Single parent burnout is real. We all know that. And it can hurt all aspects of our home, work, and social life as well as emotionally, physically, and mentally. Most of all, it affects how we, as single parents, parent our kids and show up for them. So what causes burnout and is there a way out of it?

Today we’re going to cover this in three main points. First, we’re going to talk about how solo parents get burned out. Second, we’re going to talk about types and stages of burnout, and third, we’re going to talk about managing and overcoming burnout. 

Describe a time when you were burned out and what led to that point.

When I was working for the company I worked for several years ago, I had just become a single mom a year before, and I was leading the publicity team. I was traveling a lot, I was raising Jax, I was trying to have a life, I was trying to date. I was trying to do it all and it was absolutely insane. And I had just piled on and piled on, and I think it was to cover up the pain of everything I’d been going through the year before. I was trying to live the same life I was living before becoming a single mom. I hadn’t adjusted. I was trying to still just do it all, and kept the expectations the same. All of society could say that, but I would double down for single parents. We’ve all experienced burnout at some point or another. Let’s talk about how solo parents get burned out.

Let’s start with just defining it. What is burnout? 

WebMD describes burnout as a form of exhaustion caused by constantly feeling swamped. And I know our audience can relate to that. It happens when we experience too much emotional, physical, and mental fatigue for too long. Welcome to my world. My kids are now older, and so I am not parenting them in the same ways, but when they were little, that felt like a constant refrain. In many cases, burnout is related to one’s job, but for single parents, parenting is a huge part of our job and we’re doing it alone. Burnout doesn’t just affect one area of your life. It also can affect your health, your relationships, and more.

It’s important to point out that although burnout can be caused by stress, it’s not the same as stress. Stress results from too much mental and physical pressure and too many demands on your time and energy. But burnout is different. Burnout is about too little. Too little emotion, motivation, or care. Stress can make you feel overwhelmed, but burnout makes you feel depleted and completely used up.

It makes me wonder if, over time, we become numb to how stressed we are. And because your body gets used to things and adapts, it does what it needs to adjust to that new way of life. So it makes me wonder if our bodies adjust to that stress and then we hold that stress more than we actually even know. It makes me wonder how much we’re even holding onto that we don’t know. Then all of a sudden it’s like a ticking time bomb. And then one day something falls over and there we go. So according to the Harvard Business Review, parents of any marital status in the US have one of the highest rates across the world of parental burnout. So can you even imagine you’re doing it alone? But the study described the symptoms as including intense exhaustion, cynicism, and feelings of ineffectiveness from parenting. Solos are more at risk for burnout because they’re carrying the mental load and the physical load of parenting in a job that’s meant for two, as we all know, while also dealing with unique stresses like grief, co-parenting, custody issues, etc. When you pile on top of that, resources are limited. Money’s limited when it comes to being able to get the emotional and practical help we need. The lack of sleep [is major]. Someone in my group recently shared that she just wants more than four hours of sleep. And she’s like, “I can’t get it.” 

A picture comes to mind that I use pretty often with my clients. It’s the idea that our emotional wellbeing is a bridge and stressors are the weight that’s on top of that bridge. So single parents have all these stressors coming in with work and parenting and decisions and all of those things. And underneath the bridge we need support. The heavier the stress is, the more support we need. But solo parents often have kind of a double whammy where there’s fewer supports, less sleep, less resourcing. You’re doing it alone. You’re emotionally exhausted, you’re mentally tired and there’s more pressure on the bridge. So it’s almost a double whammy, and that’s what can lead to burnout more than anything else: under-resourced and overstressed. 

I think it’s important to point out that chronic burnout leads us to believe that we’re not good enough instead of recognizing we’re just being under-resourced. They’re two different things. One is identity issue—kind of like, “This is who I am.” The other is “I don’t have enough support under that bridge.”

Let’s talk about the types and stages of burnout.

There are four types of burnout. According to WebMD, there’s 

1. Overload burnout when you work harder and harder, becoming frantic in your pursuit for success. 
2. There’s under-challenged burnout when you feel underappreciated and bored. 
3. There’s neglect burnout when you feel helpless 
4. Habitual burnout, the most serious phase of burnout with chronic mental and physical fatigue. 

And you know what? I feel like this is a quadruple check for all single parents. I literally was like, “Let’s just call it single parent burnout, with all four combined.” 

How can we find hope amidst burnout? 

We have to begin to recognize that burnout is real. And psychologist Herbert Freudenberger was one of the first to comprehensively study this concept. And as he looked at burnout, he looked at 12 different stages related very specifically to a workplace. 

Here are some of the 12 stages that apply to single parenting. 

1. An urgent need to prove yourself. In this earliest phase of burnout, you want to do well to the point of perfectionism for fear of not being a “good-enough” parent.
2. Working harder. You feel the need to do everything yourself/take on too many tasks
3. Neglecting your needs. You forget basic needs like eating or socializing.
4. Denial. Bitterness and cynicism creep in, and you begin to cut yourself off from others, becoming impatient, intolerant, and angry. 
5. Withdrawal. Dealing with your kids feels like a burden. You also withdraw from others and get angry if someone criticizes you.
6. Depersonalization. You lose your sense of identity, seeing yourself only as the vessel through which parenting and work responsibilities are completed. 
7. Feeling empty. Exhaustion, anxiety, and panic set in
8. Despair. You may have feelings of self-hatred or depression coupled with suicidal thoughts.
9. Total burnout. This last phase of mental and emotional collapse requires immediate care.

The first one he mentions is an urgent need to prove yourself. And that one has my name written all over it. As a recovering perfectionist, even after becoming a single mom, I felt like I had to keep doing all the things with the utmost degree of perfection, checking all the boxes of a clean house, all the laundry done, homemade meals. It was absolutely crazy making. And it absolutely led me into burnout.

I can really resonate with the second stage of burnout—and that is working harder. I’m recently uncovering some of my tendencies of self-reliance and how unhealthy that is—that if I just work harder, I can overcome X, Y, or Z. And so we take the pressure of keeping all those balls in the air, and if I just push a little harder, things are going to get better. And that leads to burnout. We don’t have capacity to do that, but for me, it’s going through inner child work and realizing where the idea of self-reliance came from. I had full custody, I had to do everything myself and fight against outside custody battles. But I doubled down during that season of being a single parent and thought, “It’s on me. It’s all on me.” And I completely understand how that’s a stage of burnout. 

My whole life I’ve been a worker. And I think mine has been a way of denial. It’s been a way to compartmentalize or have a different focus so I didn’t have to look at anything else. So working harder for me has also been a self-reliance thing. I definitely see myself pulled towards self-reliance in terms of “I have to do it all.” But it’s also a way for me to just not see or have to deal with other things emotionally.

For me, not only did it look like I was working harder to check all the boxes because I’m a recovering overachiever, but it also ended up with neglecting my needs. I was so busy trying to get things done and do the right things and stay on top of things and look the right way that I forgot that the things that truly mattered for me would fill me up. And that would be some of the supports underneath my emotional wellbeing bridge. So that’s one of the stages—neglecting your needs.

Elizabeth, you were saying denial. Is that the same thing as one of the stages or are you just referring to working harder?

Well, denial is one of the stages, but I don’t know if it’s a little different. It was a distraction piece on working harder for me, but also denial. Denial is described as bitterness and cynicism as you begin to cut yourself off from others, becoming impatient and intolerant and angry. 

The next stage of burnout is withdrawal. And I definitely felt this the further I went into trying to work harder and get things done and cover all of my bases. I really resonate with this. It’s basically that dealing with your kids feels like a burden. You also withdraw from others and get angry … And I tried to be present with my girls, but I was propped up and I didn’t want to socialize. I didn’t want to go out. I certainly didn’t want to hear criticism. I just isolated. 

A big one for me was depersonalization, the sixth stage listed here. It says that you lose your sense of identity, seeing yourself only as the vessel through which parenting and work responsibilities are completed. I would say that that was true. That’s been true for my entire working life, probably well before I was a parent. But then you compound that with parenting and you get to a point, or at least I got to a point, where I was just a shell of a human getting tasks checked off a list rather than bringing my full self to work and parenting. 

The seventh one is feeling empty which means feeling empty. Exhaustion, anxiety, and panic set in. At some point, it became so overwhelming that it’s like I just shut down, everything shut down inside of me. My body can’t handle it anymore. 

Maybe this is not your personal experience, but I know many single parents often internalize some of their under-resourcing as a negative message about themselves, self-hatred, depression, and sometimes even coupled with suicidal thoughts, which is a serious part of the subject. It can really be helpful to be in a group where you can talk about these things and have an outlet where you can share what you’re going through and be supported in it. It’s so unpopular to talk about, but it can be a real part of the journey for a lot of our single parents.

Let’s talk about overcoming burnout and some strategies and some ideas. How can we move past this? 

Well, so many times the solution to burnout is counterintuitive. And one of the things that absolutely refuels me is being in nature. And so I’m thinking about the meme that maybe you’ve seen and it says this you should sit in nature for 20 minutes a day unless you’re busy, then you should sit in nature for an hour. And maybe our single parents are thinking, I don’t have 20 minutes, much less an hour. But if we are under-resourced, we absolutely have to take the time to do the counterintuitive thing, which is pour into ourselves. Maybe it is going to a group, maybe it is sitting in nature, maybe it is slowing down when everything in you feels like I actually need to do more. I need to continue to be self-reliant. What about giving yourself permission to not be perfect? I stopped trying to keep my house clean all the time, literally had to stop. I started doing laundry in survival, survival mode, just what we needed for that week. I used to think all the laundry had to be done at once. That was a pipe dream as a single parent. And so we just have to consider that what I’m doing now isn’t working. It’s leading me to these really big feelings of stress withdrawal.

Some of our things that we can do to help manage stress and avoid burnout. 

One of the times I felt completely burned out, I had listened to a devotional from Christy Wright and she was talking about clearing your plate. I had gotten to that point where I was a single mom still trying to do everything the way I did it when I was married. I was leading a team, traveling all the time, very highly visible at the company. There was a lot of stress, a lot of pressure put on me there. Then I’m coming home, getting home by 6:30pm or so, having to cook dinner, get Jax bathed, do story time, get him in bed, get up, do it again. Groundhog day,

Weekends are filled with soccer, you name it. And if he’s with his dad, then I’m trying to have a life, have friend time, go on dates, do the thing. And it was just all so much, so much pressure. And [reading that devotional], I said, “Okay, I need to clear my plate.” I was really looking at and praying about how to clear my plate. At first there were things I thought were non-negotiable, like the leadership role I had at the company. When I say I had a leadership role, I was at the top. I was put on a trajectory to be a senior leader in the company and I had to say, “Hey, waving my white flag over here. Stepping out of leadership altogether. I just need to be a worker bee for a little bit so I can go home, be with my child, not have to deal with all you crazy people, and just take it off my plate.” And so that’s what I did. It was a big stab in the ego gut. I’d built so much of my identity on this leadership piece and doing big things with this highly visible company and highly visible role within the company. But it was like, “I have to do it.”

I had to give myself permission not to be perfect, to not have everything worked out. For those of us that raise opposite-sex kids, I couldn’t be mom and dad for my girls. But I tried to meet all those needs. I tried to, and it totally burned me out. So I had to start releasing the pressure to be perfect about everything.

I think about the magic word “no” and it is a complete sentence. I had to get really good at it. And I started to use bridge phrases: Let me get back to you. I need to think about that. I’m not sure, but thank you for asking. So that instead of saying “no,” which was hard for me in some of these stages, I found ways to buy myself some time to decide what needed to be on my plate and what didn’t. 

I said no to both to someone coming to clean my house and someone doing my laundry for me. I was crazy. And I’m here to tell single parents, you know what you say to things like that? “Yes, thank you.” “Yes, thank you” is a strategy. I wasn’t good at it, but please learn from my mistakes. We have to learn our limitations and it was pride [that made me say no].

What’s the difference between relief and restoration?

If you think about relief as the opportunity to cease pain, we’re overwhelmed, we’re stressed, and maybe we just numb out to Netflix or scroll our phone to cease some of the stress in the moment, but it doesn’t genuinely fill us back up and offer us supports underneath the bridge. Restoration is supportive, it’s healing, and it helps us fill back up. So relief just stops the stress for the moment, and restoration actually builds and fills us with some of what we need to keep moving forward. And relief is not necessarily wrong; sometimes we need relief, but it’s not the same as getting the support and resourcing we need.

I’m still learning about finding those little bits of restorative things. And once you know what those are, put that in the schedule and make sure that you do that every day so that you have little drips in the bucket and you don’t run dry. And then you’re having to try to fill it all up at once and let that run through. Because that bucket runs dry faster versus if you just drip in the bucket every single day. For me, it’s going on a walk or running or doing some sort of exercise [and journaling]. I have to have it. I have to. If I don’t get that for 2.5 weeks or so and it builds up for me, then all of a sudden my mind starts going crazy and I’m anxious, overwhelmed, angry, and not showing up as my best version. 

Once you figure out what fills you up, make sure you schedule a little bit of time every day. We don’t have enough hours in the day to get all that we need to done. And it builds up. There’s stress of not having enough hours in the day to check off all the boxes, so figure out what the priorities are and schedule those first. These are non-negotiables. If I get nothing else done today, these four things have to happen. And then fill in around that. Those do not move off your plate regardless of what happens. Regardless of what comes along. You’ve got to find a way.

I’m glad you brought that up, because I do feel like we live in a very reactive world. And so the tendency can be like, “Okay, I feel burned out, I’m going to react to that and do something self-care wise.” And we wait until it gets to the point where we’re overloaded instead of just dripping into the bucket that we need filled to prevent. And it doesn’t mean you’ll never get burned out, it just means that you’re less likely to get burned out as quickly. And to make that a non-negotiable, for me, was just being quiet. There’s an illustration of how a light bulb produces light, but it’s actually not the light bulb that produces light. It’s electricity that produces the light. And the only way to get electricity is to plug it in. And so to me, that’s what pause was. That’s what meditation was—a dark room, just being quiet for 15 minutes a day. I did it every day, was plugging back into the source of something greater than me that did fill my bucket.

But it became a habit for me. And it was probably one of the most helpful things that I did during my solo parent season and it’s not that way for everyone, and that may not work for you. But for me, I found that thing and made it non-negotiable. It has to be part of a routine.

I had a one-liner that I would say pretty much every morning before I got out of bed: “Lord, give me the strength I need to do the things I need to do today.”

That idea of one day at a time and staying plugged into the source of comfort and help and hope [for me] was absolutely crucial. And it still continues to be.

I read “The Ruthless Illumination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World” and it was a complete game changer for me. It’s by John Mark Comer. He says (it’s been proven by study after study), “There is zero correlation between hurry and productivity. In fact, once you work a certain number of hours in a week, your productivity plummets. Want to know what that number is? 50 hours. Ironic, that’s about a six-day work week. One study found that there was zero difference in productivity between workers who logged 70 hours and those who logged 50 hours.” So you can think that if you just put in a little more energy [then you can do more] but the truth is, we were designed with a capacity just like a battery. It doesn’t matter how much you wish. If it’s empty, once it’s depleted, it’s depleted.

If I try harder and harder, it’s not going to make any difference. It’s going [have] the same [outcome] as if I stopped at a healthy limit and rested and didn’t try to do more. It’s proof that our productivity doesn’t increase because we put more hours in. In fact, it’s capped at 50.

Takeaways

1. Solo parents are extremely susceptible to burnout because we’re carrying a load that’s meant for two. 
2. Burnout happens in stages and it’s crucial to know the signs of when you’re beginning to get burned out. 
3. There is a way out of burnout; it may not be intuitive, but it’s important.

Listener Question

My kids are in elementary and middle school and every night it’s like pulling teeth to get them to do their homework. How can I make homework into less of a chore and or fight with my kids?

Here’s what I had to do most recently because my 11-year-old Jax started middle school. And it was a huge shift from elementary to middle school. Elementary was pretty chill, pretty laid back. That’s what he’s used to. Middle school, however, is not so chill, with homework—a lot of homework. I think he had a couple tests the first full week of school. It was pretty intense.

And we noticed pretty quickly it wasn’t working. Whatever he was doing or not doing wasn’t working. He was an A/B child for all of elementary school, never really had any issues as far as academics go. I had to say, “Alright, let’s look at all your homework.” And I started sitting down with him every day, holding him accountable to what his homework was. But I also noticed he was coming home and saying, “Mom, I just need a break from the day.” And at first I was like, “Yeah, I get that. Of course you need a break from the day.” He wanted to just chill, maybe play a video game with friends for a little bit and then do his homework. 

Then those grades started happening and I was like, “We need to readjust. We need to rethink this.” And I told him, “I feel like you have too much on your plate. You’ve got two to three hours of homework. Obviously that stinks. I hate that for you. I’m sorry. But the fact of the matter is, your responsibility is school just the same way my responsibility is work right now. So it has to be the main priority. So let’s talk about what all you have on your list. You want to play video games, you want to watch tv, you want to play flag football, you want to do take drum lessons, you want to go to church on Wednesdays, all of that’s great, but you’ve got something almost every night of the week and on weekends including all of this homework. So what’s a priority? I’ll tell you it’s not playing video games and tv. Flag football or drums are also not necessarily a priority. We’re going to have to start knocking things off your list if you can’t manage your time a little better.” Well, that got him. He was like, “I don’t want to lose flag football. I don’t want to lose drums.” And I was like, “Okay, well you know what? The choice is yours. You hold the power here, so you get to make the choice. What are you not going to do?” And he was like, “I’m just going to come straight home every day and do my homework as soon as I get home and knock that out. And that way I just have the rest of the day.” [Since then] everything has turned around. 

My kids are 19 and 22, and I’m like, “Man, I’m glad this isn’t my problem anymore.” It’s a big deal and parents are facing a lot of stress trying to help their kids achieve those things and learn those lessons. So all I can say right now is, “Solo parents, I see you. It isn’t easy and keep going. You’re in it. You’re doing it.” One of my strategies was to right-size my expectations and remember that in elementary school, they didn’t have to get 100 on every little worksheet. They didn’t have to ace every single spelling test. And I had to let my perfectionism take a backseat and let my kids be who they were. And then as they got into middle school, I let them handle some of the responsibility and consequences of getting their homework done or not and having the natural consequence of getting a good grade or not. My kids fell into a rhythm and I let the teachers hold them accountable too. I shared some of the weight of responsibility with the educational system.

Time management has been the priority for middle school. A couple of parents who’d had middle schoolers (now into high school) reminded us that the grades don’t matter in middle school. They don’t stay on the record. What’s most important to learn right now in sixth grade and middle school in general, is time management. And so that helped me shift my focus. Whereas in elementary school you’re setting the foundation for learning but middle school is about time management. And that took some of the pressure off.

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