Burnout for Women in Finance: The Exhaustion of Excellence

BURNOUT • April 10, 2026

What Is Burnout in Financial Services?

It’s 6:40 on a Tuesday morning, and Meredith is already at her desk with two monitors lit and a third screen mirroring her phone, because the Asian markets closed forty minutes ago and she wants the overnight moves in front of her before the seven a.m. call. She’s 48. She’s a managing director at a mid-size asset management firm, the kind of title that took her twenty-two years to earn and that she still sometimes forgets she has. Her coffee is going cold in a mug from a conference she can’t remember attending. She hasn’t eaten yet. She won’t, really, until sometime around two.

Meredith didn’t come to see me because she was in crisis. She came because her doctor told her, at her annual physical, that her blood pressure had crept up again and asked her, not unkindly, when the last time was that she’d taken a full week off. Meredith laughed. Then she stopped laughing and said she genuinely couldn’t remember.

That’s a fairly common entry point into my work with women in finance. Not a breakdown. A blood pressure reading. A skipped period. A dermatologist asking, gently, whether she’s been under unusual stress, because her skin is telling a story her calendar isn’t. The body tends to file the complaint long before the mind agrees to read it.

Burnout in financial services isn’t a single bad quarter or a rough week before earnings season. It’s a specific, diagnosable-in-the-workplace-sense pattern that builds slowly and then doesn’t let go.

For driven women in finance, burnout carries a specific flavor. It’s exhaustion braided together with an industry that treats exhaustion as proof you’re doing the job right. Meredith once told me that the year she made managing director, three separate people congratulated her by saying some version of “you’ve clearly been killing yourself for this.” She said it took her months to notice that nobody meant it as a warning.

I want to be specific about who I’m talking about in this piece, because “women in finance” spans a huge range of roles and firms. I’m thinking here about portfolio managers, wealth advisors, traders, analysts, and executives at asset managers, banks, and financial services firms, the driven, credentialed women who chose this field because they’re genuinely good with numbers, genuinely good under pressure, and often genuinely drawn to the competitive clarity of a business where results are countable. This isn’t a piece about hating your job. It’s a piece about what a specific kind of workplace culture does to a nervous system over years, regardless of how much a woman loves the actual work.

Meredith is a composite drawn from patterns I’ve seen across many women in similarly structured, high-pressure financial roles, not one specific client, and her details have been changed accordingly. The pattern itself, though, is one I recognize instantly by the third or fourth session, almost every time.

Occupational Stress and the Nervous System

Here’s what’s actually happening in the body during a sustained stretch of high-stakes, high-vigilance work: the autonomic nervous system, which governs the body’s stress response, doesn’t distinguish neatly between “I am in physical danger” and “I have been on high alert at my desk for eleven hours.” Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, wrote in his foundational 1994 paper on how trauma is stored that the body encodes overwhelming experience somatically, in the nervous system and the stress-hormone response, not only in the story a person can tell about what happened.

That finding was built from research on trauma specifically. It matters here because it explains a piece of what Meredith and women like her describe: their bodies keep score of sustained pressure even when their minds have gotten very good at narrating it as normal. A jaw that’s clenched by 9 a.m. A stomach that’s learned to tighten before the market opens. Sleep that gets thinner and thinner even on nights when nothing is objectively wrong.

I want to be precise about what this does and doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean the markets are traumatizing you. It doesn’t mean your trading desk is a perpetrator and you’re its captive. Chronic occupational stress and trauma activate overlapping biology, and they’re not the same thing, and collapsing the two does a disservice to women who are genuinely burned out and to women who have genuinely survived trauma. I’ll come back to that distinction directly in a moment, because I think it’s the piece finance culture gets wrong most often.

Here’s what I’d rather you take from the neurobiology instead. Your body isn’t malfunctioning when it stays keyed up through a stretch of high-stakes work. It’s doing exactly what it was built to do: staying alert to a demanding environment. The problem isn’t that the alert system works. The problem is that it was never designed to run continuously for years without real downtime, and most financial services cultures don’t build in the kind of downtime a nervous system actually needs to reset. Recovery isn’t optional maintenance. It’s the mechanism by which the alert system learns it’s safe to stand down, and without it, the system doesn’t reset. It just runs hotter.

Think of it like an engine that was designed to redline occasionally, for short bursts, and then cool down. Finance, as an industry, has largely removed the cooldown. The engine doesn’t stop working. It just starts wearing down faster than it was built to.

I want to name a fragment I hear constantly in this work, because it’s such a precise piece of evidence. driven women in finance frequently describe a very specific bodily habit: opening their laptop the moment they wake up, before coffee, before a shower, sometimes before they’re fully out of bed, to check what happened overnight. It’s not curiosity. It’s a reflex built by years of the market having the capacity to change everything about her day before she’s even brushed her teeth. That reflex is the nervous system doing its job. It’s also a body that has never been given permission to find out what a slower first hour of the day might feel like.

How This Shows Up in Driven Women

Meredith’s version of burnout looked, from the outside, like extraordinary competence. She ran three portfolio teams. She was the person junior analysts asked for feedback because she gave it fast and it was almost always right. Nobody in her building would have used the word “burned out” to describe her, including, for a long time, Meredith herself.

“I don’t have the luxury of being tired,” she said to me early on, and then laughed at herself, because she heard how it sounded even as she said it. “I know how that sounds. But I’ve got two hundred million dollars of other people’s retirement in front of me most days. Tired isn’t really an input the job takes.”

What I hear underneath a sentence like that, again and again, in driven women across industries but especially in finance, is a woman who has learned to treat her own physical signals as noise to be filtered out rather than information to act on. That’s not a character flaw. It’s frequently an adaptation that served her extremely well for a very long time, right up until it stopped working.

A few weeks later, Meredith described her Sunday nights. Not a panic attack, nothing dramatic enough to have a name she’d have used at the time. Just a low, persistent dread that started around 4 p.m. and built steadily until she opened her laptop “to get ahead of Monday,” which really meant reading overnight research notes she didn’t need until the following week. “I used to think that was diligence,” she said. “Now I think it might just be that I don’t know how to be off. I don’t think I’ve actually been off in longer than I can remember.”

Tameka, 43, came to session in a blazer she’d clearly worn straight from a client pitch, her badge still clipped to her lapel. She’s a vice president at a wealth management firm, one of a handful of Black women at her level in the entire office, and she sat down and said, almost before she’d taken her coat off, “I need you to know I have exactly fifty minutes and then I have another call.”

She talked fast. She talked about the client win from that morning, a seven-figure account she’d spent four months courting, and how she’d felt almost nothing when it closed, just a flat, functional relief that it was done. She talked about being the only person in most rooms who looked like her, and the specific tax that comes with that, the extra polish, the extra restraint, the sense that one visible mistake would get read as a pattern rather than a moment. “I don’t get to have an off day the way some of my colleagues get to have an off day,” she said. Then, quieter: “I used to be so good at this. I don’t know when I stopped being able to feel that.”

I felt the particular weight of that sentence sitting across from her. Not pity. Something closer to recognition, and underneath it, a kind of professional grief on her behalf, that a woman this capable had arrived at a place where competence and feeling had become disconnected from each other. Tameka is also a composite, built from patterns across several clients who described this same dynamic, not a single person, though the specific tax she named, the extra polish, the extra restraint, the sense that one visible mistake would get read as a pattern rather than a moment, is one I hear described almost word for word by different women in different rooms.

We didn’t resolve anything that day. She had another call. She picked her coat back up, said she’d see me next week, and was gone before I’d finished my sentence. I remember sitting with the quiet after she left and thinking about how much of her fifty minutes had been spent narrating competence, and how little of it had been spent simply breathing.

There’s a specific moment that comes up over and over in my work with driven women in finance, and Meredith described her version of it in our fourth session. She’d just closed out a fund’s best quarter in three years. Her firm sent an email to the whole department. She read it standing at her kitchen counter at 9 p.m., still in her work clothes, and felt, she said, “nothing. Not even relief. Just: okay, next.” She told me she went to bed that night vaguely disturbed by her own flatness and woke up the next morning already thinking about the following quarter’s targets. “I didn’t get a single day to just have had a good quarter,” she said. “I don’t think I know how to do that anymore.”

What Meredith and Tameka share, despite very different roles and very different daily textures of pressure, is a pattern I’ve come to think of as achievement without arrival. The next deal, the next promotion, the next quarter’s numbers, always arrives and is immediately replaced by the next one, and the body never gets the signal that it’s safe to stand down. Richard Schwartz, PhD, psychologist and developer of the Internal Family Systems model, describes something adjacent to this in his writing on internal parts: the part of a person that drives relentless achievement is often protecting a much younger, much more vulnerable part that learned, early, that being exceptional was the safest available strategy. The achieving part isn’t the enemy. It’s exhausted, and it’s been working alone for a long time.

Distinguishing Burnout From Trauma

I want to slow down here, because this is the section where finance-focused writing about burnout most often goes wrong, and I don’t want to repeat that mistake.

Burnout is an occupational phenomenon. It develops in response to chronic workplace stress: unsustainable hours, unclear or shifting expectations, insufficient recovery time, a mismatch between effort and reward. It is real, it is measurable, and it deserves to be taken seriously without being inflated into something it isn’t.

Trauma is a different category. It involves an experience that overwhelms a person’s capacity to cope, often involving threat to life or safety, and it changes how the nervous system processes danger going forward. A volatile market, a demanding boss, an unreasonable deadline: these can be genuinely stressful, even harmful to a person’s health over time. They are not, in themselves, trauma. And a market downturn is not a perpetrator. A trading floor is not a captor. Using the language of captivity and violence to describe occupational stress borrows the moral weight of trauma survivors’ experiences and applies it somewhere it doesn’t belong, and it also, quietly, lets workplaces off the hook by making the harm sound like an unavoidable natural disaster rather than a set of choices about how work gets structured.

Where the two categories genuinely intersect is this: a woman who came into her career with an already-sensitized nervous system, because of an unpredictable or frightening childhood, is often more vulnerable to burnout in a high-pressure industry, because her baseline for what “high alert” feels like was set early and set high. That’s a real clinical pattern. It’s not the same claim as “finance retraumatizes women.” One is specific and useful. The other is a generalization that doesn’t hold up and doesn’t help anyone get better.

Meredith, for what it’s worth, didn’t have a frightening childhood. Her parents were steady, if undemonstrative, people who valued achievement highly and affection more quietly. Her burnout isn’t a trauma story. It’s a story about twenty-two years of an industry that never asked her to stop, and a woman who got extremely good at not asking herself either.

I think this distinction matters for a practical reason, and it’s more than a definitional one. If you tell yourself your exhaustion is trauma when it’s burnout, you may go looking for the wrong kind of help, or you may pathologize a perfectly ordinary, if painful, response to an unreasonable job. And if you tell yourself your genuine trauma history is “just burnout” because that word feels more professionally acceptable to say out loud in a performance review context, you may undertreat something that deserves deeper clinical attention. Getting the category right isn’t pedantic. It’s the difference between the right next step and the wrong one.

Both/And: You Can Love the Rigor of the Work and Still Refuse What It Costs You

Meredith loves her job. I want to say that plainly, because it’s true and because it gets lost in a lot of burnout writing that treats the driven woman’s relationship to her career as something to be dismantled. She loves the moment a thesis she built two years ago plays out exactly as she modeled it. She loves being the person people trust with hard numbers. None of that’s the problem.

The problem is the industry-wide assumption that loving the work means tolerating anything the work asks of her, indefinitely, without complaint. Both things are true at once: the intellectual rigor of finance can be genuinely energizing, and the current structure of the industry, its hours, its culture of visible sacrifice, its discomfort with anyone appearing to have limits, is genuinely making driven women sick. You don’t have to choose between honoring your ambition and protecting your body. You get to hold both.

By the third month of our work together, Meredith came in and said something I still think about. “I used to think if I ever stopped operating at this pace, it would mean I didn’t want it badly enough anymore.” She sat with that for a second. “I’m starting to think it might mean the opposite. That I want to still be doing this in fifteen years, and I can’t, at this rate.”

This is the both/and I try to hold with every driven woman I work with in high-pressure fields, finance included but far from alone. You don’t have to soften your ambition to protect your body. You don’t have to pretend you’re less driven than you are in order to justify needing rest. The rest and the ambition aren’t in competition. The version of Meredith who takes a real week off in March isn’t a less committed version of Meredith. She’s a version with a longer runway.

The Systemic Lens: What Finance Rewards and What It Never Asks

Zoom out from any single woman’s desk and you find an industry structured, in ways that predate any of the women currently working in it, around the assumption of an unencumbered worker: someone with no caregiving responsibilities, no body that needs regular rest, no limit to how many hours can be treated as available. That structure wasn’t built with driven women in mind, and it wasn’t built with anyone’s long-term health in mind either. It rewards visible sacrifice and rarely asks what the sacrifice is costing.

Several cross-sectional studies of the finance and banking sectors describe this at scale rather than as individual failure. A 2023 survey of 1,181 finance workers in Korea found that 83.5 percent reported feeling pressure to perform at work, a pressure that was statistically associated with higher rates of depression and anxiety among those who also felt pushed toward corner-cutting to hit results. A separate 2024 study of 282 bank employees in South India, using the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory, found that 82.2 percent showed moderate to high levels of burnout, with longer daily working hours directly associated with higher burnout and stress scores. A 2017 review of the banking-sector literature found uniform agreement across the studies it examined that workplace stress in banking had reached what the authors called critical levels, with consistent downstream effects on employees’ mental and physical health.

None of that’s an argument that individual women in finance are broken. It’s an argument that an entire sector has normalized a pace that its own research keeps flagging as unsustainable, and has been slow to change anything structural in response.

Stephen Porges’s more recent writing on Polyvagal Theory pushes on exactly this point. He argues for extending nervous-system-informed design beyond the therapy room, into what he calls the systemic design of institutions that support physiological safety at scale, workplaces included. That’s a genuinely different ask than “individual employees should meditate more.” It’s an ask directed at the institution: build in recovery, build in predictability, build in the basic conditions a nervous system needs to come down off alert, instead of treating every employee’s ability to function without those conditions as a personal virtue.

Tameka named a version of this from a different angle. The tax she described, of never getting to have an off day the way some of her colleagues could, isn’t just an individual burden. It’s what happens when an industry’s culture of resilience gets pointed selectively at the people who have the least structural cushion to begin with, and calls their endurance an asset instead of asking why endurance is the thing being asked of them in the first place.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist who has spent decades researching women’s advancement in demanding professions, has written about the specific “on-ramp and off-ramp” pressures that push driven women out of high-intensity fields, not because they lack ambition but because the field offers no sustainable way to stay in it long-term. Finance, in my experience with clients across the industry, is one of the starkest versions of this. The women who leave rarely leave because they stopped being good at the job. They leave because nothing about the structure of the job changed to meet a person who also has a body, a family, or a limit.

I think about how often the language of resilience gets used in finance as a substitute for actual structural change. A firm can run a wellness webinar and call it culture change while doing nothing about the fact that its managing directors are expected to answer emails at midnight. Resilience, in that context, becomes a euphemism for absorbing harm quietly enough that no one upstream has to look at it.

Meredith’s firm, to its partial credit, did roll out a wellness initiative the year after her physical. It included a meditation app subscription and a poster in the break room about the importance of work-life balance. She showed it to me once, half laughing, half furious. Nothing about her actual hours changed. Nobody adjusted her coverage so she could take the week off her doctor had recommended. The message, unspoken but completely legible, was that the burden of managing the cost of the job’s structure remained entirely hers to solve, quietly, on her own time, ideally with an app.

This is the piece I think gets missed most often in conversations about women and burnout in high-pressure industries: the solution is regularly aimed at the individual woman’s coping skills, when the thing that actually needs to change is upstream of her, in how the firm staffs coverage, structures deadlines, and defines what a reasonable week looks like. Meditation apps aren’t nothing. They’re also not a substitute for a firm deciding that its people are allowed to have a boundary.

“Addiction begins when a woman loses her handmade and meaningful life, when she gives it up for something easier, more expedient, something that has less texture and takes less time.”

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD, Jungian psychoanalyst and author

How to Heal: Charting a Path Forward From the Exhaustion of Excellence

Recovery from burnout in a high-pressure field is rarely one dramatic decision. It’s usually a series of smaller, unglamorous adjustments, made repeatedly, until the body starts to believe them.

Psychoeducation first. Meredith needed to understand, in plain language, what her body had been doing for two decades before she could ask it to do anything differently. Naming the pattern took away some of its power to feel like a personal failing.

Nervous system regulation second. Not a single retreat or a single breathing exercise, but small, repeatable practices, done on ordinary Tuesdays, that give the body evidence it’s allowed to come down off alert. For Meredith this started absurdly small: a five-minute walk outside before her first call, every single day, no exceptions.

Boundary setting third. This is the piece that’s hardest for women whose entire professional identity was built on being the person who says yes. It’s also often the piece that changes the most. Meredith’s boundary wasn’t dramatic. She started leaving her phone in another room during dinner. It took her four months to stop checking it anyway out of habit.

Identity work fourth. Underneath a lot of finance burnout sits a quieter question: who’s this person if she’s not the one who never stops? That question deserves real time, not a slogan.

Coaching or therapeutic support fifth, depending on what’s underneath the burnout. Some women need primarily practical, forward-facing support around pace, boundaries, and career design. Others discover, in the process, an earlier pattern worth understanding more deeply with a licensed clinician. Both are legitimate paths, and they’re not mutually exclusive.

There’s a sixth piece I’d add, quieter than the rest, and it’s about the achieving part Richard Schwartz describes. Meredith’s version of that part had been running her career for two decades without a single day off, and it had done an extraordinary job. Part of the work wasn’t getting rid of that part. It was thanking it, plainly, for everything it had done to get her this far, and then negotiating with it, the way you’d negotiate with an exhausted colleague, for a slightly different pace going forward. That’s not therapy-speak for its own sake. It’s a genuinely different relationship to the part of yourself that never wants to stop, one where you’re working with it instead of being run by it.

Tameka’s version of this work, when and if she chooses to continue it, will likely need to include the additional layer she named so directly in that first session, the specific vigilance required of a woman who doesn’t get to have an ordinary off day without it costing her something extra. That’s not a footnote to her burnout. It’s a load-bearing part of it, and any recovery plan that ignores it isn’t actually built for her.

Meredith is not fixed. I want to be honest about that, because tidy endings are their own kind of dishonesty. She still checks the overnight markets most mornings. She still, some weeks, forgets to eat lunch. But she took a full week off in March for the first time in six years, and she told me, a little sheepishly, that by day four she’d stopped reflexively reaching for her phone every time it buzzed. That’s not a cure. It’s evidence. It’s a body starting, slowly, to believe it’s allowed to rest.

Warmly, Annie

Medical Disclaimer