The Midlife Productivity Myth: rethinking work, energy and wellbeing
Why doing more stops working in midlife — and how protecting your energy, movement and boundaries makes for a better working day.
In my late twenties I worked for an interior design company. It was a relaxed, happy job where most of my day was spent leafing through fabric books, and I loved it. Every lunchtime I’d leave the office, walk down through the town to the river and back, and eat my sandwich on a park bench somewhere that felt calm.
I was the only one who did this. The office was full of women, and everyone else stayed at their desk, eating and working through lunch, sitting still from morning until they went home.
At our first full staff meeting, when we were asked for any comments, I said it. I suggested it would do everyone good to take a proper lunch break, to move and get outside. I genuinely believed it would help - not just our health, but the mood in the office and the quality of the work. My boss shut it down in one line: “If you want a break, you can go and work for the council, where you get three a day.” Everyone put their heads down, and the meeting ended.
No one is coming to tell you to stop
I didn’t stay there much longer. The values weren’t mine, and I’ve been something of a free spirit ever since. But that job taught me something I’ve carried through the rest of my working life: no one is coming to tell you to stop. No one in any workplace is going to look up and say, “I think you’ve been working too hard, go and take a break.” You have to learn what’s good for you, and then you have to give it to yourself.
I still do. Even now, working from home, I take a short walk after lunch, sometimes only ten minutes round the block. It isn’t wasted time. It resets me, and I come back to my desk clearer than I left it.
Somewhere along the way, most of us were taught to be busy machines. Do more, say yes to everything, keep going. But the load only grows, and past a certain point our productivity quietly falls away with it. The work stops getting better; we just get more tired. What actually helps is the opposite of what we’ve been trained to believe: ring-fenced time for ourselves, protected and non-negotiable.
Midlife, menopause and workplace support in the UK
We all know that different seasons of life bring different energy. Some years we have time and space; others we’re stretched thin. Midlife adds its own layer - shifting hormones, broken sleep, energy that doesn’t always arrive when we want it to. Perimenopause and menopause are part of this picture too, and only now are they being talked about properly in the context of work and workplace support here in the UK. None of it means we’re doing less well. It means our needs have changed, and the old “push through” approach serves us even less than it used to. If anything, this is the stage of life when making space for yourself matters most.
The mental load women carry
For women, there’s another weight underneath all of this. We don’t just have a job or a career. We have the role that comes before the job - homemaker, peacekeeper, organiser, chef, cleaner, the family PA, the one who remembers. Even in households that share things far more equally than they used to, mine included, so much of the invisible organising still seems to land with us. Before we’ve even started work there’s a mental list already running, and when something needs doing at home it’s usually our own work that gets dropped to make room for it.
Putting the big rock in first
There’s an old analogy I come back to often. Imagine a jar, and a pile of rocks in different sizes, down to fine grains of sand. The jar is your day. If you pour the sand and the small stones in first, there’s no room left for the big rock. But if you place the big rock in first, the smaller stones settle into the gaps around it, and the sand trickles in to fill whatever’s left. Everything fits, but only if the big thing goes in first.
So the real question becomes one of priorities. What matters most today? What would make this a good day? How do you actually want to spend the hours you have?
Finding that balance at work is the hardest place to ask it. The desk culture is strong, the interruptions are constant, and movement is the first thing to go. But it’s also where it matters most, and where the smallest changes count. We accept a driver alert in our cars — a nudge that tells us we’ve been at the wheel too long. Maybe we need the same at our desks. An alarm every hour: get up, move, drink some water, eat something, then sit back down. And a real cut-off at the end of the day. Being disciplined about not opening work emails or taking calls after a certain hour. I’m as guilty as anyone of letting that line blur, but when the boundary is there, everything feels steadier. The work is still there in the morning. It always is.
For me, the big rock is often my exercise, the hardest thing to squeeze around work and family, so it goes in first, before the breakfasts, the dinners, the odd phone call, the flurry of emails. All the small stones that will happily expand to fill the whole jar if you let them. Everything else settles around it, and I end the day feeling like I had a handle on it, rather than the day having a handle on me.
So take the walk. Take the lunch break no one’s offering. Claim the early hour before the house wakes. It isn’t time taken from the day, it’s what lets you meet it. And no one is ever going to hand you that permission. It has always been yours to take.
It’s also why our retreats exist. A few days where the space has already been made for you, the details are already handled, and the only thing on your list is to rest, move, eat well and feel properly looked after. Sometimes the most useful thing we can do is let someone else hold it all for a while.
If that’s something you need, you can see where we’re heading next at Zest Life Retreats.
