Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Burnout : The secret unlocking the Stress cycle - Coggle Diagram
Burnout : The secret unlocking the Stress cycle
Define by 3 components
Emotional Exhaustion
Fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long
Exhaustion happens when we get stuck in an emotion.
Trapped because of "Human Giver Syndrome"
philosopher Kate Manne describes a 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.”
Human givers must, at all times, be pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others, which means they must never be ugly, angry, upset, ambitious, or attentive to their own needs.
depersonalisation
the depletion of empathy, caring and compassion
decreased sense of accomplishment
an unconquerable sense of futility: feeling that nothing you do makes any difference
Statistics
Twenty to thirty percent of teachers in America have moderately high to high levels of burnout.2 Similar rates are found among university professors and international humanitarian aid workers.3 Among medical professionals, burnout can be as high as 52 percent
Writers
Amelia Nagoski
Emily Nagoski
Stress
definition
Stress is the neurological and physiological shift that happens in your body when you encounter one of these threats
stressor
Stressors are what activate the stress response in your body. They can be anything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine could do you harm.
Stress cycle
When your brain notices the lion (or hippo), it activates a generic “stress response,” a cascade of neurological and hormonal activity that initiates physiological changes to help you survive: epinephrine acts instantly to push blood into your muscles, glucocorticoids keep you going, and endorphins help you ignore how uncomfortable all of this is
Your heart beats faster, so your blood pumps harder, so your blood pressure increases and you breathe more quickly (measures of cardiovascular functioning are a common way researchers study stress).2 Your muscles tense; your sensitivity to pain diminishes; your attention is alert and vigilant, focusing on short-term, here-and-now thinking; your senses are heightened; your memory shifts to channel its functioning to the narrow band of experience and knowledge most immediately relevant to this stressor.
to maximize your body’s efficiency in this state, your other organ systems get deprioritized: Your digestion slows down and your immune functioning shifts.
Efficient way to complete the cycle
Physical activity is what tells your brain you have successfully survived the threat and now your body is a safe place to live. Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle.
Other Ways to Complete the Cycle
Breathing. Deep, slow 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
Positive Social Interaction. Casual but friendly social interaction is the first external sign that the world is a safe place.
Laughter. Laughing together—and even just reminiscing about the times we’ve laughed together—increases relationship satisfaction
Affection. When friendly chitchat with colleagues doesn’t cut it, when you’re too stressed out for laughter, deeper connection with a loving presence is called for.
A Big Ol’ Cry. Anyone who says “Crying doesn’t solve anything” doesn’t know the difference between dealing with the stress and dealing with the situation that causes the stress.
Creative Expression. Engaging in creative activities today leads to more energy, excitement, and enthusiasm tomorrow
How Do You Know You’ve Completed the Cycle?
Your body tells you, and it’s easier for some people to recognize than others. You might experience it as a shift in mood or mental state or physical tension, as you breathe more deeply and your thoughts relax.
Why we get stuck?
Chronic Stressor → Chronic Stress.
Social Appropriateness
It’s Safer
Freeze
Freeze is special. Freeze happens when the brain assesses the threat and decides you’re too slow to run and too small to fight, and so your best hope for survival is to “play dead” until the threat goes away or someone comes along to help you
Signs You Need to Deal with the Stress, Even If It Means Ignoring the Stressor
You notice yourself doing the same, apparently pointless thing over and over again, or engaging in self-destructive behaviors.
“Chandeliering.”
You turn into a bunny hiding under a hedge.
When your brain is stuck in the middle of the cycle, it may lose the ability to recognize that the fox has gone, so you just stay under that bush—that is, you come home from work and watch cat videos while eating ice cream directly from the container, using potato chips for a spoon, or stay in bed all weekend, hiding from your life. If you’re hiding from your life, you’re past your threshold. You aren’t dealing with either the stress or the stressor. Deal with the stress so you can be well enough to deal with the stressor.
Your body feels out of whack
Persist
The Monitor
Technically, it’s called the “discrepancy-reducing/-increasing feedback loop” and “criterion velocity,” but people fall asleep immediately when we say that, so we just call it the Monitor. It is the brain mechanism that decides whether to keep trying…or to give up.
the brain mechanism that manages the gap between where we are and where we are going.
The Monitor Knows
(1) what your goal is
(2) how much effort you’re investing in that goal
The tremendous power of understanding the Monitor is that once we’re aware of how it works, we can influence our own brain’s functioning, with strategies for dealing with both the controllable and the uncontrollable stressors.
Dealing with Stressors You Can Control: Planful Problem-Solving
Dealing with Stressors You Can’t Control: Positive Reappraisal
Positive reappraisal involves recognizing that sitting in traffic is worth it. It means deciding that the effort, the discomfort, the frustration, the unanticipated obstacles, and even the repeated failure have value—not just because they are steps toward a worthwhile goal, but because you reframe difficulties as opportunities for growth and learning
The reduced stress of positive reappraisal is not an illusion. Struggle can increase creativity and learning, strengthen your capacity to cope with greater difficulties in the future, and empower you to continue working toward goals that matter to you.
Struggle can increase creativity and learning, strengthen your capacity to cope with greater difficulties in the future, and empower you to continue working toward goals that matter to you.
Change the Expectancy: Redefine Winning
You might give up. You might start to wonder if there’s something wrong with you—after all, somebody told you it was supposed to be easy, and it turns out it’s hard, so it’s not the mountain that’s the problem, it’s you!
incremental goals that will keep your Monitor satisfied
Soon: Your goal should be achievable without requiring patience.
Certain: Your goal should be within your control.
Positive: It should be something that feels good, not just something that avoids suffering.
Concrete: Measurable
Specific: Not general,
Personal: Tailor your goal.
When to Give up
questions
What are the benefits of continuing?
What are the benefits of stopping?
What are the costs of continuing?
What are the costs of stopping?
decision grid
Staying the same
Benefits - immediate
Benefits - Long Term
costs - immediate
costs - long term
Quitting
Benefits - immediate
Benefits - Long Term
costs - immediate
costs - long term
Many of us are taught to see a shift in goals as “weakness” and “failure,” where another culture would see courage, strength, and openness to new possibilities.
It resonated so powerfully because persisting is what women do, each and every day. Often we persist because we literally have no choice. We have children to feed and a world to change, and we can’t stop just because it’s hard. Overcoming obstacles like the Mitch McConnells of the world isn’t just a necessary step on the way to our goals; overcoming those obstacles is part of our success! Yay!
Women’s difficulty is rarely lack of persistence—on the contrary. We stand gazing at the possibilities of what the world can be—what we can be. Our world can be fair; our communities can be safe; our homes can be tidy; our children can put their shoes on when it’s time for school! But there is a deep, wide chasm between us and the realization of those possibilities. Our default action in the face of that chasm is to do whatever it takes to get to the other side, and keep on doing it, no matter what, until we get there.
But then we get exhausted and we wonder if we can accomplish any of the things we hope for, without destroying ourselves in the process. We ask ourselves if it’s time to quit.
A goal is not a life—but it may be what gives shape and direction to the way we live each day. If our goals are what we want to accomplish, “meaning” is why we want to accomplish them. We persist at a frustrating job because we know we’re making a difference in people’s lives.
Meaning
But like all heroines, we thrive when we are answering the call of something larger than ourselves, when all the commuting and laundry and picking up dog poop and repeating “No television until you finish your homework!” has a meaning larger than the grind of daily routine.
definition
Positive psychology, as spearheaded by Martin Seligman, includes “Meaning” as one of the main elements that promote happiness in people who are otherwise healthy.
2 Other research approaches meaning as a coping strategy for people who are recovering from illness or trauma.
These different views of “meaning” have four things in common:
First, both approaches agree that meaning isn’t always “fun.”
Second, both approaches agree that meaning offers a “positive final value that an individual’s life can exhibit.” Meaning is the feeling that you “matter in some larger sense. Lives may be experienced as meaningful when they are felt to have significance beyond the trivial or momentary, to have purpose, or to have a coherence that transcends chaos.”
Third, meaning is not constant. Some moments in our lives feel intensely meaningful. Others feel “meaning-neutral”
And finally, whether it supports thriving or sustains coping, meaning is good for you.
For most of us, meaning is what sustains us on the long, hard journey, no matter what we find at the end. Meaning is not found; it is made.13
To make meaning, the research tells us, engage with something larger than yourself.
Meaning sources
pursuit and achievement of ambitious goals that leave a legacy
service to the divine or other spiritual calling
loving, emotionally intimate connection with others
Human Giver Syndrome
Symptoms
believing you have a moral obligation
believing that any failure to be pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive makes you a failure as a person
believing that your “failure” means you deserve punishment—even going so far as to beat yourself up
believing these are not symptoms, but normal and true ideas.
Human Giver Syndrome is the first villain in our story. It tries to make you ignore your Something Larger, because you’re supposed to dedicate all your resources to Human Beings
Human Giver Syndrome will try to stop you from pursuing meaning. Your job is to not stop. Keep engaging with your Something Larger. Use planful problem-solving. Keep completing the cycle.
Making Meaning When Terrible Things Happen
Meaning is not made by the terrible thing you experienced; it is made by the ways you survive.
“Meaning in life” is made when you engage with the Something Larger that’s waiting for you inside your own body, linking you to the world.
The stress response cycle, the Monitor, and meaning are all resources you carry with you into the battle against the real enemy
The Real Enemy
The Game is Rigged
We are not our own worst enemy. Nor is the enemy the other people in the game.
The enemy is the game itself, which tries to convince us that it’s not the enemy.
The Patriarchy
Being raised as a boy makes it easier for boys to grow up and take on positions of power and authority, which is all “patriarchy” means.
Forms
Explicit misogyny
Sex and relationship violence
women are three times more likely than men to be assaulted, while 95 percent of sex offenders are men
Globally, men who rape women report that their primary motivation is the basic belief that they have a right to a woman’s body, regardless of how she feels about it, a belief termed “sexual entitlement” in the research.
Just because the road looks flat doesn’t mean it is. Just because you can’t see the ocean doesn’t mean it’s not there. You can infer the landscape by looking at the shapes of the people who grew in those environments. Instead of wondering why they aren’t thriving on the level playing field, imagine how the field can be changed to allow everyone to thrive.
Signs of compassion fatigue include
• checking out, emotionally—faking empathy when you know you’re supposed to feel it, because you can’t feel the real thing anymore;
• minimizing or dismissing suffering that isn’t the most extreme—“It’s not slavery/genocide/child rape/nuclear war, so quit complaining”;
• feeling helpless, hopeless, or powerless, while also feeling personally responsible for doing more;
• staying in a bad situation, whether a workplace or a relationship, out of a sense of grandiosity—“If I don’t do it, no one will.”
Despair is different from grief. It’s the helpless, hopeless feeling we get when our Monitors give up on a goal, deciding it is unattainable.
Gaslighting
And that feeling you have when someone is doing it to you but you’re not sure because maybe they’re right and you’re overreacting and being too sensitive? Like you can’t trust your own senses, except what your senses are telling you is unambiguous? That’s feeling gaslit. You’re filled with simultaneous doubt, fear, rage, betrayal, isolation, and panicked confusion.
Gaslighting creates deeply uncomfortable feelings of being trapped, while making you believe you put yourself in that trap, which just makes you angrier and sadder and less hopeful.
Some people who gaslight you are doing it on purpose
The Bikini Industrial Complex