Do you see a challenge or a threat?

How we can avoid burnout.

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There are so many days where this world feels overwhelming. Where we can focus on the many crises we face across the world, on the injustices we continue to witness, on the ways we treat each other. So how do we avoid burnout and keep ourselves whole? Where do we start?

In my continued conversation with Dr. Dan Siegel this week, we talked about the possibility of reframing threats as challenges. Of seeing the work to make change as a dance.

When you really have the courage to care, and there's something you perceive as a threat, you activate your fight reaction and or, or flee. You wanna run away, or freeze, and you tighten up your muscles or even faint and collapse out of helplessness. But each of those are exhausting. That reaction is only meant to last a few minutes, maybe a few hours, or a few days. But long term, if we interpret the things we're trying to change as threats, we are going to burn out. What if instead, we shifted from a threat mindset to a challenge mindset and saw the challenges we were trying to deal with as dance partners. We would wake up every day and say, “how am I going to dance with racism?” Or, “how will I dance with climate change?” “How am I going to dance with political polarization?” 

Dr. Dan Siegel

When you think of stress as the feeling that the demands placed upon you exceed your ability to meet them, the perception of stress is different for everyone. If I tell you that something is going to overwhelm you, to be impossible, to be an uphill climb, to be unrealistic, you can imagine how your body responds. The amygdala is flooded by your feelings and your nervous system activates. In that moment, you have only the fight, flight or freeze response to call from - and with good reason. You need that nervous system in top shape to manage what feels so threatening.

But if I take the same scenario and tell you I have a challenge for you - that it will be hard, but that I believe in you, that there will be wins and losses, but it is a challenge you can face - your prefrontal cortex comes online. Your executive function skills are accessible, and you can call on the full resources you have to face this challenge. Challenge is what humans respond to. Insurmountable stress may just shut us down.

As parents, we experience a lot of burn out. Days are long, things are hard, moments of difficulty are around every corner. But we are willing to take on this challenge because this is the gig. Once we've burned out we aren’t useful to anyone until we have recharged. Instead of living in a cycle of burnout and recharge, let’s borrow what Dan said and imagine these challenges as a dance. We can dance our way through the day, making room for our partner, thinking about the music, the steps, the hard and wonderful moments. This type of thinking isn’t pollyannaish. It's adaptive and protective. 

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Warmly,