The Hidden Crisis in High-Performing Women: Why Your Burnout Isn't Your Fault
And why adding “self-care” to your to-do list is making everything worse.
Here's what I know for sure: if you're a high-performing woman reading this at 11 PM because it's the first quiet moment you've had all day, you're not broken. The system is. And, you are not alone.
PS-I’ve never met a woman who wasn’t high-performing.
Today, I asked a room full of women to raise their hand if they’ve been exhausted. Every hand shot up.
Then I asked them to raise their hands if they are ashamed of their exhaustion and the majority of hands stayed up.
We're exhausted, overwhelmed, and carrying voices in our heads that whisper “you should be more resilient, better at boundaries, more grateful for your success.”
That voice? It's not yours. It's the sound of a system that's designed to make you believe your burnout is a personal failing.
The Data Doesn't Lie
The headlines read “Leader engagement plummets by 3 points, largely powered by female leader disengagement.” It’s true female leaders did have the steepest decline of any demographic group. What they fail to discuss is why. We will talk about the why throughout this blog post, and we will keep talking about it until we build systems that support women.
The burnout gap between women and men has doubled since 2019. Only 36% of women feel empowered to perform their best work. When women leave the workforce, companies lose an average of $15,000 per departing employee in replacement costs alone—not counting the institutional knowledge, client relationships, and innovation that walks out the door with them. McKinsey estimates that advancing women's equality in the workplace could add $12 trillion to global GDP by 2025. But here's the part that should make us furious: we keep getting individual solutions to systemic problems.
Listen, I'm not here to bash wellness programs. Research shows they can help with specific health behaviors. But here's what the wellness industrial complex won't tell you: giving you a meditation app while the structure that's burning you out remains unchanged is like handing someone a band-aid for a bullet hole (thank you to Taylor Swift for that indelible image).
The truth? We need both. Individual support AND systemic change. A systems-plus approach to well-being that doesn't make you responsible for fixing what you didn't break.
The Shame Spiral That Keeps Women Trapped
You want to know the real genius of this broken system? It's convinced us that our exhaustion is evidence of our inadequacy.
Brené Brown's research revealed something devastating: shame for women is "a web of layered, conflicting and competing expectations and messages." Men face one primary expectation: don't appear weak. Women? We're supposed to be everything to everyone while making it look effortless. We are already assumed to be weak, so we can “never let them see us sweat.”
The shame cycle works like this: You burn out. You're told it's a personal resilience problem. You add self-care to your already overwhelming mental load. You inevitably fail at self-care too because it's just another item on a NEVER-ENDING to do list. You feel more shame. The cycle continues while the root causes remain completely untouched.
We start to lose self-efficacy.
I mean, if we are burning out, clearly we aren’t cut out for this work right?
We work harder. We take promotions into meaningless leadership roles, where we end up doing nothing that brings us joy. Roles where we sit in meeting after meeting, hour after hour. We get talked over. Our decision making power exists in name only, and each new day is a rinse and repeat.
We aren’t burnout from overwork, but rather meaningless work that deprives us of purpose and leads to cynicism. Burnout that results in turnover is more closely tied to cynicism than it is to overwork.
READ THAT LAST BIT AGAIN!
The Mental Load No One Considers
Let's talk about the thing no one wants to talk about—the invisible labor that's following us everywhere, even into our sleep.
Here's what researchers have figured out: there's this thing called "mental load"—the invisible, cognitive work that has three brutal characteristics. It's invisible (nobody sees us doing it), boundaryless (it follows us everywhere), and enduring (it never ends).
Even when household chores appear split 50/50, guess who's still responsible for remembering that the detergent is running low, that soccer uniforms need to be clean by Tuesday, that the washing machine has been making that weird noise? Research consistently shows women do more of the "anticipating needs, identifying options, deciding among options, and monitoring results." These lists run endlessly in our minds, taking up critical cognitive space, and leaving us depleted.
And, this invisible burden doesn't stay home when we go to work. Think back to the last team meeting, in your breakout group, who was the note taker? Oh, but women have nicer handwriting…PLEASE.
Or think about the last company social event. Who researched the restaurant options, checked for dietary restrictions, coordinated calendars, bought the farewell gift, and made sure everyone felt included in the conversation? I'll give you one guess. Meanwhile, the person who shows up and enjoys the event gets the same 'team building' credit on their performance review.
And here's where it gets really insidious: emotional labor depletes cognitive energy. We make more mistakes, take longer to complete tasks, then get judged for not performing at our peak while carrying an invisible load nobody acknowledges.
We're not just tired. We're cognitively overloaded by a system that pretends this labor doesn't exist.
The Midlife Collision Nobody Prepared Us For
If you're in your 40s or 50s, you're living through what I call the midlife collision. Two freight trains heading toward each other at full speed.
On one side: peak career success, highest earning potential, leadership responsibilities. All the things you've worked decades to achieve, only to find out they aren’t filling your cup.
On the other side: hormone fluctuations affecting everything from sleep to cognitive function, aging parents needing support, children who still need you, partnerships requiring attention, financial pressures from every direction.
Pretty traumatic, right?! Did you realize you were taking on so much?
Then we get the real slap in the face at work. The data shows only 81 women get promoted for every 100 men, despite equal qualifications. Don’t get me started on our outdated performance management systems (I think of them as performative management). Women earn lower "potential" ratings despite higher performance. Meanwhile, chronic workplace stress creates actual trauma responses that high performers mask to protect their careers.
We're asking superhuman performance from human beings carrying an invisible load, then wondering why they're burning out. Then we shame them for not having better boundaries—as if adding "get better at self-care" to their mental load is the solution.
Band-Aids Don’t Fix Bullet Holes (or broken systems)
Here's my hot take on wellness programs: Individual wellness programs can absolutely help with stress management and healthy behaviors. The problem isn't that they don't work—it's that they're being used as the entire solution to a systemic problem.
It's like this: if your entire house is on fire, a fire extinguisher may be useful. But if someone hands you a fire extinguisher and says "this should fix your house fire" while refusing to call the fire department, you're going to be pretty pissed when your house burns down. That’s a well-being program implemented without actual system change.
Research confirms that burnout is primarily the result of psychologically hazardous workplace factors—not personal deficits. Yet women are carrying unnecessary guilt and shame, assuming we’re somehow at fault for our own work-related stress.
The programs themselves can become another source of shame for women who feel they should be taking advantage of offerings they don't have time for, or that weren't designed with their experiences in mind. If when I was Heading Global Well-Being, I had received a dollar for every woman who told me how great are offerings were, but followed up with not having the time to take advantage of them, I’d have a small island. Companies make huge investments in these programs, and then fail to embed them into the corporate culture.
It’s a multi-billion dollar system failure.
What Actually Works: Systems-Plus Well-Being
Supporting women isn't charity. It's a competitive advantage that requires both individual support and structural change.
The individual piece: Yes, stress management skills matter. Mindfulness can help. Exercise is important. But these work best when they're not treated as the cure for systemic dysfunction.
The systems piece: We need healthcare that covers life transitions, not just emergencies. Leadership training that teaches managers to recognize and redistribute invisible labor. Infrastructure that makes mental load visible, valued, and equitably distributed.
Here's what this looks like in practice: A company added mindfulness training for stressed employees (individual solution). Great start. But they also added manager accountability—tracking and measuring how well managers support their teams' well-being, with real consequences for poor scores. Now the mindfulness training actually works because employees aren't getting stressed messages from their boss at 8PM when they should be recharging. That's systems-plus thinking—pairing individual support with manager accountability so the two don't cancel each other out.
Companies that figure out this systems-plus approach see real results: reduced healthcare costs, increased profitability, and access to untapped productivity potential. More importantly, they stop perpetuating a system that's systematically destroying women's health and well-being.
Fix the systems AND provide individual support. That's how you create sustainable change.
The Truth About Resilience (It's Not What We Think)
Full disclosure: I've fallen into this trap more times than I care to admit. I spent years believing that if I could just get better at self-care, manage my time more efficiently, or develop stronger boundaries, I could somehow make an unsustainable system work for me.
What I learned the hard way is that you can't gratitude your way out of systemic dysfunction. You can't meditate away workplace inequity. And you definitely can't self-care your way out of a system that rewards your suffering with more responsibility.
Brené Brown's research shows that shame resilience happens through "acknowledged vulnerability, critical awareness, and mutually empathic relationships"—not through individual grit and better time management. True resilience isn't about enduring more; it's about refusing to accept systems that require superhuman endurance in the first place.
Be the Change...Start Where You Are
The question isn't whether we can afford to change. It's whether we can afford not to.
If you're experiencing this crisis:
Name it: You're not broken, the system is
Find your advocates: You don't have to fix this alone
Document everything: Your experience matters for those coming behind you
If you're a leader:
Ask one woman on your team: "What support do you need right now?"
Audit your benefits: Do they cover life transitions?
Train your managers: 70% of engagement comes from direct supervisors
If you're designing systems:
Center women's experiences in your policies
Measure what matters: Track engagement by demographic
Build bridges, don't just offer band-aids
Every woman who leaves her career because the mental load is unsustainable represents not just individual loss, but collective failure. Every high performer operating in survival mode instead of innovation mode represents untapped potential that could transform industries.
We're not asking for special treatment. We're asking for systems that recognize our full humanity while honoring our professional capabilities. We're asking workplaces to stop making us responsible for fixing problems we didn't create.
And yes, take the yoga class if it helps you. Use the meditation app if it brings you peace. But don't let anyone convince you that your burnout is your fault or that individual wellness is the complete solution to a systemic crisis.
It doesn't have to be this way. Here's where we start: by refusing to accept that shame about not being resilient enough is the price women pay for participation in the workforce.
If this resonates with you, know you're not alone. And you're definitely not the problem.