#72: Bend so you don't break: a stress survival guide
Just as trees aren't meant to remain stiff and unyielding in the face of a storm, you aren't meant to remain efficient and relaxed in the face of mounting demands. Bending isn't a weakness; it's what you need to do to survive. But it's only your branches that need to bend - your roots need to stay put. Do you know what your roots are? Snuggle up with a cuppa for some arboreal advice from The Academic Imperfectionist.
For the 'Identify Your Core Values' exercise mentioned in this episode, click here.
To read Julia Butterfly Hill's essay, 'Surviving the Storm: Lessons from Nature', click here.
Episode transcript:
You’re not supposed to have everything under control.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi there, friends. We’re well into the new term now, aren’t we? Or the new semester, or whatever it happens to be called where you are. The start-of-term chaos is over. The deadlines are piling up. We’re back into the usual routine. And for many of us, that means doing the usual juggling act as we switch between our various obligations, focusing on maybe two or three main projects at a time, all the while uncomfortably knowing that there are others that we’re not focusing on, lurking just out of sight, but no less demanding on our time and energy. There’s always more going on than we can be dealing with at any one time. Always things to be falling behind on, even while we’re making progress on other stuff. It’s a recipe for stress, isn’t it? I want to have a little chat with you about this, in this episode. About how you respond to situations when, no matter how hard you work, there always seems to be something you’re falling behind on. What are your expectations of yourself, in that situation? What sort of things do you say to yourself? Do you talk to yourself encouragingly and compassionately, or do you berate and blame yourself for all the things you’re not getting done?
Perhaps because I’ve been thinking about this recently, something that the American environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill wrote really resonates with me. She’s famous for having lived for over 2 years at the top of a California redwood tree in the late 90s in order to prevent it from being chopped down. (She was successful, and the tree, named Luna, is still there.) She remained up there, 60 metres above the ground, through freezing rain, high winds, and intimidation from the loggers. She wrote an essay entitled ‘Surviving the storm: lessons from nature’, which you can read online - I’ll link to it in the episode notes. In it, she says the following: ‘One of the lessons I learned and something that I use a lot now is how to survive a storm. [...] The trees taught me that the way to make it through [a storm] is to stay rooted and centred but not rigid. The trees and branches that try too hard to stand strong and straight are the ones that break. The only ones that make it through are the ones that know to bend and flow and let go. So, I’ve been using that now in my life. [...] I just bend and flow when I see the wind coming; I loosen up and get ready to get blown, and then I kind of flex back into place. And I’m ready to get up the next morning and do it all over again.’
What a great metaphor. Let’s take a look at exactly why it’s a great metaphor; in other words, how and why it applies to you, to us, as we go through our stress-filled lives, juggling too many things at once, maybe speaking less-than-kindly to ourselves along the way. So, we can think of the shape that a tree takes when it’s not windy as its ‘real’ shape - with inverted commas around ‘real’. It’s the shape of the tree when it’s not being pulled around by external forces. And I think a lot of us have an analogous conception of ourselves, or at least we think we do. We have a sense - though perhaps it’s just a vague sense, or just a yearning - of what our lives would look like if we had everything under control, if we weren’t behind on anything, if we were ending each day having checked everything off our list so that we didn’t have to feel bad about ourselves, and so on. We tell ourselves that that’s what our lives should look like. We should have everything under control, and so on. Which is rather like a tree, if it had a self-conception and a nasty inner critic, telling itself that it should look the way it does on a windless day all the time. That’s the way it’s supposed to look, the tree might think, in much the same way that you might tell yourself that you’re supposed to have everything under control. Now, in the case of the tree, it’s easy to see how ridiculous that is. Trees don’t live in windless worlds. They live in worlds full of forces that are constantly affecting the shape they take. And, what’s more, trees are made to live alongside those forces. They’re made, as Julia Butterfly Hill noticed, to bend in the wind. That’s how they survive. Presumably, if there ever were any super rigid trees that snapped when it got too windy, evolution put a stop to them. If trees were capable of reflecting on themselves and telling themselves that they ought not to bend in the wind, they would be giving themselves bad advice. Being able to bend in the wind is good for trees.
Ok. So, what about you? You’re constantly telling yourself that you ought to be in control of things, you ought not to be so behind, and all the rest of it. Which is very much like telling yourself that you ought not to bend in the wind. Because, what would it be like if you were in control of everything, and stayed in control no matter what pressures were mounting up around you? You’d snap. That’s what it would be like. You’d need to be going all-out keeping up with everything, in the way that some of us can manage to do for short periods of time like when we’re up against a deadline and when we can get away with kissing goodbye to sleep and rest because we can make up for it after the deadline has passed, but we couldn’t do it permanently. We’d collapse. We’d burn out. And - be honest here - you know that if you were managing to keep up with absolutely everything that was going on in your life, you’d probably respond by thinking that you had the capacity to take on a few extra things, and then you’d have to try to keep up with those too. I can feel my blood pressure increasing just talking about this. If you think that the best way to manage mounting demands on your time and energy is to meet all those demands, no matter what, then there’s a big snap waiting in your future for you.
What if, instead of viewing our bending under the weight of demands as a sign of weakness or incompetence, we viewed it as just the way things are meant to be? Just as we view trees as meant to bend in the wind, because after all, they live in a windy world. And, analogously, you live in a world full of demands. In fact, if anyone needs to be able to bend, it’s you. Trees, after all, only need to deal with a certain amount of wind. How much wind comes their way doesn’t depend on how they respond to the weather. By contrast, how many demands come your way does depend, at least in part, on how you respond to whoever or whatever is making demands on you. There are some demands that you can’t really opt out of - if you have kids, you do have to feed them, I’m afraid, and if you have a job there are certain obligations that you have whether you like it or not - but there are plenty that you can say no to. Being able to say no is important. But so is being able to bend when the wind blows.
What does bending when the wind blows look like, not for trees, because we all know that, but for you? Well, it means accepting that if you’re devoting energy to one project or set of obligations, you’re going to have less time and energy for the others. That’s just the way things are. It means that if you’re throwing out a lot of time and energy trying to get things done, you’re going to need to recoup that by taking time to rest. It means that what your projects and obligations look like from day to day, week to week, and month to month is liable to change - some things get delayed, some things that you thought you’d be able to do turn out to be things you aren’t able to do, some things balloon and end up demanding more time and energy than you thought they would, and so on. And when this happens - and it’s about as natural as the wind blowing - it’s unhelpful to try to be rigid and berate yourself for not having everything under control and maintaining your shape in the wind. You need, instead, to bend and adapt. Accept that you need to be flexible, and that being flexible is not a matter of letting yourself off the hook - it’s something you need in order to survive.
What about the other thing Julia Butterfly Hill says about trees - that not only do they bend in the wind, but they are also rooted and centred? In other words, there’s a part of trees that isn’t dragged about by the wind. Trees survive their branches being blown around, but they don’t survive their roots being torn up. Now, it’s easy to find the roots on a tree, but what about your roots? You might need to do a bit of work there. Your roots are those things that aren’t up for grabs when things get stressful. They’re the things you’re not prepared to compromise on. Some of those things are the same for all of us. You need to eat. You need to sleep. You need down-time. You need to get outdoors and exercise. And so on. These are biological needs. We can sometimes get away with neglecting those needs for short periods of time - like when we survive on pizza and pull an all-nighter when we’re up against an important deadline - and I know some of you think that it’s possible to neglect some of those things permanently, but if so, you’re in denial. You can’t do that indefinitely without doing some damage to yourself. In addition to those basic needs, some of your roots - unlike tree roots - might be different from other people’s, and they might change over time. Perhaps it’s important to you to have time every day to spend with your family, or to live in a certain area, or to make your career in a particular field, or to go out dancing once a week. Perhaps giving up those things isn’t an option - it would cause you to wither and die. Do you know what your roots are? They’re your most important values. If you haven’t reflected on this before, or if it’s been a while, you might benefit from doing the ‘Identify Core Values’ exercise that you can find on the ‘Resources’ page on the Academic Imperfectionist website. I’ll link to it in the episode notes too.
It’s really important to know what your roots - your core values - are. Without a sense of that, everything is up for compromise. Everything is a branch, to stick with the tree metaphor. Everything is subject to bending in the wind. And you don’t want that, any more than you want to stay rigid. One problem here is that we’re often put under pressure to compromise on our core values, or to deny them, or to tell ourselves that we’re silly for having them. Take academic culture as an example. Good academic jobs are so hard to find that we’ve all come to accept that we need to be willing to be geographically mobile. Who knows what continent you’ll be living on when you next get a job offer? Do you care? If you do, you shouldn’t - count yourself lucky to be offered a job at all, and shut up moaning about the fact that it’s at the University of Alpha Centauri. (There isn’t a University of Alpha Centauri - at least, not as far as I know.) And are you even daring to hope that your spouse, if you have one, lives in the same time zone as you do? Jeez, what a spoilt brat you are. You’re dreaming. And so on. The result - and I’ve seen this so many times - is that we internalise all this and we censor ourselves by telling us that we shouldn’t care about things that we actually do care about, deeply. We tell ourselves that it’s silly not to want to emigrate or leave our friends or take on a job that would leave us with no time to pursue interests that we value a great deal. Work on noticing when you’re doing that. Find your core values and stick to them. Your core values don’t stop being your core values just because someone else, or the culture you’re in, tells you that they’re silly or that for whatever reason you shouldn’t care so much about them. If they matter to you, if you find that on reflection they’re more like roots than branches, then that’s all there is to it. That, of course, might mean making some hard decisions. It’s possible to be so pleased with a shiny new job offer that we manage to convince ourselves that actually we can be happy in a situation that, deep down, we know is going to make us miserable. We’ve all got stories like that - like that time after I finished my PhD and told myself that it would be a great idea to go and work in corporate IT. (It wasn’t.) Sometimes - as I did then - we realise we’re on the wrong path only after we’ve taken it, and there follows a lot of angst as we feel lost and untethered and we wonder whether we might have ruined our entire lives forever. Sometimes, if you’re more sensible than I was back then, you might realise that a particular option, while tempting, would be a mistake, and that you’d be better off holding out for something that’s more aligned with what you care most about, which can also be really stressful. Nobody said this was easy. But having enough insight into yourself to know what not to compromise on is worth it, I promise.
Right then. It’s been a hard day here at Imperfectionist Towers, and I think I’m going to treat myself and the kids to a pizza for dinner, because - for me - wholesome cooking is a branch, not a root. Anyway, pizzas with vegetables on them are basically salads, and I will not be taking any questions on this matter - see you next time, friends.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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