Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

1. emotional exhaustion—the fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long; 2. depersonalization—the depletion of empathy, caring, and compassion; and 3. decreased sense of accomplishment—an unconquerable sense of futility: feeling that nothing you do makes any difference.1

Stress is not bad for you; being stuck is bad for you. Wellness happens when your body is a place of safety for you, even when your body is not necessarily in a safe place.

Sometimes we get stuck because we can’t find our way through. The most difficult feelings—rage, grief, despair, helplessness—may be too treacherous to move through alone. We get lost and need someone else, a loving presence, to help us find our way. And sometimes we get stuck because we’re trapped in a place where we are not free to move through th

emotions are tunnels. If you go all the way through them, you get to the light at the end. Exhaustion happens when we get stuck in an emotion.

If you’re hiding from your life, you’re past your threshold. You aren’t dealing with either the stress or the stressor. Deal with the stress so you can be well enough to deal with the stressor.

Meaning is often misunderstood as “the thing we’ll find at the end of the tunnel,” but it’s not. It’s why we go through the tunnel, regardless of what we find on the other end. (Spoiler alert: meaning is good for us.)

Your brain was trying to keep you alive in the face of a threat that seemed unsurvivable, so it slammed on the brakes in a last-ditch attempt to do that.

The problem is that the strategies that deal with stressors have almost no relationship to the strategies that deal with the physiological reactions our bodies have to those stressors.

Chronically activated stress response means chronically increased blood pressure, which is like constantly turning a firehose on in your blood vessels, when those vessels were designed by evolution to handle only a gently flowing stream. The increased wear and tear on your blood vessels leads to increased risk for heart disease. That’s how chronic