This may actually pertain to mental health but that is one of those chicken or the egg debates.
Anyway, while fuming yesterday about superwoman syndrone and being taken advantage of by everyone in my life, and the fact that I've walked through my laundry room for three days and no one has changed the dead lightbulb yet, and a sink full of dirty dishes six inches from the dishwasher and beagle poop on the floor.....run on sentence?
You get the picture...I received this month's prevention magazine. There was an article that caught my attention because w/in the text was one of those big highlighted extractions that said something like "why doesn't anyone ever notice that the dishwasher is full?" So the point of all of this is that the author read a study done at Univ. of Md. about a concept called "tending".
When stressed, women "tend", nurture, comfort, snuggle, enable because supposedly it releases a hormone called oxcytonin which gives a sense of relaxation. The danger is that we "over-tend" when we overstress then we burn out. There is a fine line between comfort and co-dependency and enabling apparently, duh! I think we all know where the line is and do an Irish jig back and forth across it regularly. (see "multi tasking").

I see much of myself in this article's descriptions of behavior. Yes I am a wonderful, loving parent, friend, spouse. I love to give aide and comfort....but I have surrendered my "self" for quite some time now and am beyond burned out. I know I need to take a long break from "tending", I know there are probably ways to improve the burn out, like a serious ass whipping, shout down with some lazy children in my house. But that just makes me feel ugly and guilty and then I take back all of the tasks that I just assigned to them. I'm rambling, I know.

I suggest you go to the prevention web site or grab the magazine and check out this article.