Anti-Racism and Burnout: Completing the Stress Cycle
Our brains, for all the amazing things they do for us, are actually pretty dumb. Don’t get me wrong! We’re perfectly evolved to survive! But what helped our ancestors survive tornadoes, elephant stampedes, war, and famine isn’t what’s going to help us survive most of the struggles we currently face.
In fact, the ways that our brains try to protect us from traumatic events— flooding our systems with adrenaline, drawing connections between unrelated events, detaching us from reality— can cause more harm than good. This is especially true if you’re engaged in systems-change work.
If you’ve faced racism on the job, been called out publicly, lost a job because of bias, or survived police harassment, you’ve likely experienced the deer-in-headlights feeling of traumatic stress. On some level, your body has feared death, disconnection, loss of survival mechanisms, and physical/emotional/spiritual pain. For many of us, this stress is chronic; we face microaggressions in multiple spheres of our lives and, eventually, our bodies begin to believe that nowhere is safe.
Whether you’re facing full-on burnout or you are looking for ways to bounce back after a one-time stressful event, learning the science of the stress cycle can be SO helpful. I grabbed these tips from Brene Brown’s interview with Emily and Amelia Nagoski, two white academics (who are twin sisters!). Their book Burnout is written for women, so if you don’t want to see gendered language, avoid the text description of the book in the link I’ve just provided.
What is burnout?
German psychologist Herbert Freudenberger described three elements that can signal burnout.
Emotional exhaustion: The fatigue that comes from caring too much for too long. Like all emotions, stress can be described as a tunnel that you have to go all the way through in order to release. Exhaustion is what happens when we get STUCK in an emotion. If we are consistently exposed to an emotion (such as anger or frustration, but also sadness and grief), we aren’t able to come down from that heightened state of response… and we can experience exhaustion and, eventually, burnout.
Decreased sense of accomplishment. The unconquerable sense of futility, feeling like nothing you do makes any difference.
De-personalization. The depletion of empathy, caring, and compassion.
What is the stress cycle?
When undergoing stress, adrenaline floods our systems (which would help us run away from the tiger that is chasing us, if we were still our ancestral selves). And our systems are great at handling that increased adrenaline… for VERY short periods of time, such as ten minutes. However, if you happen to be exposed to stress triggers over and over again, without your body being able to complete the stress cycle, it causes burnout. It also happens to cause heart disease, digestive issues, and many other physical impacts.
Our bodies aren’t designed to be exposed to stress hormones in large quantities over a long period of time.
The stress cycle is the experience our bodies go through when exposed to stressful events, such as money troubles, transphobia, self-hating thoughts, or a hippo chasing you. It actually has a beginning, a middle, and an end! If you don’t allow yourself to go through the emotion, your stress cycle doesn’t complete and your body doesn’t ever really understand that the stressor is gone and you are safe again. Removing the stressor does not mean that the stress cycle is complete; you still have to send the signal to your body that the stressor is actually gone.
How do I complete the stress cycle?
There are seven super easy ways to complete a stress cycle.
Physical activity. Walking, running, hiking, yoga, dancing, stretching, tensing your muscles and then relaxing them.
Breathing. Slow, long breaths, as deep as you can breathe in and as fully as you can breathe out.
Personal connection. Talking to a friend or even a stranger can help your body understand that you are safe.
Laughter. Not performative, social laughter but true belly laughter that makes you forget about how you look.
Affection. A warm hug, in a safe context, can do as much to complete the stress cycle as a two-mile run. You can also think about hugging until relaxed or hugging until you can feel your chemistry shift.
Crying. As you’re able, turn away from the stressor (the thing that sparked the crying) and turn towards the physical experience of crying. Or, watch a real tear-jerker of a movie and let it all out.
Creative expression. Make, paint, dance, sing your way through the cycle. Even imagining how you might tell a story about your situation can suffice!
Your body will tell you when you’ve completed the cycle… you just have to listen!
For people of color:
Managing your own responses to outside stressors is not your job alone. In fact, all of the tools for completing the stress cycle are easier/more effective/more fun with other people!
For white practitioners:
It is quite common for white learners to bury their own internal work as they grow their anti-racism skills. I’ve heard that it feels “selfish” to admit that white people experience stress and even trauma when doing anti-racism work. But I have found that the body does what it does, and we can choose to understand and embrace that process in order to do our work more effectively, or we can ignore it and suffer the consequences. And the science of burnout teaches us that ignoring our body’s warning signs will result in an inability to engage in our work effectively… or at all.
Of course, it is not the job of people of color to assist you in completing your stress cycles— that is up to you and only you to do! Hopefully, the seven tips above can help empower you to take charge of your own body’s response to stress, trauma, and burnout, so you can do this work sustainably and effectively for many years to come.
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