Latest / Spacious Success / 02 | The Stress Superstorm: Why Women Are Burning Out Faster Than Ever

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02 | The Stress Superstorm: Why Women Are Burning Out Faster Than Ever · Spacious Success

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Hi, it's Christy and welcome back to Spacious Success.
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In today's episode, we're going to unpack what I call the Stress Superstorm.
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This is the collision of biology, beliefs and bias that are leaving ambitious women like
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you feeling depleted.
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By the end of today's episode, you'll understand why stress feels harder for women you're not
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imagining it, what's happening biologically and practical ways for you to calm the storm.
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I want to share a day in my life recently.
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It started at 2.27am, sharp awake, heart racing, mind spinning, not uncommon these days,
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night sweats, hormonal shifts and a mental to-do list that never shuts down.
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At 3am, I think I remembered that it was book week the following week and I had an organized
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costume for my son.
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By 310, it was a birthday gift that I hadn't bought for a son's birthday party.
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At 330, I was stressing about not sleeping before my keynote later that day.
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By the time I boarded my plane from Sydney to Melbourne to deliver the keynote, I'd already
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dealt with 45 WhatsApp messages from school and sporting WhatsApp groups, two identical
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billing reminders on SMS and email that my account would be debited, five emails needing
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digital signatures for permission notes for school, and I still had to deliver a keynote,
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analysing a coaching client's wearable data and respond to two inboxes that were never
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stopping.
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The sad thing is that wasn't unusual, that was a regular Tuesday for me.
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I recently saw this mean the other day on Instagram and it summed up how many high-performing
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women that I work with are currently feeling.
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It was a woman jogging, and of course she was wearing a weighted vest, and the caption
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read this.
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Mums in their 40s be like, I don't know why I'm so tired.
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Meanwhile, their training for a marathon working full time, show freeing kids to 27 different
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activities a week, trying to drink enough water, hit their protein and fiber goals, and
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of course wearing their weighted vests.
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For many of us, this is what the stress super storm looks like in real life, hormones
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caregiving careers colliding with a constant digital drip.
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Here's the thing, stress, it's not the enemy.
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In short bursts, stress actually sharpens our focus, it boosts our reaction time, it fuels
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performance, it's not the enemy.
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In fact, studies have shown that the way that you view stress, the way you cognitively
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appraise it, determines its impact on you physically and psychologically.
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Professor Ali Akram's research tells us that if we perceive stress as something that is
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negative, it's harmful, it's toxic, well it has a corresponding adverse impact on our
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performance and our wellbeing.
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But if, on the other hand, we see stress as our body mounting the right physiological
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response by narrowing our focus, elevating our heart rate, elevating our performance,
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then guess what?
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It actually enhances our performance.
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Over a short period of time, of course.
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We know surgeons perform better under pressure, that's something called the clutch effect.
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Believe it or not, if a surgeon encounters a stressful incident within the first five
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minutes of a procedure, a study found that their patients have far better outcomes.
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Yes, can you believe it?
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Stress actually makes your surgeon perform better.
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Science tells us that stress energy sharpens our performance.
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So the problem isn't stress itself.
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But it's the unresolved stress, it's the chronically elevated stress that's detrimental,
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just having our nervous system stuck constantly revving high.
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Because the reality is our HOS was designed to have short bursts of stress and to resolve
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the stress cycle.
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Not one stressful email in between three teams meetings and eighty-seven teams chat messages
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all before lunch.
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Your HOS, it was designed for the short bursts of stress and completed stress cycles.
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Our biology is wired for a threat response reset cycle, threat response reset.
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But modern life makes us feel stuck, mid-cycle.
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We have micro stresses in our days, pings, buzzers, twenty-seven open internet tabs.
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We need to talk emails.
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They drip thread into our days and frazzling our nervous system.
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Worse, our digital behaviours are often making us feel stressed in invasive yet invisible
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ways.
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We stare at our devices, we sigh less.
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Our HOS, it's designed to sigh while we're awake roughly every five minutes.
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It's a mechanism baked into our biology to regulate our oxygen and carbon dioxide levels.
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Yet, when our eyes look at our screens, at our phones, at our desktops, at our laptops,
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we simply don't sigh as regularly.
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This subtly elevates our stress.
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Sometimes we even hold our breath when we go into our inboxes.
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It's called email apnea, and it has been studied.
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We know that it accelerates our heart rate, our pupils' dialect, our blood pressure
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elevates, and it keeps us locked into this alert mode.
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We know technology is evolving at rapid rates, but the problem is that we still have ancient
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paleolithic brains.
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We have brains that were biologically designed to go and hunt, forage, and get information,
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not to have unsolicited pinks and notifications constantly being thrusted us.
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Our HOS has not designed to live in this digitally demanding world we now find ourselves in.
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So we actually perceive a team's notification, believe it or not, like a tiger chasing
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us.
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And let's be honest, some days, sometimes teams' notifications actually do feel like
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a tiger chasing us.
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And let's not forget that our days are now more sedentary.
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We have far fewer opportunities for human connection, so this is almost the perfect storm
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for elevating our stress.
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We have got the recipe for chronic stress overload, the stress, super storm.
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If you've ever thought, why does this feel harder for me than for him, my male partner,
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my male colleague, it's not you, it's biology, colliding with your life stage.
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This midlife collision is stressful and often brings a perfect storm because major life
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events coincide simultaneously, intense parenting demands, aging parents, peak career challenges
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and demands, hormonal shifts, and let's not forget the digital debt that many of us experience
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each day now.
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You see, perimenopause can start in your late 30s and can last up to a decade, yet many
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women see the symptoms as mistaken for stress, burnout or personal failure.
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But here's why the stress super storm hits women, particularly middle-aged women harder.
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You see, estrogen normally buffers us against stress.
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As it drops and fluctuates, stress hits harder and believe it or not, it lingers longer.
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We also know that estrogen supports serotonin, declines in serotonin make mood swings and
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anxiety much more likely.
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We also know that changes in progesterone change how we calm our nervous system.
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As it falls, our sleep becomes lighter, fragmented and harder to sustain.
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And the irony is that poor sleep often elevates our stress, and so we are stuck in this stress
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super storm.
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Stack that with night sweats, brain fog and heavier caregiving and domestic loads, and
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a woman's resilience will erode really quickly.
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I watch it a night, this isn't weakness, it's physiology, it's invisible labour, and
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it's cultural bias often colliding.
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So how does this stress super storm fall?
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The stress super storm forms when three forces simultaneously collide.
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Your biology, hormonal ships and biological ships, and a nervous system that is stuck
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in high alert.
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Beliefs often females are quite busyness with their worth and their performance.
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Bias, invisible domestic and caring responsibilities still disproportionately fall on women.
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Spin each of these bees long enough, and you're not just stressed, you're paying what I call
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the success tax.
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By seeing your health, your wellbeing and all your relationships in the pursuit of achievement
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and accomplishment.
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So how do we calm the storm?
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Here's the good news, you can't stop every storm, but what you can do is build an umbrella.
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In my keynotes and with my coaching clients, this is the first pillar in what I call the
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flourishing formula, and that is you have to build your stress adaptability.
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In our modern world, stress is inevitable.
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If you want to flourish, not flounder, you have to learn to dance with stress.
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And so the first thing is to build your stress tolerance.
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Today, we are living in a world where everything we need is just a click away.
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It's an age of instant gratification.
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Today, we've become so very comfortable with being comfortable, we're hot, we flick
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on the air conditioner, we're cold, we turn on the heater, we're hungry, we order
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who breeds.
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We are living in an age where we very, rarely experience delayed gratification.
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Anyone remember when we used to drop our roll of Kodak film off at the chemists and were
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told to come back an entire week later to get it, only to be disappointed that someone
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had overexposed your roll of film and you got a whole lot of yellow and orange photos.
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You see, when we avoid physical stress, it means, as humans, we're ill-equick to deal
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with psychological stress.
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And this is why so many of us men and women are like are today crumbling under pressure.
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We need to build our stress tolerance.
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So if you want to build your stress adaptability, you need to become adept at doing hard things.
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When you do hard things physically and psychologically hard things like learning a new language, taking
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a cold shower, having an ice bath, having a sauna, your anterior mid-singular cortex,
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which is an area of your brain which essentially controls your will.
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Well, this part of your brain is strengthened.
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And there's some amazing, really cutting-edge research that shows from brain scans that
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the anterior mid-singular cortex that will power center of the brain, it is physically
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bigger in athletes, smaller in obese populations.
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What does that mean?
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It means that our capacity to harness stress is a trainable skill.
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We can develop our tolerance of stress, and this will help you to thrive under pressure,
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meaning that when you pursue, when you intentionally pursue challenge over comfort, you are able
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to activate that part of your brain to help you with the next stressful situation you encounter.
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You can train your stress tolerance.
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That might mean cold showers, and ladies, good news, shorter and warmer for women works
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best.
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I'm going to do a separate episode just on this, because interestingly, there are some
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distinct biological differences for cold exposure between females and males.
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What else can you do to develop your stress tolerance?
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Physical exercise, vigorous exercise, soreners, intentional breath work.
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All of these protocols will teach your body how discomfort isn't necessarily danger.
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So when real stress hits, you don't crumble.
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Number two, reduce the digital drip.
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You have to eliminate some of the little micro stresses in your day.
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On their own, these micro stresses, they'd be benign, you wouldn't even notice them.
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But one stacked on top of another all day long is a sure fire way to deplete your nervous
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system and to elevate your stress.
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Can you batch your emails instead of nibbling on them throughout your day?
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Can you turn off non-essential notifications or bundle or batch your notifications?
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Because these trick your brain into thinking that they're urgent and important.
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Why?
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That red bubble is associated psychologically, red, with danger, urgency and importance.
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Can you add a 10 minute buffer break between your virtual meetings?
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Because we know brain scans show that a 10 minute rest period between virtual meetings
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lowers your stress.
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We also know that our eyes aren't designed to spend hours a day looking at our screens.
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Remember, ancient brains and our eyes were designed to dilate, to watch the sun rise,
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to stare at the woolly mammoth on the horizon.
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So closing your eyes for 30 seconds will give two regions of your brain in particular a
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rest.
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One's quadroxcipital load and your fuser form gyros.
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And these are very active parts of your brain when you are on virtual meetings.
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So closing your eyes just for 30 seconds gives those regions a much needed break.
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Now the trick, do this on your virtual meetings, just seek very still so that it looks like
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your internet has temporarily frozen or dropped out.
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The third way to develop your stress adaptability is to recover on purpose.
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Your body needs to know the threat and the stresses over.
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When a stressful email lands in your inbox or your kids are combusting on the way home,
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how can you respond and not react?
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A simple way, physiological size.
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A size simply two inhalations through our nose, followed by a long exhalation through our mouth.
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Doing this two to three times is an instant scientifically backed way to drop your stress.
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I monitor this on my whip strap with the stress monitor and I get my clients to do the same
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and they are often shocked to see that the most instant profound impact on their stress
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is simply by sighing two to three times.
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Another simple thing we need to do to regulate our stress is to laugh, hum, cry, sing, hug someone.
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These are all biological releases that drop the stress valve.
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They help us release oxytocin, which is the antidote to cortisol.
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Even something as simple as going for a walk.
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You see when we walk we create optic flow and things move past our eyes.
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This act of things moving past our eyes quietens down our amygdala,
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which is often the worry center of our brain.
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This is why we often feel calmer after we've had a shower.
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We've gone for a drive, sat in a train or a tram or a bus on the way home.
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It is calming.
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And finally, connection, especially for women.
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Send a meme, have a chat, go for a walk and talk.
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Science shows us it literally drops cortisol, particularly for females.
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So here's your refrained in today's episode.
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Stress isn't the villain.
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Stress can be energy.
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Left unresolved, it will erode you.
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Harnessed wisely, it will sharpen you.
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The key isn't to eliminate stress, it's to learn to dance with it.
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To know when to lean in, when to lean out, and listen to when you just want to lay down.
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Next time, in the next episode, we're going to explore why women in particular need connection.
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Why chats, memes, coffee dates, aren't indulgences.
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They're biological buffers.
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Until then, notice your storm.
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Pop up your umbrella.
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And remember, you don't have to weather the stress super storm alone.
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I'm Dr. Christie Goodwin and thanks for listening to Spacious Success.
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If today's episode resonated, subscribe so you never miss an episode.
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And share this episode with a friend who might be caught in her own stress super storm.
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Let her know that she's not alone.
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She's not exaggerating the impact that it's having on her
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and that there are some simple science-backed ways to build her stress umbrella.
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Until next time, thanks for listening.