The Other by Daniela Pierre-Bravo

Author:Daniela Pierre-Bravo [PIERRE-BRAVO, DANIELA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2022-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

7

The Burnout

I had been hardwired to play for the short game. Always in survival mode. Pile on the work—the more, the better! Survival mode affects everything, not just the way you show up at work. It can impact things like your health, your mood, and your level of concentration. It can set off a stream of stress hormones. Everything feels reactive. The deadline is now. It’s all urgent. Overwhelming. Under this duress, our amygdala—the area of the brain that helps our emotional processing—sends a signal of distress to the command center of the brain, the hypothalamus. When the fight-or-flight response is activated, it releases cortisol. Chronically high levels of cortisol, which occur the more we experience this response to stress, are linked to high blood pressure, anxiety, depression, heart disease, and gut issues. What this means is that chronic survival mode can affect both our physical and our emotional states without us even realizing it. Research shows that the long-term effects of living in a state of emergency can damage your health in a substantial way.

When chaos, crisis, or trauma is at play, and it happens on an ongoing basis, it triggers the body’s fight-or-flight response—a mechanism intended to help us get through stressful situations. I had lived with it for so long that my body started to become used to it. Then all of a sudden, it hits you: The weight of working tirelessly at the same company, in the same role, becomes unbearable. Your energy is seeping from your body. Exhaustion takes the place of your enthusiasm. You continue to pull yourself forward. In a strange way, survival mode becomes your support system, your safe space. But when you look up from your desk, you realize your colleagues have managed to move ahead, up the ladder, and you’ve been too nearsighted. Survival mode can mean being highly efficient at your job, but eventually that constant flow of adrenaline, the rush to take care of the here and now, clouds your vision of the future and doesn’t allow you the space to imagine and strategize for the long game. Over time, that constant stress response can also impair our ability to problem-solve, because our mental resources are focused on abstract planning and catastrophizing.

Even on a physiological level, my body had become an expert at fighting stressors. I couldn’t go a day without it. I’d see a task, a problem to solve, an opportunity to volunteer, and my body responded with adrenaline and energy, ready to fight small fires. When I got my job at MSNBC, we were doing a traveling show in Chicago, when Mika found out minutes before running to a public event that she’d forgotten her entire makeup bag in New York. Before she could finish her sentence, I was frantically rushing up and down Michigan Avenue, choosing colors and swatches for every makeup need, calling her assistants and makeup artists to get the exact matches, and getting back just in the nick of time before she had to leave.

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