A mom of 2 explains how she knew it was time to leave her job of 17 years due to burnout and chronic stress

• An Accenture worker quit her job last year due to chronic stress.
• She said that the burnout affected her physical and mental health.

Sarah Waylett, 46, was a single mom with two small children when the pandemic hit in early 2020. That, on top of a high-pressure job, caused her mental health symptoms to progress into physical pain, she told Insider.

"I was a ghost of myself," she said.

She had been working at IT services and consulting firm Accenture for 15 years at that point, starting in consulting and eventually moving up to leading teams in finance and risk, she said.

Waylett said she's struggled with her mental health over the years. Over the course of her career, she took three short-term disability leaves of absence, she described, the first in 2007.

"I was actually having panic attacks every time I went to lift my laptop," she said. "I was definitely in the cycle of habitual burnout over that period of time. What I didn't understand at the time was that it was also affecting not just my mental health, but it was affecting my physical health."

In 2020, she was starting to get hives, she said. Stress was affecting her eating and sleeping, and she started seeing doctors to pinpoint the pain she was experiencing, but "Nobody could really figure out what it meant," she said.

By the end of 2021, she described, her physical and emotional exhaustion as "phenomenal," and that she wasn't functioning well.

"I just realized that I had to do something different," she said. "I put in my resignation in November." Her last day was January of 2022.

Waylett isn't alone in her experience with debilitating burnout. More than half of the 5,000 women surveyed in Deloitte's Women at Work study last year said their stress levels are higher than they were a year ago, and nearly as many said they feel burned out. One third of women surveyed said they took time off of work due to their mental health. Nearly 40% of respondents said that they wouldn't feel comfortable disclosing their mental health challenges at work. That's as a majority of them reported experiencing harassment or microaggressions at work, a figure that increased from Deloitte's 2021 study.

That context might also add dimension to why women have been slow to re-enter the workforce after taking on the brunt of childcare duties in the first few years of the pandemic. Women are more likely to be looking for a new role this year than in the year before, and burnout is the "top driving factor," Deloitte said: nearly 40% of women actively looking for a new company cited it as the main reason.

Things are even worse for women of color. Deepa Purushothaman, an executive fellow at Harvard Business School, recently published research on women of color showing signs of physical illness from workplace stress. In general, she found, 2 out of every 3 women she interviewed were battling chronic stress-related conditions. Purushothaman cites microaggressions and isolation as some of the reasons for the stress.

"I think for women, especially, the pressure to show up in all of these spaces as perfect is heavy," Waylett said. "And it takes a toll. I think it takes a heavy toll until we, as I did, wake up and look around and go, 'There's got to be more than this. I'm so miserable, and I'm not who I know that I am anymore.'"

"To keep going, at some point, was just not an option"

Waylett said that in 2021, she was under a lot of pressure leading a brand new team and spearheading a new project. She said that she watched the people around her take their own leaves of absence for physical or mental health reasons.

"We were dropping like flies," she said. "It was every month… and I understood why, because I'd been there before."

She said that the lack of leeway meant that she needed to keep going at work.

"But to keep going at some point was just not an option," she said. "I was so physically exhausted and just depleted from an emotional standpoint."

Waylett said that she was always the type of person at work to take on new projects as they were given to her, and to constantly look for new opportunities for growth, leadership, and raises. At a certain point, however, she said that the expectations her company had for her were too much.

"Every time I hit a brick wall, I felt personally like I was holding the responsibility of the whole team on my shoulders," she said. "When that happens on a regular basis, everything feels like a threat."

Quitting, she said, was one of the best things she ever did — Waylett currently runs her own mindfulness business to help others recover from burnout, called Dream Garten.

She's still seeking medical help from her physical health symptoms, but says they've improved a lot over the past year.

"When I resigned, I felt like this weight had shifted," she said. " A lot of times we talk about chronic stress and we think about mental health, but it's bigger than that. It is also physical, and I don't think a lot of people make that connection."