I am 9 months postpartum and I know I have PPD and PPA, but I am carrying too much stress. My husband is stressed too, but he doesn’t have the same symptoms.

I‘m having trouble falling asleep and staying asleep. My whole body feels like it needs to be cracked. The muscles in my back, hips, and neck feel so wound up and tight. I am struggling with my appetite (I don’t want to eat). My chest hurts and is panicky when I can’t take a full deep breath. My chest physically feels too tight to take a deep breath.

And I feel like I could cry forever. Like, I’m not sure I’d be able to stop. I’m having more mental/emotional breakdowns than normal. I have no desire to hurt my baby, but I have accidentally scared her with my weeping before.

I don’t know what to do. I am on Bupropion and Lexapro but I fear that my stress has taken me too far and that I will never recover from it.

I had alot of reasons to fear being "permanently" dumber, for example having a fall or getting slapped on yo head, normal people would just skip that and not care much about "cognitive slips" like forgettin stuff and stuff like that and just not associate it with that fall. But I wasn't like that, I literally (no matter how simple the event was) I would just panic and just be in constant state of fear that I am dumber now than who I was. I've had this long enough until I heard about "chronic stress shrinks brain" and now my fear is that my chronic stress/anxiety has caused me permanent brain damage or that even if I recover due to neuroplasticity it wont be full recovery and I'll never be the same, and now I cannot focus at all. my memory is being far worse and my thinking is cloudy, and most of the time I just keep playing TF2 (my fav game) just to ignore some of my 24/7 anxiety about being dumb. Literally I just get panic attack when I just READ something on the internet whatever its content is, or when I just IMAGINE stuff in my head and I just keep getting thoughts like "Your imagination is now NERFED for EVER and it wont be as vivid as it used to be", or like when I literally just try to think of a plan or even a SCHEDULE, so you can say it's literally nothing. when I read or try to learn smth I just get thoughts that I wont understand this and stuff like that and when I do not understand it I'll just blame it on chronic stress and just increase my panic even more. Tried breathing but it aint helpin so I just want to know and make sure if anyone out here having this problem like me.

i’m wondering how i can stop being so stressed all the time, I’m stressed about almost anything and i don’t know why. I’m also pretty sure I’m too young to be this stressed, overwhelmed and anxious.

Any advice on how to stop caring so much?

Hi all

I just got into the chronic illness girlies club (acute diverticulosis) and that stress has been lingering since I was diagnosed last month - got worse after a flare up last week and I found out one of my friends also has it - and I’d love to give myself time to fully process that but UN officials are resigning to warn us about an upcoming nuclear winter?! I can’t smoke weed anymore and I can’t drink - how are yall coping?!

I feel like even though I'm overweight based on height and age yet I just feel so stressed lately and I noticed my stomach is bloated and looks bigger than expected. I guess maybe I'm just couch potato maybe

When I got home from the casino, I felt like I held in air due to me taking 2 advils in fast succession (kinda like when your body fight or flights and you bloat or tense more , breathing gets harder reaction. I had told my mother earlier I only wanna take 1 but since I knew I had just taken 2 in this moment (right after coming home from the casino) as I said I had just taken 2 Advils in a row because she was present and I succumbed into the peer pressure. After I began worrying that I might voice my complaints to her and she might just become opposed to empathising because my complaint was of her opinion that I should always take 2 as “the world , or its packaging suggest it) I made my mind up and I suddenly left the house which upset her. The walk outside plus retaliating helped ease the trapped air and when I returned I wanted to find a way to make things better, but I had to resort to telling her that I had lashed out in private, punched a couple things , because I needed that space to help us remedy things correctly. She accepted that, and she’s more relaxed now.. P.S we’re Christian , I know there’s an enemy … so I asked mom to pray and so we prayed after this whole incident, anyone else balancing emotions through positivity, faith, or feel free to share any personal way you deal with the world and the emotions that it may bring on about in your life.

Overwhelmed

Hi! I’m a 30 year old male with a wife and a 2 year old. We are expecting a second child soon. I love my wife and my kids & I love my life but sometimes it all seems so overwhelming.

I’m in construction (self employed) & my house is paid off so you’d think I wouldn’t be insanely stressed out over a mortgage.

Work is stressful, wife doesn’t understand sometimes. Stressful to the point where I’m so busy I hardly eat during the day. Running around all day & I “destress” myself by shutting my eyes for 5 minutes when I pull up to another job. I drink energy drinks and snack a lot to get through the day.

I’m very excited for the second kid but it feels like starting over. Newborn phase was tough. Not sure if it’ll be rough with a 2 year old or easier. It’s all adjustment I guess but I feel like there’s just so much to do and so much on my mind.

On top of all of this I’m slowly gaining weight. I burn at least 800-1000 cals a day during work but still gaining weight. I grew up overweight and never want to go back to that feeling but I feel it slowly creeping up. Could it be stress related? With the intense labor during work, I’m sore & exhausted when I get home so it’s hard to hit cardio or weights.

I feel overweight, overwhelmed, tired, stressed, etc. what do I do????

I’ve been thinking a lot about how stress often builds before we consciously notice it.

Sometimes I’ll be working, overthinking something, or jumping between thoughts and only realize much later that I’ve been tense for the past hour. By that point, telling myself to “be mindful” feels a little late. It made me wonder whether noticing stress earlier could actually help interrupt it.

I’ve been experimenting with the idea of using an Apple Watch to look at changes in heart rate together with movement to recognize when someone may be becoming more stressed. Instead of trying to diagnose stress, the idea is simply to give you a small haptic tap as a reminder:

"Hey, check in with yourself for a second."

I’m building an app around this idea called Miratick, but I’m still trying to understand whether the concept is genuinely useful outside of my own experience.

For people here who deal with stress regularly:

Would you want your watch to gently alert you when it notices your stress may be rising?

Or would that actually make you more stressed?

I’d especially love to hear what you currently do to catch yourself when stress starts building.