Latest / Spacious Success / 017 | Women Fantasise About Being Sick: What It Signals About Modern Work

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017 | Women Fantasise About Being Sick: What It Signals About Modern Work · Spacious Success

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Hi, it's Dr. Christy Goodwin. Welcome back to the Spacious Success podcast. There's
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a thought that I hear surprisingly often, sometimes after keynotes, in coaching sessions
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or over a conversation with a friend. And it's rarely set out loud, and it's often
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said with a shared sense of embarrassment, and it's almost never posted on LinkedIn. It
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usually sounds something like this. Sometimes I wish I'd just get sick for a week so that
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I could rest. Not seriously sick, just enough so that the worlds could stop asking questions
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of me. Enough to step off the treadmill without having to explain why. And sometimes when
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women are really honest, enough to land in hospital for just a few days, just to be
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unburdened, just to have no one need anything from them for a moment in time and without
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the guilt. A recent article in the Australian Financial Review explored exactly this concept.
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Why are so many women quietly fantasising about disappearing for a while, about getting
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sick or injured? If you've had that thought, I want you to know you are not alone. And
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I find that just saying that out aloud to a woman, I sometimes hear the sigh of relief.
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Because many of us have quietly questioned our mental health for even having that particular
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thought. I want to say from the outset, it may be common, but it's not normal to feel
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like this. I don't say this to add to your guilt for you to question your mental health.
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I say this so that you recognise these feelings are a signal that things aren't working
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in your life. We're designed to thrive, not to barely survive. In today's episode, I
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want to unpack why this fantasy is so widespread because it is, what it's actually signalling
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to us and what more importantly, we can do about it.
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Hi, I'm Dr. Krusty Goodwin, a neuroperformance scientist, speaker and executive coach who
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learned the hard way that chasing success can come at a cost. After burnout landed me
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in hospital, I made it my mission to help ambitious women who are done trading their health
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and happiness for high performance. On spacious success, I share science-backed strategies
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and real stories to help you flourish as a female at work and beyond so you can stop
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paying the success tax.
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A few months ago, I was working with a coaching client. She was, and is, brilliant, warm.
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She's quietly hilarious. She runs operations for a fast growing tech company. She had
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a full plate before her recent promotion, and by the time we started working together,
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the plate, well, let's say it had become a banquet table. In one of our coaching sessions,
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she said something that stopped me in the middle.
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Krusty, I keep having this fantasy she said. She looked around. I imagine getting a
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mild case of food poisoning. Nothing hospital worthy, just enough that I have to stay in bed
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for three days with no one needing anything from me, no one asking for anything, no meals
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to make, just legitimate permission for me to do absolutely nothing. And she laughed when
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she said it, and she also clarified that this was an drastic measure to lose weight,
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but there was something underneath that laugh. Relief at naming it. Recognition that it
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was real. A pan of guilt for verbalising something that she deep down knew wasn't right.
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And this woman is not alone, not even close to being alone. I hear versions of this in
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coaching sessions constantly. Friends often confess to me over dinner, and I certainly hear
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it in conversations with delegates after keynotes. I wish I could get a mild concussion, so
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I'd have a reason to rest is something someone said to me just a couple of weeks ago. Sometimes
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I genuinely envy people when they get sick because they get to stop without explanation.
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I've heard that one before. I drove past work last week hoping for a small fender bender.
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Nothing serious, just something that would have me have to go home and rest. When I share
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these stories with audiences, the recognition and the uncomfortabilities instant. Women
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not some laugh, some cry. Because they too have had that very thought, and they've never
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actually heard somebody say it out aloud. These are not pathological thoughts, they're
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not laziness or weakness. I believe their symptoms. Symptoms of a culture and a system
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that has removed a high performing woman's permission to rest without justification. But
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I want to go further than that. Because this is not just women's wellbeing issue, I believe
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it's a performance signal. And organizations need to start reading it and recognising
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it as that. This is also not just an issue for high performing women, but men too. Let
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me start by what's happening in the workplace itself, because the pressure profile across
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the industries I work with is unfortunately remarkably consistent. I tend to work in organisations
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like law, finance, professional services, consulting, real estate, high cognitive load,
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constant digital interruptions, back-to-back meetings, decisions with real financial and
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reputational consequences. Lay it on top of that is the constant digital deluge we experience.
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Slacks, teams, messages, emails running simultaneously. Smartphones that mean work travels with
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us everywhere. Hybrid arrangements that completely blur every boundary we once had. And an unspoken
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tech expectation of constant responsiveness. We've engineered workplaces for speed, availability
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and output, but we haven't paused to think about what our brain and biology needs for sustainable
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performance. I often say our human operating system, our HOS, is the biological infrastructure
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that will power our performance. It's your physiology, it's your nervous system. We need
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effort and recovery. But modern work looks like a constant stream of notifications, messages,
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deadlines on repeat. The system never powers down and over time that shows up in our wellbeing
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and our performance. Now, layer on top of that for many women, what they're navigating outside
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of work, what's sometimes called the second shift, household coordination, emotional labour, family
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logistics, caring responsibilities, and then add the double digital burden, the work and personal
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life now mediated through a screen. And their capacity is stretched even further. So the fantasy
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of disappearing for a while, not really is not about escape, it's about permission to pause,
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permission to rest, because the professional environments, for many of us, the only socially
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acceptable way to step away is illness or injury. Not natural rest, imposed rest, demanded
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loudly enough that no one could argue with us when we seek. And here's the performance cost.
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Research from Gardner actually tells us that proactive recovery can boost performance by up to
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26%. Yet many high performers still feel like they need to be unwel or injured to justify their
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rest, rather than protecting and being proactive about their recovery as a performance strategy
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that it actually is. Rest isn't frivolous, it is a performance mechanism. From a neuroscience
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perspective, this is what is happening underneath the fantasy. I believe women's nervous systems
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show some distinct patterns in their stress response and recovery. Research indicates, for example,
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that women tend to have a higher baseline of cortisol levels and it takes them longer to return
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to that baseline after a stressful event. What this means practically is that stress is accumulated
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across the demanding days and weeks, and we never really fully recover. And so it compounds.
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The stress tank never fully empties between these demands. Add to this, the Alison Dominguez
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research on anticipatory labour, the cognitive work of predicting needs before they arise.
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Women we often scan the environment for problems that have not yet been made. Not just responding
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to demands, but constantly monitoring for them. This is active working memory, consuming processing
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power in our brain. And it's happening parallel with everything else that we do all day.
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Layer on that, our cyclical biology is women. And we have changes in our energy, our focus,
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our recovery needs. They vary according to our circadian rhythms and they measure and change
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on our monthly hormonal rhythms too. We are built for cycles, yet most workplace structures treat
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all hours of equivalent. Our biology does not. Your biology and your body and your brain is sending
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signals that you need to rest. I'm depleted. I can't keep running at this pace. But the absence of
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social permission to listen to those signals means that our unconscious mind is searching for
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scenarios that would make resting non-negotiable approved. This is why illness and injury are what we
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consider socially approved imposed rest. Because as women, we've learned through years of social
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conditioning that I am tired is not a sufficient reason. I have too much on. It's also not a sufficient
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reason. I need to recover equally not sufficient. But to say that I'm injured or unwell, well,
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that's permission to pause. That comes from an inherited model of motherhood where we often equate
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exhaustion with virtue. The hard worker is the one who never stops. We've absorbed these models
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early and many of us are still running these models without ever stopping to question whether they
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actually serve us or enslave us. We see this playing out in satirical memes on Instagram. As you
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might see if you're watching the video, we're working mums are shown to be juggling 20 things
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simultaneously. I think we've adopted the mother martyr mode and we're perpetuating that with
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social media. Sometimes as high performing women, we're our own worst enemy. I see many accomplished
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ambitious women set impossible standards for themselves. The immaculate home, the homemade birthday
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cake, the volunteer role on the school committee on top of a 60 hour work week. The inbox by zero
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is inbox zero by 8 pm. The workout that didn't happen somehow feeling like a moral failure.
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And we've been told we can have it all, you just can't do it all. And that's not true either.
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Listen to episode five where I debunk that super woman myth. There is a quote that I often
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share in keynotes that tends to stop women in their tracks. It's from Nicola, Jane Hobbes,
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who's an author and it goes like this. Growing up, I never knew a relaxed woman.
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Successful woman, yes, productive women, plenty, anxious and afraid and apologetic women,
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heaps of them, but relaxed women at ease women, women who don't dissect their days into half
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hour slots of productivity, women who prioritize rest and pleasure and play, women who aren't afraid
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to take up space in the world, women who give themselves unconditional permission to rest
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without guilt, without apology, without feeling like they need to earn it. I'm not sure I've ever
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met a woman like that, but I would like to become one. The reason this land so hard that it's not
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just recognition, it's biology. We're wired to copy the women around us. Mirror neurons in our
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brain mean that the neural circuits fire when we perform an action, what we have observed
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someone else performing. It's a core mechanism of social learning. We do not just intellectually
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absorb the behavior of the other women that we grew up with and we're watching, we internalise
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it at a neurobiological level. The women who modeled success for us were often perpetually exhausted,
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perpetually busy, perpetually the last one on their list, and it is a pattern and a belief
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that we perpetuate. It's embedded in how our brains learn to operate and changing it requires more
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than just insight. It requires deliberate and repeated exposure to a different model of success.
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What I call spacious success. I want to gently remind you that something can be common without
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it being normal. When capable, high performing women are fantasising about being ill or injured,
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as the only route to rest, that's not a resilience problem. It is a design problem in how we work.
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It's speaking to systems that are completely misaligned with how humans can sustain their energy,
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their attention and their decision-making capacity. I call this working out of sync with our HOS.
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And when we override our HOS long enough, the system pushes back. Sometimes through burnout,
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sometimes through poor decision-making, reduced-focused, increased reactivity. This is why we snap
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at our partner over the most trivial of things. Maybe it's declining performance over time.
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The organisations that will outperform the next in the next decade are the ones that are pushing,
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are not pushing their people harder. They are the ones that are understanding how humans actually
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perform and designing work accordingly. Three things that you can do with this, whether you are
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navigating yourself or whether you are perhaps leading a team. The first one is to reframe
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rest as a performance type of infrastructure. It's not a reward. In my keynotes, I often say that
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rest is a right and a responsibility. It's not a reward. The most important shift I see in my
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coaching clients is this, because everything follows from it. Rest is not something that you
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earn through sufficient productivity. It's actually what makes productivity possible in the first
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place. Your brain consolidates learning during sleep. Your nervous system recalibrates during
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regular and genuine downtime. Your prefrontal cortex, that CEO or air traffic control system of your
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brain, it really only has a four to six hour battery life, so you need to unwind. You need to digitally
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disconnect. This is not an indulgence. It is a professional responsibility. It is not a luxury.
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Proactive recovery is not a nice to have. It is a measurable, crucial performance lever.
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The second is to build microbial recovery architecture into your days. A three hour visit
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to a day spa is a nice to have, but it's not achievable for many women to do consistently.
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It cannot compensate for a sustained absence of daily recovery. Research tells us that what works
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are what I call piccolo breaks. Two to ten minute breaks where you pause. A walk outside at midday,
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sighing between meetings, sitting in your car for five minutes before you walk into the house,
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closing your eyes for 30 seconds between your virtual meetings, not to sleep, but to give your
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occipital low, which processes all the visual input from screens, a much needed break. These aren't
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indulgent habits. They give your nervous system time to reboot, and it stops the accumulated
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depletion that leads us to fantasizing about getting sleep. Follow the Nat Ministry on Instagram,
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or read Nicola Jane Hobbs' excellent book called The Relaxed Women. Links to both of these are
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in the show notes. And the third is to practice what I call a rest rebellion. Start small.
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Take a break not because you've cleared enough from your to-do list, not because you've earned it,
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but because your body is asking for it. Leave work on time without explaining why. Say no to one
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thing this week without a detailed justification. These will feel uncomfortable at first,
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and that discomfort is information. It tells you exactly how deeply the permission structure
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has been embedded into your biology, and every small act of rest will start to help you rewire
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those neural pathways. For leaders, stop asking how can we get more out of our people,
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but instead how can we design work where people can sustainably perform? That means clear digital
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boundaries, real flexibility, not rewarding or promoting people who exhaust and burn themselves
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recovery that's genuinely built into the rhythm of work and cultures where rest isn't requiring
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an illness or an injury. We need leaders walking the talk and sharing what they do to recover,
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because when high performing women are quietly fantasizing about getting sick,
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just to get a break, that's not a personal issue. It's a loud system signal, and you need to
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listen to it. This week's power up is that you need one permission-free period to rest.
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Identify one moment in the next five days where you will rest simply because your body is asking
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for it, not because you've earned it, not because you are sick, just because rest is a biological
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right and not a reward. Notice what comes up when you try, the urge to justify it or to end it
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quicker, the guilt that will arrive uninvited, the sense that you should be doing something else.
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The discomfort is your permission structure pushing back, and that's exactly what needs to shift.
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I run a group performance program called Applied, and this takes this conversation into
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organizations with neuroscience, we use wearable data and practical frameworks to help people build
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environments where high performing women and men can actually sustain performance over time.
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If your team needs this conversation, please reach out via my website. I'm Dr. Christy Goodwin,
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thank you for listening to Spacious Success.