The Pressure to Enjoy Every Moment Is Quietly Wrecking Us
Guest post by Sanam Shamtobi, PhD, PMH-C, Founder of The Mother HoodI want to tell you about a mom I'll call Sarah, because I have permission to share her story and because she is, statistically, most of you.
Sarah came to therapy because she couldn't stop crying in her car. Not in a something is wrong way — in a this is the only place no one is touching me way. She'd drop her toddler at preschool, drive three blocks, pull over, and sob into the steering wheel for eleven minutes before pulling herself together to go to Trader Joe's. She has two beautiful kids, a partner who, by all reasonable metrics, is a good one, and a career she'd fought for. And a low, constant hum in her chest that whispers, "what is wrong with you, this is what you wanted."
Her first words to me were: "I feel guilty for being here. I should be enjoying this."
I've been doing this work long enough now that when I hear those words — and I hear them every week — I know we have two problems to untangle, not one. There's whatever is actually happening to her nervous system. And then there's the second, sneakier problem: the cultural mandate that she should be glowing about it.
That second problem is the one I want to talk to you about today. Because I think it's quietly destroying a generation of mothers, and almost nobody is naming it out loud.
The lie we don't realize we've swallowed
"Enjoy every moment." "It goes so fast." "You'll miss this someday." "Cherish it."
Strangers in the grocery store. Your mother-in-law. The Instagram caption under the perfectly lit photo of someone else's toddler. A coworker who hasn't had a baby in fourteen years and remembers it through a haze of selective amnesia.
Individually, none of these comments mean any harm. Collectively, they form a script — a constant, low-level cultural pressure that says: if you are not actively savoring this, you are doing motherhood wrong, and also you are an ungrateful person, and also someday when your children are grown you will regret every minute you didn't appreciate.
Here's what that pressure actually does to a person, in my clinical experience working with hundreds of moms:
It doubles the suffering. You're already exhausted. Now you have to feel bad about being exhausted. You're already overstimulated by the noise and the touching and the sixty-seven decisions you've made before 9 AM. Now you have to perform delight on top of it. The original hard thing is now wearing a second, heavier hard thing on its back.
It makes you lie. When the script says you should be enjoying this, you can't say this is hard. So you say "I'm just tired" — which is true but radically incomplete. You stop telling your partner the real thing. You stop telling your friends the real thing. Eventually you stop telling yourself.
It isolates you in plain sight. Every mom at the park thinks she's the only one not enjoying it, because every other mom is also pretending to enjoy it. The pressure becomes self-reinforcing. We are all standing six feet apart performing for each other.
And — this is the one that keeps me up at night — it masks real clinical conditions.Postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, birth trauma, intrusive thoughts. I have sat across from moms who waited eight monthsto tell anyone they were struggling because they thought struggling meant they didn't deserve their baby. Eight months. Of suffering that had a name and a treatment, swallowed in silence because the script said be grateful.
Why your nervous system is screaming
Let me name the thing nobody names: modern motherhood is a setup.
I don't mean that in a dramatic way. I mean it structurally. For most of human history, mothers raised children inside thick networks of other adults — grandmothers, aunts, neighbors, sisters, older children. The sensory and emotional load of caring for small humans was distributed across many nervous systems. You were never the only one in the room.
Now most of us mother alone, all day, indoors. The baby's needs route through one body. The toddler's tantrum routes through one body. The mental list of pediatrician appointments and pump parts and birthday gifts and grocery orders and which kid needs new shoes routes through one brain. Researchers have a name for this — the cognitive load, or the mental load — and it's not a metaphor. It's a measurable cognitive demand running constantly in the background of your day, draining resources you can't replace because you also haven't slept.
When you add sustained sensory input (touching, noise, interruption) to sustained cognitive load (the invisible list) to sustained emotional regulation (managing your own feelings and everyone else's, often while being someone's literal pacifier) — your nervous system does exactly what it's designed to do. It tells you, "I have exceeded capacity. Please."
That's what overstimulation is. That's what touched-out is. That's what mom rage is. Those aren't character flaws or signs you're a bad mother. They are your body delivering a perfectly reasonable message in the only language it has.
And then you tell that body to shut up because you're supposed to be enjoying this.
What "enjoy every moment" gets wrong about how humans actually work
Here is a thing I wish someone had told me — and that I now spend a lot of my professional life telling other moms:
You cannot enjoy something while your nervous system is in survival mode. That is not a moral failing. That is biology. The same parts of the brain that handle "this is delightful" go offline when the parts that handle "I am being overwhelmed" come online. Asking an exhausted, overstimulated, under-supported mom to enjoy the moment is like asking someone in the middle of a sprint to also stop and journal about the scenery.
The fix is not trying harder to enjoy it. The fix is taking the load off the nervous system long enough for the joy parts to come back online.
The joy is in there. I promise you. But it cannot get past the static of an overwhelmed system. And the harder you push to feel it, the louder the static gets, because now you've added guilt to the pile.
What I tell the moms in my office
I want to give you something you can actually use, not just a diagnosis of the problem. Here is what I find genuinely helps, in order of how fast they work:
In the next five minutes: Get out of the sensory environment if you safely can. Bathroom, porch, car. Cool water on your wrists. Long, slow exhales — make the exhale longer than the inhale, because that's the part that tells your body the threat is over. And out loud, even just to yourself: "I am overstimulated right now." Naming it interrupts the shame.
In the next 24 hours: Tell one person the actual truth. Not "I'm fine, just tired." The real version. The one with the swearing in it. You do not need them to fix anything. You just need to be witnessed without the script.
In the next month: Two things. First, renegotiate the mental load with whoever shares your home. This is a system, not a one-time conversation, and most couples need help structuring it because the load is invisible until you make it visible. Second — and I will say this gently — consider whether you might be carrying something that needs a professional, not just a friend. A therapist who specializes specifically in maternal mental health is a different animal from a generalist. We're trained to recognize the difference between this is hard and this is treatable and you don't have to live this way.
The permission slip
If you take one thing away from this, please let it be this:
You are allowed to find this hard.
You are allowed to love your kids ferociously and also not enjoy this particular Tuesday.
You are allowed to want quiet, want your body back, want twenty minutes where nobody needs anything from you.
You are allowed to admit you're overwhelmed without that meaning you're not cut out for motherhood. (It means the opposite, actually. The moms who are doing this thoughtfully are the ones who notice.)
You are allowed to ignore every well-meaning stranger who tells you to cherish it. Cherish what you can, when you can. Survive the rest. That counts. That is the job.
And the moms who came before us — the ones who suffered in silence because they didn't have language for any of this — they didn't do it better than we're doing it. They did it lonelier. We get to do it differently. We get to say it out loud.
So consider this me, saying it out loud, on behalf of every mom who's read this far thinking oh thank god, it's not just me:
It's not just you. It's never just you. And you are doing a much, much better job than the voice in your head is telling you.
The moment doesn't need to be enjoyed. It just needs to be lived through. The enjoying — the real, uncomplicated kind — comes back when your nervous system gets enough rest, enough support, and enough permission to stop performing.
You deserve all three.