The Hidden Work of Caregiving

The day of a working caregiver often begins long before the workday even starts. The load of a caregiver can be hidden, and things like calling doctors, coordinating transportation, managing morning medications—all happen before anyone logs into their workplace or looks at an email. Caregiving carries two distinct but deeply connected challenges: the emotional load and the administrative load, both of which can be unseen.

According to Caregiving in the US Report 2025, most caregivers include coordination tasks like monitoring health conditions and communicating with providers as part of their care responsibilities, but find that coordination challenging. According to that same report, 64% of caregivers report emotional stress from caregiving.

Understanding these tolls can help caregivers identify why they feel exhausted and seek the right kinds of support when they need it.

The Administrative Load

The administrative load of caregiving refers to the logistics side of caregiving. This labor and bureaucratic work are required to keep the recipient of care housed, safe, and treated. This includes, but isn’t limited to:

• Medical Coordination: Scheduling appointments, managing medication schedules, tracking symptoms, researching treatment options, and organizing medical visits and transportation.
• Financial Management: Handling insurance questions and claims, paying bills, managing pensions or navigating long-term care policies.
• Legal Oversight: Becoming the established power of attorney, managing living wills, and handling healthcare proxies.
• Communication Management: Acting as the central point of contact for updating family members, communicating with doctors and social workers.
• Crisis troubleshooting: Dealing with sudden changes to any of the above. For example, insurance denials, hospital dischargers, schedule changes, or pharmacy errors.

This work can often bring up a lot of feelings, which is where the emotional load comes in.

The Emotional Load

Caring for someone whose health or autonomy is declining (or has already declined), can carry an internal and psychological weight. This can include:

• Anticipatory Grief: mourning the gradual loss of a loved one’s abilities, memory, or presence before they pass away.
• Ambiguous Loss: grief that has no endpoint or closure, mourning for a future or set of experiences that did not and cannot happen.
• Role reversal: the painful shift to parenting a parent or managing a partner’s needs.
• Guilt and resentment: Feelings of guilt for not doing enough, often paired with resentment over the loss of personal time and opportunities.
• Hypervigilance: living in a constant state of high alert, listening for changes in breathing, or signs of distress.
• Compassion Fatigue: the feeling of becoming emotionally drained to the point of feeling numb or detached due to prolonged stress.

Why Caregivers Feel Exhausted

These two burdens feed into each other. Spending time dealing with the administrative challenges of caregiving can leave a caregiver feeling depleted and less emotionally resilient.

With all the space given to these complicated emotions and time-consuming logistics, caregivers who are also balancing full or part-time jobs can have little room left over for engagement in their professional work. They often work a full professional day then come home to another full shift of caregiving tasks, leaving no time to rest or recover.

How Organizations Can Help

Recognizing this hidden work can help caregivers validate the mental and emotional load they carry. Find out how you can help employees who are juggling caregiving access critical support systems before they reach severe burnout.