You built the career, showed up for everyone, managed the workload alongside the children, the ageing parents, the school runs and the performance reviews, and somehow made it look manageable. You were the one people called when things needed sorting, and you sorted them. That was not luck. That was decades of determination, sacrifice, and an almost ferocious commitment to not being beaten by any of it. And yet here you are, tired in a way that sleep does not touch, going through the motions of a life that looks, from the outside, like everything you worked for, and privately wondering why none of it feels like enough. This is not weakness. It is not ingratitude. It is what burnout looks like when it happens to women who have spent their entire adult lives being the person who does not burn out.

When ambition stops being the answer

Research consistently shows that women experience burnout at higher rates than men, and the reasons are not complicated. Women in professional roles frequently carry a dual burden that their male counterparts do not: the demands of a career pursued with genuine ambition, layered on top of the often disproportionate weight of domestic life, emotional labour, and caring responsibilities that still, in most households and most workplaces, falls to women.

For many women, ambition was also a form of identity. The career was not just a job. It was proof of something, a demonstration of capability, of worth, of having got somewhere despite the obstacles. Letting that drive you is not a flaw. It is often a deeply intelligent response to a world that required you to work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously. But identity built primarily around achievement is fragile in a particular way. It works well when the achievements keep coming and the momentum holds. It becomes much harder to sustain when the body begins to say no, when the children need more than you have left to give, when a parent becomes ill, when the meaning that once felt self-evident quietly drains away and nothing obvious rushes in to replace it.

The question that surfaces in burnout is rarely just about workload. It is something older and more unsettling: if I stop doing all of this, who am I?

The exhaustion beneath the exhaustion

There is a particular quality to burnout in women who have always managed. It tends to arrive not as a dramatic collapse but as a slow dimming. Things that once felt purposeful begin to feel mechanical. Pleasure becomes harder to locate. You find yourself going through days that are objectively fine and feeling nothing much about them, or feeling a low, persistent flatness that you cannot quite name or account for.

This is sometimes described as anhedonia, the loss of interest in or pleasure from things that previously felt rewarding. It is one of the less-discussed features of burnout, and it can be frightening precisely because it does not feel like stress. It feels more like absence, as though something essential has quietly switched off. For some women, this stage brings an unexpected and initially unwelcome gift: the beginning of a question they have not had time to ask before. What do I actually want? Not what I am supposed to want, not what I have been working towards, but what would a life that felt genuinely mine actually look like? That question can feel destabilising when your sense of self has been built around a set of answers you no longer fully believe in. It can also be the beginning of something important.

If any of this resonates and you would like to explore whether therapy might help, you are
welcome to get in touch

Writing as a way of listening to yourself

One of the things burnout strips away is the capacity to hear your own inner life above the noise of everything else. You have been so focused outward, on performance, on delivery, on other people’s needs, that the quieter signals from inside have been easy to override.

Writing can create the conditions for those signals to surface. Not in any formal or structured way, simply the act of putting words down without an audience, without a goal, without needing to produce anything useful at the end. Many women in this kind of exhaustion find that writing is one of the few places where the performance pressure temporarily lifts, where they can say something honest without it needing to be managed or presented.

It does not have to be long or coherent. It might be a few sentences, or a list, about what today actually felt like, rather than what you said it felt like when someone asked. It might be a letter to a younger version of yourself, or to the version of you that is still somewhere underneath all of this. It might simply be a record of what you notice when you slow down enough to notice anything.

Some women bring this kind of writing into therapy, where it becomes a way into conversations that are hard to start from scratch. Others keep it entirely private. Either way, the value is in the turning towards yourself, which burnout has made very easy to forget how to do.

About the author
Samantha Merry is a BACP Senior Accredited Psychotherapist and Clinical Supervisor based in Bromley, South East London. She specialises in burnout, trauma, and complex family dynamics, working with adults in longer-term psychodynamic therapy. She has a particular interest in therapeutic and reflective writing as a tool within the therapeutic process, and is currently completing a Professional Doctorate in Psychotherapy and Psychological Trauma at the University of Chester.

Further reading and listening

Books

• Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. grounded in research on the stress response and what genuine recovery actually requires.
• Emotional Inheritance by Galit Atlas. A psychoanalyst writing about how unspoken family histories shape adult identity and emotional life
• Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey. A Black American theologian and activist who reframes rest as a political and psychological act, and challenges the cultural conditioning that makes stopping feel like failure.
• Opening Up by Writing It Down by James Pennebaker and Joshua Smyth. Looks at expressive writing as a means of supporting mental health

Podcast

• Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel. Several episodes deal directly with identity, ambition, and the costs of the lives we have built. Perel’s relational lens is particularly useful for women asking what they want now that the script they followed has run out. https://www.estherperel.com/podcast

You Tube

• Dr. Judith Joseph on burnout, anhedonia, and women’s mental health. A board-certified psychiatrist and researcher whose YouTube content addresses the specific experience of high-achieving women who present as fine while quietly losing their sense of meaning and pleasure. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmHQJaOerTsZJfOtiYz4sOg