Introduction

Ask the question ‘how are you’ of any staff member on UK campuses and after ‘you know, busy busy’, a common response is ‘I’m permanently tired’.    There’s an epidemic of fatigue sweeping across our universities, and it’s been normalised.  But it’s not normal.

Many of my clients come to me in the middle of a kind of tiredness that is hard to describe to people who haven’t felt it. It is not the tiredness that a decent night’s sleep sorts out, or even a proper holiday. It is a flat, bone-deep exhaustion that has settled in so completely it has started to feel normal and that, I think, is the most worrying part. 

Running on empty should feel like a one-off crisis that will pass, not an inevitable fact of working life.  

If you are a leader in higher education, you will have seen this or experienced it.  Because in my decades in the sector, and in the coaching work I do now, I have never known so many bright, committed, experienced women to be this tired. Tired in a way that multi-vitamins, 9 pm bedtimes and the occasional mindfulness app are not going to touch.

So this short article is all about me calling out the acceptance of bone-weary fatigue.  It’s not normal, it’s not inevitable and it needs to stop so that you can live life to the full.

Our Internal Narrative about Fatigue

When exhaustion becomes the constant backdrop of your working life, the narrative that tends to emerge is a personal one. I’m not resilient enough. I’m not coping as well as everyone else seems to be. I used to be able to handle this – what’s happened to me?

And that story is not just unhelpful. It is, in most cases, factually wrong – and worse, it leads to a passive acceptance of permanent fatigue.  Which in turn can detrimentally affect mental and physical health.  

The evidence increasingly shows that fatigue is not simply a function of how much you have done. It is also – and sometimes primarily – a function of how much your brain has had to manage competing and conflicting demands simultaneously. The cognitive control regions of the brain work significantly harder when you are juggling misaligned goals – and that elevated demand has a real metabolic cost that accumulates across the day, and across the week, and across the months if nothing changes.

Put more plainly: tiredness spikes not when you are at your busiest, but when what you are doing feels futile, or when it sits in conflict with what you believe actually matters.  Your purpose, your values, your beliefs – the core of you that underpins your daily waking life.

This pernicious form of fatigue arises because your brain has been doing two jobs at once – the visible job, which is the one on your job description, and the invisible job, which is the constant, costly business of managing the gap between what you are doing and what you believe you should be doing.

What that gap looks like in higher education

This isn’t an abstract concept.   I have sat in enough senior leadership meetings, navigated enough reviews, strategic debates, restructures, and worked with enough women across enough institutions to know exactly what that gap looks like in practice.

It looks like:

• implementing a decision you think is wrong, with no authority or power to change it or to say so. 
• championing wellbeing to your team while slowly burning out yourself, and knowing, uncomfortably, that the hypocrisy is visible to anyone who cares to look.
• spending three hours in a committee that is consuming enormous collective energy and producing very little of value, while the work that actually matters – the strategic thinking, the proper conversations with your team, the deep focus that leadership genuinely requires -gets permanently pushed to when things quieten down, which never comes.

And all the while, you are managing upwards, managing downwards, managing the emotional temperature of people around you, and striving to regulate your own internal reaction to all of it – and presenting, publicly, as someone who has it broadly together.

That is an enormous amount of internal strain and ‘goal’ conflict. And goal conflict, the research shows, is cognitively expensive. The brain does not fire on all cylinders when it is constantly suppressing the tension between what it is being asked to do and what it believes it should be doing. It rations energy. It powers down. It gets truly exhausted in a way that rest, on its own, does not fully address.

The Science Bit

Let me be specific about the scale of what I am describing, because sometimes it helps to see the numbers rather than just feel them.

A major UK-wide study of higher education staff – Supporting Staff Wellbeing in Higher Education (Wray & Kinman, Education Support, 2021) – found that over half of HE staff showed probable signs of depression, and that nearly eight in ten reported regularly intense workloads. Almost a third said they felt emotionally drained from their work every single day.

Perhaps the most telling figure of all: 59% said they would fear being seen as weak if they sought support for how they were feeling. In a workforce where the majority are showing signs of depression, the majority are also too afraid to say so. 

A more recent systematic review of 60 studies covering over 43,000 university staff globally (Cadena-Povea et al., International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2025) confirmed that the primary drivers of burnout in higher education are workload, poor institutional support, and workplace conflict – and that women are disproportionately vulnerable. Women in leadership roles are not only managing the formal demands of complex, under-resourced roles. They are also absorbing the hidden emotional labour that still, in practice, falls disproportionately to them – the pastoral weight of holding teams together, the invisible relational work, the constant code-switching between what the institution needs to see and what the job actually feels like from the inside.

That is a great deal of expensive goal conflict. No wonder folk are exhausted.

I’ve Been There Too….

I intend to share something personal here, because I think it is relevant, and because I am always a little wary of writing about burnout without being honest about my own relationship to it.

I was signed off work for stress in my mid-career. Four weeks that felt, at first, like enforced idleness – and I will own that I was not graceful about accepting it. I felt ashamed. I felt like I had failed, in a way that would have consequences I could not yet predict but was fearful of. I was embarrassed in a manner that I now recognise as entirely manufactured by a culture that treats the acknowledgement of human limits as a professional liability.

What I could not see at the time – what I could only see later, with distance – was that it wasn’t a Jacinta Ardern moment (who famously stepped aside from her premiership stating that “I know what this job takes. And I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice”.  Rather, I had spent a long time unconsciously managing the gap and allowing that to ramp up my own exhaustion. Again – this is the gap between my deeply held values and the decisions I was asked to own and drive forward publicly. And it was juggling the gap between the pace I knew was reasonable and sustainable and the machismo pace that was expected. Finally, it was the gap between the version of myself I brought to work and the version I wanted to bring home.  Me. That relentless suppression had a cost, and the cost had accumulated in the background until, suddenly, it was overwhelming.

What I know now, and what I try to bring to every client conversation, is that recognising what is actually happening – naming the gap, really seeing and believing the cost of carrying it – is OK.  It’s not terrifying or catastrophic.  It is the start of something better.

What helps, and what doesn’t

I am going to be direct here, because I think the leadership development and wellbeing industry does women in senior roles a disservice by focusing almost entirely on the individual and almost never on the conditions.

Yoga apps do not fix this. Resilience workshops do not fix this. Being told to prioritise self-care by an institution that has created the conditions generating the exhaustion is not, in fact, supportive – it is a deflection of accountability dressed up as one.  Too harsh? 

Which isn’t to say that you are helpless in the face of a punishing culture.  Far from it!  You can control your own responses to this stuff – but it has to start with getting crystal clear on where the gap is – between what you are spending your energy on and what you believe matters actually. That sounds deceptively simple, and it is not. But it is the right question, and it is the one that tends to get lost in the noise of a working week that is already full before it has begun.

The brain that has been rationing its energy because the work feels futile or misaligned does not recover through rest alone. It recovers when it finds something worth spending itself on again – when there is enough clarity about purpose, and enough true agency over how to pursue it, that the constant suppression of conflict can, at least partially, ease.

I am not for one moment suggesting that the institutional pressures are imaginary, or that the financial crisis bearing down on higher education is not real and consequential. Both are all too real. But I have seen, repeatedly and without exception in my coaching work, that the external circumstances do not need to resolve themselves before something can shiftinternally. The relationship between you and those circumstances is something you have more agency over than you may think.

That shift – from enduring the conditions to leading consciously within them – is what I do.  It’s not an easy ride but it is utterly worth it.