Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

No wonder “helping professions” are so exhausting—you’re confronted with people in need, all day, day after day. No wonder parenting is so exhausting—once you’re a parent, you’re never not a parent. You’re always going through the tunnel.

Maybe you’re sick all the time: you have chronic pain, injuries that just won’t heal, or infections that keep coming back. Because stress is not “just stress,” but a biological event that really happens inside your body, it can cause biological problems that really happen inside your body but can’t always be explained with obvious diagnoses. Chroni

science is ultimately a specialized way of being wrong. That is, every scientist tries to be (a) slightly less wrong than the scientists who came before them,

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.

Positive reappraisal involves recognizing that sitting in traffic is worth it. It means deciding that the effort, the discomfort, the frustration, the unanticipated obstacles, and even the repeated failure have value—not just because they are steps toward a worthwhile goal, but because you reframe difficulties as opportunities for growth and learni

So many ways to deny, ignore, or suppress your stress response! For all these reasons and more, most of us are walking around with decades of incomplete stress response cycles simmering away in our chemistry, just waiting for a chance to complete. And then there’s freeze.

With positive reappraisal, you can acknowledge when things are difficult, and you recognize that the difficulty is worth it—it is, in fact, an opportunity.

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.