The Wrong Fuel: Why Pushing Harder Was Never the Answer

In the first article in this series, I named the quiet epidemic of exhaustion I see in so many women, and called it what it truly is. Not a personal failing, but the result of being handed a single model of power that was never designed with women's biology in mind.

Now let's look at why, because once this clicks, it’s a game changer

Fuel is fuel right? Wrong

Think about diesel and petrol. Both are perfectly good fuels. Both will get a car moving beautifully, powerfully, reliably. Put diesel into a petrol engine, though, and you won't get a car that simply runs a little worse. You'll get a car that grinds to a halt, and possibly an expensive trip to the garage.

Neither fuel is better than the other. Neither is weaker or stronger, superior or inferior. The only question that actually matters is whether the engine is receiving the fuel it was built to run on.

I meet so many women who are running their entire lives on the wrong fuel. This isn't a metaphor about weakness. It's a metaphor about mismatch, and once you see it, you can't un see it.

What the Science Suggests

Masculine patterns of behaviour, the drive for competition, the sharp focus, the appetite for aggression under pressure, are closely linked to testosterone. Men produce testosterone in significantly higher quantities than women, 10 to 15 times more. Women have some, of course, but only a fraction of the amount.

When a woman spends her working life operating almost entirely from this masculine mode of competition and relentless output, because that's what her culture, her workplace, and often her own upbringing have taught her is the only way to be valued, her body has to find fuel for that mode from somewhere. Without the testosterone to sustain it naturally, she reaches instead for her stress hormones. You know what they are. They are adrenaline and cortisol.

I think this goes a long way towards explaining why women are more prone to burnout than men. We are not weaker. We are simply paying for masculine output with a currency our bodies were never built to spend so freely.

The Cost of Living in Overdrive

Recent UK data bears this out starkly. Burnout at some level now affects a clear majority of the workforce, and women consistently report higher rates than men, alongside a greater likelihood of taking time off for stress related mental health challenges. High workloads, unpaid overtime, and the invisible weight of unpaid caring responsibilities show up again and again as leading drivers of exhaustion, and women shoulder a disproportionate share of all three. I see this reflected constantly in the women who come to my programmes.

When a woman lives for years in this highly adrenalised, cortisol driven state, the cost shows up everywhere. In her sleep. In her digestion and immunity. In her confidence. In her closest relationships, which quietly starve when she has nothing left to give at the end of a day spent in overdrive. Even in her sense of spiritual connection, that quiet inner knowing that so often goes silent when life is lived at full speed, with no space for rest or reflection.

None of this happens because a woman is doing something wrong. It happens because she is doing something unsustainable, at the direction of a world that told her it was the only option she had.

Time to Reframe

Here is the moment I most want to land with you. Burnout is not evidence that you are not strong enough. It is evidence that you have been running on fuel that was never built for your engine.

This doesn't mean masculine energy has no place in your life. Sometimes there is real value in focus, drive, and pushing something over the line by Friday afternoon. The problem was never that masculine energy exists within you. The problem is that so many women have been taught it's the only energy available to them, the only version of power the world will respect.

There is another way to be powerful. One that doesn't cost you your health, your relationships, or your peace to sustain.

In the final article in this series, I'll show you exactly what that looks like, and offer you an invitation into a different way of being effective in your work and your life. One built on the fuel your body was actually designed to run on.

This article draws on research into the Soft Power Paradigm from One of Many Ltd, alongside recent UK workplace data from Mental Health UK's Burnout Report 2026.