When Good Change Is Still Stressful
As I prepare to launch my emerging-adult daughter into the great known and unknown, I find myself taking inventory of what I hope I have helped her develop: character, resilience, flexibility, adaptability, critical thinking, kindness, astuteness, openness to experience, self-care, determination, and perseverance.
These qualities are equipment for the road ahead. They will help her meet obstacles, tolerate uncertainty, recognize risk, receive joy, recover from disappointment, and remain connected to herself as new experiences confirm some parts of her identity and challenge others.
I have spent years preparing her for this transition. I am beginning to recognize that I must also prepare myself.
Her launch changes the practical organization of our lives, the rhythm of the household, the shape of our relationship, and my daily experience of motherhood. Motherhood remains deeply meaningful, while its expression shifts. The familiar acts of care, the ordinary sounds of another person in the house, and the ongoing awareness of where she is and what she needs will occupy a different place in my life.
The change is overarchingly positive. It is also difficult.
Positive change still requires adjustment
We tend to associate stress with unwanted events such as illness, conflict, loss, or financial hardship. Yet stress also arises whenever life requires substantial reorganization. Marriage, a wanted pregnancy, graduation, retirement, professional success, moving to a new home, or watching a child become independent can all require adaptation.
A change has at least two dimensions: how welcome it is and how much reorganization it requires. An experience may be deeply wanted while also demanding new routines, relationships, responsibilities, and understandings of self.
Research across adolescent and adult populations suggests that the impact of a life transition is shaped by more than whether the change is welcome. The amount of change, its duration, its personal significance, and the reorganization it demands can all affect mood, stress, sleep, and well-being. A positive transition can therefore feel emotionally rewarding while still activating the body and requiring a period of adjustment.
Stress physiology offers the concept of allostasis, meaning the process of maintaining stability through change. When circumstances shift, the brain and body recruit energy to help us respond. Attention, sleep, appetite, muscle tension, and energy may change. We may feel restless, fatigued, tearful, unusually alert, or temporarily disorganized.
This is the body adapting. A transition therefore occurs cognitively, practically, emotionally, socially, and physiologically.
What the body knows about change
A sensorimotor perspective invites curiosity about how a transition is organized in the body.
The mind may understand that a child is ready to leave. The body may still tighten at the thought of the first quiet evening. The mind may feel proud. The chest may ache. The practical plans may be complete while sleep becomes disrupted as the departure approaches.
Our bodies learn relationships through repetition. They learn the sound of someone entering the house, the time they usually return, the movement of attending to them, and the subtle orientation that occurs when we listen for their voice or footsteps. When those patterns change, the body learns the new reality through lived experience. Intellectual understanding can arrive well before physiological familiarity.
In sensorimotor psychotherapy, tracking involves noticing present-moment sensations, posture, breath, movement, impulses, and changes in arousal with curiosity.
When I imagine returning to a quieter home, what happens to my breathing? Do my shoulders lift? Do I feel an impulse to reach, move, organize, call someone, fill the room with sound, or become still? What happens when I imagine her thriving? Can I remain with the softening, warmth, or expansion associated with pride?
These observations show where support, movement, rest, connection, or expression may be needed. They can also reveal resources already present: the capacity to orient toward something meaningful, reach for another person, experience faith, enjoy creative work, or feel grounded in professional and personal purpose.
The mixed experience of the empty nest
Research describes two processes that may occur together during the empty-nest transition: role loss and relief from role strain.
Parents may experience greater freedom, more time, and renewed energy for relationships, work, creativity, and rest. They may also feel the loss of a familiar role, routine, source of connection, and structure for meaning. Some parents experience loneliness or reduced well-being, others experience greater well-being, and many experience both loss and opportunity. Social connection, other meaningful roles, family relationships, cultural expectations, and ongoing contact with adult children all shape the experience.
Pride and grief can coexist. Relief can sit beside apprehension. Love can include both the impulse to hold close and the capacity to let go.
Grief in this context often reflects attachment, significance, and the passage of time. It may include grief for the child’s earlier stages, for a family era that is ending, and for the version of oneself that was needed during those years. Giving that grief space allows the transition to be integrated.
Moving through the transition
How I move through this will become part of what I teach my daughter.
A healthy model includes honest emotion, appropriate support, flexible routines, and responsibility for my own regulation. It permits sadness without asking her to retreat from her life to relieve it. It allows connection to mature into an increasingly adult-to-adult relationship.
Protective factors may include supportive relationships, physical movement, restorative sleep, predictable routines, meaningful activity, faith or community connection, creative expression, and identities beyond a single role. Ritual can also help mark the transition: a final family meal, a letter, a blessing, a photograph, or a deliberate goodbye.
The transition may become harder when grief if every quiet space is immediately filled, social connection decreases, or a parent expects an entirely new identity to appear at once.
Should I take some time off to breathe, grieve, or explore? Perhaps. A brief pause may create space to sleep, walk, pray, write, cry, create, and notice the experience before daily obligations gather around it. The pause does not need to produce a five-year plan. It can begin with smaller questions:
What do I miss? What feels lighter? What needs expression? What brings energy? What parts of me have been waiting for more room? What kind of relationship do I hope to build with my daughter as two adults?
I can know that she is ready and still feel the ache of her leaving. I can feel proud of what I have helped prepare her for and wonder who I will become in the quieter spaces. I can grieve a change while remaining open to the life taking shape on both sides of it.
Perhaps this is one of the deeper tasks of a positive transition: allowing the body time to catch up with what the mind already understands.
She is moving more into her own her life.
And I am moving, too.
Disclaimer & Continued Reading
This post is for general psychoeducational purposes only and does not constitute psychological advice or therapy. It is not intended to replace personalized care from a licensed mental health professional in Canada. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, speaking with a trained professional may help you better navigate this experience and protect your own well-being.
A note on context and culture: An adult child leaving home does not hold the same meaning in every family. Cultural values, family structure, expectations about interdependence and caregiving, financial realities, gender roles, the circumstances of the move, and the quality of the parent–adult child relationship all shape whether this transition is experienced as welcome, painful, relieving, destabilizing, or some mixture of these. For some families, ongoing closeness, shared households, or reciprocal care across generations means there may be no clear “empty nest” at all. The point is not that leaving home is inherently stressful or negative. It is that any meaningful shift in family roles, routines, attachment patterns, and daily life can require reorganization, and that adaptive work may carry strain even when the change is wanted, developmentally appropriate, and full of pride.
Additional Reading/Research:
Bennik, E. C., Ormel, J., and Oldehinkel, A. J. (2013). Life changes and depressive symptoms: The effects of valence and amount of change.
Classen, C. C., et al. (2020). A pilot randomized controlled trial of a body-oriented group therapy for complex trauma survivors: An adaptation of sensorimotor psychotherapy.
Cleland, C., Kearns, A., Tannahill, C., and Ellaway, A. (2016). The impact of life events on adult physical and mental health and well-being.
Hartanto, A., et al. (2024). Cultural contexts differentially shape parents’ loneliness and well-being during the empty-nest period.
McEwen, B. S. (2007). Physiology and neurobiology of stress and adaptation: Central role of the brain.
This article was authored by Penelope Waller Ulmer, a verified therapist in our network. Learn more about their expertise and approach below.
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