On today’s blog, Kristen is sharing the reasons why we wrote our book.
My relationship with burnout
I (Kristen) moved up and down the burnout spectrum throughout my life. Every single time I went to a workshop on self-care or burnout prevention, they listed things that weren’t feasible for me. They said to get more sleep (cool, but I’ve always had trouble sleeping), to meditate more (hard pass), to sign up for yoga/Peloton/kickboxing classes (eh), and my favorite – to reduce your stress.
At various points in my life, I worked three jobs, juggled graduate degrees and family responsibilities, was in the management group of a multinational network of companies and then moved to the ownership group, and since about 2016, I’ve largely lived in Hilton hotels. Reducing stress is a hilarious pipedream.
Especially because that’s not actually helpful. Reducing stress is great, sure, but the key is completing the stress cycle and those things are different. The article linked there is a really good explanation, but quickly: your body is designed to handle stress. Something happens, hormones release to help us deal with it, it gets handled (either entirely or the acute incident), and then our hormones and other systems calm down.
Problem is that a lot of us are stuck in a loop between the 1st and 3rd steps and never allow our body to get to the final one. We never release everything, so it all keeps building. How do you release? Lots of ways: physical activity, laughing, physical touch from someone you trust, doing something that makes you happy.
(You’ll notice that none of these involve setting more boundaries, another popular burnout ‘cure’.)
finding inspiration for our book
As a neurodivergent lady with chronic pain, a lot of ways that people recommend completing the stress cycle don’t work for me, and I was having trouble finding burnout resources that created a flexible structure that could work for everyone.
So we created one – it’s why we wrote our book.
We built it on top of a cultural understanding of the origins of burnout that we also couldn’t find anywhere else. Burnout is an individual problem, yes, but it’s not only an individual one. Pretending otherwise often leaves folks with the proverbial bandaids on bullet holes. Okay, but not great.
It got to the point where we couldn’t not write the book. We did research to see if our hunches and personal experiences were backed up by data (they were) and spent a lot of time thinking through every angle we could to make sure we provided you all with tools you can use and concepts that are easy to understand. We’re proud of this thing, we can’t lie, but there’s nothing else like it out there – and we’ve looked.
Wanna check it out for yourself? HERE you go!
Want to read more about some of our key book findings and topics. START here.
