Jeremy Mohler

Writer, meditation teacher, and therapist-in-training

How to know if you’re experiencing burnout

by

In my early 20s, I was hospitalized with what my doctor called a “complicated migraine.” I wasn’t in pain—but I’d lost vision in one eye and feeling on the right side of my body.

A magnetic resonance angiogram (MRA) test showed nothing abnormal about my brain. The hospital sent me home saying that I just needed to rest.

There had been warning signs for years—bouts of frantic anxiety, exhaustion, and overwhelming urges to drink alcohol.

But I was too busy to truly rest. Too caught up in the grind of working hard and partying harder. Too worried about making other people happy. In a word, I was too numb.

I now know that I was suffering from what’s known as “burnout.”

There’s the stress of everyday life—the cracks and potholes in the road while trying to live a decent, meaningful life. Then there’s the stress that just won’t leave. The chronic tension and ruminating thoughts that stretch for days or even years.

Burnout, explained

Burnout, according to Herbert Freudenberger—the psychologist who coined the term in the 1970s—has three main symptoms. Emotional exhaustion—being drained from caring too much. Alienation—cynicism about things that used to be meaningful. And a decreased sense of accomplishment—as the sisters Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski write in their book Burnout, “the feeling that nothing you do makes a difference.”

Physical symptoms can include extreme fatigue, frequent headaches, and gastrointestinal problems. Mentally, burnout can show up as restlessness, an inability to pay attention, increased anger, and (literally) over 100 other ways. One of the most prominent symptoms is a near-constant feeling of numbness, that decreased sense of accomplishment. A nagging feeling that there’s more to do, yet you’re too exhausted to do it. Or at least do it as well as you’d like or are expected to.

It wasn’t until I started seeing a new therapist that I recognized many of these symptoms not only at work but also at home and in my relationships. In one of our first sessions, she introduced me to a type of therapy called Internal Family Systems (IFS), also known as “parts work.” I’d been talking in circles about how stressed I was about work, my parents, and dating.

“Where do you feel that stress in your body right now?” she asked. I took a few deep breaths and felt around internally. My neck and shoulders were tense, as though all my body’s energy was being squeezed up into my head.

“Is there a memory attached to that stress?” she asked. “What do you remember?” I remembered sitting cross-legged on the living room carpet a few feet from the television. (My parents had yet to figure out I needed glasses.) My mom was talking on the phone behind me in the kitchen. My dad’s lawnmower was buzzing outside. I could tell my mom was stressed about something, but I felt free, content, safe. She hung up the phone and walked over to me.

“They wanted to hold you back from first grade,” she said. “But I told them no. You can handle it.”

It felt like an alarm rang inside my body. My neck and shoulders tightened. My mom walked back into the kitchen, leaving me with all kinds of confusing questions. What did I do wrong? Why did they want to hold me back? Is Mom mad at me?

Looking back, at the core of my questions was shame. My mom wasn’t being mean. If anything, she was defending me. She believed in me, which should’ve felt empowering. But my little developing brain didn’t take it in that way. I got the opposite message: that I wasn’t enough. I felt ashamed that my teacher had been evaluating me from afar. From then on, I was going to at least appear as though I was on task and working hard. I didn’t want to feel that pain ever again

How therapy has helped me

Over the next few therapy sessions, we explored how this and other early experiences were shaping my behaviors as an adult. Using IFS, we identified a “part” of me that felt like I constantly had to prove that I was a hard worker. This striving part gives me a nagging sense that there’s something I should be doing right now. It guilts me for relaxing, even if I’m tired. It’s almost always whispering in my ear: “You should be checking email. You should be working on your house. You should be making more money. You should be lifting weights. You should be doing something, anything. You should be hustling, improving, grinding.”

In IFS, parts are internal subpersonalities we developed as children. They get “frozen in time … and keep doing whatever extreme things they did to protect [us] when [we] were young,” says Richard Schwartz, the therapist who developed IFS. Some of our parts—called “exiles” in IFS—are afraid of being hurt or feel the shame of having been hurt, so they hide. Others are like little managers trying to get us to behave. These managers are “like internalized children who are in over their heads and don’t know how else to run the whole [internal] family other than by yelling and criticizing,” says Schwartz.

My striving part is clearly a manager. It’s almost always on guard, from the moment I wake up to when I close my eyes to sleep. It’s why I have trouble truly resting, and why I often struggle to be present with others, even people I love deeply. It keeps me leaning toward the future to get to the next thing on my to-do list.

With my therapist’s help, I listened to what my striving part had to say, rather than just believing and getting caught up in its stories. I learned that it was terrified of me falling behind. It had gotten the message that if I fell behind, I’d end up a loser with no worth to anybody. Which made sense—if I’d been held back from first grade, I would’ve likely lost touch with many of my friends. At least that’s what my little kid brain thought at the time. But it was still worried about me now that I was an adult, even though I had plenty of friends and a successful career.

Then I began to notice a shift during therapy sessions. My body was more relaxed when I talked about my striving part. Even when I was stressed out about getting enough done at work—in IFS-speak, when I was “blended” with the part—there was a little less tension each time. I was able to “unblend” more often, realizing that the part’s stories were just thoughts in my mind, real but not necessarily true.

My therapist explained that the part was starting to trust me—my true “self,” not a part of me. The part saw that some of the changes I’d been making in my life were actually helping. My therapist had suggested prioritizing more creative work like writing, making sure I was getting to it first each day before doing mindless things like cleaning dishes and checking email. I’d also made a point to relax on Sundays, telling my striving part that rest would make me stronger on Mondays.

With my therapist’s help, I learned how to stop believing the extreme thoughts and beliefs my striving part wants me to believe. I’m not going to go broke if I spend a Sunday relaxing and watching football. I’m not going to die if I go for an aimless walk. I’m not going to lose everyone who matters to me if I set my to-do list to the side and give full attention to my partner at dinner—actually, it’s the opposite. In other words, after changing my relationship to my striving part, I learned how to actually, truly, finally rest.

Through the “parts work” of IFS, I’ve found more choice in how to respond when life gets challenging and my striving part takes over. Sometimes, striving, hustling, and grinding to get the next thing done is helpful and even necessary—often, though, it’s an automatic response that keeps me on the hamster wheel of my to-do list until I collapse.

This pandemic has been exhausting. As the physician Lucy McBride writes in a recent Atlantic article about burnout, “The work of living through a pandemic has been making us sick. As a primary-care doctor, I’m witnessing the physical-health toll of collective trauma.” I’m grateful that I have a new, more healthy way to relate to myself in these difficult times. I’ve found some ease amid shifting public health measures, social isolation, and the daily outpouring of bad news.

By noticing our emotions and bodily sensations related to burnout, and changing how we relate to ourselves, we can find a little ease, connect to our creativity, and better manage whatever life throws at us, even pandemics.

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, therapist-in-training, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. Subscribe to my weekly email on how to be more mindful at your job, in your relationships, and when it comes to politics here.

If you’re in D.C. or Maryland, reach out for reduced-price online therapy: jeremy@jeremymohler.blog

Download my free ebook on how mindfulness can decrease your anxiety and transform your life.

Photo by D.Reichardt.

Uncovering the cognitive distortions fueling your anxiety

by

The author and spiritual teacher David Deida tells a story about being at a party and seeing his mentor’s wife talking with an attractive man.

“Aren’t you jealous?” Deida asked his mentor.

“Yes,” his mentor responded. “But that I’m jealous isn’t bothering me.”

In other words, his mentor was choosing how to relate to his jealousy. He wasn’t turning the emotion into a problem. He was allowing it to just be there.

As the therapist and meditation teacher Ralph De La Rosa says, “Our emotions aren’t up to us. What we do with them, however, is absolutely up to us.”

I love this story because it illustrates the power of mindfulness in a way that we’re all familiar with.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt jealous. I can’t tell you because I’ve often been literally unaware of it.

My brain gets hijacked by stories and assumptions. Within seconds I’m the world’s most unlovable person. And the person who my lover or friend is talking to must be the world’s smartest, funniest, sexiest, most interesting person.

Intellectually, I know all of that is wrong. I know that this capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist society tricks us into thinking that love and connection are scarce and not abundant. That love and connection will only come from finding the perfect partner, working my ass off, getting rich, buying stuff, competing with others, having the perfect body, etc.

These messages are hammered into our heads through school, TV, movies, advertising, magazines, the corporate news media, and the myths we tell each other about “just the way things are.”

“We’re being trained to be capitalists,” writes the organizer and author adrienne maree brown, “to compete, in a system of scarcity, to be better than each other to access resources to meet our basic human needs.”

I know that capitalism and patriarchy and white supremacy suck. But in those moments of feeling jealous — or afraid or lonely or [insert painful emotion here] — I’m lost in thought.

I’m numb to the love and connection all around me. I can’t feel my feet on the ground or hear the breeze moving the trees. I can’t tell whether I’m breathing in or out. I don’t remember that the person I love can love other people while still loving me.

My head is full of rigid, either/or stories about who I am and what other people are doing and how the world is.

The psychiatrist Aaron Beck called these thought patterns “cognitive distortions.” They’re basically short cuts that our brain takes to try to figure out what’s going on. They color most of our thinking, especially when we’re overwhelmed by an emotion — like jealousy.

They don’t mean we’re broken or crazy or bad. “Cognitive distortions happen automatically,” writes the psychologist Matthew Walley. “We don’t mean to think inaccurately — but unless we learn to notice them, they can have powerful yet invisible effects upon our moods and our lives.”

My go-to cognitive distortion is catastrophizing. I take things to the negative extreme in the snap of a finger. She’s going to leave me for that guy and I’m going to die alone. He doesn’t like me anymore and I’m going to have no friends because I’m getting old.

Some other cognitive distortions:

  • Displacement is when you’re feel unable to directly confront someone who has harmed you, so you pick a safe target to attack. Think of the man who takes his resentment toward his boss out on his children after work.
  • Projection is when you don’t want to admit something unacceptable about yourself, so you place it on someone else. Think of a cheating partner who suspects their partner is being unfaithful.
  • Filtering is when you notice details that support your internal thoughts and feelings while ignoring contradictory evidence. Political arguments on social media are rife with filtering.
  • Overgeneralizing is when you come to general conclusions about life from a single incident. Whenever you’re using “always” or “never” or “no one” or “everyone,” you’re probably overgeneralizing.

Deida’s mentor had simply done the inner work to get to know his jealousy. He probably had felt a familiar fireball in his chest or tension in his shoulders but was able to soothe his own anxiety.

I bet all kinds of cognitive distortions were blaring in his mind as his wife smiled and played with her hair. He just wasn’t listening to them.

From this mindful standpoint, he could decide to intervene or discuss the situation with his wife after the party. Or he could decide not to.

He could choose his response to what was actually happening instead of reacting based on the cognitive distortions in his mind.

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. I’m here to help you be more mindful about work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe to my weekly email here.

Download my free ebook on how meditation can transform your life.

Photo by Sue Clark.

The next time you’re stressed, act like a gazelle

by

This will sound wrong to your modern, capitalist ears, but it’s true. Relaxing the body relaxes the mind far more than the other way around.

School didn’t teach us this. The stories our society tells about success and happiness don’t reflect it.

We’re told that thinking is king. That rational thought is more valuable than emotion. That more information — more data — is always better.

But that just doesn’t line up with the science of how the body works.

Some 80 percent of information that travels between the mind and body goes from the body to the mind.

Drawing a line between something we call the“mind” and something we call the “body” might even be unhelpful. Researchers studying the digestive situation have been discovering more and more connection between the brain and the gut.

Just look at animals. “When death appears imminent,” writes the psychologist Peter Levine, “all mammals instinctively enter an altered state of consciousness.”

Like when a gazelle goes limp — “plays possum” — just before it’s caught by a chasing cheetah. “What that means for the [gazelle] is that it will not have to suffer while being torn apart by the cheetah’s sharp teeth and claws.”

Many of us humans do the same when we’re overwhelmed emotionally or stressed out.

We freeze. Our stomach muscles tighten and shoulders pull up. Our face scrunches and neck tenses.

Our body is trying to protect us from some imminent danger. Even if the danger is somebody on Twitter.

It doesn’t take a big cat to get us there. Sometimes it’s extreme trauma, like war, a near-death experience, or sexual abuse. But often all it takes is a passive aggressive text from a friend. A tweet by a QAnon-believing white supremacist. Someone driving aggressively on the highway.

Sometimes we fight back. We fire off a tweet or flip off the driver.

But because so many of these little traumas occur throughout the day, we mostly just keep things inside.

We stuff down our anger or sadness or fear because we have to get to work or pick up the kids from school or watch the next episode of that show everyone’s talking about.

“Trauma is not just the result of major disasters,” writes the psychiatrist Mark Epstein. “An undercurrent of trauma runs through ordinary life … Our world is unstable and unpredictable, and operates, to a great degree and despite incredible scientific advancement, outside our ability to control it.”

Throw in capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy — the social systems we live within — and the trauma turns up to 11. Violence and harm are all around. Yet we’re just supposed to keep going, showing up to work, paying the bills, doing, doing, doing.

But the gazelle can teach us.

“When it is out of danger, the [gazelle] will literally ‘shake off’ the residual effects of the immobility response and gain full control of its body,” Levine writes. “It will then return to its normal life as if nothing had happened.”

That “shaking off” is the key. It’s how the gazelle discharges all the energy that built up as it tried to escape the cheetah. Once that energy has moved through its body, it can move on with no stress.

Traumatic symptoms — like a tensed-up stomach — aren’t caused by the traumatic event. They’re caused by all that unreleased energy. It stays trapped in the body and wreaks havoc on our muscles, organs, and nervous system.

“Many war veterans and victims of rape know this scenario only too well,” writes Levine.

They may spend months or even years talking about their experiences, reliving them, expressing their anger, fear and sorrow but without passing through the primitive ‘immobility responses’ and releasing the residual energy, they will often remain stuck in the traumatic maze and continue to experience distress.

In other words, the body is a doorway to feeling less stress and anxiety.

Regular exercise can release built-up tension. Yoga has been shown to reset critical brain areas that get disturbed by trauma. Meditation relaxes parts of the body that have tensed up due to overthinking.

Even taking a short break and feeling your feet on the floor over the course of a few deep breaths can help take the edge off.

This all doesn’t mean that thinking — the mind — isn’t helpful.

We need our minds to make decisions, plan, and otherwise navigate the world. Having more information to make a big decision isn’t always helpful. But having the right information is.

And sometimes, we need help feeling safe enough to relax the body and let go of trauma. That’s where talk therapy comes in.

“For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety,” writes psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. “Being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart.”

But the next time you feel stuck, scattered, or lost, remember the gazelle. Go for a walk, do some dancing, stretch a little. Remember that shaking it off is far more effective than trying to think your way to feeling better.

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. I’m here to help you be more mindful about work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe to my weekly email here.

Download my free ebook on how meditation can transform your life.

Photo by Edsel Adap.