It’s a Sunday afternoon, and friends of mine who are active on the app dating scene retreat to the sofa and indulge in a swiping session. Me? I’ll sit next to them, open the Spare Room app and browse potential new house shares.

Over 5,150 profiles appear – all people who are actively searching for a house share in London. On the first page alone, there’s a 32-year-old young professional man looking sharp, a 45-year-old smiling woman looking for an ensuite in a ‘friendly house share’ and a young professional couple in their mid-20s who have clearly chosen their best, most recent selfie – the one that screams we’re clean, tidy, laid back and fun. An ‘easygoing’ 54-year-old man is also in the mix.

These faces just skim the surface of the 4.5 million people in the UK living in houses of multiple occupancy (HMOs) – as house shares are officially named. And as London rents hit a record high in 2024, it makes sense that we’re seeing the renting age rise in the capital. Reports show the average age of renters living in shared accommodation across Greater London rose by two years: from the age of 28.2 in 2020 to 30.6 in 2022. SpareRoom revealed that the number of people in the UK actively looking to rent on the site has almost tripled over the past decade, from 70,838 in January 2013 to 227,148 in September 2023. 

At 33, I’m one of many seasoned house sharers who have been co-living for the best part of a decade. And I know too well that house-sharing burnout is a real mental health condition born out of the housing crisis. After years of not being able to fully relax in my home space, in 2022, I found myself teetering on the edge.

Having lived with 18 different housemates in eight different flats, I know the exhaustion that comes with constantly compromising on your living space, of building a connection with housemates only for one of us to move on after six months and of constantly drawing and redrawing boundaries – both physical and emotional. I need my home to be somewhere where I can replenish my resources, but my house shares have rarely felt restful.

“Burnout is best defined as the feeling of total exhaustion we get when our resources cannot meet the demand,” says chartered psychologist Dr Audrey Tang. “It results in irritability, tiredness, tearfulness, zoning out and an inability to focus.

“You might have difficulty setting boundaries of personal space and privacy, and you’re having to manage the emotions of many people (some of whom might ’trauma dump’ on you),” she explains. “Combine that with the reasons which cause you to house share – perhaps you don’t earn enough for a place of your own – and that can all contribute to feelings of burnout.”

I tell people that I feel like I am constantly on high alert living in house shares, assessing and tuning in to my housemates’ actions and moods. I’ve noticed it tipping into an unhealthy sort of hypervigilance, where my nervous system is trained to never fully relax in my living space. Tang pinpoints something I have felt myself: when you’re dealing with that sort of stress in your home, it diminishes your ability to deal with stressors elsewhere.

“It’s exhausting to be in this state,” she confirms. “To borrow a model from trauma research – Dan Siegel talked of ‘the window of tolerance’ – we all have a window in which we can operate comfortably, but over-stimulation can lead to anxiety and stress. However, if we have had a lot of stressful situations – as is not uncommon in house shares – then your window of tolerance can shrink, which means it takes much less to exhaust or depress you.”

Unlike stress that you can deal with and move on afterwards, stress in house shares is often caused by everyday annoyances, eg small conflicts over cleanliness, noise and opposing lifestyles. The stress is insidious, hard to shift or resolve and remains ever-present in the place you call home. “Stress is often temporary and when the stressor goes, the body starts to relax,” explains Tang. “Burnout is a much deeper feeling of exhaustion, and almost more akin to depression rather than anxiety. Sometimes with anxiety or anger, you still have the drive to take action; often when burnt out, you simply cannot do anything.”

So while friends of mine are facing dating burnout – searching for genuine connection but losing hope and talking about ‘doom-swiping’ on the apps – I log back into SpareRoom and doom-swipe there. It’s a coping mechanism, symptomatic of ‘house-sharing burnout’: a mental health condition that I see spreading like wildfire among women of my generation. 

Whenever things went awry in my shared living set-up (as they so often do), instead of having the energy, the tools and the courage to face up to it with a potentially difficult conversation, I would subconsciously detach from it, start spending more time out the house, tell myself that it was just temporary and swipe my way through potential new house shares to indulge my belief that there was a ‘just right’ house share out there.

“Detachment and dissociation are methods of coping with a traumatic situation,” says Tang. “While a stressful house share is arguably what we might call a ‘tiny trauma’ situation (not a ‘big T’ – a big traumatic event) – a sense of escapism through detaching and to some extent disassociating (which in practice might be withdrawing, not getting involved or staying out more) can cause further loneliness or sadness.”

“The trauma is real,” says fellow serial house sharer Molly Jones, 36, who has lived in five house shares in London over 14 years. “Home should be a relaxing and safe space. I’d always valued my time at home because working in an office, commuting and living a busy life is enough. You need space to relax. But in all my house shares I lived with housemates who were judgemental of my habits (one housemate would comment every time I had a glass of wine) or just made me feel uneasy in my space. One housemate I lived with played a mandolin in the living room all the time and had sort of claimed it as his space. It meant I stayed out as much as possible, which is the last thing you want after a long day at work.”

This is the sort of behaviour that kept me stuck in a cycle of detachment and never fully investing in my house shares. I moved on every time something difficult occurred, and it left me perpetually unsettled. It was only when moving into my eighth and most recent house share that it dawned on me that I needed to stay a while and work on the interpersonal skills that lay at the heart of making a house share a home – ones I had never been taught. I empathise fully with the people like me who are facing house-share burnout and need to find a way out of it that doesn’t require a £50,000 deposit. 

Dr Tang’s advice? “Setting ground rules and boundaries is always a good place to start. As is addressing little problems while it’s still possible to have a conversation to stop things from building up,” she says. “Also, knowing ourselves and what we are really willing to accept and what we are not can help us define which battles to fight, especially if you don’t want to move. If you recognise signs of stress, take note and action them so they don’t cross over into burnout – and that can mean making boundaries clear, challenging certain behaviours or laying down rules for a peaceful share.” 

Tang points to Rosalind Wiseman, author of Queen Bees And Wannabees, and her SEAL technique, which feels particularly useful for house-sharing scenarios:

• Strategise – take a step back and decide what it is you want out of the situation.
• Explain – this can also include explanations such as “I need to talk about how I’ve been feeling and see what we can do to change it” or “It wouldn’t be fair for me to let you assume x when I meant y.”
• Affirm – be clear on what action you are going to take or want to take.
• Lock in or out – this is knowing whether you want the relationship to continue and on what basis.

How To Stay Sane In A House Share by Alice Wilkinson (DK Living) is out 6 March.

Images: Getty