Are you working to exhaustion, giving too much of yourself to everyone and everything? Is there little time to reflect upon what you want—what you need to stay well? Do you feel at times, like you are just around to make sure the lives of your loved ones run smoothly?

If this describes you, you are a Woman Who Does Too Much; this is the popular phrase for women who wear so many job hats daily that they forget about the person who is beneath them. You may think from this term that women who do too much is a contemporary phenomenon, rather than–a condition of womanhood that has existed through time. It’s only now that we give ourselves permission to consider the problem and do something about it.

There are books, seminars, and numerous online articles and websites that speak to this particular topic. Some recommend that you manage your time better and delegate chores to family members. Essentially, they are suggesting that you get better at being busy. While others suggest that you schedule time for yourself to rest and relax, or start to live your life more spontaneously.

Both types of suggestions can be quite helpful, as doing more than you can handle has negative effects on your physical and mental health. Heart attacks amongst women have increased in rate to almost that of men. Poorly managed stress is thought to be related to this phenomenon. Research also shows that women who do too much have depression. The relationship between the stress of doing too much and depression is no surprise. Without enough ways to lessen your physical and mental strain, you are apt to exhaust your body of the nerve chemicals that influence mood.

You can free up time, get better organized, learn how to delegate chores, and take time out for yourself, to start to turn your stress-reaction around. However, there’s more to the stress of having too much to do that contributes to the pressure and unhappiness that you feel.

There is an acute and chronic aspect to stress. You need to have adequate time-management, stress-reduction, and organization skills to successfully juggle a lot of responsibilities. Acute stress results, if you lack skill in any of these areas or if the pressure you have outweighs the strength of the stress-management skills that you possess.

Acute stress comes in the form of physical and mental symptoms, like fatigue, irritability, anxiety and tension, depression, headaches, shortness of breath, insomnia, disorganization and short-term memory problems. If it is a skill-deficit that makes your daily responsibilities hard to handle, then the mental and behavioral stress-management recommendations mentioned above will do much to alleviate the symptoms you feel.

Though, things are rarely that simple, right? There are often emotional conflicts that add to your stress, affecting how you feel about the activities that you carry out daily. This chronic form of stress stokes the fires of your daily pressures. The frustration and anger over the responsibilities that you have are often worsened by this emotional conflict.

This conflict usually involves some aspect of your life that you want to change, or get rid of completely, but that you cannot without disturbing the routine or happiness of your loved ones. Now, everything you have to do each day is affected by this emotional problem. And, your effort to manage your acute stress will be less effective, if this emotional conflict persists. Chronic conflicts tend to shade everything else going on in our lives, so that we are apt to mistake everything as more hard and unsatisfying.

Take my patient Beth, for example.

It was a morning like any morning; Beth a 33-year old divorced woman, raising two children, rises before her kids, to walk on her treadmill. She goes back-and-forth trying to wake her children, as she starts to make their breakfast. Beth finally gets her children to sit down and eat their food. Then, her ex-husband calls to say that he needs to change his weekend with the kids, because of work responsibilities.Beth mentally puts this on her to do list telling him she’d get back to him later, once she looks over her schedule. She’s got exactly one hour to get the kids dressed, in the car, and ready to go to school, so Beth can get to her full-time job. She’s half-way to the kids’ school and remembers that, today, it’s her turn to bring cookies for her daughter’s school party. She pulls in to the nearest grocery store, to pick up a tray of cookies and gets her kids safely to school.

Beth takes off her mother, chef, and chauffeur hat, and for just a minute or two, takes a breather. She remembers that the online preparation course to get her accountant license begins tonight. Just a few minutes before 8:30 am, Beth rolls into the parking lot at her workplace and catches a look at herself in her car’s mirror. Beth starts to cry. She sees a tired, stressed woman, older than her actual years, looking back at her.

Later that afternoon, I get a phone call. “Dr. Khoshaba, I’m Beth. I got your name from a friend of mine. I’m a single parent, you see, and trying my best to make everyone happy, to give everyone what they need. Well, it started this morning. I should have baked the cookies for the party at my daughter’s school; that’s what the other mother’s do. I know I’m not making sense. I don’t know why I am suddenly having a hard time (she cries). I feel like I’m losing it. I think I need to talk to someone, Can I make an appointment to see you?”

Something in Beth’s life had to give, to feel healthy and happy again. Beth likes her job, loves her kids, and generally enjoys the role of mother, housewife and employee. She is also pleased that she is pursuing the personal and professional goals that she suspended when she married. So, why is Beth so stressed, so unhappy?

Beth has physical custody of her children during the week, switching off custody weekends with her husband. Her husband is always changing their weekends, making his job and romantic activities more important than Beth’s or her children’s schedules and feelings.

Beth has taken on her husband’s scheduling conflicts as her responsibility to solve. According to Beth, she accommodates Bill to “keep the peace and to avoid looking jealous or vindictive”.

As our work progressed, Beth realized that she was most upset with herself. She realized that she divorced Bill physically, but not emotionally, and that she still takes a back seat to his desires and needs. Beth never realized how much this chronic stress affected how she felt and responded to everything else going on in her life.
Beth set to work on this problem and started to assert firm boundaries around her versus Bill’s responsibilities. Once she stopped taking responsibility for Bill’s lifestyle, an emotional-load lifted, reducing Beth’s pressures tremendously.

I don’t know about you, but I have found often in my life, and in the lives of my patients, that solving chronic conflicts does much to change my attitude about the daily responsibilities that I cannot change. In fact, when I’m truly happy, it’s amazing how much energy I have to fulfill all that I have to do in a day.

I don’t know about the phrase Women Who Do Too Much as specifying a type of woman that characterizes our time. Women have always had to do too much. My thoughts today are not particularly feminist; they are not comments about our subjugation. My purpose today is to help you to better appreciate all of the contributions to the pressures that you feel, so that you have the resources to understand what you are feeling and to make the change needed to stay healthy and happy.

If you like my post today, please say so by selecting the “Like” button that immediately follows. I welcome your experiences, thoughts and comments. Stay well friends. Warmly, Deborah