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.

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.

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.

So if you read some science in this book that describes “women” but doesn’t describe you, that doesn’t mean the science is wrong and it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. People vary, and they change. Science is too blunt an instrument to capture every woman’s situation.

We thrive when we have a positive goal to move toward, not just a negative state we’re trying to move away from. If we hate where we are, our first instinct often is to run aimlessly away from the owl of our present circumstances, which may lead us somewhere not much better than where we started. We need something positive to move toward. We need t

in the mundane tasks live the protective gestures that help us grow strong enough to defend ourselves and the people we love, and to make peace with our enemies. “Wax on, wax off” is what makes you stronger: connection, rest, and self-compassion.

Just Because You’ve Dealt with the Stressor Doesn’t Mean You’ve Dealt with the Stress Itself

But what are the words that describe the emotion of “freeze”? Words that might feel right: Shut down. Numb. Immobilized. Disconnected. Petrified. The very word sympathetic means “with emotion,” while parasympathetic—the system that controls freeze—means “beyond emotion.” You may feel disengaged from the world, sluggish, like you don’t care or nothi

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