There’s a particular kind of tired that only parents know. The kind where you’ve been woken up three times before midnight, finally fell into something resembling sleep around 2 a.m., and then heard that first cry at 5:15.
You stumble through the morning routine with coffee as your co-pilot, and somewhere around 3 p.m., you realize you haven’t actually finished a single thought all day.
Sleep deprivation is one of those universal parenting experiences that gets joked about constantly but rarely taken seriously. We wear our exhaustion like a badge, swapping war stories about who got fewer hours.
But here’s the thing: when you’re chronically under-rested, your brain starts making decisions you wouldn’t normally make. Patterns form. Habits sneak in. And some of them, if left unchecked, can do real damage to your health, your relationships, and your sense of self. Let’s talk about six of them.
1) Outsourcing your patience to screens
I get it. When you’re barely holding it together and your kid is asking for the fourteenth snack of the morning, handing over a tablet feels like the only way to survive. And sometimes, it genuinely is survival. No judgment there.
But when screen time becomes the default response to every moment of parental depletion, something shifts. You stop being present even when you’re physically in the room. Your child learns that when you’re tired, they get a device. And you lose opportunities for connection that, ironically, might actually restore some of your energy.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has noted that while moderate screen use isn’t inherently harmful, the context matters enormously. Screens used as a bridge while you take a shower or make dinner? Totally fine. Screens used as a wall between you and your child because you’re too depleted to engage? That’s worth examining.
The fix isn’t eliminating screens. It’s noticing when you’re reaching for them out of exhaustion versus intention. Sometimes the honest answer is, “I need twenty minutes to sit quietly.” And that’s okay to say out loud, even to a four-year-old.
2) Snapping first, repairing never
Sleep deprivation shortens your fuse. This is neurological fact, not personal failure. When you’re exhausted, your prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for impulse control and rational thinking, goes partially offline. Meanwhile, your amygdala, the emotional alarm system, gets louder.
So you snap. You raise your voice over spilled cereal. You say something sharp when your toddler asks “why” for the hundredth time. It happens.
The damaging pattern isn’t the snapping itself. It’s what happens after. When you’re running on empty, you often don’t have the bandwidth to circle back and repair. You move on, hoping everyone forgets. But kids don’t forget. They internalize. They start to believe that when a parent is upset, it’s their fault and there’s nothing to be done about it.
Repair doesn’t have to be elaborate. A simple “Hey, I’m sorry I raised my voice earlier. I was really tired, and that wasn’t fair to you” teaches your child something profound: that relationships can bend without breaking, and that adults take responsibility for their behavior. Even when you’re exhausted, a thirty-second repair can prevent long-term emotional residue.
3) Letting resentment build in your partnership
Nothing exposes the cracks in a relationship like sleep deprivation. When both partners are running on fumes, everything becomes a scoreboard. Who got up last night. Who got to sleep in on Saturday. Who changed more diapers. Who forgot to start the dishwasher again.
The pattern that forms is quiet but corrosive: you stop communicating and start tallying. You assume your partner sees what you’re doing and simply doesn’t care. You bite your tongue in the moment, then explode over something unrelated three days later.
Dr. John Gottman’s research on relationships has shown that contempt, not conflict, is the greatest predictor of relationship breakdown. And contempt grows in the silence between exhausted partners who’ve stopped checking in with each other.
The antidote is almost embarrassingly simple: talk about the load before you’re drowning in it. A weekly fifteen-minute check-in about who needs what can prevent months of built-up resentment. It’s not romantic, but it’s effective. And honestly, at this stage of parenting, effective is romantic.
4) Abandoning every form of self-care
When you’re sleep-deprived, self-care is usually the first thing to go. Exercise? No energy. Hobbies? No time. Seeing friends? Too much effort. You tell yourself you’ll get back to it when things calm down. But things don’t calm down. They just shift into a new kind of chaos.
The pattern here is subtle. You stop doing the things that fill your cup, which makes you more depleted, which makes self-care feel even more impossible. It’s a downward spiral disguised as practicality.
Here’s what I’ve learned: self-care when you’re exhausted doesn’t look like it did before kids. It’s not a two-hour gym session or a weekend away. It’s ten minutes of stretching while the baby naps. It’s listening to a podcast during the commute instead of doom-scrolling. It’s asking your partner to handle bedtime so you can take a walk around the block alone.
The goal isn’t to reclaim your pre-kid life. It’s to find small pockets of restoration that remind you that you’re a person, not just a parent. Those pockets matter more than you think.
5) Making exhaustion your entire identity
There’s a strange culture around parental exhaustion. We bond over it. We compete over it. We post about it. And somewhere along the way, being tired becomes the main thing we talk about, think about, and identify with.
The problem is that when exhaustion becomes your identity, you stop looking for solutions. You accept it as permanent. You dismiss any suggestion of improvement with “must be nice” or “that wouldn’t work for us.” You become so attached to the narrative of being depleted that you resist anything that might change it.
I’ve caught myself doing this. Someone would mention they’d been sleeping better, and instead of asking how, I’d mentally roll my eyes. As if their improvement somehow invalidated my struggle. That’s not healthy. That’s exhaustion talking.
The truth is, sleep will likely improve. Seasons change. Babies eventually sleep longer stretches. But if you’ve built your whole sense of self around being the tired parent, you might not notice when things get better. Or worse, you might unconsciously resist the improvement because you don’t know who you are without the exhaustion.
6) Ignoring the signs that something deeper is wrong
This is the pattern that worries me most. Sleep deprivation can mask, mimic, or worsen mental health struggles. Anxiety, depression, and postpartum mood disorders can all hide behind the excuse of “I’m just tired.”
When you’re not sleeping, it’s easy to attribute everything to exhaustion. The irritability. The hopelessness. The intrusive thoughts. The feeling that you’re failing at everything. You tell yourself it’s normal. You tell yourself everyone feels this way. And sometimes that’s true. But sometimes it’s not.
According to the Postpartum Support International, up to 1 in 5 new mothers and 1 in 10 new fathers experience perinatal mood disorders. These are real, treatable conditions that often go undiagnosed because exhausted parents assume their suffering is just part of the deal.
If your exhaustion feels heavier than it should, if you’re having thoughts that scare you, if you can’t remember the last time you felt like yourself, please talk to someone. A doctor, a therapist, a trusted friend. Parenting is hard, but it shouldn’t feel impossible every single day. There’s a difference between tired and unwell, and you deserve to know which one you’re experiencing.
Closing thoughts
Sleep deprivation is a season, not a sentence. But the patterns you form during that season can stick around long after your kids start sleeping through the night. The goal isn’t to be a perfect parent while exhausted. That’s not possible, and honestly, it’s not even the point.
The goal is awareness. Noticing when you’re reaching for a screen out of depletion instead of intention. Catching yourself before resentment hardens into contempt. Remembering that you’re allowed to take care of yourself, even in small ways. And being honest about when exhaustion has crossed into something that needs more support.
You’re doing harder work than most people realize. Give yourself credit for that. But also give yourself permission to examine the patterns that have formed in the fog. Some of them might need to go.
