The Anxiety You're Carrying Might Not Be Yours
If you've spent years managing anxiety - therapy, mindset work, meditation, all of it - and still feel like you're white-knuckling your way through certain days, this might be the most important thing you read.
Because what if the anxiety you feel isn't a personality trait? What if it isn't even yours?
What the research says
Researcher Rachel Yehuda has spent her career studying how stress passes between generations - and what she found challenges everything we assume about anxiety and mental health.
Her work shows that a mother's cortisol levels during pregnancy directly shape how her child's nervous system develops. Not just emotionally, but physiologically. The way a child is wired to respond to stress, to perceived threat, to uncertainty - all of it can be influenced by what their mother experienced in the womb.
So if your mum had a stressful pregnancy, or lived through a traumatic period during that time, that stress pattern may have been passed on to you. And if her mother did too, it could be running generations deep.
This is called intergenerational stress transmission. And it reframes anxiety not as something you developed, or something you need to just push through - but as something with a physiological origin that may predate you entirely.
What this means if you're pregnant now
If you're currently pregnant, this research carries a particular weight - because the nervous system environment you create during pregnancy will shape your child's too.
Working on your own stress response during pregnancy isn't indulgent. It isn't optional self-care you fit in when the to-do list is done. It's one of the most meaningful things you can do for the long-term health and resilience of your baby.
That might look like nervous system-supportive herbs, magnesium, breathwork, reducing unnecessary stressors, or simply having support from a practitioner who understands the stakes.
You don't have to just live with it
Whether you're in a preconception, pregnancy, or postpartum season - if chronic anxiety or a nervous system that feels permanently on edge is part of your experience, there is so much we can do.
If you'd like to talk through what that support could look like for you, I offer a free 10-minute chat. No pressure, just a conversation.
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