Burnout: Tips for solving the stress cycle

Episode 3: Burnout: Tips for Solving the Stress Cycle

Kendra: I wanna start this episode by telling my story with burnout. Okay. When my kids were about ten, eight, and six, I just hit a wall. I didn’t know what was going on. I had all these strange symptoms that made no sense. They didn’t seem related at all. It was like, I would have a fluttering heartbeat just outta nowhere. And then I felt so incredibly fatigued, like I was swimming through wet cement just to get through the day, like powering through my to-do list. And so I had to kind of go on my own quest, in parallel to this quest for my kids. I had to go on a quest for me, to figure out how can I find a way to feel a little better in the middle of all this? Because you can’t quit your job parenting.

I think there has been kind of some disbelief that burnout is an actual thing. And there are other terms for it, like adrenal fatigue and chronic fatigue syndrome. But because it’s not really something that’s easy to test for medically, it’s a lot easier to just dismiss it and be like, oh, you know, why don’t you take an antidepressant? Why don’t you go get some more sleep? And I was frustrated because I couldn’t get help that didn’t feel like somebody just wanted to pop a pill on me and get rid of me.

So when I finally met this woman, Dr. Kathy, who’s a functional medicine doctor, I was at my wits’ end. And she said, “Tell me about your life.” And I laid it all out again. I’d told the story a million times. And she said, “you know what? I think this is all stress-related.” And then she pulled out some test results and that’s when I learned about cortisol.

You might already know about cortisol. It’s often called the “stress hormone” and it performs all these important functions in your body, like managing blood sugar levels and tissue repair. She showed me a graph of what a normal cortisol pattern looks like. It’s supposed to be a gently sloping line that starts higher in the morning and it tapers down at night. And then she held up my graph and it was a flat line, running close to zero – all day. The doctor said it meant my adrenals were burned out. That even if I needed to produce adrenaline to survive some calamity, like lift a car off my kid, I couldn’t. And more tests proved it. I was clinically depleted.

This is A Little Easier – I’m Kendra Wilde We’re all made to handle some stress. When we’re activated our bodies produce a cascade of chemicals that help us survive the moment. But we’re also designed to have intervals of recovery. All those systems need time to come back to baseline. Otherwise your system gets flooded.

Dr. Moira Mikolajczek: Yeah, definitely. Now I can be a hundred percent sure about that. I burned out myself as a parent.

Kendra: Okay. I don’t have a Belgian accent, but I’ll try. Dr. Moira “Mick-a-lo-jack.”

Dr. Moira Mikolajczek: [pronounces her name]

Kendra: Dr. Moira “Mick-a-lo-jack.”

Dr. Moira Mikolajczek: Yeah, exactly.

Kendra: is Professor of Emotion and Health Psychology at the University of Louvain in Belgium. She co-authored one of the foundational studies on parental burnout and she got interested in the topic partly because of her own experiences.

Dr. Moira Mikolajczek: When I burned out from parenting, I didn’t know what was happening to me. I knew nothing about that. Um, but clearly it makes me want to get up every day and try to better understand this in order to help the parents as best as we can.

Kendra: So professional burnout, which is, you know, stress related to your job has been researched for decades and it’s really well understood. It was first studied in air traffic controllers. They can burn out in a high stress, high stakes work environment, but Moira’s research was some of the first to show that parental burnout was something different.

Moira: These, uh, parents feel totally exhausted by, uh, parenting to the point that, uh, even when they think about their children or think about what they have to do with their children, this just makes them want to stay in bed.

Kendra: That exhaustion leads parents to feel differently about their children.

Moira: Uh, when exhaustion gets very severe, the parent does not have any energy left for his children so he distances himself emotionally, uh, from the children. So distancing is, is the second main, uh, symptom.

Kendra: And if you’re exhausted and feeling emotionally distanced from your kids, you’re not gonna be enjoying the parenting experience.

Moira: So there is a loss of pleasure of parenting, but also of being with the children.

Kendra: And finally, if the burnout isn’t addressed, you feel like a different person altogether.

Moira: These parents tell us that they love to watch their children sleeping because at that moment, they can still feel the love that they have for their children but when they’re with their children, uh, during the day, they cannot feel this love any more.

Kendra: Burnout comes in different stages, from slightly toasty to this serious condition that mimics PTSD. But why, why are parents burning out? The first clue comes with geography and culture.

Moira: So we recruited 40 countries. Uh, all over the world. And by far, the prevalence is 10 times higher in Western countries than in all other parts of the world.

Kendra: So what’s different about parenting in Western countries?

Moira: Some cultures do put a lot of pressure on parents. It’s like this in the US, in Belgium. You feel that you have to be a perfect parent almost, uh, because the, there is a lot of state interference.

Kendra: Moira says it’s also something that’s changed in recent generations

Moira: 50 years ago. Um, fathers and mothers, they did pretty, pretty much what they wanted when the door of the house was closed. No one was watching over your shoulders. No one was telling you what you had to do, telling you that you had to give your child five fruits and five vegetables a day, that, uh, you shouldn’t put your young child before a screen and blah, blah, blah. And now there are so many recommendations in almost every aspect of your children’s life..

Kendra: and it’s not just the government and the experts that bring the pressure. We put it on each other.

Moira: Each parent has an eye on his neighbors and his friends. And so there is also this fear of judgment. No one of course wants to be a, a “bad, a bad mom.” So if, if it’s your child birthday, you have to put something extraordinary up.

Kendra: And in a culture like that. to admit that you’re burnt out or even that you’re struggling can be hard.

Moira: Currently. Parents can really not fail admitting that you are tired of your children, that you are sick of parenting. Yeah. That’s just not possible in such an atmosphere.

Kendra: And if burnout isn’t addressed, the outcome can be devastating. First of all, to your health. The release of cortisol, that stress hormone that caused me so many problems can be measured over time in your hair.

Moira: Parents in burnout have twice as much cortisol as normal parents. And their level of cortisol is higher than that of patients suffering from severe chronic pain. And also higher than, uh, death of, uh, victims of partner violence.

Kendra: This is exactly what I experienced in my own journey. When I was telling you I had extreme back pain, you know, to the point that I could barely produce cortisol anymore. And as I found out, constantly running an overdrive might feel sustainable at first, but eventually it impacts your physical health. And crucially also your mental health.

Moira: So we see that parental burnout increases suicidal ideations, much more, much, much more than, uh, for instance, job burnout or even depression. And this is not surprising because of course you cannot resign from your parenting role and you cannot just, uh, go on sick leave of your children. So parents in parental burnout, they feel totally trapped in their suffering. and in extreme cases it can also lead to violence and neglect. So we see that previously good parents, people that are, that were not violent, not neglectful as they burn out, they start to, to neglect their children because they do not have enough energy left to take care of them. And also they do not have any energy left to inhibit their anger or, uh, irritation.

Kendra: All of these dire consequences mean that protecting ourselves from burnout is crucial.

Ann Douglas: All the four kids were struggling. I was also dealing with my own mental health issues. Uh, it was a really rocky and stormy time for the family.

Kendra: Canada’s best selling author Ann Douglas gives a vivid picture of what it feels like when you’re in burnout. She wrote the best seller Parenting Through the Storm about her own journey, caring for her four children, all of whom had a mixture of neuro-behavioral issues and mental health challenges. We’ll be tapping her wisdom a lot here.

Ann Douglas: I was just literally, you know, surviving on caffeine and alcohol and simple carbs and treading water and feeling like I was sinking. And it was just like – when I look back at that time, it’s funny, I was going through like all the different articles I wrote over the years. And I’d be sending like tweeting a picture to my husband saying. “I have no memory of this” and he’s say, “How could it not be that way?” Cause like we were on autopilot for a number of years. And so looking back, I can see that, you know, it would’ve made so much sense to practice self-care and do all the right things in terms of exercising regularly and sleeping enough and all that. But at the time, I literally was just trying to keep my head afloat during a really exhausting and overwhelming time,

Kendra: In some ways, the experience of the Pandemic, which has made us all think a lot more about our mental health, has made more people aware of the phenomenon of burnout. Admitting you can’t cope, which used to be so taboo, is now more acceptable. So if we’re aiming to prevent burnout and the toxic buildup of stress hormones in the body like Ann and I both experienced, I wondered, how do we do it? Where should we turn to understand the way out?

Amy Brown: I’m just looking. What’s the book. I can’t think of it right now. It’s about completing the stress cycle. I can’t think of the name of the book.

Kendra: Oh yeah. I’ve heard them speak, but I don’t know the name of it.

Kendra: And the answer came while I was chatting with another parent, Amy Brown.

Amy Brown: I don’t know if I have it over there. Hold on. Let me see if I have it.

Kendra: This kind of conversation happens often when I’m comparing notes with friends who’ve also struggled.

Amy: This book Burnout. Have you read this? You would love this book. Okay. I’m putting burnout is secret of unlocking the stress cycle and it’s. N-A-G-O-S-K-I, Emily and Amelia.

Amelia Nagoski: [singing] standing in the fire that fuels me… I’m Amelia Nagoski. Emily Nagoski is my identical twin sister.

Kendra: If I hear about a great resource, of course, I’m gonna reach out. Besides being an author, Amelia is a musician, a professor, and a choral conductor. She knows burnout.

Amelia Nagoski: Humans are evolved in order to experience stress.

Kendra: That’s the good news. We’re supposed to experience stress. We’re adapted for it. But the trouble is we adapted to it in a very, very different environment.

Amelia Nagoski: So when we think about that environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, like the African Savannah, the time when you would experience stress is in a life-threatening situation. So you see this lion coming at you and you, your body freaks out. It pours out adrenaline and cortisol and glucocorticoids. Every system in your body is changed. Your reproductive system changes cuz you don’t need to be making a baby right now cuz you gotta save your life. Your immune system slows down,the blood pulls away from the surface of your skin so you’re less likely to bleed to death if you get cut. You start pumping more oxygen so that you can run all these things, change in your body, every system so that you can flee and save your life.

Kendra: All right. We all know about the fight-or-flight reaction, right. But here’s the next part of the story. The part that Amelia says is crucial and the bit that in modern society – with fewer lions around – we’re neglecting.

Amelia Nagoski: So you run and you run and you run and you reach a hut in your village and somebody lets you in and you hide together. And the lion gives up and walks away. And you jump up and down and hug each other and you feel so happy to be alive. And you love your friends and family. And the sun seems to shine brighter. And that is the complete stress response cycle. You’ve gone from the activation of the stress, to the expressing of the thing that your body is preparing to do, all the way through the cycle to that sense of joy.

Kendra: That joy part. That’s what gets left out.

Amelia Nagoski: Unfortunately stressors these days, the things that cause our stress are not really lions. It’s taxes, and trying to get your kid to put on their shoes, and sitting in traffic. And none of those things can be solved with fight-or-flight. We need parents, for example, to stay engaged with this difficult conversation, rather than fleeing. Like, please don’t flee from your child. We need you to stay with them, even if you wanna give ’em away tof the circus. That’s just, we, society is really grateful that you’re sticking in there. So that means that we have that stress response. Our bodies don’t have that much flexibility in how they respond to stressful situations. Um, so your body pours out all this – glucocorticoids and cortisol and adrenaline, and it has nowhere to go and nothing to do. So you are stuck in the middle of the cycle while you smile and nod and try to be patient and calm. And then where do all those chemicals and electrical signals go? Nowhere.

Kendra: This is exactly what Moira told us that she observed about cortisol building up in the body, building up in your hair. And what I experienced when I burned out.

Amelia Nagoski: It is really good news that we can deal with the stress separately from the thing that caused our stress. And it also means that even when we’re in the middle of a stress response cycle, we can set it away to deal with it later and handle the stressful situation now, knowing that it’s gonna be okay,I can deal with these feelings when it’s more convenient or appropriate.

Kendra: So that’s the key. It’s not about avoiding stress. I mean, that’s impossible. But when you find yourself flooded with stress hormones, it’s about finding an adaptive way to get rid of them safely.

Amelia Nagoski: But it’s actually not so bad because there are so many things that complete the stress response cycle. Of course, the most effective is physical activity. Is anyone surprised that physical activity is good for you? No, we’re not. This is one of the most important reasons because when you’re being chased by a lion, you run, it’s what your body’s preparing to do. So when you let it completely go through the cycle it’s intended to do where you run on a treadmill or you, you know, pound on an elliptical machine, or you just go for a walk or you wrestle with your dogs on the carpet, or you dance it out to Beyonce in your kitchen. Literally, any physical activity will help to move your body in the direction of completing a stress response cycle to tell it that it’s in a safe place.

Amy Brown: I was stressed during those years, but I was a consistent, I’ve always been a consistent exerciser every single day, whether it’s walking, running biking,

Kendra: Remember Amy who recommended Amelia’s book? Exercise is the solution that she chose instinctively.

Amy Brown: I was inadvertently completing the stress cycle and not realizing it. So I probably would’ve been a heck of a lot more stressed, because I was exercising because I wanted to be healthy, but when I started reading about the stress cycle, I thought, okay, I know exercise helped me. This is probably why. It was just interesting that if I hadn’t been an avid exerciser, how much worse could it have been for me? Not just because of physical shape, but emotional health.

Kendra: Okay. Exercise, like Amelia says. That one’s not a surprise. But if that’s not for you, there are other ways to complete the stress cycle,

Amelia: But it turns out that that dream from your eighth grade bully is your imagination initiating a stress response. Or if you get sweaty palms at a first date, there’s nothing life-threatening around you. That’s your imagination, your worry, initiating a stress response. Uh, and that’s good news, cuz it means your imagination can also complete a stress response cycle. For me, what I did was I imagined myself as Godzilla on my elliptical machine, tromping on the state land grant institution, where I was getting my doctorate that was stressing me out so much. And I would get to the end of that workout and I’d feel, you know, thrilled to be alive and the sun shined brighter and I had that whole complete stress response thing. Not because my body did anything it hadn’t done before, but because my imagination had gone all the way through a cycle, a story. And you don’t have to guide yourself through your imagination, uh, reading a book that makes you feel like, “Rahh, that was awesome.” Or you get to the end of a movie and you’re like, “Yeah, the victory, the winners!” And you walk out all thrilled to be alive. That feeling is your imagination guiding you all the way through a complete stress response cycle.

Kendra: But why does this work? How can you imagine yourself through a stress cycle?

Amelia Nagoski: There’s no such thing as vicarious emotion. If you’re experiencing emotion, your nervous system is experiencing emotion.Your brain is releasing the chemicals and electrical signals and you are physically having that emotion. So when you go through a story that inspires you and fills you with that kind of confidence and pleasure that that’s, that’s real, that’s happening.

Kendra: So exercise, imagination… what else?

Amelia: if you wanna take that another step further, creative self-expression, where you take the feelings and you put them outside yourself into a meal, or a pair of knit booties, or a book or whatever. Whatever you wanna do to create something. That act of taking the feelings inside you and pouring them out into something in the world is another way that a lot of people already know that it feels so great to create, to make music to dance. One of the reasons is cuz it’s completing stress response cycles.

Joanna: It’s been really important for me. I know everybody is different. Um, but for me to paint, it’s a set-aside special time for me to pay attention to how I feel.

Kendra: This is Joanna. She was a painter before she was a mother and she uses the technique of creative self-expression to get the stress out.

Joanna: A lot of times early in the journey I didn’t know how I felt. I couldn’t even name it. And, and typically if someone asked me how I was doing, I would talk about how my kids were doing, um, and the importance of separating ourself from them and, and marking it. And for me, that is painting. It marks a separateness. No one else in the world is making this painting or choosing this color.

Kendra: Joanna and her then-husband adopted two girls who they knew would be high-needs, but they had no idea what they’d really be getting into. Joanna said for a while, she neglected her painting when the parenting was most demanding.

Joanna: I thought about it in my head often. Um, like I would sort of picture my paint and my paper and my canvases, but I was a little scared maybe of like, what would happen if I started making work. Like I was scared of my feelings I think, almost like, I can’t fall apart. And I felt like if I opened up that box, um, that’s what would happen. Um, but it’s really just the opposite, you know, um, opening that box is just really precious.

Kendra: She started completing those stress cycles with painting and she says the effect was striking.

Joanna: I mean, I couldn’t quite figure out yhy there was a correlation. To me having this dedicated good amount of time painting, why would that have anything to do with my bettering my relationship with my children? It was such a profound change that happened. Sometimes the thing that you need to do for them is take care of yourself and do what you were put on this earth for.

Amelia: So that was physical activity, imagination, creative self-expression. There are some other quite, well, I mean, seemingly easy-on-the-surface ones but that are not, in the larger context of the world, which is like, Rest specifically: a good night’s sleep. People say, “oh, sleep on it. You’ll feel better in the morning.” Like, is the problem gonna change in the morning? Why would you feel better in the morning? Well, it’s because one of the things that happens while you sleep is your brain goes through your whole day, your whole life, and runs through scenarios and tries again and practices and gets rid of stuff. Uh, and so we wake up in the morning, you feel better. Is that as easy as it sounds? No. cuz I mean, we’ve lost track of the number of people, women in particular, who have told us they feel guilty for sleeping. If you’re sleeping, you’re using time for yourself, “How dare you?!”

Yeah. Okay. Uh, it was physical activity, imagination, creative self expression, good night’s sleep. Uh, another one is a big old cry. And this is one that parents have a hard time with cuz you don’t wanna just break down in front of your kids cuz you wanna model like how to – blah blah. Yes. Sometimes you just wanna lock yourself in the bathroom and have a big old cry. That is an effective strategy for completing a stress response cycle. There is a trick to it. And that is to turn your attention toward the experience of crying while you are crying. Just deal with the stress in your body and just notice: How hot do I feel? How tense do I feel? How much snot is running down my face? Am I drooling? Am I like what… Like you just notice it without judging it and you pay attention to it until it ends on its own.

Lisdaly: I cried so much. Because sometimes I’m like blaming myself, like, am I doing it right? Did I do something wrong? Like, what is it, how can I help him?

Kendra: This is Lisdaly. And she confirms raising her son who has ADHD involved a lot of tears. And she says, sometimes crying with another person was just what she needed.

Lisdaly: I’m so grateful for my boss because she is like this huge support system for me. And I would just call her and I’m like, “I need to have, like a personal conversation. Like I need to just let it out and just cry” and just like I would cry and she was so encouraging and, um, and just supportive, just listening, you know, sometimes we just need somebody to just listen to us. Because even though if it was like the world is falling apart, just having a conversation with somebody about what you’re going through and them listening to you, and it really helps. And I would always feel better, like just having that good cry.

Kendra: Okay. So what’s left?

Amelia: We did physical activity, imagination, creative, self expression, rest, big old cry. And I think the last one I have is laughter. The only trick to this is that it can’t be like ha that posed social laughter that serves as like a conversational lubricant.That’s necessary for interacting in the world, but it’s not the kind of laughter that’s gonna tell your body that it’s safe. It’s the wild out of control, embarrassing, mouth wide open belly laugh, where you’re a little outta control. That kind of laughter you cannot do if your body feels like it’s under threat. So when you get in that state, your body’s like, “oh, I’m safe.” And it moves you all the way through a stress response cycle. Um and it also is so fun and it might be the easiest and most relaxing of all the strategies.

Patty Terrasi / Shut Up Sister: So I was seeing, uh, a therapist for myself because I was just getting so burned out and whenever I would visit her, I would go in there and some of the most stressful times in my life, I would go in there and crack jokes.

Kendra: Patty and Gina, the sisters we met in our first episode, say they can laugh about literally anything.

Patty Terrasi: And my daughter had received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Um, and I remember saying, you know, “Bipolar disorder is just so funny. Someday, I’m gonna write a humor book” or something. And she said, looked at me and she said, “And you know, you will.” And I mentioned it to Gina, and then, Gina used to write a humor column in a local newspaper, and Gina said, do you wanna, you know, should we write a book together?

Kendra: That book became “Shut Up About Your Perfect Kid.”

Gina: We thought, like people said, “you’re gonna get criticized, you’re gonna get criticized.” And, um, and I remember we were in this huge place for our first speaking engagement in Chicago that was like 400 people in the room and someone says, “I’ve got a…” raises their hand at questions “I’ve got a problem with your book.” I’m like, “oh god, what?” She says, “why didn’t you make it hard cover? cuz the other day I was gonna beat this woman who was bragging over the head with it!”

Kendra: I love that. I got a lot of stress out, just laughing with the Shut Up Sisters, but then I have to remind Amelia actually there’s one more way to complete the stress cycle.

Amelia: Yes, affection and connection. How could I forget those?

Kendra: Your sister would be horrified!

Amelia: Yeah. Uh, so this can happen on a lot of levels, affection – connection to other people, even just a friendly exchange with your barista. “Hey, I’d like a vanilla chai latte and I like your earring.” And they say, “Here’s your vanilla chai latte. Thank you very much.” Just that little interaction is enough to remind your body, “The world’s a safe place. The world’s a safe place.” Um, if you remember and notice, “Oh, look how my body changed just a little bit because I had that interaction… don’t dismiss it as unimportant, cuz it really is very valuable and it’s helping you. Um, but going even deeper than that, if it’s comfortable, um, a 20-second hug, if there’s somebody in your life who you love and trust enough to hug for 20 seconds, it could be an awkwardly long time to hug someone who you do not deeply love and trust. Um, and the trick to that is you both support your own center of gravity, put your arms around each other and breathe and notice and wait until you feel a shift. Long enough until your body goes, “All right. I’m safe. I’m home. I’m with this person and therefore safe. Nice.”

Kendra: I hope this little survey of the stress cycle has given you some ideas that you can implement in your own life to get those unwanted stress hormones outta your body, fend off burnout or heal from it if you’re already there. And Amelia has this one last thought for us. Wellness isn’t like an end zone you reach.

Amelia: People ask us all the time that, you know, they say, “Well, my goal is I want to experience peace. I just wanna be at peace.” And sadly, unfortunately that’s not what’s gonna happen. You’re never gonna be at peace and stay there. You’re gonna cycle into effort and back to rest, and into stress and through the complete stress response cycle into a state of safety, uh, so wellness, instead of being a state of being or a state of mind is a state of action. It’s the freedom to oscillate through all of the cycles of being human.

Kendra: I, I wish that this, um, podcast had visual because just watching you, I can tell that you conduct. I love seeing your, your body language, your gestures, your motion. If people who are listening could see Amelia, she really has a great body language.

Amelia: Uh, yeah, it’s a, yeah, it’s a, it’s a thing. Stuff comes outta my hands when I should be sitting still.

Kendra: Coming up on A Little Easier we’ll take a deep dive into the nervous system and find out how understanding emotions can help us access more patience and compassion for ourselves and our kids.

Dr. Christopher Willard: Again, it activates that prefrontal cortex, which doesn’t shut off the emotional response, but it quiets the emotional response so it’s not quite so flooding. And curiosity, like that’s why like when we lean into emotions, when they’re not too much, it can actually be so helpful. And so healing.

Kendra: Brain science. Next time on A Little Easier.

Micro-Action Moment:

Kendra: We’ve given you lots of micro-action moments this time, as we’ve learned about all these ways to complete this stress cycle. Here is one more one of my favorite psychiatrists adn neuroscientists, Dr.Bruce Perry.

Dr.Bruce Perry: Just take a walk. It’s amazing how powerful a walk is and how regulating and how much better the world will feel – and you will feel – if you simply go take your kids, take a walk in the park. Now, if you can, I know it’s hard for a lot of parents, but if you can take a walk by yourself, and have a little bit of solitude, a little bit of reflective time in a beautiful place if there’s any pretty place near where you are, you, and even for 10 minutes, you are gonna feel completely different.

Kendra: I’m Kendra Wilde and this has been A Little Easier, the show that was created to help you find more joy and resilience when parenting is extra challenging. Thank you so much for being here.

Make sure you’re subscribed to A Little Easier in your podcast app so you don’t miss an episode. And while you’re there, please take a moment to rate and review the podcast, share it with family and friends. We’re an independent show focused on elevating parents because you’re the most important force behind your child’s wellbeing.

Visit alittleeasier.org for show notes and discussion questions, plus resources on parental burnout and resilience.

A Little Easier is written by Harriet Jones and co-produced by Harriet and Rae Kantrowitz. Sound design and original music by Rae. This podcast is brought to you by Wild Peace for Parents and me, Kendra Wilde.