#74: When taking on more can energise you
I know. Your life needs an overhaul, but where are you supposed to find the energy to fix it? You're struggling to keep your head above water as it is. The thing is, friend, not all demands on you are equal. The demands that are imposed on you by others exhaust you and send your anxiety skyrocketing - but those that you choose autonomously can energise you. Autonomy is important: just ask Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin, and Harry Frankfurt. How do you choose autonomously? I'm glad you asked.
You can find the Identify Your Core Values exercise here, and the 5 Whys exercise here.
Read a sample of For F*ck's Sake: Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude, and Fun here, and buy it in all the usual places!
Reference
Martina Svensson, Philip Rosvall, Antonio Boza-Serrano, Emelie Andersson, Jan Lexell, Tomas Deierborg, 2016: 'Forced treadmill exercise can induce stress and increase neuronal damage in a mouse model of global cerebral ischemia', Neurobiology of Stress, Volume 5, Pages 8-18.
Episode transcript:
Do you want to know how to turn your exhaustion into energy?
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.
Hello, friends! First of all, guess what? I did it. I finished Marathon Eryri at the end of October. I’m trying to take my own advice from the last podcast episode, and taking time to savour what I’ve achieved before turning my mind to the next challenge. It’s tricky, though. I thought I’d be bored of marathons by now and that I wouldn’t do another one, given how much they hurt. But actually, this time, I felt surprisingly fine and non-achy afterwards. My joints didn’t feel like they were smashed and crumbling, for a change. So, maybe. I might line up another one. We’ll see. In any case, though, since crossing the finish line I’ve hardly been out running at all. I mean, obviously resting and recovering is important. But also, I haven’t had time. My book, For F*ck’s Sake, was published last week, and it’s been mayhem. There have been tons of emails, interviews, articles, and so on. I spent a good part of yesterday making a Tiktok for the New York Times. I didn’t even realise anyone except teenagers used Tiktok. And, to be fair, I did need to get my almost-teenage son to help me with it. But anyway, my point is that the last week has been a whirlwind of demands, deadlines, talking to people on the phone - that itself is a big deal, I wouldn’t say I’d rather die than speak on the phone, but it’s probably accurate to say that I’d choose to spend an hour in non-life-threatening labour than an hour on the phone talking to someone I don’t know extremely well - and low level background anxiety about whether I’m missing anything. And yet, despite how hectic it’s been, surprisingly it’s been fun and exciting rather than unpleasant and stressful. And I’ve been thinking about why that might be.
It’s interesting because, if I was this busy as a result of demands being placed on me by someone else - my employer, say, or the government, I’d be miserable. The background anxiety that I mentioned would be bubbling over into full-on ‘I can’t cope with this’. Now, in general, I tend to think - as, perhaps, you do too - that my levels of stress and exhaustion are influenced primarily by the demands that are placed on me. By how much there is to do, basically. The more there is to do, the more stressed and exhausted I become. But this past week has brought it home that it’s more complicated than that. Of course, when thinking about how stressed I am, how much I have to do is relevant - but it also matters what those demands are. A key factor here, I think, is how much control we have, or feel we have, over what those demands are. I’ve done a lot of stuff over the past week, but it’s all stuff that I’ve chosen to do. It’s completely voluntary. Nobody is there saying, ‘Do this or else’. And that makes it much less stressful than it might otherwise be. I’m reminded of a 2016 experiment that took place in Sweden. An unpleasant and unethical experiment, because it involved stressing out animals to the point of injury and, in some cases, death. It looked at the health outcomes for mice of running on a treadmill. Mice like to run - it’s a natural behaviour for them. And, we all know that exercise is healthy. But what this experiment showed is that running on a treadmill is healthy for mice only if they’re doing it voluntarily. If they’re forced to run, they get stressed out and anxious, and their getting stressed out and anxious blocks the health benefits that they would otherwise get from running. So, you can have two identical mice, each spending the same amount of time running, but if one is choosing to run while the other is forced, you end up with one healthy mouse and one unhealthy or even dead mouse. Applied to us, it means that exactly the same set of demands can be either healthy and enriching or stressful and debilitating, depending on whether or not the demands are ones that we’ve taken on voluntarily. Your stress, in other words, is not simply an inevitable outcome of how demanding your life is. Having no choice - or feeling that you have no choice - about what you do is itself a stressor.
This is important. In coaching sessions, I’ve talked to people who have said things like, ‘My life is stressful and I’m miserable, but there’s no point making changes - moving house or changing jobs or ending a relationship - because I’d just be replacing one set of demands with another’. And, perhaps that’s true. But swapping one set of demands for another can vastly improve your life if the demands you’re giving up are ones that you feel forced into and the ones you’re taking on are ones that you feel you’re positively opting into.
Now, what do I mean by ‘voluntary’ here? What does it mean to choose a set of demands, rather than having them forced upon you? Because in the wild, it’s not as clear cut as being either allowed to choose whether to run or being forced into it, like those poor mice. We might feel forced into shouldering some burden by our employer, but perhaps we’re not really being forced, assuming it’s a job we entered into voluntarily and from which we’re free to resign at any time. But then again, it’s not a completely free choice either. (I’m going to ignore the question of whether there is ever such a thing as a completely free choice.) We could refuse, but there would be a cost attached to doing so, and we end up thinking - sometimes correctly, sometimes not - that the cost would end up being more stressful than just doing the thing we don’t want to do. So, while there might not be a gun to our head, we can nevertheless end up feeling like there is simply no satisfying option open to us.
But, choosing a particular course of action isn’t just about not being (or feeling) forced into it. It’s also about autonomy. Autonomy is a big deal in philosophy. It’s central to the thinking of philosophers like Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin, and Harry Frankfurt. Being autonomous means being self-governing, making our choices in accordance with beliefs, desires, values, reasons, and characteristics that not only do we have, but with which we identify and of which we approve - which form, in other words, our authentic self. So, while it might be possible to claim that we’re acting voluntarily when we meet the demands of an unsatisfying career, if we’re meeting those demands because we’re afraid of losing our job or afraid of pissing off our colleagues, we’re not acting autonomously. And that’s because, for most of us, being afraid of losing our job and being afraid of pissing off our colleagues aren’t aspects of our authentic self. They’re characteristics of us, sure, but they’re not ones that we’re happy to have. Instead, we wish we didn’t have these characteristics. We wish we could be courageous enough to walk away from this unsatisfying job and try to find something more fulfilling. We wish we weren’t so preoccupied with what others thought of us. And perhaps, like some of my clients, we end up resenting ourselves for our lack of autonomy, and for our failure to live authentically.
So, what’s the lesson here? Well, part of the lesson is really uplifting. When we’re exhausted and overburdened, we can feel trapped. We know that there are things we could be doing to make life more satisfying, things that would improve things for us, but we look around us at our full-to-bursting email inbox, unpaid bills, and mounting laundry pile and we think, ‘I’m already stretched so thinly, I just can’t cope with taking on anything more’. But once we realise that our exhaustion is not simply a result of how much there is to do, but also of what sort of demands we face - whether those demands are ones that we’ve chosen authentically, or ones that have been imposed on us - then things look a little brighter. Some demands can energise us, rather than exhaust us, so it might turn out that you can take on more - you just need to be very careful about ensuring that any extra demands are the energising kind.
Here’s an example. Imagine, in your stressed and exhausted state, opening your email inbox and seeing a message from your boss telling you that you’re being tasked with organising a conference. You need to book accommodation, sort out catering, manage the budget, and all the rest of it. You don’t care about the stupid conference, and you know you’re not going to get any credit for your work here, but you feel you have no choice but to comply. What a horrible, stressful situation in which to find yourself. Now, compare that scenario with the following one. Imagine, again in your stressed and exhausted state, opening your email inbox and seeing a message from a family member telling you that they booked an exotic vacation that they’re now unable to take, and they can’t get a refund, so they’re gifting you the holiday. Flights, accommodation, food, everything is included. All you need to do is sort out all the practical stuff - book time off work, make sure the details are transferred into your name, buy some sun cream, and so on. You’re free to say ‘no thanks’, but you don’t want to - it’s a place you’ve always wanted to visit but never felt you could afford. The practical demands of organising this are, let’s say, equivalent to those or organising that conference. But organising the vacation is energising, right? You probably can’t wait to get started. Whereas organising the conference is definitely not. You are choosing to say yes to the holiday, and you’re doing so autonomously; the conference is forced upon you.
So, if you’re feeling at a dead end, try changing how you frame your choices. Instead of ‘I can’t take on any more’, try ‘Anything else I take on needs to be something I wholeheartedly choose, not something that is forced upon me’. You can choose things that energise you. What sorts of things would they be? To answer this, you need to get in touch with those values, characteristics, beliefs, desires and so on that comprise your authentic self. They’re the ones that not only do you have, but you’re glad that you have. Do you know what your most fundamental values are? If you’re not sure, check out the Identify Your Core Values exercise on the Resources page of the Academic Imperfectionist website, or check the episode notes for a link. Anything new that you take on needs to serve your most fundamental values. If you’re not sure whether some new choice you’re thinking of making is going to serve your most fundamental values, I have another exercise to help you: 5 Whys - that, too, is on the Resources page, and there’s a link in the episode notes. The 5 Whys exercise involves digging down into your reasons for making a particular choice, in order to ensure that they’re good reasons - reasons that support your autonomy. Reasons that support your autonomy are ones that you’d be happy to act from. So, for example, if you find that your reason for considering a particular course of action is a fear of letting other people down, then perhaps you find that you’re not happy to be acting for that reason. You’d prefer not to be so anxious about what other people think about your choices. But if you find that you’re considering a particular course of action because it’s something you’ve always wanted to try but so far hadn’t found the courage - then you might be happy with that. You’re happy with having finally worked up the courage to do something you really want to do. When you’re burnt out, it’s likely that taking on any new thi ng for the wrong reason is going to be exhausting. It might even be the thing that finally breaks you. But the opposite might be true for taking on new things that excite you. Taking on something that excites you might be just what you need to lift you out of that rut you’re in.
It’s a little bit like that extra stomach that we all have for dessert. You can finish a meal feeling like you couldn’t possibly eat another mouthful - you’d burst if you tried. And then someone says, ‘hey, check out this sticky toffee pudding I made’ and suddenly you have a bit of extra capacity. In the same way, we can be half-dead with exhaustion from the demands that have been imposed on us by other people - but if we then have an opportunity to do something that we really want to do, something that will energise and excite us, suddenly we find there’s a bit more fuel in the tank. Is your extra fuel tank going unused because you’ve been thinking that all demands are equal - equally exhausting, equally energy-sapping, equally unwelcome? If so, you’re in luck, friend. I hope you’ll enjoy taking some time to think about where you might spend your extra fuel.
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!
Enjoy the show?
Please leave a review in Apple Podcasts.
Don’t miss an episode - subscribe using the links below!