whole problem be fixed. Honestly, that advice makes people want to scream, because it’s not helpful.
But you absolutely do need support; you probably know that you need mental health support, so you absolutely need to take that part seriously here. Sure, it takes a while for the body to heal, but you still might need professional help in the meanwhile such as physical therapy, because it gives the body a plan instead of more guessing (and they can help pinpoint what the problem is and what’s not properly healing).
And honestly, even small adjustments, how the baby is held, how feeding is positioned, how lifting is done, how the core is supported, can change the whole daily pain load (sometimes professionals point that out, sometimes it’s you just figuring that out yourself).
