Exhaustion Contagion
Dragon fruit, compassion and allostatic load - science of happiness, snow, and ordinary things having miraculous properties.
Two things have been on my mind this morning, dragon fruit and exhaustion. Wait, three things, allostatic load, dragon fruit and exhaustion. These things bounced around in my brain along with the revolutionary power of napping and made me think of how enjoying the little things can perform miracles.
Exhaustion has been lingering on my mind for a while. This is partly due to the virus going around. It’s partly due to the topic of exhaustion popping up like little prairie dogs in all sorts of places I visit. I spotted this first in Katherine May’s Stray Attention (which now has a different name).
I think it’s partly because so much burnout is in the air - you can almost smell it, like clouds of smoke rising through a burning town. This is a signal, an emergency.
During the pandemic years, I can’t even quantify how many times I asked my husband “why am I so tired?” Occasionally he would respond “A world-wide disaster will take the moxy out of you”. Frequently, he’d simply say: “because we are old now.” But we were old in 2020 when we ran 32 miles in 2 days. Yes, on purpose.
After all those miles, I was tired. But I wasn’t as tired then as I am now. Auto-immune flare fatigue is beyond exhausted or tired. So I think about exhaustion a lot lately.
But exhaustion was on my mind before this flare. In early April of 2023, it seemed exhaustion was in the air, in our collective neural firings. Sometimes I wonder, if thoughts are the brain firing electrons across synaptic gaps in our neural networks, can some go astray? And if so, can thoughts then become shared, or contagious?
Turns out, yes, they can. Research shows that stress is contagious: “Like a contagion, stress spreads. We literally catch the stress of others. Simply watching someone else tense up can trigger the release of the stress hormone cortisol in our own bodies.”
But I think with exhaustion, it might be more than a contagious spread of stress. Instead, if your friend shares how exhausted they are, are you more free to recognize it? Not from the standpoint of reducing stigma of admitting you can’t do it all, all the same time, all of the time. But instead, from a mere noticing standpoint. Like the punchbuggy effect: once your attention is drawn to something, you start to see it everywhere. Once someone else points to exhaustion, do you start recognizing it in your own life?
I started writing this newsletter before I heard of another suicide of a mental health writer. I promise you this with all that I am: people want you to stay. Please don’t choose to leave. I know “reach out for help” can feel impossible in a shortage of mental health counselors. But there’s no limit on the number of times you can call a crisis line. Call every day if you need. If it’s easier (little ones, lack of privacy at work) you can even text for help: Text HOME to 741741.
When I sat down to write this, I had thought I was noticing two streams of things: exhaustion and an uptick in those who did not win their fight with depression. I know that causation cannot be inferred from simultaneous occurrences. And yet, exhaustion. Also dragon fruit. Don’t forget the purple perky snacks. Was exhaustion the cause for the uptick? Also, what was causing the exhaustion?
At first, I assumed, post-pandemic, post-weird winter, everyone was tired from too long of a winter. Where I live it snowed - snowflakes falling from the sky, not just snow on the ground - constantly: between March 24 and April 6 it snowed six times. Shoveling snow is exhausting. Stepping carefully through snow is exhausting. Constantly bundling up for the snow is exhausting.
But this exhaustion going around seemed like more than just weather. It seemed like we were accepting something new - that we could be tired. Collectively, we seemed to be going beyond rejecting hustle culture. Maybe we were finally listening to the wisdom of the nap ministry.
“Rest pushes back and disrupts a system that views human bodies as a tool for production and labor. It is a counter narrative. We know that we are not machines. We are divine.”
I mean, she’s made it as easy as possible on us - she even made a card deck. She couldn’t have made it more simple to consume this revolution. And yet, we seem to not quite have gotten it. The contagion of exhaustion seems keep spreading.
The nap ministry, as I understand it, is based on somatic liberation of Black bodies. I think the absolute truth of the divine status of Black bodies is beyond refute. And yet, I also know that the refuting happens daily. The nap ministry also speaks to exhaustion as part of the experience of being Black in America. It is something more of us, of other races, are now coming to experience. Is it too much to hope that the exhaustion contagion will create a shared humanity, one that might dismantle another element of racism? I choose to keep hoping.
The exhaustion of experiencing racism brings me to my fascination with allostatic load. The Nap Ministry is right - the chronic stress associated with increased experiences of racism is leads to exhaustion, and possibly disease. And it does this via allostatic load.
There are quite a few sciency definitions of allostatic load. One from Science Direct, defines it as “the cost of chronic exposure to elevated or fluctuating endocrine or neural responses resulting from chronic or repeated challenges that the individual experiences as stressful.”
All critters, humans included, have adaptive methods for dealing with increased stress: Bears store fat, birds migrate, fish swim up river. Humans, apparently, moderate hormones to adapt. Too long a moderation, like staying too long in a liminal phase or working for an impossible boss, negatively impacts on the human body. Any body, any color of skin. Too much load becomes allostatic overload, which can result in brain changes, high cholesterol, chronic pain, inflammation and arthritis, among other things. Big time bummer and also, basically, things involving exhaustion.
In other words, increased chronic stresses can increase chronic diseases. I kept thinking, is the exhaustion contagion we are feeling just a Covid hangover? Are we collectively ill? While there is research to suggest that a Covid infection may increase your chances of developing an auto-immune illness (with fatigue being a part of that illness), other reviews indicate a lesser prevalence. One thing is emerging, the increasing stress we have become used to is decreasing our health.
Even if your direct experience of the last few years didn’t increase your stress directly, the impact of extending empathy to your family, your coworkers, your community may be reducing your reserves and leading to, yup, exhaustion. Compassion fatigue, sometimes mentioned as a snarky retort to one more campaign to save one more endangered thing, is actually a real situation. Compassion fatigue usually applies to those in caregiving careers (nurses, doctors, therapists, first responders) but I’m not sure we can limit it that way anymore given how much we all are being asked to care for and about each other. According to Psychology Today, “symptoms of compassion fatigue can include exhaustion, disrupted sleep...” and a host of other body-based complaints. Compassion fatigue is a part of allostatic load. In other words, too much caring can lead to exhaustion and illness.
But wait, there’s dragon fruit. I’m only partly kidding on that.
Turns out dragon fruit, like lots of fun colored things, has a bunch of compounds that relieve the bodily impact of stress, like inflammation or disruption of gut bacteria, and may improve the cardiovascular processes.1 In other words, I might be fixated on dragon fruit because I'm exhausted from the load of weathering the stress we all have weathered. Or because of an autoimmune flare.
But, not all allostatic load is the same. In fact, how you react to stress, or even whether you think something is stressful, moderates the allostatic load.
I had assumed that indulging in bright and crunchy dragon fruit chips was helpful because it was joyful and fun. Fun doesn't overcome exhaustion, but it does help. And importantly, as an ordinary human with trigger happy immune system, telling people about dragon fruit, it’s delicious crunchiness, its bright color, and now that I know them, it’s nutritional benefits, also serves a higher purpose.
Just as exhaustion can be contagious, so too can happiness.
According to Harvard Medicine, happiness is not just being optimistic, but can also involve how you choose to feel joy or gratitude. And, it’s contagious. Just being happier can help your friends feel happier. “Having a happy friend who lives within a mile of you, for example, appears to increase the probability that you will be happy as well.” Happiness can even spread online, according to this article from the World Economic Forum.
You might think that having a purpose-driven life is the key to happiness. If that’s your jawn, by all means, I’m not here to stop you. But, and this goes to both abandoning hustle culture and dragon fruit, it turns out that savoring small everyday moments more positively correlates to happiness. But that savoring has to be intentional. “With all the books on mood-boosting technology that does everything for us but laugh, we expect happiness to show up at our doorstep like a pizza. But it doesn’t work that way. For most of us, we have to make it happen.”
So, my dragon fruit chip habit does bring me happiness. Because I am making it happen. And because I enjoy enjoying my dragon fruit chips, I am increasing my happiness (and potentially my neighbors too). This ordinary little treat makes my days just a little better. It makes them extra-ordinary days.
I know it can feel like it will take a miracle to overcome exhaustion or the deep shame or sadness you might feel from existing if you are in a place of despair. Making happiness happen might be out of your reach if you are going it alone. I don’t have a miracle, but I do have a lot of dragon fruit chips. I have plenty to share.
Maybe, by choosing to write this thing on these weird topics, my happiness can be infectious. Someone who is struggling might catch the stray happy thought and might chose to stay. I will keep choosing to hope. I hope you do too.
A few points on the science of dragon fruit. The best is this hella sciency one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9861186/
Others that break it down: https://www.health.com/health-benefits-of-dragon-fruit-7485190 and https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324655#summary and https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/dragon-fruit-benefits#TOC_TITLE_HDR_10