How I finally crashed and burned (burnout part 4)
Sugar intake, caffeine and why exercise counterintuitively made my stress worse
Last week I talked about the different burnout profiles, stubborn optimism and burnout, and why I kept going full throttle despite needing a break. This week I dive into the first physical signs of burnout and when things got real dicey.
1/ Gimme some of that sugar
My brain chemistry was starting to look like a heroin addict's. Studies have found that when you're stressed day in and day out, (checking emails, pitching investors, gawking at declining revenue) it alters brain function. Eventually, you get to a point where your brain looks like people with post-traumatic stress disorder and rats during opioid withdrawal.
After a stress-ridden day full of what felt like loss after loss, the only thing that seemed to make me relax at all was a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. The intense flavors of caramel, chocolate peanut buttery goodness stimulating my tongue was one of the few positive sensations that was “loud” enough to drown out the sound of my mind yelling at me that nothing was going to plan. Those 1,108 calories of cream and sugar were my heroin.
Sugar provides the biggest bang for your buck when it comes to giving you immediate energy. So when your body is particularly stressed out and depleted, you crave sugar. Unsurprisingly, 70% of people who are going through a stressful period consume more sugary foods. Also, sugar releases opioids and dopamine, hence why it felt soooo good to binge on ice cream for me.
The chemistry of a substance can make it more or less addictive. It can mess with your hormones, altering certain hunger-hormones like leptin and ghrelin, causing you to increase your appetite, thereby creating a negative spiral.
And we wouldn't do any of this if it didn't make us feel good. If you think about it, most of us are really chasing a feeling from our drug of choice (whether that's sugar, alcohol, or heroin). That's what we really want — the energy from sugar, lowering our inhibitions with alcohol or the buzzy focus we get from the nicotine in a cigarette.
I was craving something in that ice cream, but what was it?
If I were to take a close look at my behavior, I would discover a simple truth that was hard to swallow:
I wanted to feel good to compensate for the fact that most of the day I wasn’t feeling great.
I was stressed as hell. I brushed off these sugar cravings as temporary, even though I was starting to eat ice cream almost every night. This was cognitive dissonance at its finest. I was looking the other way, even though I knew that things were starting to feel off in my body.
Leon Festinger, who wrote about dissonance said,
"..Most people prefer to preserve their current understanding of the world by rejecting, explaining away, or avoiding the new information or by convincing themselves that no conflict really exists. This is why people get upset when you challenge what they hold most closely."
Yup. This was me.
As someone who’s pretty health conscious, this oversight might seem surprising. But my knowledge of and supposed "control" over my health was a double-edged sword. Because I had experimented with water-only fasting, I truly believed that I could just fast for a few days and reverse any damage I incurred from the binge-eating. While this was true on a physiological level — I could always change my diet and I probably didn't cause irreversible damage eating ice cream — I completely ignored the behavioral/psychological aspect.
I never seriously asked myself, “Could this abnormal behavior be a warning that I might need to address?” Instead, I saw my psyche as unshakeable. Nothing could break me. My body was a tool that I could use to my liking. I never considered that my physical cravings were a warning sign that I was about to derail myself.
2/ Why exercise probably made it worse
Wife: “You’re eating so much ice cream!”
Me: “Yeah, but…I run like an hour or more every day. It’s fine.”
Wife: “Okay…”
I was wrong on both ends — the ice cream AND the running were actually not helping me.
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