The first sign of Mom Fatigue is leaving weird stuff in the fridge. Olivia Walch once got so tired that she put a box of Cheerios in the refrigerator. For Erin Wamsley, it was mugs of coffee and clean dishes; for Amanda Lamp, a pen. Maya Cash Carpenter told me her car keys sometimes turn up there.
As I interviewed mothers about the symptoms of their persistent exhaustion, they described brain fog, sleepiness, and general discombobulation. “I can’t remember the words I’m trying to say, or a concept I’m trying to convey to people,” said Jennifer Wood, a mother of four and a nurse. And they mentioned, unprompted, the refrigerator. (I, for one, recently bought a $7 pint of fancy ice cream and quickly placed it on a shelf next to the eggs and milk because I, too, am a sleepy mom.)
Believe it or not, mothers of young children sleep on average more than eight hours a night—technically “enough” rest. But many wake up each morning feeling like they could easily snooze for two to 10 more hours. Even after they no longer need to breastfeed in the middle of the night, many moms feel zonked, fantasizing about naps (for ourselves!) and spacing out during conversations (when we’re lucky enough to have adult time). This problem seems to mostly affect mothers specifically, not parents in general. Mothers sleep about the same amount as fathers do, researchers told me, but they report higher levels of fatigue. A 2017 study found that for women, having children in the house is associated with “feeling unrested”—not so for men. Moms don’t seem to need more sleep; we seem to need more … time? Brain capacity? Life juice? What, exactly?
When I called researchers, some said that tired mothers might, in fact, simply require more sleep than the eight hours that most people assume adults need. “The main way in sleep medicine that we would measure whether you’re getting enough sleep would be whether you’re tired during the day,” said Wamsley, who in addition to being a mother of a teen is also a cognitive neuroscientist at Furman University. If you’re tired, in other words, that means you need more sleep, even if you think you’re getting enough.
But some researchers suggested that a lack of sleep isn’t the main culprit at all. “Parents will talk about fatigue as being something that persists and is unrelenting, even if they’ve had sleep and rest,” Rebecca Giallo, a researcher at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia, told me.
So what is going on with mothers’ energy levels? The problem might be that, although they are sleeping enough hours, the quality of their sleep isn’t great. About 12 percent of women have their sleep regularly interrupted by their young children, compared with less than 3 percent of men. I sleep with a baby monitor on, and I can hear my son wake periodically throughout the night, roll around in his crib, and fuss a little until he gets comfortable again. I wake up every time he does, and then I usually stay awake for a few more minutes to be sure he’s really settled. All of those minutes get deducted from my seemingly solid eight hours. Walch, the mother of a 10-month-old, the founder of a sleep-app company, and the author of Sleep Groove, told me that parents’ sleep schedules are also often inconsistent—that is, parents aren’t going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, because their kids won’t go down or because they’re trying to squeeze in tasks after bedtime. Staying up an hour later or waking an hour earlier than your body is accustomed to can make you feel tired, even if you sleep eight hours.
Then there’s “sleep debt”: All those nights of waking up frequently to feed a baby or to tend to a sick child contribute to a serious sleep deficit, one that takes a while to pay off—potentially weeks or months, depending on how large the debt is. A mother may have gotten eight hours of sleep last night, but not enough over the past six months. Walch told me about an old study that sounds like every new parent’s fantasy, in which healthy people were confined to a dark room for 14 hours a day. The first night, they slept about 12 hours, and the following night about 10, and so forth. Slowly, they drained the sleep deficit they had accrued over a lifetime.
Finally, many working mothers spend their lives hopping from the treadmill of child care to the treadmill of work, and back again. Before I had a child, I spent my nonwork time decompressing, staring at my phone, and doing nothing in particular. But these days, when I’m not working, I’m never truly relaxing. I’m ordering diapers from Walmart.com, Googling the right way to cut broccoli florets to minimize choking risk, researching different types of rashes, or making my son an occupational-therapy appointment because he’s “sitting wrong.” Oh, and I’m blocking and tackling a high-speed pre-toddler as he climbs the furniture, then frantically showing him how to play pat-a-cake, because learning this is apparently an important milestone. My husband is not doing all of this, because, like most men in a heterosexual relationship, he doesn’t focus as much on the details of our kid’s life as I do. He doesn’t know what the milestones even are.
I’m far from alone in how I spend my, uh, “free time”—or in being the one who spends way more hours and brain power on raising my child than my partner does, Melissa Milkie, a University of Toronto sociologist, told me. Even in families in which the parents earn roughly the same amount, mothers spend six hours more a week on caregiving and housework than fathers do. According to one recent study, women shoulder 73 percent of all cognitive household labor and 64 percent of the physical labor. All of this means that I, like many working mothers, have very few opportunities to wind down. Employed women get only about 13 minutes for “relaxing and thinking” on an average weekday, according to the American Time Use Survey. Employed men get 25. (The study didn’t provide information about working mothers and fathers specifically, but I can only imagine that the moms surveyed had even less time to relax.)
Fathers feel fatigued too, but “mothers, more than fathers, are taking on this really big, huge responsibility of making sure their children turn out successful and happy,” Milkie said. Maya Cash Carpenter, the mom who puts her keys in the fridge, has a 3-year-old, hosts a podcast, and also takes care of her ailing dad. She told me, “Even when I’m technically resting, I’m making mental checklists, responding to texts, planning content, or wondering if my toddler’s quiet time means peace or property damage. I’m quite literally a human browser with 47 tabs open at all times.” She said that her husband is tired in a “just finished a workout” way, while she’s tired in a “my soul needs to be wrung out like a sponge” way.
Working mothers have not historically had to manage such an enormous mental load on their own, Amanda Lamp, a sleep researcher at Washington State University (whom I called by the wrong name initially because I was so tired), told me. In our ancestral past as hunter-gatherers, she said, mothers watched their kids among groups of people while going about their day. Through industrialization and into the early 20th century, mothers were more likely to have the help of extended family and community members; they didn’t sprint home from a meeting to make it to “baby and me” swim class, stop on the way home for groceries, cook dinner, and do their kid’s bedtime routine. And parenting is different from other stressors that most humans are subjected to: A big work project ultimately ends, but motherhood just keeps going. “There’s a different kind of fatigue when you have 16 things pulling for your time, versus one really big project,” Carrie Mead, a therapist in Maryland whose clients are primarily women, told me.
To combat this problem, the experts I spoke with recommended that busy mothers take a few minutes each day for “wakeful rest,” or, in layman’s terms, for mentally zoning out. Lab studies have found that “having some amount of time in which a person is mentally not focused on the here and now is beneficial to memory consolidation,” Erin Wamsley said. This is not the same as meditation, which is beneficial in other ways but involves concentrating on your breath or on a mantra. Wakeful rest means just doing nothing: letting your mind relax. “Our brains are not built to deal with this onslaught of information,” Lamp said. Letting your mind wander for a few minutes can help reset your brain, kind of like turning your computer off and on when it overheats.
But how can mothers squeeze in this wakeful rest when they’re so busy? Lamp recommended that, if you are a tired mom, you take five or 10 minutes every day to do a mindless task—fold some laundry, go for a walk, what have you—during which you don’t listen to a podcast, make lists, or talk to anyone. Try not to think about anything in particular. Just be—the Walmart order can wait.
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