It’s supposed to be the most exciting time of your life … and everyone is telling you how lucky you are to have a beautiful baby, but all you can do is cry. You’re pretty sure none of your new-mom friends are feeling this way. But they might be. Because 15 to 20 percent of new moms, about 1 million women in the US each year, experience some form of postpartum depression.

Truth be told, my baby days were the most difficult and painful hours of my life. I was a hormonal and stress train wreck. Looking back now–my youngest is five–I see that a few alterations in my lifestyle might have helped matters. I’ll share them with you, so that you don’t have to feel so bad … or, you know, all alone.

1. Say it … “Yikes.”

Take a moment to consider all that has changed in your life. Your social life is … poof … gone, not to mention your sex life and any romance that was left in your marriage. You don’t remember becoming a Navy Seal but, like them, you operate on about three consecutive hours of sleep at night. Plus there is this seven-pound creature that you are responsible for – and let’s just say it’s more demanding than the fern in your kitchen that will forgive you if you forget to water it for a day or so. Oh yeah, that adorable, Gerber baby is louder than the Winnie the Pew keychain one of your frenemies bought you. But the very act of registering all the modifications can be surprisingly comforting … like proof that you’re not imagining it: you’ve entered another world, and you definitely don’t speak the language.

2. Identify the symptoms.

At some point, you’re going to need to distinguish symptoms of the new-mom culture shock and its accompanying baby blues from a bona fide mood disorder. You can find a list of the standard symptoms for postpartum depression by clicking here, but better than that, I think, is the description actress Brooke Shields gives in her memoir, “Down Came the Rain”:

At first I thought what I was feeling was just exhaustion, but with it came an overriding sense of panic that I had never felt before. Rowan kept crying, and I began to dread the moment when Chris would bring her back to me. I started to experience a sick sensation in my stomach; it was as if a vise were tightening around my chest. Instead of the nervous anxiety that often accompanies panic, a feeling of devastation overcame me. I hardly moved. Sitting on my bed, I let out a deep, slow, guttural wail. I wasn’t simply emotional or weepy, like I had been told I might be. This was something quite different. This was a sadness of a shockingly different magnitude. It felt as if it would never go away.

3. Start talking.

Journalist Tracy Thompson begins her insightful book, “The Ghost in the House” with two brilliant lines: “Motherhood and depression are two countries with a long common border. The terrain is chilly and inhospitable, and when mothers speak of it at all, it is usually in guarded terms, or in euphemisms.” Which is why you need to start talking …. often, for long periods of time, and loudly. But with safe people.

4. Find safe people.

How do you find these so-called “safe people” who won’t report you to the pope or child services for saying things like you want your body back, you want your old life back, and at times you wonder if you made the right decision by having sex with your husband without a birth control method in place? That’s tough, and like so much else in life, you just need to feel your way through. I personally look for a sense of humor. Any mom who can laugh at the squash stains on her new Ann Taylor sweater is a candidate. The mom who left the playgroup 15 minutes early to get in the half-hour pre-nap ritual is definitely not.

The other tips are coming in a soon-to-be gallery featured for Mother’s Day!

To read more Beyond Blue, go to http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue, and to get to Group Beyond Blue, a support group at Beliefnet Community, click here.

To subscribe to “Beyond Blue” click here.