Candice Roquemore Bonner, PsyD, who is a clinical psychology resident at Brigham and Women's Hospital, knows the parenting-while-working juggle really well.
She moved to Boston with her two kids to begin her residency in June 2020, functioning solo until her husband could join them. Managing her career and her family’s well-being—all during a global pandemic—often left her own self-interest neglected. As a result, she said perpetual exhaustion and high-level irritability became part of her daily routine.
"I've been a working student and parent for 5 years, so it's been a constant juggling act," Roquemore Bonner explained. "But this year elevated my sense of burnout because there was simply no escape."
As the world is lifting pandemic restrictions, birthday parties are in full swing again, youth sports are back, and families are rushing from one activity to the next.
While this may be the light at the end of the tunnel people have been eagerly waiting for, parents never really had a chance to recover from pandemic burnout.
Burnout is a result of chronic exposure to emotionally draining environments and is characterized by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a decrease in self-fulfillment.
In 2019, the World Health Organization recognized burnout syndrome in its International Classification of Diseases as an occupational condition linked to several health symptoms, including fatigue, changing sleep habits, and substance use. While burnout is most associated with helping occupations like health care or high-pressure professions like law or finance, an increasing number of studies suggest burnout also occurs in other roles, particularly with the strain of navigating post-pandemic life.
As Lucy McBride, MD, a practicing internist in Washington, D.C., and author of a widely read COVID-19 newsletter described it in a text for The Atlantic, simply being human carries occupational risk, so now is the time to finally redefine burnout as the mental and physical fallout from accumulated stress in any sphere of life, whether that's work or parenting.
"To muster the energy for reentry into non-pandemic life, people need more than a vaccine and a vacation; they need validation of their experience, a broader reckoning with how they lived before March 2020, and tools to dig out from more than a year of trauma," McBride noted.
We've been flirting with burnout well before the pandemic, McBride said.
"The combination of hustle culture, toxic stress, and poor access to affordable health care conspired to make Americans among the least healthy populations in wealthy countries. Diseases of despair—including depression, anxiety, PTSD, and addiction—were already rampant."
