I learned a couple of years ago, through the brilliant and generous work of Amelia Nagoski, about the scientific, biological processes involved in the experience of burnout. Nagoski writes specifically about the ways in which burnout affects women and the cultural and physiological phenomena that make our experiences of burnout unique. What has stuck with me and become part of my daily practice is understanding how a stress response occurs in the body, and how it must be worked out to completion in order for the body to know it is safe. Essentially, when we experience some sort of stressor in our lives, that automatically triggers a physiological response in the body. We all experience this: imagine you get an email from your boss with the subject line “We need to talk”. What happens in your body? Do you get hot? Maybe you go icy cold. Your heart rate probably increases. Your hands may curl into fists. Your jaw may tighten, teeth clenched. Or maybe you’re stopped at a red light and someone runs into the back of your car. Your heart rate will certainly jump, you’ll get a rush of energy, you may freeze, you may prepare for a fight, you may want to run away. All of these automatic, biological responses are happening all day and we have almost no control over them when they arise. What we do have control over is how we respond to them, right? That’s why we teach toddlers to count to ten and take deep breaths before they react. It takes years of practice to develop the tools to act right when we’re in a cortisol dump.
What was revelatory to me in Nagoski’s work around burnout was this concept that the body *must* complete a stress response, or it builds and builds inside of us. It has to have somewhere to go. Her research has to do with the cumulative impact of experiencing stressors over and over and over, and how the impact of that stress impacts our bodies and brains over time often resulting in a very specific kind of burnout. One of the key ways we have to prevent this backup of stress is to let the experience run all the way through us, to complete the cortisol charged stress response by discharging it from our bodies with physical movement. Let’s go back to the email.
When you see that email, your body automatically does what it does in response to that very scary subject line. Let’s say you muster the courage to open the email and it’s completely benign! Your boss has an idea they want to run by you and is simply terrible at writing subject lines for emails. The stressor has been eliminated. You’re safe. You’re not getting fired. In fact, your boss trusts you enough to run something new by you and get your feedback. Great! Trouble is, your body is still processing the physiological experience of the cortisol dump that happened automatically a few seconds ago. You’ve gotten a bump in glucose, a fuel source your body would have needed if you’d been in a situation where your life was at risk and you’d had to run or fight to save yourself. Your heart rate and blood pressure are elevated. Your body has been automatically primed for a life saving fight against a threat, but suddenly there’s no threat. It was just an email. But your body on cortisol doesn’t know the difference between a harmless email and someone pointing a weapon at you.
What I learned from Nagoski is that this moment - the moment you realize you’re actually safe and the threat is either gone or not real- is the moment we need to address. Most of us go back to whatever we were doing before the stressor spiked our threat response. Or we grab a drink. Or a cigarette. Or buy something. Or eat something. We look to some outside source to help us re-regulate our inside experience. You can imagine, if this happens over and over and over throughout your day, your year, your life, you experience a pretty major build up of unsatisfied, incomplete stress responses.
What our bodies need from us ini this moment to process all the way through that experience and know it is safe is…. movement. Yep. Often, all we need to do after that moment of panic is give our bodies some way to metabolize and complete the physical response that it started automatically by moving in a meaningful way. This could be a walk around the block. It could be a five minute dance break in your living room. It could be 10 jumping jacks. It could be a few sun salutations, for the yoga lovers out there. It simply has to be something in which you get your heart rate up and then naturally back down again, and it wouldn’t hurt to break a tiny sweat. This simple act of moving your body in a meaningful way helps your nervous system process through the initial stressor, comprehend that you are safe, and complete the stress response cycle by returning your hormone levels to baseline.
Learning this changed the way I interact with my body under stress. Now, when I experience a physiological stress response, I move. I almost always take a walk. It’s non-negotiable.
So what does all this have to do with why I had to leave Instagram *right now*?
I shared with you that when I hurt my knee, my mind went straight to panic over what would happen to my body if I’m unable to stay active for a long time. The fear of this has been so intense, at times, it has felt like I saw that “we need to talk” email. Because I’m injured, I’m not able to take my walks. My knee is too unstable for the elliptical, and it swells and throbs with too much exertion. In those moments of fear, anxiousness, worry, I would simply pick up my phone. My thumb reflexively moved to the Instagram icon. Scroll. Scroll. Scroll.
I’ve been dealing with something uncomfortable and embarrassing and vulnerable for a while, and maybe you will relate.
I’m active. I eat a lot of whole, healthy foods. I love novelty in all things, so I’m always trying new workouts: Strength training. Kickboxing. Functional fitness. HIIIT. Walking. Swimming. Pilates. Yoga. I close my rings. I get my steps in. And I love it! When I look in the mirror and see my body, I usually like what I see. I’m not unhappy with myself. I can trace the stretch marks and track the growth of my body over time, but when I’m alone with myself, I like me. This softer version of me still feels sexy. This softer version is still fucking strong. What sends me into an absolute tailspin is when I see pictures of myself that others have taken and posted, without my consent, to the internet. If you have done this, yes, I have been furious with you. Because what I see when I’m caught unaware in a photograph, or even if I know this picture was taken but I don’t have any control over it, is not what I see when I look in the mirror. What I see is someone other than myself, a person inside a body I don’t recognize. A body I fear. A body that crept outside the bounds I once decided are acceptable for my body. An unruly body. A too-large body. Not my body. So when someone posts a photograph of this body that cannot be my body I think: Is that what I look like? That’s not what I see when it’s just me. But clearly that’s what they see. That’s what people see. That is what people see when they look at me. And they are so okay with this that they just put it on the freaking internet. It’s a nothing to them. It’s a fact. It is just how I look. And I am filled with anger, panic, fear. I feel out of control. I feel violated, betrayed. I feel hot, clenched, tense.
But I do not complete this stress cycle. What lies underneath that fear feels too dark and hard to face. I do not know where to begin. So, I scroll. I numb. I swipe. And because I’ve been on this ride for a while, the algorithms know. They fucking know.
So, when my knee went out and I fell into a stress response about my fears around my body and I could not take a long walk even if I wanted to, I scrolled. I scrolled until I realized I was looking up how to get gastric band surgery in Mexico to shrink this body that only feels too large when I see it on this app that exists solely to sell my attention to uncaring corporations, lulling me into such a state of psychological apathy that I forget what I know to be true and sign my birthright, my sacred and unimpeachable autonomy, over to whatever marketing fuckstick can get the right ad in front of my face at the right time.
I was arresting my stress response cycle right at my most vulnerable moment and throwing myself into a funnel cloud of mental shrapnel and psychological debris.
So I got myself out.
More about facing deeply scary shit in part 3.