The rocks in your pocket
There’s a lot to feel stressed about right now — worries we’re stuck carrying. But where might you be adding extra weight to your mental load?
I was in Ireland last week, driving around the countryside with my partner and his mom. It was a long-delayed vacation, and a sorely needed escape from…well, you know. Everything was beautiful: lush hills, oceanside cliffs, crumbling medieval monasteries.
But the driving itself? Oh boy.
I’ve driven lots of places. I’ve been laughed at by a bus driver while struggling to start a stick shift up a steep hill in Catalonia. I’ve navigated my way through central Munich in the pre-smartphone era with nothing but my aunt’s scrawled-out instructions. I’ve even driven on the left a few times!
But none of that quite prepared me for the stress of driving a stick on the left in a country where most roads are the width of a toothpick and bounded by stone walls — and where an oncoming truck often forces you to stop entirely and wait for them to inch past.
At one point, we came upon an accident at the edge of a narrow bridge. Everyone was fine, but a car was wedged diagonally, blocking one lane fully and jutting out into the other. After a while, a few brave folks started nosing their way through the narrow opening — the bridge’s stone barrier on one side, the wrecked car on the other. No shoulder, no wiggle room. I could see they had just a couple inches on either side. The truck in front of me waved me ahead — they knew they were too wide to make it. So I held my breath and went for it, gripping the steering wheel like a life preserver, visions of insurance claims and hefty deductibles dancing in my head.
Returning that rental car felt like setting down a boulder. I practically floated my way onto the Avis shuttle bus back to the airport.
That’s when it hit me: I had spent the whole week feeling vigilant — always on the lookout for a wandering sheep, or a stalled car, or an oncoming tour bus. Always thinking “little left, big right” at intersections. Always holding my breath, just a little.
And I didn’t realize how heavy it felt until I set it down.
A lot of people I work with are having similar realizations: “I didn’t realize how much anxiety my job gave me until I quit,” they tell me. “I didn’t realize how burnt out I was till my body physically shut down and I couldn’t work for three months,” they say.
That’s how chronic stress gets you: by becoming so normalized that it no longer registers as stress. It’s just the air you breathe.
The trouble is, there’s a lot to feel stressed about right now — threats to democracy, to bodily autonomy, to health and safety. You can’t just drop a nation-state off at the return counter and get your deposit back. Some worries we’re stuck carrying.
But when there are so many truly heavy things weighing us down, what we sure as hell don’t need to do is add more rocks to our pockets.
Yet that’s what we often do. We fret over little things. We micromanage. We feel certain the world will fall apart if we let something drop.
It makes sense. When your nervous system’s flooded with stress, everything starts feeling scary. Risks get overblown: If I say no to this project, I’ll lose my job. If I speak up, everyone will hate me.
In times like these, staying vigilant to everything and everyone is tempting. It feels like it will help you stay safe. If I can just monitor everything around me and never slip up, maybe things will be okay. But of course, you can’t monitor everything. No one can.
And in fact, trying to do so will probably just drain you further.
Take Amanda Ripley’s story. She’s a journalist who used to spend hours a day reading the news. It felt like her professional responsibility. But a few years ago, she started finding that the more she engaged with the news, the less able she was to do anything else — including her job. “I felt so drained that I couldn’t write,” she says.
I gave myself stern lectures: “This is real life, and real life is depressing! There is a pandemic happening, for God’s sake. Plus: Racism! Also: Climate change! And inflation! Things are depressing. You should be depressed!”
The problem is, I wasn’t taking action. The dismay was paralyzing. It’s not like I was reading about yet another school shooting and then firing off an email to my member of Congress. No, I’d read too many stories about the dysfunction in Congress to think that would matter. All individual action felt pointless once I was done reading the news. Mostly, I was just marinating in despair.
You hear that? Marinating in despair. I’ve definitely been there, and I bet you have too: overwhelmed, stretched thin, stuck in extreme thoughts. Everything is falling apart. Everything is hopeless.
That’s not gonna help a damn thing.
After coming to terms with her news avoidance, Ripley spent a year researching how we might remake journalism for this era. What she found was that there are three things humans need to live full, informed lives: hope, dignity, and agency.
Agency. Let’s talk about that one. Because I think that’s at the heart of so much work stress right now — a feeling that we don’t have agency. That we don’t have choice. That’s why I loved this post from Beth Fox, all about her burnout recovery. The whole thing is powerful (read it!), but there was one sentence that really stopped me in my tracks:
I’m learning to give up “custody” of problems until someone comes along to take them over.
Custody of problems. I read this and knew exactly what she meant. Those problems that you’re not solving, that you actually have zero capacity for right now…but that live in your brain and clog up your thoughts nevertheless.
These are the rocks we stick in our pockets, weighing us down further precisely when we need to lighten the load. We often feel like we have to hold onto these rocks — like we have no agency. But what Fox found was that, ultimately, she did have choices. She could “Marie Kondo” her life. It was deeply uncomfortable. It meant saying no to things that were exciting. But it was possible. And it was necessary.
So today, I encourage you to take a moment. Close your eyes, and breathe deeply. Where have you been holding your breath? Which rocks are in your pocket? What would it look like to release custody of some of them right now?
This post originally appeared in the July 12, 2022, edition of our newsletter, Nice Work. Subscribe here.
