Burnout is a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress. It’s a workplace phenomenon that cannot be confused by daily stressors of everyday personal life responsibilities.

With the worldwide shortage of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) medicines due to increased global demand and manufacturing problems, many patients and parents are feeling despondent in their unfruitful search for medication.

As a child, we were creative for most parts of the day shaping clay, drawing, building forts, engaging in imaginative role-play with toys, and galloping around the house on pretend horses.

Wine has become shorthand for relaxation. That well-deserved break after a long day of working and parenting, signaling the start of the last shift before bedtime.

We have literally entered the year with a multitude of flat batteries: physically, emotionally, and to add to the discomfort, also Eskom-induced.

We’ve all noted the social media meme It’s OK not to be OK reminding us that bad times are inevitable and that feeling emotionally overwhelmed is normal at times.

Frustration. It’s a complex cocktail of being annoyed, angry, disappointed, and powerless. It’s an emotional reaction to stress and in many cases rather short-lived.

It’s true that society has created certain standards for mothers. It naturally doesn’t help that we as women have also set our own standards that are incredibly high and drive us in constant pursuit of being the “perfect mother and woman.”

At the start of 2021, I joined the worldwide Facebook post, whereby the first 5 people who shared my post and committed to paying it forward would receive a random gift from me throughout the year. I sent cupcakes to Gauteng and Durbanville, and coffee vouchers to Stellenbosch.

Emotional baggage is a collective term for all our unresolved past emotional experiences and issues, traumas, and stresses. We carry these experiences, inner criticisms, insecurities, deep (perhaps shameful) secrets, and past relationship pains, with us.

Every time I read a Facebook post or a WhatsApp on a support group, where a mother asks where she can find CBD oil for her child with ADHD (or as a colleague of mine remarked “for everything from asthma to hemorrhoids”), I cringe.

Often the seed of a blog is planted months earlier, and then has to mature until it is ready to sprout. But sometimes, we keep the soil very hard and dry, preventing the seed from pushing the fresh shoot above the soil – we are not granting the story permission to be told

What a blessed couple of weeks! Although having loads of the usual pressures, our dream to launch Goldilocks and The Bear Foundation became a reality.

Not a day in my practice goes by without a patient complaining about their weight gain. So often the antidepressants are blamed.