Why the "Push Through It" Approach
Stops Working in Your 40s
by Bex Greenwell, LAc, MAcOM | Hidden Summit Acupuncture
At the risk of sounding cliché: I have a pattern. It feels kind of cringe to say that, but I want to describe it so you can tell me if you have it, too.
A little birdie tells me you do.
Step one: I push way too hard. Work, cooking, the house, the family, the workouts, all of it to eleven. Oftentimes trying to make up for time that I’ve convinced myself I’ve lost.
Step two: my body files a formal complaint. A brutal cycle, a week or two of bad sleep, a stomach that’s suddenly mad at everything I eat. (Bodies can be such Karens sometimes)
Step three: I lose a few days to feeling terrible, and because I’m someone who measures her worth in checked boxes, I feel guilty about it the entire time.
Step four: this is Step One. I get back up and push even harder to make up for the days I “wasted.” Which sets up step one again.
Rinse and repeat. Sometimes just repeat. For years.
If you’re nodding right now: heeey. Pull up a chair.
There is No
Carrot
For most of my twenties I ran on 12 to 14 hour days and considered it a personality trait. I was proud of it. And honestly, my body went along with it, which is the part that makes this pattern so hard to break. It worked. Technically. Not forever, but long enough to become the plan.
What I eventually figured out, and it took me an embarrassingly long time, is that the to-do list does not end. Ever. You can slay it on a Sunday night and by Monday at 9am it’s regrown like a hydra. A very needy, guilt-tripping, insomnia-inducing hydra. There is never a day where you finish everything and finally give yourself permission to the rest, to be relaxed person you’ve been promising yourself you’ll become once things calm down.
Things don’t calm down.
There’s probably some fantastic quote from an extremely quotable person about all this, but I’m just going to talk about carrots. I think about the carrot-on-a-stick thing a lot. The whole point of the carrot is that you never reach it. Damn thing is always just outside arm’s reach. And I’m getting close enough to 40 that I can do the math on what happens if I keep chasing it. I’m thinking you can, too. But that’s not going to stop us, right! Thing is, I don’t want to wake up at 70, look back at decades of 14 hour days, and realize I gave my best years to that stupid carrot. It’s just a carrot.
So I stopped. Mostly. Periodically. Sporadically. Okay, I didn’t. But I’m working on it! Some weeks I’m better at it than others, and I’ve made peace with that. Mostly…
Why It Worked at 25
and Doesn't Now
Okay, here’s the part reassuring part. It means you aren’t weak or lazy or “falling apart.” Your body is running on different hardware than it was twenty years ago (“Yes, I knooow. Screw this new hardware!”), and the push-through strategy was built for the old version.
Your recovery capacity shrinks. Recovery is not just about hours in bed. It’s how efficiently your nervous system shifts out of “go” mode and back into “repair” mode. One way researchers measure this is heart rate variability, the small, healthy beat-to-beat variation that shows your nervous system can switch gears easily. HRV tends to decline with age, which means the switch gets a little stickier every decade. At 25, you could stay up late, work hard, and bounce back by the weekend. At 42, the same schedule leaves a recovery debt, and the interest rate is higher.
Deep sleep gets thinner. The slow-wave stage of sleep is where a lot of your physical repair happens, and the amount of it you get tends to drop as you age. So even on nights when you technically sleep enough hours, you may be getting less of the stage that does the heavy lifting. Less repair per night, plus more to repair, is a math problem that only goes one direction if you ignore it.
Your stress response takes longer to shut off. After a stressor, your body is supposed to bring cortisol back down fairly quickly. With age and with years of chronic stress, that off switch tends to get slower. You finish the hard day, but your body is still acting like the hard day is happening. That’s the wired but tired feeling at 10pm, and sometimes the 3am wake-up.
Your hormonal cushion is thinning. This is the big one for women, and it’s the part nobody warned me about. Estrogen and progesterone do a lot of quiet background work in how you handle stress. Progesterone has a calming effect on the brain, which is part of why sleep is easier when it’s steady. Estrogen influences how you respond to stress, how well you recover from it, and even how sensitive you are to pain. In perimenopause both start swinging and dropping, and that cushion that used to absorb a lot of your overdoing gets thinner. The same workload that your hormones used to quietly buffer now lands directly on your nervous system.
Put those together and you get the pattern I lived in. The hustle hasn’t changed. The shock absorbers wore down.
And That's Why the Crash Looks
the Way It Does
I used to think my rough cycles (like biting-through-tables, She-Hulk rough), my insomnia, and my gut flare-ups were three unrelated bad luck events that happened to arrive after my busiest stretches. They weren’t unrelated at all.
Your brain treats chronic overload as a threat, and when it senses threat, it quietly turns down the systems that aren’t urgent for survival. Your reproductive system is one of the first things it deprioritizes, because from a biological standpoint, a stressed body is not the ideal time to reproduce. Your hormone signaling gets thrown off, and your cycle shows it. Your digestion also gets pushed down the priority list, since “rest and digest” isn’t on the menu when your body thinks it’s in fight mode. And your sleep suffers because the same alert state that helped you power through the day doesn’t have an off switch at bedtime.
Researchers call the cumulative wear from all this allostatic load, which is a fancy way of saying the bill for chronic stress eventually comes due. You can defer it for a while. You cannot defer it forever, and the longer you defer it, the more expensive it gets.
Then comes the part that really keeps the cycle going. When you crash, you feel unproductive, and when you feel unproductive, you overcorrect by pushing harder, and the harder push is exactly what causes the next crash. I did this for years. Boom, bust, guilt, overcompensate. It’s the most reliable way I know to feel perpetually behind and perpetually exhausted at the same time.
What Actually Changed
for Me
The shift was not a new supplement (imagine that!), it wasn’t a new routine, or a planner with better tabs. It was letting go of the idea that my productivity is the measure of my worth.
That sounds like a greeting card, and I know it. But it’s the thing that actually unlocked everything else. As long as my value was tied to output, rest felt like losing. Once I stopped keeping score, rest became just another thing my body needs, like water. Nobody feels guilty for drinking water.
Practically, a few things helped:
I started recovering before I crashed instead of after. Short, boring, unglamorous recovery built into normal days, like a slow walk, a real lunch away from the screen, an evening with nothing planned. That’s cheaper than the week of wreckage that follows when you skip it.
I started treating the early warning signs as information instead of inconvenience. A rougher cycle than usual, a few nights of lighter sleep, a gut that’s suddenly picky. Those are my body tapping me on the shoulder. They used to be things I tried to out-work. Now they’re my cue to ease up a notch.
I stopped trying to make up for lost time. If I have a rough few days, I don’t try to cram them back in. The work will still be there and I will do it at a normal pace, like a person who intends to still be doing this at 70.
And I let acupuncture do what it’s good at, which is helping a stuck nervous system remember how to downshift. It’s one of the few places where I’m lying still, doing nothing, and being treated for it. Fitting, honestly.
A Few Questions
Worth Asking Yourself
If this post feels uncomfortably familiar, here are some things to sit with:
What would you do differently this week if you knew the to-do list would never be finished? If you were never going to catch the carrot?
When are you pushing because something genuinely needs it, and when are you pushing because stopping feels unsafe?
If your body could send you an honest memo right now, what would it say? (“Let’s table this for now?” “Let’s circle back on this later?” “I’ll get to that by EOD?”)
I don’t have neat answers for you. But if you’re still reading, you’re likely not the kind of person who needs one.
Speaking
To you?
If you’re stuck in your own boom and bust cycle, and your sleep, cycle, or digestion are starting to send you messages, we’d love to help you break the loop. Hidden Summit Acupuncture is in Boise, and we work with patients across the Treasure Valley, including Meridian, Nampa, and Eagle. You can book a visit at hiddensummitacu.com. Bring your to-do list if you want. We’ll make you leave it in the car, though.
Bex is a licensed acupuncturist at Hidden Summit Acupuncture in Boise. She cooks a lot, renovates things, and is slowly learning that the carrot was never the point.