One of the most common refrains that pregnant people hear is that your stress will fuck up your baby’s entire life. They might not use that exact wording, but the implication is clear. If you want a well-regulated, happy newborn turned child turned adult, you better spend the nine months they’re cooking in your belly in a state of perpetual bliss. Even as your body revolts and you prepare for one of life’s biggest upheavals—don’t let that get to you! STAY ZEN OR ELSE.

The idea that stress is bad on our bodies and minds isn’t unique to pregnancy. It’s a reality all of us face and it often feels like a trap. Because it is inherently stressful to fear stress. Especially in a world that isn’t going so well. You just need to scan the news to feel a tightening in your chest. Or have the words AI or climate change pop up in conversation. The future of humanity feels particularly fragile at this moment, and yet we aren’t supposed to stress about it. And if we fail, well, we can expect to die of heart disease as the robots cart our bodies away amid another natural disaster and we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

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A few weeks ago, my area of Los Angeles was on tsunami watch. This was particularly challenging for me because I have a huge (and some might say irrational) fear of this specific scenario. I can trace my phobia back to a movie I watched years ago. The horrifying opening sequence of people and buildings being swept away remained burned in my brain—even if the film’s title did not. Given my heightened tsunami concerns, which for some reason do not apply to earthquakes or fires—two things far more likely to actually happen in California—I became worried that my house would flood and my home would be destroyed. But even more distressing, I became unreasonably pissed off at the possibility of having to pack a go bag and stay in a hotel overnight.

For someone who is normally good in a crisis, I could feel myself falling apart. It all felt like too much. I didn’t have the capacity for another disruption in my routine. Logically, packing a bag and driving across the city to safety wasn’t beyond my capabilities. If anything, I was lucky to have somewhere to go if the watch turned into a warning. But my regular regulation techniques were MIA. As I was spiraling, a voice in my head kept repeating this is bad for the baby. A lovely reminder that I was failing not only to be a mature adult but also screwing up as a mom.

As news came in that the tsunami was less likely to have a big impact outside of harbors and beaches, I decided that the only good option was to put myself to bed. I took two Benadryl and crawled beneath my sheets, no longer interested in being an active participant in reality. It all felt like too much, and I wanted my body to shut down before my stress did even more harm. If things took a turn, and we needed to flee, I would rally. But in the meantime, unconsciousness felt like my best, and healthiest, option.

Figuring out how to not be overly stressed while you remain awake is a trickier beast. Since my mother died, I have had an even more taxing relationship toward death than before, which has increased my anxiety level. Now that random, tragic death has touched my inner circle, I can’t logically convince myself that I am safe from the same fate. My delusion that that sort of thing only happens to other people no longer held any weight.

How does one face the constant possibility of death without being stressed out?

To me, it feels like there are two options for managing all the stress in your life—including the threat of impending death. The first is to lie to yourself. When a fear pops up, you push it away with thoughts like everything will be okay or that will never happen. This strategy won’t prevent those horrible things from happening, but they allow you to bury your head in the sand as the U.S. government barrels full force toward authoritarianism or you wait for important test results to come back from the lab. It requires you to live in a world of your own making where manifestation works and everything happens for a reason. Stress can’t get to you because you refuse to see it.

The problem with this approach is that it detaches you from reality. You can’t have an in-depth conversation about the danger of climate change because in your worldview that is either a problem that doesn’t really exist or one that will miraculously be solved in the nick of time. It makes it difficult for you to sit with other people’s real pain or problems because they are a reminder that bad things do happen and if you acknowledge that the stress might sneak through your carefully crafted barriers.

Personally, protecting my cortisol levels doesn’t feel more important than meeting people where they are and seeing the world for what it is. This leaves me to embrace the second option, which is a level of radical acceptance that goes against my natural, anxious state. It’s basically the if I die, I die approach. It’s living with acceptance that horrible things can and do happen at any moment, but I don’t need to spend my time or mental energy worrying about it. It’s basically the decision to not live in fear. This doesn’t mean I won’t take steps to create the life I want or fight for a better future. I will still care about myself, my loved ones and humanity as whole. But I won’t live a life trying to outrun or outmaneuver anything bad. And if I am okay with bad things happening, the stress doesn’t have anything to latch onto.

Obviously, I have not perfected this method given my recent mini breakdown. But having a framework other than admonishing myself for being stressed in a stressful world has been helpful. Is my new approach a little morbid? Yes, but so is the nature of being mortal creatures. We all die someday—even if we manage to avoid tsunamis.

xoxo,

Allison

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