As we reach the end of yet another chaotic year, the general mood is… not good. We look at why Christmas is – again – feeling so hard for many people and the two questions that might show we’re making things harder for ourselves than we need to.
Because Capsule started towards the beginning of the first pandemic year, all of our Christmas coverage has been tinged with the same chaotic – manic? – energy that has chased all of our tails since 2020.
It’s not like life was calm before 2020, we were all overworked, we were all tired, we were all always hoping things ‘will calm down in the next week or so.’ And it’s not like we hadn’t gone through terrible events before – the Christchurch earthquake, Trump’s election and the subsequent spike of racist vitriol, the Mosque terrorist attack, Whakaari… things had been serious for a long time.
But things have felt relentless in a new way for the past few years and the cumulative psychic energy of that feels like it is reaching some sort of fever pitch. And part of the problem is the light at the end of the tunnel that we keep pinning our hopes on keeps getting further and further away from us.
Let’s just look at the past three Christmases, shall we?
Christmas 2020: The golden summer, where we were one of the only countries in the world where we could still socialise in person, all tinged with the existential terror of knowing that the bubble would probably not last, as we watched multiple countries build mass graves to deal with the sheer numbers of people dying from a contagious disease that kept knocking on our door.
Christmas 2021: Large parts of the country emerged from months-long lockdown only to have to learn how to be around humans again, loneliness slipped into society in a new way, our collective resilience was put to the test, plus the team of five million was splintered.
Christmas 2022: It was heralded as ‘the return of the Kiwi summer’, only for many parts of the country, it rained almost every single day which then lead into a year that has included of some of the worst weather we have ever had, where multiple people died due to unpredictable, devastating flooding and cyclones. We started the year on the back foot, again, and we never got the chance to regain any ground.
And here we are! Christmas 2023: a second war dominates our headlines, pushing the internet more into its toxic corners than ever; large parts of Aotearoa are still suffering from the aftermath of devastating weather, and we have voted in the most conservative government of our lifetimes, who seem hell-bent on targeting our most vulnerable communities, putting climate change on the back burner and also embodying the ‘old-man-yells-at-sky’ meme with possibly devastating consequences. We’re in year two of a cost-of-living crisis, skating around the edges of a recession, which means you probably know people who have lost their jobs recently. And Covid is still here!
Fa la la la la, la la, la la.
So if you’re wondering why there might be a bit of a lag between your mental health and the festive season, I guess pick any of the above? This is a long-winded way of saying: it’s not you, it’s the world. But the good news from being a website that was created in a furnace of bad mental health and chaos is that we have plenty of expert tips on how to look after yourself.
Of course, there are certain aspects of our life that can make burnout that much more inevitable – sickness, financial insecurity, awful bosses, working in overburdened sectors where the need outweighs the resources. In those situations, what’s needed is money, care, change and support – you cannot simply self-care your way out of systemic issues.
However, if those burdens are not your burden, but you still feel like you reach the end of every year, or, honestly, the end of every week feeling like you are stretched thin, then there might be something else at play.
Two Questions To Ask Yourself If You’re Feeling More Burned Out Than Ever
1. Whose Expectations Are You Trying To Live Up To?
This is a gnarly conversation to have with yourself. When your inner critic starts talking – or, more likely – yelling at you, whose voice does it have? Is it the mean boss from your 20s? Is it a critical family member or friend? Is it your own voice?
Are you so busy trying to be the perfect wife/mother/employee/friend/team member/employer that you are tying yourself in knots on a daily basis, aiming for a level of achievement that is frankly impossible?
Could you lower your standards and your expectations, so that rather than treating yourself like a bad employee and also overworked CEO, you recognise that you are just a human being, flawed as anyone else, just doing your best.
Or is it more about being honest with yourself that you get a tremendous amount of self-worth from trying to ‘do it all’ – and most importantly, do it all EFFORTLESSLY – so that you have two modes – overwhelmed and achieving, or self-loathing when the wheels fall off – and you tussle between them on any given day.
For many women, our panic zone has become such a normal place for us that if we’re not working at 100 miles an hour, we assume we’re failing. But overwhelm is not a sustainable place to live your life, and those anxious chickens come home to roost at a time of year when we are expected to finally relax, and find ourselves unable to.
2. What Are You Trying To Prove?
When we spoke to Dr Lucy Hone, Co-Director of New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience, she talked at length about how her team manage burnout, as they work in one of the most in-demand fields in this country: mental health.
In order to get out from under crippling to-do lists, they all practiced what she referred to as called ‘ruthless prioritisation.’ Every Monday morning, Lucy says, she writes a “jumbled” list of everything she needs to do for the week – at work and at home – on the left-hand column of her diary. On the right-hand column, she brings over 7-10 things that “if I nail those, I will know I’ve achieved something meaningful.”
If something is on the left-hand column for three weeks and still isn’t done, she drops it as it’s clearly not important. “This keeps burnout at bay because I can see I’m being effective and I’m willing to let things drop off the list.”
If you take pride in having a literally impossible to-do list, or are always setting yourself up to pop just another thing on your metaphorical plate, it might be worth asking: what are you trying to prove?
In his best-selling book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals, UK journalist Oliver Burkeman writes extensively about how so much of our pressure comes from trying to optimise every minute of our days, without looking at the most glaring reality of our extremely limited life span. It is, without a doubt, the most effective self-help book I have ever read because the message is very clear: you do not have all the time in the world, so pick wisely.
Similarly, the most quoted line of Mary Oliver’s extremely famous The Summer Day poem is ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.’ It’s a quote most often used to tell you to DREAM BIGGER, aim higher! Find your purpose, you only have one life!
But this completely misses the point of the actual poem, which is all about ‘being idle and blessed,’ observing nature, and paying attention to the small miracles around you with the knowledge that you will be dead soon. Mary Oliver didn’t write this masterpiece so you could use it to stress yourself out with yet another lofty goal, she wrote it so you would lie down and watch a damn grasshopper!
