The burnout nobody sees because it looks like accomplishment

Can I ask you something before we get into it today? And I really want you to be honest with yourself, even if just for a second. That moment last week, or maybe it was last month, or maybe honestly it was this morning, when you snapped at your child about something small. Something that on any other day wouldn’t have even registered. Do you really think it was about that thing? Or do you think it was something else entirely?

I ask because I had a moment like that with my youngest daughter. We call her the spill monster, and I say that with so much love, genuinely, because this child has a truly remarkable gift for redistributing any liquid within her reach onto any available surface. It’s actually impressive.

And I want to be honest with you. I do not always take the spilling well. Like, this is not a daily grace situation. She spills something basically every day and most days there is at least a very deep breath involved. But there was one specific evening, I couldn’t even tell you what she spilled, where I really snapped. Not a firm word. Not a calm redirect. The kind of reaction that surprises even you while it’s happening.

And then it was over, and she’s looking at me, and I just felt it immediately. That guilt. That specific, awful guilt of, she is little. She is still developing her fine motor skills. It was a cup of something. And now I’m standing here wondering if I just added something to the pile of things she’ll eventually discuss with a therapist.

Which, I genuinely hope I haven’t. But in that moment, I knew. It wasn’t about the spill. It was never about the spill.

Now, for those of you who don’t know me yet, I’m Latina. And I will tell you, I once had a colleague at P&G, before we were actually friends, when we were still just acquaintances, and apparently every time someone mentioned my name, she would say: “the loud one?”

So. Volume is not new for me. I come with it built in and I’ve made peace with that. But even by my standards, this wasn’t passion. This wasn’t frustration. This was empty. My tank was completely empty. And the spill was just the thing that landed on top of an already overloaded system.

I was burnt out. I just didn’t know it yet.

Welcome back to Unscripted, a Momtoring podcast. The show for the ambitious working mother who is everyone’s default and is finally ready to hear her own voice again.

I’m Andi Salcedo. I’m a coach, a working mother, and the founder of Momtoring, which is the coaching brand and community for working moms behind this show. If you end up wanting to go deeper after listening, momtoring.com is where you’ll find me. But right now, this conversation is what matters.

Last week we talked about chapters, about the myth that we can live every season of our life at full intensity at the same time, and what it costs us when we try. Today I want to go one layer deeper. Because before you can choose your chapter, you need to be honest about where you actually are right now. And today’s episode is going to give you a name for what you’ve been feeling, a reason why it makes complete sense, and one small thing you can actually do about it today. For a lot of working mothers, where they are is boiling. They just can’t feel it yet.

You’ve probably heard the story about the frog in boiling water. If you drop a frog into a pot of already boiling water, it jumps straight out. Danger, exit, done. But if you place it in cool water and raise the temperature really slowly, so gradually that it never quite gets the signal to jump, it just keeps adjusting. Until it can’t.

That’s burnout for working mothers. Not a crisis. Not a collapse. Not one dramatic moment where everything falls apart. It’s this slow, steady, almost invisible rise in temperature that we keep adapting to because adapting is what we do. We take on one more thing and find a way to carry it. We lose an hour of sleep and learn to function on less. We skip the workout, the lunch, the phone call with a friend, and our baseline for what’s okay just quietly slides downward, without us noticing it’s moving.

And here’s what I think is really important to understand. Burnout in women who are good at things doesn’t look like falling apart. It looks like keeping going. It looks like accomplishment. It looks like being completely on top of everything. Nobody burns out and announces it. We burn out quietly and competently, with a full calendar and a smile at the school gate, while remembering it’s crazy hair day on Thursday and hitting our targets at work and making sure the enrichment classes are booked. We burn out while looking, from every angle, like we have it together. Which is exactly why we miss it.

So let me tell you what burnout actually felt like for me. Not the clinical version. My version.

The first thing I noticed, though I didn’t call it burnout at the time, was the patience. Or really the absence of it. I found myself snapping at my daughters for things that would never have bothered me before. The arguing about shoes. The snack request at 5:58pm that felt, in that moment, genuinely unbearable. And underneath the snapping was something that frightened me more. I couldn’t hold space for them anymore. When they had big feelings, when they needed me to be the calm in their storm, I had nothing to offer. Because you can’t regulate someone else’s nervous system when yours is completely dysregulated. And mine was.

Then there was the joy. Or really the absence of it. Things I had always loved started to feel like obligations. Playing with my daughters felt like something I was supposed to do rather than something I actually wanted to do. And when I was doing it, I wasn’t fully there. Physically present, mentally somewhere else entirely. Like a part of me had quietly left the building without telling anyone.

And then, and this is the one I’m most hesitant to say, because it felt so unlike me, I started becoming cynical. Just generally upset with the world in a way that had no specific target. A low hum of bitterness about everything. And that one frightened me the most. Because I am, at my core, a hopeful person. And I didn’t recognize what I was becoming.

And through all of it, the snapping, the disconnection, the cynicism, I kept going. I kept delivering. I kept showing up. Because that’s what burnout looks like when you’re good at things. It doesn’t look like stopping. It looks like running on fumes and calling it fine.

Here’s what I really want you to hear. Burnout doesn’t mean you’re not enough. It means you’ve been running on empty for so long, and staying so quiet about it, that you’ve started to believe the emptiness is just who you are now.

It isn’t.

And I want to add something important here, because I came across an idea from Emily and Amelia Nagoski. They wrote a book called Burnout, and it genuinely changed how I understood what was happening in my body. They talk about the stress cycle. The idea is that stress is supposed to move through you. Your body triggers it, and your body is also designed to complete it, to release it. But most of us never get there. We manage the stressor, we answer the email, we get through the meeting, we hold it together at pickup when our kid is melting down over a forgotten stuffy, and then we just carry on. The stress stays in the body, unfinished, cycling on repeat.

And here’s the part I want to sit with for a second. It’s not just energy that gets trapped. It’s the emotions themselves. The anger that you didn’t have space to feel. The grief that had nowhere to go. The loneliness you couldn’t name because you were surrounded by people who needed you. Those feelings don’t disappear when we push through them. They freeze. They stay in the body, waiting. And part of what burnout actually is, underneath the exhaustion, is a body full of emotions that never got heard.

And the thing that gave me most hope about this is, closing the cycle doesn’t require you to change your life overnight. It can be a ten-minute walk. A few deep breaths that you actually mean. A cry in the car that you stop apologizing for. Movement, breath, release. Your body already knows how to do this. It’s just been waiting for permission.

So that’s where we start. This show is going to walk with you through all of it. The resentment underneath the burnout, the beliefs that keep you over giving, the perfectionism that makes rest feel unsafe. We’re going to get to all of it. Today you just needed to see and name where you are.

And when we name what isn’t working, we can’t un-know it. It’s there. And at some point, we will take responsibility for writing a different story.

I want to leave you with one question this week. Not a to-do. Not a framework. Just something to sit with tonight.

If your body could answer honestly right now, not your calendar, not your to-do list, not the version of you that has it together, what would it say it needs?

You don’t have to have an answer right now. But tonight, before you go to the next thing, I want to invite you to try something. A body scan. It takes about ten minutes. You can do it in bed, right before you fall asleep. It’s a simple practice of moving your attention slowly through your body, not to fix anything, just to notice. To let your nervous system know it’s safe to finish what the day started. I’ve recorded one for you, specifically for burnout, specifically for this moment, and it’s waiting for you at momtoring.com/body-scan.

That’s closing the cycle. And it begins there.

If this episode resonated, a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify helps another working mother find this show. Thirty seconds, and it genuinely makes a difference. And make sure you hit Follow right now because next week, we’re going into the resentment that nobody talks about. What it’s really pointing at. And why it was never about your family at all. It’s one of the most honest episodes of the show.

I’m Andi Salcedo. This is Unscripted. See you next week.