The Traits That Make You Successful Are Also Making You Sick

Are you the woman everyone relies on—the one who keeps pushing, performing, caregiving, and holding it all together, even when your body is begging for rest? In this solo episode, I'm exploring the connection between chronic stress, inflammation, autoimmune disease, and the high-achieving woman pattern. 

I talk about why autoimmune conditions disproportionately affect women, how stress impacts the immune system through cortisol and the HPA axis, and why traits like people-pleasing, perfectionism, emotional labor, and caregiving can quietly become health risks. This episode is a deeply personal and science-backed look at what happens when ambitious women normalize stress, and how to start noticing the signs before the body forces us to listen.

In this episode:

• The surprising stat around autoimmune disease and women
• The difference in stress response between men and women and how that shapes the way we handle pressure and manage relationships
•  The high-achieving woman pattern that can make burnout feel “normal” 
•  The role emotional labor and the invisible mental load can play in women’s stress levels 
•  Why ambitious women often push through warning signs instead of slowing down 
•  A simple framework for identifying symptoms, stressors, and nervous system patterns 

Resources:

• Symptom Tracking App: Bearable

Research articles:

• How women are more likely to develop autoimmune disease
• How chronic stress dysregulates immune function
• How women may be more susceptible to stress-related immune changes
• Dr. Shelly Taylor's paper on behavioral responses to stress in females
• Parental burnout and invisible labor among caregivers
• The emotional labor burden on ambitious women in the workplace

Transcript

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the traits that we high-functioning women have that make us successful in the first place, these are the exact traits that can also make us sick. This is well done. A space where we explore the mind skin connection, living in alignment, and what it actually means to live well and look your best. I am your host Kat, a beauty industry insider, mom of twins, and someone who suffered from severe eczema before realizing that true beauty is an inside job. We don't talk about surface level quick fixes here. This is about real insight, practical tools, and learning how to listen to your body. Let's go. Hi, well-beings. Welcome back to the Well Done podcast. I cannot believe it is May already, and I hope everyone had a nice Mother's Day. For me, Mother's Day is tough because, my mom passed away a couple of years ago, and for anyone who has lost their mom and is also a mom, you might feel the same way. But for me, Mother's Day is kind of a complicated day, I want to celebrate myself, but also I do feel this tremendous, absence in my life. So if that's you too... my heart goes out to you, and I hope you were still able to enjoy the weekend. But thinking about my mom actually ties into today's episode. This is kind of an impromptu episode. I actually had something different planned for today, but I was really thinking about my mom and her illness. She passed away in 2024, so she was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, which is a deterioration of the lungs, and she also had rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease. And while pulmonary fibrosis itself isn't an autoimmune condition, it actually can happen and worsen when someone does have an autoimmune disorder. So what exactly is autoimmunity? It's when the immune system loses the ability to actually distinguish the self from the non-self, meaning that your body starts attacking itself. That protective system, your immune system, essentially becomes misdirected, and that can cause inflammation, tissue damage, and impaired organ function, and this can lead to a variety of autoimmune diseases. So in m- the case of my mom, she had an immune system that simply was not functioning properly, and the doctors could not figure out what was causing her condition in the first place, and the only thing that they could do was provide her with immunosuppressants, which is typical for autoimmune diseases. It's medication that suppresses the immune system from, over-firing. Nevertheless, you know, her disease accelerated at a very alarming rate, and she didn't make it. Unfortunately, we never really figured out why or what caused her autoimmune condition. But recently, I stumbled across this stat that made me really pause. So according to the NIH, approximately 8% of the US population is living with an autoimmune disease. But that's not even the crazy part. The crazy part is that nearly 80% of those people that have an autoimmune disease are women. 80% are women. So why is that? So this topic is really about connecting the dots in a way that hasn't really, really been fully explored. A few episodes back, I interviewed a woman named Ginny Priem, she's the author of the framework and book Unsubscribe. And we talked a lot about what happens when high-achieving women, ignore warning signs, and they start to, lose themselves and abandon themselves because they are so used to pushing through. We tend to get into patterns of achievement, people-pleasing, doing more despite feeling exhausted, and it really starts to cost us through our bodies and our health. The irony here is that the traits that we high-achieving, high-functioning women have that make us successful in the first place, these are the exact traits that can also make us sick. And I'm not just talking about the workplace or being an ambitious woman. I'm talking about being somebody that other people rely on, being empathetic, absorbing other people's energy, being a caregiver, and all of those traits that make us excel in our careers, at home, family life. These are also the same traits that can lead to stress-related problems in the body. If you've been listening to this podcast, then you know that I myself have suffered from some health challenges. I had severe chronic eczema for many, many years, and even before that I had thyroid problems, my hair was falling out. And I've learned that in many cases, especially chronic eczema, psoriasis, rosacea, skin problems like that, they're often associated with autoimmunity. And stress, even though it wasn't the only thing contributing to my skin problems, it really was a catalyst, and we already know that stress causes inflammation in the body, and chronic inflammation can really lead to a whole host of problems. So Today, we are going to really dive into the science behind stress and its connection with inflammation in the body, how it can lead to things like autoimmune disorders, but how specifically women are susceptible to these stress-related disorders and illness. And make sure you stay until the end because I do share a small framework that I put together that helps us identify these patterns and hopefully break these patterns. Okay, let's get into it. First, let's talk about the high-achieving and high-functioning woman pattern. What is this pattern? This is not the woman that's falling apart. Like, she is not the woman who can't get her shit together, right? She is the person who actually has it all together. You might be this person in your friend group, or you likely have someone in your friend group who is the one that others go to when they need help. You're the reliable one, the capable one. You show up early. You stay late. You remember other people's birthdays. You follow up on your emails promptly. You're good at managing your own schedule, your family's schedule. And many of us women who are like this, we don't really have a ton of time for ourselves, But we try to make time because we know that that's important. But then that adds to the pressure because being high functioning, being high achieving, we tend to be perfectionists, and we wanna do wellness, even wellness the right way, which means we add to our routines, we ignore fatigue we also don't really give ourselves enough real rest, because rest can feel like we're losing momentum in our lives. It can feel like we're being lazy. And of course, this comes with that pressure of equating productivity with our self-worth. It means that we know we can handle a lot, and we have the capacity to handle a lot, and that is what has helped us move up in our career. But this also becomes a problem. We become so used to this low-grade hum of stress because we're not sticking to our boundaries, we're going above and beyond, and we're ignoring the warning signs. You might acknowledge that you're tired and stressed, But we also think, I'm doing a lot, but so is everybody else." And so we, kind of brush it aside. And symptoms start to emerge, but again, we brush them off. It could be a migraine here and there. You might not be able to sleep well, and suddenly more hair is falling out. This constant flow of stress makes it harder and harder for your body to actually distinguish what is something that needs attention versus something that is normal. And then your baseline stress, right? It starts here, and then it starts to move up and up and up, and now your baseline stress is much higher, and that has a lot of implications for your physical health. But before we get into the science of stress and its impact on our bodies, I do wanna share a little bit about myself and my story, how I grew up and how my own traits, my own habits likely contributed to my skin problems and my health. I had a lot of these high-achieving, high-functioning traits early on. I'm Asian, and my parents were immigrants, and we grew up in a predominantly Caucasian community. My brother and I, we were two out of total three Asian kids in our entire junior high school. So from a young age, there were two things that were really important to me. The first one was fitting in and doing what it takes to fit in, the second one was achievement because my parents had sacrificed so much, and culturally there was a lot of pressure to be perfect and perform well in school and then get a high-paying job, et cetera. But first, wanting to fit in was really key for me All the way from elementary school through university, through, my early career. I wanted to adapt myself, or I learned to adapt myself to the rooms that I was in. So at home, you know, we were very immersed in Chinese cultural things. Like, we spoke exclusively Chinese at home, Cantonese at home. My parents were involved in the Chinese community and every Sunday I practiced Chinese dance with performances sprinkled here and there. But at school, I wanted to blend in, and that meant being agreeable and literally accepting the fact that I was the token Asian friend. And I think I often discounted my own feelings and my own opinions in order be accepted and liked in my friend group. the second piece was the pressure to perform and be perfect. And I think this is something that a lot of Asians identify with. My parents really fit the immigrant stereotype. They were extremely hardworking. They expected me and my siblings to be as well. And because my brother and I, we were so close in age, and this is common, I think, also in Asian households and Asian communities, but we were compared to each other a lot. I always had my brother as kind of the benchmark and the gauge for success and achievement. I always wanted to be just like him and achieve as much as he did. And so that put a lot of pressure on me to, perform. My parents, you know, emphasized that we had to bring home good grades, and not just good grades, like not just straight As, but A-pluses. Like the stereotype there was very accurate at least in my experience, that even an A-minus, so I grew up in Canada, an A-minus is, 80 to 85% or so. And I remember once I was in high school, I got an A-minus on a paper. And for me at that time, that was kind of a failure. And when I saw the grade, I had an immediate full-on meltdown in class. And in the middle of the lecture, I ran out of the room, and I was bawling in the bathroom, crying my eyes out because I had this A-minus, this 83%. And I remember feeling a lot of shame and embarrassment over that one grade. And that was, not uncommon for me, is that if I performed lower than I expected, I would always feel shame and embarrassment. And that pressure to achieve wasn't limited to grades. I felt compelled to prove myself in all these other ways, right? I joined every club possible at school. I was on the yearbook committee. I joined the cheerleading team, the track team. I remember being pretty exhausted throughout high school and university because I had taken on so much, but I also felt like I had to do these things and there was really no other choice. And as much as there was pressure from my parents, I think I put a lot of pressure on myself. And as I grew up and I entered the workforce, that version of me pretty much became the script that I followed. So it was all about work hard, really hard, put my head down, avoid conflict, make sure that I always do good work, and also play the part. I carried that pressure to fit in and belong all the way through into my early career. And I really wanted to work in fashion and the beauty industry now I understand in hindsight why those two industries were so glamorous or what they represented for me. I put so much weight on looking a certain way and the image. I didn't really have a lot of actual confidence in myself growing up, and I thought that if I worked in these industries that that would come, and that if I looked a certain way, dressed a certain way, that I could be part of this world and that that would help me build my confidence, and that I would be then safe, I would fit in and I would be safe. But under all of that, I was just this little kid, this little Asian kid trying to achieve and perform And belong. And ultimately, you know, this is the whole point of this, is that the traits that get us to where we are or get us to succeed,'cause I got what I wanted from my career. those traits can also, wreak havoc on your body and cause chronic stress that then leads to other issues. So if you've been listening to this show you're probably familiar with my story, but I was working in the beauty industry where image is everything, and being perfect and polished was everything, at least at my company, and my own skin was starting to fall apart. The eczema that I had as a kid was coming back worse and worse, and it was appearing all over my body in places that never used to get rashes. And as I moved up in my career and got more responsibilities, I was leading a team and making decisions, I started to notice more and more of these rashes. And flash forward, I went through, a very challenging time where my skin was really, really bad, I had other health challenges. I had a thyroid problem, and my hair was falling out, and I lost a lot of weight. I was down to eighty-nine, ninety pounds. And I think what I was doing was that I was normalizing my stress over time. I was dismissing what I needed to actually feel safe, thinking that if I did all of these things, like reach this level in my career, look this way, that I would be able to trick my body essentially into feeling a certain way. Your body knows otherwise. Your body keeps the score, really. And in my case, it really knew what was going on, and it was trying to send me these signals that I ignored for a long time. A lot of us do this. we ignore the symptoms that we get because we think that they're pretty normal. Like we say, of course I'm stressed. Of course I have a headache because I have three kids. I'm taking care of a sick parent. I work nine to five, or I'm building a business. Of course I'm stressed." We push through and we ignore, and we really shouldn't. So let's talk about the science here because it's really useful to understand how chronic stress specifically can lead to consequences in the body and how this actually occurs. First of all, there is an axis called the HPA axis, and this connects your hypothalamus to your pituitary gland and then your adrenal gland. It's pretty much responsible for the process in which your brain communicates with your body that something stressful or life-threatening is happening, this is essentially responsible for our fight or flight response, it helps us interpret what is stressful So when your brain perceives a threat, it sends these signals down the HPA axis, and that helps your body determine how to address the stressful eve-event appropriately, right? You start to get elevated cortisol as a result. Back in cavemen times, this would have helped us with understanding whether we should fight. Should we fight the lion or should we f-flee from the lion? In modern times, this could happen, when we're getting an email from our boss at midnight, and then suddenly we feel like we're not doing enough, even though we've put in the hours the last two weeks and we are doing more than enough. But we get this feeling like, oh, shoot, they're emailing me at night. Why did I get this email? And you start to spiral. It triggers a response the hypothalamus sends a signal to the pituitary gland, and the pituitary gland sends a signal to your adrenals, and at that point, cortisol is released. And what cortisol does is it boosts your energy, it sharpens your focus, and these are the things that you need because it helps you react to the situation. Again, if you were being attacked by a lion, this would be very helpful because it would help you focus on getting out of that situation, And In the case of the email from your boss, that cortisol and adrenaline helps you get focused and respond. But it's not really helpful if you were about to go to bed, and you see that message. Even if you decide you're going to deal with it in the morning, your cortisol is spiked. And there is now pressure in your body, and you're thinking about the situation. Your body is reacting to the situation. And if that is something that is a common occurrence, like you have a very stressful, high-paced job, or you're a business owner, and it's twenty-four/seven, then you are constantly sending a signal to your body and to your nervous system that you are in a fight or flight mode. And it becomes kind of normal for you to feel that way. This is chronic low-grade stress, and added to that all the other things that you deal with. You've got the emails, you're facing traffic every day, you are handling your kids, The stress response, starts to malfunction a little bit. It doesn't really know the difference between real stress and what's not real stress. And because of that, your body becomes resistant to the signal. There's chronic inflammation, and your immune system doesn't really know what to actually do with it. And that is essentially a recipe for autoimmune disease because remember, autoimmunity essentially means your immune system doesn't know how to function correctly, and the body starts to attack itself. so going back to this idea of stress and the traits that women have that can lead them to illness, while I don't wanna simplify the science, right, there are other factors involved that lead to chronic illness and disease. As an example, hormones could potentially play a role, as estrogen itself can amplify the immune response in the body. But there's this other dimension that I don't think is explored enough, and it's maybe starting to get some traction now, or at least people are looking into it, but it's really around the connection between behavior and societal expectations of women and how we operate that are linked to illness and stress. First of all, what's really interesting is it's a kind of a relatively new area of research. Women's stress was not really studied until the 1990s. All related research, all stress-related research before the 1990s was really around men's physiological response. But then in 2000, a UCLA psychologist, her name is Dr. Shelley Taylor, she published a landmark paper in Psychological Review that really changed everything. What she proposed was that women's primary stress response is not necessarily that classic fight or flight model. She actually coined it tend and befriend. What she argued is that while both sexes do experience the physiological fight or flight,, increased heart rate, cortisol, adrenaline, women's behavioral response is more likely to involve tending, which is nurturing and protection, and befriending, seeking social support and forming alliances and connection. Dr. Taylor and her colleagues highlighted that oxytocin, which is the bonding and trust hormone, is central to this, and it is released during stress in women and dampens that fight or flight response. So why is this important? Well, first of all, what this points to is that women's stress relief actually relies on relationships. It means that for women specifically, social isolation and prolonged social stress can actually amplify health risks. It also connects directly to the traits of high-functioning women, like people who are ambitious professionals, caregivers, mothers, because it explains how we tend to prioritize other people's needs above our own, and we have a drive to nurture, connect, and protect others often at the cost of our own personal health and recovery. And so how this could show up in practice is for caregivers and for mothers, we have this tend part that means we have a nurturing behavior toward children and family, even when we're exhausted, even when we are so depleted, we still show up trying to be the perfect mother, and we have this pressure that leads us to put others' needs above our own, even if it leads to burnout, and physical and mental exhaustion. Then again, this also shows up in high-achieving ambitious women because we tend to push through, internalize our stress, in favor of over-performing, people-pleasing, and prioritizing the needs of other people in our work environment and our teams over actual rest or over ourselves We want to be seen as the ones that other people rely on, and of course, this leads to chronic stress, chronic anxiety, and other issues. So that's the first part. The second part of this is that women tend to carry this other invisible load, in 1983, a sociologist named Arlie Hochschild, coined this term emotional labor, and it refers to the effort that's required to essentially manage one's emotions in order to meet the expectations of others, whether that's in a job, a specific role, a social situation. And it involves us masking or faking our feelings by acting on the surface like we might be forcing a smile even though we don't agree, or we are trying to even convince ourselves that we feel a certain way, even when we don't feel that way, when we feel otherwise. high-functioning women, high-achieving women are especially susceptible to this we may actually habitually suppress our personal opinions or suppress our, desires for rest in order to appear that, like, we're fine. There's a perfectionist trap amongst ambitious women. We tend to put on this mask often, like trying to uphold the image of being a strong mother, a strong leader, habitually suppress, personal exhaustion in order to provide support, maintain harmony, project competence, making sure that others, see us as polished and put together, even though we might not feel it, even if it were to lead to cumulative depletion to anxiety, depression, and physical symptoms. These specific traits of high-achieving women or high-functioning women, even though they are adaptive, they can create this kind of invisible labor that exhausts us, in a twenty twenty-four leadership survey, it found that eighty-nine percent of women reported cognitive depletion from invisible labor. In another twenty ten study, it was found that women who lived in cluttered homes had elevated cortisol levels compared to the men who stayed in the same home. Like, the men had no change in their cortisol levels. So what this points to is that women tend to, be more impacted by their environment than their- male counterparts. Women tend to notice and internalize maybe their environments or the, you know, specifically the clutter as being unfinished work, and that can trigger stress and trigger anxiety. So the bottom line is that not only do we have a different stress response when it comes to fight or flight, we actually may even be more exposed to stressful situations than men. And so while we will thrive on traits like resilience, empathy, being nurturing, we are also burdened by this invisible mental load. And these same strengths that help us achieve and be successful and in relationships can also become liabilities when they essentially lead us to mask our exhaustion, we silence ourselves, and then we suppress our emotions and our needs and push through despite feeling burnout and exhaustion. The body has a way of keeping score, and if the stress response becomes a default, then your body will eventually start to break. And in my case, it was breaking, first with my gut, then my thyroid, my hair loss, and of course my skin. So now let's talk about how do we get ourselves out of this pattern. I put together a little framework, an acronym, and I'm calling it SIGN, S-I-G-N, because really this is about noticing the signs and then taking action. So S stands for symptoms. Your symptoms are the signals, right? We, we don't want to constantly put Band-Aid solutions on symptoms because those symptoms are telling us about something that could be bubbling under the surface. And this can be anything. It could be persistent fatigue, skin suddenly changing, digestion issues, mood swings, hair loss, you name it. This is your body's way of communicating, and so sometimes things can feel one-off, but this is where I suggest keeping track of any symptoms that you have, so you can keep a log or a journal to track your symptoms. But there's also so many apps now that actually make it really easy for you to do this. i found one app, it's called Bearable. Bear as in like animal, B-B-E-A-R-A-B-L-E. And it has over five thousand positive reviews, so check that out if you need an easier way to track your symptoms. I is for inventory. As in take inventory of the stressors in your life. And this is not just things that are pretty obvious, like the high-grade stressors, but this could be the low-grade stressors. Things that are causing feelings of dysregulation in your body. And how I would suggest doing this is take two days of your week, so one is a weekday and then the other is a weekend, and start to track from morning to night your feelings and what you're doing that is causing certain feelings to kind of bubble up throughout the day. You might notice that you are feeling a certain way during, specific tasks, specific conversations. Maybe you feel even guilty when you don't take a break or when you do take a break. Are you in meetings where you feel like your opinions are being dismissed? Do you feel frustration at certain people in your life? Do you feel mom guilt, working too much and not spending enough time with your family? Those are like the things that are kind of always happening, and then there are the high-grade stressors in your life, which could be, potentially something catastrophic happening in your business or you have some draining relationship that's really sucking the energy out of you. So it's really about taking stock of everything that's going on in your life and being cognizant about its impact on the way that you feel and your nervous system. And then that leads us to G, which is get honest. I couldn't think of a word that starts with G, but, you know, get honest. And this is about reflecting and noticing the patterns. So first you've spotted the symptoms, then you've taken inventory about the way you feel and all the stressors in your life. Now you're trying to connect the dots and be really honest with yourself about what specific events, conversations, et cetera, are linked to the way that you feel, and therefore potentially causing certain symptoms. used to find myself getting really itchy and scratching all the time when I had to go into the office for work. And miraculously, from Thursday through Monday,'cause our, the office that I was working in was only twice a week, those four days I would be completely fine, not itchy, not scratching, and then all the rashes would come back when I had to go into the office. So this is really about asking, is there a pattern here? Where am I saying that I'm fine when I'm really not? What am I tolerating right now that is potentially causing symptoms? If my body is keeping score, what is it trying to tell me? We know that we can handle a lot, We're high-achieving, high-functioning women. We have the capacity to do a lot and to do a lot of good work. But just because we can handle the work doesn't mean that we should. And this was one of the hardest lessons that I've had to learn throughout my career and my life. I feel like I was constantly over-delivering and trying to make everybody happy, and this ultimately really affected me and my health. And I'm still trying to unlearn this because this is behavior that you've really been conditioned on, your entire life. So it's gonna take a while to notice and unlearn these things. Finally N,'cause we're spelling SIGN here. N is nervous system reset, after you've identified everything that's causing you stress in your life, and you become really honest about what that is. Now it's time to unblock and unlearn and reset. And there's so many ways to do this, like there's meditation, there's breathwork, journaling, going for a walk in nature and reflecting. But the point is to get yourself out of the constant day-to-day cognitive hum, cognitive load, and just be present and try to unblock if you feel pressure physically in your body. And try to give yourself some rest. We are so used to thinking of rest as potentially being something that holds us back a little bit or we're not being productive when we're resting. But I actually think rest is the opposite. it's something that is really needed in order to come back with fresh ideas, more motivation. You're able to handle more when you've actually given yourself a break So that was it, the SIGN framework. If you do try it, let me know what you're finding and what comes up for you. The goal ultimately isn't to do less, right? Or to be less ambitious, be a less motivated person, be a less caring person. Like, I still want to achieve everything, but I don't wanna pay for it in my health. You wanna enjoy the fruits of your labor. You don't wanna achieve everything only to be met with a lot of health and physical challenges later. Being an ambitious, empathetic woman who cares deeply about her family, her relationships, and also has the capacity to work really, really hard, I think that is a huge gift. But we are not machines. Our bodies come with a nervous system, and that nervous system needs to feel safe. It needs to have rest. It needs to have you check in before it starts screaming, literally screaming for your attention. As always, if this episode resonated with you, please share it with a friend who might find this information useful and also might need a reminder to slow down. also dropped the research articles and resources that I used for this episode in the show notes if you care to peruse through any of those. And come find me on Instagram because I always love to hear what came up for you. Until next time.