The Young Woman Who Grew Tired Before She Became an Adult
37 percent of young women between the ages of 16 and 29 say they feel stressed, nearly twice as many as young men of the same age. Six out of ten people aged 16 to 24 say they suffer from anxiety, fear, or worry—a figure that has risen steadily over the past twenty years and is higher among girls than boys in every survey. We’re no longer talking about a marginal group. It’s the norm.
Something has shifted in terms of where exhaustion begins. The woman I wrote about earlier—the one who forgot to rest—built up her exhaustion over decades, career after career, responsibility after responsibility, until her body finally rebelled. For many young women today, that same exhaustion sets in much earlier—sometimes as early as their teens—before they’ve had a chance to build anything worth losing.
Psychology has a term for part of what lies behind this: “self-silencing”—the tendency to silence one’s own needs in order to protect a relationship or belong to a group. It’s rarely a conscious choice. It’s something learned early on, often as early as the first time a girl is met with a certain reaction when she speaks up, cries, or asks for something for herself. Affirmation comes more easily when she’s compliant, and is met with silence when she asserts herself; the body learns this pattern long before the mind has had time to put it into words.
You see it in everyday scenes that go almost unnoticed until you know what to look for. The girl who apologizes before she’s even had a chance to say what she thinks. The teenager who replies, “I’m fine,” to a question about how she’s doing—for the third time that week. The young woman who is the one everyone in the circle of friends turns to, who keeps the group chat going, who remembers everyone’s birthdays but forgets her own exhaustion until it becomes too overwhelming to hide.
This pattern rarely manifests in just one way. Sometimes it becomes outwardly visible—as apathy, a lack of energy, a nervous system that eventually shuts down because the struggle feels impossible, a girl who stops raising her hand, who can no longer manage what once felt effortless. Just as often, it goes in the opposite direction: a heightened sense of control directed inward—toward grades that must never be anything but top marks, toward the body, toward performance itself. This form is the hardest to detect from the outside, because it is rewarded every step of the way. No one worries about a girl with top grades in the same way they do about one who seems to be struggling; on the contrary, she is celebrated, which makes it even harder for her to ever ask herself whether the price is reasonable. Both directions—the collapse and the control—stem from the same nervous system seeking a grip on the only thing that still feels within her control, just in different directions.
Add to this a flood of images and expectations that today reach girls even before puberty is over, and it becomes clear why this particular group stands out in the statistics. Screens rarely create these patterns from scratch. They take what was already there—self-silencing, pressure to perform, a nervous system that has learned that worth must be earned—and spread it faster, to more people, earlier in life than ever before.
The strange thing is that this is happening in one of the world’s most gender-equal countries, a Sweden where girls formally have every freedom to take their place, speak their minds, and choose their own path. But self-silencing is rarely about formal freedom. It’s about the fear of losing a relationship or a sense of belonging if one exercises that freedom to the fullest—a fear rooted in the nervous system rather than in the law, and one that no single gender equality reform can resolve on its own. One can have the full right to be heard and yet have learned that it comes at too high a cost to do so.
The cycle rarely ends with the individual girl, either. An entire generation that normalizes exhaustion as the price of being good enough shapes the next generation over time, starting in the nursery—the same pattern repeated in new bodies. And when so many young women are burned out before they’ve even had a chance to build an adult life, a career, a relationship, or a secure sense of who they are, it becomes harder to be surprised that so many are waiting longer and longer to start a family—or never do so at all. What begins as one girl’s adaptation becomes, on a large enough scale, a societal issue.
The older woman often has something to mourn when she realizes she must slow down—a career, an identity, a life built around delivering results. The younger woman has rarely had time to build anything at all. She is exhausted before she knows who she is beyond simply being accommodating, and that grief is harder to put into words, because there is no earlier version of her to miss.
This pattern isn’t her fault, and it’s rarely the screen, the grade, or the individual demand that’s the real culprit. It’s a way of relating to herself that began far too early. The only thing that truly disrupts this is an environment that asks one more time when the answer is “I’m fine”—an environment that validates setting boundaries just as much as it does achievement, and that dares to show that resting isn’t the same as giving up.