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“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.”
Chinese Proverb

Rushing Woman Syndrome is a phrase coined by Dr Libby Weaver and it speaks to the phenomenon that is modern woman: a woman in a mad rush to do everything, and be all things to all people. The woman who is wired but tired, who has the perception that there is not enough time in the day, combined with a never-ending to do list.

Women are now working at work and working at home for their families, doing a frantic double shift with very little rest. This is changing the face of women’s health in such a detrimental way, with stress causing everything from IBS to PMS to menopausal issues.

Adrenalin is the hormone that is unleashed in times of stress. It is the body’s response to danger signals, and it starts and maintains a metabolic cascade: it forces sugar into to the blood stream to maintain high activity, digestion shuts down, the immune system shuts down and the body is on high alert. The upshot is that sleep becomes elusive and isn’t refreshing, we crave sugar to give us energy and to replace the sugar that we are burning, and whatever sugar is left over gets stored as fat (while at the same time we give ourselves a hard time for giving in to sugar cravings). Sugar causes inflammation, hormones become unbalanced, we get bloated, are unable to burn fat and put on weight.

Why do we rush around like that? I definitely can’t say it any better than Libby Weaver herself:

“One reason is because we care so much for the people in our lives. On one level this way of living comes from such a beautiful place. It comes because we have beautiful hearts, but even deeper than that it comes because we made up a story a really long time ago that we aren’t enough the way we are; that we aren’t good enough, tall enough, slim enough, pretty enough, brainy enough, on time enough, that we’re just not enough the way that we are, so we spend our lives trying to please everyone in our realm, putting their needs ahead of our own. We rush around and do all we can to make sure that others love and appreciate us so that we never, ever have to feel rejected, ostracised, unlovable, criticised, yelled at, and like we’ve let others down. It’s not just the physical health consequences that concern me for women. It’s that they live their lives so out of touch with those beautiful hearts, out of touch with how extraordinary they are and in the cloud of false belief that they aren’t enough.”

Dr Weaver’s TedTalk – The pace of modern life versus our cavewoman biochemistry – is awesome, I highly recommend it.

I hope you find this article useful, I will be updating it as new information comes to light.

Keep well,

Sandra