Women in their late 30s, with the pressure of young children and a full-on career, can struggle with overwhelm. Photo / Getty Images
More women are experiencing extreme levels of stress and the consequences can be life-changing.
Lynn Blades had been a highly successful executive coach for nearly two decades when life took an unexpected turn. In 2020, when the pandemic hit, while many of us sat back online and waited to see what would happen next, Blades’ experience in digital global coaching meant her number of clients tripled. Within a year, her health had deteriorated so badly that her back ended up being held together with three-inch screws.
“I was in my late 50s, with a university-aged daughter, juggling a mountain of work, running the household, and propping up a husband neck-deep in his career as a film producer. It was organised chaos on a good day – and I was the one holding all the strings,” she says.
Then in August 2021, Blades almost collapsed while out walking on Hampstead Heath. Within a couple of weeks, she could barely move and ended up having emergency surgery on her back. It transpired that two discs in her lower spine had deteriorated, causing the vertebrae to grind against each other.
“A few years before everything came crashing down, a specialist warned me I needed physical therapy,” she recalls. “My spine was crying out for help. But I didn’t listen. There was always a deadline, a duty, a demand louder than my own wellbeing. I wore my resilience like a badge of honour, powering through the pain, telling myself I was strong. Eventually, my body called time.”
The price she paid as a result was major surgery. “A titanium cage and three-inch screws now hold my spine together,” she explains. “I spent six months on 1,800mg of nerve blockers, floating through life in a fog. It took nearly a year to feel like myself again.”
Blades is not alone. According to Mental Health UK, 94% of women reported experiencing high or extreme levels of pressure or stress in the past year, compared with 89% of men. Suicide risk among female doctors, related to work stress and emotional burnout, is also significantly higher (76%) than the general population.
And women over the age of 55 lose more working days to mental-health issues than any other group in Britain, reports the most recent Health and Safety Executive’s Labour Force Survey, with 53% of professional women in leadership roles dropping out.
What’s more, it seems, there are red alert ages for burnout. Women in their late 30s, with the pressure of young children and a full-on career, can struggle with overwhelm, while those in their mid-50s are stretched to breaking point while managing work, older children, ageing parents and menopause.
Sadly, because many of us tend to normalise living in a hyper-state, the warning signs are passed off as simply “having a busy life”. But doing it all is rarely sustainable, and often it’s passed down through the generations.
“I see women who have grown up with female role models, like their mother, who put others first, worked hard and didn’t prioritise rest,” says burnout expert and psychologist Jaime Jonsson. The reason behind this is that women often tend to be the main carers in the family, plus they often veer towards being people-pleasers. But ask yourself: do you want it modelled for your own daughters?”
Blades also sees certain female traits playing out in the workplace. “Women are conditioned to put their head down, go again, and then reward will come,” she says. “I work with many senior female executives who have shattered expectations, but they are still riddled with impostor syndrome, or they believe asking for help is a sign of weakness.
“As a result, they suppress the anxiety, fear, and exhaustion that come with constant overachievement,” she adds. “But emotions don’t just disappear; they build up, creating an unbearable weight that can crush even the strongest among us.”
In her new book, The Quiet Burn, Blades speaks about the importance of self-care. But first, she says, it’s crucial to understand burnout symptoms. These range from exhaustion, brain fog, irritability and insomnia to anxiety, heart palpitations, loss of appetite and emotional detachment from colleagues or family.
“Question your values, assess your purpose, work out your needs,” she advises. “Then make sure they are aligned with how you are living. If you don’t look after yourself, no one else is going to get the best version of you.”
And while the pressures of a career can crush all aspirations for an unruffled existence, those who typically hurtle towards burnout tend to be mothers.
At 36, Claire Ashley, a doctor and neuroscientist, was working ridiculous hours as a GP in a surgery with medically complex patients, while juggling two small children and a husband who worked away regularly. With no family back-up, she was forced to pay an extortionate amount for childcare, which not only stretched her bank balance, it also created crippling feelings of guilt around leaving her young children for hours on end.
“I felt like I was a failure at work and as a parent,” she admits. “Emotionally, I was strung-out; physically, I was incredibly fatigued. I wasn’t sleeping properly. I became quite cynical. And I’d either fly off the handle easily or burst into tears. Even so, I was still turning up for work every day and trying my best. I went into survival mode.”
Ashley says she believed that no one was to blame but herself. “I saw it as a ‘me’ problem,” she explains. “I thought, you’ve worked so hard to become a doctor, just get on with it, you should be able to cope.”
Then one evening, after a particularly long and stressful day, Ashley was on the phone to her husband and she had a panic attack. “I’d never had one in my life before and it was a real shock,” she says. “I completely lost control, shaking and crying and feeling like I was going to vomit. It took me a while to calm down, but once I did, I had the clarity to realise I’d reached breaking point.”
The first thing Ashley did was speak to her boss. “We had a frank conversation about my situation, and I told her I couldn’t carry on in the same way. I was given support by NHS Practitioner Health, which is the service that looks after doctors with mental health problems, and, consequently, my hours at work were reduced. My recovery was slow but I’ve since put changes in place to prevent those stresses ever taking over again.”
Ashley now works as a locum doctor, which means flexible hours and more control over her diary – and is an ambassador for Doctors in Distress, a charity which protects the mental health of healthcare workers. She has written a book, The Burnout Doctor, to help others in similar situations.
“Burnout is a term that’s been around for a while now,” says Ashley, “And knowledge around the topic is increasing. But there could be much more work done on how to effectively prevent burnout at an organisational level. People use the term burnout interchangeably with stress without the realisation that burnout is the end result of chronic stress. Once a person gets to this point, it is a serious and debilitating condition.”
After Blades’ own debilitating experience of burnout, she decided to make drastic changes. “I knew if I didn’t get my situation under control, there was every possibility it would kill me,” she admits. She looked long and hard at her approach to working and identified a number of red flags.
“Generally, women do not ask for what they want,” she says, “Men do and are much more likely to be promoted on potential while women are promoted on attainment. This discrepancy in opportunity makes women feel invisible. When I was younger, I’d step in to take on the load hoping to be recognised, now I am not afraid of stepping out. Saying, ‘No, I can’t’ isn’t a sign of weakness, it shows we have the strength to choose what we really want to get involved in. It means you respect your boundaries and capacity.”
Blades also understands that for women in their 50s, there are specific difficulties to overcome. “Not only is the menopause throwing brain fog, hot sweats, sleepless nights and mood swings at us, there may be the pressure of teenage children or ageing parents in the mix.”
And never imagine burnout is not a “real” thing. As a neuroscientist, Ashley reveals the brain actually changes shape in burnout. “The amygdala in the temporal lobe of your brain processes emotions, especially anxiety and fear. When a person reaches burnout, this section increases in size and becomes more emotionally reactive. When I was struggling, knowing this helped me to understand that my feelings weren’t just in my head, my brain was literally being overloaded. It gave me the wake-up call to realise enough was enough, but above all, I was enough.”
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