Let me tell you what switching off looks like when it goes wrong for me.
I am in the middle of a project. Not a dreaded one … one I love, the kind that makes me lose the hour. I work on it all day. And when night comes and it is finally time to wind down, I move through the whole ritual at double speed. Brush the teeth, quick. Into the pajamas, quick. Into bed, quick quick quick … because some part of me is already in tomorrow morning, where I get to pick it back up. I am not winding down. I am sprinting toward the next start.
I catch myself doing it. I even say it out loud, usually as a joke. “This is going to take quite a bit for my chakras to calm the F down.”
It is funny. It is also the whole problem in one sentence.
Because here is what most advice about switching off misses: your nervous system does not know the difference between dread and delight. Excitement and stress run on the same wiring … the same quick pulse, the same lit-up brain, the same flood of stress chemistry. It cannot tell whether you are running toward something or running from it. It only knows you are still running.
Maybe my version is not yours. Maybe yours is the harder one.
It is 11pm and you are still at the laptop. That blue, artificial glare in your eyes. Your body needed the sunset hours ago … the warm, low light that tells it the day is ending … and you missed it. You were working. So melatonin does not stand a chance, because the one signal it was waiting for never came.
And you could close the laptop. But closing the laptop has never been the problem. The work just changes its clothes. There is the message from your mother you have not answered. The thing one of the kids needs for tomorrow. The friend who is going through something, the dinner that will not make itself, the running list of everyone else’s needs that lives in your head and never powers off. Saying no … to your boss, to your mother, to the friend, to the part of you that has to stay on top of all of it … feels more dangerous than staying up. So it bleeds into the weekend. You keep performing. You keep being the one who handles it. You go until something in you finally collapses.
I have sat with many women living exactly this.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
Why the Usual Advice Doesn’t Work
You know the advice by heart. Set a hard stop. Build a wind-down routine. Phone in another room. Try mindfulness. Get better at work-life balance.
And you have tried it. Most of it. Maybe all of it, more than once.
The advice is not wrong, exactly. It is aimed at the wrong layer. These are behavioural fixes for what is not, underneath, a behavioural problem. You can put your phone in another room. You cannot put your nervous system in another room.
What Is Actually Happening in Your Body
Your body does not know the day is over. That is the short version.
The longer one: your nervous system is built to respond to threat … to mobilise you, sharpen you, keep you watching. Under steady, long-running stress, it learns to live in that state. Not because something is wrong with you. Because it is doing exactly what it was trained to do.
The emails, the pressure, the performing, the low constant hum of being needed … the body files all of it the way it would file a physical threat. And once the threat has been there long enough, your system stops waiting for permission to stand down. It just stays vigilant.
Before we go further, a word in defence of cortisol.
It has a terrible reputation. The stress hormone. The thing every wellness post tells you to lower at all costs. But you do not want low cortisol. You want cortisol in its right rhythm.
In a body that is working well, cortisol follows the sun. It falls in the evening as the light goes warm and low … which is part of why looking outside at dusk helps you wind down. Dimming light is the signal your body reads to start releasing melatonin, the chemistry of sleep. Cortisol bottoms out around midnight. Then, while you are still asleep, somewhere around three in the morning, it begins to climb again … slowly, on purpose … so that by the time you wake it has peaked and you have the energy to get up and meet the day. Dr. Andrew Huberman calls that morning surge the cortisol awakening response.
That is cortisol doing its job. On at dawn. Off at dusk, so melatonin can take over and carry you down into sleep.
What chronic stress does is flatten that curve. The evening fall never fully comes. The system that should power down for the night stays half-lit instead … all night, every night. You are not wired wrong. Your wiring is stuck in the on position.
This is why the bath does not work. Why the holiday does not quite work either. You can change your surroundings. The body brings its own weather.
Why High-Functioning Women Are Especially Vulnerable
There is another layer here, and it is the one I spend most of my time inside with the women I work with.
When you have built your whole identity around being capable … the one who handles it, who delivers, who does not drop the ball … switching off is not a small ask. It is a threat. Not only the fear of falling behind. The deeper one: who am I when I am not producing?
If your sense of safety and worth has quietly fused to your output, rest does not feel like rest. It feels like exposure. Some part of you believes that the moment you stop, it all comes apart … or you do. So the brain keeps running. Not because you are undisciplined. Because stopping feels like risk.
This is not a flaw. It is a survival strategy that worked, for a long time, until it didn’t.
And here is where the body quietly sends the invoice. While you are busy with the question … am I doing enough? … you are overriding every natural rhythm you have. You push through the afternoon dip instead of working with it. You ignore the days in your cycle when your energy was never going to be high, and read that as failure instead of biology. You meet perimenopause, the season when the body stops tolerating being overridden, with the same strategy that got you here: try harder, need less, keep going.
We are cyclical creatures. The day has its light and its dark. The month has its rise and its fall. The body was built to ebb as much as it was built to flow. When you detach from those cycles … when every day is meant to be high-output and every hour productive … you are not being strong. You are setting up a slow disaster you cannot even see, because you are too busy being capable to notice what it costs.
This is also where assertiveness stops being about other people.
Most women hear “be more assertive” and recoil. They do not want to be the difficult one, the selfish one, the one who makes it about herself. But standing up for yourself, from where I sit, is not a power move. It is not proving you are stronger than the person across from you. It is simpler and far more physical than that: this body needs to rest, the same way it needs to work. Saying no is how you tell it the day is allowed to end.
What This Costs You
The obvious cost is sleep. But the quieter costs are the ones that accumulate.
You stop being fully present … with the people you love, in conversations that are not about work, in your own body. You lose the ability to receive: pleasure, rest, connection, stillness. Everything becomes something to get through, something to manage, something to optimise.
And the exhaustion that builds from this kind of chronic activation is not the kind a weekend fixes. It is the kind that lives in the tissue. The kind that makes you wonder, quietly, why you feel so tired when you are doing everything right.
And there is a cost that does not surface until much later, in the body itself.
For years, the body pays for what the voice won’t say was something I believed from the room, not from a study. In 2022, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh followed 290 women between forty and sixty … and measured not how they felt, but their arteries. The women who habitually silenced themselves, who held back what they thought and felt to keep the peace, had more plaque built up in their carotid arteries. The link held even after accounting for the usual suspects: blood pressure, cholesterol, weight, depression, diet.
Read that again. The cost of not saying the thing was measurable in the walls of their blood vessels.
That study looked at silence in intimate relationships, not the office … and that is exactly why it belongs here. This was never only about work. The swallowing is the same swallowing wherever it lives: with a partner, a parent, a boss, a friend. Anywhere you hold the true thing in to keep the peace, the body is the one left holding it.
Switching off is not a luxury. It is physiology.
What Actually Helps
Not a longer list of tips. A different understanding, and a few real signals you can actually send.
Your nervous system does not respond to intention. It responds to evidence. It needs a genuine message, sent through the body, that the threat is over and it is safe to slow down, to rest, to switch off. Not a distraction from the day. A clear end to it.
A few small enough to start tonight:
1) Catch the sunset. Or honestly, just look outside. Here is why this is not as small as it sounds. Your brain sits in the dark, sealed inside your skull. It cannot see the day ending. Your eyes are its only window to the outside world … the one instrument it has for knowing what time it actually is. You do not even need to find the sun. Look out at the evening light for a minute, and your eyes register it for you and pass the message inward: the day is closing. That low, warm light is the cue your body reads to let melatonin begin. You are not relaxing. You are sending a signal, on time, the way the system was built to receive it.
2) Negotiate your yes before you give it. The next time someone asks something of you, do not answer on reflex. Pause … a single second is enough. Because every yes is also a no, and you are about to say no to something. Ask yourself what. More often than you would like, the answer is: no to your rest, no to your cycle, no to the body that has been asking you to stop. Once you can see what the yes will actually cost, you get to make a real choice … and sometimes the no belongs to the request, said out loud, instead of to your own health, said in silence.
3) End the day with a full stop, not an ellipsis. Most of us let the workday trail off … one more glance at the inbox, one more open loop. Try closing it with an actual sentence, out loud if you have to: I am done for today. Spoken endings land in the body in a way that drifting ones never do.
These help. For some people, they are enough.
And for some, they are not … because the reason the system learned to brace in the first place runs deeper than any single evening can reach. If you have tried the routines and the boundaries and the apps, if you have been there and done all of it and your body will not settle down into rest mode, that is not a failure of effort. It usually means the work lives at a level underneath behaviour … in the nervous system itself, and in the story that taught it to stay alert and available.
That is the work I do. Not surface stress management. The deeper recalibration that changes how you carry the day, not only how you end it. If you recognise yourself in all of this, a discovery call is where we find out what your system has been bracing against.
Related
- High-Functioning Burnout: The Exhaustion You’ve Been Calling Fine
- Why Psychology-Based Coaching Is Critical for Women’s Emotional Well-Being in the UAE
- Life Coach or Therapist: Which One Do You Need?
Further reading: Jakubowski, K. P., et al. (2022). The Cardiovascular Cost of Silence: Relationships Between Self-Silencing and Carotid Atherosclerosis in Midlife Women. Annals of Behavioral Medicine.
