My daughter was born three months ago. I returned to work two months ago. And every day, between a diaper change and a meeting, I do the same thing I did before she arrived: I help companies take their people's mental health seriously. The difference? There is now an irony that won't leave me: I am selling, with conviction, the very thing I am finding most difficult to practice myself.
I am writing this because I suspect it is not just about me. Every year, thousands of people return from parental leave, open their laptops, and try to be, at the same time, the professional they were before and the parent they have just become.
The leave was one month. I am writing the number out in full because it still seems short to me: one month. That was the time I had to get to know a new person, reorganize an entire house around her, and start to realize that I, too, had become someone different. After four weeks, I opened my email again. My body was at the desk; my head remains divided between two worlds that now share the same address. And if this happens to someone who works in this field every day, I wonder what it is like for those who have never even had the language to name what they are feeling.
Remote work is, at this stage, both the greatest gift and the biggest trap. It is a gift because I hear her laughing in the next room in the middle of the morning. It is a trap because the boundary between "I am working" and "I am being a father" has become very thin. There is a thin wall and a constant feeling of doing two things halfway. We talk a lot about the advantages of remote work; we talk little about how to protect mental health when personal and professional lives no longer have clear boundaries.
Then we talk about exhaustion—not the kind from a bad night's sleep, but the kind that accumulates and tangles your words in the middle of a sentence. I am responsible for growth and strategy; my job is, literally, to think clearly about the future. Doing so with four hours of intermittent sleep is a daily exercise in humility. I am still learning that giving my best at 60% during a period like this is not failing. I already witnessed it, and now it has become clearer that many teams are full of people at 60% who do not dare to say so, for fear that it will be read as a lack of commitment.
What caught me off guard was the identity. I knew I would sleep less. I did not know I would stop recognizing myself for a while. The existence of a new, non-negotiable priority collides with a sense of who Pedrois. There is a silent grief in this, difficult to confess when we have in our arms everything we have ever wanted. And if there is one topic that is rarely discussed in companies, it is this: what changes in a man's head when he becomes a father.
This is where the irony dissolves and turns into something else. Selling mental health with a newborn at home forced me to stop treating it as an argument to be explained and to start living it as a practice that comes at a cost. When I argue with a partner company that the well-being of its people cannot survive on good intentions, it is no longer theory. It is the most concrete thing in these days.
This is a testimony from someone experiencing this for the first time, not from someone who knows what they are talking about. In that sense, I did not want to finish this text alone. I leave the rest of the text on Joana da Silva's keyboard as a challenge: How do we navigate this transition without getting lost along the way? What can organizations actually do? That is the conversation I want this text to start.
Pedro, thank you for the challenge! I will try to answer you as best I can, with a clinical and scientifically appropriate framework.
One of the sentences in your testimony that caught my attention the most was, “Then we talk about exhaustion (...) the kind that accumulates and tangles your words in the middle of a sentence.” It would be tempting to think that this is about fragility… however, it is a perfectly normal physiological response of your brain, given the circumstances. A brain deprived of sleep, on an ongoing basis, undergoes changes in the activity of the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for planning, deciding, and thinking clearly about the future. Furthermore, the amygdala—a central structure in detecting stimuli with emotional relevance—becomes hyper-reactive to aversive stimuli and loses the regulation exerted by the medial prefrontal cortex (Yoo et al., 2007). However, the imbalance is bidirectional: sleep deprivation also amplifies the reactivity of reward circuits to pleasant stimuli, to the point of biasing judgment about what is positive (Gujar et al., 2011)—overvaluation without the counterweight of evaluation. It is always the same pattern, whether negative or positive: subcortical structures (amygdala and reward circuits) become hyper-reactive, and the prefrontal cortex loses the ability to regulate them. Hence, the same bad night's sleep produces a disproportionate reaction at 10 a.m. and an impulsive decision at 6 p.m. In practice, this boils down to two very concrete things: in addition to thinking and planning with more difficulty and less efficiency— as if a thick fog were filling our minds, you also feel everything more intensely and are more emotionally raw (Goldstein & Walker, 2014). Furthermore, the “intermittent sleep” you mention also interferes with memory consolidation and hormonal regulation, specifically cortisol—the stresshormone. This is why the risk of perinatal anxiety and depression increases precisely during this period, not only for the mother but also for the father, although research on the latter is more recent and limited (Culnan, 2025; Wynter et al., 2020).
Moreover, it is understandable when you say that this life experience has shaken the foundations of your identity! According to perinatal psychology, a reorganization of identity is a natural part of parenthood. In both fathers and mothers, there may be increased activity in the neural networks associated with bonding and reading the baby's emotions, which is more pronounced the more involved they are in caregiving (Abraham et al., 2014). Additionally, testosterone levels in fathers tend to drop in the months following birth (Gettler et al., 2011). It is, therefore, perfectly natural that you feel that not only your life, but also your brain and your identity, are in metamorphosis. I believe that naming this does not erase the existential grief you are currently feeling, but I hope it lifts the weight of feeling like it’s a sign that something is wrong with you. And, although it may seem simple, the most valuable answer I have to “how do we get through this without losing ourselves” perhaps lies precisely in recognizing that you cannot get through it without changing, and in accepting that the change must happen.
But accepting does not mean enduring it rigidly, or enduring it alone… The literature on parental burnout demonstrates that it is essential to balance what this phase demands (sleep, cognitive load, and identity reorganization) with the resources we have available to cope with it (Mikolajczak, Gross & Roskam, 2019). Self-compassion, actively seeking social support, and reducing the internal standard of the “perfect parent” are among the resources with the strongest protective evidence.
What can organizations actually do?
What organizations can do requires intention. It is important to shift the perspective, seeking to treat parenthood as a transition with distinct phases, each with its own unique needs: preparing before the leave begins, so that expectations related to parenthood and pregnancy are not experienced in silence; providing support during the leave, not only for the logistics of caring for a baby but also by recognizing and respecting the identity reorganizations mentioned earlier; and, above all, actively supporting the return, a particularly sensitive moment because the person returning is no longer entirely the person who went on leave and is still in a process of transition. In practice, this can translate into psychological support available before and after the return, peer-sharing groups for those at the same stage, structured mentoring upon return, and real, concrete measures for flexibility. There are, in fact, programs already designed specifically for this transition, namely the MindPartner program called Baby is Coming.
Ultimately, Pedro, organizations cannot solve the challenges and demands that the biological and physiological changes or the metamorphosing identity of those becoming parents entail. They can, however, avoid adding more weight to them and facilitate the process through support, and that is already a great starting point.
References:
https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0960-9822(07)01783-6
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/50831535_Sleep_Deprivation_Amplifies_Reactivity_of_Brain_Reward_Networks_Biasing_the_Appraisal_of_Positive_Emotional_Experiences
https://walkerlab.berkeley.edu/reprints/Goldstein-Walker_AnnRevClinPsych_2014.pdf
https://postpartum.net/the-connection-between-sleep-and-perinatal-mood-and-anxiety-disorders/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0266613820301108
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1402569111
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1105403108
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332402868_Parental_Burnout_What_Is_It_and_Why_Does_It_Matter