In the last few years – after the COVID-19 pandemic and the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of our country – Ukrainian women have more often begun to complain about emotional devastation and burnout.
Forced isolation during the pandemic, constant stress from enemy missile and drone attacks, combining professional duties, household chores, and caring for loved ones only deepens emotional distress.
UNN investigated what science says about women's emotional burnout, what factors most affect exhaustion, and how to maintain a balance between different roles without harming mental health.
What is "burnout" in simple terms
In everyday life, "burnout" often refers to any severe fatigue, irritability, or overload. But the World Health Organization (WHO) uses this term more precisely.
Burnout in ICD-11 is a state resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Its key characteristics are exhaustion, increased mental distance from one's job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job, and reduced professional efficacy.
WHO identifies excessive workload, high work pace, lack of control over tasks, long or inflexible hours, lack of support from colleagues or supervisors, bullying, violence, discrimination, and role ambiguity as major risks to mental health at work. All of these can be exhausting in themselves. If household duties, which do not disappear after the end of the shift, are added to this, the load becomes continuous.
Do women really experience burnout more often?
Studies do not confirm that women always and everywhere "burn out" more than men.
Almost 200 scientific publications in this field, published on the ScienceDirect platform, prove that women, on average, report emotional exhaustion slightly more often, while men more often demonstrate depersonalization, i.e., detachment from people and work. The authors emphasized that the difference depends on which component of burnout is being assessed, as well as on the context of work.
At the same time, in a number of professions (especially in medicine and care for the sick, infirm, or children), women more often report emotional exhaustion and show increased rates of burnout.
Thus, a survey conducted among doctors showed that female doctors more often experience manifestations of burnout, and also face factors that exacerbate it: discrimination, overload, less autonomy, pressure to combine work and family roles.
Why is the risk of "burnout" higher for women than for men?
First, it is important to understand that the dominant factor when it comes to burnout risks is workload distribution, not gender.
According to WHO data, 67% of women work in the paid global health and care sector and perform approximately 76% of all unpaid care work.
In turn, the International Labour Organization (ILO) reported back in 2024 that in 2023, 708 million women worldwide were out of the labor market due to care responsibilities, while among men, this figure was 40 million. The statistics shown illustrate an uneven distribution of responsibilities, which directly affects recovery, time for sleep, treatment, rest, and basic daily life.
In addition, it is worth mentioning a systematic review from 2025, dedicated to the conflict between work and family responsibilities in women, which showed a link between so-called dual presence and the risk of physical and mental problems. Researchers associate this effect with the amount of domestic work, the conditions of paid work, and psychosocial factors of work organization. Another review notes that unpaid domestic and care work is associated with a greater mental burden, poorer quality of life, higher levels of anxiety and depressive manifestations, especially when a woman does not have enough time for rest and self-care.
What signals should not be ignored to maintain emotional health?
Mental health practitioners – psychologists, psychotherapists, and psychiatrists – emphasize: in the early stages, burnout may not at all resemble complete exhaustion. During this period, a woman may face such phenomena:
- loss of motivation;
- decreased self-confidence;
- emotional abruptness;
- avoidance of complex tasks;
- staying late at work;
- refusal to rest;
- working without breaks.
A person can still maintain visible productivity, but this requires spending more and more mental resources, which are already becoming limited.
A separate alarming signal is when even a long rest does not restore the feeling of resourcefulness. If, after a weekend or a few free evenings, a woman feels exhausted, cannot gather her thoughts, feels guilty about any pause, and gradually loses interest in work, it is not about ordinary fatigue after a busy work week.
this no longer resembles ordinary fatigue after a difficult week.
How to maintain a balance between roles and tasks and avoid "burning out"
The first step is to stop assessing your emotional and physical state "by eye." Experts advise first determining what exactly causes psycho-emotional tension: an excess of responsibility, uncertainty, difficult relationships with colleagues, lack of support, or the inability to combine a work schedule with family responsibilities. For this, it makes sense to record, at least for a week, what time is actually spent on and what takes the most energy. Such an audit allows you to see not only paid work but also "invisible holes" through which resources "leak": household planning, queues of tasks, agreements, care, and constant online availability.
The second step is to regain some control. WHO directly calls the lack of control over the workload one of the risks to mental health.
And Mental Health Foundation experts advise regularly reviewing priorities, tracking the actual duration of working hours, speaking up when demands become excessive, and not confusing long hours with efficiency. In practice, this means having the opportunity to have a defined start and end of the working day, breaks, time for household chores, and separate time to be alone with oneself, or to reflect, "recharge," or simply take care of one's body.
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The third step is to set boundaries. Psychotherapists motivate women to consciously separate work from personal time, especially if they work remotely:
- do not respond to work messages in the evening and before the start of the working day;
- do not transfer work tasks to weekends;
- do not cancel rest due to accumulated small tasks;
- use the lunch break as a pause, not as a reserve slot for finishing tasks.
The fourth step is to change working conditions or the job itself without hesitation if it worsens mental and physical well-being, review the workload (official and domestic), and delegate household duties.
If a person constantly works overtime, lacks support, faces discrimination, or lives in a state of continuous stress, a few days off and self-care will not eliminate the cause of exhaustion.
When to seek help
It is necessary to seek additional support from specialists when stress lasts a long time, affects daily life, causes pronounced distress, worsens sleep, concentration, relationships, or the ability to perform usual duties. It is better to stop overload earlier than it leads to a long breakdown or loss of working capacity.
Burnout in the modern world: what needs to change at the global level
The Mental Health Foundation indicates that employers should regularly review the realism of the workload, support parents and caregivers, create conditions for open discussion about stress, encourage the use of vacations and breaks, and not informally punish for seeking psychological help.
The CDC also emphasizes that changes in workplace policies and practices are the best way to reduce burnout.
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