by When the demands of motherhood intersect with the physical and emotional challenges of perimenopause, exhaustion can become more than just fatigue – it can feel overwhelming, isolating, and all-consuming.
Mothers are more tired than ever. Recently a large-scale systematic review showed that the average prevalence of parental burnout was 6-9% but both personally and professionally I feel like that number should be a lot higher (90%?)
Do you know a mother with young children who isn’t battling through in a sleep-deprived haze? I don’t.
Burnout is often spoken about as if it belongs to one stage of life or another, but for many women it can persist across both motherhood and perimenopause in varying degrees. While the two experiences can overlap, the drivers and symptoms can be different in motherhood compared to perimenopause. Understanding those differences can help make sense of what’s happening in the body and mind – and point toward more effective strategies for coping.
Burnout in motherhood is frequently shaped by relentless external demands. It often begins with sleep deprivation, the constant mental load of planning and anticipating others’ needs, and the pressure to be ‘on’ at all times. Whether caring for a newborn, managing school-aged children, or juggling paid work alongside unpaid work (parenting), the workload rarely comes with clear boundaries or much downtime, if any, at all. Over time, this can lead to emotional irritability, and a sense of losing oneself in endless to-do lists. Many mothers describe feeling like they are functioning on autopilot – present in their body to some degree and ‘going through the motions’ but feeling a little out of touch with their own needs.
A key feature of maternal burnout is that it is often systematically reinforced within our patriarchal system. Social expectations, uneven distribution of domestic labour, and lack of systemic financial support all contribute to stress and strain. Even when support exists, guilt can complicate the ability to actually receive that support, or enjoy it. In a French study of 550 women, this ‘mother guilt’ was shown to be a distinct psychological condition, contributing to burnout, anxiety and depression in the postpartum period.
Perimenopausal burnout in contrast, is often more internally or physiologically driven, though life circumstances still play a major role. Hormonal fluctuations -particularly changes in oestrogen and progesterone – can affect sleep quality, stress tolerance, and emotional regulation. Women may notice increased anxiety, brain fog, fatigue that isn’t relieved by rest, and a diminished capacity to recover from stress that previously felt manageable.
What makes perimenopausal burnout particularly disorienting is that it can occur even when external responsibilities haven’t changed. A woman may still be managing work, family, and life logistics at the same level, yet feel as though her sense or capacity to ‘buffer’ the stress has gone.
As mothers, our bodies no longer recover in the same way, which can create a sense of betrayal – it’s painful to realise you can’t cope like you used to.
While motherhood burnout often feels like depletion from constant outward giving, perimenopausal burnout can feel like there’s a gap between inner capacity and outer expectations. Both involve overwhelm, but the source of strain differs – external load versus shifting internal resilience (though in reality, both are usually occuring at once).
There is also a psychological overlap. Many women in perimenopause are still actively parenting, sometimes babies, often teenagers or young adults, while also caring for ageing parents and maintaining careers. This ‘sandwich generation’ pressure means the two types of burnout frequently coexist, compounding each other. At a time when mothers most need support, they are stretched even thinner in their loving care for parents as well as their children of varying ages.
What can be helpful in both cases is naming the experience accurately. Burnout is not a personal failure; it is a signal of sustained overload and lack of adequate rest and recovery. In motherhood, this might mean redistributing tasks or lowering standards that were never sustainable. In perimenopause, it may involve lowering expectations in light of changing capacity and physiological demands, prioritising sleep, and recognising that you can ‘have it all’ as the popular phrase suggests, just not all at once.
Ultimately, both forms of burnout ask for the same response – more support, more rest, and more setting of healthy boundaries. The differences lie in what is changing underneath – but the need for appropriate medical care as well as lifestyle medicine support remains the same. We were never designed to go through life at a full throttle pace, so when fatigue slows us down (regardless of the life stage) it’s an opportunity to listen and course correct. Of course, you don’t have to figure it all out alone, please speak with your trusted doctor, integrative GP, naturopath or other health professional for individualised care.
References
Hem-Lee-Forsyth, S., Gabriel, J., N’Diera Viechweg, M. H. L., Kim, S., Sowa, F., & Bainey, K. (2023). Postpartum Burnout Among Women of Childbearing Age: A Neglected Global Public Health Problem. International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Analysis, 6(09), 4396-4404.
Ren, X., Cai, Y., Wang, J., & Chen, O. (2024). A systematic review of parental burnout and related factors among parents. BMC public health, 24(1), 376.
Sánchez-Rodríguez, R., Orsini, É., Laflaquière, E., Callahan, S., & Séjourné, N. (2019). Depression, anxiety, and guilt in mothers with burnout of preschool and school-aged children: Insight from a cluster analysis. Journal of affective disorders, 259, 244-250.
Zeng, W., Xu, J., Yang, Y., Lv, M., & Chu, X. (2025). Factors influencing sleep disorders in perimenopausal women: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Neurology, 16, 1460613.
Leave a Reply