Dance in the kitchen, have sex, paint a picture

Understanding stress and how to deal with it can protect you from burnout

If you feel that you are juggling a lot of balls just to keep life going, I can confidently say, ‘You are not alone’. I mentioned this feeling in a previous post, and it resonated with lots of you. One friend messaged, ‘I’ve started to read, you will be speaking to so many women. Will look again later when I’m not juggling!’.

I don’t sense that anyone is enjoying the juggling. In fact, it causes stress. And the stress is chronic. If you never get to the end of the to do list, and you can never take your eye off the balls you are juggling, you may come to accept the underlying stress as an inevitable part of life. You may not even be aware of it. And then other stressful events layer on top - you have to give a presentation at work, your train is late, your kid is sick. But you just deal with these and move on, because you need to keep juggling.

But all this stress can continue to live in your body, long beyond you dealing with the cause. And unless you take deliberate action to process it, it can have significant effects on your long-term mental and physical health.

How does stress ‘live in your body’?

In our evolutionary history, a stressful event was something that required action. A threat which required us to fight or flee. So when something stressful happens, the hypothalamus in our brain releases stress hormones - adrenaline and cortisol - to get our body going. Breathing gets faster, heart rate quickens, blood vessels constrict to divert more oxygen to the muscles, the liver produces extra blood sugar for energy, the immune system prepares for injury or infection. The whole body is primed and ready to go.

But in a modern world, most of the time we don’t need to fight or run to protect ourselves. We need to smile and stay put and cope. And when there are stressful events every day, many times a day, the stress response is over-active. We may never return to a balanced, relaxed state.

There is a wealth of academic literature on the impact of chronic stress on physical and mental health. Causal links with cardiovascular disease (think high blood pressure, stroke and heart attack) and digestive health (think IBS and type 2 diabetes) are well documented. As are negative effects on the menstrual cycle, libido, and immune system. If you want a deep dive into the impact of prolonged stress on your body, have a read of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers or When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. It’s suggested that chronic stress theory can explain the ‘suddenly changing patterns of premature mortality rates in transforming societies’¹. So in essence, modern life can be so stressful it makes you more likely to die early. Excellent. And in the meantime, you are prone to poor health and burnout.

Let’s talk about burnout

Burnout is a brilliant word because it is so evocative. The idea that all your fuel has been used up, all your brightness has diminished, and you are left as a small pile of smouldering ashes. You have given too much of yourself and now you are barely surviving.

Burnout was first described by Herbert Freudenberger in the mid-1970s². It used to be an academic term reserved for people working in helping professions - doctors, nurses and the like. I have personal experience of it being a much-discussed topic in the genetic counselling profession. Freudenberger provides this insight as to why:

Who is prone to burnout? The dedicated and the committed. We work too much, too long and too intensely. We feel a pressure from within to work and help and we feel a pressure from the outside to give.

But, hello. This applies to pretty much every woman I know. And no doubt a lot of men too.

I’m not alone in noticing this. Burnout is now recognised to apply to a multitude of people and situations. Parental burnout, overload burnout, caregiver burnout. They can all result in feelings of exhaustion, irritability, anxiety, low motivation, and even physical pain.

My ‘must-read’ book on this topic is Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski (details at the end). In it, they talk about the world containing two types of people. The human beings, whose job it is to live, to express, to be their humanity, and acquire whatever resources it takes to do that. And the human givers, whose moral obligation it is to give their humanity, their time, their lives, their bodies, their feelings to the human beings³.

Which type are you?

So how do we stay stress-free and well?

I’d guess we could all come up with a list of things that would reduce our stress, but it is not realistic to expect to avoid it altogether. It makes sense therefore to understand how to process stress and prevent it harming our health and wellbeing.

Back to Burnout (the book). And this bit is the game-changer.

We must take deliberate action to process the stress of the day, or it will get stuck in our body. And dealing with the stressor is not the same as dealing with the stress. Let’s take an example. You get stuck in traffic and you are late to pick up your kid. That evening, the stressor has passed, but the stress it caused is still living in your body. It still needs to be dealt with. Think of it as a cycle that needs to be completed, or a tunnel you need to get through.

While you’re managing the day’s stressors, your body is managing the day’s stress. It’s absolutely essential to your well-being that you give your body the resources it needs to complete the stress response cycles that have been activated.

So what does your body need?

The language your body speaks is physical. Remember how stress gets it primed and ready to go? It needs to move. This doesn’t mean you have to go to the gym or go for a run, though either would definitely do the job. Dance, jump on a trampoline, have a pillow fight. For at least 20 minutes. Every day.

There are other six other suggestions of ways to down-regulate the stress response, or help process the stress held in your body. These are;

1. Breathe - deep slow breaths to tell your body you are safe

2. Talk to people - this is an external reassurance that the world is a safe place

3. Laugh - helpless, belly laughs will regulate emotion

4. Affection - from someone you trust as it will make you feel safe

5. Cry - just let it out if you need to

6. Be creative - it is an outlet for your emotion

A 3am silent kitchen disco

I used to exist in a perpetual ‘boom and bust’ cycle of emotion. For weeks and weeks I would do all the things. I’d never say ‘no’, never let anyone down, never miss a deadline, never fall short. Stress would build inside but I’d fail to notice it. I wouldn’t entertain the idea that I couldn’t cope or wasn’t resilient. Then one day, all the emotions I’d been pushing down would spill over in a big, messy outbreak. It would start with anger, something irritating that pushed me over the edge. It would quickly morph into tears and progress into sobs. I could sob for an hour or two, sometimes more. I’d wind up even more exhausted than I had been. And then I’d slowly put the pieces of myself back together and step out into the world ready for another round. That was just…life.

That was before I learnt about the stress cycle.

A few months ago I woke in the early hours and my brain was buzzing. I felt jittery and anxious. I had the idea that I needed to move my body, to complete the stress cycle. I got up and went to the kitchen. I found my earbuds and put an upbeat playlist on my phone. I started to move, slowly embracing the idea of a private, 3am silent disco. I felt really self-conscious, all alone in my kitchen in my pyjamas. What if Deri got up and saw me? What if someone else could see me through the bi-fold doors? I shook off the feeling and braved some bigger dance moves. The playlist was eclectic and I let my body respond to it. I danced on my own in that kitchen for over 2 hours straight. I busted all the moves. When my family wandered in for breakfast I was flushed, relaxed and happy. It sure felt a lot better than sobbing for 2 hours.

And I was gifted a little musical memory. Now, every time I hear Meghan Trainor’s ‘Made You Look’ a spark of joy flickers in me and I am transported straight back to the kitchen disco. A little reminder of the importance of completing the stress cycle in a positive way. The final word on this one goes to the Nagoski sisters:

“Because you experience stress every day, you have to build completing the cycle into everyday. Make it a priority, like your life depends on it. Because it does.”

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How’s it for you?

What daily things cause you stress?
How is stress affecting your life?
Did you know about the stress cycle?
What do you do to manage your stress?

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Interested to explore more?

Burnout: The Secret to Solving the Stress Cycle
By Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski

It’s probably already clear that I got a lot from this book. It’s very much a book by women, for women. It is unapologetically feminist and goes quite heavy in places on the ways in which modern western culture is screwing women over. That does feel validating, but probably alienates a male audience who could benefit from the content on the science of stress and practical ways to manage it (but hey, maybe they’d also benefit from understanding the ways in which women feel modern western culture is screwing them over!). If you are juggling life, if you are feeling wrung out, if you are a human giver, if you are holding too much emotion inside you - read it!

1. Kopp, M.S. and Réthelyi, J., 2004. Where psychology meets physiology: chronic stress and premature mortality—the Central-Eastern European health paradox. Brain research bulletin, 62(5), pp.351-367.

2. Freudenberger, H.J., 1974. Staff burn‐out. Journal of social issues, 30(1), pp.159-165.

3. This explanation is taken from the transcript of a podcast the Nagoski sisters recorded in October 2020 with Brene Brown, in her podcast series Unlocking Us.