How to stay healthy in a banking job when “everything is urgent”
Sophia Mullins knows what it’s like to work in financial services. She also knows what it’s like to work in financial services, to burn out, and to do something different. She is trying to impart her learnings to other people.
Mullins, who is now based in Miami, spent nearly two years working as an investment banking analyst at Barclays in New York City, nearly five years in investor relations in private equity and a year at Third Point, the hedge fund run by Dan Loeb.
💥Follow us on WhatsApp for news alerts.💥
Now Mullins runs Wall Street Wellness LLC, which she describes as a “concierge wellness consultancy” helping high achieving individuals thrive and stay healthy in demanding jobs. This includes financial services professionals like Mullins’ former self.
Mullins admits a propensity for overworking. “I have a tendency to get my head down for 10 hours without checking in on my own mental wellbeing,” she says. When she worked in banking and private equity, this translated to jumping at every request and driving herself into the ground. “Everything is urgent in finance, but I was taking that urgency to the next level. I was constantly sprinting through deadlines and leaning into the spring mentality with no reprieve,” says Mullins. “It was sending me into physical and mental burnout.”
She became ill. Mullins lost weight and was exhausted. Her lymph nodes swelled. She was screened for lymphoma. “Fortunately, I didn’t have that but it was scary being in my early 20s and hearing the C word,” she recalls.
In fact, Mullins had Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune condition where the body attacks the thyroid gland. It’s often hereditary but can be triggered by chronic stress. Mullins says she initially wrote off her symptoms as the result of working in a high stress environment. “For example, I was tired and my energy levels were inconsistent,” she tells us.
The solutions to burnout aren’t simple and Mullins isn’t alone in propagating them. Lucy Bullman, a London-based coach who was previously Morgan Stanley’s head of EMEA client onboarding, works with banks and hedge funds helping employees build sustainable careers. “There’s growing openness around the fact that high performance isn’t just about technical capability,” she says. “People are talking much more honestly about cognitive overload, sleep disruption, anxiety and the challenge of maintaining perspective in very demanding environments.”
Much like Goldman Sachs’ CEO David Solomon, Bullman advises her clients to get a life outside of work. “The senior portfolio managers I work with now often emphasise the importance of not over-indexing on your career”, she says. “When identity and self-worth are too closely tied to professional performance, drawdowns can feel disproportionately destabilising. Having perspective outside work helps build longer-term resilience.”
Bullman is not a fan of Mullins’ former method of jumping at every command. “If you approach a finance career at the pace of a sprint, it becomes very difficult to sustain over the long term,” she says. “The people who perform best tend to think much more strategically about sustainability and recovery.”
These days, Mullins is a reformed character. Having been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, she says became “aware that as a high achiever I was often pouring fuel on the fire.” Lifestyle changes resulted in a less combustible lifestyle. “I started journaling in the morning and waking up earlier than I had to have a morning walk and nutritious breakfast. I started to allow myself to take time out.”
Mullins now works with clients to encourage them to take their health more seriously. Moving from banking to private equity is often seen as a panacea for overwork but Mullins says this is a misconception. “Private equity was more stressful than banking. I was working in investor relations and covering multiple time zones and my hours were often even longer than banking,” she tells us. “I was working with prospective investors all over the world and often burning the midnight oil.”
If you don’t address your health, no one else will do it for you.
Sophia Mullins will be answering your questions about jobs in banking, private equity and hedge funds and discussing how to prevent and survive burnout in the Bubble until June 11th.
Follow me on X. Follow me on LinkedIn.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.
