The Physical Toll of Being a Woman in Finance
The Physical Toll of Being a Woman in Finance
"I felt sick every day. My stomach was hurting, my chest hurt." - Stef, 37, who describes her relationship with financial services as a love/hate affair she can't quite quit.
As Stef spoke, the conflict became crystal clear: her ambition was high, her drive was relentless, her love for a high-pressure, high-reward environment was genuine. Wall Street is where she has thrived. But as she approached her late 30s, she found herself working for a boss who made her life untenable, her body breaking down.
Ambitious women can be drawn to finance because of their brilliant ability to thrive under pressure. Finance rewards people who seek challenge, tolerate pressure, and don't stop. The same drive that fuels their success can also keep them pushing long past the point where their body is desperately asking them to slow down.
"I wear the Oura ring and it was flagging major biometric symptoms that told me — you're not well! And I'm like, I'm not sick. This is just my state right now," said Ashley, who spoke to me while taking time to recover before starting a new job after an emotionally abusive boss left her with insomnia, weight loss, and hair loss.
In financial services, the overall burnout rate sits at 68% (eMonitor Workforce Analytics, 2026). According to McKinsey's Women in the Workplace report, the gap in burnout between men and women has almost doubled in recent years, with women now significantly more burned out than men (McKinsey & Company, Women in the Workplace, 2023).
As a therapist who specializes in working with ambitious women in finance, I see many women who come to my office reporting severe physical symptoms that are related to the destabilizing, demoralizing, and emotionally abusive work environments they struggle with.
Before private practice, I worked with firefighters and EMTs. Their job calls for the body to repeatedly respond to emergency situations that require sustained bursts of adrenaline, what we know as the fight-or-flight response. As a result of this chronic adrenaline in the body, first responders experience high rates of insomnia, panic attacks, chronic pain, and autoimmune diseases.
What I began to notice with women in the New York financial world is that their stress expressed itself in remarkably similar ways. Just like firefighters, these women were receiving signal after signal that their body was tired and overworked. And just as a firefighter is trained to run toward the alarm, these women are overriding their bodies' signals telling them to stop. They just kept pushing through.
When the body perceives any kind of stress, emotional, environmental, or physical, it triggers a fight-or-flight response, a useful surge of adrenaline designed to help us take action. But this stress response is designed to be short-term. When it becomes prolonged, through ongoing emotional pressure, unrealistic work deadlines, constant threats to job security, or 50 plus hour work weeks, the adrenal glands have to run without rest. Biochemist and nutritionist Karen Heard, who has spent decades working with clients on stress-related illness, uses the analogy of factory workers forced to operate 24/7 with no recovery time: eventually production falls off. The result is a cascade of symptoms, fatigue, brain fog, poor memory, irritability.
Karen Heard estimates that 99% of chronic illness traces back to stress, accidents and acute injuries being the rare exception.
The women I work with often come to my office when they are no longer willing to keep living in this state. They speak of missing parts of themselves — a life outside of work, a body that can rest, time enjoying their children. You don't have to live this way. I urge you to ask for more. It's possible to love your job and shift your nervous system — to have a body and a life that are healthy, secure, and thriving.
Here are 3 steps you can take right now if your body is saying no to a toxic work culture:
Move gently, not harder. Chronic stress tempts many of us to push through or shut down completely. Walk, stretch, swim, dance in your kitchen, anything that brings you back into yourself. Let reconnection, not performance, be the goal.
Find one thing that feels good right now. A photo, a patch of sunlight, the smell of food cooking on the stove. Whatever it is, pause and actually feel it. Notice what shifts in your body, a fuller breath, softened shoulders, a small smile. Do this once a day. It's not trivial; it's quietly teaching your nervous system to settle.
Get real support. Your symptoms are the measurable cost of long-term stress. They deserve more than an app and a long weekend. Seek a therapist trained in how stress lives in the body, Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, Sensorimotor Processing, or Creative Arts Therapy. For many people, this is what finally makes them feel like themselves again.
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