Mental Breakdown Triggers in Women: Hormonal, Caregiving, and Emotional Load

There are many potential emotional breakdown triggers in women. They include:

Hormonal Triggers

Hormones can make or break your ability to handle stress. For example, during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, progesterone rises and estrogen drops. This shift impacts the brain’s serotonin system in women who are already vulnerable to mood disorders. In other words, you’re not imagining the low mood, irritability, brain fog, and emotional fragility at this time of the month. It’s biochemically real.

There’s also premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), a severe psychiatric condition affecting about 5% of menstruating women.² It is driven by abnormal sensitivity in the brain’s response to natural hormonal changes. Studies show that women with PMDD have an exaggerated response to hormones. This response can result in crippling mood swings, panic, rage, and depressive episodes intense enough to mimic major depressive disorder.³

Pregnancy also brings a whole different storm of hormonal triggers for breakdowns. Estrogen and progesterone levels skyrocket to more than 100 times their baseline. In early pregnancy, this increase can trigger mood instability and anxiety – even in women with no history of mental illness.

Finally, during peri-menopause, hormones spike and crash unpredictably, often bringing chaos in brain regions involved in emotion regulation. Sleep disturbances, hot flashes, and brain fog during this period can add fuel to the fire.

All of these hormonal disruptions easily push the nervous system past its breaking point.

Emotional Load and Caregiving Roles

The term “emotional labor” originally came from sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who used it to describe the effort it takes to regulate emotions for the benefit of others.⁴ In households, it’s often women who absorb this labor by default.

For instance, studies show women are more likely to remember birthdays, schedule appointments, anticipate children’s needs, and offer emotional support to family members. All of this typically happens in the background, on top of paid work and daily logistics.

Unfortunately, there is an established connection between caregiver burnout and breakdown risk. This risk increases for single mothers and “sandwich-generation” caregivers (women taking care of kids and aging parents simultaneously).

Such emotional load keeps the stress-response system activated for far longer than it should be. Over time, stress overload wears down the ability to function, sleep, focus, or bounce back from setbacks, potentially leading to a nervous breakdown. 

Societal Expectations

There’s a quiet pressure that follows many women into every room they walk into.

Be competent, but not intimidating.

Nurturing, but never needy.

Ambitious, but not aggressive.

These double standards can be exhausting. They create a psychological environment where a nervous breakdown is an understandable response to impossible expectations.

Societal pressure and mental health in women are directly related. Women are expected to be emotionally available at home, professionally capable at work, socially present with friends, and physically polished at all times. The result is what psychologists call “role strain” – the long-term stress of managing multiple, often conflicting roles.⁵

In addition, despite doing the same work, women are still underpaid, under-promoted, and underrepresented in leadership at workplaces. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2023 report, the global gender pay gap remains at around 16%, and women hold fewer than a third of senior management positions worldwide.⁶

What doesn’t always make the headlines is how this inequity affects female mental health and burnout. For instance, women, especially those of color, are more likely to experience impostor syndrome.⁷ Microaggressions, being talked over, passed up, or made to justify your expertise, eventually can wear down your sense of worth. 

Unresolved Trauma

The brain doesn’t file traumatic memories the same way it does regular experiences. Unresolved trauma from childhood stays “stuck” in the amygdala and hippocampus, the regions of the brain responsible for fear detection. 

As a result, memories of traumatic events don’t get properly encoded, which means they don’t feel like the past. They feel like they’re happening right now, in the present. This is why anyone with unresolved trauma could spiral into a nervous breakdown after a seemingly minor argument or stressful event.

Additionally, women, statistically, are more likely than men to experience interpersonal trauma, like sexual abuse, domestic violence, emotional neglect, or repeated invalidation. In fact, a CDC report revealed that one in three women in the U.S. has experienced sexual violence, and many cases go unreported or untreated.⁸

Financial Strain

A long-term lack of financial security keeps the brain in a sustained state of threat. It activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, elevates stress hormone levels, and disrupts sleep, digestion, memory, and emotional regulation.

According to a 2022 report from the American Psychological Association (APA), 66% of women reported money as a significant source of stress.⁹

Women are also more likely than men to live in poverty, take time off for caregiving, work part-time or in lower-paying industries, and retire with less. For single mothers, the scenario is typically worse; nearly one in three single mothers in the U.S. lives below the poverty line.¹⁰

What’s more, financial stress rarely exists in isolation – it tends to amplify everything else. Health issues get neglected, relationships become tense, burnout accelerates, and access to support like therapy, time off, and rest becomes harder to afford.

Perfectionism and Self-Criticism

Many people don’t realize that perfectionism is not a high-functioning personality quirk. It’s a well-documented risk factor for anxiety, depression, and emotional burnout.

Women, in particular, are often socialized into perfectionism from a young age. This kind of conditioning easily morphs into long-term self-monitoring.

Add in the impossible cultural standards around beauty, motherhood, emotional labor, and career success, and you can end up with an unsustainable pressure load.

Self-criticism makes it worse. When people engage in harsh self-judgment, the brain’s default-mode network lights up in the same way it does when we’re experiencing social rejection or physical pain.

Plus, every time a woman mentally beats herself up for not doing enough, she’s reinforcing a stress loop in her brain. And unlike external stressors, internal pressure never lets up. You don’t get to leave it at the office.

Breakdowns from emotional exhaustion are there when you wake up, and they follow you into sleep. You stop feeling proud of what you’ve done and start obsessing over what you haven’t, which can lead to nervous breakdown symptoms creeping in.