Fried: Why You Burn Out and How to Revive

Fried

Also by Joan Borysenko, Ph.D.

Books

Minding the Body, Mending the Mind

Guilt Is the Teacher, Love Is the Lesson

On Wings of Light (with Joan Drescher)

Fire in the Soul

Pocketful of Miracles

The Power of the Mind to Heal

 (with Miroslav Borysenko, Ph.D.)*

A Woman’s Book of Life

7 Paths to God*

A Woman’s Journey to God

Inner Peace for Busy People*

Inner Peace for Busy Women*

Saying Yes to Change

 (with Gordon Dveirin, Ed.D.)*

Your Soul’s Compass

 (with Gordon Dveirin, Ed.D.)*

It’s Not the End of the World*

Audio Programs

Reflections on a Woman’s Book of Life*

A Woman’s Spiritual Retreat

Menopause: Initiation into Power

Minding the Body, Mending the Mind*

The Beginner’s Guide to Meditation*

It’s Not the End of the World (five-part seminar)*

Video Programs

Inner Peace for Busy People*

The Power of the Mind to Heal*

Guided-Meditation CDs

Invocation of the Angels*

Meditations for Relaxation and Stress Reduction*

Meditations for Self-Healing and Inner Power*

Meditations for Courage and Compassion*

*Available from Hay House

Please visit:

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Hay House Australia: www.hayhouse.com.au

Hay House UK: www.hayhouse.co.uk

Hay House South Africa: www.hayhouse.co.za

Hay House India: www.hayhouse.co.in

Copyright © 2011 by Joan Borysenko

Published and distributed in the United States by: Hay House, Inc.: www.hayhouse.com • Published and distributed in Australia by: Hay House Australia Pty. Ltd.: www.hayhouse.com.au • Published and distributed in the United Kingdom by: Hay House UK, Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.uk • Published and distributed in the Republic of South Africa by: Hay House SA (Pty), Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.za • Distributed in Canada by: Raincoast: www.raincoast.com • Published in India by: Hay House Publishers India: www.hayhouse.co.in

Editorial supervision: Jill Kramer • Project editor: Lisa Mitchell

Design: Jami Goddess

The anecdotes and stories submitted by Facebook friends are reprinted here with their permission and have been edited for length and clarity. In some of the other stories, names and identifying details have been changed to preserve confidentiality or are composites true to the subject matter, but not to the experience of any particular person living or dead.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private use—other than for fair use as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews— without prior written permission of the publisher.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Borysenko, Joan.

Fried : why you burn out and how to revive / Joan Borysenko, (with her Facebook Friends). — 1st ed.

    p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-4019-2550-5 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Burn out (Psychology) 2. Stress (Psychology) I. Title.

BF481.B67 2011

158.1—dc22

2010030782

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4019-2550-5

Digital ISBN: 978-1-4019-2951-0

14 13 12 11 4 3 2 1

1st edition, January 2011

Printed in the United States of America

For my Facebook friends. Thank you for the conversation, the inspiration, the information, the laughter . . . and most heartwarming of all, for your love, prayers, and support when SkyeDancer returned to his home in the stars.

Contents

Preface: Hell Is a Bad Place to Pitch a Tent

Introduction: Notes from the Underworld

Chapter 1: Mapping the Descent into the Inferno

Stage 1: Driven by an Ideal

Stage 2: Working Like a Maniac

Stage 3: Putting Your Own Needs Last

Stage 4: Miserable, and Clueless as to Why

Stage 5: The Death of Values

Stage 6: Frustrated, Aggressive, and Cynical

Stage 7: Emotionally Exhausted and Disengaged

Stage 8: I’ve Morphed into What?

Stage 9: Get Away from Me!

Stage 10: Inner Emptiness

Stage 11: Who Cares and Why Bother?

Stage 12: Physical and Mental Collapse

Chapter 2: The Depression Industry

Chapter 3: The Childhood Roots of Burnout

Chapter 4: Personality, Temperament, and Burnout

Chapter 5: Energy Management

Chapter 6: Letting Go and Moving On

Chapter 7: The Great Revival—Awakening in the Now

Chapter 8: Heaven on Earth

Epilogue: Your Epitaph

Endnotes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Preface

Hell Is a Bad Place to Pitch a Tent

This is my 15th book, and perhaps it is the most important.

Fried may seem like an innocuous enough word since so many of us use it these days to describe our frenzied, speed-oriented, exhausted state of mind. But innocuous it is not. Feeling fried is an alarm that life has veered seriously off course. It’s shorthand for losing our way individually and culturally in a world spinning so fast that it feels like we’re about to be launched into outer space.

As a Harvard-trained biologist and psychologist, I’ve been described as a world expert on stress. However, that’s not what this book is about. When you’re stressed out, you keep chasing the same old carrot, whatever that may be for you. But when you’re burned out, you eventually give up the chase. The hope that you can create a meaningful life fizzles out, and you find yourself sitting in the ashes of your dreams.

In a culture wedded to positive thinking, burnout and its first cousin, depression, are thought of as disorders to be fixed. But what if, borrowing a line from author and social commentator Judith Viorst, they are necessary losses? Perhaps they are losses of naïveté, false identities, and faulty assumptions that make way for a more authentic life.

Like many self-help authors, I write about what I need to learn. Flirting with burnout, and eventually allowing it to seduce me, is a pattern that I know all too well. When I burn out, my most loving, creative self goes missing; and I contract into a homely homunculus— the smallest, most negative version of myself. It is not a pretty picture.

I’ve burned out more than once—ironically, but predictably—trying to do and be my best. The pain is so great and the available help is so limited that I felt compelled to write a book that describes the inner world of burnout and how it can actually be used as a guide to inner freedom and an authentic life.

My intention is to create a map of burnout that makes the condition accessible and easily identifiable. William Styron, the Pulitzer Prize—winning author, wrote a compelling memoir of his descent into severe depression titled Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness Psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, likewise catapulted manic-depressive illness (bipolar disorder) into full visibility in An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

While Fried is not a memoir in the true sense of the word, my personal experience is central to what you’ll read here. Like most of my other books, this one is braided from four strands: clinical experience, psychological and biological research, personal recollections, and a larger spiritual view. Unlike any of my other books, however, Fried has a fifth strand—real-time input from social networking.

Sitting alone in a hotel room one night (the fate of a traveling speaker), I logged on to Facebook and asked if anyone had had experience with burnout. A landslide of responses followed. For the next year, our virtual salons deepened as one inquiry led to another and another. As many as 60 or 70 people would respond within a few hours to questions such as: What does burnout feel like? What are its stages? Who is susceptible to it, and why? What are the physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of feeling fried? How do you think those relate to depression? Do you have experience with antidepressants that you’d be willing to share?

Once we had explored the anatomy of burnout together, our impromptu community turned its attention to recovering one’s will and purpose, hope and wonder, faith, and the kind of I can do it attitude that creates what mythologist, sage, and social artist Jean Houston calls a passion for the possible.

One evening I was thinking about the latter stages of burnout—depression and despair—and I posted this inquiry: If you had a single sentence to share with a person in despair, what would it be?

Facebook friend Richard Held responded with a wry one-liner: Hell is a bad place to pitch a tent.

Richard’s posting reminded me of a strange experience that occurred on the day I began writing this book. That odd happenstance turned out to foreshadow the book’s structure and content.

I’d purchased a transcription program for my computer called MacSpeech Dictate, hoping that it might be more efficient to write the book by speaking it. (It wasn’t.) The program does work quite well after it has learned to recognize your speech patterns, but every time I said The Burnout Challenge, which was the working title at the time, it stubbornly typed The Inferno Challenge instead.

Intrigued by the computer’s insistence, I spent a fascinating afternoon Googling Dante Alighieri and The Divine Comedy, his epic 14th-century poem. The three-part narrative is based on a series of compelling visions that Dante had during Holy Week in the year 1300, which culminated in a complete shift in his view of life. He went from feeling lost and absorbed in his own pride and apathy to feeling free and in touch with the wholeness—the holiness—of life.

In his extraordinary visions, Dante experienced a descent into the Inferno (the Italian word for hell), then a powerful self-reflective purification in the Purgatorio (purgatory), and a final rising up to Paradiso (paradise). His intention in writing this massive work was more than cataloging his experience; indeed, he was challenging his readers to make the same journey. The epic poem begins:

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say

What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,

Which in the very thought renews the fear

So bitter is it, death is little more;

But of the good to treat, which there I found,

Speak will I of the other things I saw there

I cannot well repeat how there I entered,

So full was I of slumber at the moment

In which I had abandoned the true way.¹

When I read those opening lines, my eyes popped open and I stopped breathing for a moment. Was this written for me? Feeling fried—at least at its end stages— really does feel like going to hell. Getting to the point where I was working 10 or 12 hours a day for weeks or sometimes months without time off (and actually dreaming about shopkeepers and gardeners who had gentler, more spacious lives than mine) was my personal version of straying into a forest dark. And like Dante, I couldn’t really say how I had gotten so far off track. Apparently, I had fallen asleep at the wheel of my own life.

Through much of Dante’s journey, he is accompanied by the poet Virgil, who leads him through the nine allegorical circles of hell, which, although unique, share one commonality: Their denizens have lost touch with the mysterious Source of Life and Love that expresses itself newly as the aliveness of each moment. They have died to possibility and are in a state of constriction and stagnation. There are a lot of ways to lose heart, but the seven deadly sins at the core of The Divine Comedy are a good overview: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust These aren’t just for folks who went to Catholic school. We all have plenty of experience with these excruciating states.

As my friend Wayne Muller discusses in his book A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough, it’s not that these sins get you thrown into the fiery pit by some Divine Third Party—they are the fiery pit. They are love misdirected. You had hoped that they would restore you to happiness, but, in fact, they have separated you from the sweet flow of life unfolding.

In the grip of envy, for example, you miss the beauty that’s right under your nose. Convinced that someone else has what you need in order to be happy, you cut yourself off from the infinite possibilities that life offers in this moment. Possessed by anger, you become a prisoner of the past, incapable of connecting with the gifts of the present. Tormented by greed, nothing you have is ever enough and you live with