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Key points
- The world over, people are struggling to perform at work and at home and are feeling guilty about it.
- Guilt is an unhealthy negative emotion that doesn't take into account mitigating circumstances such as the pandemic.
- The healthy version of guilt is remorse, where you see your behaviour in context and with new understanding you previously lacked.
If you are feeling exhausted and unable to cope and are also beating yourself up for feeling exhausted and unable to cope, you are really, really not alone.
I gave an online interview about this subject for a global wellness platform a couple of weeks ago. So many subscribers tuned in live that it almost crashed the system.
The world over, people feel that their coping strategies have been stretched to the limit, which they have. Here in the UK, we recently passed the one-year anniversary since the first Coronavirus lockdown began. We have spent a year and more in crisis mode, dealing with life under a pandemic. The human body is not designed to live that long in stress mode — not without consequences.
Not only that, but the pandemic has given us two things that really test our mettle as human beings: constant change and uncertainty. We don’t like either one of them; we find them both really rather stressful. Add those things together and you can see why we are at the end of our tethers.
It’s quite the mental health perfect storm really: dealing with an ongoing crisis, coping with constant change and uncertainty, all whilst trying to perform optimally at work (or trying to survive on furlough), managing the home, probably home-schooling children and a myriad of other personal and professional things.
At the same time as dealing with all that, we have lost all our usual stress-relieving strategies. We can’t socialise properly, exercise properly, meet friends for lunch and offload or wander around the shops in a state of mindful bliss.
Here in the UK, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) defines stress as, “the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressures or other types of demand placed on them.”
So, when the demands and constraints of a situation exceed our ability to cope, we can become stressed in an unhealthy way.
Well, if that doesn’t sum up the past year, I don’t know what does. We are all mentally and physically taxed to our limits. The world over, we could all do with a couple of weeks off, lying in the sun and not having to worry about anything. Sadly, that is not going to happen any time soon. The wonder of it is that diagnoses of stress, burnout, and fatigue are not higher than they are.
When it came to the Q&A section of the interview, the moderator could barely keep up with the influx of questions. It soon became apparent that many, many people were beating themselves up for not performing optimally, either at home or at work or with both. They were feeling guilty for feeling fatigued, burned out, fed up, and disengaged from their jobs and their lives and were not taking into account all of the mitigating factors that the past year has brought.
What happens when we feel guilty
When it comes to guilt, rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT) is very clear. It is an unhealthy negative emotion. It is not rational or helpful.
Very simply put, an unhealthy negative emotion is the result of some unconsciously held beliefs or attitudes about an event or a set of situations. The unhealthy beliefs lead to an emotion that controls you, that has you thinking, feeling, and acting in ways that are not constructive.
In REBT, every unhealthy negative emotion has a healthy negative counterpart, one that is the result of a more healthy and helpful set of beliefs about the same event or set of situations, but one that you are in control of and one that has you thinking, feeling and acting in ways that are more helpful and constructive. The healthy version of guilt is known as remorse.
With REBT, the theme (or inference) of guilt is about the violation of your moral code. It’s about sin (but not in the religious context). There is the sin of commission (I did something I should not have done) and there is the sin of omission (I didn’t do something I should have done). Possibly, you have hurt the feelings of someone important.
With guilt, you assume you have definitely committed the sin and you assume far more responsibility than the situation warrants. You also assign far less responsibility for the wrongdoing to the other people involved, you do not think of all the mitigating factors that surround the issue, and you do not put your behaviour into an overall context. And so you behave irrationally and erratically. You might try to escape the pain of your guilt in rather self-defeating ways, promise unrealistically to never sin again, beg forgiveness, punish yourself, and more.
Drop the guilt and choose remorse instead
When you are remorseful, there is the same theme: maybe you did do something you should not have done, maybe you didn’t do something you should have done and maybe you did upset someone you care about but, you see your behaviour in context and with an understanding you previously lacked. You assume an appropriate level of responsibility not only to yourself, but to other people and to the situation. You take all of the mitigating factors into account. As a result, you will deal with your remorse in a much more balanced way, understand yourself and what happened better, act appropriately on that understanding, and be more forgiving of yourself.
And so, to all you fatigued people out there I say, “drop the guilt.” You have nothing to be guilty of. Go easy on yourselves. You are dealing with an unprecedented situation to the best of your ability, whilst not being able to relax the way you want to or, even at all. Maybe you have dropped the ball. Maybe you have dropped several balls, but you did so whilst coping with a year-long crisis. You did so whilst working, or dealing with furloughs and lockdowns, whilst worrying about how you are going to make it emotionally, physically and financially through the weeks and months ahead. Some of you will have dealt with illness and sadly, even, deaths in your immediate circles.
You are doing the best you can as often as you can; and no one can expect any more of you (although some will sadly try). So, drop the guilt and give yourself a break. You really do deserve one in both the literal and metaphorical sense of the word.
