Why high performing women are often the least connected to their bodies

There's a version of high performance that looks entirely convincing from the outside.

A woman who lifts well, manages a demanding career, shows up consistently, and carries herself with the kind of energy that reads as capable and composed. What you can't see — what she may have spent years learning to conceal — is what it's actually costing her. And whether the signals her body has been sending for months, or years, have been acknowledged at all.

I had a conversation recently that has stayed with me.

Jessica Murphy has worked in high-stakes public service for over twenty years. She also lives with inflammatory arthritis, fibromyalgia, ulcerative colitis, a chronic blood cancer, chronic migraines, and ADHD — diagnosed in her forties. She trains with me weekly. And she is, without question, one of the most somatically intelligent athletes I work with.

That correlation is worth examining.

The intelligence that comes from having no choice

Jess didn't develop her body awareness through a mindfulness practice or a somatic training programme. She developed it because her body has, at various points, required her full attention in order to keep her safe. When sepsis arrives quietly, you learn to listen carefully. When inflammation is your daily baseline, you become expert at reading your own signals.

She described this for years as hypervigilance — and it was, in the clinical sense. A nervous system primed for threat, scanning constantly, associating somatic awareness with fear rather than information.

What working together has done, over time, is reframe that capacity. The same attunement that once felt like anxiety has become precision. She can tell me mid-movement where the load is landing. She can calibrate effort against how her body will respond tomorrow. She can draw a clear line between productive challenge and damage — a distinction that takes many pain-free, healthy athletes years to develop.

I don't say this to romanticise chronic illness. I say it because it illuminates something important about what body intelligence actually is, and how most high-performing women relate to their bodies in its absence.

What disconnection actually looks like

The women I work with who don't have chronic illness are often disconnected in a different but equally significant way. They've learned to override their body's signals rather than ignore them entirely. They've become adept at pushing through fatigue, suppressing the quiet pull toward rest, reframing systemic exhaustion as a motivation problem.

They feel the signals. They've just built an exceptional capacity to override them.

This is, in many ways, what high performance training has taught them to do. Push harder. Recover faster. Don't let the body set the ceiling. And for a period, that works. Until it doesn't. Until the energy dips become harder to recover from. Until the luteal phase fatigue they've been ignoring for years starts to land like a crash rather than a tide. Until the nervous system, which has been running at high load with insufficient completion, begins to pull the handbrake.

This isn't burnout as a personality failing. It's physiology doing what physiology does.

What Jess's approach to pacing actually means

Jess told me it took her approximately eight years to genuinely learn how to pace herself. Not because she lacked intelligence or discipline — she has both in abundance — but because pacing requires an ongoing, honest relationship with your body that isn't built overnight.

She plans her week around her energy. She builds rest days in before demanding periods, not after she's depleted. She's learned that transitions — re-entry from holiday, the shift from weekend into working week — are genuinely difficult for her nervous system and ADHD brain, and she structures around them accordingly.

None of that is weakness. It's sophisticated system management. It's the kind of calibration that most high-performing women haven't been given the language or permission to do, because it requires them to acknowledge that the body is not a constant, that it operates in rhythms and cycles and phases that need to be worked with rather than overcome.

The cycle connection

One of the things Jess mentioned — and I've observed it clearly across our months of working together — is the impact of her menstrual cycle on her inflammation, her energy, and even her capacity to make eye contact with me. In her luteal phase, something shifts. She arrives differently. Her pain presentation changes. Her capacity for social engagement narrows.

She said, plainly, that she had never in thirty-five years of having periods joined the dots between her mood and her cycle. And once she did, things shifted.

This is not an unusual thing to hear. Most women I work with have been operating at odds with their hormonal rhythm for decades — not through ignorance but because the dominant model of performance doesn't account for it. The assumption is that consistency means showing up identically every day. It doesn't. It means showing up honestly, to what's actually available, and working with precision rather than stubbornness.

Trust as a training outcome

The most significant shift Jess described in her training isn't a strength metric or a movement milestone. It's trust.

She came to me asking questions about every single movement, anxious about doing it wrong, uncertain whether her body would hold up. That anxiety was the echo of years of her body surprising her in frightening ways. The trust she's rebuilt — slowly, through consistent, intelligent, body-responsive training — is, in her words, something she can't put a price on.

That's what recovery actually is. Not the absence of effort. Not enforced rest. The rebuilding of a relationship with your own system — one where the body is no longer something to manage, suppress, or override, but something to work with.

That's what I'm interested in. That's the work.

If you're a high-performing woman who trains consistently but feels like you're operating below your actual capacity — the Active Shakti podcast episode with Jessica Murphy is worth your time. You can find it on Spotify.

Seema Chopra works with high-performing women to train intelligently, recover well, and sustain performance without burnout