Kate's Nuggets

Finding Your Way When You Are Exhausted and Things Feel Futile
Episode 25

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
Today I want to talk about how to find your way when you're exhausted and things seem futile.

There's a thing that happens when people get really tired or overworked or stressed where everything seems to crash and it feels like there's no more oomph, there's no more go, there's no more motivation. There's a sense that everything is just too much. This can feel very, very frightening if you're not used to moving through this and into action on the other side.

This is a place where people who think of themselves as high achievers will crash and will then shame themselves for not being able to do as much as they can, for not being at their best, for not being productive.

The first thing I want to say is that that cycle of shaming yourself doesn't help.

It makes perfect sense if you don't understand what's going on, so I want to talk a little bit about what's going on when we crash like that, and then talk a little bit about how we can work with it.

What happens is that under stress, our bodies divert energy to solve the particular problem in front of us. It takes energy away from all of the other things that we could be doing, memory formation and sleep and feeding ourselves and playing.

We get a very narrow focus on the single problem that we are trying to solve.

Now, if the single problem that we're trying to solve is as complex and all-consuming as how to get through a pandemic safely, this demands an enormous amount of energy.

If we spend all the time thinking about it, we don't have any energy left for rest or digestion or just hanging out, and our bodies actually need that rest time in order to reset all sorts of hormonal systems, to rebalance neurotransmitters, to actually take care of our physical bodies so that we can have a healthy immune system and that we can have good memory formation and all sorts of things.

But the thing about human beings is that we can force our bodies to do things beyond their perceived capacities.

If you've ever had that tense feeling where you say, "I'm white-knuckling it through this one, I'm just going to get to the other side, and then I can relax," that is actually pushing your body past what it intuitively thinks it can do.

Now human beings can do this, and we can adapt to incredible amounts of stress and we have limits. The way we know that we've hit our limits is we kick in these defense mechanisms which are stop trying, you need to rest.

This is often a form of adrenal fatigue, the adrenaline that amped us up and got us going and kept us moving, white-knuckling crashes, and we just have no energy left for moving through whatever the situation is. When we have an adrenal crash, we need to rest until our body has reset, until we've stabilized at a more normal level of adrenaline flowing through our systems, and then when the body's reset, we naturally find that we have more energy to keep going.

So, if we're just overextended and exhausted, that crash is a healthy reminder that we need to rest.

That crash tells us that we had been working at a pace that was non-sustainable, and that if we want to not crash like that in the future, we need to find more sustainable ways of engaging with life going forward.

Something slightly different is happening when we get to the point where we feel like it's time to give up and things feel futile. When things feel futile and we give up, that is typically a defense mechanism that is mediated by norepinephrine rather than it being adrenaline response.

What norepinephrine does in that system is it is a defense mechanism that prevents us from wasting resources on a hopeless task. That system says we need to save our energy for something we can do something about.

So, if our brain interprets a situation as futile or our body feels like it can't do something or we lose a sense of optimism about our ability to affect change, we activate that system, which actually blocks our motivation and action. The message that we get cognitively is there's no point, give up.

Giving up in a situation that seems hopeless is hardwired into our being.

It is an energy-conserving mechanism that human beings have so that we don't waste energy on things that we cannot affect. This is why when a problem seems too big, like climate change, a lot of people don't take any action because the hormonal system has said, "That's too big for me to do anything about. It's futile. I'm going to give up." So how can we do anything about this?

Deciding to give up gives us two really big benefits, and that decision can be unconscious. It's not always conscious.

Sometimes our bodies just go, "We're giving up." If we stop trying to do something that will be hard or frustrating because we're not going to meet our goals, giving up relieves us of that frustration and that difficult work. It makes things easier.

Now, most of us also have a part of our brain when we're in the process of giving up on things that tells a slightly different story. The part of us that wants to achieve the thing that we're being tempted to give up on knows that if we fight through to the end, we'll get a victory that we will be able to celebrate for the rest of our lives, that we will be able to accomplish things that matter, we'll have a sense of meaning, a sense of our own competence, both of which are things that we need.

So often there's this fight that's going on in our body that is one part of us wants to give up because everything feels overwhelming and futile, and one part says, "No, no, no, no, no, we can do this. You can do this. I can do this and when we get there, it will be so great. We will feel so good about what we've accomplished."

So, what can we do if that feeling of hopelessness hits us? The first thing to do when we notice that we've hit that place of feeling hopelessness is simply to notice and to label and to name, "Oh, look at that. I'm feeling hopeless," and then get curious. What am I feeling hopeless about? What feels like an insurmountable challenge? Now, this is very, very difficult.

When we've hit this place of hopelessness, our friends can come up to us and give us the best advice on the planet, and we are going to say, "No, that's not going to work."

You've probably experienced it from both sides.

You've probably been the person who thought that things were impossible and had somebody give you good advice and you've gone, "Nope." Maybe later you've realized that that was good advice. You've probably also been the person who has had a friend or coworker go, "Ah, I just can't." You go, "Yes you can." Been a cheerleader and given advice and they'd gone, "No, I really can't."

Now, often those periods of feeling like I can't don't last very long, but sometimes they last a very long time. If they last long enough, they push you into the realm where a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist will diagnose you with depression, and you might find that your recovery system isn't working well enough to get you through that place and some medication is useful or some therapy.

If you feel like "I can't", and then it passes and then you start doing it again, what you have just been through is your body's natural resiliency kicking into place.

The human being actually is incredibly good at recovering from stress. So many, many stressful things don't turn into trauma in our bodies. The way that that works is the stress hits us. We have that feeling of we can't, and we rest and we step away and we don't try anything.

In our subconscious, our neurons rewire and solve problems, and our bodies rest and recuperate and put together resources in ways that we are not consciously thinking about. At some point we've adapted to the situation, it no longer feels hopeless, and we take action. This is our natural recovery cycle.

Now that you understand that this is what happens, there's a part of you that will have this awareness the next time you get to a place where you are tempted to give up. That part of you will grow stronger over time if you encourage it to be present.

So, if you notice, "Oh, I've hit that place where everything feels futile," feel good about having noticed it, even if nothing shifts for you right in that moment. Know that noticing it and relaxing with, "Oh, here's where I am," is training your brain to be more adaptable.

If you have enough awareness to know, "Oh, I'm in this place where things feel hopeless," then you may have enough of the adaptability neurons wired in to be able to start actually working with the situation.

Now, this takes time and you may not be able to do it at first. It's all good. It's all practice. It's stuff that gets wired in over time, and every little bit of attention you bring to this helps build new neural pathways that will be more useful the next time.

If you notice, "Oh, I'm in this place where everything feels overwhelming," there are two things that you can do. The first is to notice what feels overwhelming and to break it down into a really small next action step that you can take. Break it down into chunks, dividing it into pieces until you get to one that is small enough that it doesn't feel overwhelming. This can be used in all sorts of cases.

If you want to walk a thousand miles, a thousand miles feels overwhelming. Putting on your shoes is the first step, getting out the door is the second, and walking a few steps gets you started. You'll have to do that over and over and over again until you get to the thousand miles. But each time you take enough steps to walk a quarter of a mile or a half a mile, you're closer to that.

If you're overwhelmed by a project and you know it's going to take several days and you just say, "Okay, I'm going to spend 15 minutes today on it and 15 minutes on it tomorrow." When you give yourself permission to just spend 15 minutes on it, sometimes you just spend 15 minutes on it and sometimes getting into action makes you realize that you can accomplish more and you spend more time working on it because it feels very exciting to be making progress.

You can do this with tasks at work. You can do this with all sorts of things.

Okay, that's a four-day project. I don't feel like I've got four days' worth of energy. What am I going to do in the next 10 minutes? Because the other thing that happens is once we start getting in action, we actually generate a sense of, "Oh yeah, I can do this," because we are in action, so we have evidence that we can be moving forward towards our goal, and that becomes a reinforcing, virtuous feedback loop.

Sometimes we then get into trouble because it's so exciting to be making progress that we want to keep going and going and going and going and going and going. If it's a big project, we actually have to remember to rest, or we will take ourselves beyond our capacities and we will crash again and we'll have to go through the same cycle of, "Ugh, I can't do it. It feels like too much. No, I got through 150 miles, so I've only got 850 to go, but I'm going to start with the next two steps. Let me start the process all over again."

If you find that you notice that you get into that place where it feels like I just can't, there's no point, but you can't bring yourself to break things down into small actions, there's an exercise that you can do once you've gotten out of that place, once you've gotten out of that mental state that can help you be more at choice the next time you experience it.

This one's a little tricky because you want to make sure that you are talking about or drawing about that state of feeling like things are futile and not trying to recreate feeling it.

The exercise is to take a piece of paper and using your cognitive processing, what you think about when you know what it's like to have had that experience, sketch maybe with some colored pencils or some crayons so you can get some color in it and maybe just doodle, but sketch something that is a representation of what it feels like when you are in that place.

Maybe you have some metaphors that you can use. Does it feel like a desert? Does it feel like you're drowning? Does it feel like you move through molasses? There may be some metaphors in there that are useful. Draw them and then speak aloud or write maybe to a friend, maybe to share and maybe just for yourself an explanation of what it is that you just drew.

This is a really cognitive exercise. This is saying, "When I get to the place where I feel like I'm ready to give up, my body gets really tired and I want to have a drink of alcohol. I want to wrap myself up in a blanket and I don't even want to watch TV or read a book. Everything feels dark and heavy and it's like the whole world goes gray." Or maybe you're like, it is a desert and there's no water and you're parched.

Whatever your experience is, you want to talk about it. This is an experience that a part of you brings to the table. The part of you that says it's time to stop wasting energy on this project that feels too big. The idea is to notice that that is a way you get, it's not your whole identity, it's a part of your experience. It's not your whole experience.

The drawing is a way of looking at that part of your experience from the outside and you want to separate your sense of identity from that experience. That experience is an experience that you have, but you are not that experience.

Once you've done this exercise, what happens is you've strengthened by wiring in some more neural pathways a sense that there are two different experiences and that they can exist simultaneously. You can sort of integrate the two parts of your experience without blending them together.

So, your sense of identity is wrapped up in this idea that it's futile and that nothing's going to help. You separate them, so you have your sense of identity in one hand and this experience in another, and the next time you have that experience, you're more likely not to get trapped in it. You're more likely to have in your consciousness a sense of, "I am myself and this is my experience that I'm having right now. This is not who I am, and this will pass."

That part of you that has an identity that is separate than your experience is the part of you that is able to become active and say, "Okay, it's feeling like everything's too much right now. I know that one of the best things to do if it's feeling like too much is to find one thing that I am capable of doing that's moving in the direction that I want to go and do that one step that feels doable."

Depending on how motivated you are about your goal, how skillful you are in terms of having the skills and resources that you need to accomplish the goal, you will find that the next step is either small or tiny, or actually quite a big step, just not as big as the whole project. You will build your capacity to do the project by taking the little tiny steps and the next time you come to a similar project, you'll probably be able to take a slightly bigger step as your first step.

Now, the other thing that it is worth noting about the neurotransmitter norepinephrine that actually mediates the system that shuts down that says, "Oh, that's futile. It's time to stop wasting energy on doing that," you can counter the norepinephrine activity with sleep and exercise.

So, if you have proactive practices of good sleep hygiene and good exercise habits, you are less likely to get into that place where everything's futile.

Now, there's of course a paradox, if it feels like everything's futile, unless the part of your brain that has your identity, sense of identity that's not trapped in believing the futility, but is able to see that sense of futility as a message, until you've done that work, you won't be able to be in that sense of futility and go, "Oh, I know I just need a nap and it won't feel overwhelming after the nap," or, "It feels overwhelming, but if I go for a run or I do a little yoga, it will not feel overwhelming anymore because I will have reset my system using those physiological mechanisms."

These things all work together.

The more that you separate your sense of identity from the experience so that you're able to understand what's going on and read the emotional experience as a message to deal with the overwhelmingness, sometimes the right thing to do is to give up.

Sometimes there really is no more that you can do and it really is futile. Quite often, most of the time, maybe even all of the time, there's actually something that you can do.

Viktor Frankl in "Man's Search For Meaning" talks about how the ability to choose how he responded in the concentration camps in World War II made the difference between him giving up and not giving up. So maybe we can't all do it under those level of stressful circumstances, but maybe we can. We can't control so much of life. So much of life is luck. So much of life is other people doing things that we are not in control of, the weather doing things, systems that are bigger than we are.

But in that small moment between something happening and us choosing what to do, even all if the only thing we have the power to choose not to do is to say, "All right, this sucks. I'm not giving up," if we have the power to do that, then all of a sudden nothing becomes futile.

Now the reality is that it takes a training to wire in those habits and that we have other systems in our brain that are likely to interfere with us having that ability of control. If we get hijacked, for instance, by our amygdala and our threat assessment system, the fight, flight, freeze response also kicks in, and we need to actually manage that as well as the sense of overwhelm. We have a whole bunch of different neurotransmitters coursing through our bodies and through our brains. Learning which ones are at play in the various challenges that we deal with inside our own minds can give us a hand in figuring out what will be helpful, both in terms of preventing being hijacked by the system and in terms of recovery once we are.

So, adrenaline is fear-based. So, when you have a fight flight, freeze, fawn reaction that's fear-based, then the body of tools that you should be using should be about risk management and courage.

The norepinephrine circle here about stopping wasting energy on things that feel futile, exercise and sleep, that have a direct impact on the functioning of that system on a very physiological level, and increasing your perceived sense of control and capacity to make progress by either increasing your skillset or decreasing the size of the task until it feels manageable will help you move forward.

These imaginative exercises about drawing a picture of your freaked out afraid self and your overwhelmed giving up self and separating them from your sense of identity are incredibly powerful tools because they cultivate that sense of, "I am witnessing these experience happening in my body, and once I witness these experiences happening in my body and in my mind, then I can notice, oh, I don't have to believe the content of what it's telling me. I can listen to the underlying message.

This feels like too much. This is scary. I can deal directly with those." Because once we turn and face those issues directly, then we can apply our natural creativity and resourcefulness to changing what is in our control enough to be able to move forward.

So, in this time when we are dealing with climate change and a global pandemic and violence to do with racial profiling and discrimination and violence against people of color in the States and all sorts of other stressors, because we've all got other smaller, more personal stressors in our lives at all times, it's not surprising that for some of us it feels like it's too much. F

or some of us, it feels overwhelming. For most of us, it feels scary. For some of us, it's actually energizing. For some of us, the fact that things have gotten this bad is motivating and is actually resulting in energy and activity.

If that's you, this is a great time to just know that if you push yourself past your limits of what is sustainable, your body will let you know by giving up for a bit, by forcing you to rest, by stopping, and know that that is not bad, that is not shameful, that is not you losing your commitment. It is your body saying, "All right, it's time to rest for a bit. Let's recover so we can get back to work."

Wishing you all ease and energy and compassion for the times when you are scared or overwhelmed.

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Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.