The Hidden Signs of Maternal Burnout (and what to do next)

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1:33Hey, my loves, and welcome back to Motherkind. We are proudly supported by Wild Nutrition's Women's Supplements, and this is the podcast that is about you, the woman behind the mother. Motherkind is your guide for the massive shifts that happen to your identity, your well-being, and your career in motherhood. I am obsessed with helping you not just survive as a mother, but to thrive as a woman. If you are new here, welcome to the Motherkind family. Trust me, you are in the right place. And if you're a regular listener, then thank you for coming back every week. You really do mean the world to me.

2:08Okay, so today we have something new, something I've wanted to do for ages, which is a compilation episode on a topic I know so many of us have struggled with, and that is burnout. I recently called about 100 listeners. So if you were one of the listeners that I called, thank you for our chat, because I wanted to find out exactly what our listeners need from Motherkind to hear your stories and how I can continue to make Motherkind exactly what you need to be. So through those 100 calls, there was actually a massive pattern. About 80, I would say, of the 100 of our listeners that I spoke to had experienced or some of them were experiencing burnout.

2:51So I knew we had to do an episode on it, almost like an emergency episode. I said to the team, we have got to support our community with this. The stats on maternal burnout are quite shocking. The Motherly 2023 report showed that 48 % of mothers reported feeling frequently or always burned out. That is insane. Nearly half feeling frequently or always burned out. And I think it's not that surprising. It's kind of sadly unsurprising when we look at the environment that so many of us are mothering in. It's so multi-layered and so personal, but I think the three big buckets are the structural challenges we're facing.

3:33You know, the cost of living crisis, the cost and availability of good childcare, the unequal division of the mental load, the lack of proper postpartum care, workplaces not designed to support us. And then we have the societal challenges, you know, the pressure to be perfect, more parenting information than ever before, social media pressure and comparison. And then I think we've got the personal, you know, the pressure that we put on ourselves, the lack of understanding that we have about our own matrescence and of postpartum and how to care for ourselves in a new way in motherhood. I know that my burnout I experienced in 2021 was a perfect storm of all those things.

4:17You know, I moved house to a new area. We didn't have childcare. I was putting myself under way too much pressure. I wasn't asking for enough help, partly because I didn't have any friends where we moved to. So I didn't have a network or a community and I was putting myself under way too much pressure to keep growing the podcast and the business. And as a result, I just stopped caring for myself, all the things that I know I should have been doing. I teach this stuff I live this stuff I stopped doing I just worked and I looked after the kids and I sorted the new house that's all I did and unsurprisingly I completely burned out and if you've ever experienced burnout or maybe teetered on the edge of it you will know how visceral it is I literally felt like giving up on everything choosing what to make for dinner would just have me in tears and I remember crying because the thought of getting my one-year-old dressed one morning just felt like too much, felt like climbing a mountain.

5:16So if you've been burnt out or if you feel close to it, I get it. And I really want you not to ignore it. Don't push through. Don't just leave it. That's why I wanted to put this episode out with these amazing experts to help you actually do something. First expert you're going to hear from is Dr. Claire Ashley. She is known as the burnout doctor. She's a GP, the burnout. And she tells you how she ended up getting burnout, the warning signs she missed, that is pure gold, and how to avoid a full-blown burnout. Next up is Rianne Lambert. She's one of the UK's leading nutritionists. She explains her burnout and recovery.

5:54And then the last clip is from me sharing a tool that every single person needs to understand, and that is completing the stress cycle and how it helps avoid burnout. I think if I'd known that and I was doing that, I would not have burnout in 2021. So I really want to listen up to that part. I hope this episode helps. Please do share it with a friend who you know you want to hear this too. Perhaps the friend that just keeps on pushing through. She needs to hear this too. Here is the episode. I hope you love it.

6:26And so that Claire who's kind of edging towards burnout and knowing what you know now, because there'll be people listening who are in that sort of edging towards not in a full-blown burnout, what would you do differently? So prevention, it's like any physical problem, right? With burnout, prevention is better than cure. So if you end up in the crisis point, like I did, then it's a one to three year average recovery period because the stress has done such a number on your brain and your body, because it makes real changes to your brain, its structure, its function. This all sounds terrifying, by the way, but it's completely reversible with time and with changes.

7:03And it changes the way your body reacts to stress as well. That's why you get so many symptoms and that's why you end up needing that prolonged recovery period. But if you get yourself before you end up in that situation, then you can avoid that. And so I think had I been, you know, had I caught myself at an earlier point, I think if I'd known that I could have avoided that having to make as many changes as I did to how I work and as many changes as I had to make to my life and how I parent and how I manage my stress. You know, the recovery period was, it was years for me, to be honest. And I would have done anything to have avoided that, you know, so.

7:43Hindsight is a wonderful thing. What would some of those things have been? What would some of those early interventions been for you? So I think, so I would have looked at it from two angles. The first one would have been to identify the work factors that were fueling my stress and my burnout. So there are six workplace factors that can cause burnout. And a problem with just one of these things can send you to that place. So it's problems with workload, control, values, community, fairness, and reward. And I think when I look back, I think there were problems with all of these factors. It sounds like all of those you were ticking the boxes for.

8:19And so really what I could have done is just taken a step back and think, okay, how can I start to make small changes in all of these areas so that I can successfully manage the root cause of my work stress rather than trying to manage my emotional responses to it. And I think that would have made a big difference. And what's really nice about burnout is that just believing that you've got control over these things, that mindset shift is enough to help that recovery process. Because it's the counter to the helplessness, of course. Exactly, yes. So that really does make a difference. And then the second thing is I would have looked at how I was coping with my stress and perhaps thought about having some therapy to get some different coping strategies because my coping strategies really were overwork and exercise which I wasn't really doing at the time and that wasn't really robust enough anyway and actually I think I said two things but I'm going to add a third thing to that as well.

9:13I would have looked at the structural things so the things that were happening outside of work that were affecting my capacity for that so I would have looked at addressing the fact that my village was really lacking, thinking about how I could maybe change my working patterns so that, you know, the inflexibility, the childcare wasn't so much of an issue and also carving out some time for myself because I was either parenting or I was working. And actually, as we know, parenting, you know, it comes with a lot of joy and a lot of happiness, but also can be very stressful as well and can feel like work too.

9:50So I think I probably would have looked at having a bit more more for myself because I everything that I did during that period was for other people I didn't do anything for myself

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10:11did you have that once the book was out did you experience that release and collapse I can relate to that in my first birth in lockdown, I actually developed psychosis. I've probably discussed it before because I was awake for five days straight. And I mean, awake because it was COVID. Billy, my husband wasn't with me and I was on my own in the hospital and I was unsupported. COVID was, it was April 2020. It was the height of the pandemic. It was a different time. And I've had a lot of therapy for that, a lot of trauma work for that period of time, but I can relate to that heightened. So what it kind of does in your brain when you're on high alert, especially when you've just had a baby, you just can't, it's hypervigilance and you just cannot switch off.

10:54So I can completely relate to that feeling. And I would actually say the crash for me is only just happening now. He's nearly two, like two years later, I suddenly feel like, why am I exhausted all the time? I'm a nutritionist. I even went to get my iron levels tested because I thought, hang on, maybe I'm anemic. I was like, why am I so knackered? I'm now getting more six to seven hours most nights of sleep. That should be enough. But actually, it's not. It's really hard for us women to survive on such a long, and men, on such a long period of time with severe sleep deprivation. So yeah, I can totally relate to that feeling of being on higher hypervigilance and equally having to function and having no choice.

11:36The stress levels internally are up. Thanks for normalizing that because I think there's this sort of idea which I absolutely hate, which is that once you're past the six weeks or the 12 weeks or the first year, you're sort of out of the woods. And actually, as you know, on the podcast, I talk really passionately about hostnatal depletion is a decade. It's a decade. And you'll know this from your book, to get your nutrition levels and your hormones and everything, even now it is a decade. I think we just need to completely change the timelines around mother's health. Yeah, I could not agree more.

12:11And it's not my area, the political side of things with how much paid leave we get or people that are in those types of jobs get and paternity leave. That's a different question, but that doesn't help the stereotypes around that type of recovery. Our society doesn't help it like they do in our other cultures, of course, with how they respect women post-birth and the support they receive. But I do think in terms of our nutritional status, like even our dental health, that's why women on the NHS should have free dental care. I think it, again, sadly isn't forever. I think it's like the first year or something.

12:43Any dentist listening, please correct me. It's probably wrong. But you get support because your body, when you have a baby, all the nutrients are leached for the baby. So your stores that you've built pre-pregnancy and during pregnancy, there's next to nothing left for you. You can crack teeth, your bones can be brittle. I've always wondered that, Rhi. Is that why pregnant women get free dental care? Yeah. Because our body prioritizes the baby and our teeth can fall out. Well, yeah. When I say fall out, that's drastic, but they will be weakened. I don't want to scare people listening, but I crack the tooth from teeth grinding at night, literally cut the top bit off the tooth.

13:23So I'd start wearing a mouth guard, but it's because my teeth have become more brittle, I don't know the correct word, I'm not a dentist, than usual. And calcium stores, things that aren't spoken about enough nutrient-wise, are most definitely impacted. And I love that you said it takes, well, it's quite sad, but also amazing. It takes 10 years. It should take at least two before your body is nutrient-speaking, getting enough and feeling better. But for those women that have been through severe pregnancies, perhaps even longer. And so with your kind of, I guess your personal and your professional hat on, you're sat here thinking, hang on a minute, why am I so exhausted?

14:02You said you were the first to checking iron. I've had that experience as well. And I, and my iron was low. And I think for a lot of women, you'll know this far better than me. It is low. Yeah. What are you going to do next? Like where, where does your investigations take you next? Because I think there'll be so many people listening who relate. I'm very fortunate in the fact that I could afford therapy and I can't actually afford it at the moment but I did have a severe course, an intensive course of it for a while and I identified that one of the other symptoms for me was breathing. so I find it hard to get you know like a full breath in and it really puzzled me because you know I'm an ex-soprano I know how to diaphragmatic breathe I understand parasympathetic nervous system the benefits of breathing from your diaphragm not just up here from your chest and your shoulders short breaths and it was a sign of chronic stress so when I speak about the work I did alongside having two babies like all the books I've written in the last few years have been with a baby or a newborn or in with under two.

15:04And the toll of that was that my body, I physically could not breathe. And this went on for a year. So a year from T's age, probably one to two now, I just couldn't breathe. So that was an indicator. And then that's also led me to the anemia assumption. So it could manifest in so many different ways. It might not just be a nutrient level manifestation. It could be your gut health, your bowel movements aren't back, they aren't feeling right. You are feeling foggy in the head, your hair doesn't look the same. It's not got the usual shine, your nails. There should come a point postpartum where all of those sorts of things level out, like you notice the regrowth of hair, those lovely baby hairs, and those little triangle chunks at the front of your head, wherever it may be for you.

15:45I've still got the baby hair growth that's just like there. But all these common signs. And I think for women, if you don't feel right, like for me, anxiety levels were also really high. And I never used to experience anxiety before children in the way, even with my performing background, and I was putting so many ruthless situations, it was never as bad as it was post-children. And that's because of the birth trauma and the lockdown experience. How many women in the last four years have had a lockdown experience with children? All of us that now have under fours have experienced some level of psychological distress more so than they would have done before.

16:24It's going to impact everyone. And that in itself depletes nutrients, makes us feel tired, makes us feel exhausted. And the only answer I sometimes find is I have to get into bed really, really ridiculously early, even if I don't sleep, because then I'm more likely to fall asleep earlier. There's no other way to catch up without getting that early at night, I don't think. Yeah, I think you're right. Sometimes you just have to be quite ruthless with your boundaries. I know I've got all these things to do. I'm going to leave the house in a complete tip because actually the number one thing I have to look after is my health yeah is me this was life changing for me and this is called completing the stress cycle and this idea was taught to me by emily and emily nagoski who wrote i think the only book on burnout specifically from a woman's angle and completing the stress cycle all changed my life because I thought that burnout was about taking on too much stress.

17:28Basically, I was taking too much stress and I needed to de-stress my life and that's how I would avoid burnout. But actually, what Amelia and Emily taught me is that so much burnout comes from not releasing the stress. I wasn't completing the stress cycle. So actually, stress is meant to happen in a cycle. We're meant to have a stressor, feel the stress, and then we're meant to release it. But actually, I didn't know that. And I didn't know how to release stress. And I didn't know that there were scientifically proven ways and simple little things that we can do at the end of every day to release the stress.

18:01It's almost like we wouldn't pile on yesterday's dishes, you know, on top of today's and we would, you know, we'd clear the table and start again. It's exactly the same with completing the stress cycle. Another analogy that I like is this one with the sponge, where we can absorb so much stress and we can take on so much. But actually, if we don't wring the sponge out, that is when we burn out. So completing the stress cycle is like the equivalent of wiping the table and wringing the sponge out. It enables us day after day to keep taking on stress. And the reason that I just am obsessed with this idea so much is because it's actually super simple and quick.

18:39It's not like a 10 step, 10 hour thing that we have to do to complete the stress cycle. It's actually quick. Like the top ways are a short burst of physical activity, like 10 minutes star jumps in the kitchen with the kids would do it. Deep breathing. So just three rounds of deep breathing, hugging until you feel relaxed, that releases the oxytocin that you need. Crying is another way to release the stress cycle. If you're interested in this, there's a whole sort of section on it in the book. And I've also done solo episodes just on this. So we will link those in the bottom two. Okay, so that is completing the stress cycle.

19:19What an incredible episode. I hope you loved it too. If you've got this far, then I am guessing that you did. So make sure that you share it with a friend and subscribe so you never miss an episode. And I will see you next Monday and Thursday for more. See you next time.