A couple of weeks ago I shared my growing concern over the silent struggle many high-performing women are currently facing on my Instagram stories. This came about after a number of friends, executive coaching clients, speaking delegates and colleagues confided in me in recent months that they were stressed. Really stressed. These women are battling stress, feeling perpetually overwhelmed and are chronically exhausted as a result.

Women are not okay.

The response to my Instagram story was immediate and intense. My DMs filled up with messages from clients and friends, from followers and from fellow-women whose concerned friends had tagged them on the post. I’ve had school mums stop me at school drop-off and pick-up times to say what I shared deeply resonated with them and that they were relieved that they weren’t the only one feeling this way. Two Saturdays ago I even had a grateful mum stop me as I was walking into the stadium, to watch my eldest son’s football grand final, to say ‘thanks’ from behind a wall of tears and then sob on my shoulder as she reached out for a cuddle.

Women are not okay.

At the speaking engagements I’ve had over the past two weeks, I’ve had a number of women approach me and tell me that they too are struggling with stress. They’ve thanked me for tackling a topic that many women are experiencing and enduring, yet is rarely discussed or acknowledged in public. Despite their ambitious and composed facades, many (not all) women are crumbling behind the scenes, feeling stressed because they’re stretched in a myriad of directions.

Women are not okay.

I believe we’re dealing with a silent epidemic of stress amongst modern women that demands our attention.

The Hidden Crisis: Women Are Struggling

The disparity in stress levels between men and women is concerning. Recent research highlights that women are more likely to experience high levels of stress, burnout and mental health issues compared to men.

It’s estimated that 75-90% of doctor visits have a stress-related component. This means that stress has a direct and significant impact on our physical health, mental wellbeing and also on our performance. From a brain perspective, chronic stress can impair how the prefrontal cortex operates,this is the thinking region of the brain, as high levels of catecholamine impair this brain region. So we cannot perform at a high level when experiencing stress.

Some compelling data points:

1. Deloitte’s Women @ Work Report suggested that 50% of women say their stress levels are higher than they were a year ago.
2. Recent aggregated biometric data from Oura, a wearable device showed a discrepancy between the amount of time women spent in a stressed state as compared to men, with women spending an average of 109 minutes in the stress zone and males spending 84 minutes.
3. UK data showed that women aged 34-55 years had significantly higher rates of stress than their male counterparts.
4. US data from the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey found that women reported higher average levels of stress and were more likely to rate their stress higher than men.
5. What was very concerning (and my speaking and coaching work corroborates this fact) is that women ‘strongly agree’ that no one understands how stressed they are. Women are suffering in silence.

Women are stressed because they’re stretched.

Women often juggle multiple roles and responsibilities, creating a perfect storm of stress. The constant balancing act between careers, family and societal expectations leaves many feeling like they’re merely surviving rather than thriving. According to the results from the Women’s Agenda 2024 Health Survey, when it comes to mental health, the impact of caring responsibilities is significant: 44% of women report that their mental health is adversely affected by these duties. Additionally, over half of women (53%) feel that the competing demands of paid and unpaid work are taking a toll on their mental wellbeing. Also worrying and a signal that women are increasingly stressed is that 57% of women reported not getting enough sleep: solid research confirms that insomnia is strongly associated with stress. All of these statistics underscore the urgent need for greater support and resources to address the mental health challenges faced by women balancing multiple roles.

In the latest National Working Families Survey, compelling insights into the stressors faced by women in the workforce reveal a persistent imbalance. Women continue to shoulder the majority of caring and domestic responsibilities, nearly double that of men, despite working similar hours in paid employment. This imbalance is exacerbated by the additional ‘digital load’ of managing emails, messages, and reminders for household tasks. Notably, 74% of women (compared to 57% of men) report feeling stressed about balancing work and family commitments, a sharp increase from 51% in 2019 for women (and 34% for men). These figures highlight a growing need for systemic changes to support working women more effectively.

So Why are Women More Stressed Than Men?

Faster, Larger, and Longer Stress Responses: Women can experience more intense and prolonged stress reactions compared to men. This is a distinct biological difference.

Hormonal Influences: Women and men respond to stress differently both psychologically and physiologically. We know, for example, that testosterone plays an important role in regulating our stress response and energy levels. The hormone estrogen can sensitise the stress system, causing variability in stress response throughout the menstrual cycle. Hence, fluctuating stress responses.

Women Feel Like They Need to be ‘Always On’: Women often have more flexible work arrangements to meet their caring roles. In an attempt to meet the demands of their roles they may be more responsive after hours, replying to emails and Teams chats, which can lead to increased stress and a blurring of work-life boundaries. This is called ‘digital presenteeism’. Some women may work after-hours so from an optics perspective, it looks like they’ve earned their flexibility.

Unacknowledged Contributions: Women frequently assume roles related to wellbeing at work that are not formally recognised or rewarded in performance metrics. The irony is that these additional roles stress and deplete them.

High-Achieving Traits: Many high-achieving women display traits like perfectionism, a strong inner critic, and a desire for approval. While these traits drive high performance, they can also lead to heightened sensitivity to stress and lower self-confidence.

Increased Mental Health Risks: Women are twice as likely to suffer from anxiety disorders and two and a half times as likely to develop depression compared to men. Contributing factors include role strain, a tendency to internalise negative emotions. Approximately one in five women will develop depression in their lifetime. It has been postulated that women tend to ‘overthink’ situations which could explain their elevated stress levels.

The Solution: Building Stress Tolerance and Resilience

To address this silent stress epidemic, we must build our stress tolerance and resilience. This is not just about managing stress; it’s about transforming our relationship with it. Here’s how we can help ourselves and female colleagues to do that:

1. Reduce Micro-Stressors in Your Day

Micro-stressors are the small, cumulative stressors that chip away at our wellbeing and also erode our productivity. To reduce these:

Mono-Tasking Instead of Multi-tasking: Focus on one task at a time. Multi-tasking may seem efficient but often leads to increased stress and reduced productivity. For example, we know that multitasking increases cortisol levels and depletes glucose levels meaning we feel stressed and exhausted if we engage in mukti-tasking.
Work in Sprints, Not Marathons: Break work into focused intervals with breaks in between. This approach helps maintain high levels of performance without elevating your stress levels because you’re working with your ultradian rhythm.
Manage Notifications: Limit notifications to reduce constant interruptions. Allocate specific times to check messages and emails. We have ancient, Paleolithic brains that have not evolved to have unsolicited information constantly being thrust at it. So our brain perceives these alerts and notifications as a potential stressor or danger… and so we feel compelled to open the message, or respond to the email. It’s the ‘urgency fallacy’ at play.
Delay Your Morning Coffee: Avoid caffeine for 60-90 minutes after waking up to prevent an excessive cortisol spike, which can increase stress levels (and can also explain why you hit an energy-slump in the afternoon as your caffeine can block adenosine receptors in your brain). Research has also shown that caffeine increases cortisol secretion in people undergoing mental stress.

2. Build Your Physical Stress Tolerance

Physical stressors can enhance our ability to cope with psychological stress. Today, we live in a very physically comfortable world, where we rarely experience physical stress. This often means we’re less equipped to deal with psychological stress. Yet our brains and bodies need us to experience physical stressors. If you’re interested in this concept I highly recommend Paul Tayor’s book Death by Comfort.

Why do we need physical stress in our lives? Your anterior midcingulate cortex is an area of your brain that essentially controls your will. And like any muscle you can make it grow or shrink by intentionally doing things you don’t want to do- hard things! So your brain needs you to train to do physically hard things. Interestingly, some research has shown that the anterior midcingulate cortex is bigger in athletes and smaller in obese people. How can you do that, without jeopardising your health:

Deliberate Cold or Heat Exposure: Engaging in activities like cold showers or saunas can help condition your body to handle stress more effectively. For example, cold showers can produce a range of neurochemicals such as epinephrine, norepinephrine and dopamine that can improve our cognitive focus, energy and mood and train our brains and bodies to tolerate stress.
Vigorous Physical Activity: Regular exercise helps manage stress and boosts overall wellbeing as you produce a range of neurochemicals that make you feel fabulous including dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which give the hippocampus (important for learning and memory) a boost. When we’re stressed or anxious, we don’t remember much because our neural activity is concentrated in the amygdala and not as much in the hippocampus.
Good Sleep Practices: Maintain a consistent sleep schedule (research suggests that this may be just if not more important than how much sleep you got), and seek morning sunlight to regulate melatonin production (your body will naturally start to produce melatonin 12-14 hours later).

3. Develop Your Stress Resilience

Resilience is about how we bounce back from stress because its an inevitable reality in our modern days:

Breathing Exercises: Practice sighing and exhale-emphasised breathing to calm the nervous system and reduce stress. Why? We don’t sigh every five minutes, when we’re on screens, like we should. Sighing is a natural mechanism to regulate our oxygen and carbon dioxide levels
Vision Breaks: Stare at distant objects to give your eyes a break from close-distance work. This helps alleviate the biological stress response triggered by prolonged computer use.
Close Your Eyes: Regularly close your eyes to reduce the sensory overload your brain processes. This gives your occipital lobe a break as the brain processes 10 million bits of sensory data through our eyes every second). This simple act can help refresh your mental state.
Connection: when we connect with real people in real time, our brains produce oxytocin, the social bonding hormone. Oxytocin is the antidote to cortisol so make sure you carve out time for connection. Interestingly, the Women’s Agenda 2024 Women’s Health Survey revealed that 76% of women said that spending time with their friends positively contributed to their mental health.

Moving from Survival to Thriving

The goal is not just to cope with stress but to thrive despite it. By adopting these strategies, we can enhance our ability to handle stress and improve our overall performance. The aim is to live as a high-res human—balancing peak performance with robust wellbeing.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed or unsure where to begin, I’m here to support you. Let’s work together to develop a tailored approach that allows the women in your workplace to thrive both personally and professionally and turn down the dial on their stress.

Use my Powered-Up Performance Profile tool to determine if you’re currently powered-up or down, or enquire about me speaking to your female high-performers about realistic research-based solutions to manage stress through my keynotes, workshops or coaching programs.