Burnout
American Moms Are Over-Functioning Mavens (and Miserable)
Here's why it's time to help them lean out.
Posted July 5, 2021 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Key points
- American moms are caught in a cycle of perpetual productivity and over-functioning as they lean into their careers and their personal lives.
- Moms who chronically over-function experience stress, anxiety, inner conflict, and burnout.
- The chronic state of burnout modern moms face can be attributed to external societal expectations and to internal pressures to over-function.
- Burnout affects mothers personally, but also impacts their work performance, parenting effectiveness, and community contribution.
“Mom? Mom? Mom! Are you even listening?”
My 4-year-old daughter is trying to get my attention, but I’m just too busy. I have groceries to buy, a team meeting to plan, an article to write, and a patient to email. Today’s supposed to be our special mommy-daughter day, snuggled up on the couch reading books and sharing confidences, but I just have too much on my plate to slow down. I’m up for an executive committee appointment at my pediatrics office and this book is not going to write itself, I tell myself. Plus, there are all the clothes to fold, dishes to wash, and bills to pay. If I stop now, I may not have the energy to start again.
That was me three years ago before a worldwide pandemic forced me to slow me down and before I understood there was a better way. I was a ball of burnout and inner conflict—wearing how productive I was like a badge of honor, and ruining my life in the process.
American Moms Do It All, But Should They? Can They?
American moms like me try to do it all. We juggle work, home life, and social calendars all day, every day. And, to keep it together, we have to keep running at full tilt at all times, or at least we tell ourselves we do. Productivity is the ultimate modern mommy status symbol. The better you are at multitasking and the more you can pack into a day, the higher your super mom status. Unfortunately, the more you try to do it all, though, the more stressed and ineffective you also become.
This is not a problem I see consistently among the low-income families I care for in my pediatrics clinic—the hard-working moms barely scraping by to keep their children housed and clothed. Those moms are tired, maybe even depleted, but they don’t describe themselves as busy. They’re occupied with putting food on the table. No, this is by far a problem for career-ladder-climbing, spin-class-loving, coffee-slugging, Instagram-scrolling moms like me—the ones whose stressors are about climbing the corporate ladder, investing in their kids, and trying not to lose themselves in the process.
Our twisted sense of pride when it comes to getting the most done isn’t entirely our fault. We’ve told moms, especially working moms, that they can have it all if they just lean in fully to every facet of their lives and that they hold the most value when they are doing, not when they are being.
A Learned (and Reinforced) Way of Being
My mother—a serial solopreneur—nods in agreement when I ask her how this measures up to her own experience.
“I thought that by multitasking and working hard all the time, I was showing you kids—and especially you—that you could do anything you wanted to do,” she said. “I was constantly tired, constantly burning the candle at both ends, but it felt like that was how it had to be. I see your generation wanting more, expecting more for yourselves and for your families.”
The archaic nature of most parenting partnerships doesn’t help, either. Though working moms are just as entrenched in the workforce as their male counterparts, they still shoulder the majority of the mental load and the physical labor of their homes as well. As default home managers, they’re the ones to drop everything when a diaper needs changing or a preschooler needs consoling. My own partner, a well-intentioned, progressive man, wonders aloud almost weekly if the dog was fed or why the playroom is such a mess, even though these menial chores are on his side of the to-do list we divide and conquer.
The workplace is no better. Business culture pretended a clear dividing line existed between the office and home life for working parents until Zoom-bombing toddlers started showing up in C-level meetings this year. Only now, as some predict the Great Resignation, with surveys suggesting they’d rather resign from their positions than return to their in-office jobs, are we starting to see companies entertain the idea that our personal lives and preferences are an integral factor in how and where we work best. A sea change is coming in company policy and culture, one forced by the chaos of a worldwide event we didn’t see coming.
Even our mom tribes reinforce that we can do more and do it better if only we’d invest in a smarter organizational system, use a new app, or commit to a regimented early-morning routine each day. The problem is, while building streamlined efficiency into our work and home lives is one piece of the puzzle, it doesn’t address the underlying reason we feel the need to stay so productive in the first place: a subconscious belief that our value is fundamentally linked to performance. Our worth is tied up in what we do and how much we can accomplish instead of who we are. And, ironically, the more we compulsively check items off our to-do lists, the harder it is for us to rid ourselves of the need to keep in motion, and the faster the hamster wheel spins around us.
Too Busy Being Busy to Be Mindful (or Effective)
The truth is, though, that this practically endemic, frenzied approach to life leads to missing out on all the good stuff because we’re too busy being busy. Aligning your sense of accomplishment or self-worth with how much you do puts you on the losing end of a perverse pissing contest. Being “exhausted” all the time feels too much like a crown of thorns. Sure, you might be the best mom around. But boy, what a price to pay. And, just like my daughter got the short end on that not-so-special “special day” three years ago, our own bodies and minds keep score when we push harder than we should. We wake up to exhaustion, irritability, and anxiety. We find it almost impossible to live with the absence of distraction and obligation. There’s less space for vulnerability. We experience deep inner conflict. Our kids learn they have to perform to be valuable, too. It’s an accomplishment I’m not sure we actually want.
A New Measure of Success
If we want to be truly successful as moms—content, effective, and centered—it’s worth remembering that we don't have to let productivity and perseverance define us. Our goal shouldn’t be to keep going at all costs. It should be to spend our energy on the people and things we care about most. It should be to embrace lazily eating sticky blueberry pancakes on a Saturday morning the way we did in quarantine when we truly had nothing better to do; to see the quiet, lackadaisical moments we spend attuning to ourselves and to our loved ones—those lean-out times—as just as significant as our lean-in ones.
What if, instead of refilling our lives like our bottomless junk drawers with activities, commitments, reward charts, committees, meetings, and bake sales, we took a lesson from the pandemic lifestyle we were forced to live for the past year to focus on doing less in the coming months, but doing it more mindfully? What if we decided to embrace the COVID-induced moment of reckoning we all faced when our lives ground to a screeching halt? What if we decided being busy and productive is overrated, and that we are ready for our own sea change as we emerge into a post-pandemic world, not just in our work environments or in our company’s policies, but in our whole lives? We’d get a little less done, but we’d be a whole lot happier.
