The Key To Less Cortisol

Warning: some swearing and sexual reference

If there is anything more irritating than when my children refuse to get buckled in their car seats, it is when they don’t actually mind getting buckled in their car seats, and the only thing standing between me and backing out of my driveway is my goddamn missing keys. I’ve lost my keys or something of equal importance so often that I’ve unwittingly conditioned my two-year-old to ask if I have my (insert thing I forgot yesterday) every time I switch into reverse.

Sometimes a mild case of absent-mindedness sends me running back inside to grab my phone from the charger, but other times—more often than is probably sane— my losing things is….. an event. The recognition that I don’t have what I need and am out of places to look yields a particular fluster that starts in a hot knot at my center then seeps like magma to the surface of my skin as the ticking of time swallows my ability to see straight, taking my logical brain offline and rendering me a useless twister of emotion. The window between hot knot and total vexation escalades quickly, and before I know it, I am plowing through the house, slamming drawers, throwing back sheets, and stabbing into pockets of clothing I haven’t worn in weeks in a nonsensical search hijacked by rage.

In the most recent episode of flipping my lid before 9:00 am, I was triggered by the unknown whereabouts of my phone (yes, phone this time! My phone and keys are essentially interchangeable in regards to the frequency I lose them) ten minutes past when we were meant to leave for pre-school. It was a Wednesday morning after a holiday break which meant it’d been a week since I’d heard any of my own thoughts. The car was packed, the kids were buckled, my phone was lost. If not for the immediate request for Elmo’s Alphabet Rap (thoughts and prayers for my Spotify account) from the backseat, I would have driven away without it, but it’s fair to say I benefit from my children’s gift for chance punctuality.

Back inside, I scanned the obvious sites to no avail and buckled up for the crossover to crazy town. Sweeping through the house, I raced to retrace my steps, only pausing to haphazardly shuffle through a stack of kid’s artwork, as if the black brick may appear from a pile of glittered construction paper. Despite my illogical fugue, I knew it was time to renounce my search in lieu of a day without my pocket computer. Ire in my veins, I bolted toward the front door, but instead of side-stepping an empty toy basket in my walking path, I made the very mature choice to punt it, slipping on the jute rug in my entryway like a Loony Tune on a banana peel. Suddenly horizontal and with a not unsubstantial knot forming on the back of my head, I laid and wondered how many times this scenario would have to play out before I listened when my husband tried to teach me about the FindMy app. Before I would consistently return my keys to the bowl. Before I would stop letting stress overcome me in this way. But all I could really grasp in that moment was my response under the pressure of daily life needed work— way more work than could be solved with AirTags. 

You might be wondering how I could let a missing device send me into such a tetchy tailspin as to give myself a head injury, and I’m glad you asked because I’ve lost stuff enough now to understand why their absence sends me spiraling: I absolutely cannot stand wasting time. Which, I KNOW, is not a great trait for a woman whose children take upwards of three years to put on pajamas, but that’s kind of beside the point because nothing makes me angry quite like losing something when I’m late. That, and when adult-aged families span the ENTIRE CORRIDOR of the mall leisurely strolling in a clueless paper doll chain as if all of us enjoy an adagio pace en route to Dillards. Anyway. These grievances point to the same conclusion: I’m a girl in a hurry and I’m mad when I can’t keep the pace I prefer. 

In addition to all the time I spend (waste) running around batshit in pursuit of my to-go internet and some scraggly metal, plenty other slight offenders slow me down. Water bottles left in the fridge, a nap mat on the dryer, a smoothie I spent ten minutes I didn’t have making only to forget it near the coffee pot have all contributed to my u-turns. This kind of close-to-home forgetfulness really pushes my buttons, but way worse was when I was a single right turn away from being on time for drop-off when I realized my oldest child was not wearing shoes. Sitting at the light, I clawed through my hair and gave a closed-mouth growl. “Mommy, are you mad at me?” I exhaled and told her the truth. “No baby, I’m mad at me.”

My friend Sara (name changed) and I are in a similar stage of motherhood. We tend to have corresponding parenting (and life) philosophies, and have been a positive and validating source in each other’s lives since we moved across the street from each other at the same time two years ago. By some miracle, she is also a mental health counselor, which is to say that she is a phenomenal listener and a wealth of knowledge when it comes to recalibrating the body from an elevated state (much to do with her trauma training). Sara told me that when she feels frustrated—as we tend to be when it’s past bedtime and we’re still negotiating the book stack. Or, say, when a kid is shoeless at our destination—she clenches her fists tightly for a few seconds then releases, over and over again until her irritation passes. In theory, I loved this idea. Moving my anger along with the release of clenched fists sounded like a favorable alternative to brawling with the urge to yell. But when I tried her strategy, I found that my variety of mad exceeded the confines of my hands, and my cortisol needed wider filters. 

The solution—“solution” feels generous— the *better option* I came up with was the addition of jump squats (stay with me). At the bottom of a squat, I’d pulse with my hands tightly squeezed for five seconds, then jump as high as I could, opening my hands as I sprung from my sticky kitchen floors. If, unlike me, exercise doesn’t sound like an appealing route to relief, apologies, but I rely on it. The buildup of stress in my body (when something is missing, or someone is screaming, or something is something else) needs somewhere to go, and physical exertion is often the most productive (non-damaging) path. At any rate, I don’t want to tell you the embarrassing amount of jump squats I have to do for this to work even a little bit (my kids know), but if I had to live with this much tension, I guess there was solace in a tighter tush. 

It’s true I get worked up and feel crazy all the time—the loss of my phone, my keys, or my mind, a mere byproduct of the ongoing overstimulation and multitasking particularly present in early motherhood. And still, especially because I’m a mom, I know I have to find better ways to cope with my big feelings apart from kicking a field goal with a storage basket, for example. But the petty truth is that I am often discouraged by my own design. I get that it’s my adult responsibility to control myself when I feel angry or overwhelmed, or any less than stellar sensation that runs the gamut of negative emotions; And yet, it is not super crystal clear how to do that in a body that so frequently operates from a stance of fight or flight. I have learned that my physiology has the tendency to translate feelings of overwhelm into a state of unhinged autopilot, which frankly isn’t a circumstance I can ignore.

If only my plight could be solved with a bit of awareness. Just a few deep breathes and a willingness to pause long enough so that I may take flight into an ethereal Mother Teresa. Except that it’s never been that easy. Just as I refreshed my effort to be less reactive, I did a melodramatic one-handed dump of our entire diaper bag in the Target parking lot in another brainless, dissociative panic looking for keys that weren’t there because I’d abandoned them at customer service while dealing with the equity of snack distribution between the sibset in my cart—this whole scenario a reminder that just because I discreetly read an electronic copy of The Angry Mom’s Guide To Self-Regulation doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to cancel my subscription to the bountiful e-library that is Kindle Unlimited. In other words, if I want to handle these stressful situations with the kind of collected calm I want my kids to see, I’ll be hard-pressed not to arm myself with a strong behavioral blueprint for just $11.99 a month. 

Herein lies my point. Sure, I’d really love to stop going in circles in search of my singular means of vehicular transport, but more importantly, I want to model negative emotions that offer a positive outcome for my kids. I want to show them that despite discomfort in our bodies, it remains our responsibility to handle ourselves well. And lucky for me, life offers the opportunity to practice in the form of lost keys, or phone, or shoes, or time every single day— all of these predicaments urging me to remember the tools I’ve gathered on this quest to do better, some of which include: box breathing, tapping on meridian points, placing an icepack on my neck, visualizing my body as an anchor, vagus nerve massage, jaw massage, ear massage— ALL THE WAYS YOU CAN MASSAGE!

One technique in particular has been especially worth noting, perhaps because it is most similar to the physical release offered by jump squats (I am so sorry to use the phrase, “physical release.” It’s exactly what I mean and yet it sounds like something else I do not have to explain). It’s called “voo breath” and it’s just as weird as it sounds. You take a deep inhale through your nose, then exhale as you say vooooooooo, which is a relief as much as it is the sound of a potentially horny dinosaur, which I can’t be sure is any less detrimental to my kids than losing my cool. So I’m shelving it.

While I continue down this imperfect path of trial and error, in the meantime, I’ve let this essay sit unfinished for weeks believing I had to have the perfect archive of effective tools that work every time in order to earn the right to talk about it. If I didn’t have a clear-cut, step-by-step, how-to guide for maintaining equanimity while driving in a high-volume hot box, had I done what I’d set out to do? Did I have enough of a solution to address emotional instability, especially as it relates to motherhood? 

Of course, now I believe the answer is yes. While I do not have the ongoing capacity to model difficult emotions flawlessly every time, I do have a new therapist, and babysitters, and earplugs, and exercise. I have a partner and close friends who are willing to talk about the challenge of handling the unbridled emotions that make us human, which has helped me see that working through these less savored experiences are part of the privilege of parenting, and the catalyst for our growth. So even on my hardest days, when my needs are not met and my tools are not sharp, I relax a little knowing that at the very least, I can aim to get the keys in the bowl.