What's Holding You Back?

Have You Hit the Wall?

How to manage the mental fatigue of nonstop overload.

By Marc Lener, M.D.

We all experience varying levels of stress, and we can handle a certain amount of pressure while still feeling stable, comfortable, and fulfilled. Stress, however, can accumulate when we don’t have control over involuntarily added demands or when we fall behind on tasks.

When you think back to highly stressful periods of your life, the pressure probably crept up on you, and then you hit the proverbial wall.

Physiological stress relates to a biological state that prepares the body for danger based on external pressures, and psychological stress relates to the emotional turmoil that a person may experience. Stress initiates the sympathetic nervous system that tells us to fight or confront, take flight or avoid, freeze or disconnect. Anxiety is also part of the equation: Prompted by the fear of anticipated danger, which is the cause of the stress, it can be so painful that we may avoid or disconnect from tasks big and small.

You may be unaware of the accumulation of stress and anxiety but notice that you are lashing out at friends and family or see a negative change in your performance or interactions at work. You may not even feel this accumulation of stress and unknowingly push past the so-called wall.

People hit the wall for different reasons and at different times. Regimented people can have difficulty compartmentalizing their focus on tasks (or setting proper boundaries) and therefore are overwhelmed by their growing list of to-do items. For others, avoidance can lead to an expanding list of unfinished tasks. The stress can then snowball and become a downward spiral, which can have a deleterious effect on well-being as well as relationships. This could happen, for example, when external reminders make us confront what we have not accomplished or when a new obligation or pressure has been added. The burden becomes too much.

Intense negative emotions can also dampen the thinking process necessary to handle stress, burdens, and goal-oriented initiatives. A person may reach the point of being overwhelmed when their coping mechanisms have been hampered or weakened. A person may have excellent skills in high-stress situations, but if they hit the wall, those skills may disappear. This is the marathon runner still trying to maintain a record pace when they are just not physically able to do so.

To overcome stress before we reach the wall, one approach is to act and make progress on something small that shortens our task list. We follow through on one step of our plan regardless of how we feel about taking it on. This victory can give us confidence and also help us recover our skills and get back into the groove.

In addition, we remove ourselves from experiencing shame by focusing on the task at hand rather than thinking negatively about ourselves. Shame over unfinished projects or unmet expectations can push us down, and negative judgment can create a lack of self-belief, which can affect performance and the overall management of stress. You can see how the cycle perpetuates itself.

It may also help to reach out for help to a person who is a sounding board—a friend, spouse, tutor, or a trained mental health professional like a therapist or psychiatrist. Talking through the problems can help you better define, frame, and work through them. In addition, blowing off steam in small doses, and at a low frequency, can help. Another person can help you see from the outside in versus the inside out, giving you another perspective that perhaps allows you to move away from feeling hopeless.

Good athletes know their limits. They know where the wall is, and they train to push it further back and cope when they know they are approaching it. You can borrow this strategy in your everyday life. Anyone can hit the wall. It can feel like a weakness, but when you know where it is and when you’re approaching it, you can turn it into a reminder to take control and draw on your strengths.

Marc Lener, M.D., is a psychiatrist in private practice in New York City, as well as the founder of the Singula Institute.

When Parenting Is Too Much

Facing stressors without the resources needed to handle them.

By Noam Shpancer, Ph.D.

Contemporary parenting has become a strained and contradictory undertaking for many. On the one hand, our culture lauds parents as role models, children as precious, family values as cherished, and parent-child relationships as foundational. On the other hand, while demanding a lot from parents, our culture does not offer them much support.

Stress and exhaustion can escalate to the level of burnout for as many as 20 percent of parents, and the rates are higher for parents of children with a chronic illness, according to research from Örebro, Sweden.

Parental exhaustion varies by circumstance but also by culture. People in Western, individualistic cultures are more vulnerable to experiencing burnout than are parents in collectivist cultures. A recent meta-analysis of the literature by Belgian researchers found that contrary to expectation, the number and ages of children are not strong predictors of parental burnout. Neither is being in a blended family or a single-parent household, particularly if single parenthood is chosen.

The best predictors identified in the literature involve family disorganization, low emotional intelligence, lack of social support, social pressures toward perfection, disagreements in co-parenting, and work-family conflict. Unemployment, financial insecurity, and a lack of leisure time have all been associated with an increased risk of exhaustion. Predictors, however, differ by culture. For example, single parenthood is a vulnerability factor in Iran, a neutral factor in Belgium, and a protective factor in France.

Parental burnout is characterized by mental and physical exhaustion, depersonalization, and a decreased sense of fulfillment as well as self-efficacy. It tends to result from chronic exposure to emotionally draining environments. While not a formal clinical diagnosis, burnout has been recognized by the World Health Organization as an occupational condition resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been
successfully managed.

Finnish researchers found that a strong risk factor for burning out was socially prescribed perfectionism, and its effects were exacerbated in parents who also reported a high level of self-oriented perfectionism. The authors also found a gender effect: Mothers reported more socially prescribed and self-oriented perfectionism than fathers and, consequently, were more burned out.

Personality matters as well. French psychologists Sarah Le Vigouroux and Celine Scola found that parental meticulousness and lack of emotional control were both risk factors for burnout. By contrast, agreeableness and perseverance were protective factors. Other research has found that personality traits associated with resilience, namely low neuroticism and high conscientiousness, agreeableness, and extraversion, are linked, unsurprisingly, to a lower incidence. They found that the effects of personality in parents were more pronounced in the years before children reached school age.

The researchers list several consequences of parental burnout, including undermined mental and physical health, increased feelings of guilt, and escape and suicidal ideation. Life satisfaction and well-being appear to decrease. There is also a link between burnout and an increase in the stress hormone cortisol and, with that, more somatic complaints. Naturally, increased parental stress, coupled with emotional distancing, has consequences for children, in part through increased parental anger, neglect, and even violence.

Unfortunately, the literature on treatments is extremely scarce. One recent study showed that short-term group interventions either to address directly the defining features of burnout or to offer a setting in which people are heard and understood without judgment were both effective in significantly reducing behavioral and emotional symptoms and cortisol levels. Therapeutically reappraising how one thinks about co-parenting has also shown promise, and teaching parents informal mindfulness practices aiming to enhance the awareness of the present moment may help as well.

Noam Shpancer, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at Otterbein College.

Is Stress Contagious?

Germs aren’t the only infectious agents out there.

By Tony Buchanan, Ph.D.

The word contagious rightly conjures thoughts of a bacterial or viral infection spreading from one person to another. The idea that psychological factors can be contagious is not as well-known. Like traditional infectious diseases, emotional states, including stress, can be spread from one person to another. The stress and burnout that you attribute to your own impossible to-do list may, in fact, be partly influenced by the lives and moods of those around you.

Large data sets about human health and behavior have allowed scientists to study this interconnectedness. Analysis of social networks—both in real life and online—has revealed that characteristics ranging from happiness to smoking to obesity can spread from one person to another and another. A parent’s warnings about peer pressure are justified: We are strongly influenced by the behaviors of those around us.

The feelings and physiology of stress show the same contagion. This pattern is obvious to anyone who’s observed a struggling public speaker. The audience may feel just as stressed as the speaker. Surveys often place public speaking near the top of people’s greatest fears. It has the ability to elicit a physiological stress response in the form of increased heart rate, blood pressure, and the stress hormone cortisol.

In our lab, we asked people to give a speech in front of research assistants trained to show no reaction to the speaker. Their passivity was remarkably effective at causing a stress response in the speaker. The lack of reaction on the part of the research assistants seemed worse than negative feedback.

After conducting this research for many years, University of Michigan psychologist Stephanie Preston and I observed that the experiments seemed to elicit a stress response in us as well as in the speakers. Of course, this was just an anecdotal observation, but it led us to design a study to test whether we could discover physiological changes in the observers.

To assess such responses, we collected saliva samples to measure the stress hormone cortisol. What we found surprised us: When speakers showed high cortisol responses, the observers also showed high responses. We described this matching as “physiological resonance.” It was as if the stress system of the speaker had a direct impact on the stress system of the observers.

Maybe this shouldn’t have surprised us, given the contagion of all sorts of feelings and behaviors observed in people over the years. However, an unanswered question remains: What aspects of the speakers’ behavior cued the observers to produce a stress response? Research has focused on the speakers’ voice and facial expressions, but no simple description has provided a strong link between observed behavior in one person and physiological responses in another.

We process a variety of social cues when we interact with others. This allows us to assess the well-being of our friends and neighbors and also gives us the ability to detect potential threats in the environment. If your neighbor shows signs of stress, you’d best pay attention. What affects them is likely to affect you as well. Such sensing is a holdover from our evolutionary history. There are many examples of other animals picking up on stress cues from one another. Quick detection of stress in others could give us a head start to avoiding trouble.

The contagion of stress occurs in many settings, affecting family and work, and demonstrates our interconnectedness, even at a physiological level. It also represents a public health challenge, not just for those under stress but also for the people around them.

Tony Buchanan, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Saint Louis University.

How to Beat Burnout

Small, simple actions can make a big difference.

By Seth Gillihan, Ph.D.

1. Tell Yourself “Good Morning”: Often, our minds are running before our bodies have left the bed. This disconnect creates a background buzz of unease for the entire day. Before you get up, tune in to your body and take three slow breaths.
2. Get Outside: Take a short walk or sit and watch the clouds—anything to spend a few minutes outdoors. Leave your phone behind and take in the surroundings. The fresh air will reduce stress for longer than you might expect.
3. Feel Water: We touch water many times a day but rarely feel it. Paying attention to the sensations of water is common in mindfulness practices; it brings us into the moment with greater awareness. Feel the water in the shower or when washing dishes.
4. Celebrate Wins: The mind recalls losses and disappointments, while joys and victories are forgotten. In this frame of mind, every day feels mostly bad. Before bed, jot down three things that went well. Be specific so that the memories are vivid—“Made a great eggplant parm” counts!

Seth J. Gillihan, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist and the author of Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Simple Path to Healing, Hope, and Peace.

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