You have to be able to say, ‘I’m burned out. I can’t keep doing this the same way’.
– Susan Landers, MD
Maternal burnout is often framed as a private struggle—something to fix with better routines, more gratitude, or improved time management. But in this informative conversation, Susan Landers, MD, a neonatologist with more than three decades of experience caring for newborns and supporting families, describes something far less individual and far more systemic.
What many mothers are experiencing, she suggests, is not a failure of resilience. It is a state of depletion, and increasingly, it is widespread.
Recent surveys of women in midlife—particularly those caring for both children and aging parents (the so-called sandwich generation), those raising teenagers, or supporting neurodivergent children—suggest burnout rates exceeding 50 percent in some groups. That means, quite literally, that half of women in certain caregiving roles are functioning in a state of ongoing exhaustion.
In parts of Europe, Dr. Landers notes, the experience has a name that may be more precise than “burnout”: depleted mother syndrome.
“It really captures what women are describing,” she says. “Not just stress. Total depletion.”
The Hidden Weight Behind Maternal Burnout
To understand maternal burnout, it helps to look not just at individual lives, but at the structure surrounding them.
For many women, the daily reality includes a full-time job paired with what is effectively a second, unpaid full-time role: managing a household and raising children. Layered on top of that may be elder care, financial strain, relationship challenges, or the complexities of supporting a child with ADHD, autism, or other additional needs.
What has changed in recent decades is not just the volume of responsibility, but the erosion of support.
Fewer families live near relatives. Informal childcare networks—neighbors, extended family, close-knit communities—are less accessible. Childcare itself has become significantly more expensive, often rivaling or exceeding housing costs. Workplace expectations, meanwhile, have not consistently adapted to the realities of caregiving.
The result is a quiet but profound mismatch: more responsibility, fewer buffers.
“We think we’re supposed to do everything,” Dr. Landers says. “But most women don’t have flexible schedules. Most don’t have enough help. And most are doing it without a real support system.”
Even in households with two adults, the distribution of labor is often uneven. And for single mothers, the equation becomes even more difficult. The pressure is not always visible. But it accumulates.
The Comparison Trap
If the structure creates the conditions for burnout, culture often intensifies it.
Social media, in particular, offers a steady stream of curated images: tidy homes, coordinated outfits, smiling children, productive routines. The implicit message is not just that these outcomes are possible, but that they are typical.
Humans are, by nature, comparison-oriented. When mothers measure their internal reality against others’ external presentation, the gap can feel like personal inadequacy.
“You look at someone and think, ‘She’s doing it all. I should be able to do it, too,” Dr. Landers says.
But what remains invisible in those comparisons are the trade-offs, the absent support systems, the few resources, and or the strain.
The performance of effortlessness can be one of the most misleading features of modern motherhood.
What Burnout Actually Feels Like
Burnout does not always arrive dramatically. More often, it unfolds gradually, through a series of subtle shifts.
A once patient mother becomes more easily irritated. Small frustrations escalate quickly—conversations with a partner become tense. Sleep becomes fragmented or insufficient. Concentration fades.
There may be an increase in coping behaviors—more alcohol, more convenience food, more scrolling, more withdrawal.
But one of the most telling changes is emotional. “Women start to lose their ability to feel joy,” Dr. Landers says.
Moments that should feel meaningful—watching a child play, spending time together as a family—begin to feel like obligations. Instead of presence, there is preoccupation. Instead of enjoyment, there is a persistent sense of being behind.
That shift can be disorienting, and often alarming. It also overlaps, in important ways, with depression.
Burnout and depression are not identical, but they can look similar from the inside. Both involve fatigue, low mood, and diminished engagement with life. Burnout, however, is often more directly tied to external circumstances—chronic overload, insufficient support, sustained stress.
Still, the distinction is not always clear to the person experiencing it.
Why High-Achieving Women Struggle to Name It
One of the paradoxes of maternal burnout is that the women most affected by it are often the least likely to acknowledge it early.
High achievers—those who are organized, competent, and accustomed to managing complexity—are also often skilled at masking distress. They continue to function. They meet deadlines. They show up. And they conceal.
“We’re very good at hiding when we’re struggling,” Dr. Landers says. “Especially perfectionists.”
Perfectionism adds another layer. It is not simply the desire to do well, but the internalization of an exacting standard—often shaped by early messages about achievement, behavior, and worth.
Those messages become internal scripts: Do more. Be better. Don’t complain. Don’t fail.
In that context, admitting burnout can feel like breaking character. Which is precisely why naming it matters.
Naming It Is the First Step
Dr.Landers emphasizes a point that is both simple and difficult: recovery begins with recognition.
Without that acknowledgement, change is unlikely. Awareness creates the possibility of intervention. It shifts the question from What’s wrong with me? to What needs to change?
From there, the process becomes more practical—and more challenging.
The Reality of Change: Something Has to Give
If burnout is driven by overload, recovery requires reducing that load.
In theory, that sounds straightforward. In practice, it is often the hardest step.
Something has to give.
That “something” may be a work schedule that needs adjustment. It may be a set of extracurricular commitments that can no longer be sustained. It may be the expectation of maintaining a certain standard at home.
It may require difficult conversations with a partner, an employer, or a family member. It may mean asking for help in ways that feel uncomfortable or unfamiliar.
And it often involves setting boundaries, including the ability to say no. For women conditioned to accommodate, perform, and manage, that shift can be deeply counterintuitive.
But without it, the underlying conditions of burnout remain unchanged.
Rethinking “Good Enough”
Dr. Landers returns frequently to the idea of “good enough” as a corrective to perfectionism.
Not as a lowering of standards, but as a recalibration of what is realistic and sustainable.
“If you’re working full-time and raising children, you’re probably already doing enough,” she says.
The challenge is that many women evaluate themselves against an ideal that is both culturally reinforced and structurally unsupported.
Burnout, in that sense, becomes a signal: not that effort is insufficient, but that expectations are misaligned with reality. Learning to accept “good enough” is not passive. It is an active resistance to an unsustainable standard.
Small Interventions in Constrained Lives
While structural changes are essential, they are not always immediately possible. For many mothers, work cannot be paused. Responsibilities cannot simply disappear.
In those cases, Dr. Landers emphasizes smaller, more accessible interventions—not as solutions, but as stabilizers.
Short breaks. Moments of intentional pause. Brief transitions between roles.
Even five minutes of quiet in the car before entering the house can serve as a psychological reset. A short walk during the workday can reduce stress. A brief meditation can help mark the shift from professional to caregiving mode.
These practices are modest by design. They acknowledge the constraints many women operate within.
“They’re not magic,” Dr. Landers says. “But they help your brain recognize that something has changed—that you’re not in the same mode anymore.”
Other small practices—journaling, gratitude, limiting alcohol, maintaining basic nutrition—support physical and emotional resilience.
Even something as simple as eating protein in the morning, she notes, can stabilize energy and mood. These are not cures. But they are part of a broader recovery process.
The Role of Connection
If burnout is, in part, a function of isolation, connection becomes an intervention.
That connection does not have to be formal or extensive. It can be a conversation with a friend, a shared activity, or a regular phone call.
“There’s research showing that women feel better when they talk to other women,” Dr. Landers says, with a note of humor. “Which is not surprising.”
What matters is the exchange itself: the opportunity to speak honestly, to be heard, to recognize that one’s experience is not unique.
Even brief interactions—with colleagues, acquaintances, or strangers—can contribute to a sense of connection and improve mood.
These moments are small, but cumulative. They counter the sense of carrying everything alone.
Recovery Is a Process, Not a Reset
One of the most important—and often overlooked—realities of burnout is that recovery takes time.
There is no immediate return to baseline. No quick fix.
For those who can take extended time away from work, recovery may occur faster. For those who cannot, it may unfold gradually, over months or longer.
Dr. Landers speaks from experience. When she experienced burnout while continuing to work full-time, recovery took about a year.
That timeline is not unusual. Burnout is not a temporary imbalance. It is the result of sustained strain. Reversing it requires sustained adjustment.
You Are Not Failing
For the mother who feels she is failing, Dr. Landers offers a reframing that is both direct and compassionate.
“You’re not failing,” she says. “You’ve been asked to do too much.”
Being present, loving one’s children, working, managing a household—these are not small tasks. When they are combined without sufficient support, strain is inevitable.
Add additional stressors—financial pressure, caregiving for parents, hormonal changes, relationship challenges—and the load increases further.
In that context, burnout is not evidence of inadequacy. It is evidence of overload. But recognizing that does not eliminate the need for change.
“Something still has to give,” Dr. Landers says. “And that starts with you deciding what that is.”
A Personal Experience With Structural Roots
Maternal burnout lives in the details of daily life: the rushed mornings, the unfinished tasks, the short tempers, the exhaustion that sleep does not fix.
But it is also shaped by broader forces: economic, cultural, and institutional.
Workplace expectations. Childcare systems. Healthcare access. Social norms. Geographic mobility. The decline of informal support networks.
To address burnout solely at the individual level is to miss that context.
At the same time, for the individual mother experiencing it, relief often begins with small, immediate changes—naming the problem, adjusting priorities, seeking support where possible.
The tension between structural causes and personal action is not easily resolved. But acknowledging both is a start. Sometimes, the most honest conclusion is also the simplest: This is too much.
And recognizing that may be the first step toward something more sustainable.
