Scary thoughts, irrational fears, worried “what if,” thinking, or imagining disturbing scenarios that play out in your mind are one of the lesser talked about downsides of motherhood.
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In the eras before motherhood, becoming a parent can seem blissful, seamless, and even like the best time of your life. Society tends to portray parenthood—and particularly motherhood—through rose-coloured glasses. And while it *is* rewarding to become a mom (don’t get me wrong!), there are some things that make the experience emotionally difficult at times.
Why Your Mind Sometimes Automatically Goes to the Worst Case Scenario
Scary thoughts, irrational fears, worried “what if” thinking, or imagining disturbing scenarios can happen to anyone. In fact, random, unwanted, or even bizarre thoughts are a normal part of being human.
However, these thoughts often become more noticeable during periods of stress, uncertainty, major life transitions, or heightened responsibility. For many parents, particularly during pregnancy and early parenthood, the combination of caring for a vulnerable child, adjusting to a new identity, and navigating significant life changes can make these thoughts feel louder and more frequent.
If you find yourself constantly imagining the worst-case scenario, you’re not alone. Many parents experience intrusive thoughts during pregnancy and early parenting. While occasional intrusive thoughts are common, thoughts that cause significant distress, interfere with daily life, or lead to constant worry, avoidance, or reassurance-seeking deserve attention and support.
These thoughts often show up as “what if” scenarios about your child’s safety, your own safety, or things going terribly wrong. While they can feel intense and unsettling, they are often part of how the brain tries to prepare for and prevent danger.
These scary thoughts have a name: intrusive thoughts. They’re a symptom of anxiety and there’s a lot you can do to manage them.
What are intrusive thoughts?
Intrusive thoughts are the worries or fears that pop into your mind and for moms, they often relate to harm coming to your children. Even though they’re just thoughts, they can really negatively affect how a woman experiences motherhood.
They can leave moms constantly fearing the worst, wondering if their thoughts could be premonitions, or they may even put an excessive amount of energy into avoiding certain situations in case the hypothetical scenarios that they’re imagining become reality.
Not sure if you’re experiencing intrusive thoughts? Scary thoughts in motherhood can truly be about anything, but they often show up in four categories (really, the mind can endlessly create scary thoughts to worry about). The breakdown is as follows:
- Physical injury: Whether it’s a car crash, imagining your child falling down the stairs or slipping from a high surface, fears about physical injuries are one of the most common categories of intrusive thoughts that parents experience.
- Harm coming to you: Sometimes the irrational fear is about you! You might be enjoying an otherwise nice day with your family when suddenly your mind wanders to what would happen to your family if you took a fall or if your plane went down.
- Fears around violence or abuse: Some people will have scary thoughts that involve harming their child on purpose. Sometimes mothers will notice themselves worrying about a scenario where a trusted adult abuses their child, or even a scenario where they themselves enact harm. This is a common theme of intrusive thoughts as a parent. It’s also one of the hardest to sit with.
- Worries about serious illness: Health anxiety has always been a main pillar of worried thinking in motherhood but that has just gotten worse with the pandemic. Many parents notice that their days get interrupted with thoughts about their kids getting anything from COVID to food poisoning to a respiratory infection.
What do intrusive thoughts as a parent sound like?
Intrusive thoughts or irrational fears in parenthood typically play out in the internal dialogue you have with yourself. Below are examples of what these thoughts might sound like. If you’ve noticed your thoughts follow a similar vein of thinking, you’re likely dealing with intrusive thoughts.
- “My child is going skiing. What if she falls and breaks her leg?”
- A sudden urge to let go while holding them over a balcony or elevated surface
- “I’m going on a business trip. What happens if the plane crashes?”
- “My son/daughter is doing so well in sports but what if I can’t trust the coach?”
- “My baby just coughed. Could this be a symptom of something more serious?”
- Picturing your baby slipping under the water during bath time
- “I want my child to experience the outdoors but are the rivers/ledges/ocean too much of a risk?”
- “What if I accidentally gave them too much medicine and I didn’t notice?”
Why Do Parents Imagine the Worst Case Scenario?
Imagining the worst case scenario is often your brain’s way of trying to protect your child. When you become a parent, your awareness of risk increases significantly.
Your mind starts scanning for potential dangers so you can prevent them. While this can be helpful in small doses, it can become overwhelming when your brain gets stuck in a loop of constantly predicting what could go wrong. This doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It means your brain is working overtime to keep your child safe.
Why are intrusive thoughts so common in early parenthood?
Although our thoughts might significantly impact our day, they can be a window into what’s going on on a deeper level. Intrusive thoughts aren’t pleasant to experience, sure. But they do have an explanation.
When we understand *why* our brains jump to worst-case-scenario thinking, that context alone can put us at ease. In understanding the reasoning for this part of our thought processes, we almost take their power away because we’re no longer scared by them.
The reason why so many new or soon-to-be parents deal with unsettling thinking is because caring for a baby or young child automatically means that there are more threats to be aware of.
You’re responsible for a vulnerable being and because of that, you’re privy to all the factors that could put them in harm’s way. Your brain is wired to be on the lookout. While that may be emotionally taxing at times, it makes sense, right?
What do the thoughts mean?
One of the most important things to understand about intrusive thoughts is that they don’t tell you anything meaningful about your character, your values, or your abilities as a parent. So if this whole post has outlined your reality, you can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that it doesn’t mean anything bad about you as a mom.
Many women worry that the presence of a disturbing thought somehow indicates that they will act it out. (For example, thinking about a child falling down the stairs might make a mom worry for a split second that she will actually push them.) That’s something that many people experience outside of parenthood too—it’s just that as a parent, these fears might feel more intense or frequent. For example, many of us have stood on a balcony at high heights and worried for a moment whether or not we’d jump. But that’s easy to shrug off knowing that we don’t actually intend to do so.
When Scary Thoughts Start Taking Up Too Much Space
Intrusive thoughts are often associated with anxiety, and for some people they can also be part of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). However, having intrusive thoughts does not automatically mean you have OCD.
One of the key differences is how someone responds to the thoughts. People struggling with OCD often find themselves caught in cycles of checking, reassurance-seeking, researching, avoiding situations, replaying scenarios in their mind, or trying to figure out what the thoughts “mean.” These behaviours can temporarily reduce anxiety, but often keep the cycle going over time.
Because intrusive thoughts and OCD can overlap, it’s important to seek support, like therapy, if these experiences are causing significant distress or interfering with your daily life.
In therapy, one of the goals is often not to eliminate the thoughts entirely, but to change your relationship with them. Rather than treating every scary thought like a problem that needs to be solved, we help people learn how to notice the thought, recognize it for what it is, and reduce the urge to engage with it. Because intrusive thoughts, anxiety, and OCD can overlap, it’s important to seek support if these experiences are causing significant distress or interfering with your daily life.
What to Do When You Can’t Stop Imagining the Worst Case Scenario
If your mind feels stuck in these patterns of scary thoughts and worst case scenarios, the goal isn’t to eliminate the thoughts completely. It’s to change how you relate to them.
Step 1: Notice and Name the Thought
The first step is recognizing what’s happening. Instead of immediately getting pulled into the content of the thought, try naming it:
- “That’s an intrusive thought.”
- “That’s anxiety talking.”
- “There’s another worst-case scenario.”
- “My brain is trying to protect me right now.”
Naming the experience can help create a little distance between you and the thought.
Step 2: Resist the Urge to Engage
When intrusive thoughts show up, many parents naturally try to make themselves feel better by analyzing the thought, researching it, seeking reassurance, replaying the scenario, or trying to prove the thought isn’t true.
While these responses make sense, they often keep the anxiety cycle going. Rather than trying to solve the thought, see if you can allow uncertainty to exist without continuing to engage with it.
Step 3: Return to the Present Moment
Once you’ve noticed the thought and resisted the urge to engage with it, gently bring your attention back to the present moment.
Some parents find it helpful to:
- Notice five things they can see
- Take a few slow breaths
- Feel their feet on the floor
- Focus on the task they’re currently doing
- Engage their senses and reconnect with what’s happening right now
The goal isn’t to make the thought disappear. The goal is to stop letting it dictate your attention and behaviour. Over time, learning to respond to these thoughts with less fear and urgency can reduce how intense and frequent they feel.
That said, if you feel like your scary thoughts are actually in alignment with what you want, or what you think should happen, then this would be a medical emergency and reason to reach out for help asap. If you have intentions or desires of harming yourself or others, call 911 right away.
Getting Support for Intrusive Thoughts
If intrusive thoughts are frequent for you and troubling your day-to-day life, then we encourage you to look at ways to manage anxiety more generally. That can look like simple things like practicing mindfulness, limiting scary TV shows or movies, journaling before bed, prioritizing sleep, therapy, getting out in nature, or cuddling a pet.
This is also an area that we can support you with in counselling, as all the therapists on our team have advanced training in things like anxiety and intrusive thoughts. We can help put your mind at ease, and also help you build skills to manage this symptom. Feel free to book a session with one of our therapists today.
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