When Motherhood Feels Lonely and the Feelings Feel Too Big
Key Takeaways For The Busy Mum
Feeling lonely in motherhood is common and often physiological, not a personal failing. You can feel alone even when you are never by yourself.
Big emotions like overwhelm, rage, grief, anxiety or numbness are normal responses to hormonal shifts, sleep disruption and caring for others without enough support.
Your nervous system plays a central role in how you experience motherhood. When it feels unsafe or unsupported, emotions can become louder and harder to hold.
Gentle, somatic practices can help you feel more grounded, connected and supported in everyday moments, even with very little time.
You are not meant to do this alone. Support, guidance and co-regulation matter just as much for mothers as they do for children.
Many mums I work with and those I get the privilege to just hang out with share how there are days or fleeting moments when the challenges you face as a mother feel lonely.
Like they can be with people all the time yet a struggle they are facing can feel so unseen. It might be healing from birth, breast feeding challenges, navigating life with a toddler and a new born, parenting on your own or with aging parents, health issues, concerns for a child’s wellbeing, financial stress….
Many mothers I work with tell me they expected exhaustion (although not to the extent they feel it!). They expected their lives to change. What they did not expect was the intensity of the emotions, or how alone they might feel inside them.
The waves can be big. One minute you are feeling a love that feels almost unbearable and then a rage arrives or a grief for the life you had before. Guilt for wanting space. Anxiety that hums in the background. Numbness that can sneak in when it all feels too much.
No one really prepares us for this part or talks openly about it.
From a nervous system perspective, it makes so much sense. Your body has gone through enormous change. Hormones shift. Sleep is disrupted. Your system is constantly tracking another human being. On top of that, many of us are mothering without the village our bodies are wired for.
Loneliness is not just emotional. It is physiological.
When we do not feel held, mirrored or met, our nervous system can move into survival. That can look like overwhelm, irritability, shutting down or feeling like everything is just too much. Big emotions often arrive not because something is wrong, but because something inside us is asking for connection and safety.
The problem is, we are often taught to push through, cope, calm down, fix ourselves.
But what if the work is not about fixing?
What if it is about learning how to be with yourself in the middle of it all.
This is where embodiment and somatic practices can be so supportive. Instead of analysing your feelings or trying to make them go away, we slow down. We notice what is happening in the body. We learn how to gently anchor ourselves when emotions rise. We create small moments of safety that your nervous system can actually feel.
Sometimes that looks like a hand on your chest and a slower breath. Sometimes it looks like naming, quietly, this is loneliness, or this is anger, and letting that be enough. Sometimes it looks like being guided by another calm, steady voice so you do not have to do it alone.
This is exactly why I created my Insight Timer course for mothers - The Wild Edge of Motherhood.
It is a space you can drop into when the house is quiet, or when your baby is sleeping on you, or when you are sitting in the car needing a moment to breathe.
Inside the course, we explore how to meet big emotions with kindness and steadiness. We work gently with the nervous system. We normalise the emotional landscape of motherhood. And we practise coming back into the body, again and again, as a place of refuge rather than something to override.
If you are feeling lonely, overwhelmed or unsure how to hold everything you are feeling, you are so welcome there.
You do not need to be calm first. You do not need to have it all together. You just need a willingness to arrive as you are.
You belong, even here.
If you would like to join me, you can find the course on Insight Timer. Let it be something that supports you, rather than another thing you have to carry.
