Ask Jay: How Do You Take Care of Yourself Through Life’s Hardest Seasons?

Jay Shetty (0:00)

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Hey, it's Jay. I don't know what your day's been like, but I was just thinking about you for a minute. And I hope you're being a little patient with yourself because you deserve it. And yeah, I'll talk to you soon.

Today we're talking about health.

So much of our lives are built around the feeling of control. But when physical or mental health challenges show up, that control can vanish overnight. It can feel terrifying, isolating and utterly exhausting to navigate a body or a mind that feels like it is working against you. I'm ready to dive into these messages with you today. Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_2 (1:54)

Hi Jay. I just had my third baby. I am in the thick of the postpartum period. I have postpartum anxiety pretty bad with him, like I did with my first baby. I was diagnosed with preeclampsia and had to be readmitted. That threw my anxiety into a whirlwind. I'm also a mom baby nurse, so I know too much. But postpartum preeclampsia is just not talked about enough. Being in this situation, going through one of the scariest things that a postpartum mom can go through. How do we move past trauma when we're currently living what we most feared would happen?

Jay Shetty (2:31)

Congratulations on your third baby.

As exciting as that is, I'm also so sorry you're dealing with postpartum anxiety for a second time. I obviously have no idea what that must be like, and I commend you for working through it. You mentioned that postpartum preeclampsia isn't talked about enough, and I agree. So let me explain it for anyone listening who might not be familiar with it. Not for you, because you're a mom baby nurse, and you know this better than I do. So you can correct me if I get it wrong. But postpartum preeclampsia is a condition involving dangerously high blood pressure after giving birth, and it is really hard to predict. Left untreated, it can cause seizures and strokes. And what makes it super dangerous is that in general, the blood pressure peaks tend to happen somewhere between day three and day six after delivery. That's important because most patients are discharged from the hospital around 48 hours after delivery, which means that the highest risk period lands after you've gone home. You're on your own with a newborn, running on no sleep, and then something life-threatening happens. And I'll bet that when people find out you're a nurse, they say something like, well, at least you know what's happening. But you don't just know what's happening. You know every way it can go.

You have seen the bad outcomes, not as statistics, but with real people.

So to your actual question, how do we move past trauma when we're currently living the thing we were most afraid of?

Moving past something is work you do after that thing is over. And it does not sound like it is over for you yet. Maybe part of what's exhausting you is trying to recover from something you're not done experiencing yet, which is a bit like trying to review a movie you're currently watching right now. But there is real work you can do right now. But to be clear, I would never pretend to know how you should manage your postpartum anxiety or preeclampsia. But I want to do my best to answer your question about navigating trauma in the midst of living a major fear.

There's a well-known piece of research by psychologist Chris Bruin and his colleagues studying what predicts whether someone develops lasting trauma. What they found is that some of the strongest factors were the circumstances surrounding the event, including whether the person had support around them.