When Parents Get Burnout: What It Looks Like and What To Do About It
You know those days. Days when you can’t seem to keep your focus and you start a million tasks but can’t seem to finish any of them. Days when you are just so tired, so bone weary that even a full night’s sleep doesn’t completely cure it. Maybe, like me, you’re becoming more and more irritable with your partner and/or your kids. By bedtime it can feel like you don’t have one ounce of patience left and you’re about ready to erupt.
I know this feeling. Every parent knows this feeling. This is what they like to call “burnout,” and as demands on parents get higher and higher, it feels like it’s happening more and more. Parenting is a full-time job in and of itself. The amount of thinking and planning it requires, alone, is enough to exhaust our poor brains. Add on to this another full- or part-time job, caring for a parent, a sick family member, or, say a pandemic and forget about it. Burnout central.
About a month into the pandemic, I hit true and severe burnout. The combined impact of the emotional and psychological toll of experiencing a world-wide pandemic, and the logistical nightmare of trying to school a 3- and 6-year-old at home, all while trying to continue to do the work that I love became too dang much. I started to feel like a mess; like I couldn’t do anything. I normally consider myself a pretty capable person. I’m organized, I go above and beyond for my people. But when I was feeling burnout, it felt like each task was a slog, and the littlest things could make me feel like crying.
Psychologist Christina Maslach, PhD, who has worked extensively on burnout, points out that it includes a feeling of “detachment”, which can lead to a deadening of our sense of empathy. For example, when you yell at your kid and it’s not until later that the guilt sets in and you think “they’re just a kid, how could I do that?” In the moment, your empathy was turned off. You just could not see their needs because yours were so ignored. As a parent, empathy is one of our best tools and we need it in order to keep our perspective when tiny humans are screaming at us for snacks for the thousandth time that day.
Studies have shown that Parental Burnout is not only painful for the parent but can have negative outcomes for children as well. An irritable, detached parent is not one with the space and peace to handle the rigors of raising whole human beings. I noticed this in my own home and have always noticed that the more stressed and burnt out I’m feeling, the more anxious and frustrated my kids are feeling. It becomes this cycle of them irritating me (because parents with burnout are more irritable) and then my response triggers a negative reaction in them, and round and round we go.
It was my own coach who pointed out to me that I might be experiencing burnout myself. Here I am, trained to notice it in others, and I still fell into the trap of just blaming myself rather than being in tune with myself and my needs. I was feeling exhausted. I was irritable with my kids. I was distracted and detached. I had every right to be. Life is hard, parenting is hard, and doing it all under the weight of a pandemic that is outside of any of our experience or understanding can feel untenable.
So what do we do, then, when we are well and truly burnt out, but life doesn’t stop moving and we can’t just stop doing? Emily and Amelia Nagoski write in their fantastic book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Code about how, even when the stressor remains, we can still process the stress. That is, even as a pandemic rages, even as oppression continues, even as your kids refuse to sleep, we don’t have to just “suck it up” or “push through”. Taking time to excise the stress you are holding in your body is essential to battling burnout.
The Nagoski sisters suggest activities such as 15-30 minutes of cardio (I like dance, personally), a 20 second hug, a good cry, a 6 second kiss, a conversation with someone who is in what they call your “love bubble”; all of these things can help with processing the stress of daily life. So for me, when my kids are driving me bonkers and I’m about to lose it, I text what I lovingly call my “Lady Team” (as named by my six year old) and vent about what’s going on. Immediately, I feel a little relief. I can also throw some Prince on (my personal favorite) and have a dance party with my kids. This one is great because it both gets my heartrate going, which helps my body process stress and anxiety, but also lifts my mood and helps me to reconnect with my kids by resetting whatever was frustrating and focusing on having a little fun with them.
In order to deal with big time burnout, like what I was dealing with in the beginning of the pandemic, life changes need to be made. We need to not only deal with the feelings of frustration, anger, and anxiety in the moment, but to set up daily routines that give our bodies and minds regular doses of those happy hormones that will sustain us throughout the rest of the day. For me, I realized that my situation was untenable; that if I didn’t make some changes immediately, I would not survive this new reality. I saw that, not only was I miserable, but I wasn’t making anyone else in my house so happy either. So, I decided to make some changes that I really had needed to make for a while.
I started moving my body. At first, I went slow and took walks while listening to my “Make Me Happy” playlist. Then I started free YouTube yoga, doing one session every day. After reading a chapter in Glennon Doyle’s already a classic Untamed, I realized I wasn’t having enough fun, so I started doing hip hop dance workouts every day. For the first time in my life, I was able to commit to movement every day, because instead of shaming myself into it based on my body shape and size, I committed to it to make me feel good.
I also started trying as much as possible to focusing on the moment. As a massive overthinker, this has always been tricky for me, but like everything else, I just started small. I focused on the feeling of the water on my hands as I washed dishes, I laid down on the ground and looked up at the trees in my yard. I also used mantras to bring myself back into the moment at hand, to remind myself of what I could and couldn’t control. My favorite mantra to use during COVID has been “in this moment, I am safe”. When the world feels so unsafe, it really helps to remind myself that I actually am not in any imminent danger. I also have mantras for when I’m doubting myself as a parent, when body image issues resurface, and much more.
The most important thing I did during this time was to believe that I was worth working on, that my burnout wasn’t because I had failed or that I wasn’t capable, but simply because I was experiencing difficult times and difficult situations, and I needed to change how I was approaching them. Part of that was reaching out for support, to friends, to my amazing coach, to the research (oh I love the research). We do not exist in this world alone, nor are we meant to.
Burnout may feel inevitable with everything that is going on in the world, but I don’t believe it has to be. The more we understand it, the more we prepare for it, the kinder and more understanding we are with ourselves and each other, the more we will be able to see the warning signs and stop it before it gets to that point. One of the things I want to do for my clients is help them set up these systems for themselves, to help moms who are feeling overwhelmed and overworked to believe in their deservedness, to believe that they are worth the work it takes to create meaningful and positive change in their lives. I want every mom to have support as they manage life as a mother and a woman in this world. That means you too!
So, the next time any of those warning signs start to pop up for you, ask yourself what you can do in the moment to help with the stress. Then do it. Ask yourself what one thing you could change in your daily life that would help, and then make a plan to do it. (Check out my free Burnout Planner for Parents here!) You don’t have to go from never exercising to doing an hour of cardio every day. You don’t have to go from never mediating to meditating perfectly for 20 minutes every day. Figure out one small step in the right direction and take it. If you feel like you want a partner on that process, I’m always here for you.
