Silent Struggle: Why Women Don’t Talk About Overwhelm

[Ep 23 of The Bold Life School Podcast]

Today we're diving into something almost no one talks about, but nearly every high achieving woman is living through on the daily: the silent overwhelm. The invisible workload, the pressure to hold everything together while quietly unraveling inside.

The message is for the strong ones, the capable ones, the women who look fine on the outside but feel exhausted, stretched thin and unseen on the inside. 

Let's start with the truth bomb. Only 20 to 30% of high achieving women actually talk openly about their stress or overwhelm. Of all the women around me in the workplace, I very rarely ever hear anyone talk about stress or overwhelm. When asked how they are doing, most reply, “I'm fine. I'm good.” 

Really?

Up to 70 to 80% of women, especially corporate moms in midlife, are suffering silently. Who's anyone talking to about their stress? Most women don't tell their friends. They don't tell their partner; they don't tell their co-workers; they don't tell their boss. They're not telling anyone the full truth. Are they even telling themselves the truth? At most, they might share little pieces with one trusted friend or sister. But the real truth, the resentment, the exhaustion, the pressure, the stress, the fantasies of running away to a quiet Airbnb for three days of nap based healing - Almost no one shares that out loud. And if this is you, you are not alone. You're simply carrying more than anyone realizes. 

Every year about Q4, things really ramp up at work. In the past I've gotten myself so worked up and stressed out about what I was carrying that I felt like I couldn't do it anymore. Launching multiple projects, taking on the responsibilities of a leadership role, being in a season where everything hits at once, including the holidays and being in charge at home. Home admin itself is a part-time job. I have felt this pain more than many times, and as a result have really tried to find ways to strike a better balance. I don't think women stay silent because they're weak.vWe stay silent because it's emotionally safer, easier, and it's less complicated. Let's break down why:

First, we believe everyone else is handling life better than we are, which is simply not true. We look around. No one else is talking. No one else is complaining, ranting, or losing it. We assume that we're the only ones drowning. We see all of these moms dropping off kids with their hair done and looking like they've been up for hours. Their children are on time. The co-worker who extra prepared for meetings as if she has all the time in the world. When you're working in a highly competitive environment, it makes it hard to believe that others are struggling. All you see is high performers around you. The friend on Instagram with perfect weekend adventures. The perfect meals. Picture-perfect family portraits. You think, “How do these people even have time to do this stuff?” Many of us would rather be home napping. We need to be home napping. The colleague who seems calm, polished, unflappable, and certainly never loses her cool. We compare our inside to everyone else's outside, which is not fair at all, and we decide that we must be failing. I mean, we don't want our struggles to affect our reputation.

High-achieving women are conditioned to protect the image of competence, calm, capability, control - especially in leadership. You get on a call and ask everyone how they're doing. Good, fine. Even though you cried in the car or your pets are blowing up in the background just before the call or you're screaming at your children. Showing up polished to meetings while your personal life feels literally on fire. Construction all around you. Chaos. Pretending deadlines don't terrify you. Many of us have multiple projects and the prioritization of them is all at once. Acting unfazed by work pressure even though you are losing it inside. Working late to stay afloat while pretending it's no big deal. Working weekends. Reputation management becomes emotional suppression. And we are taught that to be a good employee, we're supposed to be able to handle it all even when it's too much to handle. Not only are we supposed to hold ourselves together, especially in leadership, we feel responsible for holding everyone else together, for helping everyone else stay emotionally stable. We're the glue. We're the planner. We're the doer. We're the fixer. We are supposed to be the emotional shock absorber. Your child has a meltdown. It's your job to comfort the child while ignoring your own. What if, hey, what if I'm having a meltdown inside too? Can't do it.

Holding emotional space for your partner, family, friends, colleagues without receiving any back is hard. Many people are in relationships where they're carrying the weight emotionally for the partner and the whole family. Taking on extra work so your team doesn't feel the pressure. In leadership, you're supposed to protect the team's time and sometimes at the expense of your own. Saying, “I've got it. I’m on it. I'll have it on time.” 

We're living on autopilot, running the household because everyone relies on you. You're the one that has to call the handyman. You're the one that has to handle the pool guy. We hold the emotional atmosphere together and silence becomes survival. Sometimes we don't have time to complain. We don't have time to feel sad and overwhelmed because we're too busy taking care of everyone around us.

Sometimes talking about it makes it too real. If you say it out loud, you can't hide from it anymore, can you? I found myself in this position. Drama is happening, and instead of telling a friend about it, you just avoid talking about it because you don't want to bring it all up again and have to explain to someone what's going on. You'd rather it just go away. To avoid the overwhelm because you're afraid of the truth. If you admit to yourself that it's too hard or you're doing too much, then you might have to actually do something about it! You might have to admit that there's a problem. 

We keep quiet because we don't want to open the floodgates. 

We're handling things, we're suppressing. And if we open those floodgates, all hell could break loose. We stay silent because honesty requires emotional energy that you just don't have, right? If you finally gotten a moment of peace, who wants to bring it all back up just to talk about it again or to argue about it again? Silence itself becomes emotional self protection. 

Other times we minimize our struggles because we feel like we should be grateful. We guilt trip ourselves. We do feel bad because the life around us is pretty good. We have nice things. We're accomplished. We say to ourselves, “Other people have it worse. Well, at least I have a job. In a climate like this, I shouldn't complain.” Complaining feels like we're showing our weakness. Saying things to ourselves like, “Well, this is just what motherhood looks like.” I've said that to myself. Having a tween age son who is giving me a little bit of hellfire, I’ve thought, “Well, this is normal. In a couple years, hopefully things will look a lot better. This is just what I'm supposed to be going through, so I shouldn't complain. This is what I signed up for.” We do not give ourselves grace.

We ignore exhaustion because life looks good on paper. And this makes us dismiss our needs. We dismiss what our inner self is telling us. We feel like we shouldn't have any problems handling the things that we're supposed to be doing - that we should feel grateful for having, being, doing. Gratitude is like a muzzle. It keeps us quiet. It keeps us from sharing. It keeps us from letting loose our feelings about what we're going through. And if we're not expressing our feelings in a healthy way, we often start expressing them in unhealthy ways.

Success often traps us in silence. Life looks good from the outside. Admitting the hard part feels complicated -especially admitting it to people who you believe that you are doing better than. Meanwhile, others are looking at you and keeping silent because they assume you are the lucky and together one. They're looking at your life like you're looking at other people's lives on Instagram. You look like you've got it all together. Staying quiet because success creates that pressure to perform happiness with it. Nobody likes somebody who complains all the time about their seemingly wonderful life. It makes others feel uncomfortable and resentful. So this appearance of perfection on the outside becomes a prison for us. We sit up in the tower and we have no one to share it with. 

Sometimes there are one or two people with whom you do feel comfortable sharing. But asking for help often feels like more work than anything. Especially when you are the one that holds everything together. Delegating often means more emotional labor. Labor for you. It's easier to do it yourself. Sure, I want my child to take out the garbage and to go clean up his room. But sometimes I've found that not asking him to do it is easier because I don't want to have to ask him five times and then give him a consequence when he doesn't do it. We feed a perpetuating negative cycle.You don’t ask your partner for help because you'll have to explain every step. 

People do this at work as well. It's easier to do it yourself than to delegate it because you don't trust the follow through in your team. Or it's too many steps, or you're gonna receive five emails about it anyway. So why not just get it over with yourself? You feel guilty because you know that your team already has a ton of work to do. So your empathy feeds into your overwhelm. “I'll just do it myself becomes your burnout soundtrack.” 

We were raised to be easy, nice, and low maintenance. Good girls aren't supposed to complain. We don't need help. We're big girls. Just don't rock the boat. Don't take up too much space. Don't call attention to yourself. Calling attention to yourself in a bad way might make people question why you're here or why you are there. I see this in the workplace all the time. Women over-apologize. We apologize for being late when we were coming from another meeting. We apologize for juggling an impossible load. We smile when we are going through something serious or awful. Just softening the truth. Softening the hardship. Softening the difficult interactions with someone so that everyone stays comfortable. 

We minimize our emotions so as not to burden others, so as not to make a big stink. We shrink ourselves emotionally because that's what we were taught to do as women and as moms. We don't want to be judged by other moms. Mom culture is quite competitive. Trying to look like you've got it all together, not admitting that your house is messy because the other moms seem perfect. “How do moms with four children have the energy to get all of their children to the various practices and multiple school drop offs?” is what I want to know. I've got one and one is my limit. 

We avoid talking about burnout because everyone else looks energetic. I go to basketball practices and moms with four children, some of which are screaming toddlers, just look happy and calm. Are they calm on the inside? I don't know, but it looks like it. We pretend that we're fine because we don't want other school moms to gossip. We don't want them to know about the divorce or, you know, that our husband is cheating on us, or that we're about to put ourselves in the loony bin because we cannot take it anymore. You compare your capacity to the mom who runs the PTA. Again, you're looking at your inside and comparing it against someone else's outside. 

But who knows what's going on with those moms? Perhaps if we talked about it more openly, we would see that we all have a lot in common, despite looking like high achievers, successful parents on the outside. Instead, motherhood just becomes a performance. Silence keeps the mask on everyone. And we walk around each other, and people aren't really even being authentic in their lives with each other. Women are lonely in their struggle. We don't want to trigger reactions in people who we don't feel can help us because opening up is emotional labor. It's a lot of work to tell somebody the truth, to open up to somebody, especially if we don't know them that well, even if we know them very well.

Oftentimes, a chosen confidante gets defensive or judgmental instead of being supportive. So why would you talk to that person? For example, you talk to a parent who responds with toxic positivity. You express difficulty with your child and your mom says, “Well, you wanted to have him.” The friend who tries to fix you instead of listening or tells you, “Well, I told you so.” God forbid you tell your boss  something that's really bothering you. What if they no longer look at you like a calm, fastidious leader? Nobody wants their coworker or direct report to think they're a chaotic mess. 

You tell someone about a problem, and they panic, making it bigger than it is - even more dramatic. And you find yourself having to comfort them about your stress, or they just make it all about them. So to avoid all of this extra chaos and extra work, because we live in a society where we haven't really taught people how to be emotionally there for others or to hold space, we just stay quiet to avoid creating more chaos and more drama. Oftentimes, it feels like there's no safe outlet for our truths. 

We don't know where to take the tough conversations. In an environment like the one just described, therapy feels like too much. Like, do I really need to go talk to a therapist? Friends feel too vulnerable or too busy with their own issues. Partners can often feel too risky. With co-workers, it feels way too exposing. Parents feel too complicated. So who do you talk to? You talk to no one, not even yourself, because you don't even have time. 

Or on the flip side, maybe that's all you do inside your head is speak negatively and worry and struggle within yourself without telling anyone where it builds up into depression, anxiety. We keep thinking that relief is coming next week, next quarter, after the holidays, after this project ends. Or, once school starts. The kids go back to school after the vacation. I'll get it together once the kids are older, after the busy season. But the magical week never arrives. The chaos just shape shifts into something else. 

Silence costs us a lot when we don't talk about it. The overwhelm doesn't disappear, it just grows. And the cost is real. Chronic stress, Resentment, Exhaustion, Irritability. That's probably my big one. Loneliness, Resentment, Identity loss. Numbness, Burnout. Feeling invisible. Just losing a sense of yourself. Who am I anymore when all I am is a human doing, not a human being? 

Keeping silent steals the life that you're working so hard to build. You look around and wonder, where's the time gone? Where was the old me with the hopes and the dreams, the plans, the excitement?

I want to give you a short quiz, one that almost always hits home for the women that I work with. So just take a deep breath and answer honestly. There's no judgment here. It's just about clarifying how you're feeling to see Are you silently struggling?

Quiz

1. Do you often say, “I'm fine or I’m good,” when you're anything but fine?
2. Do you carry most of the emotional and home admin load even if you have a partner?
3. Do you avoid talking about your overwhelm because you don't want to sound dramatic, weak, or ungrateful? Or maybe because you don't want to have to talk about it anymore?
4. Do you feel guilty when you want rest, space or time alone?
5. Do you secretly wish someone would step in and help. but you don't know how to ask or who to ask?
6. Do you worry that if you told the truth about how stressed out you are, you might break down? Lose it? Become insane?

If you've answered yes to most of these questions, you're probably carrying too much silently. If not, hats off to you. Maybe you already made some bold shifts! If so, I celebrate and applaud you. I am jealous. 

This quiz isn't about judgment. It's about recognition and liberation. It's about realizing that maybe it is time to exit from this silent overwhelm. 

Here's the good news: You don't have to have a blow up in your life to feel better. You don't actually have to go to a mental institution or a spa for a whole week. You may not need a new job, a new marriage, a new personality, a color-coded pantry system, or to start waking up at 4am to do your workout routine and green smoothies. You just need better systems. You need boundaries for your life, support from others. You do need mental load relief though. Some time. Freedom, emotional bandwidth to be yourself, to get away from the chaos, the admin, the work carrying the load for others. And you need a plan designed for your next season of life - not somebody else's like a 25-year old tech bro or spring chicken fresh out of college. You deserve more peace, more ease, more rest, more joy, more support, more freedom, more you time.

The next chapter of your life isn't about powering through. It's about coming home to yourself. If this message hit a little too close to home, if you felt seen, if you whispered, “Oh my gosh, that's me” even once, I'd love to support you. 

You can book a free Discovery call with me at www.theboldlife.coach. We'll talk honestly, maybe for the first time, about what you're carrying, what you need, what's bothering you, and what a calmer, simpler more fulfilling life looks like for you. You don't have to do it alone and you don't have to stay silent anymore.

Dear Bold One, there is a way out. Thank you for listening, for showing up, and for giving yourself this moment of truth. Take care and I'll see you in the next episode.

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