There is a version of success women are rarely warned about: flawlessly executing life while running on empty.
It is the grueling art of answering emails while managing school runs, meeting deadlines, and showing up for everyone with a smile, all while your physiological tank registers zero.
Exhaustion has been repackaged as status. In South Africa's high-octane environment, being tired has stopped functioning as a warning sign. It has simply become the baseline.
The data behind the crisis
This is not a vague story about women feeling "busy." It is an institutional breakdown.
According to Gallup’s latest workplace research, 31% of women report feeling burned out “very often” or “always,” outstripping men at 23%. Data from the McKinsey Health Institute and the World Economic Forum also shows a systemic tax on the female body: women spend 25% more of their lives navigating poor health.
“We are increasingly seeing women functioning exceptionally well on paper, yet physiologically depleted,” notes Dr Siddharth Govender, from NADClinic, a practitioner specialising in clinical exhaustion.
“They lead boardrooms and raise families, but underneath, navigate deep fatigue, brain fog, and fractured sleep.”
Modern women keep going even when empty because society treats a woman's collapse as an inconvenience but celebrates her martyrdom as an asset. The espresso gets stronger. The weekend becomes a desperate recovery mission.
Eventually, "tired" becomes your personality. Govender insists on a sharp distinction: “If you rely on stimulants to power through, those are clinical markers worth investigating, not badges of honour.”
To look at burnout through a global lens misses the compounding weight of the South African environment. Here, the cognitive load is structurally heavier.
A South African woman juggles her career while orchestrating life around load shedding, water failures, and safety anxieties. The nervous system never fully relaxes when you are constantly calculating if the inverter will hold or if the school route is safe.
Furthermore, professional women navigate the emotional and financial weight of the "Black Tax": the expectation to support extended families. Success is an economic lifeline for an entire ecosystem.
Even domestic help does not erase the load; it merely shifts it from physical labour to managerial labour.
The trickle-down effect
When a matriarch operates on empty, the fallout trickles down. Domestically, children internalise this hyper-vigilance as the default setting for adulthood. We are raising girls who believe that to be worthy of success, they must first be exhausted.
Professionally, the leadership pipeline dries up. High-performing women step away because the biological cost of "having it all" is too expensive
Labelling every exhausted woman "burned out" is medical gaslighting. Persistent fatigue is often the smoke signalling a physiological fire, such as iron deficiencies, thyroid dysregulation, metabolic shifts, or perimenopause.
“Two women can present with identical exhaustion profiles and have entirely different underlying drivers,” Govender warns. “We cannot make ‘tired’ the final diagnosis.”
This precision is vital in a landscape that normalises a woman’s suffering as the inevitable price of ageing, motherhood, or being a "strong black woman" expected to carry the world without breaking.
The weaponisation of resilience
Women are praised for holding everything together. In South Africa, the phrase "Wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo" (You strike a woman, you strike a rock) has been twisted to imply that women are inanimate objects built to absorb infinite pressure.
“The myth of the ‘strong woman’ is dangerous,” says Govender. “It redefines strength as the capacity to suffer in silence without demanding structural change.”
True recovery requires structural boundaries, not a better self-care routine. An exhausted woman does not need another wellness assignment. Try these four actionable shifts:
- Audit availability: Establish explicit communication windows. Not every email requires a midnight response, and not every organisational fire belongs to you.
- Shift the domestic contract: Household responsibilities must move from a partner "helping out" to absolute equity. Outsource or automate logistics to eliminate managerial load.
- Investigate the physiological 'why': Demand full metabolic, iron, and endocrine panels. Treat exhaustion as a clinical data point, not a personal flaw.
- Strategic divestment: Ruthlessly drop tasks that rely on your martyrdom. If a task doesn't serve your peace or core goals, say no.
Women should not have to become better at surviving unsustainable lives. As Govender notes: “High performance should not be measured by how long you can override your body’s warning signals.”
The ultimate modern luxury is no longer being the woman who can carry it all. It is being the woman who dares to put it down.
vuyile.madwantsi@nationalmg.co.za