Support Your Nervous System in Early Motherhood

Gosh, early motherhood is a full-body experience. It’s not imagined either! Your nervous system is doing night shifts, your heart is doing doubles (and feeling like it is outside of your body) and your mind is trying to keep up.

It’s why I believe that supporting a mother’s nervous system is so important to her ability to cope and foundational to everything else that is happening around her.

Your system is always scanning

In early motherhood, your nervous system is scanning on overdrive but because you’re biologically wired to track your baby and your environment for safety. It’s the constant listening for the cry, checking of breathing, the background awareness of time, milk, nappies, sleep. Even when you’re resting, a part of you can feel like it’s still on watch.

In polyvagal terms, your body is continuously detecting cues of safety or danger beneath conscious thought, and your autonomic state shifts accordingly. This is why you can feel fine one moment, then suddenly tight, edgey, emotional or shut down the next.

So nervous system support in motherhood is important to help gently stack the deck in your favour by adding small, realistic cues of safety.

Four practical supports for new mums

1) Track glimmers and build on cues of safety on purpose

Humans have a well-established negativity bias, meaning “bad” tends to register faster and stickier than “good”. Glimmers are tiny cues of safety that support a shift toward ventral vagal regulation (more connection, more capacity). These cues of safety and sociality are central in downshifting threat responses.

Glimmers can be tiny:

• warm shower

• sun on your face

• music that softens your heart

• one kind message with a friend

By steeping in these glimmers for 20-seconds essentially you are training your system to register safety. You are letting your body take in evidence that, right now, something is OK. You can use my Free Glimmer Tracker to assist you.

2) Use co-regulation and supports

Co-regulation is super biological. Research describes co-regulation as a mutual, multi-level process where two nervous systems influence each other across physiology (stress hormones, autonomic activation) and behaviour (tone of voice, facial expression, proximity).

There’s also evidence that social support can reduce physiological stress responses, compared with being alone, even when the stressor is physical.

And when no safe person is available in the moment, “imagined support” (bringing a supportive figure to mind, remembering how it feels to be met) is often used clinically because the nervous system can respond to felt sense and memory, not only what’s physically present. In the broader research base, perceived support is consistently linked with lower stress and better mental health outcomes.

3) Take your regulation outside

Nature-based interventions for pregnant and postpartum women are an emerging area of research, with systematic reviews specifically exploring outcomes for perinatal depression, anxiety, and loneliness.

This matters because nature can offer steady, non-demanding cues of safety. Think natural light (circadian support), gentle movement, sensory settling, and a break from constant social performance. A conceptual review on postnatal wellbeing maps several of these pathways as plausibly relevant for new mothers.

Even micro-doses count. So standing on the front step, looking up at the sky, sitting under a tree. There’s also growing interest in co-designed postnatal nature interventions, suggesting both acceptability and promise in this space.

4) A hand on the body, many times a day

Another option is to change your relationship to what’s happening inside you is the move from managing experience to being with experience, which is strongly linked to reduced struggle and more regulation over time.

Research on mindfulness-based interventions in the perinatal period suggests they can reduce postpartum depressive symptoms and support emotional wellbeing, with the strongest effects often coming from simple, repeatable practices that build present-moment awareness and self-compassion.

Bringing gentle, non-judgemental attention to body sensation is one way to assist with emotional and regulation processes.

How to do it (30 to 60 seconds):

• Place one hand somewhere neutral or comforting (thigh, chest, belly, upper arm).

• Name what’s here in simple language: tight, fluttery, heavy, blank, hot, numb.

• Offer one phrase of companionship rather than fixing:

  “I’m here.”

  “This belongs.”

  “I can be with this for one breath.”

• Let the hand be an anchor without the need to change anything.

This is practice invites co-presence with yourself and over time builds the inner safety cue of “I’m not alone in here”.

Simple next step

If you’d like something to hold you through the day, I’ve created a 5-day meditation audio journey as a soft landing place for your nervous system. It’s short, supportive, and designed for real motherhood, where practice needs to be doable.