The weight of it. All of it. All the time.
Caregiving doesn’t come with a warning label. This maps exactly where the pressure is coming from — and gives you somewhere private to talk about the parts that have nowhere else to go.
The part you can’t say to anyone.
The exhaustion, the resentment, the guilt, the grief — Annabelle has the full picture now. If there’s something you want her to understand before your session starts, you can type it or say it here.
When caregiving has taken more than you were told it would
Tuesday afternoon. You just finished making lunch for someone who may not remember you brought it. Or you’re sitting in a waiting room pretending to read something on your phone while calculating how many hours you lost this week to things that no one noticed. Or it’s late, and you’re trying to decide whether to call someone — and realizing there’s no one to call who won’t somehow make it about themselves.
Caregiver burnout doesn’t arrive all at once. It builds in the gap between what caregiving actually costs and what caregiving culture will let you admit it costs. Somewhere along the way, “I’m tired” became “I’m fine,” and “I’m fine” became just the answer. The one that stops the follow-up questions. The one that keeps everything moving.
What the five dimensions are measuring
The sliders on this page draw from the research clinicians use to understand caregiver burden — the Zarit Burden Interview, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, and work on ambiguous loss and compassion fatigue. What the research consistently shows is that caregiver burnout is multidimensional: the exhaustion, the isolation, the guilt, and the grief rarely arrive alone. They compound each other. You can be physically functional and emotionally gutted. You can be surrounded by people who love you and still feel completely alone in this specific experience.
The five dimensions: emotional reserves (how much is left in you at the end of a caregiving day), personal identity and time (how much of your life still belongs to you), physical wellbeing (what the sustained stress is doing to your body), social connection (whether the people around you understand what this actually costs), and the guilt weight (how heavy the feelings you’re not supposed to have have gotten).
The score isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a shape. A map of where the pressure is concentrated, so the conversation that follows has somewhere specific to start.
The feeling that doesn’t have a name in polite conversation
There is a particular feeling that lives in long-term caregiving that almost no one talks about, because it sounds wrong to say out loud. It isn’t just love. It isn’t just dedication. It’s the specific, corrosive compound of love and resentment and grief and guilt that accumulates when you’ve been the person who holds everything together for long enough that you’ve forgotten what it felt like before.
When you’re angry at someone you also love. When you feel trapped by a situation you’d also never choose to leave. When you catch yourself doing the math on how much longer, and then feel terrible for doing the math. The clinical literature calls it caregiver burden, compassion fatigue, ambiguous loss. But those terms don’t capture what it feels like at 11pm when you’re alone with it. That’s what the conversation after this is for.
Questions people ask
Will this tell me I’m burning out?
It’ll tell you where the pressure is concentrated. Some people find the scores confirm something they already suspected. Some find one dimension they hadn’t named as the real problem — the guilt, the isolation, the body breaking down. Either way, you leave with something more specific than “I’m exhausted” to start from.
Is this for people caring for elderly parents, or sick partners, or children with disabilities?
All of them. The specific shape of burnout looks different depending on who you’re caring for and how long you’ve been doing it. But the five dimensions — emotional depletion, loss of self, physical toll, isolation, and the guilt weight — appear across every caregiving situation. The name of the situation changes. The internal cost looks remarkably similar.
What if I feel guilty for even being here?
That’s worth noticing. The guilt about seeking support for yourself, while someone else’s needs have to come first, is one of the most reliable signals of caregiver burnout. It’s also exactly why the advisor on the other end of this doesn’t open with advice. She starts by asking about you.
What happens after?
Your scores and whatever you choose to share are handed privately to Annabelle, an AI advisor. She doesn’t start with how the person you’re caring for is doing. She starts where your burnout map says the pressure is greatest — and asks the question you haven’t been able to ask yourself.
If the weight is more about invisible domestic labor and the mental load of running a household than caregiving specifically, the Mental Load Calculator is closer. If there’s a conversation you need to have with someone — a partner, a sibling, a doctor — about your capacity, and you don’t know how to start it, How Should I Say It is built for that. Or start at the front page.