Running on Empty: Stress, Menopause, and Women in Education

If you regularly find yourself shutting down, procrastinating, people-pleasing, becoming defensive, pushing harder, or feeling like you have nothing left to give, it might be worth paying attention.

We hear a lot about wellbeing, stress management and self-care. Sometimes those phrases can feel a little fluffy - especially when you’re a busy educator with a hundred other things to think about.

But when we look at what is happening inside the female body, managing our stress and protecting our capacity starts to look a lot less like a luxury and a lot more like an investment in our future health.

Let’s go a little deeper into the science

Your adrenal glands sit just above your kidneys and produce several important hormones, including cortisol and DHEA. 

Cortisol is part of your body’s normal stress-response system. We need it. It helps us wake up, respond to challenges, and mobilise energy when something demands our attention. The problem isn’t cortisol itself.

The problem is when our lives keep asking the body to respond to one demand after another without enough opportunities to recover.

DHEA is part of the body’s hormonal support system, helping to provide the raw material needed to make estrogen (the hormone that supports our bones, skin, brain, and mood) and testosterone (the hormone that helps us build and maintain muscle and supports energy).

At the same time, menopause brings a significant decline in ovarian estrogen production.

That change can contribute to familiar menopausal symptoms such as:

• Hot flushes and night sweats

• Brain fog

• Sleep disruption

• Changes in mood

Over the longer term, declining estrogen is also associated with changes in bone and muscle health.

The menopausal transition is therefore already asking the body to adapt to a major hormonal change.

During menopause, ovarian estrogen production falls dramatically. The adrenal glands continue producing hormones such as DHEA that can be converted into small amounts of estrogen elsewhere in the body. At the same time, chronic stress places additional demands on our stress-response systems, which can affect sleep, mood, energy and resilience—and may make an already challenging menopausal transition feel harder.

Think of Estrogen as major source of income that reduces at menopause. DHEA and other pathways provide some smaller “side hustles,” while chronic stress increases your monthly expenses, leaving less flexibility in the system.

Menopause creates a major hormonal transition at the same time that many women are carrying a significant stress load. Chronic stress, poor sleep, lack of recovery and ongoing conflict can reduce our overall resilience and may amplify some menopausal symptoms.

If we learn earlier in life to recognise our stress patterns, recover well, build supportive relationships, exercise and respond to challenges in more constructive ways, we may enter menopause with greater physical and psychological capacity to navigate that transition.

If life is simultaneously asking you to manage chronic stress, sleep deprivation, work pressure, and everyone else’s needs, it isn’t hard to see why your capacity might start feeling very different.

So what’s the solution?

Yoga!

Just kidding.

Yoga is wonderful, but it’s not enough. And that’s coming from a yoga teacher.

The answer isn’t simply adding another wellness activity to an already overflowing calendar.

We need to look at what is draining our energy in the first place.

What expectations are we placing on ourselves?

What expectations are we placing on one another?

Where are we saying yes when we want to say no?

Where are we avoiding conversations that would actually make our lives easier?

Where are we trying to control things that aren’t ours to control?

And where have ways of working that were once manageable become unsustainable?

Rather than constantly asking, “How can I become better at coping with all of this?”, perhaps we also need to ask:

“What doesn’t need to be this hard?”

Here are three things you can do now to support both your current wellbeing and your long-term health.

1. Pay attention to your patterns

The goal isn’t simply to “reduce stress.” It’s to notice the ways you might unknowingly be creating more of it - through perfectionism, people-pleasing, avoidance, over-responsibility, control, or constantly pushing through.

Once you can see the pattern, you have more choice about what you do next.

How coaching can help

Often, the patterns draining our energy are so familiar that we barely notice them anymore - overthinking, people-pleasing, avoiding difficult conversations, taking on too much responsibility, or pushing ourselves long after we need to stop.

Coaching gives you space to slow those patterns down, understand what is driving them, and experiment with different ways of responding.

The aim is not to give you another thing to “work on,” but to help you find ways of working, leading, and living that use your energy more intentionally.

2. Get strong

Find a form of movement you genuinely enjoy and can sustain.

And if you aren’t already doing it, consider adding strength training.

Maintaining muscle and bone becomes particularly important as women move through menopause, and resistance training is one of the most useful tools we have for supporting both.

Think of it as putting money into your physical pension - you’re investing now in the body you want to be living in decades from today.

3. Look after the women around you

Reach out to another female educator.

Ask how she’s really doing.

Give her a hug.

Cover something for her.

Encourage her to go home.

Tell her she doesn’t need to apologise.

Challenge the idea that exhaustion is evidence of commitment.

Because perhaps one of the most powerful things we can do is stop expecting individual women to become endlessly more resilient and start creating environments where we don’t need quite so much resilience in the first place.

And finally… the list

Stress doesn’t always look like someone saying, “I’m stressed.”

Sometimes it looks like shutting down:

• Avoiding decisions or difficult conversations

• Procrastinating because everything feels overwhelming

• Giving up quickly

• Waiting for someone else to solve the problem

• Agreeing even when you disagree internally

• Apologising excessively

• Constantly seeking reassurance or permission

• Focusing on everything outside your control

• Minimising your abilities or contribution

• Feeling stuck and unable to see alternatives

• Avoiding risk because you’re afraid of getting it wrong

• Taking feedback very personally

• Becoming passive rather than stating what you need

It might sound like:

• “There’s no point.”

• “I don’t know what else I can do.”

• “It’s just the way it is.”

• “I’m not good enough.”

• “I don’t really have a choice.”

But stress can also look like fighting harder:

• Becoming defensive

• Blaming people or circumstances

• Complaining frequently

• Needing to prove you’re right

• Interrupting or speaking over others

• Becoming impatient

• Micromanaging

• Using sarcasm or criticism

• Keeping score

• Becoming territorial

• Competing rather than collaborating

• Looking for flaws in other people’s thinking

• Reacting before considering alternatives

• Pushing harder when you meet resistance

It might sound like:

• “That’s ridiculous.”

• “They should know better.”

• “Why do I always have to deal with this?”

• “If they would just do their job…”

• “I’ll show them.”

• “This isn’t fair.”

None of these behaviours makes you a bad leader, teacher, colleague, partner, or parent.

They’re signals.

And perhaps rather than judging ourselves for them, we can become curious about what they’re telling us.