By month ten of being a working mother, I had what I can only describe as a very undramatic breakdown in the middle of a supermarket aisle.

I wasn’t crying. Nothing bad had happened. I was just standing there with my stroller, holding two different brands of olive oil, and I felt completely blank. I had a list. I had a plan. I had a routine so tight you could set a clock to it. And yet something was deeply, quietly wrong.

It took me a few days to name it. I had optimized my entire life for efficiency and somewhere along the way, I had squeezed out every last drop of joy.

1. I built a machine, not a life

When my first daughter was born, I did what I always do when things feel chaotic: I made a plan. A detailed, color-coded, obsessively logical plan. Wake time, work blocks, nap windows, meal prep, workout slots, evening routine. Every hour accounted for. Every task batched. Nothing wasted.

And it worked. On paper, I was thriving. The house was tidy. Dinner was on the table every night. I was hitting my work deadlines. My daughter was well-fed, well-rested, and happy. My husband and I had our weekly date nights locked in.

But I had started to feel like a very efficient robot.

The morning walk to drop my husband at work, which used to be one of my favorite parts of the day, had become just another item to tick off before the nanny arrived. Cooking, something I genuinely love, had turned into a production task. Even date nights had started to feel like scheduled maintenance rather than something I actually looked forward to.

I had built a system so optimized for output that there was no room left for anything unplanned, unproductive, or just… nice.

2. Efficiency is a tool, not a personality

Here’s the thing about being an efficient person: it’s genuinely useful. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. With a full-time job, a toddler, a household to run, and a pregnancy now added to the mix, efficiency isn’t optional for me. It’s survival.

But there’s a difference between using efficiency as a tool and letting it become the entire point.

When efficiency becomes the goal rather than the means, you start making strange trade-offs without realizing it. You skip the longer route home because it adds eight minutes. You stop lingering over your morning coffee because there are emails to answer. You rush through bathtime because bedtime needs to start on schedule. Individually, each of these decisions makes sense. Together, they slowly drain the texture out of your days.

Research in psychology backs this up. Studies consistently show that unstructured, low-pressure moments, what psychologists call “psychological detachment,” are essential for wellbeing and even for sustained performance. You can’t just remove all the soft, wandering moments from a life and expect the person living it to feel okay.

I had removed almost all of them.

3. Joy doesn’t schedule itself

After the supermarket incident, I started paying attention to when I actually felt good. Not productive. Not accomplished. Just good.

It was almost always in the gaps.

It was when my daughter grabbed my hand on our morning walk and stopped to stare at a dog for a full two minutes. It was when my husband and I ended up talking at the kitchen island way longer than we planned because something funny came up. It was putting on a playlist while cooking instead of a podcast, just because I felt like it.

None of these moments were in my schedule. They couldn’t be. Joy, real everyday joy, tends to live in the unoptimized spaces. It needs a little slack in the system to show up.

The problem is that when you’ve built your entire day around efficiency, slack feels like failure. Every unplanned moment starts to feel like a leak in the system. You find yourself mentally calculating what you could be doing instead, even when what you’re doing is perfectly lovely.

That’s when you know the tool has taken over.

4. What I actually changed

I want to be honest: I didn’t overhaul my life. I still believe in routines. I still batch tasks, plan meals, and protect sleep. This phase of life genuinely requires a high level of organization and I’m not going to romanticize chaos.

But I made a few small, deliberate changes that made a real difference.

I stopped timing the morning walk. It ends when it ends. If we stop to look at a dog or my daughter decides she needs to examine every crack in the sidewalk, we just do that.

I started cooking with music on more often, sometimes dancing while I stir things. It sounds small. It changed the whole feel of the evening.

I gave myself permission to have one completely unscheduled hour on weekends. No tasks, no errands, no optimizing. Just whatever sounds good in that moment.

And I started asking myself a different question at the end of the day. Instead of only “Was I productive today?”, I added: “Did I enjoy any of this today?”

It shifted something. Not in my schedule, but in how I was moving through it.

5. The real cost of squeezing everything

There’s a version of high performance that looks great from the outside and feels terrible from the inside. I’ve lived that version. Everything gets done, nothing falls apart, and yet you arrive at the end of the week feeling strangely empty.

That emptiness is information. It’s not weakness or ingratitude. It’s your life telling you that output alone is not enough.

We talk a lot about burnout as if it only happens when things go wrong. But burnout can also come from doing everything right and forgetting that “right” has to include feeling something.

Two children under two (coming soon!), working full time, managing a household across two cities, I’m not going to pretend my days are leisurely. They’re not. But I’ve learned that even within a very full life, you can choose to leave pockets of space that aren’t optimized for anything. Just open. Just available for whatever small, good thing might happen.

Finding joy inside a full life

The supermarket breakdown was not a crisis. It was a signal. And looking back, I’m glad it came when it did, gently, in an ordinary moment, before I spent another ten months running a very smooth machine that I didn’t actually enjoy living inside.

You don’t have to blow up your routines or slow everything down dramatically. You just have to stop treating every moment like a resource to be used. Some moments are allowed to just be what they are.

Efficiency got me here. Joy is what makes it worth staying.