For nearly two decades, Nat Hugill was the woman who never dropped the ball. Then, a chronic burnout diagnosis on her 37th birthday stopped her cold. Now an accredited Nervous System & Burnout Coach, the former event lead and performer writes about a life that looked like she was thriving where she was, in fact, barely surviving. Sound familiar?
It was 5am on event day and I was running on three hours’ sleep. Same as the night before, and the week before that.
I had a radio on my hip, a clipboard in hand and the first fire of the day had arrived before my coffee. A supplier was late, a marquee was in the wrong spot and the venue rep needed me to move a piece of fencing by 25 centimetres to meet health and safety compliance. I sighed, stifled the surge of frustration, smiled, said “No problem” and got it sorted, just as I’ve always done.
By the time the gates opened, I’d put out eleven fires and given a pep talk to my overworked colleagues. That coffee I ordered? Cold, ignored, sitting on a speaker where I’d absent-mindedly left it while solving everyone else’s problems.
Funnily enough, that cold, abandoned coffee was a fair representation of how I treated my own needs while being useful, available and CEO of Capable for everyone and everything else.
For eighteen years, I lived in high-pressure, high-stakes rooms. I produced metro, major and global events, directed my own production company, ran two performing arts academies and worked stages across New Zealand as a professional MC and performer. In 2023, I reached what felt like the peak of it all as a Host City Event Lead for the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
The whole way through, the qualities I was praised for were always the same: reliable, detail-orientated and willing to go above and beyond. “I’ll rest when I’m dead” was a joke I made a lot, and the sad thing is that I meant it. On the surface, it was a glitzy life with incredible highs. Underneath, I wore my exhaustion like a perfectly tailored suit – impeccably presented, professionally flawless, but it was hiding that I was slowly unravelling.
When my World Cup tenure ended, despite 80-hour weeks for months and a bone-deep exhaustion that no amount of sleep could fix, I did what I had always done and kept going, diving straight into another summer of events – my sixth in a row without a break.
I convinced myself I was fine, and even talked myself into believing that a massive New Year’s Eve gig was going to be easy. Cue me standing in sleeting rain, covered in mud, trying to stop a portaloo from sliding down an embankment. I wish I was joking, but even then I kept telling myself I was fine, because everyone needed me to be.
Nat Hugill
I never told anyone how I felt because the mask was the thing about me that being praised, and if I dropped it, I wasn’t sure I’d still be useful, or needed, or wanted in the room at all. Upholding that facade made me feel lonelier than I’d ever been, even while surrounded by thousands of people.
If you’ve never been near burnout, this is what it was like for me: sleep didn’t land, and I woke as bone-deep tired as when I went down. When I did give myself a break, guilt about what I “should” be doing sat right alongside me. I would be at dinner with people I love, physically at the table, but mentally, nowhere at all – just flat where the joy used to be. A fifteen-minute task took an afternoon because knowing what needed to happen and actually being able to start it had come apart.
My relationships strained because I wasn’t emotionally available for anyone, let alone myself, and I threw myself into unhealthy coping mechanisms like alcohol just to force some modicum of feeling back into my days. Even the things I was known for, being detail-oriented and capable, were starting to unravel, so I threw myself further into work, because it was the only way I knew how to cope.
I never told anyone how I felt because the mask was the thing about me that being praised, and if I dropped it, I wasn’t sure I’d still be useful, or needed, or wanted in the room at all.
Nat Hugill
A week out from my 37th birthday in March 2024, I took a two-week holiday, my first in six years. One morning at home, as my husband and I were making coffee, something inside me took over. Almost observing myself from the third person, I turned to him and said, “Shane, I can’t go on like this.”
Suddenly, I was back in my body, and years of holding it together came pouring out. I cried like I’d never cried before, a deep, grieving cry, and confessed everything: how I felt, why I’d hidden it and why I’d been so afraid to speak up.
He looked at me and said, “Nat, I had no idea. Why on earth didn’t you tell me?”
That was the rub. I was so afraid of being seen as incapable, and wore the mask so well that I’d hidden it even from the person who would have supported me without question. Two days later, on my birthday, I was diagnosed with chronic burnout.
Two weeks became eight months.
Those eight months cost me my career, my income and my health, but they also forced the one thing I had refused to do for two decades: stop for long enough to look at what had driven me there.
The drivers hadn’t started at work – work just gave them the biggest stage available. The pattern was in the wiring: early beliefs that being capable, reliable and endlessly available was how I earned my place in the world. Burnout was never a willpower problem, because my nervous system was reacting to fears and narratives that had been running long before the workload got heavy.
Unfortunately, I’m far from the only woman living this. According to the TELUS Health Mental Health Index NZ, 39 per cent of New Zealand women sit in the high mental distress bracket, and it hits productivity directly, with nearly two months of working time lost every year. In my work now, I see the same three pressures feeding it everywhere: financial strain, the unpaid labour women carry at home on top of everything else and isolation – having plenty of people relying on you, but very few you feel safe leaning on.
What changed for me was that I stopped trying to think my way out and learned to feel my way through. I got curious about the patterns and beliefs that had been hiding underneath the mask, and came to understand that I’d created them because, once, they kept me safe. When I saw them as protection rather than proof that something was fundamentally wrong with me, the shame went out of them. I learned to read the signals in my body I’d spent years overriding, and to act on what I felt was right rather than what I thought I “should” do, one honest choice at a time.
As I recovered, I retrained, pulled a full 180 and built a private practice as an accredited Nervous System & Burnout Coach. I could see how many other women were barrelling down the same highway I’d been on, and I wanted to give them somewhere to pull over before they crashed.
I didn’t stop doing events immediately; I initially chose a few projects with people I loved doing the mahi with. But the late nights and high pressure didn’t feel the way they used to, because now I could actually feel them. The exhaustion I used to push through, the frustration I’d sigh past, the perfectionism – my body recoiled from all of it. As it turns out, being great at something doesn’t mean it’s good for you.
A few months ago, I made the call to step away from event work entirely, and naturally, three enormous contracts arrived within the week. Despite my ego tapping my shoulder, whispering, “Ohhh, think how GOOD that will look on your CV!”, I tuned in, felt the clear, full-body no and let that guide me. I turned down all three, and the relief that swept through my entire body was palpable.
Today, my ambition hasn’t disappeared, but the fuel is completely different. I make decisions without exhausting second-guessing, I hold boundaries without attached apologies, and I’ve stepped off the treadmill of needing the next accolade to prove my worth. The people I love, including myself, finally get the present, available version of me, rather than whatever scraps were left over after work.
I still think about that woman on site at 5am with the radio on her hip. She was brilliant at what she did, but she was also the loneliest she’d ever been. If you’d asked her, though, she would have smiled and told you she was fine. She always was.
Your story is yours, but perhaps there is someone in your life who would say what Shane said to me – someone who would be floored to learn how tired you actually are. Maybe being the “capable one” has become so central to who you are that you’re not sure who you’d be without it.
Or maybe it’s even simpler than that. Maybe there’s a coffee going cold on your bench right now while you sort out everything for everyone else.
Nat Hugill is an HCANZA-accredited Nervous System & Burnout Coach based in Auckland, New Zealand. Having experienced burnout after almost two decades in high-pressure industries, she retrained and now runs her own online practice supporting high-achieving women to regain their clarity, capacity and self-trust – so they can live fully and lead sustainably, without burnout. You can view more about her via her instagram at @nathugillcoach or her website https://www.nathugillcoach.com.