COULDN’T CARE LESS

Close to burnout? It’s time you started giving fewer fucks

If ‘spent’ used to be what happened to your money on payday in Wetherspoons, now it’s more likely to describe a mind-fogging fatigue. As a new book reveals that emotional exhaustion is a modern malaise affecting pretty much everyone, is it time you stopped caring so much about, well, everything?

They had already exchanged 21 Whatsapp messages that weekend, but it was the double ping she received en route to their Sunday dinner date that made 27-year-old Chloe’s adrenaline surge. ‘I’m so sorry to do this...’ her friend Karen wrote, before bailing for the third time that month. Furious, Chloe stewed: her shoulders clenched, she wrote a passiveaggressive retort she knew she would never send, then realised she’d also been lumbered with cancelling the reservation. As for plan B? She could now make 8pm yoga, but her desire to practise had evaporated along with her social life. As she waited for the train to take her home, she scrolled through her emails, finding reminders about a staff meeting and the £350 she owed for a hen do. Far from ending the weekend rested, she felt hopeless, mind-frazzled, shit.

This shit has a name – emotional exhaustion. And if it sounds like the kind of Pr-speak employed by a celebrity who’s just been papped with some mysterious white powder, it’s a real phenomenon. ‘We’re talking about the first stage of burnout, brought on when you’re constantly exposed to stressful situations and, rather than deal with them effectively, you ignore them and let the stress fester,’ says Dr Amelia Nagoski, feminist academic and author of a new book on the subject – Burnout: The Secret To Solving The Stress Cycle, which she co-wrote with her twin sister, and fellow doctor, Emily (oh, to be a member of that highachieving family). They found

that while emotions themselves are nothing sinister – ‘the release of neurochemicals in the brain, in response to some stimulus’ – exhaustion builds when you get stuck in a repeated emotion. ‘Emotions are based in the body, so emotional exhaustion becomes a kind of physical exhaustion when you don’t complete the cycle from stress-response to relaxation,’ Dr Nagoski explains. ‘For example, your muscles tense up without the release that’s supposed to follow.’ Because fatigue from feelings is deemed less important than the kind you feel after running a half marathon, you likely ignore it, or worse still, blame yourself for not handling so-called #firstworldproblems. Instead of resting, you power on, bottledup stress leeching your energy reserves like Google Maps tracking in the background.

And the consequences of a stiff upper lip go beyond a pursed mouth: the list of conditions that can be traced back to exhaustion – both the mental (anxiety and depression) and the physical (raised blood pressure and migraine) – is extensive. Which makes you question, what would happen if you followed the memes and… gave fewer fucks?

FEMME FATIGUE

Both your gender and the time you’re living through suggest that if emotional exhaustion has a target, it’s going to be you. When psychologist Herbert Freudenberger coined the term ‘burnout’ in 1975, emotional exhaustion – defined then as the fatigue from caring too much, for too long – was burnout’s evil mastermind. Fast-forward to today and stressing too much about too many things has become a national pastime. The Nagoskis explored the topic in the wake of the 2016 US election, and they believe that the political uncertainty in the UK right now is leading to a similar emotional fallout. Then there’s the working culture that’s more five to nine than nine to five, plus the perma-presence of social media. Certain professions are notorious emotional leeches (high-pressure industries, such as financial trading, plus ‘giver’ roles like those in medicine, social care and teaching), and women are disproportionately represented in both paid and unpaid care work. In her 2017 book, Down Girl: The Logic Of Misogyny, Kate Manne, assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell University, describes a society of two groups: the human beings, then the human givers whose role is to offer time, attention and affection to the beings. No prizes for guessing which one most women fit into. ‘Human givers are more at risk of developing emotional exhaustion,’ confirms Dr Nagoski. ‘There is a social expectation for women to be happy, calm, generous, attentive givers. It isn’t that women’s personalities are burning out faster than men’s; being a woman is more stressful than being a man because society makes it so.’

So, how to put emotional exhaustion to bed before it beds you? The first step in extinguishing the exhaustion, according to Dr Nagoski, is to take it back to what happens physiologically when a stresstrigger strikes. She cites the fight or flight response. Imagine, for a moment, you’re confronted with a lion. Neurological and hormonal activity pushes blood and oxygen into your muscles, your heart pounds faster. But when you flee, you’re putting all that cortisol to good use, or ‘completing the stress cycle’. Now imagine the lion is a shortnotice flat inspection by your landlord.

‘If you never talk about an emotion, never think about it, stuff it away... well, then your muscles still have tension that never got released. And it adds up: day after day, year after year,’ Dr Nagoski warns. The classic symptom? The other f-word: ‘I’m fine!’ ‘You have to do something that signals to your body that you’re safe, or else you’ll stay in that state. Physical activity is perhaps the most efficient strategy for completing the stress-response cycle. Your body doesn’t know what “resolving an interpersonal conflict through rational problem solving” means. But it does know what jumping up and down means.’ While exercise is the gold standard for stress elimination, anything that allows your body to return to a state of relaxation works, from a night of dancing to a game of ‘my boss is a bigger dick than yours’ with your mates.

EMOTIONAL INVESTMENT

But while sweating off your frustration might do wonders for your heart rate, such tactics can’t future-proof you against future fuck-giving. So what can? In a word: boundaries. Hold the eye-roll. ‘A boundary is any decision that governs your behaviour,’ explains psychotherapist Jennie Miller ( jenniemillercounselling.co.uk) and author of (you guessed it) Boundaries. If the word makes you squirm as much as ‘moist’, she understands, but thinks it’s time you embraced the concept regardless. ‘Setting a boundary seems to go against the message of pleasing others, as if it will upset someone. But the opposite is true. When you set clear boundaries, everyone knows where they stand and where you draw the line.’ Work sucking all your emotional energy? You already have boundaries, in the form of an employment contract. Should anything jeopardise your ability to fulfil your work contract –

Stressing too much about too many things has become a national pastime

say, the colleague who spends Friday mornings stirring up worst-case-scenario rumours when you’re on deadline – ask a manager if you can work remotely until 1pm (or at least hire an empty meeting room) to get the job done stress-free.

As for what boundary-setting looks like IRL? It’s time to practise getting slippers-and-pjs comfy with the word ‘no’. When friend-frazzled Chloe realised Karen wasn’t only messing with her schedule by flaking, but also her energy levels, her take on ‘no’ meant screening Karen’s calls. Harsh? Perhaps. And yet doing so has resurrected a flagging friendship and her emotional health. ‘For me, boundarysetting means not instantly replying to her Whatsapps or taking her late-night phone calls where she offloads all her dating dramas and doesn’t even ask how I am,’ she explains. ‘I now arrange for us to do something, like a barre class, instead of dinner. If she bails, I’m happy doing that solo; but usually it means quality time spent on more equal terms, with a shared experience to talk about afterwards. For once, I’m giving more fucks about myself than someone else, and it feels great.’

Ready to lose a few fucks, too? Miller suggests starting with scenarios where you’re not emotionally invested – turning down an upsell in a cafe or rejecting the job opportunity from the recruiter that you know is wrong for you – to build your confidence for those scenarios where you are emotionally invested. Think: turning down an invite to the dinner with your mates where you know you’ll drop £70 and feel guilty about it. If it seems unkind, know that bottled-up resentment is as legit a health concern as a scratchy throat. They’re your fucks, now use them wisely.