THE FAST &THE FURIOUS
Women are getting faster, busier and unhappier. But are we our own worst enemies when it comes to managing our time? Meg Mason investigates
If you look now, women have no time,” said Germaine Greer, talking about the progress of gender equality in the nearly 40 years since the publication of her book The Female Eunuch. “Women do everything on the run. You just have to watch on any city pavement at lunchtime [to] see who is tearing down the street to pay the bills, get something for supper and all of that.”
That was 2007, and in the decade since there’s been no discernible slowdown in the pace at which women attempt to close out each day’s to-do list, get shit done and be on time – which is to say, early. And if you’ve ever woken up already scrolling through the day ahead with a sense of diffused dread, you know it already. Women are getting busier... and unhappier.
“She often feels very anxious, more so than unhappy, and then guilty for feeling that way,” says nutritional biochemist Dr Libby Weaver, who characterised our kind and gave a name to our condition in Rushing Woman's Syndrome, first published in 2011 and re-released this year. “It’s not a medical condition, but it’s the name I gave to a pattern I was noticing more and more in my practice. The Rushing Woman is typically 30 onwards, although it’s happening younger and younger. She cares very much about doing well in the world, achieving, showing people she cares, so in that sense, it actually comes from a beautiful place.” But as a result of the pressure the Rushing Woman applies to herself to do all those things, and be everything, Weaver says, “she becomes unable to connect to any part of her life, and as things go on, she begins to sacrifice her own health.”
Living in a state of permanent elevation, that sort of tired-but-wired, knot-in-the-stomach hyper-mania, as the Rushing Woman does, requires shot after shot of cortisol, the stress hormone, and adrenaline, the fight-or-flight hormone that the body produces in response to threat. “But as a species, we can’t decipher between the adrenaline spike produced by coffee or by a car that’s approaching at speed and putting your life in danger,” explains Weaver. “So the body thinks your life is in danger all the time.” And if, as Weaver says, the Rushing Woman requires coffee to get up and wine to get down, in a way it is.
Cortisol is the new calm. And as most of us know, the constant production of stress hormones is linked to depression, infertility and creeping
“Across multiple studies, the ultra-busy were perceived as being richer and more successful than people who had a bit of time to spare in their day”
weight gain, as the body learns to burn fast-acting glucose instead of fat, as though we’re literally on the run. “The Rushing Woman has good nutritional knowledge but isn’t always able to act on it – doing really well at breakfast and lunch, but needing sugar for the rest of the day, leading to accidental weight gain,” Weaver says. “Digestive issues and IBS are common. Her periods aren’t easy and she snaps constantly, tolerates less and loses her patience.”
If the portrait seems extreme, consider that more than 40 per cent of women claim they’re “often or always” pressed for time, according to figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. In another study, the same percentage of women said that they had been diagnosed with either depression or anxiety, a figure the study called “concerning”, while a survey of more than 26,000 professionals conducted by Springfox, a resilience training organisation, found that women are more likely to feel distressed, vulnerable and withdrawn in the workplace, with more than a quarter of us experiencing chronic stress symptoms, compared to less than an eighth of men.
But are we singularly to blame for living our lives on the constant cusp of panic? If you’ve ever suspected that stress has become a status symbol, you’re right. Once upon a time, being able to do nothing was the surest sign of success. Now, it’s being able to do everything. Across multiple studies by researchers at Columbia Business School in the US, the ultra-busy were perceived as being richer and more successful than people who had a bit of time to spare in their day. And if your social capital depends on how stretched and in-demand and constantly torn you are – “driven by the perception that a busy person possesses desired human capital characteristics [such as] competence and ambition”, as the study put it – the fact your weekend may actually be a little bit open and you didn’t get into work until 9am today stops being something to boast about.
For many women, of course, to-do lists are real. The mental, physiological and emotional fall-out of chronic stress is real, too. But what if, in another way, the Rushing Woman is a social construct? A modern-day trope akin to, say, the Perfect Housewife of the ’50s or the Angry Bra Burner of the ’70s, and as ultimately limiting. “I see the constantly harried, crazy-busy, no-time-foranything as the dominant cultural narrative [for] women and particularly working mothers,” says Laura Vanderkam, a time management and productivity expert and author of I Know How She
Does It. “And the dangerous thing with narratives is that they become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can find evidence for anything, so if you’re telling yourself, ‘I’m exhausted’ or ‘My life is a hot mess,’ you’ll easily find three moments in the past 24 hours when that was true.”
Besides which, it’s a narrative powerfully reinforced by the media, even entertainment media supposedly made for (or targeted at) women. I Don’t Know How She Does It established the genre, Bad Moms recently updated it. Every iteration of the “Can women really have it all?” think piece refreshes the guilt, the worry, the sense of impending disaster. Victoria Beckham writes open letters describing work-life balance as a “constant struggle”. Arianna Huffington becomes an evangelist for sleep after collapsing from exhaustion and waking up in a pool of blood. “But we’re not labouring in the salt mines,” Vanderkam says. “And we risk becoming our own worst enemies every time we tell ourselves that building a career and having a family or a fulfilling personal life is basically impossible.”
Whatever gains have been made, society has hung onto its basic mistrust of the working woman/working mother so that if we’re ever caught being productive and engaged and efficient and calm, accused of managing perfectly well, we’ve already got an apology preloaded. “Women have a long history of downplaying their accomplishments, as though it’s somehow more feminine,” Vanderkam says. “So one of the things you’ll see all the time is, if you say to a woman, ‘You’re amazing at work and your children don’t seem to be screw-ups,’ she’ll say, ‘Oh, but my house is a mess,’ or ‘I haven’t been to the gym in three months.’” Never mind that studies have found that working mothers are healthier physically than stayat-home parents and less likely to experience depression.
The plain fact is that complaining about the struggle is a reliable point of social connection between women, and we work it hard. Vanderkam calls it the Misery Olympics: “Your life is terrible, so is mine, we should be friends. But there are literally no medals there.”
Instead, take your pick from the poor health, unhappiness and anxiety that sit on your chest like a sack of sand and then ask, why are we doing this to ourselves? Why are we letting others do it to us? “Victory only comes in refusing to take part,” Vanderkam says. So why not take a sweeping, gender-wide opt-out of Rushing Woman culture? The singular reason is this: stress is the high-achiever’s word for fear. “As humans, our greatest fear is that we’re not enough, and if we’re not enough we won’t be loved,” Weaver says. “It’s hardwired into our nervous system that love is essential for survival, so to keep ourselves safe, we’ve got to keep everyone else happy.”
Is it actually, legitimately possible that when we’re running towards closing elevator doors in real life, we’re running away from rejection in our interior lives? It seems like a stretch but then, “let’s pick on running late,” says Weaver. “It’s not being late that stresses women most. It’s what other people will think of them if they are late.”
As confronting or potentially exposing as that hypothesis feels, for Brooklyn Storme, a 43-yearold psychologist and entrepreneur, it’s real. “It got to a point where my whole life was just consumed by it, this identity of being stressed so that I was actually afraid to let go,” she explains. “Everything was fear-based. The idea of not being good enough, not being able to support myself, worrying what would happen to my lifestyle or who I would actually be without it.”
Although Storme was experiencing migraines and cramps, found herself constantly shorttempered, “running everywhere and literally hopping from foot to foot while I was talking because I couldn’t stand still and felt too busy to go to the bathroom”, it was only six months ago that she linked her unhappiness to busy culture. “At first I just thought that there was something
“I thought there was something wrong with me because I wasn’t coping and the rest of the world was doing wonderfully”
wrong with me because I wasn’t coping and the rest of the world was doing wonderfully. I felt really disconnected from people because it didn’t seem like they would understand. But when I eventually confided in friends, it turned out they were all feeling the same way.”
Around that time, Storme came across the concept of bullet journalling – a form of diary keeping and schedule making that is highly creative, and provides a visual breakdown of how your time is actually being spent – and the practice marked the beginning of her journey back to happiness. “It would make me happy while I was being productive and gave me a better grip on where my time was actually going and a sense of release in terms of work. I’ve seen it’s okay to drop some things, it’s okay to delegate. I don’t have to be in charge of everything.”
For Juliet Potter, 45, it was an all-out health crisis three years ago that forced her to reassess the pace and intensity of her daily life, as a single mother of three working full-time in PR. “I was already prone to anxiety but at some point I just stopped being able to cope and I ended up with severe situational depression.”
Although her actual situation, involving a marriage breakdown and scaling down her business, was empirically stressful, Potter locates the root cause of her crisis elsewhere. “I didn’t have selfesteem until I was 40 and my self-talk was so negative, it all just became self-perpetuating.”
Potter fought back with sweeping changes to her diet and alcohol intake. She began exercising, meditating and working with a health coach to develop tools to help manage stress, including hypnotherapy and positive affirmations, which she deploys every time she feels the tug back towards a more manic sort of existence. “I definitely recognise my triggers, and if I feel that anxiety coming back, I’ll regroup. I bunker down. For me it’s a survival thing, but also the realisation that I’m perfectly entitled to balance my life. Eventually you just decide to draw a line.”
In the same 2007 interview, Germaine Greer said this about us: “Women will work. They’ll work so hard. Give them a challenge and say, ‘You’ve got to struggle all the way through this,’ and they’ll do it.” Do we dare see what happens when, just sometimes, we don’t?
“It’s the realisation that I’m entitled to balance my life. Eventually, you just draw a line”