WE have all met the likes of her. She is the one who gets the email at 9pm and replies within minutes, volunteers for the project no one else wants, remembers the birthday of the boss’s wife and organises the office party while simultaneously delivering the quarterly report.
We call her “Superwoman”. And for a while, she loves it.
I have a client – let’s call her Sharin – who fits this mould perfectly. A young mother of two, Sharin came to see me with a sigh of relief and tears of exhaustion. The cape of being “Superwoman” had turned into a noose around her neck.
Six months ago, Sharin was invincible. The praise from her male colleagues was intoxicating. She felt essential, irreplaceable and powerful. The late nights and the weekend emails were a price she was willing to pay for that validation.
But that feeling wore off, as it always does. The adrenaline was replaced by cortisol and the praise began to sound like a demand.
Now, work follows her home – to the dinner table, into her children’s bedtime stories and even into her dreams. She is terrified: terrified of saying no, terrified of the repercussions and terrified of falling off the pedestal she built for herself.
Sharin’s story is not unique; it is a pandemic of the modern workplace. In a post-pandemic world, where the boundaries between home and office have blurred into a permanent grey area, professionals, especially women who often carry the dual burden of career and domestic management are burning out at alarming rates.
How do we solve a case like Sharin’s, who is on the brink of a breakdown? The answer is not quitting her job or buying a planner. It lies in a radical, psychological shift: reclaiming the self.
Here is the approach I offered Sharin, and perhaps it may resonate with you.
My first task was to help her disentangle her identity. “Who are you,” I asked, “when you are not being useful?” She couldn’t answer.
We are conditioned to believe that our value at work is tied to our output. But when you say “yes” to everything, you are effectively saying “no” to your health and your family.
We looked at her workload. I asked her to list everything she did in a typical week. We then categorised them into three columns: My Job, Someone Else’s Job and Nice to Have.
The result was staggering. Half of her tasks belonged to other people who had simply offloaded them onto her because she was reliable.
Sharin was mistaking “being helpful” for “being competent”.
I introduced Sharin to the concept of strategic indifference. This was not about being lazy; it was about being efficient. It was about learning to differentiate between “urgent” and “important”.
For the week that followed, I gave her a radical instruction: Do not reply to any email or message after 6pm and do not check your work phone on Saturday.
“But I’ll be fired!” she gasped.
I challenged her on that. If you are fired for not working at 9pm on a Friday, is that a job worth keeping?
The fear of missing out is often greater than the anxiety of a delayed response. We practised “the pause”. Before saying yes to a request, she had to pause and ask herself: “Is this my priority or is this a crisis of their making?”
This is the hardest part for people like Sharin. We practised the “low-stakes no”. We started with small things like, “I cannot send the meeting minutes now but I can send you the notes later”. Or, “I am at capacity this week but I can look at that next Tuesday”.
We worked on the wording to ensure it sounded professional and firm. You don’t owe your boss a detailed explanation of why you are saying no. A simple “I am prioritising job X deadline right now” is sufficient. When you say no to the noise, you are saying yes to the signal.
I reminded Sharin that she is not a machine, she is an asset. A burnt-out asset is a liability. If she is crying in the bathroom or snapping at her children, she is not productive. I encouraged her to reframe boundaries, not as a sign of weakness but as a sign of strategic leadership.
When you respect your own time, others are forced to respect it too. By setting a boundary, you are telling your workplace that the quality of your work is more important than the quantity of your hours.
We are currently doing a “digital detox”. Sharin is learning to sit in the discomfort of being “unavailable”. She is learning that the world does not collapse if she doesn’t reply to a message for 12 hours.
The fear of repercussions is real. The fear of not being the “superwoman” is valid. But the alternative, a nervous breakdown, a wrecked family life and a shattered sense of self is far worse.
I leave you, the reader, with the same question I asked Sharin: “If the price of being seen as ‘indispensable’ is your sanity, is it a price worth paying?”
Sharin is still in the trenches. It is not a quick fix; it is a daily battle to reclaim her dinner table, her weekends and her mind but she has stopped crying in my sessions.
She is starting to sleep again. And for the first time in months, she looked at me last week and said: “I think I am more than just my job title.”
And she is right. So are you.
Dr Bhavani Krishna Iyer holds a doctorate in English literature. Her professional background encompasses teaching, journalism and public relations. She is currently pursuing a second master’s degree in counselling. Comments: [email protected]
