Hello beautiful soul (or Dearest gentle reader should I say haha)
I BURN for you.
If you have seen Bridgerton, you will know exactly where that is from. The longing. The intensity. The completely unhinged level of feeling that one man has for one woman and cannot for the life of him do anything sensible about it.
(I do love a good yearn, I can't lie — who else is a lover girlie haha?)
Okay, so I am not a Bridgerton character (yet!). But I do burn for you. Just in a slightly less repressed, more useful way.
What I ACTUALLY burn about — what keeps me up, what drives every single thing I do in this work — is watching brilliant women run themselves into the ground overfunctioning and call it "not enough".
Because that is what burnout looks like for most of us. Not collapse. Not crisis. Just the slow, quiet erosion of everything that makes us us — dressed up as being good at our jobs.
And this week I want to talk about it properly.
Here is what the research says first (aka the science bit).
59% of women report burnout compared to 46% of men. And it is getting worse, not better. The gap between women and men experiencing burnout has more than doubled since 2019. 43% of female executives report burnout compared to 31% of their male counterparts.
So if you have been sitting there wondering why you feel the way you feel — the data says you are not imagining it. And you are not alone.
But here is my hot take.
Burnout is not the problem.
Burnout is the signal.
It is what happens at the end of a very long road that starts somewhere much earlier. And in my work I see it follow the same four stages almost every single time.
1. It starts with needing to prove yourself. At first it feels like motivation. Like drive. Like being really good at your job. But underneath it the brain is doing something else entirely — it is seeking validation through overwork. And the more it gets it, the more it keeps going back for more. The brain is a dopamine seeking machine. Once it learns that overworking gets rewarded, it just keeps asking for more of the same.
2. Then you start neglecting your own needs. The slippery slope. The trade offs begin. Your sleep, your food, your body, your friendships — all quietly start to fall below the line of what you are giving to everyone else.
3. Then you start leaving yourself behind. And this is the part that breaks my heart. Because when we abandon ourselves for long enough we start to feel resentment. We feel in conflict. We know something is wrong but we cannot quite name it or stop it.
4. And finally — at the end of that long tiring road — depression, exhaustion, feeling lost. Truly overwhelmed. Unsure of what to do next. So we do nothing.
Here is the part that most people miss though.
Many of us live for years in a form of burnout that is not dramatic enough to be named. It does not look like collapse. It does not look like crisis. It looks like getting through the week. It looks like functioning.
I call it functional freeze — aka burnout in disguise.
You are still showing up. You are still delivering. But you are running on empty and you have been for so long you have forgotten what full feels like.
And for women this runs deeper. Because we are not just carrying our workload. We are carrying the emotional labour of our teams, our families, our relationships. We are navigating systems that were not built with us in mind. We are doing more and being recognised for it less. We are saying yes when we mean no because we learned somewhere along the way that our value is tied to how much we give.
We say yes because we feel we ought to.
We say yes because we want to be helpful.
We say yes because we are afraid that if we reject someone they will reject us.
We say yes because being loved and being needed have become the same thing.
And all of that yes costs us.
So here is what I want to offer you instead.
A different relationship with no. An understanding of where your energy actually comes from and what drains it. A way of building a rhythm for your life that supports you rather than slowly hollowing you out.
And I want to do it in real time — with you — in a free session this Tuesday 19th May at 11am EST.
We are going to talk about all of it. The burnout stages. Why women carry more of it. The hell yeah self care audit. How to actually build a routine that works for where you are in your life right now — not the idealised version, the real one.
No scripts. No performing. Just the honest conversation about energy, boundaries and what it actually means to take care of yourself at this level.
Come. Bring a friend who needs to hear it.
Register here: https://www.womenwholead.us/exhaustion
(If you've been wondering if Women Who Lead is for you, this is a great chance to come and hang with me and get a bit of the real experience of it.)
You were never the problem.
Rooting for you always
Ruth x
Ps. I can't believe how many years I spent not realising I was actually burnt out gang, my wish for you is that you don't do that too. Join me on Tuesday here. This was me dancing in the early hours of Friday morning in Times Square, NYC!
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