Why high-functioning women are exhausted and burnt-out..

If you’re a woman who’s in a leadership role or who carries a lot of responsibility at work, then you know what it means to be high-functioning in your role, while also feeling like you’re overwhelmed and struggling in other parts of your life. 

Have you ever stopped to consider your nervous system? 

Your nervous system is wired to survive and cope - it’s how you’ve stayed alive for so many years. Its primary role is to look for danger and find ways to keep you safe from that danger.

From a young age, you learn to pick up cues in the environment and then build coping mechanisms to get your needs met. Survival is the biggest role of your system at any cost. 

It's an evolutionary system and you can’t talk yourself through it or reason with it.

You learn to mask your feelings and tailor your expression to your environment. As you get older, it’s a way to avoid feeling the unprocessed pain, the stuck emotions and the disconnection from your system that’s developed from a young age. 

You probably don’t even realise you’re doing this. It’s so humbling to realise how little control we have over what is happening in our human system unless we bring awareness to it and unwire this so it can help us thrive rather than survive.

And then you add to this - the need to feel worthy in the collective work / life system that does not allow softness, the need to keep doing more, to keep running on a hamster wheel. And you create a high-functioning woman.

Signs of a high-functioning woman from an embodied leadership perspective include:

1. Are you always on the go? Stillness or coming to a full stop is hard for you. You might think that you are busy with work and life, so how can you be still or stop? Try this test every day for a week: put an alarm on your phone for 2 minutes, 3 times a day, and see how much you struggle to be still for those 2 minutes without doing something or wanting to do something. 
2. Are you able to sense your body? The visceral sensations. When you tune into your body, what comes up for you? Do you feel numbness? Is it too hard to tune in? You might question whether it’s normal to feel numb. Numbness could also mean there is so much unprocessed stuff showing up in the body that it takes over and drives your emotions, actions and thoughts.
3. Are you always thinking ahead? Far ahead in the future? Making goals and strategies is great, but that is different from always being in the future. This could mean there might be a struggle to be in the present as your human system does not know how to be secure in the current reality and stay in the body. This is harmful as you might be missing cues your body is trying to give you regarding your health, burnout, stress, etc. 
4. Are your emotions showing up as extreme? Either too positive or too negative. Or do you intellectualise your emotions? This could mean that your body struggles to hold and feel your emotions and use their wisdom which can only happen from building capacity to feel them.

These are not just unique to women but it shows up differently in women compared to men. 

This is not to shame yourself or fix yourself. There is already enough self-harrassment, which is one of the biggest pandemics we are facing. This assessment is to give you a sense of relief that many of the symptoms of stress, burnout, insomnia, people-pleasing, chronic fatigue, etc,  are not your fault. There is something happening at your body-mind-nervous system level that you need support with. 

Women don’t realise how these things are impacting all areas of their lives - from health issues, to relationship issues, to speaking up in meetings, to feeling their full power, to feeling innate vibrancy and aliveness.

These points are based on my expertise after studying and practising this field from all possible angles for the last 10 years - spirituality, psychology, human behaviour, somatics, nervous system, developmental trauma, attachment trauma, adverse childhood experiences, cultural and collective issues, generational patterns, emotional wisdom, mindfulness. 

However, each woman is unique and full clarity is only available when I can feel someone’s nervous system through deep work with me or when I am in the same room through workshops.

Use these above points to start questioning yourself to see if you might have some traits of a high-functioning woman…don’t settle for band-aid solutions!!

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

For more detailed understanding and diagnosis, please reach out and book 1:1 session with me through my website, or email me on [email protected] to let me know if any of these symptoms felt familiar to you.