Caroline Dooner - Tired as F*ck: Burnout at the Hands of Diet, Self-Help, and Hustle Culture

For everyone who is tired

A few years ago, I read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, and along with everyone else, I decided to declutter my entire apartment of everything that didnt spark joy. I was feeling stuck, and I hoped that getting rid of my stuff would help me feel... something. Lighter? Freer? Clearer?

So I got rid of lumpy pillows stuffed in the back of the linen closet. They did not spark joy. I got rid of dresses that were supposed to make me look like a little princess for the musical theater auditions I still forced myself to go to. Joyless. I threw out my little box of mismatched buttons Id collected over the years. I was never ever going to use them because I am not a quirky seamstress. Goodbye twelve tangled obsolete computer cords! Goodbye broken umbrellas! Goodbye to who I was before! None of these things spark joy. I decluttered and decluttered. I donated and threw out bags and bags of broken kitchen utensils and boots that had never fit, until I was left with a nearly bare apartment.

After a few days, once the temporary high of seeing thirty-five empty hangers in an empty closet wore off, I realized: oh... my stuff wasnt actually the big problem; my life doesnt spark joy. My life sparks dread. It exhausts me. And it has for a long time.

I was sick of everything. I was sick of auditioning for acting jobs. I was sick of a career that I needed to medicate myself for in order to calm down. I was sick of never feeling like I was doing enough or being productive enough or impressive enough or innovative enough. I was sick of online dating and the drain of bad first dates, and the guilt I felt for wanting to just stay home. And after fifteen years (more than half my life at that point) of self-help books, I was so so sick of trying to self-improve in one way or another.

I was exhausted, but I didnt feel like I deserved to be exhausted. Most people have way harder lives than me, and most people just push throughbecause they have to. So, what the hell was wrong with me? Was I weak? Lazy? My burnout seemed like some sort of personal failing. But no matter how ridiculous or weak I thought it looked on the outside, I couldnt deny it: I was exhausted. I was burnt out. And I could either keep going the way I was going and probably get even more tired, or do something about it.

The truth is, the exhaustion went beyond physical exhaustion (even though physical exhaustion was definitely part of it). The exhaustion was stemming from an even deeper place. I had been operating under so many beliefs that I had never consciously recognized. Beliefs about human worth tied to our productivity: You must always be productive. You must always be improving. You can only relax once you reach your goal and become more impressive. I never felt like I was allowed to just... be. And I didnt think I was allowed to accept myself the way I was, because the way I was wasnt good enough. I was deeply flawed. And I thought until I fixed all my flaws, I had to suffer. I was never able to enjoy and relax, not only because Id chosen a life and career that was so nerve-racking to me, but also because I was constantly supposed to be self-improving and getting somewhere else. And because the goalpost is always moving, and I never actually got there, it never ended. I never felt calm. And it was frying my nerves.

Usually, when I started feeling this way, I looked for a self-help book to help me figure out what was wrong with me, and how to fix it. But this time, something inside me told me that instead of reading another self-help book that promised to heal me on a cellular level from the inside out, what I really needed was to stop. After more than a decade dedicated to rabid self-improvement, the answer for my exhaustion wasnt more self-improvement. It couldnt be. Id already tried that over and over. I didnt want to be a project anymore. Honestly, I was too tired to be a never-ending project. Right now, the only answer that felt relieving to me was rest. Rest from self-improvement. Rest from the grind. And if at all possible, rest from my own cruel mind.

When youre burnt out, the answer isnt more pressure. Its less. I needed to, somehow, get off the hamster wheel I was on. I needed existential rest. I needed soul rest. I needed to opt out of the entire story Id written for myself about what I was supposed to be doing. We live in a culture that doesnt really understand or respect burnout. We all soak in this belief that exhaustion is weak and that we all need to just buck up and be a little bit less lazy. Thats what Id been trying to do. But it wasnt working for me. So, I needed to give myself permission to opt out of our entire culture that tells us were never good enough and never doing enough. I needed to figure out if it was even possible to wake up every morning and not feel guilt or dread.

Four years earlier, I realized that dieting and trying to lose weight over and over again had run me ragged. Dieting messed me up physically and mentally and emotionally. So, I decided to stop dieting. I bought bigger pants. I deliberately unlearned most of our misguided cultural beliefs about food and weight and health. I examined some of the root causes of my body fixationand it all eventually became The F*ck It Diet book.

My decision to opt out of our cultural diet mania completely changed my life, but after a few years I realized that I still had cultural expectations about everything else, not just food and weight. Diet culture pushes the belief that we should always be striving for control over food and over our bodies. It says that less food and being thinner is always better. But diet culture is actually just a subset of our culture at large thats obsessed with control, and hustling, and personal responsibility, and hyper-productivity. And when I addressed my relationship with food, Id only actually addressed a small part of a bigger cultural paradigm that worships control and self-punishment. So, now I needed to say f*ck it to all the other cultural expectations that were still invisibly strangling me. I had to address hustle cultures hold over me, where every single fucking second of the day I expected myself to be working, hustling, and being productive. And the way I was deciding to opt out? I was going to rest. I was going to give myself a significant healing period of rest. And, just to be extra dramatic, I decided I was going to give myself two full years to rest. I wanted it to feel radical. And epic. And I felt like one year just wasnt going to be long enough.

Now, when I say rest, most people imagine that Im saying either: rest from work, rest from physical activity, or good old-fashioned sleep. And while those things are great and important and absolutely a part of rest, Im actually talking about something even bigger than just sitting still or lying down or doing less. I didnt want to approach rest as just an activity to check off my to-do list (though thats fine too!), I wanted to approach it as a sort of... way of life. I knew that just sitting around or forcing myself to lie down wasnt going to be enough. I had to release my stress over it. I had to release my resistance and guilt. I had to radically allow the act of rest. I needed permission to rest as an antidote to the anxiety and burnout Id been experiencing for years.

I still had to work. I wasnt going to be just lying around for two years. So, my rest was about working through the beliefs I had around rest and relaxation in the first place. I needed to actually figure out how to operate in my life in a more restful