Perhaps it was the day I forgot to collect my 10-year-old from school; instead, she woke me up on the sofa, where I’d randomly fallen asleep (she’d walked home with friends). Maybe it was the out-of-character panic attack, or possibly the abject horror of a night terror so realistic I felt a stranger climb on top of me in my bed.
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I lost my ability to deal with stress – all I know is that, for the first time in my life, I felt overwhelmed in the face of it. Inexplicably I had stopped coping under pressure and strange things started to happen to me. The go-go-go stress of a busy life that had once fuelled me through a fast-paced career and co-parenting four children had now derailed me.
I was editing a glossy magazine when my tolerance for stress started to dip. It wasn’t just the big stuff I couldn’t cope with, it was the run-of-the-mill small stuff, too. I was jittery organising a holiday, fearful of booking wrong times or dates. I was worried about driving and became tearful before an important day at work.
This was a quake in my outgoing, organised, extrovert identity and, frankly, I found it shameful: I come from the endurance generation – at 55, I’m Gen X – the so-called ‘have it all’ army who wore our ability ‘to push on through’ as a badge of honour.
When I first wrote about my ‘windows of tolerance’ around stress closing on my Instagram and Twitter accounts, a funny thing happened: it became the most-liked and commented-on piece I have ever put on social media in almost a decade of writing about women, family and work.
Women of all ages messaged me to say they cried with relief and recognition, but men messaged me too. They wanted to thank me for making the women in their lives feel OK about melting under pressure.
Several men told me they’d alerted their female partners to my posts to help them understand what they were going through. Anecdotally, I noted men didn’t seem to suffer from this reduced ability to cope with stress as they aged, maybe because they didn’t have so much of it in their lives as women?
From researching my book, What’s Wrong With Me? 101 Things Midlife Women Need To Know, I’d discovered women were three times more likely to encounter mental health issues than men. It felt like I’d discovered a new ‘gap’ alongside the pay gap and the pension/wealth gap: this was the female exhaustion gap.
I had once flourished at full-speed but I realised I was now faced with a conundrum of having to slow down. I started to say no to things at work and home. I re-evaluated my diet, my exercise routine. I made everything ‘softer’ and less manic. I even put ‘do nothing’ in my diary as a reminder to take time out and reset.
It was odd because I had assumed my extra years of experience as a mother and a boss/employee would mean I’d be able to cope with more, not less. Instead, the emotional weight of the huge changes and identity shift that women encounter as they get older (complex parenting, elderly parents, job challenges, health issues) proved more debilitating than anticipated. I felt lonely but I wasn’t alone because so many women told me they felt the same.
One wrote to me privately that she was unexpectedly struggling with stress as a CEO in a male-dominated industry and had handed in her notice the day she read my words on Instagram. She wanted to slow down, as I’d recommended, and seek a softer way of living too. She’d decided to be more vulnerable, less tough and ask others for help with her workload at home as well.
Another woman told me that as her window of tolerance closed she’d assumed it meant she needed a new challenge: she was so overwhelmed she’d given up her job in finance and trained as a nutritionist, but the stress got worse. ‘You could have just taken a sabbatical,’ I suggested as we laughed at the mindset that prompted her to work as hard in a new career as she had in her old one.
The lesson we are all learning here is that if we know in advance that our ability to cope with stress may decline (whether we are working or parenting full-time, or both) then we will be ready for it. Losing our tolerance under pressure is not a sign of weakness, ageing or anything to feel guilty or ashamed about. It is, as the therapist Philippa Perry told me, simply our brains saying, ‘Please slow down.’ A message we all need to hear.
‘What’s Wrong With Me? 101 Things Midlife Women Need To Know’ is out now.
How to cope with the exhaustion gap
By clinical psychologist Dr Julie Smith, author of Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?
Do a values check-in: our values will change over time. Ask yourself what your priority is now. Is it your health? Your family? Your elderly parents or job? Work this out and then lean your days towards that priority. This gives you a sense of control over things and a sense of choice around what you do. Ask yourself, ‘If this is now my priority in life, what do I choose to do differently to accommodate that?’ Be specific. This may mean setting new boundaries.
Practise ‘grounding’: Grounding means getting in touch with all your senses. So, you might hold something like the table and see how it feels using your sense of touch, you may listen to something or really look at something and study it. You may move your body and go outside to focus on your environment with all your senses. This will root you in the here and now and make you less likely to catastrophise. It will stop your mind spiralling to the future.
Ask for help: Not just from professionals but actively seek support from those around you. Social connection is incredibly important in stressful times. Be proactive about this, don’t hide away.
Do less and be OK with that: Normalise the idea that it’s OK to look after yourself and slow down. Being unable to cope is not a shortcoming.