How to Calm Your Mom Rage
If you’re a mom, when you hear the words “mom rage”, a certain image may come up. Maybe it brings you back to last week when you felt an uncontrollable anger, seemingly out of nowhere, that scared you. Maybe you’re thinking about last night when you lost it on your partner for leaving their dirty dishes out, or snapped at your daughter after she asked you to read the same story for the umpteenth time. All moms lose their cool every now and then - despite the pressure we feel to be the calm in the storm of family life, that calm eventually snaps. Mom rage can catch us (and our loved ones) off guard, feeling like we’re going 0-60 in the blink of an eye. It is intense and explosive, and can feel confusing, overwhelming, and even embarrassing.
If you've experienced moments as a mom where the intensity of your anger surprises, or even scares you, you’re not alone. You’re also not a “bad mom”, a “mean mom” or an “angry mom”. Mom rage is something so many moms experience, but few talk about. The silence around maternal anger only deepens the sense of shame and loneliness we experience when we feel it.
Let’s break mom rage down - what it looks like, where it comes from, and how to calm it before it boils over and consumes you. You don’t have to live in survival mode, feeling like your unaddressed anger is controlling your life. In this post you’ll learn strategies to feel more in control, less reactive and better understand what your anger is communicating to you.
What is Mom Rage, Really?
Mom rage goes beyond everyday irritability and frustrations (although these things can build up and contribute to it) - it’s the feeling of a pressure cooker of anger suddenly exploding, when you weren’t even aware it was simmering to begin with. When your mom rage explodes, you may feel a disconnection from yourself, almost like you’re watching yourself from the outside. You may see yourself snap and wonder “What’s wrong with me? Why am I acting like this? Where is all this anger coming from?”
Mom rage describes intense anger that feels disproportionate to the situation. Maybe your toddler dumped the cereal on the floor again, or your partner made another comment about how “you just need to relax.” It’s not just what happened in the moment that triggers you - it’s the buildup of everything you’ve been carrying that finally spills over.
Mom rage is incredibly common, and it doesn't mean that you’re a bad mom. It’s often actually a sign that you’re overwhelmed, burnt out, under-supported, or stuck in self-induced cycles of guilt and perfectionism. You're expecting yourself to give more than what’s sustainable for any one person to do - and your nervous system is saying “enough!”
What Mom Rage Looks Like
Mom rage doesn’t always look like screaming and yelling. That’s often a telltale sign for many women (and certainly gets the attention of our partners and kids), but it can show up in more subtle or passive ways too. Here’s some other examples of what mom rage can look like:
Snapping at your kids or partner over seemingly small things
Slamming doors or kitchen drawers
Feeling like you’re’ going to burst into tears at any second, or crying out of nowhere
Stewing silently, feeling resentment and annoyance rise in your chest
Emotional shutdown, withdrawing or stonewalling
Intense anger directed at yourself through a harsh inner dialogue like “I’m the worst mom/partner” or “Why can’t I keep it together?”
Anger is intensely physical. You might feel heat rise in your chest, your jaw clench, or your fists tighten. Some moms feel it as a red-hot surge, others as a wave of panic or racing thoughts. The volume of your anger might surprise or scare you.
After the moment passes, it’s common to feel flooded with guilt or shame, maybe even apologizing to your child through tears, worrying that each outburst colors their image of you as a mom.
Maternal Anger and Shame
One of the most painful parts of mom rage is the shame that comes after. Our culture paints the ideal mother as endlessly patient, self-sacrificing, and serene. We tell ourselves that moms are “supposed to” be calm, grateful, and nurturing - always.
So when you feel anything but patient or loving, the internal dialogue can get brutal:
“Good moms don’t yell like that.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“I swore I’d never do this, but here I am acting like my own mom.”
“I’m messing up my kids forever by treating them like this.”
But here’s the truth: anger is a valid human emotion - and the stereotype of the eternally calm, unflappable mother sounds more like a Stepford-Wife-robot than a realistic depiction of a human being. Becoming a mother doesn’t mean you stop being a person with needs and limits. Giving off an image being endlessly accommodating and emotionless doesn’t make you worthy as a mom - it actually sets a problematic example for your children for what to expect of themselves or their partners in the future. You’re allowed to feel angry, and you are certainly allowed to be curious about what that anger is telling you.
Mom rage is often just the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface is exhaustion, loneliness, unmet needs, loss of identity, lack of support or past trauma. Giving yourself permission to examine your anger more deeply (insead of stopping at the flood of judgment and shame) allows you to better understand yourself, your triggers, and intervene before your mom rage becomes all-consuming.
How to Figure Out Where Your Mom Rage is Coming From
Most of the time when we experience anger, it’s trying to communicate something to us - that we aren’t taking care of ourselves, that we’re feeling alone, spread too thin, or something even deeper is being triggered. Instead of judging ourselves for our outbursts of mom anger, it can be more helpful to notice the anger and become curious about what it’s trying to communicate: What is really going on with me? What is my body telling me it needs right now? Instead of blaming ourselves for our anger, we come to recognize that it is valid and exists for a reason.
Here are some common examples of the hidden causes of mom rage:
Sleep Deprivation and Physical Depletion
When you’re running on fumes, your brain becomes more reactive and less able to regulate your emotions. Sleep deprivation and physical exhaustion can lead to increased anger and irritability, as well as reduced patience.
Unrealistic Expectations and Perfectionism
Our culture has totally unrealistic expectations for moms - to be able to juggle the mental load for the whole family, care for everyone’s needs, be the “point person” for so many tasks and often work outside the home on top of this. The messaging that we receive makes us feel like we’re failing if we ask for help or acknowledge our struggles. When we hold ourselves to these impossible standards, anger can arise when our reality of family life as messy or chaotic doesn’t match the “perfect,” peaceful ideal.
Feeling Alone and Unsupported
Resentment arises when moms feel like they’re carrying most of the household labor all on their own, especially if they are struggling to ask for help, or maybe even have tried but still aren’t getting the support they need. Resentment can slowly build, eventually boiling over into passive-aggressive comments or full-on explosions of anger.
Postpartum Anxiety, Depression and the Transition to Motherhood
Mom rage can often result directly from postpartum anxiety, depression or the transition to motherhood. All of a sudden women are thrown into the whirlwind of responsibilities that go along with becoming a parent, often having unrealistic expectations for themselves, struggling with their new identity and feeling scared to ask for help. Add in sleep deprivation and hormonal changes and you have a recipe for a short fuse, new strong and confusing emotions, and overwhelming anger.
Overwhelm, Over-scheduling and Overstimulation
Managing the invisible mental load of parenting is exhausting - keeping track of feeding schedules, laundry, household supplies, school forms and regulating everyone’s emotions, often without writing anything down or having a moment to breathe. You’re rushing from one place to the next in the midst of tantrums, cries and tugs for attention. Your nervous system is on overdrive and your heart is racing to get to the next appointment on time. Eventually, all this building tension leads to an explosion.
Suppressed and Unmet Needs
As moms, it feels like our most important job is to take care of everyone in our family’s needs - often at a cost to our own. Sometimes there really are urgent, safety needs that need to get addressed for our children and spouses - and sometimes they aren’t that urgent at all, but just feel that way. Our needs are often more complex than we even realize - we have our obvious biological needs like sleep and hunger, but social needs and emotional needs are important too - things like feeling connected to others, feeling respected and having purposeful and stimulating activities in our lives. When we neglect our needs we will eventually start to feel depressed, overwhelmed, resentful and angry.
Understanding the underlying factors that are triggering your mom rage (sometimes it’s just one, but often it’s a bunch all piled on top of each other) can help you to understand where your anger is coming from, have compassion for yourself and break free from shame, which grows the more you isolate and self-blame. Understanding your triggers will also help you understand the key to taking care of yourself and asking for what you need, before your frustration and resentment bubble into full blown, explosive mom rage.
Calming Your Mom Rage
Let’s be clear - calming your mom rage does NOT mean never feeling angry. Anger is a normal human emotion, and motherhood is one of the most demanding jobs there is - we are bound to feel angry as moms from time to time. Calming your mom rage means working to change the way you express your anger so that it doesn’t feel so scary and uncontrollable to yourself and everyone around you. Here are some strategies that can help:
Pause before you act
Try to get into the habit of noticing the warning signs that your anger is bubbling up (pay attention to bodily cues like racing heartbeat, flushed cheeks or tightness in your chest) and take a moment to pause before you act on it. Taking a deep breath, walking into another room or excusing yourself to splash water on your face can make a huge difference in interrupting your body’s gut response to lash out in anger.
Name what’s happening (without judging)
When we feel angry, it’s important to acknowledge it rather than trying to push the feelings down - this helps to combat shame, take ownership of our emotions and signal to our brains that we’re noticing the signals it’s sending us. This can actually help reduce the intensity of the emotion, and help you to feel founded instead of confused.
Identify what’s triggering you
Allow yourself to be curious about where this anger is coming from - have you had too much on your plate lately? Has your partner been out of town and you’re still recovering? Have you not been getting enough sleep or time for yourself? Understanding your triggers can help you to make sense of your mom rage, rather than feeling blindsided and controlled by it.
Breathe
When you feel angry, your body tenses up - your muscles may become tighter, your heart rate increases and your breath becomes more shallow. Interrupting this cycle by intentionally taking deep breaths can help your muscles to relax, your heart rate to slow down and cause you to overall feel more calm.
Find safe outlets for your anger
Anger is a normal emotion that needs an outlet. Find a healthy way to get out your frustrations before they turn into mom rage - try going for regular walks, allowing yourself to free-journal, dance out your anger or even try something like kickboxing classes. Physical activity can be especially therapeutic when it comes to calming angry feelings.
Ask for help
Communicating with those around you is so important when you’re feeling burnt out, spread thin and resentful. Even those closest to you can’t read your mind, and often won’t know how much you’re struggling until you tell them. This can look like not just asking your partner for help but allowing yourself to get support from friends and extended family members as well. Even just talking about your mom rage to a close friend can help you feel seen and supported instead of alone and ashamed - shame thrives with secrecy, and sharing our experience of shame with others allows us to work through it.
Take care of your needs proactively
Before you get to the point of feeling totally burnt-out, try to be intentional about making time for yourself in your routine. Communicate with your partner when you’re starting to feel spread-thin. Ask for time to go to the gym, take a pottery class or have a movie night with a friend. Having these moments regularly built into your routine can go along way in preventing day to day frustrations from building to the point of mom rage.
Lower the bar
Start questioning the standards that you hold yourself to: where do these expectations come from? Why do I think they’re realistic? Is it social media? Movies? Messages from family and friends? Regardless of what others around you are saying, it’s important to remember that we are all on our own journey of parenting and if you are experiencing anger, rage and burnout on the reg, that’s a clear sign that you’re expecting too much of yourself.
Leaving the “Angry Mom” Behind
Let’s be real: you are still going to get angry sometimes. That’s part of being human - and especially part of being a mom. But what changes with calming your mom rage is how you respond to that anger, and what you allow that anger to tell you about yourself.
Feeling angry, yelling at your kids or slamming a door does not make you an “angry mom” - it makes you a normal, human mom who has too much on her plate. Trying to break free from the judging inner voice that puts labels on us (and other moms!) is crucial in getting support, feeling less rageful and setting examples for our kids of the parents we want to be.
Remember: your children don’t need a perfect mom. They need a real mom - a mom who apologizes when she loses it, who models emotional growth, and who shows them that it’s okay to have big feelings.
If you’re looking for more support in understanding your anger in motherhood or coping with the stress or being a mom, therapy can also help! Get in touch to schedule a free 15-minute consultation with an expert therapist for moms in Colorado, New York and New Jersey.
Related Posts:
How Mindfulness Can Help You Be a More Present Mom
Understanding Postpartum Anxiety
The Myth of the Perfect Mother: How to Break Free from Perfectionist Parenting
Mental Health Resources for New Moms in Denver
5 Ways Therapy Can Help Overwhelmed Moms Recovery from Burnout
Postpartum Identity Crisis? Here’s How Postpartum Anxiety Therapy Can Help
Other Services at Root to Rise Therapy:
Other mental health services at Root to Rise Therapy include Therapy for Anxiety, Therapy for Perfectionism, Therapy for People-Pleasing,Cultural Identity Counseling, ADHD Therapy, Counseling for Moms and Postpartum Counseling. I see clients located in Colorado, New York and New Jersey. Contact me to learn more about how I can help you overcome anxiety and reclaim your life!
