A major exhaustion epidemic is plaguing the modern woman

Last week I was a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I had jet lag after a five-day working trip to the US, my husband was sick in bed, my one-year-old had a cold, was teething and waking up six or seven times every night and my five-year-old wanted his Disney DVD at 6am.

And, no, we don’t have a nanny.

When I did make it to the school gates, I looked with wonder, envy and a teensy bit of bile at the fresh-faced mothers who don’t work.

On Wednesday evening, I had to rush to the city for a work event and managed to catch the last train home. In bed by 1.30am. By Thursday, I was mainlining espressos and had my baby’s cold and high temperature. I was sobbing quietly over the stale bread rolls that were my lunch.

I emailed my editor and said: “I think I’m too exhausted to write that article on why women are so exhausted all the time.”

So Dr Frank Lipman’s new book, Spent, with its seductive subtitle End Exhaustion And Feel Great Again, landed on my desk like a lifeboat in a gale.

His book is aimed at a particular breed of wrung-out modern woman-almost every woman I know.

In the introduction, he talks of Emily, his typical “spent” patient: “When the alarm rings, Emily groans and hits the snooze button. Lying there dreading the second ring, she feels dead on her feet before she is even on them.”

Emily has dull skin and hair, puffy eyes, and relies on caffeine, sugary snacks and carbohydrates to get through the day. She is constantly guilty about all the chores left undone, “but she soldiers on-fending off and engaging with emails, phone calls, bills, employers and employees, children’s schoolwork, family projects and her husband’s life”.

Her brain is foggy, she’s always distracted, she’s too tired to see her friends and even too exhausted for sex. Spent, in Lipman’s context, means you’ve squandered all your energy and are running on empty. Sound familiar? My own relationship with the alarm’s snooze button is pathological, and the last time I bounced out of bed was 1993.

I emailed 24 female friends asking them if, by any chance, they felt spent.

“Where to start?” wrote my friend Cora, a divorcee with three teenage children, who runs her own business. Her day begins at 5.30am, she walks the dog, goes to yoga, gets the children off to school, heads for the office and works non-stop until 8pm.

Then she rushes home to make supper, do the cleaning and laundry and visit the supermarket. She takes work home at the weekend and struggles to fit it in around her children’s complex schedule.

She wrote: “And yesterday, my 16-year-old daughter rang at 3am to tell me she had split up with her boyfriend and was standing outside somebody’s house, and could I get in the car immediately and drive a 100km round trip to pick her up…”

Another friend, Molly, with two preschool age children who wrote she’d been working ludicrous hours, had just “poured the milk in the bin instead of the coffee cup”. But Molly counts herself lucky. Her best friend is a college lecturer who kept her baby under her desk in a car seat for the first two months of his life because he was too young for childcare and she was so anxious about losing her job that she didn’t dare take time off.

So it would appear Dr Lipman is on to something. As a young medic, South African-born Lipman worked in poor black townships and noticed inhabitants rarely suffered the depression, aches, and auto-immune system failures of rich, white patients.

His book identifies the key irritants that exacerbate our sense of exhaustion: poor diet, lack of exercise or even over-exercising, filling our bedrooms with electronic equipment on standby (so our nights are never dark and peaceful) and being out of touch with our bodies’ natural rhythms.

“Spent” is a six-week program including recipes and relaxation exercises to wean the reader off such pernicious modern crutches as caffeine, alcohol and nicotine.

So just how did so many smart and sassy women end up so exhausted all the time? My friend Cora wrote that “our suffragette grandmothers would be turning in their graves about the level and range of responsibilities that have been visited upon us”.

She adds: “The Germaine Greers of this world have a lot to answer for because, while they may have helped us break through the glass ceiling, they failed to understand that in the final analysis the women would be left holding the babies and paying the bills.”

Exhaustion starts from the moment you are told to breastfeed on demand, multiply that through several more babies and, shortly after that, you find yourself on a treadmill of play dates, swimming lessons, football fixtures and general chauffeuring. And as your family grows, you need a bigger house, making you a mortgage slave for most of your adult life.

One friend said she didn’t think modern career women with washing machines and cleaners had any right to complain; not by comparison to our gadget-free grandmothers in the war. Which begs the question: Are we better off than our grandmothers?

I think not. For starters, I don’t have a cleaner.

My middle-class maternal grandmother, who was comfortable but not affluent, had a gardener and a home-help, and never needed to work while bringing up her three children. She led a vibrant social life and wasn’t plagued by 40 urgent emails every day.

Women of my grandmother’s generation weren’t under pressure to climb the greasy career pole while simultaneously being hands-on mothers and domestic goddesses.

Nobody thought them cruel if they sent their children to boarding school and spent the day playing bridge and drinking cocktails. Poorer women often chucked their kids out of the house all day, telling them to amuse themselves. They didn’t beat themselves up for not making cakes.

And it’s pretty clear that women of bygone generations also had time for sex. Not us. As one mate put it: “Bed is purely for sleeping these days.”

Fertility specialists see it all the time; severe dips in libido and fertility because of the taxing lifestyle.

“Nature only wants us to create life if we have the energy to cope with a newborn child, so if the energy gauge drops in us, our sex drive drops at the same rate,” says fertility acupuncturist Gerad Kite.

Looking at my multi-tasking friends, I find it a miracle any found the time to breed, let alone raise children. As for me, I started Lipman’s book thinking I should try his “42 simple steps” to a healthier life.

I got as far as the smoothie ingredients in his preparation chapter and saw the following ingredients: organic frozen blueberries, flaxseed oil, coconut water, raw almond butter … I felt utterly defeated and -yes -bloody well exhausted.

Top tips to tackle tiredness in just six weeks

Sick and tired of feeling shattered? Dr Frank Lipman shares wisdom on how to feel wide awake and enjoy a good sleep.

Cut out caffeine Eliminating caffeine, particularly coffee, is essential. Caffeine is a powerful stimulant that can stay in your body for hours-longer if you use oral contraceptives -blocking sleep neurotransmitters and over-exciting adrenal glands. Alcohol isequally disruptive.

Cut sugar Overwhelming your body with sugar can put enormous stress on hormones. Crash from a sugar high and adrenal glands release cortisol, a steroid-like substance, to help lift you. Your adrenal glands get exhausted trying to regulate sugar levels, so you feel washed out. Cut sugar and sweeteners, but don’t go cold turkey. Replace with fruit smoothies. Load up on superfoods such as berries and broccoli. Glutamine supplements ease craving by tricking the body into thinking it is getting glucose.

No processed fats Like sugar, processed fats and foods are toxic, particularly if you’re run-down. Avoid hydrogenated fats and trans fats as they notonly increase bad cholesterol, they also block the uptake of good fatty acids such as omegas 3, 6 and 9 -needed for healthy brain functions, eyes, joints and skin.

Make your food colourful Phytonutrients are the substances that give foods their smell, flavour and colour. They’re also thought to protect the body from disease, acting as anti-inflammatory, detoxifying, hormone-balancing agents.

The colours in fruit and vegetables house more than 20,000 beneficial chemicals.

Eat early, eat well By midday, the body’s metabolism is peaking, so make breakfast and lunch your largest meals and include a larger proportion of proteins and fats. As daylight wanes, the body slows secretion of active hormones andour metabolism. If you eat late, include nutrient-packed carbohydrates such as fruit, vegetables and whole grains.

Sleep smarter The first rule for better sleep is don’t watch TV in bed. Don’t use your bed for anything other than sleep or sex. Many of us are photosensitive, so the light from your TV will make your body think it is still daylight. Taking small doses of the hormone melatonin (0.5 milligrams) can help you fall asleep.

Breathe properly Take a “breathing break” before bed to aid relaxed, deep sleep. Find a comfortable space, sit and spend five minutes breathing deeply. It is great to settle the mind.

Choose gentle exercise Yoga is a great way for stressed-out bodies to stretch and relax without using up too much energy. Also, practise good posture, which is essential to help balance your body.

Get some sun There is no greater healer than the sun, so get outdoors to give your whole body a boost.

Spent: End Exhaustion And Feel Great Again, by Frank Lipman; is a book that will be released in Australia in September