Most woman are on the go-go-go from
morning till night, talking epic to-do lists while navigating one distraction
after another. They have accepted fatigue as a fact of life, but being
perpetually spent takes a big toll on health and happiness. Here’s how to
revive yourself.
It’s 6a.m., and Alena Burley’s alarm clock is screaming.
By 7:30, the 23-year-old from Tallahassee,
Florida, has walked her dog, eaten an egg-white omelette, showered, dressed,
and driven 30 minutes to her third-grade teaching job. By 4:30, her dog is back
on its leash, then Alena sprints to gym before her grad-scholl class, after
which she rushes to her evening babysitting gig. Back home well past 10 p.m.,
totally beat, she grades papers and falls into bed-after setting her alarm…for
6 a.m.
“Sometimes I go to nonstop that I suddenly
realize I’ve had to go to the bathroom for hours, “ says Alena. “ I feel
burned-out all the time, but when I look around, everyone I know is just as
busy.”
Of course, such a frenzied day-to-day in
nothing new. Woman have been run ragged for decades, especially after they
entered the work force en masse, juggling career and family responsibilities.
But Alena’s attitude exemplifies a novel and more worrisome psychological
shift: Young women have accepted exhaustion as a normal state of being. But
even youth is no defense against the health hazards that come with such
gruelling schedules.
Resisting a Rest
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention proclaimed insufficient sleep a public health epidemic. And an
American Psychological Association survey showed a large gap between the level
of stress people say they experience and what they think is healthy. But
another survey found that when women are tired, 80 percent are at least
somewhat likely to push right on through. “We live in a culture in which people
accept lagging energy as a fact of life,” confirms integrative medicine
specialist Frank Lipman,M.D., author of Revive: Stop feeling Spent and Start
living Again.
It’s a mindset that starts early. “ we’re
now primed to be fatigued from the get-go,” says anaesthesiologist Bradley
Carpentier, M.D., who has studied causes of exhaustion. “ Kids are loaded with
after-school activities; high schoolers are busy getting into college, where
they’ll only get up earlier and stay up later. Then come careers, the iPhones
and BlackBerrys, the 24-7 multitasking.”
Yet many experts believe more in
going on
than just crammed calendars. They point to a need for validation that
often
drives women to never say no. “Women are caught up in the societal
expectation
that, in order to get ahead, a price must be paid and that price is
exhaustion,“ says sleep researcher Karin Olson, Ph.D., R.N., of the
University of Alberta. Even those who step off the career track to start
families don’t
necessarily slow down, They just switch lanes, trading insane office
hours for
marathon mummying.
Women are also more prone than men to feel
guilty if they can’t fit it all in and are therefore less likely to challenge
exhaustion acceptance, says Carol Landau, Ph.D., a clinical professor or
psychiatry and medicine at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University. “We
tell ourselves, I can’t go to bed now because X, Y, and Z aren’t done
perfectly,” she says. Plus, social cues prime women to internalize the idea
that family and possibly friendships are a priority, making them feel culpable
for, say, spending extra hours at work.
The result ? Women pile on more, accepting
less rejuvenating time for themselves. “Some do feel a sense of helplessness
about it,” says Elizabeth Lombardo, Ph.D., author of A Happy You: Your
Ultimate Prescription for Happiness. “But they feel they have no control,
so they don’t try to do anything about it.”
Tired Without a Clue
Perhaps more alarming is that some women
don’t even realize they’ve accepted exhaustion or that they’re exhausted at
all. With serious fatigue comes a continuous rush of the stress hormone
cortisol, which can act as a mental and physical stimulant. And just as your
brain rewards you for an awesome physical experience-an orgasm, for instance-It
releases feel-good chemicals after a big score in your career or personal life.
Because of this, says Debbie Mandel, author of Addicted to Stress,
“highly charged women often don’t sense that they’re burning out. They get
addicted to the high of accomplishment.”
That high can override fatigue, allow women
to function while essentially flying at half-mast, says Lombardo. “You may not
even realize how tired you are,” she says. “You may think, Oh , this is just
how I am.” The problem is, no high lasts forever, and oftentimes when women
come crashing down, they feel the need to build themselves up by augmenting
their to do lists, perpetuating the cycle.
“Women can get so used to
feeling lousy
that they don’t remember what it’s like to feel goo,” says sleep
medicine
specialist Katherine Sharkey, M.D., Ph.D., of Rhode Island Hospital.
“And studies show people aren’t good at gauging how impaired they are by
exhaustion.”
Therein lies a big issue: Being chronically fried leads to a laundry
list of physical
and psychological woes.
