More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 9 - January 11, 2024
We humans are not built to do big things alone,
nobody ever asked, “What’s burnout?” (Mostly what they said was, “Is it out yet? Can I read it?”)
first coined as a technical term by Herbert Freudenberger in 1975,
decreased sense of accomplishment—an unconquerable sense of futility: feeling that nothing you do makes any difference.
Twenty to thirty percent of teachers in America have moderately high to high levels of burnout.2 Similar rates are found among university professors
it’s the first element in burnout, emotional exhaustion, that’s most strongly linked to negative impacts on our health, relationships, and work—especially
emotions—these instantaneous, whole-body reactions to some stimulus—will
emotions are tunnels. If you go all the way through them, you get to the light at the end. Exhaustion happens when we get stuck in an emotion.
No wonder “helping professions” are so exhausting—you’re confronted with people in need, all day, day after day.
system in which one class of people,7 the “human givers,” are expected to offer their time, attention, affection, and bodies willingly, placidly, to the other class of people, the “human beings.”8 The implication in these terms is that human beings have a moral obligation to be or express their humanity, while human givers have a moral obligation to give their humanity to the human beings. Guess which one women are.
Disagree?
If they dare to ask for or, God forbid, demand anything, that’s a violation of their role as a giver and they may be punished.
In Human Giver Syndrome, the giver isn’t allowed to inconvenience anyone with anything so messy as emotions, so givers are trapped in a situation where they are not free to move through the tunnel. They might even be punished for it.
that instinct for self-preservation is battling a syndrome that insists that self-preservation is selfish, so your efforts to care for yourself might actually make things worse, activating even more punishment from the world or from yourself, because how dare you?
Meaning is often misunderstood as “the thing we’ll find at the end of the tunnel,” but it’s not. It’s why we go through the tunnel, regardless of what we find on the other end.
in the mundane tasks live the protective gestures that help us grow strong enough to defend ourselves and the people we love, and to make peace with our enemies.
connection, rest, and self-compassion.
every scientist tries to be (a) slightly less wrong than the scientists who came before them, by proving that something we thought was true actually isn’t,
And there’s nothing wrong with the science, either; it’s true that women are, on average, five foot four—but that tells us nothing in particular about any specific woman we may meet.
We try to be as science-based as we can be, but we’re aware of its limits. That’s where the art comes in. As science fiction author Cassandra Clare writes, “Fiction is truth, even if it is not fact.”
if you’re moving away from a threat, it hardly matters where you end up, as long as it’s somewhere safe from the threat.
We need something positive to move toward. We need the cheese.
The cheese is growing mighty,
“Dread is anxiety on steroids,” Amelia said, remembering her own days teaching middle school music, “and the anxiety comes from the accumulation, day after day, of stress that never ends.” “Yes,” Julie declared, filling her glass again. “The thing about teaching is, you can’t ever get rid of the causes of the stress,” Amelia said. “And I don’t mean the kids.”
Dealing with your stress is a separate process from dealing with the things that cause your stress. To deal with your stress, you have to complete the cycle
endorphins help you ignore how uncomfortable all of this is.
Your muscles tense;
your memory shifts to channel its functioning to the narrow band of experience and knowledge most immediately relevant to this stressor.
Hand in hand with the people you love, you take a deep, relaxing breath and give thanks to the lion for its sacrifice. Stress response cycle complete,
Suppose you were running away from the lion, when it’s struck by lightning! You turn and see the dead lion, but do you suddenly feel peaceful and relaxed?
your body is still in full action mode, because you haven’t done anything your body recognizes as a cue that you are safe.
Just telling yourself, “You’re safe now; calm down,” doesn’t help.
it is absolutely essential to your well-being—the way sleeping and eating are absolutely essential—that
tomorrow…the terrifying project is still there.
Self-care to complete the stress response cycle every day/throughout the day
bad—it’s only bad when the stress outpaces our capacity to process it. Which, alas, is a lot of the time, because… 2. Social Appropriateness. Sometimes the brain activates a stress response and you can’t do the thing it’s trying to tell you to do: “Run!” it says, pumping out adrenaline for you. “I can’t!” you say. “I’m in the middle of an exam!”
Be nice, be strong, be polite. No feelings for you.
Smiling and being nice, ignoring it and telling yourself it doesn’t matter—these are survival strategies. Use them with pride. Just don’t forget that these survival strategies do not deal with the stress itself.
From a biological point of view, fight and flight are essentially the same thing. Flight is fear—avoidance—whereas fight is anger—approach—but
Freeze happens when the brain assesses the threat and decides you’re too slow to run and too small to fight,
parasympathetic nervous system swamping the sympathetic—and
you may think about a circumstance where you were unsafe and wonder why you didn’t kick and scream, why you didn’t fight or run—why, in fact, you felt as if you couldn’t scream or kick or run. The reason is that you really couldn’t.
parasympathetic—the system that controls freeze—means “beyond emotion.” You may feel disengaged from the world, sluggish, like you don’t care or nothing matters.
even just standing up from your chair, taking a deep breath, and tensing all your muscles for twenty seconds, then shaking it out with a big exhale, is an excellent start.
Physical activity is what tells your brain you have successfully survived the threat and now your body is a safe place to live.
breaths downregulate the stress response—especially when the exhalation is long and slow and goes all the way to the end of the breath, so that your belly contracts.
breathing deeply is the gentlest way to begin unlocking from the trauma, which makes it a great place to start.
Casual but friendly social interaction is the first external sign that the world is a safe place.
Hug someone you love and trust for twenty full seconds, while both of you are standing over your own centers of balance.
literary, visual, and performing arts of all kinds give us the chance to celebrate and move through big emotions. It’s like a cultural loophole in a society that tells us to be “nice” and not make waves.
progressively tense and release every muscle in your body, starting with your feet and ending with your face. Tense them hard, hard, hard, for a ssslllooowww count of ten. Make sure you spend extra time tensing the places where you carry your stress.” “Shoulders,” Sophie said instantly. “Super! And while you do that, you visualize, really clearly and viscerally, what it feels like to beat the living daylights out of whatever stressor you’ve encountered.”
