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  • Diagnosed With ADHD at 54: Why Late-Diagnosed ADHD in Women Shows Up in Midlife

    I was diagnosed with ADHD at 54.

    Fifty. Four.

    By then I’d built two multi-million-dollar consulting practices at two different firms. Earned a PhD. Sold multi-million dollar deals. Worked in the intelligence community. Wrote speeches for Admirals, Generals, and rocket scientists. Was a behavioral-health counselor and taught cognitive psychology.

    Yes. I taught other people how the brain works while mine ran an entirely different operating system in the background.

    (Please – nobody tell those students.)

    So when people ask how it got missed for that long, here’s the candid answer:

    I was very good at masking it. And didn’t know to look for it.

    That’s the pattern for a lot of women with late-diagnosed ADHD. Especially high-performing, successful, Type A+ overachieving women. Symptoms so well covered nobody went looking, including us. Then we hit our 40s and 50s, hormones shift, and the mask stops working.

    It’s ADHD Awareness Month. Here’s what I wish someone had told me in my 30s instead of 54:

    • Why ADHD in women gets missed for decades
    • What masking actually looks like in a high performer
    • Why it so often falls apart in perimenopause
    • What to do when the coping strategies quit at work

    Why is ADHD diagnosed so late in women?

    Short answer: ADHD in women is often missed because it looks different than the hyperactive-boy picture the diagnosis was built on, and because capable women compensate. Good grades, big careers, and elaborate workarounds hide the struggle until something, often midlife hormone changes, pulls the workarounds out from under them.

    The research has been saying this for a while. Girls and women are underdiagnosed, more often show inattentive symptoms than disruptive ones, and are more likely to get treated for the anxiety or depression sitting on top of the ADHD instead of the ADHD itself (Hinshaw et al., 2022; Quinn & Madhoo, 2014).

    Translation: if you weren’t bouncing off the classroom walls, nobody checked.

    And if you were succeeding? Forget it.

    High performance is the best camouflage there is. Nobody refers the woman running the department for an evaluation. They give her more work!

    The takeaway: a late diagnosis doesn’t mean you didn’t have it. It means you were compensating so well that nobody, you included, thought to call “chronic stress” or “burnout” or “success” something else..

    What does ADHD masking look like in high-performing women?

    Short answer: ADHD masking is the set of workarounds you build to look like everything’s fine: over-preparing, perfectionism, panic-powered deadlines, backup systems for your backup systems. It works. That’s the trap. From the outside it looks like competence. From the inside it costs a fortune in energy.

    I call mine the duct tape.

    Here’s what it looked like:

    • Deadlines met at 2 a.m. on pure adrenaline…and kinda loving it (it was the dopamine chase)
    • Three backup systems for the one system that kept failing.
    • A Post-it stuck right in front of my face. Staring straight at it. Still forgot the meeting I scheduled.
    • Keys locked in the Jeep. (Once. Okay. More than once. Okay, stop counting.)

    Here’s the thing.

    It worked.

    For decades, it worked.

    Success held together by duct tape still looks like success from the outside. Nobody checks the duct tape. Including the woman holding the roll.

    In fact – you get called “quirky” or “eccentric” and people start to compensate for you.

    My doctoral research was on women leaders navigating chronic pain in gendered environments and found deliberate masking is a key tactic to survival and success. I found the exact thing I was doing. And still didn’t see it in my own mirror.

    Seriously people – that’s not a lack of intelligence. I’m smart. That’s a “yeah, but that’s not me.” Masking is designed to be invisible. If you could see it easily, it wouldn’t be a “mask”

    The takeaway: masking is armor. The problem isn’t that you have the armor…but that you wear it every day and it costs you.

    Why do ADHD symptoms get worse in perimenopause?

    Short answer: Estrogen helps regulate dopamine, the brain chemical ADHD already runs short on. In perimenopause, estrogen swings and drops even more than normal, and dopamine signaling swings with it. Sometimes radically. Focus, working memory, and follow-through get harder, and coping strategies that worked for decades can stop working fairly suddenly.

    But you don’t know why.

    Your OBGYN makes offhanded comments like “yeah that’s normal” – but that doesn’t really help. Guess what? OBGYN’s want to birth babies. They are (and yes this is a rant) regulated by insurance to 15 minutes per patient regardless of your issue, so having an educational conversation about your menopause brain and how the neurochemicals work 1) isn’t what they went to school for, 2) isn’t the conversation they want to have, 3) isn’t what insurance reimburses them for. So who makes the connection for you?

    Well Dr. Lisa Mosconi in her book The Menopause Brain – trust me. This neuroscientist is shaking things up and she’s showing what the female brain is all about!

    Heads up: that’s an Amazon affiliate link from my other platform 10PM Somewhere. If you buy through it, I earn a small commission. It costs you nothing extra.

    Bottom line – Estrogen is freaking important for dopamine! Dopamine is freaking important for our executive function. Working memory, focus, attention, emotion regulation, finding words, prioritizing, holding a thought long enough to finish it. Without enough we feel foggy…

    I can’t tell you in perimenopause it isn’t dementia, but I can tell you if your in your 30s to 50s and you all of a sudden your brain feels “foggy” it could be hormone’s – not matter what your gaslighting medical professional may say. They may call you a WW (Whining Woman) off-the-record because that’s what they were trained to do (watch this video only if you want to be really pissed

    ADHD already involves dopamine trouble. Then perimenopause shows up, and estrogen doesn’t glide gently downhill. It swings. Hard. For years.

    Every drop takes a little dopamine with it.

    So all that masking machinery you spent a lifetime building – the perfectionism, the hyper-vigilance, the panic-powered deadlines – doesn’t fade out politely.

    It quits. All at once. Usually mid-quarter.

    Researchers have found that women with ADHD report more hormone-related mood symptoms, including heavier symptoms during the menopause transition (Dorani et al., 2021). Which tracks with every woman I’ve talked to who said some version of “my meds just stopped working.”

    They may not have stopped working. The ground under them moved.

    The takeaway: if your brain suddenly got harder to run in your late 30s, 40s or 50s, there’s likely a biological reason worth bringing to your doctor…and not just any doctor. Find a functional doctor that will work with you.

    Is it ADHD, perimenopause, or both?

    Short answer: It can be both, and the symptoms overlap heavily: brain fog, forgetfulness, trouble focusing, irritability, sleep problems. Only a clinician can sort out which is which. You don’t need to have the answer before asking for help. You need data to bring to the appointment.

    I’m doctor but not that kinda doctor. I’m an integrative psychological scientist, not a physician. I can’t tell you which one you’ve got.

    What I can tell you is this: you don’t have to pick one before you’re allowed to ask. Don’t diagnose yourself with dementia before you’ve talked with a trained professional who knows what they are doing.

    A lot of women get bounced between offices. Too smart for ADHD. Too young for perimenopause. Too stressed, have you tried yoga?

    Each specialist treats their slice. Nobody looks at the intersection, which is where you actually live.

    Find a functional practitioner – here’s a link to the

    Institute of Functional Medicine – Find a Practitioner Tool

    That’s why the next section matters.

    The takeaway: walk in with evidence, not just a feeling. Feelings are easy to dismiss. Patterns are not.

    What to do when your ADHD coping strategies stop working at work

    Short answer: Stop treating it as a willpower problem. Start tracking what’s actually happening: when focus shows up, when it doesn’t, how you slept, where you are in your cycle. A written pattern removes the guesswork, gives your doctor real data, and shows you where to put your limited energy at work.

    For most of my life, I had a name for my brain.

    “Chasing shiny things.”

    Said the way great-aunt Hilda says it at Thanksgiving.

    Turns out it was wiring. The same wiring that makes me see patterns other people miss.

    Not a superpower. And not a defect.

    Simply different wiring. And wiring I can work with, now that I see it.

    You may not feel it. But I know you can see it.

    What finally helped me wasn’t a new planner. (FYI: I own enough planners to wallpaper a Target.)

    It was writing it down where I couldn’t argue with it.

    • When focus showed up.
    • When it didn’t.
    • What happened the night before.

    Not to fix anything.

    Just to stop lying to myself.

    When you’ve lived in overdrive long enough, your internal gauge breaks. You honestly don’t feel how bad it is. But two weeks of notes on paper? That you can see. And then you can’t ignore the pattern of data.

    A feeling is easy to talk yourself out of. A pattern on paper is data..

    Here’s what the data gets you:

    • At the doctor: a log instead of “I just feel off” is much harder to wave away and ignore. (Remember – I’m a researcher!)
    • At work: you learn when your good hours actually are, and you stop scheduling the hardest thinking into the worst ones.
    • In your own head: the evidence that this is chemistry, not “character” which shuts up the voice saying you’re losing your edge, are lazy, or my personal favorite a “moron.” (such a nice word Shannan, such. a. nice word (sarcasm)

    The takeaway: energy is the finite resource, not time. Track your energy and capacity.

    And a book worth your bandwidth this ADHD Awareness Month

    If you want something to read in short bursts (and let’s be honest, short bursts is the name of the game (not this mammoth blog I wrote to appeal to SEO/AEO!)

    ADHD Field Guide by Cate Osborn, Erik Gude, and Rennie Dyball, with a foreword by KC Davis, LPC.

    Seriously! As someone who loves format, simple, soundbytes, real-talk, getting to the point. These folks do an amazing job.

    Heads up: that’s an Amazon affiliate link from my other platform 10PM Somewhere. If you buy through it, I earn a small commission. It costs you nothing extra.

    The bottom line

    Late-diagnosed ADHD in women isn’t a mystery. It’s been working. Then hormones changed, the duct tape let go, and it looked like we were falling apart.

    Not really, the workarounds ran out. But the wiring has been in tact the whole time, it’s just different type of wiring.

    So this month, don’t buy another planner. Don’t white-knuckle it.

    Write down what’s actually happening for two weeks. Take it to someone who’ll read it.

    Happy ADHD Awareness Month.

    Now…go find your keys.

    (Tip: check the freezer or the Jeep ignition.)

    Frequently asked questions

    Can you be diagnosed with ADHD in your 50s?

    Yes. ADHD is present from childhood, but many women aren’t diagnosed until their late 30s, 40s, 50s or even 60s, often when hormone changes make long-standing strategies stop working. I was diagnosed at 54.

    Why does ADHD get worse during perimenopause?

    Estrogen helps regulate dopamine, which affects focus, working memory, and follow-through. As estrogen fluctuates and declines in perimenopause, many women with ADHD notice symptoms getting harder to manage, sometimes suddenly.

    What is ADHD masking?

    ADHD masking is the set of strategies people use to hide ADHD symptoms and appear organized: over-preparing, perfectionism, adrenaline-fueled deadlines, and backup systems. It often works for years, which is one reason ADHD in women is diagnosed late.

    How do I know if it’s ADHD or perimenopause?

    The symptoms overlap, and it can be both. Only a clinician can tell them apart. Tracking focus, sleep, mood, and your cycle for a few weeks gives your doctor concrete data instead of a vague description.

    About the author

    Dr. Shannan Simms is an Integrative Psychological Scientist, a Professor of Business, Psychology of Gender and Cognitive Psychology and a Certified Stress Coach through the American Institute of Stress. She holds a PhD, built and ran two multi-million-dollar consulting practices without ever taking a business class, is a neurodivergent thinker and lives what she teaches, coaches, consults and speaks on.

    References

    Barth, C., Villringer, A., & Sacher, J. (2015). Sex hormones affect neurotransmitters and shape the adult female brain during hormonal transition periods. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 9, Article 37. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2015.00037

    Dorani, F., Bijlenga, D., Beekman, A. T. F., van Someren, E. J. W., & Kooij, J. J. S. (2021). Prevalence of hormone-related mood disorder symptoms in women with ADHD. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 133, 10–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2020.12.005

    Hinshaw, S. P., Nguyen, P. T., O’Grady, S. M., & Rosenthal, E. A. (2022). Annual research review: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in girls and women: Underrepresentation, longitudinal processes, and key directions. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 63(4), 484–496. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13480

    Quinn, P. O., & Madhoo, M. (2014). A review of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in women and girls: Uncovering this hidden diagnosis. The Primary Care Companion for CNS Disorders, 16(3). https://doi.org/10.4088/PCC.13r01596

    <small>Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Some links on this page are affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission if you buy through them, at no additional cost to you.</small>

    <small>Not medical advice. This article is for education and is based on my own experience and published research. It isn’t a substitute for diagnosis or treatment. Talk with a qualified clinician about your symptoms.</small>

  • 3 Surprising Reasons Burnout Isn’t What You Think It Is

    The WHO calls it an occupational hazard. Your brain calls it a fuel shortage. Both are right, and neither one is your fault.

    I really, really hate the word “burnout.”

    It’s the catch phrase everyone reaches for to talk about bone-weary exhaustion in the most commonplace way.

    I’ve actually experienced it twice, and even then I REFUSED to call it burnout, out of sheer pride. Medicated, and threatened by my physician with a forced medical leave of absence, I still resisted the title, because to me “burnout” admitted defeat. Failure.

    But today everyone tosses the word around. Either they’re living it, or they’re selling a solution for how to avoid it, recover from it, outsmart it.

    Here’s my problem. Burnout is so much more than being “tired” or “fatigued” or even “exhausted.”

    Think about the word itself. It’s two words – burn and out. Extinguished. Complete. Nothing left.

    Meaning your brain literally does not have the fuel left to do what it needs to do.

    This is a neurochemical situation.

    And I come at this from a slightly different angle, for a few reasons.

    First, I teach undergraduate psychology, and I’ve spent over 20 years translating brain, behavior, and social psychology for organizational leaders going through disruption and transformation.

    Second, I was just recently diagnosed with ADHD, and I’m learning how differently neurodivergent brains are actually wired.

    Third, I went through menopause three times in my 30s. And now, as all my friends hit perimenopause and menopause, I’m revisiting my own experience through a new lens, because their questions keep surfacing ones I never thought to ask.

    I’m making connections I’ve never made before about the female brain, in large part thanks to Dr. Lisa Mosconi (lisamosconi.com), neuroscientist, women’s brain health specialist, author of The Menopause Brain, and director of the Weill Cornell Women’s Brain Initiative.

    Thanks to Dr. Mosconi, we now know the female brain is brilliantly different. Not “different” in the way it got weaponized for years through a neurosexism lens to keep women parked in intellectual inferiority. Different in a way that shows the real distinctions, and the plasticity. And that opens the door to real solutions.

    Because brilliant, senior, high-achieving women are hitting their late thirties, forties, and fifties and walking away from the peak of their careers. Or getting organizationally gaslit, stalled, and quietly exited from them.

    The narrative is that we’ve “lost our drive,” or we “need to slow down.” And the undercurrent culprit everyone names is “burnout.”

    So let’s actually take the word apart. Because the fight over what burnout is has two camps, and both are half wrong.

    Camp one says burnout is a personal problem. You’re not resilient enough. Do some self-care, build your grit, try yoga, take a bath, become a slightly better-optimized version of yourself who can absorb the exact same load without cracking.

    Camp two says burnout is purely structural. It’s the job, full stop, and your brain is an innocent bystander.

    Here’s what the data actually shows: it’s both, and they’re wired together. So here are three surprising reasons burnout isn’t what you think it is. You can’t fix what you refuse to see whole.

    Reason 1: It’s an occupational hazard, not a personal weakness

    In 2019, the World Health Organization put it in plain language. Burn-out is “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed” (World Health Organization, 2019).

    An occupational phenomenon. Tied to the conditions of work. Not a defect living in your personality.

    And the psychologist Christina Maslach, whose research built the standard measure of burnout, found it isn’t one thing. It’s three (Maslach & Leiter, 2016):

    + exhaustion – you have an empty tank

    + cynicism – you are going mentally distant from work

    + reduced efficacy – you have a creeping sense nothing you do lands

    Rest only touches the first one. That’s your first clue a bubble bath wasn’t going to fix this.

    She and Michael Leiter also found burnout isn’t random and shows up where there’s a chronic mismatch between a person and their job, in six nameable areas (Maslach & Leiter, 1997): workload, control, reward, community, fairness, values.

    For the record – in case you missed it – that’s a diagnostic you can use disguised as a list.

    If you are facing down burnout, the source is usually screaming at you from one or two of these areas, not all six.

    Reason 2: It’s a fuel shortage in your brain, not a feeling

    I’m sure the term “occupational hazard” sounds like a policy memo…right up until you see what the ongoing, day-to-day lived experience does inside your noggin.

    Chronic workplace stress isn’t just a bad mood. This stress floods your system with cortisol, the stress hormone that the body releases to help us survive in a fight or flight situation – you know like when we’re being chased by a sabre tooth tiger.

    This sustained high cortisol physically degrades the prefrontal cortex, the executive center that runs focus, judgment, working memory, and impulse control. Under that load, control shifts away from the thoughtful PFC and toward older, more reactive parts of the brain (Arnsten, 2009).

    So…when we need to be “thinking” what’s running the ship is the “reactive” part of the brain – most of the time on Autopilot.

    Burn. Out. The fuel and the machinery that runs on it, both depleted. That is why “just rest” and “just try harder” both fail. You’re asking a chemically downshifted system to power up on command, and it can’t, because the conditions drained the exact resource the command requires.

    Reason 3: Not every brain runs on the same size tank

    Now hold that next to the female brain, the ADHD brain, and the perimenopausal brain.

    ADHD is, at its core, a difference in how the brain regulates dopamine, the neurochemical you run on for focus and follow-through. Estrogen is a major player in regulating that same dopamine system. As estrogen swings and drops through perimenopause and menopause, the fuel supply gets really volatile (Mosconi, 2024).

    So take the same occupational load, the same six mismatches, and drop it on a brain that’s already running a smaller or more variable fuel reserve. The burn out doesn’t come because the woman is weaker on Tuesday than she was a year ago. It burns out faster because there is an oversized demand met an already-taxed supply.

    So here’s the actual equation

    I have math dyslexia, but to me this is actually a relatively simple formula.

    Burnout is occupational demand divided by neurochemical supply.

    What your work is demanding divided by the actual supply and reserves of the brain fuel you have to do.

    The job sets the demand.

    The demand is frequently rigged.

    The rooms you move through are often sending signals that you use extra energy to pay attention to without even realizing it. The tone of voice, who speaks first in meetings, who gets promoted, what project was assigned, who was released from employment, when and under what conditions.

    And your unique chemistry sets the supply, which is unique and variable.

    Blame yourself, and you get both variables wrong at once.

    The hidden “should” underneath all of it

    Running underneath burnout for many of us is a hidden “should”

    *I don’t “feel” stressed, so I “should” be able to handle this. If I were (fill in the blank – tougher, more resilient, more organized) I wouldn’t feel like I was burning out.**

    And that, should, my friend, is wrong twice over.

    The conditions are overloaded, AND your tank may be running lean through no fault of yours.

    What’s Your Move?

    So the question becomes – what do I do about? My recommendation, start by asking the question – Is this a me-problem, or is this a situation problem? Usually it’s both. And both have a move.

    Move 1 – Attack the demand.

    1. Use Maslach’s six areas and just ask yourself questions about each area and see if one is screaming. Workload? Fairness? Values?

    2. Name it candidly, don’t shy away from it.

    3. Determine the one move for the next 30 days that will give you the time, space, or energy you need to align with your priorities.

    Move 2 – Respect your supply.

    1. Stop comparing and grading your current brain and who you are today against some version of yourself in the past or someone around you.

    2. Get the real picture about your brain and where you are. There are actual clinical and support options for hormonal and neurodivergent side of this.

    FYI: Many OBGYN’s are ill equipped to talk about your brain health, but more and more functional doctors are becoming certified perimenopause and menopause trained to provide the support needed. Shoot me a DM if you want some resources and if you’re neurodivergent and experiencing perimenopause/menopause check out Dr. SarahNeurodivergent Women, Rewritten Hormones, Health, LongevityClear, science-based writing on hormones, health, and longevity for neurodivergent women, at every stage of life.By Dr. Sarah

    For the record, I believe you are quite possibly the most capable brain in the rooms you are running in … even if that brain does have little glitches here and there.

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    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is the real definition of burnout according to neuroscience and psychology?

    Burnout is a neurochemical fuel shortage resulting from chronic, unmanaged workplace stress, rather than a personal defect or lack of resilience. Formally recognized by the World Health Organization as an occupational phenomenon, burnout consists of three distinct components: physical exhaustion, cynicism (mental distance from work), and reduced efficacy. High cortisol levels from sustained workplace stress degrade the prefrontal cortex, shifting control to the brain’s reactive autopilot systems.

    How do perimenopause and ADHD accelerate burnout in women?

    Estrogen plays a major role in regulating dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for focus, working memory, and executive function. Because an ADHD brain already regulates dopamine differently, the hormonal fluctuations and estrogen drops of perimenopause create a compounding neurochemical deficit. High workplace demands paired with a volatile dopamine supply cause the brain to deplete its fuel reserves far faster.

    What are the six core workplace mismatches that drive burnout?

    Psychologist Christina Maslach’s research shows that burnout occurs when there is a chronic mismatch between a person and their work environment across six specific areas: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. Rest and self-care only temporarily address physical exhaustion; resolving burnout requires identifying which of these six structural areas is creating the underlying strain.

  • The Rung I Chased for Ten Years (and the Flatness at the Top)

    The most expensive mistake I’ve ever made didn’t cost me money.

    I spent years climbing a corporate ladder. One where everyone had pointy elbows, jockeying for the next “opportunity.”

    And when I got the promotion I remember my leader ushering me in by saying “Congratulations! Now you’re part of the problem too.”

    Wait?! What?

    Within weeks I felt like it was bait and switch. I told a mentor and advocate that the process was wrong.

    I’d climbed the goat path. Run the obstacle course. Been invited into the vault. Then the vault door was slammed shut and only then were the lights turned on to show me what I’d been clamoring for.

    I didn’t feel triumph. I felt faint, confusing flatness.

    Something closer to the feeling of showing up to what you were promised would be the best party and experience of your life – like what you imagine champagne and caviar is “supposed” to be like (for the record, I’ve had both and do not like either), but you find yourself standing in the doorway wondering why you’d rather be at a pizza party in someone’s backyard with a cold beer.

    Here’s my point: Some of the “shoulds” in your life that are costing you the most don’t feel like guilt.

    Let me show you how I missed it.

    Some “shoulds” show up as drive or ambition.

    We think we can spot a “should” because it feels bad. It nags. It guilts. *You should call your mother. (probably…yeah ok…maybe) You should answer that text (meh…). You should be further along by now. (argh)

    But the sneakiest ones don’t nag at all. They dress up as want.

    I should want this promotion. I should be scaling my business by now. I should want the big title, the big office, the big life someone sketched out for me before I had opinions about my life.

    That doesn’t feel like an imported order. It feels like your own honest ambition. Which is exactly the disguise.

    I accepted someone else’s ambition.

    And that’s the actual mistake.

    It wasn’t the climb. It was the fact that I didn’t actually want it.

    In fact…I did it out of spite because some guy told me he didn’t believe I could and didn’t support me. Everyone around me agreed that this next step, this next rung was the right one for me except this one guy. I’d been saying “no” for years. Right up until he said he didn’t believe I “could” and then my competitive nature kicked in.

    And I had to prove I could.

    My Autopilot is fast and cheap and confident (we met it in the Intruder Paradox piece). It handed my slower, thinking brain a tidy story… this is the win, go get it. this is how you prove yourself and get people to take you seriously… and my thinking brain, lazy by design, signed on the dotted line without reading the contract.

    Ten years of technically-mine decisions that somehow weren’t mine at all.

    My body sent me the bill.

    Here’s the thing about running someone else’s ambition through your own nervous system. There’s a tax, and your body pays it.

    Mine came due.

    ER visits. Chronic pain. Two surgeries. Medication. Chemotherapy. Two auto-immune disorders. Medically induced and then surgically induced menopause. And everything that comes with it.

    Let me be specific about the chronic pain, because “chronic pain” is a tidy phrase that tells you nothing.

    This was not bad-period pain. Not the cramps you push through with a heating pad, an Advil, and a tight smile at 9am. Because that’s the box everyone tries to file it in – and it’s the wrong box.

    This was pelvic pain that spiked without warning and shot straight up to the base of my skull. The kind that leaves you panting for a second. Nauseated. Shaken. Trembling. Then it would settle back into its baseline… a dull, pulsing, bone-deep ache in my abdomen, my hips, and my lower back.

    All the time. 24/7. Nothing touched it. Always on, always playing in the background.

    This background “noise” takes rent out of your brain and quietly eats the capacity you need to problem-solve, think critically, hold a conversation without a snap or a snark riding shotgun on every sentence. I wasn’t difficult. I was in pain, all day, every day, running a full executive load on whatever cognition the pain hadn’t already spent, popping Vicodin to make it through.

    Opioid medication dulls the pain and quiets the background noise, and dulls those executive functioning skills.

    Here’s what that looked like in the rooms where I was supposed to be the sharpest person present:

    + I’d be mid-point in a meeting, building to my point – the point I’d “practiced” – only to lose the thread. Just gone. I got really good at roundabout ramble phrases to bring myself back to my point and just hoped no one noticed.

    + I’d lose words presenting to leadership. Not obscure ones. Ordinary ones like “proposal” or “pen”. The word right there, close enough to touch, and my brain would hand me static instead.

    + I’d read the same report four times and retain nothing. Blank on a colleague’s name mid-introduction – someone I’d worked beside for ten years – while I was handing them to a client.

    So I built scaffolding to hold it together. Lists for the lists. Alarms on the alarms. The elaborate machinery of a woman spending most of her energy masking and hiding that things weren’t working out of fear.

    And under all of it, a fatigue that sleep didn’t touch. Not tired. Depleted. I’d hit 2pm and feel my thinking wade through wet sand, quietly doing the math on how many hours were left before I could stop performing “fine.” It was always 4 hours until I drove an hour to reset and then got back online to do my administrative work.

    I told myself this was just the cost of the level I was now playing at.

    And that’s the lie that keeps you climbing.

    The strain my body was under wasn’t a sign that I needed more grit. My body was flagging a significant all system failure but I kept overriding it.

    The lesson: I never asked if I was chasing my dream.

    My lesson was when I said yes to the promotion it wasn’t because I really wanted it. Others wanted it for me.

    I hit a point where I couldn’t do it anymore (that’s a whole different story) and I climbed down that ladder in my 40s. Deliberately. Shuffled sideways. Into work that fit me. And I’ve done it twice more in the years that have followed.

    But before I made the decision to climb down I wondered if it was “failing” because you’re supposed to you know, climb up the ladder. Especially as a woman. And as you rise up, you lift others with you.

    The Autopilot told me that going down the ladder was for people who couldn’t hack it; that everyone would see me as a failure. (The Autopilot was very invested in the ladder. The Autopilot also never once asked if I like heights.)

    I overrode the Autopilot with evidence and choices. Deliberately designed my exit and transition.

    Here’s what I know now – walking away from a title that doesn’t fit isn’t a fall. It’s authentic and the truest thing I could have ever done for me to align myself to do work with my values.

    The one question that would have saved me a decade.

    I knew I was proving myself but I never asked whose ambition and dream I was following. I couldn’t see that the room I was in was dictating and driving the decision, and much of that decision was coming out of fear and this longstanding need to be taken seriously.

    I didn’t ask the question did I choose this or am I just going through the motions because it’s what I’m supposed to do. Because it’s the logical next step.

    I’m not anti-ambition. I’m anti-imposed ambition. Want the promotion. Want the title. Want the corner office. Just make sure it’s your true want before you lose a decade and kill your nervous system going after it.

    Next Steps

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    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is “borrowed ambition” and how does it lead to burnout?

    Borrowed ambition occurs when you adopt external expectations, corporate milestones, or a desire to prove someone wrong as your own personal drive. Because this motivation is imported rather than authentic, pursuing it forces your nervous system to operate on stress and fear, eventually leading to severe physical exhaustion, health crises, and cognitive depletion.

    Is stepping down from a senior corporate role a sign of failure?

    No. Stepping down or moving laterally off a traditional career ladder is an act of intentional realignment, not defeat. Choosing to leave a title that actively damages your health or conflicts with your core values requires overriding default cultural conditioning (“Autopilot”) that falsely equates endless upward mobility with personal worth.

    How does chronic stress and physical pain affect executive functioning?

    Continuous physical strain and chronic pain consume immense cognitive bandwidth. This ongoing “background noise” drains the exact mental resources required for working memory, focus, and decision-making. When your brain is constantly processing physical distress, simple cognitive tasks feel exhausting, forcing you to rely on elaborate masking strategies just to perform routine work.

  • How Menopause Rewires Your Brain and What You Can Do Right Now

    Why you can’t willpower your way out of a dopamine shortage, what the latest research proves, and one step to reclaim your sanity today..

    I went through menopause three times in my 30s. I had stage IV endometriosis, and the OBGYNs were only concerned with my “fertility.”

    I fired them all.

    I was concerned with chronic pain, being able to think, remember, walk, sleep, hold a conversation, find my car keys (oh, and keep my job, you know, the one I’d already killed myself to get promoted into). Yeah, that.

    Because why?

    Because I’m a Type A+ over-achieving perfectionist with just enough people-pleasing tendencies that I’ll run myself into the ground before disappointing someone I respect. (Okay, that’s the old me. Just add the word “recovering”.)

    I’d been promoted to the senior world and was at my first leadership retreat when I found myself in the ER. That started a wild ride of a diagnosis, deep fatigue, memory glitches, and heavy medication. Then I found a doctor who said, “We can try an off-label prostate cancer chemotherapy to suppress your estrogen and put you into chemical menopause. I think that could help you.”

    Wait! What?! Are you for-real?!

    The Hormone Roller Coaster

    I’m female, and I don’t have the biological parts of male anatomy. Like most females, my estrogen production used to swing wildly. During a normal monthly cycle, estradiol levels can shift by more than 1,000% in just a matter of days. Yep 1,000%.

    Stick with me, I swear I have a point to biology lesson.

    I want you to reflect on your wildest, and I mean wildest, PMS day.

    You know the one I’m talking about: the laugh then ugly cry, then sudden rage at everything moment, even though you just ate a whole pint of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food and watched a funny rom-com (or in my case, an action movie where they blow things up – don’t judge). Okay, that.

    Our culture and society have this expectation of linear, consistent performance. But week to week, our own biological blueprint is surging and crashing. And that PMS week – oh Nelly – it can be doozy depending on your biology.

    And when someone enters natural menopause, there is a time called perimenopause, which I always thought sound so “nice” and gentle. It’s the “before” stage. It sounds like it should be a little vacation, but it isn’t.

    Natural peri-menopause averages 4 to 8 years. It’s a long, chaotic, multi-year roller coaster where ovarian hormones vary wildly before dropping.

    In a normal timeline, the brain at least has years to slowly recalibrate to these changes. I mean, you visit Cuba personally and unexpectedly and have an internal summer in the middle of winter, but your brain eases into…and in hindsight having gone through what I went through I actually now think that’s the more important thing.

    Because when I said yes to that prostate cancer chemotherapy (a GnRH agonist called Lupron, which is used as an endometriosis treatment), I shut my estrogen production down overnight. I went into a massive chemical crash. It was a total kill-switch.

    The drug aggressively shut down the communication line between my ovaries and my brain. And when estrogen leaves, it takes your dopamine supply line right along with it.

    By the way – your brain desperately needs this for your executive functioning!

    The Brain Needs Fuel

    Estrogen isn’t just a reproductive hormone that runs the show downstairs and then politely retires.

    Oh no Janet.

    Do you know what I learned rapidly that no one told me?

    I learned that I couldn’t remember anything. And I mean anything.

    I could write a reminder on a post-it note, have that note right in front of me while staring directly at it, and it was still as if it never happened. My working memory simply wasn’t working.

    Estrogen is a massive player in your brain. One of its main jobs is helping to regulate dopamine. That’s the exact neurochemical your brain runs on for focus, working memory, motivation, follow-through, and the general ability to hold a thought long enough to finish it. (Don’t get me started on the fact that NOW I know I’ve lived with ADHD all my life so it was a double whammy to me…but I didn’t know that 17 years ago!)

    Now watch what happens in normal perimenopause. Estrogen doesn’t glide gently downhill. It swings erratically and steeply from month to month for years. Every single time it drops, your dopamine supply takes a little hit with it.

    For me, that drop happened within hours. That’s not just “getting scattered.” That’s an acute neurochemical shortage.

    + The keys you can’t find (or, ahem, left in the ignition of your locked Jeep).

    + The credit card you lost (again).

    + The meeting you forgot (and you scheduled it)

    + The name of the person who was just in the meeting (was it Bill…Trudy…the guy in the plaid that just kept talking)

    + The word that was right on the tip of your tongue and then suddenly wasn’t. (I’d like my coffee on the rocks please)

    + Your kid’s name, birthday, or soccer event (or the fact that you had a kid and were supposed to pick them up, feed them, or something).

    Those moments aren’t evidence about your competence, and they don’t mean you’re losing your edge or your mind. They’re the biological readout of a brain trying to run premium software on a suddenly unreliable power supply. That’s it

    The New Science of the Shift

    A brand-new study published in June 2026 by researchers Abigail Testo and Julie Dumas sheds some serious light on this. They looked at the brain scans of 151 women in different stages of perimenopause and menopause to see how the brain communicates.

    They discovered that menopause is, at its core, a true neurological transition.

    All females go through this neurological transition.

    I want you to sit with that for a second.

    Testo and Dumas (2026) found that women in post-menopause have lower functional connectivity in certain parts of the brain while at rest. The main area that changed was the supramarginal gyrus (okay, I had to go look this up).

    Guess what that specific area does? Critical for proper verbal working memory.

    When your BS meter gives out at the same time (because holding your tongue also runs on the exact executive function you’re now short on), you find yourself unable to sit politely while the Guy With The Too-Obvious Toupee confidently repeats your exact idea back to the room two minutes after you said it. And you don’t hold your tongue. Your tolerance didn’t get worse. Your neurochemical budget for pretending got cut.

    But the researchers found something incredibly empowering, too.

    Having lower brain connectivity at rest doesn’t mean your brain is broken!

    They explained that the postmenopausal brain might just require less connectivity at rest because resting takes very little cognitive energy.

    When it’s actually time to do a hard task, the brain powers up perfectly well to get the job done. Your brain is just optimizing its power settings.

    I like that a lot. I’m “optimizing”

    Stop Paying the Shame Tax

    You cannot willpower your way out of a chemistry problem. Please stop trying.

    I have had one too many conversations over the last six months with competent, capable women who are questioning their value, their worth, their competence, and their sanity.

    When the cracks start to show, the fear cycles.

    The fear doesn’t say, “My estrogen is low.”

    It says, “What is wrong with me?”

    It says other women seem totally fine.

    It says if you were really as sharp as people thought, you’d handle this.

    It says, “I used to be able to lose weight and now I can’t, even though I’m not doing anything different. I’m such a loser.”

    So you white-knuckle it. You cover. You try to add willpower to a system that is short on the exact neurochemical fuel that willpower requires. That’s like flooring the gas pedal to fix an empty gas tank.

    I know, because I ran this exact play in my 30s. And I lost that fight for years, believing that I wasn’t good enough, smart enough, competent enough, or capable enough. Because I was getting signals from my environment that I internalized and I was comparing new self to my old self. My new brain to my old brain…but I didn’t know what was happening and no one was there to help see that I was fighting the wrong opponent

    Here is the one should hope you drop today: “If I were really good enough, I should be able to push through this.”

    If you feel brain-fog, forgetful, short-fused strain that isn’t proof that something is “wrong with you.” It’s the physical sound of a great brain running low on fuel.

    And you can’t willpower estrogen back.

    You can stop grading yourself on a rigged exam.

    Go get the real picture. There are actual clinical options out there that work. (I couldn’t take HRT due to my medical history, so I don’t know what all of those are; I’m not that kind of doctor, but I hear there are great doctors who can help.)

    But where I can help is to show you the science and the system so you stop paying the shame tax on a biological bill that isn’t yours to pay.

    Next Steps

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    References

    Dumas, J. A., & Testo, A. A. (2026). Differences in functional connectivity during midlife between menopause stages. Menopause https://doi.org/10.1097/GME.0000000000002836

    Mosconi, L. (2024). The menopause brain: New science for women to navigate midlife and optimize brain health for the rest of their lives. Avery.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    How does estrogen affect dopamine and working memory?

    Estrogen helps regulate dopamine, the key neurotransmitter responsible for focus, working memory, motivation, and executive function. When estrogen swings or drops abruptly during perimenopause, menopause, or chemical suppression, dopamine levels plunge as well. This neurochemical shortage makes it difficult to retain short-term information, track daily tasks, or retrieve words quickly.

    Why doesn’t willpower work to fix perimenopause brain fog?

    Willpower relies on executive function, which requires a stable supply of dopamine to run. Attempting to out-discipline hormonal brain fog is like pressing the gas pedal on an empty gas tank, you are attempting to fuel your focus using the exact neurochemical resource that is currently running low.

    Is perimenopause brain fog a sign of permanent cognitive decline?

    No. 2026 neuroimaging research by Testo and Dumas reveals that menopause is a natural neurological transition rather than permanent brain damage. While postmenopausal brains show lower functional connectivity at rest in areas like the supramarginal gyrus (which handles verbal working memory), the brain effectively ramps up connectivity when engaging in active, complex tasks.

  • Lessons from My Corporate Detox, Six Months Out

    The rules I absorbed. The ones I’m putting down. And the choice I get back.

    Six months ago, Accenture, the world’s largest global consulting firm, released me from employment due to “lack of work.”

    I have a PhD, 20+ years experience, built and ran 2 multi-million-dollar consulting practices at 2 different firms. Let me tell you upfront – this isn’t an Accenture-bashing memory. As a former executive who has had to make these calls, I understand how this decision was made, because I’ve had to make it and execute it multiple times.

    This decision was made by people who don’t know me as a human but by looking at a business – at a spreadsheet, looking at profit and loss, and viewing human talent as “inventory” and “assets.”

    The questions are always

    + What is the market currently buying?

    + What inventory can we sell and at what price point to make a profit for our shareholders? For service based organizations, this is service and solution-based approaches built on skills of people who that work out to an hourly loaded bill rate – salary + cost of keeping them employed.

    + How long has the inventory been on the shelves? For service based organizations, this is how long has the person not billed their time directly to a client.

    + Do we think we can recoup the investment at some point in the future based on where we’re headed from a strategy perspective?

    It genuinely isn’t personal and is a purely, humanly-disconnected financial exercise, looking strategically at numbers.

    When someone says “it isn’t personal, it’s business” – this is what’s happening to get to the decision. Before it gets personal.

    Once the decision is made, the execution of that decision is pushed down to a leader who actually has the relationship with the human who is impacted, whether that leader agrees with the decision or not.

    Now it’s personal.

    In my past, I had the unfortunate difficulty of having to make both made the financial call and then executing the phone call.

    I didn’t hide behind layers of leaders to hand the decision to someone else to execute. I felt the full weight of the responsibility of the decision. I every person I ever had to release is still a stone on my soul. Because I knew, if I didn’t make that one decision today, I’d have to make ad additional 10 in a month. Because it was business.

    That’s a burden of business leadership. It isn’t about profit over people. Or people over profit. It’s people and profit.

    I haven’t said that out loud until right now.

    I haven’t had the right words.

    And I’ve spent the last six months in a kind of detox situation… shaking off so many things I’ve absorbed over 20+ years in corporate America that I started to mistake as part of my “identity.”

    I’m sharing the top five today.

    Lesson 1: Invisible rules outlive their context.

    Every organization runs on rules nobody writes down. You absorb them to succeed inside that specific place at that specific time. But the risk is that somewhere along the way you can maybe stop seeing them as a “rule to survive here” and rather start seeing them as just part of life, or a part of you. Things like:

    + Always be available and reachable. On vacation. On weekends. During the birthday party, the family celebration… the family crisis… even your own health crisis….

    + A packed calendar means you really, really matter.

    + You should never be the one who says “no.”

    + The person who cares the “most” is the one who stays latest or logs off last.

    + You have to “prove” yourself.

    + You can, and “should” be able to “do” it all – be a C-suite leader, be named to Forbes 40 under 40, a present mom who “never gets angry”, a compassionate partner who “understands”, volunteer of the week, keeps the house clean, shows up to events with home-made food, handstitchs the kids halloween costumes…I’m sorry…that sounds ridiculous even as I’m typing it…

    You learn the rules because they work for that organization, department, or team. Right up until you step out of that “room” or watch something change around or underneath you. Those same rules don’t work other places and can even become a liability.

    The “detox” is about catching a rule as it’s firing, looking at it, and determining if it’s valid, if it works for you, and if you’ll keep it. Like cleaning out the the junk drawer in your kitchen. Keep what works and what you value. Toss the junk.

    Lesson 2: Corporate loyalty is a one-way street.

    Organizations ask for loyalty like it’s a relationship, like a one-sided relationship.

    FYI: IT ISN’T.

    I can’t say that loud enough.

    For the record, those caps are for those of you in the back of the room, who have outstayed your time misaligned in organizations taking advantage of your brilliance.

    I feel like I need to restate the obvious. Just like marriage, employment is a contract. Yes, you hope there’s mutual respect – or even love – when you sign a marriage license, but at its core, it’s a legal agreement. Severing a marriage takes court filings, lawyers, and costly legal action because of how the government views joint assets and income.

    Employment is no different in its contractual nature – except companies will rip up that contract the moment it suits their bottom line.

    Read it that way. Act like it.

    I’ve had three corporate exists, two planned and deliberate and one unplanned, but it’s the same lesson… employment is a contract.

    Negotiate the contract coming in. Recognize the contract while you are there. Respect that it was contract on your departure.

    Give your work your best while you are there. But give your time and effort in context of the contract.

    + Your self-advocacy isn’t disloyalty to the organization.

    + Your belief in your self-worth isn’t disloyalty to the organization.

    + Your expectation for fair compensation and respect isn’t disloyalty.

    Your expectation for a promotion because of time in service or because Sheila got one and she’s a jerk – now that’s another conversation and likely a whole different article, but I digress…

    Lesson 3: Worth and value get welded onto identity.

    In the United States – in Western society actually – a big part of our identity is connected to our work, and our work is, in a lot of ways, is connected to “output” – what we “produce” and what we “do.”

    To our competence.

    To a title.

    To our reputation.

    Being the one who holds it together, or rides in at the eleventh hour to save the day.

    So when the badge stops working at the turnstile, and the login shows “user not found”, and you have to introduce yourself with the word former… an internal sense of worth can wobble.

    That’s a trap.

    I’ve been reminding myself that someone else’s decision, made on finances and margins and market cycles, is not a verdict on my worth.

    Its a verdict on fit, timing, alignment, and possibly values – but not on “value” as in my personal value and self-worth.

    But our brains don’t wait for that memo. The brain takes the signal from the external environment and translates it, super fast, into a self-claim (maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am, not as ‘valuable’ as I thought) before you’ve had a chance to weigh in.

    I’ve been wrestling this one for months – who am I if I don’t have a “fancy title” or role description or current exciting, complex, difficult project or Fortune 500 company name to say when I introduce myself?

    Turns out… I’m still me. Same kick-ass stories, same skills, same sass. And when I talk to people without all of that other stuff they still lean in to listen to me. Even as “just Shans.”

    Lesson 4: Busy is the enemy.

    I want to put a big star here because this one is huge: busy is just busy. It doesn’t mean you are actually more productive, “moving the needle” toward anything of value, and all it does is make you “feel” better – for a minute.

    I have this insatiable drive to “feel” like I am getting something “productive” done every day. If I don’t, a little alarm goes off and a little anxiety sets in.

    I’ve had to sit and look at it. Really, really look it to understand why. Who is it serving? Who am I performing for? What is it getting me? Is it getting me closer to my goals?

    Or am I just moving papers around creating an illusion for my brain.

    Here’s what I’ve finally realized… “busy” is a bottoms-up brain stimulus-chasing brain function. It’s chasing a dopamine rush of feel good.

    And it’s noise.

    It’s manufacturing the feeling of doing something meaningful so I don’t have to sit still.

    Personally, 6 months after release, I’m paying myself to build something new and shed what no longer fits. I recognize that I’ve had the luxury of not sprinting to the next company or role the second the last one ended.

    But my nervous system keeps trying to spend that luxury on being “busy” anyway. Partly out of pure habit, partly out of what I now have learned is a brain-wiring difference. Three months into this detox when I couldn’t focus I got some help and learned I have an ADHD brain – and a lot of my past experiences now make a whole lot more sense.

    Busy is how I’d get the dopamine hit handed to me on a schedule.

    Including why I’ve chased so many shiny things for so long.

    Detoxing from “busy” is harder than actually detoxing from the job title, the work, the structure, or the identity.

    Lesson 5: If we don’t pause in the gap between an event happening to us to choose our path, reflex will choose for us on an autopilot default.

    The day I left Accenture, I felt 100 pounds lighter. Literally, the night I dropped off my laptop I felt pretty good. But the next morning when I woke up without any of the expectations, I felt so light.

    And I think that when someone capable, competent and committed feels lighter walking away from something – either by choice or if it’s chosen for them – that’s information about the misalignment in th conditions.

    I don’t say this with any bitterness toward the work, the organization, or the people. I say it as a pause.

    The consulting world raised me and I’m a consultant in my soul.

    I learned to be a consultant in the late 1900s (ha!), back when Joyce Doria, a Booz Allen partner and a student of Albert Bandura, father of social learning theory (one of my idols), might send you home if she decided you, as a woman, weren’t dressed appropriately to represent women correctly in the workplace. (FYI: My office was 3 doors down from Joyce…every morning was a really stressful walk past her office.)

    It wasn’t unheard of to work 16 or 18-hour days in a conference room racing a deliverable into a FedEx envelope – this was pre “sending it” digitally to a client.

    I’ve seen big shifts from my first gig training National guardsmen on how to bring in business to community Internet cafe’s at National Guard facilities in the early 2000s to today. The industry has asked a lot, and it gave a lot. I’ve learned to lead, to really problem-solve, and to dig for more when I was sure my tank was empty.

    AI is disrupting and rewriting all of it. And underneath the disruption there’s a quiet question the whole industry is asking its people… “did you do enough? Are you doing enough? Can you be replaced by a computer program”

    Which is being quietly translated through a productivity lens of “am I enough”

    But watch what the brain does with that. It takes “did you do enough”, and before you can weigh in, it translates it into “am I enough” – basically do I have enough value and worth.

    It’s a fundamental threat to the human psyche. Am I, a human being enough. Am I so easy to replace. What is my meaning?

    When we get down to it. That is the question.

    Who am I if I don’t have this?

    That translation is the whole game. It happens in a gap so small you don’t see it.

    The same gap where I was released and my nervous system reached for a reason and passed a verdict that the reason was “me” (to quote Taylor Swift – “Hey, hi, I’m the problem it’s me”)

    That’s also the same gap where the choice lives.

    You don’t choose the signal. Or even see the signal. But you can see the translation before it hardens into a self-claim, and pick the response.

    Catching the handoff from “did you do enough” to “am I enough” and refusing the trade by answering the question “yes I did enough. yes. I am enough”

    That’s what I’m building a space for.

    Taking my years of experience translating brain + behavior + social psychology for organizations to help people like me – Recovering Type A+ Overachievers shed cognitive load and high-functioning exhaustion picked up from rooms signaling expectations they’ve mistakenly owned as their own voice and get back on their own priority list.

    Six months out, I’m finally hearing the difference in the voice (ok – reality check, I’m getting quicker)

    If you’re a Type A+ overachiever…or just experiencing high-functioning exhaustion from those invisible “shoulds”… I see you.

    Stick around for the journey. I’m building this for us.

    Next Steps

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    References

    Burns, D. D. (1980). Feeling good: The new mood therapy. William Morrow.

    Horney, K. (1950). Neurosis and human growth: The struggle toward self-realization. W. W. Norton.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Why do corporate layoffs feel like a personal failure even when they are financial decisions?

    Service-based corporate layoffs are fundamentally impersonal financial calculations 0 evaluating talent as billable inventory, utilization rates, and profit margins. However, because Western culture tightly couples professional titles and productivity with personal identity, the brain automatically translates a structural, spreadsheet-driven decision into a personal verdict of being “not enough.”

    How does chronic “busy-ness” act as a neurochemical coping mechanism?

    Constant busyness triggers a bottom-up brain response that delivers quick dopamine hits, creating the illusion of meaningful progress and productivity. For high-achievers (and particularly neurodivergent individuals), staying continuously occupied acts as a functional distraction from anxiety, helping perform competence rather than addressing underlying cognitive exhaustion.

    What are workplace “invisible rules” and why do they cause burnout?

    Invisible rules are unwritten cultural expectations – such as remaining perpetually reachable, over-committing, or treating packed calendars as status symbols – absorbed to survive inside a specific organization. High-functioning exhaustion occurs when you mistake these temporary survival tactics for permanent personal standards and continue carrying them outside that corporate environment.

  • The Invisible Load: Why “Doing It All” Is Wearing Out Capable Women

    It looks like a time-management problem. It isn’t. And that’s exactly why the calendars and the spa days keep failing.

    You know the plate spinner at the circus. One plate, fine. By the eighth you sit up a little. By the eighteenth you’re at the front of your seat, holding your breath, certain it’s all about to come down.

    It never does. That’s the act. He’s a professional, and every one of those plates is his.

    We spin more than eighteen most days, and ours come down all the time. Not because we’re worse at it. Because half our plates were handed to us by rooms we walked out of years ago, and we picked them up anyway.It never does. That’s the act. He’s a professional, and every one of those plates is his.

    We spin more than eighteen most days, and ours come down all the time. Not because we’re worse at it. Because half our plates were handed to us…or thrown at us.

    Key Points

    + The invisible load is the unseen work of remembering, planning, and holding everything together. Real, measured, and heavier for women.

    + “I should be able to handle this” isn’t a fact. It’s a memory your brain re-rendered until it sounds like your own voice.

    + More effort makes it worse, because the load grows every time you handle it quietly.

    + The fix isn’t self-care or a better calendar. It’s prioritization: deciding whose plate is whose, and setting down the ones that were never yours.

    What is the invisible load?

    The invisible load, often called the mental load, is the cognitive and emotional work of running things that never shows up as a finished task. It isn’t doing the dishes. It’s holding the whole map: what needs doing, who needs what, what’s running low, what quietly breaks if nobody tracks it.

    At work it carries a third dimension no job description names. The constant deciding. The emotional labor of keeping people steady. The unwritten expectation to be always available and always credible.

    Researchers have documented this weight for decades, and it falls disproportionately on women (Hochschild, 2012; Robertson et al., 2023).

    It usually shows up in five forms:

    + Cognitive overload. The relentless deciding and anticipating, too many mental tabs open at once.

    + Emotional labor. Absorbing other people’s stress while keeping your own face calm

    + Unwritten expectations. Always reachable, always proving you belong. It compounds for women of color

    + Self-silencing and overperformance. Taking on more just to read as competent, which runs straight toward burnout

    + Gendered mental labor. The second shift (named back in 1989), with women still carrying about double the caregiving load at home

    None of it is measured. All of it is real. And because it’s invisible, it gets treated as free.

    Why does the phrase “I should be able to handle this” play before you can catch it?

    Because it’s a memory that’s triggered by a “cue” And memory isn’t a recording you turn off and on.

    We treat memory like footage we can replay, like we’ve got the real tape of what happened. We don’t.

    Memory is reconstruction, not reproduction. Your brain rebuilds the thing every time you recall it. That’s why you can ask seven people who watched the exact same event what they saw and get seven sincere, different answers. It’s why you can retell your own story enough times that the new details get recoded into long-term memory as if they were always there.

    Now hold that thought next to a “should.”

    A should is literally a memory that got installed early in the shape of expectations: who you were supposed to be, what a good girl/boy, daughter/son or a competent woman/man does (because most every expectation is shared in the binary). Then it got reinforced in the bigger rooms, school and work and the whole culture, re-rendered so many times it stopped sounding like an instruction from outside and started sounding like it was your own voice. Internalized. The reinforcement isn’t subtle, either. Women are rewarded, early and consistently, for being helpful and agreeable, and penalized when they aren’t. The same directness that reads as competent in a man reads as abrasive in a woman, a double bind that’s been documented for years and hasn’t closed.

    So breaking a “should” doesn’t feel like breaking a rule. In some ways, it feels like betraying yourself. The guilt, the shame, the fear that shows up when you don’t host the thing or answer the email or carry the plate (aka say yes to the thing you want to say no to), that weight is real, and it’s pointed at a standard you don’t remember agreeing to.

    And it’s fast. The should fires in under 200 milliseconds, before deliberate thought arrives. You’re not choosing to pick up the plate. You’re reacting to a reconstruction that has been re-rendered into bedrock. By the time the thinking part of you shows up, the plate’s already spinning, and the only question that feels available is how do I keep this up, not was this ever mine to hold.

    Is the invisible load the same as burnout?

    No. But the invisible load can be a cause. Burnout is what happens after you carry the burden of things that are yours too long without relief.

    And the numbers say it isn’t imagined. Women leaders are about twice as likely as men to be “always on,” and for every 100 men promoted into leadership, only 87 women are (McKinsey & Lean In, 2023). The load gets normalized into the background, which is exactly why nobody names it and it keeps growing.

    Why don’t time management and self-care fix it?

    Because both quietly accept that the woman is the thing to fix. That’s the same move that made the load invisible in the first place.

    Better boundaries. More confidence. A tighter calendar. A weekend away. All of it points the repair back at the person already doing the most. And the math doesn’t close: a load that grows every time you handle it can’t be out-handled. More effort just raises the ceiling on what gets expected next.

    There’s a particularly costly version of this, the sprint. The promise that pushing through this one crunch, this one quarter, will buy the rest on the far side. But moving crisis to crisis without real recovery doesn’t build resilience. It compounds the stress and teaches the body to treat chronic pressure as normal (American Psychological Association, 2023). Sprinting feels productive. It’s depletion with good posture.

    What actually helps: ask whose plate it is

    Here’s the difference between you and me and the expert plate spinner. That plate spinner chose every plate. He set them up, he knows how many are in the air, he’s watching them. Nobody walks onstage and lobs him a surprise plate on a random Tuesday with a guilt trip attached.

    Our setup is different. Some of our plates we picked on purpose. The rest got thrown to us, and we caught them because a should told us they were ours. You don’t crash from spinning. You crash from spinning plates that belong to someone else. So the work isn’t spinning better. It’s sorting the plates.

    1.Make the load visible. Ten minutes, the list that isn’t on any calendar: the remembering, the anticipating, the “I’ll just deal with it.” Notice what you hesitate to write down. The hesitation is information.

    2. Ask whose plate it is. One question, every line: Would I expect this of someone else? Where the answer is no, you’ve found a should that was never yours. The question does real work, because it moves the load out of “my character” and into “my choices” (Tulshyan & Burey, 2021).

    3. Set down what isn’t yours. Not thrown back, not shattered for drama. Just set down, so the pole gets a little lighter.

    4. Choose what you carry. Nobody carries all of it. The ones who look like they are, are dropping things in private, or paying for it in sleep, or coming apart where the room can’t see. “Doing it all” isn’t a high bar that strong people clear. It’s not a real thing. It’s a setup. So pick what gets the real you, and let the rest be good enough on purpose. That isn’t lowering the bar. It’s stopping everything that lands in front of you from setting it.

      Frequently asked questions

      What is the invisible load? The unseen mental and emotional work of running a household, a team, or a life: tracking, planning, anticipating, holding it together. It produces no visible output, so it’s easily dismissed as “not real work,” which is exactly why it stays invisible and falls disproportionately on women.

      Why do I feel like I have to do everything myself? Because the response is trained to fire before you can question it. Years of being rewarded for being helpful and never difficult turn “I’ve got it” into a reflex that runs before the deliberate part of your mind has weighed in on whether the task was ever yours.

      Why does breaking a “should” feel so terrible? Because a should is an installed memory, re-rendered so many times it sounds like your own voice instead of an outside instruction. Breaking it registers as betraying yourself, not breaking a rule, which is why the guilt is so out of proportion to the actual stakes.

      The bottom line

      The invisible load is real, it’s structural, and is often built by systems that benefit when capable women stay too busy to question what’s happening. Things are bound to crash, and that isn’t about character or capability or competence. It’s about capacity.

      So look at the pole. Go plate by plate and ask whose plat is this? Keep the ones that are yours, with both hands, because you want them. The rest, the ones you caught out of an old reflex, off a memory you re-rendered into fact, you can hand those back.

      References

      American Psychological Association. (2023). Stress in America 2023: Strained, drained, and uncertain.

      Catalyst. (2023). The double-bind dilemma for women in leadership. Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.

      Hochschild, A. R., & Machung, A. (1989). The second shift: Working families and the revolution at home. Viking.

      Holder, A. M. B., Jackson, M. A., & Purdie-Vaughns, V. (2023). The impact of intersectionality on women of color in leadership. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 44(3), 517–533.

      McKinsey & Company & LeanIn.Org. (2023). Women in the workplace 2023.

      Pew Research Center. (2023). Gender disparities in household labor and career advancement.

      Robertson, K., Dumas, T. L., & Boswell, W. R. (2023). Gendered mental labor: A systematic literature review. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 15(1), 123–145.

      Tulshyan, R., & Burey, J.-A. (2021). Stop telling women they have imposter syndrome. Harvard Business Review.

      Next Step

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    1. The Tyranny of the “Should”

      A psychologist named it in 1950. And it’s still running your Tuesday.

      I started a newsletter on Substack…and it almost didn’t get a name.

      Not because I couldn’t think of one.

      Because I thought of plenty, and then I “should-ed” them out of existence.

      Every. Single. One.

      → It should be more professional.

      → It should signal the credentials.

      → It should be searchable, strategic, polished, defensible to a committee that exists only inside my own head and meets, apparently, around the clock…. (argh!)

      (I do this for a living, by the way.)

      I’m a behavioral scientist. I’ve spent (ahem) 20+ years explaining to very smart people why they keep doing the exact thing they swore they’d stop. (Sidebar: Did you know the internet says you “shouldn’t” lead with how many years of expertise you have if it’s over 15 because… ageism? Cool. So we’re breaking that one right out of the gate, too.)

      But back to the story about should…

      …There I was, narrating the play-by-play of my own stuck-ness in real time, completely unable to move.

      (Cool. Great. Very on brand!)

      So let me introduce the thing that almost ate me alive, because there’s a decent chance it’s been snacking on you too.

      Here’s the thing about a “should.”

      It doesn’t feel like an opinion. It feels like a fact.

      + I should answer that email tonight. (why?)

      + I should host Thanksgiving. (because of what?)

      + I should be further along by now. (according to who?)

      + I should want this promotion. (but do you?)

      The word shows up wearing the costume of obvious, neutral truth, and we obey it before we’ve had a chance to ask a single question. Like do “we” want it.

      A psychologist named Karen Horney clocked this back in 1950. She called it “the tyranny of the should”… the way a life quietly fills up with internal commands about who you’re supposed to be, none of which you remember agreeing to (Horney, 1950).

      Decades later, cognitive therapists put “should statements” on the official list of distorted thinking, right next to “catastrophizing” and “all-or-nothing” thinking (Burns, 1980)…(for the record, I’ve been known to do all three, sometimes in rapid-fire succession).

      You can want things. That isn’t bad. But the “should” is actually a standard you didn’t set. This standard was imposed on you, and then punishes you when you don’t meet the expectation.

      And that’s the part nobody mentions. The “should” comes with a tax.

      Two of them, actually: guilt and permission.

      There’s the guilt trip, on the inside.

      + The low hum or whisper that says you’re behind, you’re selfish, you’re not doing enough, you dropped a ball you never agreed to carry.

      And then there’s the permission slip, on the outside.

      + The sense that before you get to choose the thing you actually want, somebody has to sign off. A boss. A mother. Your neighbor’s best-friend’s Aunt Frida –

      + A culture, that decided a long time ago what a competent woman’s day is supposed to look like, a masculine man’s day is supposed to consist of, whether non-binary or transgender are even allowed to have a ‘day’

      So, a “should” is really two things at once. Something installed in you, and something still being broadcast at you, meeting in the exact second you decide what to do next.

      That’s why willpower doesn’t touch it. You can’t out-discipline an instruction you didn’t know you were following.

      To be fair, you can’t delete the reflex either. I’m not going to try to sell you that. The should is going to keep showing up, fast (so fast – like 200 miliseconds fast!) before you can think… that’s just our brain and how our brain works.

      But here’s where it gets interesting.

      You can’t stop the “should” from firing. But you can absolutely catch it after.

      That tiny gap, between the should landing and you obeying it, is the whole game. And the move in that gap is one question:

      Whose “should” is this? Is it mine or someone else’s?

      That’s it.

      That’s the verb.

      You look at the should sitting there, dressed up as obvious truth, and you ask whose is this? Sometimes it’s yours, and you keep it, eyes open, on purpose. Often it belongs to a room you walked out of years ago, and you get to hand it back.

      (No thank you sir, I respectfully reject this and hand this toxic nonsense back to you)

      That’s what I mean by “UNshould.”

      Not “stop having standards.”

      Not “quit caring.”

      Just… take the thing apart, find out whose it is, and choose from there. One should at a time. The first few are clumsy. Eventually, they get faster.

      So that’s what this is.

      UNshould is where I’ll bring you the science behind the default. It’s about getting yourself back onto your own priority list – you know, like that swanky nightclub in LA where you say, “I’m on the list,” and they usher you inside in front of everyone else. That kind of priority!

      We’re doing it without the guilt trip, and without waiting for anyone to sign a permission slip.

      Some weeks it’ll be burnout and boundaries. Some weeks I’ll wax poetic about neurodiversity. Some weeks it’ll be the strange thing your brain does in the meeting that matters. But it will always be the research, translated into something you can actually use by Tuesday.

      I’m going to sit next to you and whisper, “This is what’s happening,” with enough of the absurdity named out loud that we can both barely keep a straight face.

      The committee in my head still meets. I just stopped letting them run the place.

      Glad you’re here. Let’s go take some “shoulds” apart.

      Next Step

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      Or ready for a reset? Book a free-15 minute Chemistry Call Book Now

      References

      Burns, D. D. (1980). Feeling good: The new mood therapy. William Morrow.

      Horney, K. (1950). Neurosis and human growth: The struggle toward self-realization. W. W. Norton.

      Frequently Asked Questions

      What is “the tyranny of the should” in psychology?

      Coined by psychoanalyst Karen Horney in 1950, “the tyranny of the should” describes the rigid, unwritten rules and expectations people impose on themselves. These internalized commands create an impossible standard of perfection, driving chronic guilt, anxiety, and self-criticism whenever you fail to live up to values you never consciously chose.

      How do you stop “shoulding” yourself?

      You can’t eliminate automatic “should” thoughts because the brain fires them in milliseconds, but you can change how you respond to them. The moment you catch yourself saying you “should” do something, ask one core question: “Whose ‘should’ is this—mine or someone else’s?” Pausing to trace the origin of the expectation gives you the choice to keep it or hand it back without the guilt tax.

      Why does willpower fail when trying to break unhelpful habits?

      Willpower fails because “should statements” act as automatic cognitive distortions rather than conscious decisions. Because your brain processes external expectations as objective facts rather than optional opinions, you cannot out-discipline an internal instruction you don’t realize you’re following. Sustainable behavioral change requires questioning the default reflex rather than forcing compliance.

    2. The Imposter Myth: Why You Aren’t a Fraud, You’re Just “Reading the Room” Correctly

      “Do I even know how do to my job?.”

      You’re sitting in a high-stakes board meeting, about to pitch a strategy you’ve spent weeks pressure-testing. Suddenly, right as you open your mouth, a familiar script plays in your mind: “What if they realize I don’t belong here?”

      For decades, career coaches and pop-psychologists have given this experience a tidy, clinical label: Imposter Syndrome.

      They subtly signal that somehow it’s an “internal” flaw – a confidence deficit or nagging perfectionism that you need to master, overcome, and “mindset” your way out of.

      But let’s call it what it actually is: A red herring.

      When we isolate self-doubt as an individual psychological defect, we completely ignore the architecture of the space you are standing in. You don’t have a confidence problem. Your brain is simply caught in The Invisible Loop™.

      Let’s dismantle the old imposter narrative and look at what is actually happening when you “read the room.”

      The Anatomy of the Loop: Inside vs. Outside

      To understand why traditional imposter advice fails, we have to look at how our brains process professional spaces. Human behavior doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It is an output driven by two constant, simultaneous streams:

      1. The Internal Interpreter: The part of your brain that rapidly assesses, filters, and catalogs your environment based on your history and identity.

      2. The External “Room”: The cultural structures, organizational policies, and subtle social cues surrounding you.

        These two streams collide at lightning speed at what I call the Crossing Point.

        When you feel like an “imposter,” your Internal Interpreter isn’t malfunctioning. It is acting as a highly sensitive antenna, accurately picking up exclusionary signals being thrown off by the External “Room”.

        Beyond Imposter Syndrome: The Intruder Paradox

        This isn’t just a theory; it’s backed by rigorous modern institutional research. A groundbreaking 2025 study by Dr. Kori LaDonna and her team introduced a concept that completely rewrites this playbook: The Intruder Paradox (IPx).

        LaDonna’s research challenges the classic definition of the Imposter Phenomenon. While classic imposters internally look at objective evidence of success and mistakenly think “I don’t belong here,” intruders are actively being told—implicitly or explicitly—that they aren’t wanted in the field.

        The study defines the Intruder Paradox as a form of systemic gaslighting directed at leaders who don’t fit traditional sociocultural or institutional norms. When a professional culture routinely treats women or marginalized leaders as irrelevant, second-guesses their competence, or holds them to highly variable standards, it creates an environment of hypervigilance.

        [The Classic Imposter] —> “I feel like I don’t belong here, despite the data.”

        [The Systemic Intruder] —> “I am reading the cues correctly. This room is telling me I don’t belong.”

        When you are blamed for having “imposter syndrome” in a room that is actively signaling your exclusion, you are being double-gaslighted. The organization treats your natural reaction to a systemic barrier as a personal confidence deficiency.

        How to Recalibrate: 3 Upstream Shifts

        If your self-doubt is an output of an unaligned loop, a “brag file” or a list of receipts isn’t going to fix it. You cannot mindset your way out of a room that is throwing off toxic data streams.

        Instead of trying to “fix” your confidence, you need to change how your Internal Interpreter interacts with the space. Here is how you disrupt the loop:

        1. Separate the Input from the Verdict

        The next time that sinking feeling hits you in a meeting, stop asking “What is wrong with me?” and start analyzing the architecture of the room. Is the doubt internally generated, or is it an externally imposed perception of incompetence? Look at the data: are people talking over you? Are accomplishments being minimized?

        The Shift: Realize your anxiety is often a highly functioning trauma or survival response to repeated systemic friction—not a reflection of your actual skill level.

        2. Reject the “Imposter” Label Entirely

        Stop diagnosing yourself with a syndrome you don’t have. Words carry weight, and adopting the “imposter” label forces you to carry the emotional labor of fixing a broken corporate system. Follow the lead of the defiant executives in LaDonna’s study who pushed back against the term and declared: “It’s not imposter syndrome—it’s that you don’t want me in the field.”

        The Shift: Reframe the narrative from “I need to be more confident” to “I am highly competent, and I am currently navigating an unaligned environment.”

        3. Move the Leverage Upstream

        True career-life alignment means recognizing the limits of individual development. You can spend years contorting yourself to fit into a “testosterone-laden, cowboy-ish” or patriarchal corporate mold just to survive. But survival mode is exhausting, and it has a strict ceiling.

        The Shift: Stop burning your executive energy trying to perform, prove, or please a broken External Loop. Use your power to choose which rooms you occupy, or use your leadership leverage to deliberately redesign the policies and signals of the room itself.

        Stop Fixing Yourself. Start Designing the Loop.

        You have spent years training, executing, and building your operational brilliance. You do not need a personal overhaul or a dramatic confidence intervention.

        The next time your internal script tells you that you aren’t enough, pause and look at the Crossing Point. Decode the room. Recognize the signals for what they are.

        You aren’t an imposter. You’re just the most observant system analyst in the room – and it’s time to use that data to take your power back.

        Reference

        LaDonna, K. A., Cowley, L., Field, E., Ginsburg, S., Watling, C., & Pack, R. (2025). Introducing the intruder paradox: “It’s not the imposter syndrome, it’s you don’t want me in the field.” Medical Education, 59(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/medu.15741

      1. How to Find Work-Life Balance for Women Leaders 40+

        If you’ve built a successful career – but feel like it’s running you instead of fueling you this post is for you.

        I’m going to walk you through how to reclaim work-life balance without quitting, starting over, or sacrificing everything you’ve built.

        This is the same approach I use with experienced women leaders over 40 who want more breathing room, more clarity, and a way of working that actually fits their life now not just the version they built 10 years ago.

        Ready to trade survival mode for something more sustainable? Let’s go.

        Key Takeaways:

        1. Work-life balance doesn’t require a dramatic exit – just smarter, more aligned decisions.
        2. Most women don’t need reinvention. They need realignment.
        3. Micro-moves (not massive overhauls) can restore your time, energy, and clarity.

        Why “Balance” Isn’t Working Anymore

        You’ve followed the rules. Built the career. Earned the respect. But somewhere between meetings, milestones, and managing it all – you lost the feeling that your work works for you.

        That’s because the idea of balance keeps everything looking functional, even when you’re running on empty.

        Work-life balance tells you to juggle. Work-life alignment asks you to recalibrate.

        The difference? Balance is a time equation. Alignment is a values decision.

        And when you’re over 40, the calculus changes. The cost of continuing without clarity gets steeper.

        Work-life balance implies a scheduling problem. But for most high-performing women, the issue isn’t time it’s alignment.

        You’re not just managing tasks. You’re carrying unspoken roles, expectations, and the emotional weight of being the one who always holds it together.

        Maybe you’ve internalized beliefs like:

        + “Saying no makes me unreliable.”

        + “My title determines my worth.”

        + “If I step back, everything will fall apart.”

        That’s not strategy. That’s survival. And it’s costing you.

        What Work-Life Alignment Actually Looks Like

        The reality is that “balance” is a myth – it’s a fancy word for juggle.

        Work-life balance asks: How do I juggle everything without dropping the ball?

        Work-life alignment asks: Am I carrying the right things – and do they reflect who I am and what matters to me?

        Work-life alignment means your calendar reflects your priorities – not just your obligations.

        It means saying yes to work that energizes you, and no to things that don’t – even if you’re good at them.

        It means showing up without constantly performing, proving, or pleasing.

        Alignment isn’t about necessarily working less. It’s about working in a way that’s honest, strategic, and sustainable.

        And the best part? You don’t have to do radical things to get there.

        Realignment, Not Reinvention: Lisa’s Story

        Lisa had spent 20 years in healthcare leadership. She was respected, capable, and utterly exhausted.

        She didn’t want to walk away from the career she’d built. But she just couldn’t keep going like this.

        Working with me and using The Career-Life Realignment Reset, Lisa got clear on what mattered to her, reconnected to what mattered most to her, not what looked good on paper and identified the one strategic shift she needed to make. She reclaimed 40% of her work week and gained visibility across the organization.

        No title change. No personal reinvention. Just alignment.

        What Helped? A Career-Life Alignment Audit

        Most high-performing women don’t need a reinvention. They need a realignment.

        When things start to feel off – when the role no longer fits but you can’t name why – it’s not always a sign to quit. It’s a signal to pause and audit what’s working, what’s draining you, and where you’re out of sync with your values.

        Here’s how to start:‍

        STEP 1. Spot the Pattern

        Stop asking, “Why can’t I do it all?” and Start asking, “Whose rules am I still following?” If you’re still playing by inherited rules about what success or leadership should look like, it’s time to disrupt the default. You don’t need more effort. You need more intention.

        STEP 2: Audit Your Alignment

        Use these three lenses to assess your current role:

        + Cancel or renegotiate one meeting that no longer serves you

        + Say out loud what you’re excellent at – without softening or minimizing

        + Choose one obligation you’re done tolerating, and act on it

        “When women shift from performance to values alignment, they see more satisfaction and less burnout.”
        — Forbes Women, 2022Don’t stop at the audit. Clarity only matters if you act on it.
        That leads us to Step 3.

        STEP 3. Shift the Levers

        ‍Once you know what’s misaligned, start making micro-moves with macro impact. You don’t need a dramatic pivot. Small shifts often change everything:

        + Energy: What lights you up? What drains you – even if you’re good at it?

        + Impact: Where are you truly having an impact? And where are you just filling gaps?

        + Values: Does how you spend your time align with what matters to you now?

        This isn’t about burning everything you’ve worked so hard to build to the ground. It’s about taking your power back – one lever at a time.

        So…Now What? Make it Practical.

        Big shifts start with small check-ins. You don’t need a spreadsheet. You need a moment of honest reflection.

        Try this Weekly Alignment Check-In

        Ask yourself these three questions – candidly :

        + Am I putting up with things because it looks impressive?

        + Would I change if I stopped trying not to disappoint anyone?

        + Is there a decision I could make this week that would give me breathing room?

        If your gut just whispered “yes” to any of these…you’re ready to realign.

        References

        American Psychological Association. (2023). Stress in America™: The State of Mental Health in the Workplace.

      2. How to Stop Saying “Yes” on Autopilot

        Let me paint a picture.

        You’ve had three back-to-back meetings, your inbox is a mess, your team just Slacked you “quick Q?” and now someone’s asking if you can just take a look at that deck before EOD.

        And without even thinking, you say:

        “Sure, I’ve got it.”

        No Sheila – you don’t “got it.”

        But your mouth said yes before your brain had time to consult your actual calendar or your real energy.

        Welcome to the amygdala hijack.

        It’s not a mindset issue. It’s not a lack of boundaries.

        It’s biology – and your brain is doing exactly what it’s been wired to do when stress shows up like an overbooked meeting request.

        Here’s what’s happening

        When you’re under pressure – decision fatigue high, energy low, calendar packed – your amygdala kicks in. This is your brain’s fear center. Its job is to keep you safe, not strategic.

        It senses threat (a disappointed client, a critical boss, or even the awkwardness of saying no) and immediately pulls you into survival mode. Fight, flight, freeze – or in the case of women leaders? Fawn.

        Fawning is that reflexive yes. The over-accommodating. The default “I’ll just do it.”
        It’s protection disguised as professionalism.

        Here’s the problem: when the amygdala takes over, the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for logic, decision-making, and strategy, gets pushed to the back seat (Arnsten, 2021). You can’t think clearly because your brain is too busy protecting you from perceived social threat.

        Sound familiar?

        + To all you experienced leaders: It’s why your calendar is full of work that doesn’t actually move your title or salary.

        + To rising stars: It’s why you overprepare and still get overlooked.

        + To the business owners and entrepreneurs: It’s why you’re spinning in five directions but not gaining real traction.

        The science behind the spinout

        This isn’t about “just saying no” or “having better boundaries.” That advice skips over the biology.

        According to Arnsten (2021), chronic stress triggers a chemical cascade that weakens activity in the prefrontal cortex—making it harder to access executive function in the exact moments you need it. In other words, the more overwhelmed you feel, the harder it is to think straight, speak up, or strategically respond.

        That’s not a personality flaw.
        That’s neuroscience.

        And if your work relies on positioning, persuasion, and power? You need your prefrontal cortex online.

        The Pattern Interrupts That Get Your Brain Back

        If your brain’s been hijacked, you can’t mindset your way out.
        You need a pattern interrupt—a physical or sensory cue that tells your nervous system “Hey, we’re not under attack. You can stand down now.”

        Here are three quick resets I use and recommend:

        5-4-3-2-1 Grounding

        This one’s popular because it works. Scan your environment and say out loud

        + 5 things you see

        + 4 things you feel

        + 3 things you hear

        + 2 things you smell

        + 1 thing you taste

        It forces your brain to shift from reactive to present. Use it before you respond to that “quick favor” email.

        Cold Water on the Wrists

        Run cold water over your wrists or splash your face.
        It activates the parasympathetic nervous system and literally chills your fight-or-flight response.
        Try it between meetings, or before that high-stakes conversation.

        Stand Up. Change Rooms. Change State.

        Move your body. Change your visual input. Step away from the desk, even for 60 seconds.
        The movement plus visual disruption helps reset your amygdala’s sense of danger.

        These aren’t hacks. They’re interrupts. Micro-movements that shift your brain back into power mode.

        Before You Say Yes Again…

        Ask: “Is this a real yes, or an “amygdala yes”?

        Because clarity, confidence, and positioning all live in the prefrontal cortex.
        And if you’re leading, building, or leveling up? You can’t afford to keep giving power to a hijacked brain.

        Reference

        Arnsten, A. F. T. (2021). Stress weakens prefrontal networks: Molecular insults to higher cognition. Nature Neuroscience, 24(4), 408–417. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-021-00860-4E: helping clients strengthen confidence, sharpen clarity, and create meaningful momentum in ways that are practical, honest, and sustainable.

        Your next step

        To learn more about how we could partner together check out our services or book a free chemistry call today.