Managing Emotional Burnout for Women Over 40
This is the third post in our Burnout 101 series. The first post covered what burnout is and isn't, and the second post explored how to recognize it. Today, we're delving into emotional burnout and the labor contributing to it, especially for women over 40. Burnout sneaks up through countless everyday tasks that go beyond the obvious responsibilities at home or work.
How Often Are You Typing "Sigh" into Your Comms?
Whether it's texting or using workplace tools like Slack or Teams, communication has grown more informal and constant, increasing the expectation for immediate responses. This shift began over 20 years ago with the advent of Blackberry and texting. Nowadays, people rarely pause after reading a message; they often feel compelled to respond right away, sometimes expressing their emotions with emojis, GIFs, or simply typing out feelings like 'sigh' or 'rant.'
These moments involve what's known as emotional labor—activities and behaviors that support others' emotional and psychological well-being, often at your own mental and physical health's expense. It's crucial to find ways to distribute this burden more effectively, especially since this emotional load typically falls on midlife women.
How Emotional Labor Can Be Expended at Work?
At work, emotional labor might look like volunteering to take meeting notes, ordering food for meetings, or subtly influencing executives to adopt your ideas as their own. This often leads to longer hours or unfinished tasks, contributing to high burnout rates among women over 40.
Emotional support at work often starts with being a confidante but can escalate quickly. I've found myself caught between senior executives venting about each other, which is exhausting. Eventually, I urged them to confront their issues directly—a conversation that never happened.
Sigh.
We’ll get into why I loathe the term “man up” in a future post.
What Does This Look Like Outside of Work?
Known as the ‘Sandwich Generation’ phase, women in midlife juggle caring for everyone, especially aging parents. This involves more than just physical care; it's about managing medical appointments, understanding health issues, handling insurance, legal matters like estate planning, and the emotional challenges that come with aging.
The amount of time these tasks can take alone can be soul crushing. Note that Go Long has a network of people that can help here. Book a call here.
Additionally, women are often expected to mediate family disputes, sometimes sidelining their own emotions to maintain peace.
My sister does this. We all know it. God bless her and I’m not being sarcastic. One time I screwed up by not inviting a specific family member to an event my husband and I hosted and she had to deal with the [appropriate] blowback from that family member. During the week she was hosting Thanksgiving for 25+ people. Nice, Jill. Yes, I did apologize to her and the family member. But ooof, an unforced error I would like back.
Speaking of family engagements, think of always organizing gatherings, remembering birthdays and keeping the relationships going with distant relatives or friends. Also tangential to this is all of the social coordination around planning and organizing events, managing family schedules and ensuring social obligations are met. All of this takes time and comes at the expense of other activities that you could be doing.
Anyone ever chair the local school auction? If you haven’t and the opportunity arises, I have plenty of anecdotal evidence from friends and family to JUST. WRITE. THE. CHECK. INSTEAD. There’s volunteering with the PTA as another example. Being a coach or a troop leader for Girl/Boy Scouts. Maybe it’s rallying politicians around getting better support services for kids with special needs (and your kid may be one of those kids). All of this takes time and emotional energy, which increases your stress.
iStock: ViktorCap
The Unsung Heroine of the ‘20s - The Unpaid Uber Driver
How many of you are doing all of the above after your day job and then feel like you’re a car service for 3-4 hours after that? You’re doing the best you can trying to get one human from A to B to C while getting another human from D to E to F at different times in different towns in rush hour traffic. Dinner on the table at 6pm or 630pm is a relic of the past. So it may be hitting the drive-thru on the way home or in between pick-ups.
The Outcome of All of This Is Typically….
No time for you. Prolonged stress. Eventual burnout. Worsening health physically, mentally and emotionally. The goals you set for yourself at the beginning of the year are gone. Life has gotten in the way, which is normal.
No time for you to eat the way your body needs. No time for you to exercise. No time for you to relax and decompress.
Most of Go Long’s clients are in this situation and we talk through very tactical strategies on how to manage all of this. It isn’t perfect but it’s practical for you. It could be packing a cooler in your trunk. It could be a meal prep service for you. It could be figuring out how you can get a walk or a run in between pick-ups. It could be hiring someone to help you with managing certain aspects of helping your parents.
It could also be pushing back and asking others to pitch in, whether at work or at home.
We’re going to get into some strategies that you can employ to push back and take back some control over your time. That’s next week’s post.
As always, thanks for reading Go Long.