Many women grow up learning that relentless work is protection, not aspiration, and our workplaces reward that trauma long before they recognise it. I learned it in the pressure cooker of poverty, where childhoods slip away quietly and survival becomes muscle memory.
At seventeen, I was living in an overcrowded share apartment with four single beds pushed together because it was all I could afford. I worked night shifts and slept in my car in the university car park from dawn until lectures. I lived in a constant state of vigilance that I recognise now as survival mode. There was no gap year for overseas travel and no safety net. There was only one rule: work hard enough to stay afloat.
The trauma behind a work ethic
In many ways, I had learned to tie work to safety long before adulthood. After being removed from my mother’s care following severe neglect, my sister and I arrived traumatised at my father’s home. I didn’t speak for a full year. I hoarded food and flinched at small sounds. A hypervigilant child. This trauma meant overwork didn’t enter my life as ambition. It offered me protection. I believed that if I kept moving, contributing, proving myself, then I might finally feel safe.
That unhealthy wiring carried me into my career. And like so many women, I was rewarded for it. It’s so easy to see when you step back: women are applauded for resilience and reliability, but rarely protected from the systems that demand those traits. The harder we work, the more the world expects us to carry.
And eventually, inevitably, I broke.
What happens when protection turns into collapse
As an Autistic woman, I am predisposed to burnout. My mind wants to learn everything, to dive intensely into every project. These traits made me an entrepreneur, but they also made me vulnerable. My burnout was never about the hours I worked, it was the intensity of my work, a lack of recovery time and a lifetime of absorbing emotional responsibility.
Melbourne’s long lockdowns pushed me over the edge. I logged onto a Zoom meeting with my managing director and cried. I told her I thought the company should replace me because I no longer believed I brought value. The irony is that I was generating close to seven hundred thousand dollars in revenue, personally. Burnout had stolen my love of creating, my creativity, judgment and my sense of worth.
What I remember most from that moment is the voice in my head. My younger self, the girl who learned to survive through vigilance and hard work, was screaming inside my CEO body: emergency. ‘You are not worthy if you cannot keep going. You are only valuable when you can outwork everyone and everything.’ That childhood alarm system, built in poverty and trauma, convinced me that slowing down made me unsafe. That losing stamina meant losing my worth.
Data proves what women already feel every day
Recent data affirms that my experience is not unique. Beyond Blue’s newest insights reveal that one in two Australians are now experiencing workplace burnout, with women, parents and younger workers carrying the heaviest load. It’s proof that burnout isn’t an individual resilience issue, it’s a structural issue that women, already managing the invisible labour of families, are expected to absorb.
If we are normalising the systems that lead us to the dark hole, we must also normalise the structures that will help us stay afloat. For me, what worked was enlisting the help of psychologist Megan Luscombe, who built what I now call my burnout roadmap. It helps me recognise early signs, like the feeling of defeat before the week begins and the lack of human connection that can sustain me. Once I learned my patterns, I could redesign my systems.
That redesign has shaped my leadership.
We deserve better than survival
As the Founder and CEO of The Digital Picnic, I no longer treat recovery as a perk. It is operational infrastructure. The first seven days of every month are fully remote work. It is our reset. A reserved window for deep focus. Our creative exhale. It’s not lip service, our dashboard shows this reset leads to productivity increases. Our ideas improve because creativity lives in the gaps, not the grind.
Research backs this, too. A 2025 study from Aston University and the University of Leipzig found that workaholism erodes moral self-regulation, making people less likely to speak up about ethical concerns. When workplaces normalise urgency and overload, they don’t just drain creativity, they quietly weaken ethical judgment and team safety. Rest isn’t indulgent; it’s the foundation for integrity and innovation.
So we design around human nervous systems, not outdated, arbitrary rules. We align work hours to circadian rhythms rather than insisting on 9am starts. We hire what I call “kind geniuses”: people who bring humility, intelligence and energy-raising presence. Women are often told to be either kind or competent; I want workforces where we can be both, and we can do it without killing our nervous systems and missing all the important family moments.
None of this is soft. It is sustainable performance design. Burnout is not a character flaw. It is a system failure. And women, who statistically carry the largest share of unpaid domestic work and emotional labour, feel the failure most deeply.
I want something different for us
I want workplaces that understand and respect nervous systems as intuitively as they understand profit. I want leaders who see recovery as strategy, not softness. I want ambition that doesn’t require self-erasure. I want women to build extraordinary careers without inheriting the burnout we normalised.
I am calling time on Australia’s overwork addiction. Because I know, from lived experience, that you can sprint for years — until the day you can’t. And when that day comes, the only thing that matters is whether the systems around you were designed to break you… or to support the woman you’re still becoming.