Mom Burnout Solutions: Combating Career Burnout As a SAHM

Career burnout has become a pretty well-known phenomenon. But it’s easy to forget that being a mom 24/7 is a “career,” too, and career burnout doesn’t pass over us. Mom burnout symptoms are essentially the same as for any other career. The solutions are fundamentally similar, too — although the differences in context make the application slightly different.

Mom Burnout Symptoms

Mindtools says that:

Burnout occurs when passionate, committed people become deeply disillusioned with a job or career from which they have previously derived much of their identity and meaning. It comes as the things that inspire passion and enthusiasm are stripped away, and tedious or unpleasant things crowd in.

That’s a pretty solid summary. And they have a handy self-test to evaluate yourself for symptoms of burnout. (If you’re burned out, you probably already know that. But sometimes we get so caught up in “keeping on keeping on” that we aren’t really paying attention.)

HelpGuide differentiates between stress and burnout by describing stress as “too much” going on/on your plate, and burnout as feeling like “not enough.” They further describe burnout as “feel[ing] overworked and undervalued,” of “feeling empty…devoid of motivation, and…all dried up.”

If you feel emotionally wrung out, purposeless, unappreciated, and/or emptied out as though you have nothing left to give, you may be experiencing mom burnout.

There are some health reasons that you might be feeling down and unmotivated, so be sure to rule out or address physical contributors. And there are some things we really can’t fix. But a lot of mom burnout can be overcome, or at least lessened, by changes within our control.

Mom Burnout Driver #1: All Things to All Men

One major cause of burnout is trying to be “all things to all men.” When you’re trying to make everyone happy all the time by meeting everyone else’s standard of a “good mom” or a “good Christian woman,” or whatever the case may be, you’re not prioritizing your own standards.

What’s important to everyone else overshadows what’s important to you.

It’s hard to feel purposeful while ignoring what matters to you!

The solution to this is to be intentional about your priorities. Know what you value and ensure that’s driving your actions. It’s okay — good, even! — to honor others, but we honor them by valuing them, as people, not by adopting their values in place of our own.

Mom Burnout Driver #2: Trying to Be Someone You’re Not

Closely tied to #1, trying to be someone you’re not gets exhausting! There are certain high-level things we’re all called to do — for instance, all moms are called to love their children — but our individuality can, and should, influence how we do those things.

While growth is good, and requires that we sometimes stretch out of our comfort zones, it’s really okay that some moms are more artsy than others, some are more intellectual, some are more concerned with being orderly, etc.

I’m a bold, passionate, exuberant kind of mom. And that’s okay, because there’s nothing inherently sinful about being bold, passionate, or exuberant. Do I need to be able to tone it down some when circumstances call for calm? Yes. Do I need to learn to temper my boldness with grace? Absolutely. But if I try to just be quiet and softspoken all the time, it won’t work. I won’t be quiet and softspoken, really; I’ll just be miserable — and my family probably will be, too.

On the flip side, a quiet, softspoken mama might have to be willing to speak up sometimes in contexts where that makes her uncomfortable, but she shouldn’t try to be me.

Mom Burnout Driver #3: Treating Everything As Equally Important

This third trap is also closely related to #1. When everything is equally important, nothing is really important — and you’re constantly running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to get a nearly infinite number of things accomplished in a very finite amount of time.

This approach also tends to result in doing the most “urgent” things first, so the most (truly) important things are perpetually postponed.

The solution is to know what’s important to you, and then prioritize and balance those values accordingly.

For example, running the dishes through the dishwasher, washing them by hand, assigning that task to a child, paying someone else to do it, or using disposable dishes in the first place are all valid ways to avoid a pile-up of dirty dishes — and each one operates from a different balance of values.

The paper plates aren’t very eco-friendly — but they use the least time and energy. Washing them personally by hand gives the most control over the results. Assigning a child to do it can help foster discipline and responsibility on the part of the children. And so on.

Your own needs and values will (or should) determine which one(s) you choose — and that might vary as your season of life changes. I wouldn’t personally use paper plates on a regular basis, as a general rule. I prefer to use a more environmentally-friendly option (and I can). But if I had a child in the hospital, I might decide that was a worthwhile trade-off for the time savings.

Your priorities might be different from mine, and the paper plates might be your ideal option. Or maybe you can afford to pay a little more and you get compostable ones, so you can have ease and eco-friendliness. The point is, it’s a balancing act, and you are in a better position to decide what’s the right balance than anyone else is to determine that for you.

Mom Burnout Driver #4: No Work-Life Balance

When those who work outside the home experience career burnout, we talk about work-life balance. That is, we realize that their work can’t be all they have; they need to have a life outside of work, too.

A stay-at-home-mom’s work is so tightly enmeshed with her life that it can be easy to forget that moms also need to have something that’s not work.

“Self-care” can be taken to an unhealthy extreme, and for that reason it gets a bad rap, but taken in balance (there’s that word again!), it’s healthy to take some time to care for yourself.

We know that if you neglect to put on your own oxygen mask when the plane’s going down, or if you’re bleeding out in the wake of a disaster, you’re of little use to anyone else. But we seem to think that in our day-to-day lives if we don’t “bleed” for everyone else, or give them all our “air,” that’s selfish. Mama needs to have her buckets filled, too, or she doesn’t have anything left to give!

As a rough guideline, if you’re considering what you need, you’re most likely balanced enough; if you’re considering what you “deserve,” you’re probably overbalancing into self-centeredness.

Shortcut to Bypassing Burnout

If you need some help finding a good starting point for these things (especially numbers 1-3), download my 3-D IMG Method (below). It will show you a simple step-by-step method for sorting out what actually needs to stay on your to-do list or calendar, and what can go.