Live In Your Season: A Perfectionist’s Take
The sound of my son flapping his arms and legs pulls me out of a deep sleep I’ve been trained to snap out of to the slightest baby coos and whimpers. I open my heavy eyes and as they adjust to the dark, a huge baby grin appears. In translation, “let’s go play! I want to crawl!”. I look at the clock, 4:15 am. No way. How many hours of sleep is that? Three? Google tells me to keep him in here, to not interact and wait until he falls back asleep but with this being my second baby, history tells me I either sit here for an hour in the dark, rocking like a lunatic or go to the living room for an hour to let him crawl. My thoughts are interrupted by an impatient babble, so I decide on the latter. I pick him up and cover his cheeks with kisses as I bring him out to the living room so he can try the new moves he is so eager to practice. I sit on the floor with him and think about the things I need to do today. It’s Saturday. My husband’s home from work today which means I can relax and just pick out our groceries, but relief doesn’t quite settle like it usually does. I could just have my husband do groceries this time but that’s not the issue. My brain feels like static, and I feel a dopamine shortage during one of the happiest chapters of my life; the hallmark symptoms for burnout. I feel my cheeks burn and eyes blur, then imagine I feel similar to how my toddler does every evening since she's outgrowing her nap. I know that just one good rest isn’t my cure though. Live In Your Season. I’m reminded of a Substack piece by Heather Lanier I recently read about living intentionally. Lanier discussed that sometimes, you don’t know which season you’re in. That phrase has bounced around in my brain for days trying to let me know I’ve been wearing shorts and flip flops in the dead of winter this entire summer.
Whether you grew up in an authoritarian home, or you're just a natural born perfectionist (if you’re both, well… sorrows, sorrows, prayers), you have probably become an expert at ignoring your biological cues. You might be convinced that life is designed to always be in productive harvest season, even when there’s nothing left to harvest because how dare you spend the winter resting. Then you spring right over the season of trying out new ideas because you don’t recognize the difference between being a beginner and just being bad at something (I’m doomed if my life ever depends on throwing, catching or running).
I have come a long way since I was a 19-year-old college student taking melatonin supplements to force myself to sleep 4-6 hours, then chugging energy drinks all day to get through an unnecessary amount of credit hours at school and shifts at the nursing home — all for a degree I picked to make other people happy. I didn’t know I was experiencing burnout when I sat down to take a final exam and I couldn’t read it. All I could manage that day was write my name then walk out to my car to cry. I took the next semester off and moved in with a friend who taught me about concepts like positive affirmations and showed me how to play with flow art props (those sticks and ropes people light on fire and dance with at festivals). When I finally started to go easy on myself and did things for the sake of making myself happy; it felt like some family started to treat me like I was the burnout. I had a hard time distinguishing the difference so I gave up on the rest of the pans I had in the fire. I ran off to another state, leaving behind family, school, goals and dreams, my religion and even my legal name for dramtic effect. I left in search of my own thoughts and opinions about myself and the world around me.
I have reached burnout countless times since then, each time more resilient than the time before. Now, I’ve come to an understanding that this cycle is inherent to my nature. If I’m not pouring my heart and soul into everything and everyone I love, then taking time to recover to do it all again, then I just wouldn’t be me. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t keep improving my rhythm. I want to model to my kids that we should listen to our bodies and teach them that we’re not meant to push ourselves to the very limit so often. So, I decided to do some research on perfectionism and burnout and how they might be affecting my parenting style.
To learn more about my perfectionist tendencies, I searched my college database for peer reviewed articles and found a study published in 2020 called Relationship Between Parenting Styles and Multidimensional Perfectionism: A Meta-Analysis Study by Meltem Yıldız, Jale Eldeleklioğlu and Hazel Duru. For the study, they came up with three different perfectionist styles. The names they came up with were hard to follow so I came up with my own names: the Heartfelt Perfectionist (high standards with healthy motivation), the Anxious Perfectionist (high standards motivated by fear of failure or judgement) and a Organized Perfectionist (organization, neatness and predictability). Then they compared and analyzed the relationship between the three types of perfectionism to four different parenting styles: Authoritative (high rules, high warmth), Authoritarian (high rules, low warmth), Overprotective (high control, high warmth) and Permissive (low rules, high warmth). If you're still following, congrats! You've reached the good part; the heartfelt perfectionist had a fragile link with all parenting styles except permissive, which was no link at all. More importantly, the organized perfectionist had a firm alliance with authoritative style. From my understanding, this means your heart can be in the right place and you can read all the parenting books in the world, it won’t stop you from getting overstimulated and becoming harsh when you trip over your kids’ shoes in the hallway. Having systems set in place, like a shoe rack by the door will keep you from crossing over into authoritarian parenting too much. Who would have guessed that breaking out authoritarian style likely means we have the least order?
As motivating as that sounds, I feel like I’m not in the season of organizing. So, I did a search for burnout and found a study published in 2026 called Mapping Patterns of Parental Burnout Along Psychological Resources and Parenting Styles by Patrik M. Bogdán, Katalin Varga, Szandra Katona, Kristóf Gróf and Annamária Pakai. Researchers had over 450 parents in Hungary take three different psychological tests. Then they used fancy math to take factors out of the equation like income, age, and number of kids so they could focus exclusively on psychological traits affecting burnout. The results were parents who had more tools in their mental toolbox could parent more authoritatively and experienced burnout less. With fewer tools in their mental tool box permissive and authoritarian parents experienced burnout more. This does not mean that experiencing burnout means we must be parenting wrong. Parenting is difficult even for the most patient creatures. This study debuffs the exact message the social media algorithm sells us: we don't need a millionaire’s budget to survive parental burnout. We need to hunt down the appropriate tools to cope with burnout effectively. This includes adopting healthier concepts like good-enough parenting, radical acceptance of negative emotions, finding micro-breaks throughout the day, worrying less about what we can't control and eliminating unrealistic expectations.
When I combine these important discoveries, I learn that recovering from and preventing burnout isn’t just about getting rid of stressors, it’s also about the practical systems and mindful habits we add in place of those stressors. It’s okay to want to put a bunch of pans in the fire; to cook a homemade meal for my family every night, spend time with my husband, play with my kids, work on my career, and enjoy my hobbies. The issue isn't the number of pans we have going. We need to delegate our time and priorities appropriately to keep from burning everything. We need to adjust our expectations about how lavish we can make each dish so we time everything to finish at the perfect temperature, so everyone can sit down and enjoy the results together (including the chef!). I think I’ll name this season The Season of the Busy Couch Potato: eating well, studying hard, resting often and loving deeply. What season are you in?