Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast for people who are trying to figure it out. We’re trying to figure it out, aren’t we?

Martha Beck:
We are. We try so hard.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. How are you doing today at figuring it out?

Martha Beck:
Very dimly sighted. I’ve been looking at my computer screen so much that I’ve gotten very nearsighted. You’re just a blur to me. How are you doing?

Rowan Mangan:
You’re just a blur to me too, but-

Martha Beck:
Yeah, that’s emotionally-

Rowan Mangan:
… I can see you perfectly clearly, it’s just that you move so fast.

Martha Beck:
But what are you actually trying to figure out in a more important way?

Rowan Mangan:
I’m trying to… You know, Honey, I’m always trying to figure you out one way or another.

Martha Beck:
Good luck.

Rowan Mangan:
You’re an endless mystery to me in the best possible way. And one of the recent things that’s happened in our household is that we’ve been infested with moths. There’s little moths that are… There’s obviously something in our pantry that is… We should be putting things in-

Martha Beck:
We’re trying.

Rowan Mangan:
… the airtight everything, and we try, but maybe there’s something and a little moth came out of it. It’s kind of a gross thing to admit actually. It’s like-

Martha Beck:
Oh, my goodness, we’re infested with vermin.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. So these little moths started to appear, and I haven’t spoken specifically to Marty about this aspect of the moths, but I’ve just noticed that when you see a moth, you get enraged. And I do not blame you for that at all. There is an enraging quality to the idea of all our blankets and clothes getting munched on, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s just math.

Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Rowan Mangan:
So that’s not the problem. The weird thing for me though is, on many separate occasions, and on several where I know you think I wasn’t watching, I have seen you in your rage towards a little tiny moth, there’s only little guys, they’re not like big, beautiful ladies of the night. Wow. I didn’t think my brain was going to go there with that, but anyway, now you know. They’re not those beautiful moths, they’re just little shitty little moths. Sorry guys, you’re all beautiful, but-

Martha Beck:
I think that’s a Latin name for them though is shitty little moths.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So Marty, you see them, you become enraged, you don’t know anyone’s watching, and what I’ve seen you do is run over in high dudgeon to the moth, and I swear to God, listeners, do martial arts on them.

Martha Beck:
Yes, exactly.

Rowan Mangan:
Like do karate chop and kick the moths.

Martha Beck:
Yes, I do.

Rowan Mangan:
What is going on in your mind when you’re trying to kick a flying moth to death with a fancy Karate Kid move?

Martha Beck:
Okay, so first of all, it’s not rage. What you’re seeing is deep shame and ambivalence and trying to get the energy to overcome it because I don’t want to kill anything, but at a certain point, I thought, “I’m going to start killing these things. I can’t trap them and take them outside.” And I really don’t like the holes in clothes. I don’t like the little grubs that appear in the food, no, no. I had enough of that growing up, believe me. There’s a whole childhood history with these moths, okay? Let me just say we were Mormon. We stored wheat in like dustbin-sized bins for the apocalypse.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, this is how Mormons get their protein. Go on.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And so, the moths were everywhere, and they were in it, and we had to eat them. And okay, it was really bad. So I decided, I don’t want to kill. See, I can’t even say it. I don’t want to kill anything, but I’m going to kill them. So the only way I can get past my reluctance to kill something is to go back to my martial arts training where I realized, okay, if somebody’s trying to kill me or attack me or rape me or whatever, I will fight. “That is the line, buddy.” So when I see the moth and decide to kill it, part of me goes, “No, I can’t kill another living creature.” And then, another part goes, “Hey, I’m going to…”

Rowan Mangan:
“I’m a bad-

Martha Beck:
[inaudible 00:04:53].

Rowan Mangan:
“I’m a badass. I’m going to take you down.”

Martha Beck:
So I have to go back. Yeah, I have to go back into the mental state I was in when I was in martial arts fighting my dear friends who were all twice as big as I was and men. And yeah, so I started kicking and punching. It’s perfect.

Rowan Mangan:
You start kicking and punching a small flying insect. How’s that working for you?

Martha Beck:
I’m getting a lot of exercise.

Rowan Mangan:
Fair. Fair. So in my mind, I just secretly hashtag this every time I see it, I just hashtag it Moth Wars.

Martha Beck:
And I thought that that was short for Mother Wars and you were going to give us some deep, internal-

Rowan Mangan:
Sociological.

Martha Beck:
… thing that you’re experiencing as a mother. No, you just really-

Rowan Mangan:
It’s just you kicking moths in my distractible subconscious. It’s just all you.

Martha Beck:
Kicking, weirdly enough, is a better way for me to hit them than punching.

Rowan Mangan:
All right.

Martha Beck:
Typically, I knock them out of their flight path, I think just with a rush of air. I rarely actually kill them.

Rowan Mangan:
All right, and this is something that we are going to explore Martha, but-

Martha Beck:
Okay. Okay. But-

Rowan Mangan:
… for now, tell me what are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
Okay, so the one thing, we’ll talk about this more, but I’ve been writing a book and it’s taken, virtually, all my time. And one of the ways I escape is to play little games in my phone that are meant for seven-year-olds. And one of the things that does drive me into an actual rage, so I’m already ambivalent, so that’s a key grounding point, ambivalence leads to extreme action, I’m thinking, “I’m wasting my time. This is so stupid. Why do you always have to line up three things and then they explode? And they’re all exactly like. And why are they all about candy? I don’t get why they’re all sugar things.”

Rowan Mangan:
Oh mate, you should come over to Farm Heroes where I spend my time, there’s no candy inside.

Martha Beck:
I tried Farm Heroes, it’s way too hard for me. It’s just hard.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s just basic agriculture.

Martha Beck:
So I try not to buy more lives that is literally just throwing money into a furnace. And so, I have my five lives a day or whatever and I flame out. I eat through those five lives. And then, the screen comes up and goes, “Sorry. Anyway, here are your achievements.” And then, it lists the things I’ve been able to do in this stupid phone game, no offense to anybody who’s making them or whatever or who loves them, but no, that is not an achievement. When you tell me that I have achieved something by losing a computer, phone game, it just brings up all my internalized fear of failure because it’s a lie. I haven’t achieved anything.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s patronizing too, isn’t it?

Martha Beck:
It’s very patronizing and it’s very deeply upsetting for me and I think I need to go back to therapy for it.

Rowan Mangan:
Do you think that works on anyone?

Martha Beck:
Therapy? Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
I think the jury’s still out on that, but no, the thing of like, “Look what you achieved,” it’s a little bit like a participation award or something.

Martha Beck:
I did once know this guy who lost his job and then he became obsessed with showing people that he had finished the New York Times crossword puzzle every day. And he would literally carry it around and show it to people to bolster his sense of, I don’t know, efficacy. Yeah, humans are funny beasts.

Rowan Mangan:
Aren’t they? Aren’t they funny?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, we are.

Rowan Mangan:
Luckily we don’t suffer from any of those sort of issues.

Martha Beck:
We aren’t human.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ll be right back with more Bewildered. We don’t say this enough, we are so glad you’re a Bewildered listener and we’re hoping you might want to go to the next level with us, by which I mean, if you rate and review the podcast, it helps new people find us so we can keep bewildering new souls and you know how much we love that. Ratings are very much appreciated. Obviously, the more stars you give us, the more appreciation is forthcoming. Reviews are quite simply heaven and we read everyone and exclaim over them. And we just love you all.

All right, so today’s topic for Bewildered, Marty, I’m quite excited about because it’s something that, well, all the episodes pertain to me as much as I can make possible because-

Martha Beck:
Not to me at all.

Rowan Mangan:
No, just because I’m very self-centered. So we thought we would talk about burnout today, and then, move into kind of reset as a way of counteracting burnout. But when you hear this term burnout, especially lately, I feel like people are defining it more broadly than I would. So if we’re going to talk about being burned out, what do we mean today for us, for our purposes today?

Martha Beck:
I’m kind of interested in all the different definitions, but to me, it’s reaching a level of exhaustion because you’ve been under repeated episodes of stress and you lose your ability to regulate into being sort of all put back together after stress has sort of frayed you apart. You often talk about feeling like you’ve been grated-

Rowan Mangan:
Let say-

Martha Beck:
… by a cheese grater.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, my nervous system feels like a cheese grater or sandpaper has been all over it.

Martha Beck:
And that’s not necessarily catastrophic, but if you-

Rowan Mangan:
It becomes chronic.

Martha Beck:
… never get a chance to regulate out of it-

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. If it just happens over and over and over and it’s like you bob to the surface, you grab a breath, you go back under, but you’re not quite getting enough oxygen on any given breath to actually sustain life.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, and I think burnout is a point we reach after a certain amount of time in that state, right?

Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Rowan Mangan:
There’s a point where one cannot go on. And in terms of bewildered and culture nature, I sort of think of it as burnout is often going to be a consequence of when your nervous system is exposed for long enough to the impact of a culture that doesn’t really fit it. So there’s always a trying to fit and ultimately failing to whatever extent.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we did not evolve to have the stressors we have right now. There is just more going on. There are more bright lights shining in our eyes. There are more people streaming through our consciousness. I mean, it really is bizarre to have to deal with this level of stimulation that. The odd thing to me is that so many people can do it-

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, no kidding.

Martha Beck:
But hypothetically, if we were in a setting that matched our nervous systems, we could find that healthy level of activity and put that in every day or every hour and then get it back in a subsequent night or hour. We could sustain a healthy level of energy expenditure and then rest to go on indefinitely without ever reaching burnout.

Rowan Mangan:
I want to say something to you. I have a ring that tells me about myself.

Martha Beck:
Does it?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Does it find them? Is it one ring to rule them all?

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t-

Martha Beck:
Is it? Is it?

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know. All I know is that I really don’t want to give it to anyone. No, it tells me about myself. So for instance, I wear it all the time, every now and again, I take it off and charge it for a few minutes, but I wear it all the time. And I wake up in the morning and you might say to me, for instance, “How did you sleep?” And I will say back, “Let me check my app and I’ll let you know.”

Martha Beck:
That’s right.

Rowan Mangan:
And so, my watch tells me how I slept. It tells me if I wasn’t a good girl.

Martha Beck:
We’re having coffee, and I’m like, “How you doing, Rowie?” And she looks at her app, she turns on the app and the app just says, “Please, go back to bed, please.”

Rowan Mangan:
Seriously, some days I open it in the morning and it literally says, “It’s going to be okay.” And I feel really seen when it says that weirdly. But recently-

Martha Beck:
Is it your precious?

Rowan Mangan:
It is my precious. Recently, it’s got a new feature, which is it tells me about my stress. But the funny thing is, and it’s like you talk about ambivalence to culture, I feel like this ring is the exact, not the ring itself, but whatever the thought is that goes into the ring and the app, they’re like the epitome of that because now it measures stress. So I don’t know, is that your heart rate, your body temperature? I don’t know.

Martha Beck:
Maybe it just knows you emotionally.

Rowan Mangan:
How fat your fingers are that day. It just knows. Yeah, it just knows. And it’s really funny because when you go to the app and you look at your stress levels, it’ll be like, “You had a low stress day, but remember, sometimes stress is good.” And then, it’ll say you had a lot of stress today, but that could be really good.

Martha Beck:
“It could be good.”

Rowan Mangan:
“It could be good. So don’t just think it’s bad just because it’s stress, because stress is also good.” So yeah, my ring doesn’t know if stress is bad or good. And-

Martha Beck:
We don’t even know how it’s measuring it, and that’s why I think it’s covering its options. If finger-fatness doesn’t accurately describe your mood, it has an out. It could be good. It could be… It’s called eustress, like E-U-stress, eustress.

Rowan Mangan:
You’re just making shit up now.

Martha Beck:
[inaudible 00:14:32].

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know. Look, I went off the reservation with the whole ring thing. I just want to say rupture, repair, get tired, rest. You’re saying there’s a natural rhythm to these things that we can have-

Martha Beck:
Yes. Yes, but-

Rowan Mangan:
… without getting burned out.

Martha Beck:
… what does our culture say about burn out?

Rowan Mangan:
I’m glad you asked. I’m glad you asked. Yes. Yes. All right, well, what does the culture say? I don’t know. It doesn’t have a mouth. It can’t speak. The culture-

Martha Beck:
It has a million mouths.

Rowan Mangan:
The Culture has a Million Mouths by Martha Beck.

Martha Beck:
It’s a hydra, cut off its mouth, another grows back, two more grow back.

Rowan Mangan:
No, stop. No, we’re going too deep.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. So I feel like the culture, as we have said so many times, just wants us to be little machines of and little productivity creators. And to me, what that’s about when you’re talking about burnout and chronic stress and all of that sort of thing is it’s like do not have a context in which you are productive. And so, if that’s like don’t have an environment, don’t have emotions, don’t have hormones, don’t have a ring that knows you very well. It’s like you must exist in this climate-controlled isolation tank of life where it’s, “Just keep producing and smile and you’ll be fine.” So don’t have context I think is what the culture says. And if you don’t have context, you can’t burn out. What do you think about that as a thought?

Martha Beck:
I think that’s so interesting. And you were talking earlier about not having inner or outer weather.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And I was thinking about how so much medical research is done only on men because women have those pesky hormone cycles that make the data harder to interpret. So like breast cancer studies were always done on men because you wouldn’t want to figure out what estrogen does to breast cancer. Anyway, that’s just an aside.

But you’re right, it’s like don’t have any fluctuations, don’t have any context of any kind. And when you said weather, I was thinking about, I just read a book by Katherine May, one of my favorite new authors, it’s called Wintering. And she makes a very good case that in actual physical winter time, wherever you are on the globe, whatever it is for you, our biology wants us to winter. It’s a verb, yes. And if you can’t respond to the weather cycles, people talk about seasonal affective disorder, would we still have severe seasonal affective disorder if we allowed our bodies to winter or does that maybe come from trying to do summertime things when all the biological cues are saying go hibernate?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, don’t be an animal. I mean, I wonder if sometimes that’s what burnout actually is is a failure to winter.

Martha Beck:
Ooh, I love that. I love that.

Rowan Mangan:
Like in seasonal affective disorder, we’re mammals. We need to lie down sometimes. But in the climate-controlled, fluorescent lit cubicle world, there is no winter or summer, there is only Q1 KPIs or whatever. I don’t know what any of those words mean.

Martha Beck:
I don’t either.

Rowan Mangan:
But yeah, and things like that, HR, hashtag Moth Wars. Huh? Huh?

Martha Beck:
I am in a hibernation. I don’t quite understand. May I say something about hibernation?

Rowan Mangan:
I was hoping you would. I assumed you would.

Martha Beck:
Okay, so this is my new life goal. Katherine May talks about dormice. Dormice-

Rowan Mangan:
Most feel like because dormouse only has one O for door and not two as I always assumed reading Alice in Wonderland that it should be dormouses. And I don’t know why that is.

Martha Beck:
I struggled with that just this-

Rowan Mangan:
Really?

Martha Beck:
… moment as I was saying, “Should I say dormouses or doors mice?”

Rowan Mangan:
Right?

Martha Beck:
Dorsmice, I thought they were mice that lived in in doors.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, same. It’s not-

Martha Beck:
Not indoors, but inside doors.

Rowan Mangan:
In the door. Yeah, me too.

Martha Beck:
And in the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Alice in Wonderland, the dormouse lives in the sugar bowl and they keep smacking him on the head and then he goes back to sleep. He’s always asleep. You should google dormouses or dormice or whatever, dorsmouses because they’re adorable. Maybe it’s just short for adorable mice.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh.

Martha Beck:
Because they sleep most of the year. And the rest of the year, they’re just putting on weight to survive their hibernation. And they become so chubby, so round and chubby that if you find one fully fed, the little round thing, if you poke it gently with your finger, it will dent and the dent will stay there. So I feel that if I’m fully burned out, you just poke me. If I don’t dent, I need to eat and sleep more. There you go.

Rowan Mangan:
Marty?

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
I know that your love for animals is real, but I also know that you collect facts and so, I feel compelled in this moment, for the sake of journalistic integrity, to say, have you, Martha Beck, ever poked a dormouse personally?

Martha Beck:
In my heart or in physical reality?

Rowan Mangan:
In this lifetime.

Martha Beck:
I may have spent lifetimes poking dormice. I think if I lived in England in previous lifetimes, I would’ve been digging up dormice and poking them gently for years at a time. So-

Rowan Mangan:
I think your homework-

Martha Beck:
I have a framed answer.

Rowan Mangan:
I think your homework between now and the next podcast is to find a fat little dormouse and give it a little poke so you can dent it.

Martha Beck:
I think I’d have to fly to England for that, but I will.

Rowan Mangan:
Of course, you will.

Martha Beck:
For dormouse, I totally would.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s the least you can do.

Martha Beck:
Anyway, my point is, you got to be able to winter. And all these other animals are running on these clocks where if they did not stop doing whatever they do when they’re tired, they would just die, they would just plain die, and we try not to.

Rowan Mangan:
Get fat and sleep, that’s what we are built to do.

Martha Beck:
In the winter.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, but like get fat and then sleep. Get fat in the summer, sleep in the winter. I like it. I’m going to do that.

Martha Beck:
I like that.

Rowan Mangan:
So I’ve been burned out, how about you?

Martha Beck:
Oh my God. Oh my God. Have I ever been burned out in my life? When have you been burned out?

Rowan Mangan:
I always think about workplaces. This is the whole thing with KPIs and Q1 and stuff is that I was not built to do the office world very well. And I think it’s like… Honestly, this sounds a little bit like I’m trying to… I don’t know. But it’s really just the constant small talk that everyone has memorized the weather and what might happen later in the day weather-wise and what won’t. And they’re all so good at knowing when to bring an umbrella and when not to. And I’m just like, “If I can get there at nine, I’m winning.” And I have no idea from weather. I’m just there. And so, I think I was about a year into my first longterm, full-time job, when I hit a wall of I can’t do five days a week indefinitely, that’s not how I’m built. And I fell down. And I-

Martha Beck:
You literally physically fell down? Because I’ve actually seen you do that. You get chronic fatigue.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I mean, actually, I did, I did. I fell down. I broke a rib, which isn’t actually, as many people will know, all that disabling. But then I took a month off for my broken rib just to lie down and watch 31 seasons of survivor.

Martha Beck:
You fell down as a result of stress from small talk about the weather?

Rowan Mangan:
No, I think I fell down in order to… Look, it’s not important, but I think I fell down in order to provide myself something.

Martha Beck:
Just have this image of you showing up at work and somebody going, “Yeah, brought a brolly to work today, it’s going to rain later,” and you physically collapsing and breaking a rib.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my god. I mean, it really was so close to coming to that. And like at other jobs, just hiding in meeting rooms. And I used to be really good at finding weird little places where they’re sort of strange. I worked in a university for a while, two universities at different times, and there’s always like weird little cul-de-sacs and stuff where you can hide. So I was always finding little spaces to hide.

Martha Beck:
Like a dormouse.

Rowan Mangan:
Just like a little dormouse. But I will say, more recently, on the burnout thing, I feel really aware of… And I know I talk about the mom stuff a lot, it’s kind of-

Martha Beck:
You’ve got a toddler, it’s dominating your entire life.

Rowan Mangan:
It really is. And what I noticed just today was that, so our daughter no longer naps, but we have quiet time because otherwise, we would quite literally go insane. So she goes into her room and she has some quiet time where we just lock her in her bedroom and survive.

Martha Beck:
It’s a lot like prison really but with more stuffed toys.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. But then, I realized I get notifications on my phone from our baby monitor if there’s a loud noise in there or excessive motion or whatever. And I was saying to Marty earlier, I get that ding and my whole body goes into fight or flight and it’s like, “What fresh hell is this? What now?” And it’s never anything. It’s probably her just talking to her little stuffy like, “Hello Mr. Santa Claus.” And she’s really obsessed with Santa Claus, I don’t want to go into it. But it’s like it has this huge adrenaline response for me because I’m supposed to be wintering, having my little winter of the day at that time. And it spikes. And I feel like that spike of adrenaline is like there’s a component of that in the larger sense of what we’re saying. Do you know what I mean?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I actually think-

Rowan Mangan:
It starts feeling chronic.

Martha Beck:
… the spike of adrenaline and the shift into fight or flight is what ends up burning us out more than anything else. If you could go do things with a completely level set of hormones that never go into fight or flight, maybe burnout would not happen so much. I don’t know.

I mean, for me, the interesting thing is that I go into fight or flight in situations where other people get energized. So people are like, “Come on a book tour, you’ll have a meet and greet every night with a whole bunch of new friends,” and it should be really energizing.

Rowan Mangan:
Do people really enjoy that?

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Really?

Martha Beck:
Come meet new people who like you and think like you. It seems fine. It seems great. I don’t know what they mean because I literally come back from something like that and I have to lie down on a bed and shudder for an hour to get back into my body.

Rowan Mangan:
You literally have a trauma response to meet and greets.

Martha Beck:
Yes, I do. And things like, “We’re going to go on vacation. You’ll meet a whole bunch of new people.” No, no new people. I love people, but that’s not all the time.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, on paper.

Martha Beck:
So I actually retreat and write, which is why I love writing. The book tour side of writing is the part that I’m actually worst at.

Rowan Mangan:
How ironic that to punish you for retreating and doing what you love, which is hiding in a cave and writing a book, to punish you for that good deed, helping people, they send you out into endless meet and greets.

Martha Beck:
“Guess what? You’ve just joined the entertainment industry.” “No, I don’t want to ever see anyone.” But here’s the thing, my most recent book, we traveled a lot this year. I came back, I had a whole year to write this book, but I came home from Australia, the two of us, with Lila, and realized-

Rowan Mangan:
Don’t know if we mentioned that at length for a whole episode.

Martha Beck:
I had 10 weeks to write this book. And my publisher had great faith in me and I did not have great faith in myself at that time. So I said, “Look guys, I’m retreating into my room.” I literally bought enough bottles of iced tea to have one iced tea every day for 10 weeks without leaving my room. I have a bathroom in there. And I took like nuts and things in there. And I literally hibernated. And I would just wake up, roll over in bed, grab my laptop and start writing, because I write lying down in bed because I’m such a complete loss, a wreck of a human. And I’ve been doing that for 10 weeks and I can no longer see anything beyond my computer screen. And I finally got burned out on the actual just hiding in a cave and writing. I took it to the extreme.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, she can’t look at a document anymore. She doesn’t mind looking at games, but she won’t look at a document, it’s like, “Oh, God, no. Oh, God.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah, so I hit burnout even on doing my very favorite thing because I did it a little more than I could tolerate every day for 10 weeks. So I’m a little bit burned out right now and I’m very excited for the solution to whatever that is. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Well, let’s just take a break and talk about it in just a moment.

Martha Beck:
So, Ro, we’ve got to figure this out, yeah?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, we do. We’ve got to figure out burnout. And we have this idea of reset. I just wanted to say though, one of the weird consequences of burnout in the culture is that, like with me falling down, watching Survivor for a month at home, it’s like you have to find a way to explain burnout to the culture because the culture doesn’t allow burnout. So you can’t call your boss and say, “I’m going to be tired for four-

Martha Beck:
Yeah, “I’m calling in tired.”

Rowan Mangan:
“I’m calling in tired.” Yeah. “I’m calling in cozy.”

Martha Beck:
“Calling in dormouse.”

Rowan Mangan:
I remember like, really, not long after I met you, you gave me the term cultural cover story for something that’s like if it’s not fair, what the culture is asking you to do, you’re allowed to make up a story.

Martha Beck:
It’s my moral system.

Rowan Mangan:
One of our little loopholes with…

Martha Beck:
Integrity.

Rowan Mangan:
… with integrity. But it is, I mean, it’s so obviously integrity to be… But I also think that it’s one of those like if you don’t enjoy lying, I don’t enjoy lying, so then it’s an extra layer when you have to come up with something and misrepresent what’s going on. I just think that’s just not fair.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It’s like when I quit academia and I said to the person that was trying to get me to stay, “I am so exhausted and I hate being here so much that I’d have to go on some kind of major antidepressants to stay employed.” And the dean said to me, “Well, I’m on antidepressants,” which is fine, I’m glad he was on antidepressants, but the idea is, when you try to tell people what you’re actually going through, they say, “Well, okay, medicate it. Fix it.” That’s not a reason to not do what you’re supposed to do. You’ve got to get up and get going no matter what it takes, if you have to take stimulants or whatever, do it. So you end up lying to preserve your integrity of body.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And lying to preserve the culture in a weird way. Don’t put cracks in the culture, which is [inaudible 00:30:53].

Martha Beck:
So what do we do about it? Help us. Help me, Ro. Help me.

Rowan Mangan:
So I reckon there’s got to be two things that have to happen if we’re going to address burnout short-term, longterm. And I think, one, is we all got to get together and agree to just be more honest, gradually, in word and deed so that the culture doesn’t have to be so at odds with ourselves because that lying in order to get along with the culture, that is eroding us on some level as well. And I don’t know if it’s… I think it’s part of the same thing and I also think it’s a different thing, there’s like a soul damage thing that happens there, but… So let’s gradually try and move into more coherence between what we’re saying and what we’re doing.

Martha Beck:
I love that. And it makes me remember a very big party I went to, it was like the 10th anniversary of the Oprah Magazine or something.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, my God.

Martha Beck:
It was a blasting party.

Rowan Mangan:
Lucky you.

Martha Beck:
It was supposed to-

Rowan Mangan:
You must’ve met so many new people.

Martha Beck:
I did, I did. So God help me, I did. But at a certain point, I just turned to people that I was talking with and said, “I’ve got to go now.” And one of them is a man I admire very much, a meditation teacher, famous. And everybody was like, “Well, why are you going?” And I tried to say, “Oh, because I’ve got an appointment. Calling someone overseas at some weird hour.” Whatever. But instead, I just looked at this man, I thought, “I can’t lie to him.” And I said, “I have to go because I hate this.” And his whole face softened. He just went, “I hate it too.”

Rowan Mangan:
Oh.

Martha Beck:
And that actually was very nourishing to meet him. And it’s the lying that exhausts me.

Rowan Mangan:
I’d like to think that, at that moment, both of you reached into your pockets and pulled out a little dormouse-

Martha Beck:
Tiny dormice.

Rowan Mangan:
… and just poked them at each other.

Martha Beck:
I actually just reached over and prodded him on the face and the dent remained.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh. So-

Martha Beck:
It’s probably there to this day.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, what a lovely thought. Anyway, moving on.

Martha Beck:
Okay, what’s the second thing? You said two things.

Rowan Mangan:
So then, I reckon, this is where we were sort of heading is this idea of a reset. And if we can engage in regular resets proactively, we can not just deal with burnout when it happens, but get ahead of it. Because I think, if you wait for burnout itself to land upon you, it’s going to take forever to get back to zero. And you’re seriously going to need upwards of 28 seasons of Survivor to just climb back to baseline. So yeah, I’m talking about a reset is like a planned restoration of body, mind, heart, spirit.

Martha Beck:
It is amazing because after the years and decades I have spent thinking about this exact thing, how do I not fall victim to the culture? When you said reset, I thought, well, once you get fully burned out, you deserve a reset. And I think that, again, is a cultural assumption. Yes, you get to lie down for a while if you are well and truly exhausted. I used to fantasize about finishing a marathon and then everybody would understand why I needed to take a nap. And then, I did finish a marathon and this guy wanted me to come over to his apartment. This is when I was in college. And I said, “I just ran the Boston Marathon.” And he said, “That’s okay, I can make spinach.” I was like, “Really?”

Rowan Mangan:
No wonder you hate people, you just know such strange ones.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah. Comes with my life territory. Anyway, you said this whole reset thing is you preempt the burnout, which is brilliant, right, I believe.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, with spinach and planning. So yeah, I mean, I just think we’ve got to remember that we’re animals. To go back to the wintering things, we’re mammals. We’re mammals. We’re just all animals, guys. [inaudible 00:35:05]-

Martha Beck:
Check, you got nipples. Everyone listening to this has got nipples. Sorry for you birds.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, Marty.

Martha Beck:
What?

Rowan Mangan:
I can’t believe he just said that. I don’t know. I don’t know. It just seemed really inappropriate.

Martha Beck:
Dormice have nipples, live with it. No, but it’s true, we are animals, we are mammals, and it’s okay-

Rowan Mangan:
We are.

Martha Beck:
And animals, when I come to think of it, do not wait until they are fully and totally burned out to reset, that would be suicide, wouldn’t it?

Rowan Mangan:
Exactly. And I mean, we will have to go about it differently from a dormouse because we do have a culture that we have to exist adjacent to, if not deep inside of.

Martha Beck:
You know what? I bet dormouse culture is very tolerant of this. Just saying.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, there’s a lot we could learn from the dormouse community.

Martha Beck:
From the storied dormouse.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
So how do we do it?

Rowan Mangan:
All right, so I reckon, look, we can only talk about what works for us, and we are weirdos, so what we’re going to say will resonate or won’t. These are just some ideas that we came up with. So for me, it’s got to begin with getting away. And that’s not like… It can be, “Come to Costa Rica with Ro and Marty and Lila and we’ll,” I don’t know, “we’ll walk on the beach and have a culture cleanse.” But-

Martha Beck:
We actually will.

Rowan Mangan:
But we will. But it can also-

Martha Beck:
But people can’t always do that.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So it can also just look like going into the bathroom and locking the door after you and breathing for three and a half minutes. You’ve got to find what level of getaway is possible, but you have to get away from it because in the room with it, whatever it is… Oh, and also, turn off notifications on your phone for those three and a half minutes because-

Martha Beck:
And you know what? Don’t play a damn computer game that’s going to give you achievements and put timed expectations on you to do things that don’t matter because that is the culture in a tiny little thing.

Rowan Mangan:
It is.

Martha Beck:
Tells you to do things that don’t matter and then say, “You’ve achieved.”

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, my God.

Martha Beck:
And you haven’t slept because you’ve been playing whatever candy-mashing thing you’re doing for the last 48 hours of hypnotic time. Yeah, that’s the culture in your hand, don’t take it on your getaway.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And there has to be solitude because that’s the only time when there’s no culture at all is solitude.

Martha Beck:
But some people are afraid of solitude because I think, they do solitude without nourishment. And if you do solitude and you are deliberately accessing what nourishes you you can fill cup, fill the well. And different people are nourished by different things.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’s kind of a fun thing to think about, isn’t it? So for me, I have this thing where after a certain point in the evening, basically, after it gets dark and I’m getting ready for bed, I listen to audiobooks all the time, but I don’t have to listen to audiobooks that are nonfiction or even good fiction, it’s just crime. It’s just murder, murder, murder. And that’s how I reset at the end of the day, and soothing.

We talk about the soothing of murder. Oh my god, folks, in Marty’s new book. There is such a funny… It’s not out yet, it’s not going to be out for ages, but when it does come out, there is a hilarious passage about how soothing murder is. Anyway, yeah, how do you nourish yourself?

Martha Beck:
Murder doesn’t nourish me that way.

Rowan Mangan:
Really?

Martha Beck:
No, I need non-fiction. It has to be something… But it can’t be too interesting. Like if it’s archeology, I will be up till dawn just going, “Tell me what happened next. Where did you dig next?” Any science, I’m just like, “I am in.” I’ll stay up all night.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, God, that sounds terrible.

Martha Beck:
So what I go to, every time I’m lying there, I’m not ready to go to sleep, I think, okay, my body isn’t sleepy, I need lugubrious Buddhism.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my god.

Martha Beck:
Lugubrious Buddhism says things like… So I put a book, an audiobook, but on half speed. And they say things like, “We don’t run after pleasure or away from pain, we-

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, stop. Stop.

Martha Beck:
Is it not soporific?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my god.

Martha Beck:
Am I not putting you to sleep?

Rowan Mangan:
No, you’re giving me a panic attack.

Martha Beck:
Oh, well then that probably wouldn’t work for you then?

Rowan Mangan:
No. So everyone, like we say, find your own thing. Outdoors is a big one.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah, that for you is huge. Well, for both of us, being outdoors is huge.

Rowan Mangan:
I think that actually, that’s probably one of the few that is quite universal because it is evolutionary or whatever. Even nature documentaries, I’ve read, can help mental health.

Martha Beck:
Even a picture of a tree or a houseplant. And they’ve done so many studies, I just went through them for my book. There are so many things that go right in your body the moment you start connecting with the natural landscape. I’m not even going to… We could do a whole podcast on that.

Rowan Mangan:
We could.

Martha Beck:
The research is mountainous and yet, we still don’t do it. We could really save ourselves a lot of health care costs if we-

Rowan Mangan:
Just remember that we’re animals.

Martha Beck:
Animals in nature. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think whatever you do, whether it’s a book or whether it’s a dormouse or whether it’s going outside, I like to think of it in terms of body, heart, mind, soul, those four different components. I have to rest for all those components. And the most obvious one and the one that our culture tends to contemptuously disdain is the body. Like, “Just suck it up and get your head to meetings.” Think that’s all that matters.

So for me and for clients that I’ve had over the years, starting with body and doing something really obvious like literally shaking your hands and feet, and then, stretching and breathing. Every time you exhale, a nerve impulse goes from the right side of your brain down to slow the tempo of your heart.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, that’s awesome because I exhale all the time.

Martha Beck:
I do too, right? We’re doing something right.

Rowan Mangan:
We’re killing this.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
We’re killing it.

Martha Beck:
We’re awesome.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I mean, I just thought of a weird body thing for me that is really, really powerful is, back in Melbourne, I used to go once a week and do kirtan yoga, which is chanting, and it’s just like go in a darkened room, sit there and do some Hare Krishna, Hare Rama stuff, seriously, and yeah, chanting. But because it’s repetitive and there’s a quality to… I wouldn’t know what the science or whatever of it is, but it’s definitely about the vibration. I think is a lot to do with chanting the way that it vibrates in your body because I would come out of there and I always said that was spiritual wasabi. What wasabi does to your sinuses is what kirtan does to my soul. It’s soul wasabi.

Martha Beck:
So for me, it’s biometrics, getting a place that is warm, warm enough, soft enough, just bright or dim enough and light, sunlight, firelight, candlelight, a fan in a warm room, a blanket on a cold day. I mean, it’s simple, simple stuff. But I also realized that touching your head is a really big calmer for me-

Rowan Mangan:
Is that because-

Martha Beck:
Very nourishing.

Rowan Mangan:
…. when you dent it, the dent stays?

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s that one?

Martha Beck:
And then, the last thing I want to say is I get in my bed and I get everything, all the biometrics, and then, I roll and roll and roll. I just roll around. I roll on the floor sometimes. I just love to roll. Maybe I am a dormouse.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay.

Martha Beck:
Anyway.

Rowan Mangan:
Roll about on your bed. Good.

Martha Beck:
Rolling is very nourishing for me. Good,

Rowan Mangan:
Good. Good.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
So I’ve got like a shorthand, like a too long don’t read thing. And I think it’s just like if you’re in doubt about how to do your reset, but you know you’re getting close to burnout or you’re in burnout, God forbid, it’s an easy hack, rest. It’s like rest your life depends on it. Check out The Nap Ministry on Instagram, Tricia Hersey, she’s amazing. And rest as resistance, yeah, right?

Martha Beck:
Stick it to the mans.

Rowan Mangan:
Stick it the man.

Martha Beck:
Sleep for five days.

Rowan Mangan:
[inaudible 00:44:04].

Martha Beck:
That’s what I did after 10 weeks of riding every day, all day. I mean, I really did not stop thinking about my book for 10 weeks straight without any breaks. And it seemed like a really sedentary occupation. And I just thought I was getting very old because I got very, very tired. And then, we had a break. I took a break before going back and doing a second draft. And I slept almost continuously for five days. And I thought, well, this is because I’m broken. But after five days, I woke up and seriously felt like I had aged backwards. I really thought I’m just old and tired and nothing will ever help me. I couldn’t believe that I needed five full days of sleeping. That just seemed impossible because I’d never been told it was possible, it’s possible. You may need to sleep for five days. You may have to wait weeks before you get a chance, but if you do get a chance and you feel like it, go with it. Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And try to get ahead of burnout I think is so important because if we wait too long, it can be quite disastrous. And we just got to remember that we’re an animal.

Martha Beck:
Remember you’re an animal and head off burnout and stay wild.

Rowan Mangan: 
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word ‘WILD’ to 570-873-0144.

We’re also on Instagram. Our handle is @bewilderedpodcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show.

For more of us, Martha’s on Instagram, themarthabeck. She’s on Facebook, The Martha Beck, and she’s on Twitter, marthabeck. Her website is, MarthaBeck.com. And me, I too am on Instagram. Rowan_Mangan. I’m on Facebook as Rowan Mangan. And I’m on Twitter as RowanMangan. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI.