Shopper's Guide•Focus & Energy

6 signs mom brain is really just burnout

Summary: I called it mom brain for two years because that's the phrase everyone hands you. Then I noticed it got better on the quiet weeks, which is not how a permanent condition behaves. Here are the six things I'd been explaining away.

Here's all 6 👇

1. You read the same sentence four times

Not because it's difficult. Because it doesn't land. I'd get to the bottom of an email and realise I'd have to start again, and the second pass wasn't much better than the first.

2. The word you want is just gone

Mid-sentence, in front of people. You can feel the shape of it and it won't come. I'd started building little detours into how I spoke so nobody would notice the gap.

3. You're not tired at bedtime, you're wired

Exhausted all day and then wide awake at eleven. If the tiredness were simple, it would follow you to bed. Mine didn't, which was the first clue that it wasn't really about sleep.

4. Everything costs the effort it used to take twice

The tasks didn't get harder. Getting started on them did. I was spending the first twenty minutes of every job talking myself into it, which is not a scheduling problem you can fix with a better calendar.

5. Coffee stopped working and started costing

There's a point where the cup is holding off a deficit rather than giving you anything. Mine was three cups by two o'clock and a flat, short-tempered evening as the invoice.

6. It lifts when the load lifts — which tells you what it is

A quiet week and it's noticeably better. That's the part that made me stop calling it mom brain and start treating it as burnout. Superfocus is what I use on the days the load doesn't lift: 75mg of caffeine, L-Theanine, Alpha-GPC and Lion's Mane, every amount printed on the label.