Fried

This is my 15th book, and perhaps it is the most important.

Fried may seem like an innocuous enough word since so many of us use it these days to describe our frenzied, speed-oriented, exhausted state of mind. But innocuous it is not. Feeling fried is an alarm that life has veered seriously off course. It’s shorthand for losing our way individually and culturally in a world spinning so fast that it feels like we’re about to be launched into outer space.

As a Harvard-trained biologist and psychologist, I’ve been described as a world expert on stress. However, that’s not what this book is about. When you’re stressed out, you keep chasing the same old carrot, whatever that may be for you. But when you’re burned out, you eventually give up the chase. The hope that you can create a meaningful life fizzles out, and you find yourself sitting in the ashes of your dreams.

In a culture wedded to positive thinking, burnout and its first cousin, depression, are thought of as disorders to be fixed. But what if, borrowing a line from author and social commentator Judith Viorst, they are “necessary losses”? Perhaps they are losses of naïveté, false identities, and faulty assumptions that make way for a more authentic life.

Like many self-help authors, I write about what I need to learn. Flirting with burnout, and eventually allowing it to seduce me, is a pattern that I know all too well. When I burn out, my most loving, creative self goes missing; and I contract into a homely homunculus— the smallest, most negative version of myself. It is not a pretty picture.

I’ve burned out more than once—ironically, but predictably—trying to do and be my best. The pain is so great and the available help is so limited that I felt compelled to write a book that describes the inner world of burnout and how it can actually be used as a guide to inner freedom and an authentic life.

My intention is to create a map of burnout that makes the condition accessible and easily identifiable. William Styron, the Pulitzer Prize—winning author, wrote a compelling memoir of his descent into severe depression titled Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness Psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, likewise catapulted manic-depressive illness (bipolar disorder) into full visibility in An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

While Fried is not a memoir in the true sense of the word, my personal experience is central to what you’ll read here. Like most of my other books, this one is braided from four strands: clinical experience, psychological and biological research, personal recollections, and a larger spiritual view. Unlike any of my other books, however, Fried has a fifth strand—real-time input from social networking.

Sitting alone in a hotel room one night (the fate of a traveling speaker), I logged on to Facebook and asked if anyone had had experience with burnout. A landslide of responses followed. For the next year, our virtual salons deepened as one inquiry led to another and another. As many as 60 or 70 people would respond within a few hours to questions such as: What does burnout feel like? What are its stages? Who is susceptible to it, and why? What are the physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of feeling fried? How do you think those relate to depression? Do you have experience with antidepressants that you’d be willing to share?

Once we had explored the anatomy of burnout together, our impromptu community turned its attention to recovering one’s will and purpose, hope and wonder, faith, and the kind of “I can do it” attitude that creates what mythologist, sage, and social artist Jean Houston calls “a passion for the possible.”

One evening I was thinking about the latter stages of burnout—depression and despair—and I posted this inquiry: If you had a single sentence to share with a person in despair, what would it be?

Facebook friend Richard Held responded with a wry one-liner: “Hell is a bad place to pitch a tent.”

Richard’s posting reminded me of a strange experience that occurred on the day I began writing this book. That odd happenstance turned out to foreshadow the book’s structure and content.

I’d purchased a transcription program for my computer called MacSpeech Dictate, hoping that it might be more efficient to write the book by speaking it. (It wasn’t.) The program does work quite well after it has learned to recognize your speech patterns, but every time I said “The Burnout Challenge,” which was the working title at the time, it stubbornly typed “The Inferno Challenge” instead.

Intrigued by the computer’s insistence, I spent a fascinating afternoon Googling Dante Alighieri and The Divine Comedy, his epic 14th-century poem. The three-part narrative is based on a series of compelling visions that Dante had during Holy Week in the year 1300, which culminated in a complete shift in his view of life. He went from feeling lost and absorbed in his own pride and apathy to feeling free and in touch with the wholeness—the holiness—of life.

In his extraordinary visions, Dante experienced a descent into the Inferno (the Italian word for “hell”), then a powerful self-reflective purification in the Purgatorio (purgatory), and a final rising up to Paradiso (paradise). His intention in writing this massive work was more than cataloging his experience; indeed, he was challenging his readers to make the same journey. The epic poem begins:

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear

So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there

I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment
In which I had abandoned the true way.¹

When I read those opening lines, my eyes popped open and I stopped breathing for a moment. Was this written for me? Feeling fried—at least at its end stages— really does feel like going to hell. Getting to the point where I was working 10 or 12 hours a day for weeks or sometimes months without time off (and actually dreaming about shopkeepers and gardeners who had gentler, more spacious lives than mine) was my personal version of straying into a “forest dark.” And like Dante, I couldn’t really say how I had gotten so far off track. Apparently, I had fallen asleep at the wheel of my own life.

Through much of Dante’s journey, he is accompanied by the poet Virgil, who leads him through the nine allegorical circles of hell, which, although unique, share one commonality: Their denizens have lost touch with the mysterious Source of Life and Love that expresses itself newly as the aliveness of each moment. They have died to possibility and are in a state of constriction and stagnation. There are a lot of ways to lose heart, but the seven deadly sins at the core of The Divine Comedy are a good overview: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust These aren’t just for folks who went to Catholic school. We all have plenty of experience with these excruciating states.

As my friend Wayne Muller discusses in his book A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough, it’s not that these “sins” get you thrown into the fiery pit by some Divine Third Party—they are the fiery pit. They are love misdirected. You had hoped that they would restore you to happiness, but, in fact, they have separated you from the sweet flow of life unfolding.

In the grip of envy, for example, you miss the beauty that’s right under your nose. Convinced that someone else has what you need in order to be happy, you cut yourself off from the infinite possibilities that life offers in this moment. Possessed by anger, you become a prisoner of the past, incapable of connecting with the gifts of the present. Tormented by greed, nothing you have is ever enough and you live with the pain of lack, unable to appreciate that life itself is a feast that has been laid out before you.

I would add another circle—another deadly sin— to Dante’s allegorical description of hell: burning out, a state of mind in which all possibility is eventually extinguished. When you’re in the latter stages of burnout, Dante’s inscription over the gate of hell really hits home: “All hope abandon, ye who enter in!”

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that you’re free to leave the Inferno anytime you like.

The Divine Comedy, after all, is a three-part journey from hell to purgatory to heaven. In the Inferno, Dante witnesses how the various deadly sins create pain and suffering. Then, in the Purgatorio—and the root of that word means “to be purged or cleansed of”—he actively experiences how lust, rage, pride, envy, and the rest actually feel. He becomes an active participant in his transformation through heartfelt self-reflection. When the scales then fall from his eyes, he rises up through the spheres into paradise.

My husband, Gordon Dveirin, who has postgraduate training in literature and the history of ideas, explained to me (your basic literary ignoramus) why this mind-bending epic poem is a comedy (in classical literature, “comedy” simply means a story with a happy ending). It descends into hell, moves through the clarifying atmosphere of purgatory, and finally rises to paradise. The shape of its structure—like this book—is a smile.

Let’s begin the journey by tracing the 12 stages of descent into the “Burnout Inferno.” Then—just as in Dante’s Purgatorio—you’ll have a chance to reflect on which of your personal beliefs and behaviors have led you into the fiery pit. By the book’s end—and with a little willingness on your part to examine your life—you’ll begin to get glimpses of heaven on Earth.