How to make the impossible possible—Part 2
Five practices to battle burnout and stay in the fight for a better future
Let’s face it. As a people, we’re all suffering from a bad case of burnout, if not full blown PTSD.
In recent years, we’ve experienced a pandemic, a racial reckoning, a divisive presidency, rising polarization, record-breaking mass shootings, a contested presidential election, an attack on the Capitol, the collapse of the Republican party, a worsening climate crisis with its catastrophic fires and floods, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the resurgence of cyclical violence in the Middle East, self-aggrandizing extremists in and outside of Congress threatening the future of our nation . . .
The list goes on, all of it delivered to our doorstep in gory, hyperbolic, unbalanced detail on social media and 24-hour news. Anyone who isn’t feeling mentally exhausted, unenthusiastic about the road ahead, easily distracted, anxious and hyper-reactive—hasn’t been paying attention.
As a nation, we have suffered a series of debilitating traumas, and the extremists causing or compounding them aren’t going away any time soon.
They sure would like us to go away, though. They would like to exhaust and enrage so many of us that we can’t recover, that we lose hope and give up, that we think it impossible to reclaim our nation, our planet, and our democracy.
Our race to see who prevails in the end is a marathon, not a sprint, and we have just hit Heartbreak Hill. To stay in the race, we must keep in mind the paradox that allowed vice admiral James Stockdale to survive seven years of torture in a Vietnamese prison where many succumbed1:
You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
Confronting brutal facts is always hard, and it will cause us to struggle from time to time. To persevere, we need a set of everyday practices to sustain us, so we do prevail in the end. Five practices have sustained me for fifty-five years and counting. I hope they do the same for you.
1. Unplug. The amount of incoming flying over our virtual transoms these days is enough to drive the heartiest soul mad. We all need the occasional respite. We all need the occasional break from our emails, phones, and news feeds. Ann Lamott put it best in a TED talk: "Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes...including you,”2 For us humans, it might take a little more than a few minutes. It might take a few hours or a few days, maybe even a few weeks. But not forever. That’s not unplugging; that’s retiring from life.
I have always found it hard to unplug. It always feels as if there is too much to do in too little time and like everything hangs in the balance. That’s when words from John Mayer’s song Gravity help: “Twice as much ain’t twice as good; it can’t sustain like one half could. Wanting more is gonna to send me to my knees.” Best to unplug before ‘wanting more’ sends you to your knees.
2. Detox. Laugh early and often. Read cartoons. Relish jokes, even bad ones. I flip through Greg Eisenberg’s mind-altering jokes almost daily. Something about his book Letting Go Is the Only Thing We Have to Hold Onto makes me laugh. Check it out:3
Instead of marinating in violent movies and TV shows, binge every so often on those that uplift and inspire. Watch comedies that make you belly laugh. Learn from people who’ve lived through moments like ours; listen to their stories on audiobooks or watch them on TV. Breathe: Inhale for four seconds, hold for four, then exhale for four. Say your prayers, even if only to the god within. Relax. Take a break. Take a walk in the woods. Stop to look (really look) at something beautiful, and always remember to smell the lilacs.4 Read about our natural world and the extraordinary animals living in it. Find wisdom and comfort in books like How To Be a Good Creature by Sy Montgomery and Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard. I did. I bet you will too.
3. Stay inspired. Don’t settle for news stories that only uncover problems, assign blame, and expose individual bad apples. Stories that “lead with what bleeds” are designed to engage our amygdala, provoking anxiety and outrage without giving us the information we need to do anything constructive about it. Today’s dominant news paradigm rarely tells us anything truly new. Rather, it offers one or another simplified version of the same story line with different details. Worse, it doesn’t help us understand or alter the underlying causes that produce the same story line.
This approach to the news has survived long past its sell-by date by trapping us in a box where we keep clicking the same button in the hope of finding something, anything to make us feel better, even though experience tells us it will only make us feel worse. WTF, people?
As mystifying as our addiction to bad news may seem, it is pretty well understood. The press’ penchant for repeatedly exposing us to adverse stimuli with little hope of escape has produced a nationwide epidemic of learned helplessness. Back in the 1960s, psychologist Martin Seligman coined the term learned helplessness to explain why dogs, conditioned to endure repeated shocks, stopped trying to escape the shocks even when they could.5 Evidently after repeated shocks, the dogs came to learn (erroneously) that their situation was hopeless and that they were helpless. Like Seligman’s dogs, we’ve been conditioned by the press to believe that there is nothing we can do to better our circumstances, even when there is.6 Most disturbing, as historian Timothy Snyder points out, this is the same playbook totalitarian regimes use to ready populations for total control.7
Want to get out of the box? Want to discover new ways to solve old problems like homelessness, poverty, and climate change? Then do what I did in the midst of despair during the pandemic. Go in search of news that tells the whole story, not just what is wrong, but what people are doing about it. My research quickly brought me to theSolutions Journalism Network where I subscribed to their newsletter. There I discovered journalists who not only uncover problems, but investigate what people are doing around the world to tackle their system-level causes. Elsewhere, I came across journalists who don’t just report on natural or manmade disasters but recount what people and communities do to restore themselves and repair their worlds after disasters strike. (For an inspiring example of a restorative narrative, see Patrice O’Neill’s documentary Repairing the World.)
The point is, don’t let the news get you down; read news that lifts you up!8
4. Connect. Isolation is a powerful accelerant of all the things we hate about hate: fear, division, polarization, violence, withdrawal from life. So put down your iPhone, iPad, and iPod and make eye contact with people.Friends don’t let friends drift away. Talk regularly with your friends, especially those who’ve grown distant. Ask them what’s on their minds and in their hearts, and share what’s on yours. Misery really does love company, but after commiserating, shift your attention to what you can each do to feel better. This is where solutions journalism really helps. You can explore what people are already doing to make things better and brainstorm ways you can lend a hand.
When connecting, don’t just round up the usual suspects. Make friends with people on the other side of some demographic or ideological divide. After learning that 17% of Black voters said they would vote for Trump in 2024 (twice as many as 2016), I sent an email to two of my closest friends, both of whom are Black. It said, “My friggin’ God!”
It’s amazing what you can learn from friends whose lived experiences are different from your own, especially if the friendship allows you to tell each other the truth. One friend responded with a detailed account of the many ways the Democratic party has let Black people down over the past 50 years, while still turning to Black communities to save their bacon every time an election came around. My friend went on to imagine what those in the 17% might be feeling:
“I recognize the existential threat. I know Trump in office takes the entire world to the brink of global catastrophe. But if my life is already a living hell, and you never gave a crap about me, then why should I care, AGAIN, about this?”
You might be quick to answer, but don’t forget. As my friend pointed out, President Trump signed prison reform, put cash in people’s pockets during COVID, and ranted about the immigration crisis that some people in Black communities fault for unhousing their people.
A recent New York Times article by David Leonhardt echoed my friend’s account: “The multiracial, predominantly working-class group of Americans who have soured on mainstream politics and modern liberalism are not all hateful and ignorant. They are frustrated, and their political loyalties are up for grabs.”9
Those who do not like hearing this perspective ignore it at their own peril. We cannot afford to dismiss views that clash with our own. We need to bring people closer in, not push them further away. Let’s get to know those on the other side of a divide. Let’s find out, not just what “those people” hate or fear, but what they long for, then imagine ways we might make common cause.10
5. Help. We may feel helpless, but we are not helpless. Want more joy and contentment to counterbalance feelings of anxiety or outrage? Help someone or help some cause. Helping boosts feel-good chemicals in your brain: serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin.11 Giving of your time, attention, or money activates regions in the brain associated with pleasure, social connection, and trust. Blogger and podcaster Tim Ferriss tells the story of Joshua Combs, a hairdresser working in a London salon. One day Joshua noticed a familiar homeless person on the street and instead of passing him by, asked how he was. He then had an idea. He had his clippers and scissors with him, so he offered the man a free haircut, right there on the street. “In the hour that followed, he told me his story,” Joshua writes in his book Do Something for Nothing. “We connected and became close.”
That first moment led to other moments, then to an Instagram site with 150,000 followers, then to launching the #DoSomethingForNothing movement. Ferriss sees a lot of wisdom in Joshua’s story:
The Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh taught that attention is the most precious gift we can give someone. Certainly, all generosity starts right there—a willingness to stop focusing on ourselves and pay attention to someone else and their needs. From that act of connection, anything can happen.
Who knows? We might even change the downward trajectory of our nation. After all, the only thing we really need to do is help those already turning it around.12 Trust me, you’ll feel better if you do.
Parting Thoughts
These five practices have stood me in good stead for decades. But here’s the thing about practices. They take, well, practice—especially if they go against the grain of how you currently operate.
“Knowing the right thing to do doesn't automatically mean we do the right thing,” observed Shankar Vedantam, host of the Hidden Brain podcast, in an interview in which he and conflict expert Peter T. Coleman explored the gap between what people think they should do and what they actually do. “It isn't about hypocrisy per se. It's that learning something and doing something involve different sets of brain muscles, so to speak. This is a very ancient idea and something that many religious and spiritual traditions have explored over the centuries.”13
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks and commentator David Brooks took up the same puzzle in their dialogue on finding a moral compass in challenging times. “Jews love God,” Brooks said at one point. “But there are kosher rules to keep you in line; there are blessings you say on almost any occasion. For Muslims, it's prayer five times a day. So I wonder if those guardrails, those habits, those norms, all the rituals, all the lighting of candles is necessary to structure a moral life… Without those structures and those disciplines, the influence of the market takes over the course of everyday life.”14
To paraphrase renowned dancer and choreographer Martha Graham: Practice means to perform some act of vision, faith, or desire over and over again in the face of all obstacles.
The market demands of everyday life will always throw obstacles in our way. Putting in place supportive structures with a few supportive friends has helped me find my way around those obstacles enough of the time to make my pursuits in life sustainable, even when my reach exceeds my grasp. Not perfect, not stress free, but sustainable. I hope you spend some time figuring out what works best for you. And if you have ideas to share with others, please do under Comments!
Notes and Resources
For more on James Stockdale and the Stockdale Paradox, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Stockdale
You can find Greg’s jokes on Amazon. Greg Eisenberg, Letting Go Is the Only Thing We Have to Hold Onto: Mind-Altering Jokes. Curved-Space Comedy. Boulder, CO. 2018.
My mentor Don Schön to his grandchildren.
Charlotte Nickerson, “Learned Helplessness Theory in Psychology (Seligman): Examples and Coping.” Simply Psychology. https://rb.gy/d28vtf
If you haven’t already read Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. You really must. It is theplaybook for sabotaging the authoritarian’s playbook.
Solutions journalist Amanda Ripley believes more and more online news sites will struggle to make ends meet with clickbait headlines and ad revenues, and that more and more news outlets will turn to subscribers to finance their reporting. “That means they have to shift from a one-night-stand business model to a long-term relationship with readers—which has to be based on something deeper than cats and Trump tweets,” says Ripley in In “Complicating the Narrative.” Subscription newsletters are disrupting the dominant paradigm. Support them.
David Leonhardt, “A Misleading Story” in The Morning: The New York Times. March 21, 2024.
For advice and examples on how, see Remaking the Space Between Us and stay tuned for future posts.
“Why giving is good for your health.” Health Essentials. Cleveland Clinic, December 6, 2022. https://rb.gy/jfh2yv
As its website says, Citizen Connect has “over 500 organizations focused on everything from election reform to civic education to restoring civil dialogue. They’re run by people who span the political spectrum – Republicans, Democrats and Independents.”
Shankar Vedantam, Host of the Hidden Brain. Interview with Peter Coleman, On Living with Our Differences https://rb.gy/7s7dz4
I recommend their dialogue in full: “Finding a Moral Compass in Challenging Times: David Brooks with Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks.” https://rb.gy/bs1sa3
This is a wonderful piece for an interesting and compelling Substack! Wise and insightful.