First the water was too hot, and she whined that touching it felt like a sunburn. When I turned the cold dial to cool it down, she wailed that it was now “fweezing!” and that the tub was as full as the ocean and she hated it being too full. By the time I got my overtired four-year-old actually into the bath, it was far past her bedtime and far past the limits of my patience.
You might guess how the rest went. She screamed when I put the shampoo in her hair. She batted me away when I tried to wipe the soap from her eyes, but then wailed that it was burning. She didn’t like the toys that were floating around her, but when I removed them she yelled for me to put them back. Her voice had turned to that pure high-pitched whine, interspersed with sharp, angry screams. I could feel my insides curdling in frustration.
I’d spent the day solo parenting my kids, and so by the time this bathtime rolled around, it felt like my reserve of grace and patience was fully tapped. And it was. As my youngest’s irrationality got stronger and her agitated yells more shrill, I was working so hard to regulate my own bubbling rage. Apparently, she was too.
When I flipped the lever to drain the water and stood up to offer her a towel, you would have thought I had shredded her favorite stuffed animal. She let out a raging wail and demanded that I let her stay in the bath longer. I breathed in sharply and dug my nails into my palms to keep from losing it, and I told her no, bathtime was over. She lunged at me with all of the force in her slippery four-year-old body, my own body stumbling backward as she ran out of the room.
After catching my breath, I followed after her quickly as she stormed into her room and started shaking the large dollhouse, tiny toys and Barbie shoes flying around the room. I tried to reach for her to hold her, hoping to calm her and prevent the destruction I could see unfolding, but she thrashed around, and I feared I couldn’t grasp her without hurting her. She tore around the room with an enraged and wild look in her eyes, slamming her dresser drawers and throwing her stuffed animals. Finally, she threw herself into her closet, pulling a bin of toys in front her to block me out.
I had been in a state of complete overwhelm the minute before, unsure how I was going to get this situation under control. She had looked like a frantic animal, circling her room in an agitated panic. Now, I sat down on the floor a few feet from her in her closet, the large basket of toys sitting between us. She’d stopped screaming long enough by this point that I could tell her that she was safe and that we could sit here for a while. She was taking gasping breaths as her sobs slowed, and then all of a sudden she reached into the basket between us and pulled out a stuffed cheetah. The choice seemed strikingly appropriate to me. She lifted it to show me, and in a voice that resembled that of my generally sweet-natured daughter, she said quietly to me, “Isn’t he so cute?”
I smiled at her and nodded. “He is so cute,” I affirmed, my head spinning with emotional whiplash.
“Where’s his brother?” she asked innocently, referring to a smaller version of the same stuffed animal that was likely buried somewhere in this room. I told her I wasn’t sure, but that we could look together, to which she replied happily, “Okay, let’s look!” We spent the next several minutes looking – and fortunately finding – the smaller stuffed cheetah. Eventually we even got her pajamas on, read a few stories, and she fell asleep with her head on my chest.
As I ran my fingers through her still-wet hair, I reflected on the previous 45 minutes. I had just seen play out a perfect example of the stress cycle – and how wildly different it can look in a preschooler versus her mother.
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You may have heard of the stress cycle, particularly if you’ve read the book Burnout by sisters Emily and Amelia Nagoski. It was in that book that the Nagoskis popularized the concept of this cycle, explaining it as the root of our eventual burnout. When I’d first read the book, the concept struck me hard and right away I started teaching it to patients and in my workshops. But it was only recently that I realized that my understanding hadn’t been complete.
I’d gotten the basic premise well enough, which was this: we all have stressors in our lives that pop up and create a flood of stress hormones in our bodies. We deal with those stressors in the moment – like making it through the crazy traffic or deleting the nasty email from the coworker – which gives resolution to the stressor. But as the Nagoskis importantly pointed out, that doesn’t necessarily resolve the stress itself – the cascade of neurochemicals that have coated our brains and flooded our bodies. That stress, even if it’s no longer showing up as an urgent air traffic controller directing our attention, is living in us and needs to be dealt with. That’s where “completing the stress cycle” comes in, which means engaging in some intentional practices – like exercise or hugging a loved one or creative expression – to bring us back to some homeostasis.
But when I heard Amelia Nagoski on a podcast recently, I realized that while all of that remained true, there was another layer here that I hadn’t recognized the first time I’d engaged with their work. And that layer immediately made me think of my daughter – and my sons.
What I started to appreciate better this time around was that when we experience a stressor in our day to day lives, our bodies produce a fear response. At their core, stressors bring about fear. As I would often teach in my stress workshops, stressors could be defined as things that threaten something that is important to us. Depending on the stressor, the threat could be to a value we hold, an identity we have, or an outcome we want. Whatever it is, something that matters is on the line. In the case of my daughter’s bathtime meltdown, it was lots of things: my energy, a reasonable bedtime, my sense of myself as a “good mom,” my ability to get other things done that night, her mental health, and more. They were all seemingly under attack, producing a huge stress response inside of me.
When our bodies experience fear of threat, our stress response is an attempt to help keep us safe. Our nervous systems give us the whole fight or flight response options. This relatively unsophisticated set of options is, of course, a remnant of our mammalian roots. Just like animals in the wild experiencing threat, our bodies are telling us to attack or to get the hell out of there.
This is what happened for my daughter, in fact. She felt extreme threat, and thus stress. Her hopes for her bathtime, her autonomy, her sense of agency was all being threatened by my dominance, and so her nervous system took over. It triggered her own fight or flight response, and that’s just what she did. She lashed at me, she tore things apart, she ran as far away as she could get. And here’s the thing – it worked.
Because my daughter was able to discharge all of that stress in the moment – because she could complete the urges that were exploding inside of her, her stress cycle was all done. I could see it in real time. The anger abated. Her cortisol dropped. She found the cheetah and she was ready to play. Nothing about it was easy and I’m not suggesting it was pleasant – but from a nervous system perspective, it was perfect.
It was also a perfect contrast to my own experience. Because this is exactly where it all goes haywire as a parent – or, really – as any adult living in the modern, social world. When my daughter is raging at me and at the room I’ve constructed for her, my own nervous system desperately wants to do one of two things: to get aggressive with her and shut her down, or to slam the door and run away. But as a mom who is trying to raise a healthy child and also doesn’t want to go to jail, I suppress those natural urges. I breathe through them and squeeze my fists and engage my executive functioning skills and stay, what appears to her, mostly calm.
And just as I said above, it may seem like the stress has passed when she herself calms down or we can move on to bedtime, but I’ve never completed my own action urges. I’ve never fought or fled. My higher-order self is proud that I haven’t, but that doesn’t make my mammalian body feel any better. The stress of those urges aren’t gone, they are just suppressed for the sake of my values.
And what happens when we continuously suppress those urges, even when it’s serving an important purpose? Well, you’ve heard of stress-related illnesses. You’ve heard of depression and anxiety. You’ve heard of burnout. Those are what happens when we chronically suppress those drives without ever figuring out other ways to complete the stress cycle.
Here’s what I notice too, when we suppress those urges for the sake of our kids or other vulnerable people or people we don’t want to harm (for example, our students or clients or customers). Because the nervous system urge to fight is still there, we often express that with the first safe person with whom to do that. For many of us, that’s our romantic partner. To me, this explains at least 60% of why marriage while raising young children is so freaking difficult.
Now, the answer here is most certainly not to rage at our kids or to flee our home whenever they tantrum. Suppressing the mammalian urge for the sake of our values and good parenting is actually vital. But then so is going back later to the stress and doing something about it – something that’s not picking a fight with our spouse – so that it doesn’t stay stuck.
The cool thing about completing the stress cycle is that there are actually a lot of ways to do it. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be directly through fighting or fleeing. As I referenced earlier, exercise is the one that seems to get cited the most, and for better or worse, it’s for good reason. The physicality of movement helps discharge that energy in an effective way. But if physical activity is possible or preferable, there are lots of other options too. You can journal. You can vent to a friend. You can have sex. You can color mandalas. You can write an angry letter to your congressperson.
Completing the stress cycle is about connecting with that unprocessed urge that got stuck inside you earlier and discharging the energy from it. When you get into the habit of doing it regularly, your body doesn’t have to store all that up anymore. You sleep better. You feel better. You’re nicer.
While I hope that we all find ways to complete the stress cycle, I hope even more that understanding what’s happening in our bodies as parents or the people who have to stay regulated for any number of reasons feels helpful and validating. When I started to observe these processes happening in my own life, I noticed a couple of things.
First, I started being able to narrate this process to myself in the moment. When my daughter was tantruming, I could remind myself that it’s actually good because she’s completing her own stress cycle. I was going to keep her and myself safe, of course, but letting her complete the cycle is what is helping her body actually stay much healthier. I could also remind myself that while I did need to keep myself regulated for her sake while this was happening, I could be assured that later I would discharge my own stress. Just knowing this helped in my regulation efforts.
It also helps me to be able to better offer myself grace and compassion, both when I don’t stay as regulated (because we all have limits to our capacity for this) and for what makes being an adult and a parent so ridiculously hard. Our inner four-year-olds just want to rage and lock ourselves in our closets, but we don’t. We sit a few feet away being the parent we may have also needed.
