Get this amount of sleep and you won't burn out
JK you know I wouldn't play those games with you
I couldn’t stop myself and I clicked on this article by Shane Snow on burnout. Snow briefly explains why the level of control we have over an outcome makes the difference between a fulfilling experience and burning out.
A few years ago, Mark Stolow wrote an article on how no one cares about caregiver burnout because everyone seems to be suffering from burnout.
When caregivers raise awareness of how burnt out we are, we aren’t met with the help and sympathy we expect awareness to bring. Instead, people are like “yeah, join the club” with an eye roll or a shrug.
Which might be why “only another caregiver can understand” is such a popular catchphrase.
If you’re managing a team of employees, you have the ability to do things to prevent them from burning out. If you’re being managed, recognizing that you’re being forced to follow the recipe for burnout at least provides the cold comfort of being damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Sometimes headlines like “This is the perfect amount of sleep to get to prevent Alzheimer’s” make me laugh. They also irk me.
There is no right amount of sleep, exercise, food, or whatever to prevent dementia, cancer, heart disease, or whatever someone is worried about getting.
If only life were so simple.
Doctors aren’t even sure how to control people’s weight. Sure, calories in, calories out seems like a simple metric, but real life is more complex. The calorie counts of food are based on estimates of what’s in the food, which may have little to do with the calories taken in by our bodies. Our bodies burn wildly different numbers of calories. They slow the rate at which we burn calories when we eat less. We eat more when we exercise more. They’re not sure how it balances out. Information around calories consumed and utilized seems like hard data, but it’s data incorporating a lot of guesswork.
We see certain patterns in who develops particular conditions and we think that by tweaking those correlates we can control who gets the condition.
That’s a huge leap of faith.
A false sense of control can be helpful.
The more anxious I am, the cleaner my apartment gets. I can’t put my whole life in order, but I can put some things in order. It may not address the real issue, but I find it soothing. It seems like a healthy enough way to cope.
Trusting that a certain diet or fitness regimine will keep you healthy can be incredibly empowering. Learning to cook, taking the time to pay attention to your food, taking delight in the way your body can move and change are all satisfying and rewarding.
So many things give us the illusion of control. They provide the security to keep going and keep hoping when that’s not a reasonable thing to do.
A false sense of control is problematic when our hubris fuels guilt and shame. When we hold ourselves responsible for things no one has the power to control.
You didn’t answer the phone during a work meeting and your dad had a stroke.
You couldn’t cajole your BFF into adhering to her medication regimine and she relapsed.
Your partner only does their PT exercises when they’re actually in PT and they’ve hit a plateau.
You finally showered for the first time in days and your sister fell.
You got sick and now you can’t provide the care someone else needs.
You cannot make the money in your checking account cover the bills.
You turned your back for just one second.
You weren’t able to cure someone with the sheer force of your love and devotion.
You have no control over how much care the other people in your life need right now or how much they’ll need in the future.
You probably have very little control over how much care you’re able to provide them.
If you’re feeling burnt out, it’s not because you’re not doing a good enough job at “self-care.”
If you’re feeling burnt out, it’s probably because you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.
If you’re in a crisis, you can get free, confidential support from a trained crisis counselor 24/7 by texting the Crisis Textline: US & Canada: text 741741 | UK: text 85258 | Ireland: text 50808. You can also message them on Facebook from anywhere in the world.
Right now it seems like everyone is debating who should get the vaccine first and how it should be handled, as if every random person with a Twitter account is personally responsible for the covid vaccine roll-out.
It’s like those projects we did in school, where we were the ones in charge of solving a hypothetical problem for some big name company. Where we called all the shots and controlled the outcome. Where solving the problem was an option within our grasp.
Are we obsessing over details to avoid dealing with the situation we’re currently in?
That can be totally fine. But wouldn’t it be more fun to obsess over something less stressful? Why do we gravitate towards being fantasy public health officers and solving cold cases?
It reminds me of when I spent days/weeks/months obsessively researching other people’s medical diagnoses and treatment options. Sometimes it was helpful and important. Other times…not so much.
As much as I believe in western medicine and science, I’m also aware that people in various other times and places believed just as fervently in their systems of healing and explantions for how the universe works. They have compelling evidence, too.
Sometimes we just have to decide what to believe, knowing we might be wrong. We decide to stand by our people, knowing they might be wrong. Knowing they might change into people we barely recognize.
There’s so much messaging right now that if you aren’t careful enough, grandmas will die of covid-19 and it will be all your fault.
If you don’t get your kids and partner and friends to eat healthy and exercise they’ll spend decades suffering with chronic diseases and it will be all your fault.
If you don’t cut back on stress and set boundaries and take care of yourself, you’ll get sick and die and it will be all your fault.
WTF.
You are not in control of cancer cells or viruses or the economy or whether your phone is going to freeze in the middle of an important call or if your partner is going to remember to stop at the pharmacy or whether or not another car stops at that red light.
Do the best you can.
No matter what happens, it’s not all your fault.