Tell me something we don't know

Breaking news! Midlife women are most stressed.

Oct 09, 2024

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I know this is going to sound really bloody obvious to many of you, but I have to set the scene, so here is another study telling us women in midlife what we already know.

In a new survey, it’s revealed that a third of people in Ireland claim to feel always or often stressed on a daily basis due to work concerns (47%), money (31%), health issues (26%), family issues (21%), care responsibilities (14%) and work colleagues (14%).

And the biggest cohort? People 45-54, with twice as many women as men.

Many women in these crucial years may have several of those factors at once. When I’m coaching a woman, she may have come to me because of a career decision or issues in her marriage or family life, but when we get into the nitty gritty, it is never about one thing; there always seems to be a pile-on of pressure from several fronts.

And let’s throw in some haphazard hormonal head-wrecking and it can be a perfect storm shit-show decade.

Yes we now have amazing opportunities, AND the pressure from all fronts can feel waaaaaaaaaay too much. Not because we’re not competent, but because, as I’ve written about before here, we are the generations of women in transition from a patriarchal system where we did all the support work, to one of equitable opportunities and distribution of support work and there has been far more advances in one area - the careers, education and opportunities than the other - equity in housework and family-caring.

We’re doing too much.

We’re expected to do too much.

We’re feeling we’re not enough (because we literally cannot do it all, despite being told we can have it all).

How did this happen? How did women go from fighting for equality, only to realise there is way too little equity? We got to have educations and jobs, but we also still have the great responsibility for domestic and family workload.

The latest Lean In Women in the Workplace 2024 report still showed how the inequity in homes persists.

“But no matter how high women climb on the corporate ladder, inequities persist at home: today, roughly 4 in 10 women with partners say they are responsible for most or all of the housework—the same as in 2016. And senior-level women with partners are over four times more likely than men in the same situation to do more housework. In a society where we talk about the mental load and unequal share of parenting duties much more often, women are still responsible for most of the household duties.”

I have a client at the moment who is literally making herself ill with the stress of juggling it all, yet is unable to make the decision to prioritise her health. She’s not alone.

It’s as if the subliminal (and overt) messaging somehow told us that resting is cheating.

That saying “I’ve too much on at the moment, I have to drop some standards here” will have you cancelled.

That by prioritising yourself so you can give from a place of strength makes you a selfish bitch, and hey, selfishness is not a good look on a woman, right?

How do we fix it?

The question I get asked the most is “how do I stop the tsunami of stuff swallowing me whole?”

And I say, no-one is coming to save you. Not because your friends and family don’t love you, but because it has to come from within.

Other people can support you, but they can’t morph into life-buoys for you. The most important thing you can do…. before you put the proverbial oxygen mask on first is realise the context of your life. Understand why you are feeling so stressed and overwhelmed, understand that that why is often societal and totally bullshit, so you can make the right proactive decisions to alleviate some of it.

In response to the latest survey that came out this week, I was asked to comment on our national radio news programme, RTE Radio 1’s Drivetime show. You can listen to the interview here.

As I said on the interview, you have to find a pressure valve. If it can’t be your parents needing help, it has to be your kids taking on more roles. If it can’t be your kids, it’ll have to be your job. But it can never be you.

You HAVE to matter.

But what women tend to do is put our own wellbeing as the first pressure valve (because the hangover from the old system where women cared for everyone before herself still lingers like a night on Jagermeister shots).

I’m not saying this all from a nice perch on some wellbeing mountain where I drink Zen Kombucha and massage my own shoulders while humming “My menopausal belly is beautiful.”

I’ve worn the Stressed as Fuck t-shirt. I had a few good years at the coal face of life after my mum needed 24 hour care following a stroke just days after my third baby was born. I literally had three children under 5 and a mum who need constant care and a dad who needed support to provide the vast majority of that care, and a career to figure out. My marriage was in melt-down (unrelated) and then ended so I became a single parent, sandwich years carer and there was barely time to breath. I mean literally. I was so busy stressing about everyone else, I couldn’t even take the deep enough breaths I needed to function properly and had such bad panic attacks I passed out once on my kitchen floor. I can occasionally pick that T-shirt out of the washing basket and wear it still. We all can, which is why it’s so important to gain perspective on the context rather than normalising it for years on end.

And I was useless to everyone eventually because I let the stress wear me out. In my book Midlife, redefined: Better, Bolder, Brighter I explain why it’s so easy for women to start ghosting themselves, not answering their own calls, and sadly this latest study is just another red flag that we should all be recognising but are likely too busy checking our To-Do lists.

There is no well without being. That means you have to understand stress is context, not a state of being.

Here’s one way I see it happening in couples.

They start off as an equal couple. So far, so modern.

Then they have a family and by nature, the mother often takes the greater role of parenting and household management because, well, she has a vagina and often this coincides with his career advancement. It coincides with the time that she is expected / has earned promotion but you know, the vagina and babies thing. This carries on for a few years while the kids are young and then she decides it’s time to increase her skin in the game.

But a deeply grooved pattern has set in. Everyone knows she is the one who remembers what sports gear needs washed, the one who thinks about the half-term cover, she is the one who thinks and does most of the family / kids / household tasks. And nothing changes despite her taking on more work responsibility. I see this time and time again, and often I end up coaching around practising conversations to update the family on the fact things have changed. They are growing up and they all need to take on more responsibility.

Yet as we all know….. we also do pretty much ALL of the thinking!

A recent study by the US Fair Play Institute looked at how mothers and their partners divied up 30 common household tasks, such as laundry, groceries and helping with homework. Crucially, the study differentiated between the cognitive or planning aspects of a certain task, versus the physical labour or execution of the tasks. The thinking about the task as well as the doing of the task, basically.

I hear this distinction over and over again with my clients; even if their partner does some of the work, my clients are still the ones thinking about what needs done, and organising it.

So how this looked in the study as an example, when it came to the task of groceries, they differentiated between checking the fridge for what is low and making a list (the planning), versus doing the actual shopping and bringing the groceries back in the house (the execution).

What the report found was that mothers took on greater responsibility than their partners for the cognitive labour of 29 out of 30 tasks as well as the physical doing for 28 out of 30 tasks. A typically “male” job like taking out the rubbish was the only task for which partners were responsible for both the cognitive and physical labor.

“The entire world is focused on execution, and men are stepping up, but women are still doing most of the cognitive labor,” says the report. “It is not men’s fault, but they have an inaccurate perception of what a task involves, so they are over-reporting what they do.”

There is a gap between doing and planning and therein lies many an issue in a family. Often when I'm helping a woman find more mental and physical space in her life it is getting down to the nitty gritty of how to articulate what she needs. We also know that there is an emotional burden of thinking about, worrying about and caring for our family members that weighs heavier on women.

I have a client in the throws of this at the moment as she tries to shift her family out of the deep groove that she is responsible for everything, even thought her kids are teenagers and she works as much as her partner. When she says things like “we need to have an argument about that” I gently suggest she has a discussion instead - he is learning too. He will have grown up in a deeper patriarchy than the one he is married in (because we are slowly in transition) and none of us have a clear role model of the more equitable system we are all working towards.

Let’s take language as just one way to tackle our impotence around tackling stress rather than be smothered by it.

This is a slide I sometimes use when I give talks to companies on managing overwhelm.

If you say I am stressed / overwhelmed it feels disempowering. You are a victim to something that has overtaken you as a person,

Even if you can shift that to say I am stressed / overwhelmed right now you can see that this is temporary and perhaps ask for help in certain areas (or my favourite - just drop some standards, especially when it comes to household stuff).

You can shift further with I am feeling stressed / overwhelmed right now which separates you from the feeling and puts it in context.

And finally the best level is to say: I am stressed / overwhelmed right now because….

I am feeling stressed right now because….

Now you have timeline, context and reason and it takes the burden off you to cope until you drop, and gives you space to create some sanity buffers.

Once you have context, then you have something to work with. This transition is going to take generations and so for now you have to become your own life-buoy to stay afloat and swim to a more stable shore out of the shit-show storm.

Below for paid subscribers I’m giving you an exercise to help you figure out how you are and how you behave in various states so you know where you are on the stress rollercoaster. Don’t forget there is a discount below too for all my subscribers who’d like to book a one hour Coaching call to discover exactly where you are and how you might manage it better.

I absolutely love hearing from you, and I’d love to know how you feel about stress, so please join me in the comments below (if you’re reading this in an email, please click on the link below to go through to the website to join the conversation.)

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