Many Americans are caregivers for others, sometimes in paid, professional roles, and sometimes as family members or friends who simply want to support those they love. The work is important… and exhausting. 

After all, caregiving is a complex task that can involve everything from helping with daily routine tasks like bathing to preparing meals to managing and administering medications to making financial decisions. Many caregivers also occupy an advocacy role, attending medical appointments and communicating with healthcare providers, insurance companies, or care agencies. Caregiving can be an around-the-clock, 7-days-a-week job. It can span months, years, or an entire lifetime. 

Because caregiving is a uniquely challenging role, it also has a significant impact on the caregivers themselves. If you’re a caregiver who feels overwhelmed, worn out, or like your own physical or mental health is suffering due to the stress of caregiving, know that you are not alone. Caregiver burnout is a documented and increasing problem in the United States. 

Fortunately, there is help: therapy can offer you a supportive space to process your experiences, and it can also teach practical, effective skills for reducing stress and recovering from burnout. Caregivers need and deserve care, too, and psychologists at Aviva Psychology Services are trained to help. 

Who Is A Caregiver?

According to the American Psychological Association, a caregiver is any person who provides physical, emotional, or practical support to someone who cannot care for themselves due to age, illness, injury, or disability. 

This definition is sometimes further broken down into two categories. 

• Informal Caregivers: non-professional caregivers who typically provide unpaid support out of  a sense of love or duty. Examples include:
  
  
• Immediate family members, such as parents, grandparents, and siblings
• Partners and spouses 
• Friends 
• Neighbors 
• Spiritual community, such as fellow church, mosque, or synagogue members

• Formal Caregivers: professional caregivers who are trained, paid skilled laborers, typically in providing certain kinds of caregiving support. Examples include:
  
  
• Medical professionals like doctors and nurses
• Mental health professionals like psychologists and social workers
• Home health aides
• Personal care aides

In 2025, AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving published data that shows the demand for informal, family caregiving has increased 50% in the United States since 2015, with especially rapid growth following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. You can read more about Long COVID disability and its impact on mental health in our Long Covid blog post.

As of 2025, 63 million Americans serve as informal, family  caregivers. That’s one in every four adult Americans! 

Of those 63 million Americans, 94% are providing care for adults. One in three caregivers is under the age of 50, and nearly 30% of them are “sandwich generation” caregivers, meaning they support both children and adults. 

Overwhelmingly, both formal and informal caregiving is labor that is done by women. 65% of informal, unpaid caregiving is performed by women and is estimated to be worth $1 trillion dollars annually. Women also make up 87% of home health aides and 80% of personal care aides.

What is Caregiver Burnout?

The phenomenon of caregiver burnout has become increasingly recognized, including by organizations like The Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins Medicine. While there is no universal definition of caregiver burnout, one definition is as follows:

Caregiver burnout is a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by the stress of prolonged caregiving, resulting in significant distress in the form of chronic fatigue, irritability, sleep problems, social withdrawal, and development of both medical and mental health symptoms. 

Caregiver stress is a recognized condition—it is not a character flaw, personal failure, or a sign that you don’t care about the person or people for whom you are a caregiver. 

Caregiver burnout is also not the result of a failure to “do good self-care.” It is the result of circumstances that would be taxing on any human being, no matter how excellent their self-care strategies are. Caregiver burnout is a system-level and societal-level problem, not a personal problem. 

Caregiver burnout is also common: research suggests more than 60% of caregivers experience it. Common signs of caregiver burnout are:

• Feeling emotionally exhausted, numb, or detached
• Feeling physically exhausted, even after adequate sleep
• Losing interest in hobbies or other activities that you once enjoyed
• Socially isolating or withdrawing from family and friends
• Feeling hopeless or helpless
• Feelings of resentment and betrayal 
• Feeling more irritable or having unexpected, disproportionate angry outbursts
• Having difficulty feeling compassion and empathy
• Experiencing changes in appetite or weight 
• Experiencing changes in sleep patterns
• Having difficulty concentrating or with memory
• Getting sick more often than usual and requiring longer to recover than usual 
• Increased physical problems, like headaches and muscle aches
• Feeling badly about yourself and your abilities 
• Neglecting caregiver duties or the people under your care 
• Engaging in physical violence 

How Does Burnout Impact Mental Health?

Psychological research is clear: caregiver burnout is a threat to mental health. 

A 2021 study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence found that caregiver burnout, especially when experienced as emotional exhaustion, is associated with caregivers developing depression. The study also found that caregivers develop negative beliefs about their own health status and are more likely to engage in physically aggressive behavior. 

Another study conducted in 2023 explored the impacts of caregiver burnout on the quality of life for informal, non-professional caregivers like family members. This study found that higher levels of caregiver burnout are associated with lower quality of life in physical, psychological, social, environmental, and spiritual domains. 

The results show that burnout, and especially emotional exhaustion, is significantly associated with depression, low subjective health, and perpetrated physical violence, but not with perpetrated psychological violence.

Multiple psychological studies, included in the references below, have evaluated the psychological impacts of different types of caregiving, such as for children with mental health difficulties, spouses with head or brain injuries, and loved ones who require ICU care. These studies have found that caregivers are at higher risk for developing PTSD-like reactions and complex, chronic grief experiences. 

Collectively, the research is clear: caregivers experience psychological impacts from their caregiving role, and they need and deserve psychological care. 

Therapy for Preventing and Recovering From Caregiver Burnout 

There is good news: therapy can help! 

Caregiver burnout can result in experiences like anxiety, depression, PTSD, and complex grief. These are all conditions that have well-established, effective treatment in the form of psychotherapy.

Aviva Psychology Services offers evidence-based, trauma-informed therapy to treat anxiety conditions, which can take the form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Internal Family Systems Therapy, and more. For caregivers, learning to manage anxiety doesn’t mean denying real worries; it means learning how to interact with a stressful, complex reality in a way that doesn’t exhaust, harm, or overwhelm caregivers or those they provide care to. 



Depression is a common experience for caregivers, and psychological reach tells us that interventions like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy are safe, effective treatments that can help caregivers improve their mood, enhance their motivation and sense of purpose, and live a more values-consistent, enriched life. At Aviva Psychology services, all depression treatment is provided through a trauma-informed, client-led approach that can flexibly address your unique experience as a caregiver. 

Being a caregiver often involves repeated exposure to distressing, disturbing, or even life-threatening situations. As such, some caregivers need therapy to address trauma and PTSD. Aviva offers a specialty trauma clinic staffed by psychologists with advanced training in providing evidence-based care for those who have experienced complex, prolonged or ongoing forms of traumatic stress. You can read more about PTSD here, and you can also read about what to expect in evidence-based PTSD treatment here. 

Caregiving also commonly involves complicated experiences with grief and loss, and we are proud to offer a Grief and Losss specialty clinic at Aviva Psychology Services. Psychologists at Aviva are trained in all the nuances of grief, including anticiapatory grief, disenfranchised grief, and traumatic grief. 

Sometimes caregivers worry that their therapists won’t understand the complicated medical situations they navigate. At Aviva Psychology Services, some of our psychologists specialize in working with clients who experience medical complexity. These psychologists provide specialty care through our Disability and Chronic Illness Clinic in addition to providing therapy for co-occurring concerns like trauma, grief, depression, and anxiety.

Getting Started In Therapy

Caregivers often feel stretched to their breaking point, with little to no time to spare. Setting aside time to pursue therapy can feel like an impossible task or waste of time. 

However, burnout requires treatment to maintain safety and sustainability for yourself and for those under your care. While therapy does require time—typically one hour per week—it can pay for itself over time by improving your mental and physical health and making daily life less exhausting and more enriching. Remember: the helpers need help too, and caregivers deserve care!
 

Psychologists at Aviva are trained to help you develop a customized treatment plan to address your unique needs and goals as a caregiver. You can get connected with a psychologist who has expertise in overcoming phobias by filling out the Request an Appointment form.

References, Recommended Reading, and Resources

1. AARP and National Alliance for Caregiving. Caregiving in the US 2025. Washington, DC: AARP. July 24, 2025. https://doi.org/10.26419/ppi.00373.001
   
   
2. Blom, C., Reis, A., & Lencastre, L. (2023). Caregiver Quality of Life: Satisfaction and Burnout. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(16), 6577. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20166577
   
   
3. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, The Economics Daily, In 2023, the majority of home health aides and personal care aides were women at https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2024/in-2023-the-majority-of-home-health-aides-and-personal-care-aides-were-women.htm (visited July 17, 2026).
   
   
4. Causes and Symptoms of Caregiver Burnout. (2024). Www.Hopkinsmedicine.Org. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/about/community-health/johns-hopkins-bayview/services/called-to-care/causes-symptoms-caregiver-burnout
   
   
5. Cleveland Clinic. (2023, August 16). Caregiver burnout. Cleveland Clinic. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9225-caregiver-burnout
   
   
6. Gallagher, K. (2024, June 27). Americans” Unpaid Caregiving is Worth More than $1 Trillion Annually – and Women are Doing Two-Thirds of The Work | National Partnership for Women & Families. National Partnership for Women & Families. https://nationalpartnership.org/americans-unpaid-caregiving-worth-1-trillion-annually-women-two-thirds-work/

1. Gérain, P., & Zech, E. (2022). A Harmful Care: The Association of Informal Caregiver Burnout With Depression, Subjective Health, and Violence. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 37(11-12), NP9738-NP9762.
   
   
2. Sanderson C, Lobb EA, Mowll J, Butow PN, McGowan N, Price MA. Signs of post-traumatic stress disorder in caregivers following an expected death: A qualitative study. Palliative Medicine. 2013;27(7):625-631. doi:10.1177/0269216313483663