Why do people exhaust me?

by Graham Panther

5 Apr

Hyper-vigilantes! Graham here.

In truth, this issue could be called ‘why does everything exhaust me?’ Because COVID has hit me hard. Not so much the initial burst of symptoms, which weren’t too bad, but the fatigue that’s followed.

I have more to say about all that, including how it’s intersecting with my health anxieties in interesting ways.

But for now, below is a piece I wrote a few weeks back on an evergreen topic: why it’s so hard to be around people, even the ones you love.

Also thanks for the lovely well-wishes by the way. You’ll understand why I’m not replying, but they were much appreciated.

For those who do have a bit of energy right now, there’s still time to book your spot for our free events this week, including Wednesday night’s online session, and Saturday’s in-person meet up in Melbourne.

Now on with today’s topic…

A single line in a podcast really got me recently.

I was listening to trauma specialist Jeffrey Rutstein on the topic of ‘not being a prisoner to your nervous system’. I’d chosen that episode because, well, it’s been a rough few weeks anxiety-wise.

Okay, months.

(Okay, years?)

The idea of escaping my always-on nervous system sounded pretty appealing. Plus this man has the most calming voice I have ever heard. So I was instantly hooked.

About halfway through the podcast, Rutstein was talking about the everyday challenges of living in a hyper-vigilant brain (where you’re always primed for the next threat, real or imagined).

The line that really got me was actually quite simple. Obvious even. But I’d never heard someone say it so matter-of-factly.

If I’m hyper-vigilant, Rutstein says, if I’m spending most of my day “just trying to manage my inner impulses and my moods, I’m not going to have much social energy.”

Well, damn. The man has a point.

Introvert, or anxious bean?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve found socialising exhausting. To the point that I am constantly budgeting my ‘people energy’, and feeling pushed past my social limits.

For the past few years I’ve made sense of this mainly in terms of being an introvert. Even this took me years to get to, since I’ve spent much of my life doing and enjoying things that look pretty damn extroverted. Public speaking. Playing music on stage to large crowds of people.

It took me a while to understand that this isn’t all that unusual for an introvert — especially when you factor in that after doing one of these seemingly extroverted things, I’ll want to go find a cave somewhere for the next three days to recover.

Recently though I’ve been wondering if it’s just introversion that makes me so uncomfortable around other people.

Because here’s the thing. Even in a deep, philosophical one-on-one conversation with a dear and trusted friend (in other words, introvert catnip) chances are I will be feeling quite uncomfortable, for no obvious reason. I can be simultaneously deeply engaged in the conversation, genuinely in my happy place, and yet at another level, my body is telling me I’m in danger. That if I don’t hold myself in just the right way, or say just the right thing at the right time, there’ll be consequences.

So what’s that about?

On guard

In the podcast, Rutstein says that many of his therapy clients need to have multiple sessions with him before they feel comfortable enough “to receive what the relationship has to offer”.

And that’s just step one. Mostly these are people who feel similarly uncomfortable around their friends, and even their spouse, because for the most part, “they’re still too much on guard, or too contracted. They’re too afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing.”

Ding ding.

The context for Rutstein’s work is trauma, specifically. This past couple years, I’ve been digging into some of the ways my childhood (and later events) have shaped me in this regard. As I slowly come to better understand this context, it certainly makes sense to me that I am so on guard around other humans, even other humans I love.

But also, your own on guard feelings might not ‘make sense’ to you yet. I’ve spoken to a number of Big Feels Clubbers over the years who’ve named a similar all-pervading discomfort around other people, but don’t necessarily have anything they can point to in their past that ‘explains’ it.

And in either case, even an explanation doesn’t necessarily mean you understand what’s happening in your body.

The window of tolerance

Rutstein has a useful idea here. The ‘window of tolerance’.

At any one moment, he says, we lie somewhere on a spectrum, in terms of the state of our nervous system.

At one extreme, we can be in a state of ‘hypoarousal’ - which means lethargy, numbness, or dissociating. At the other extreme is the state of ‘hyperarousal’- which means fight or flight, fear or anger. (Hello. I spend a lot of time here.)

Either one of these extremes is a natural reaction to feeling overwhelmed or in danger - whether that’s due to what’s currently happening, or echoes of your past.

The window of tolerance is the state in between these two extreme states. A mythical (I mean optimal AHEM) state in which you’re alert but not overwhelmed. Calm but not sleepy.

Rutstein says that sometimes, for various reasons, our window of tolerance gets smaller. And here’s the bit I found most useful about this way of framing it. A smaller window of tolerance means that by definition there’s a smaller range of everyday emotions that are tolerable to us.

That’s why someone criticising an idea of yours at work can feel so hurtful, even when you know it shouldn’t be that big a deal.

It’s why one small thing going awry can make you so overwhelmed, even when you think it shouldn’t.

It’s why a person walking past you on the street can have you tensing in fear at some imagined attack, even when there’s no obvious sign of danger.

The power of pretending

Listening to Rutstein describe the window of tolerance, I realised two things:

That my window of tolerance is small. In recent years, perhaps even smaller than ever. I can count on one hand the times I recall being in this optimal state in the past few years. (Seriously.)
That my ability to operate outside that window of tolerance - and to nevertheless appear fine and dandy to a casual onlooker - is quite impressive.

Number 2 is particularly interesting, I think. I can’t put it on my CV (‘performs surprisingly well under pressure of my own making’). But as a friend said to me recently, what to me feels like desperate flailing often looks pretty good and capable, from the outside.

Number 2 can be a mixed blessing. I dive much more deeply into this conundrum in my new eBook:

“Sometimes all that pretending pays off. You push yourself to go to the social gathering, and you come away feeling warm and connected.

Then other times it just feels like you’re going through the motions, putting on ‘life drag’, and worse, no one has even noticed.

So when you’re having a particularly tough time, being good at hiding your big feelings is a double-edged sword. The better you are at pretending, the easier it is to maintain those vital social connections - work, friends, family commitments. But you can start to feel like a victim of your own success. Your ability to pretend can become just one more piece of evidence that you don’t really belong here.”

Oof.

The eBook is called ‘Why is it so hard to feel like I belong?’, and we'll be releasing it before too long. Watch this space for details. (Card-carrying members, you’ll be getting a free copy as a little thanks for supporting the club).

Still searching

Jeffrey Rutstein is just one of many people whose work I’ve been diving into on trauma and its effects lately. I’ve also been trying various treatments inspired by reading Bessel van der Kolk’s opus on the subject, The Body Keeps The Score— including neurofeedback, EMDR, and next cab off the rank, something called Somatic Experiencing which I’m starting this week.

I don’t think I’ve found an answer yet, although I have found a few clues. A few moments of being in what feels like that ‘window of tolerance’, even if only briefly.

Having spent many years deciding I just couldn’t find any real help (so why bother) there’s both hope and frustration on this new path.

In recent months I feel a little bit like I’m back at square one, every bit as anxious as I was a year ago when I first started asking for help again. This can be incredibly frustrating, but it’s not unexpected.

As I said last week to a friend who’s having their own very tough time, sometimes the smallest clue will have to do. The idea of a possibility that it won’t always be like this. The merest suggestion of the beginnings of a path.

Why will that be enough today? Because (I hope) it will get me to the next clue, and the next one after that.

In our last member talk, Big Feels Clubber Jeff put this in a way that’s really stuck with me:

“With what I know, and what I have, I am doing what I can.”

And that’s really it.

One 'hot tip' to finish

Since I wrote this piece, I’ve now done my first two Somatic Experiencing sessions (in between lots of COVID snoozing, as well as some incredibly stressful work things I had to get done because, well, life doesn't stop does it?).

Somatic Experiencing is essentially a kind of trauma therapy. But instead of diving into what’s caused the trauma, you focus specifically on its bodily effects, and how you might tend to those effects in the here and now.

From what I can tell so far, it offers a kind of user manual for your own nervous system.

My practitioner has a bunch of ‘hot tips’ for responding to moments of overwhelm. Here’s a simple one I’ll share, in the spirit of ‘try this if you feel like it’.

Step 1: Sit in a chair or in bed, relax your jaw

Step 2: With your head still, move just your eyes so you’re looking all the way to the right, and hold this for a few seconds, until you notice a kind of softening or letting go in your body.

Step 3: Do the same thing but this time looking to the left, again holding for a few seconds.

The relaxing feeling may be very subtle. For me, it’s a kind of softening, in my chest and shoulders. Nothing life-changing, but nice.

The first time I did it, it took about twenty seconds on the right to feel anything, then about ten seconds on the left. I now find myself doing it a handful of times a day, just a few seconds each side.

And of course, sometimes I don’t feel any kind of shift or release at all.

If you give it a go, I’m curious to see how it feels for you. Weirdly helpful? Completely useless? Click here and let me know.

One last reminder about ze events :)

Plus if you come on Saturday, you can also choose to stick around to decompress afterwards with a hands-on drawing workshop with artist, cartoonist and feeler of feelings (plus all-round good egg) Sarah Nagorcka AKA Gorkie.

All three events are free, thanks to our event partners Science Gallery Melbourne.

And, given today’s topic, it’s worth saying, our events have often been described as a ‘different’ kind of socialising. Think of them as get-togethers for people who have many complex feelings about getting together. Shyness, low energy and ambivalence about coming are all very much encouraged xx

— Graham.

Graham Panther