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Are you a mom to young children and feeling some mom burnout? I would honestly be surprised if the answer were an unequivocal “no.” In researching this post, I even found out there’s a medical term called “Depleted Mother Syndrome.” There are so many reasons moms feel burnt out that I can’t get into them all here. But the Cleveland Clinic page linked above and this article from Prevention are great places to look for more information about how you got to this point.
What I found lacking in those sources, and similar ones, is suggestions for how to turn things around. Some tips are helpful, but most are not specific enough about the actions you need to take to be able to mother without burning out. That’s why I’m sharing the 9 tips below for preventing mom burnout.
What is Mom Burnout? How Do You Know If You’re Burnt Out?
So how do you know if you’re burnt out? There are a few telltale symptoms of burnout, which were originally defined for job-related burnout. These include feeling exhausted and without energy, having a general pessimistic or negative outlook (including feeling resentful toward your partner and/or children), and feeling that you’re letting balls drop or fumbling responsibilities in various areas of your life.
While specific lists of symptoms can be helpful to reference, I personally say that if you feel burnt out…you are. There’s a reason you’re using that phrase and it’s not because you’re dramatic. Expectations for mothers are, to be honest, out of control. It’s almost inevitable that someone trying to do good job at mothering will experience mom burnout.
9 Ways to Reverse and Prevent Mom Burnout
So, we can acknowledge that there are million reasons mothers experience mom burnout. But, given that all these factors are stacked against us, can we do anything about it?
I argue yes, while society isn’t going to change overnight, there are changes you can make yourself that can majorly turn things around. Here are 9 ideas:
1. Use Naptimes to Rest
When my son was a newborn, I heard the advice to “sleep when the baby sleeps” plenty of times. But even after he was sleep trained, I found myself completely exhausted. It got bad enough that I had to seriously evaluate how I was organizing my days.
When my son took naps, I would seize the opportunity to get things done – most often chores. My son is not the kind of kid to entertain himself, so doing anything productive is off the table while he’s home and awake. So, during the 2–3-hour window when he was asleep, I tried to cram in as much housework as possible. Even after he started daycare, I would end my (remote) workday around 5 and then run to do housework for 30 minutes before my husband came home with him.
This behavior is logical on the surface, but the problem was I never rested. That’s manageable for a while, but eventually it will catch up to you and you’ll burn out.
Now on weekends, when my son takes a nap, I also take a power nap before moving on to chores. And if I find myself with a 30-minute window between work and kid time, I sit down and read a book. It’s unbelievable how much guilt you feel as a mom taking just a few minutes to read. But fighting through that is necessary. And you know what? When my son comes home, I’m in a great mood and excited to see him instead of exhausted and wondering how I’ll make it through the evening until bedtime.
Caring for small children is exhausting; you need to rest just like they do. Don’t let chores usurp your limited quiet time.
2. Ask for Help
This seems like pretty obvious advice, but it was the hardest one on this list for me. I resisted it as much as possible.
Even when I started feeling mom burnout, I didn’t want to ask my mother-in-law to watch my kid for an afternoon. I didn’t want to spend money on a babysitter. I wasn’t even willing to ask my husband to help with certain chores, feeling like he should volunteer instead, and I didn’t want to be a “nag.”
The result of that pride was feeling exhausted and resentful of my spouse.
If there’s something you wish your spouse would do, ask them. Be specific. Sure, it would be ideal if they noticed housework that needed to be done and took initiative. But waiting for that magical moment to happen is only going to make you miserable.
Beyond your partner – if you have one — ask for help from family and friends for things like babysitting. Or even helping you with a chore or errand. Most people underestimate how willing others are to do favors for them. And the worst they can do is say no.
3. Accept that Some Things Don’t Need to Be Done
I also resisted this one, but I think it had the most impact on my life of this whole list.
Before kids, your home may have existed at a certain level of cleanliness. Your beauty routine may have taken a certain amount of time. You may have had an exercise routine that required certain hours within a week.
When you become a mom, you don’t want to give those things up. Your expectations for the appearance of your home and yourself are still the same as they were before this massive responsibility landed in your lap.
But here’s the thing. Things are different now. Jus accept it. You don’t need to keep up the same standards while you have young children.
I used to complain to my husband about how exhausted I was because I did most of the house chores. The response I would hope for was, “Don’t worry, I’ll do 50% of the housework from now on.” But the response I got was, “Most of those things don’t need to be done.”
Naturally, this infuriated me. Not only was he not volunteering to help, but he was also telling me what I cared about wasn’t important! It took some time and a lot of humility for me to recognize that he was right. Nothing bad will happen if your counters aren’t clean for 3 days in a row, if your laundry hamper starts to overflow, or if some food expires in your fridge before you clean it out. The reason my husband seemed more relaxed than me wasn’t because I was the one shouldering these burdens. It was because he truly didn’t care about them. And that was something I could learn from.
4. Declutter Your Home
Obviously, I have to recommend this one. I’ve discussed in other posts how a more minimalist lifestyle will spare you hours of cleaning. Limiting how much stuff you have in your house drastically reduces the time you need to spend tidying and caring for things.
I’ve quoted Fumio Sasaki’s book Goodbye Things before, but it bears repeating here, because it’s a great explanation of how every item you add to your living space increases the amount of time you’ll spend cleaning:
Cleaning can be really easy if you have fewer things. Let’s look at how we might clean the floor if we had an owl sculpture in the room.
Step 1: Move the owl over.
Step 2: Wipe the floor where the owl had been sitting.
Step 3: Return the owl to its original position.
And if we didn’t have this statue in our home?
Step 1: Wipe the floor.
Decluttering is extra work – and that’s hard to take on when you’re going through mom burnout. But it’s a project worth taking on for the long-term benefits.
5. Keep Your Kids’ Toys and Clothes Minimal
Building on the tip above, part of the reason chores get so much harder when you have kids is that you now have way more stuff. Clothes they outgrow quickly, a million toys, books, and random junk gifted at birthday parties or from school.
But it’s worth being diligent about not allowing all this junk in your home. If your kid only has a handful of toys, even if they dump them all out on the ground, it will only take a minute to tidy them.
Check out my post on how to handle baby clothes as a minimalist parent for detailed tips on how to keep your kids’ clothes minimal.
And if your kids already have too much stuff, and you’re worried they’ll lose their minds if you try to declutter, there’s plenty of advice online for how to pull it off.
6. Minimize What You Need to Care For
As a mom, you have a lot to take care of. You have one or multiple kids. If you have a partner, you probably take care of them to some degree. You may care for elderly family members, too. Plus, moms generally put more effort into caring for the home itself.
So, if you want to avoid mom burnout, don’t volunteer to care for more things. That include pets, plants, and even household items like appliances.
Personally, I love pets. I have a dog and a cat. They bring so much joy to my life that it’s worth the extra work for me. But if you don’t already have pets, and your kids are begging for one…I advise saying no. The last thing you need is another creature to care for.
I also love the idea of keeping plants in my home and growing things in a flower bed I have outside. If you have a green thumb and this brings you joy, of course you should go for it. But for me, I realized that I did not need to create work for myself. Planting things outside or bringing plants into my home is only going to add to the number of living beings I need to keep healthy.
As much as I like the idea, I realized that it’s better for my mental health if I actively limit how many things and creatures I’m responsible for at any given time.
7. Do More Things That Energize You
Part of why you’re burnt out is that you’re doing too many things that deplete your energy, and you need to rest. That part is obvious. But another factor may not be. You also need to do more things that give you energy.
In her book, Find Your Unicorn Space: Reclaim Your Creative Life in a Too-Busy World, Eve Rodskey urges women to dedicate time to creative pursuits. She acknowledges a reality that you’ve probably noticed anecdotally: men are more likely to dedicate time to their own interests, even at the cost of housework. Women will often put their interests aside to make sure chores get done. The result of that dynamic is festering resentment and a strained partnership. It would benefit both parties if women were more active in ensuring they had time for creativity.
An unfortunate effect of mom burnout is giving up on hobbies because you feel you don’t have the time and energy to do them. Recognizing these activities are not just diversions but rather important parts of your life will help you combat burnout.
How to pull this off?
- Write a list of activities that bring you joy. Don’t just think – write!
- Schedule time for at least one. Setting a specific time on your calendar for it will force you to prioritize it.
- Get whatever help you need to make it happen. A babysitter? Your partner watches the kids one day? A day off work? Whatever it takes will be worth it, and it will pay off in the long run.
Find Your Unicorn Space suggests many more specific strategies for flipping the dynamic in your household and ensuring you have time for creativity. I recommend checking it out if you think this tip is impossible for your life.
8. Implement “Life Admin” Days
One reason for mom burnout is keeping track of all the little administrative tasks for our families: setting appointments, paying bills, running errands, answering e-mails, making phone calls. Not only is it hard to find time for everything, but it’s also exhausting to maintain this mental “to do” list.
That’s where the life admin day comes in. It’s a personal day you dedicate to doing all those administrative tasks that have piled up over time.
I’m in the US, so I understand well that not everyone has much paid time off (PTO) from work. And if you’re a stay-at-home mom, you don’t get any days off!
But I also think many Americans have PTO but feel pressured not to use it. Even when we’re sick, we feel others will resent us if we take a day off.
You should use PTO, and not only for vacations or illness. Schedule leave days (or days when your kids are in school, with grandparents, etc.) as life admin days. In the meantime, keep a list of tasks you don’t have time for. That way, they won’t take up valuable real estate in your mind.
Within months of going back to work after having a baby, I realized that something would have to give if I was going to manage all my new and old responsibilities. I was simply going to have schedule leave days to handle it all.
I felt guilty taking time off for no “real” reason. And I also felt guilty using up precious PTO that could otherwise be used for a vacation. But it helped to consider how my leave balance piled up over the years, because I wasn’t using it for anything. I might as well use it to alleviate my mom burnout.
9. Stop Multitasking at Work
I remember feeling overwhelmed as soon as I went back to work after giving birth. I was forgetting things for work and for my kid. My boss would e-mail about something I’d lost track of. A minute later, the daycare would text saying I forgot to pack something that morning. I felt like I was failing at everything.
After reading Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity, I realized I was so frazzled because my days looked like this: Get my kid dressed and take him to daycare, answer work e-mails, call the pediatrician because I remembered I need a form signed, do half a work assignment, remember we need diapers and buy them online, answer work e-mails….and so on.
The pattern to my workdays was chaotic, yet working moms are used to multitasking like this. Meanwhile, if I asked my husband to make a call during his workday, he simply…wouldn’t. Days would pass, and he’d say he forgot. Why could I remember 50 additional tasks to do during the workday and he couldn’t manage one? I told him, “It must be nice to go to work and just think about work.”
This dynamic is frustrating. But nagging your husband to multitask more doesn’t work.
What to do instead? Act more like him. When you’re at work, work. If you think of a kid-related task, jot it down but then get back to work. Take care of family admin tasks outside work. You’ll be more productive at work and at home because you’ll focus on one thing at a time. Plus, if you’re handling things at home with your spouse, you can ask for help.
And when there are too many admin tasks to handle on evenings and weekends? That’s where the life admin day from #8 comes in.
What Do You Think?
What contributes to your mom burnout? Have you used any strategies to solve it? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!
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