Tired as F*ck

Burnout at the Hands of Diet, Self-Help, and Hustle Culture

Caroline Dooner

• Publisher: Harper Wave
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780063052970
• eBook ISBN: 9780063052994
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

“I laugh-cried all the way though this biting critique of self-help bullshit and manipulative power structures. Dooner has written something deeply of the moment and relatable as f*ck.”—Amanda Montell, author of Cultish and NYT Bestselling The Age of Magical Overthinking

Blending memoir and blistering social observations, the author of The F*ck It Diet looks back at her desperate attempts to heal her hunger, anxiety, and imperfections through extreme diets, culty self-help methods, and melodramatic bargains with the universe. 

Offering a frank and funny critique of the cultural forces that are driving us mad, Caroline Dooner examines how treating ourselves like never ending self-improvement projects is a recipe for burnout. We have become unknowingly complicit in perpetuating our own exhaustion because we are treating ourselves like machines. But even phones need to f*cking recharge.

Caroline takes a good hard look at the dark side of self-help, and explains how she eventually used a radical period of rest to push back against cultural expectations and reclaim some peace.

Tired As F*ck empowers us to say no to the things that exhaust us. It inspires us to carve out time to slow down, feel okay about doing less, and honor our humanity. 

This is not a self-help book, it’s a cautionary tale. It’s an honest look at the dogma of wellness and spiritual self-improvement culture and revels in the healing power of rest and letting shit go.

How to Figure Out if You’re ALLOWED to Be Tired

Even though four years earlier I’d had an epiphany about my food and weight obsession, I hadn’t really stopped seeking. Ever. I’d never slowed down. I reversed my direction, but The F*ck It Diet was actually its own crisis. Oh, my God, what now?! What am I going to do for a job? What am I going to do to stay alive? How am I going to heal this deep shit I’m in? Where am I going to live? How am I going to navigate this world while I heal? I need to buy all new clothes . . . can I even afford to buy all new clothes?

Healing your relationship with food is hard. I needed to figure out how to heal really deep issues, and it took a lot of energy and vigilance and trust and surrender. Those first four years on The F*ck It Diet were absolutely life-changing, but they were not restful. Even though I deliberately rested physically from exercise in the beginning, my mind and emotions never, ever rested. And that’s what I really needed at that point. I had let myself off the hook from the ever-present pressure to be a thin, ethereal, wholly healed, glowing, perfect person, but there were so many pressures I still needed to untangle from. And this was my chance.

But really, I still didn’t feel like I deserved to be exhausted. I really didn’t. I had been very hard on myself for being exhausted for a long, long time. All those years when I was underfed. All those years when I thought I was lazy but just didn’t have enough blood. Just push through, Caroline. Stop being such a lazy wimp. Go for a run. I wasn’t doing any more than anyone else. In fact, looking at everyone else around me, most people were juggling way more. And I knew how lucky I was. I was in my twenties, living in New York City, trying to chase my dreams. Cry me a river, little girl.

So, I forced myself to push through my exhaustion until I literally couldn’t ignore it any longer. I was extremely physically tired. More tired than seemed logical. There were times when I was in the middle of a conversation with someone and I had a hard time keeping my eyes open. Physically, something wasn’t quite right. And it was hard to pinpoint, because so much of my physical health was better than it was before, thanks to my better relationship with food. But something was still off. I also started feeling depleted dread looking at my full schedule of running around New York, trying to make eight different careers happen. And going to one more class or one more audition started requiring me to summon more energy than I had.

Why can’t I motivate myself? Why can’t I just hack this life thing?

Something responded, Because you’re exhausted. And you keep forcing yourself to do things that are keeping you exhausted and depleted. Whether you think you deserve to be or not, you’re burnt out.

The oddest experience of all was that I’d started getting liver pain every time I had alcohol, even just one glass of wine. I expected that to go away eventually, but it didn’t. I also started getting very frequent low-grade fevers, once or twice a week. At first I thought: Wow, I keep almost getting sick, but my body keeps fighting it off! But it kept happening, and I finally realized that something wasn’t right.

I wasn’t sure whether my exhaustion was just from all the years of pushing myself into being an actor and a performer and chronic stress. Or if I was exhausted because something else was physically going on in my body. Was it circumstantial? Or physical? Or both? I didn’t know, but either way, I knew I needed rest.

I always compared myself to other people to justify why I shouldn’t be tired, but really, what good did that do me? Exhaustion isn’t a pissing contest. We can all be exhausted for different reasons. And most of us are exhausted, for one reason or another. Life is exhausting. And we do not live in a culture that supports and allows for healing from that exhaustion. We live in a culture that sees hyper-productivity and exhaustion as a badge of honor. We live in a culture that expects us to be able to work 9 to 5, five days a week, fifty weeks out of the year. And often way more. But did you know that the forty-hour workweek is actually too long for a lot of people? An article in atSpoke looked at different studies on work hours, productivity, happiness, and health, and stated, “There are a few studies that have shown employees are happier, healthier, and more productive when they work less than forty hours a week.” In 2004, the CDC found that people who work overtime, or more than forty hours a week, are less healthy and less productive than those who don’t. In the book Laziness Does Not Exist, Dr. Devon Price said that “researchers consistently find that in office jobs, people are capable of being productive for only about three hours a day, on average.” Meaning, what most of us are expected to do, and expecting ourselves to do, leads directly to burnout. And none of us understand why, because we are trying to follow the norms of our culture. Just like with dieting and diet culture, we are all under the impression that we are broken. We are doing it wrong! We keep eating too much! We keep feeling tired and lazy! But in reality, we are just operating under ridiculous expectations. We are not designed to work constantly and never get a break. Under those conditions, we are designed to fall apart.

But still, we live in a culture that tells us we are not doing enough. We live in a culture where most of us feel constant guilt and worry, every day, that we aren’t working hard enough. In the United States, two million hourly workers are at or below minimum wage, and twenty million hourly workers are earning “near-minimum” wage. Most of them will have to work multiple jobs, which puts them way over forty hours a week, just to barely make ends meet. By default, this is keeping people in constant survival mode, just because we refuse to raise the minimum wage. Most people also don’t have paid sick leave, maternity leave, or bereavement leave. We aren’t allowed to stop. We aren’t allowed to heal. Even if we wanted to, most of us can’t afford it.

Honestly, because of all this, a lot of our collective exhaustion is unavoidable. And even with better working conditions, there’s no way to avoid the hardship and trauma that comes along with being a human. But some of our exhaustion is avoidable, and it’s mostly the unexamined cultural, subconscious expectations lurking in the background. The stuff we are putting on ourselves. The stuff we don’t even realize that we learned. Think about all the time and money we spend on . . . say, beauty, and weight loss, and skin care, and buying the latest fashion trends. If you genuinely enjoy it, that’s one thing. But for most of us, we feel like it’s not even a choice. We have to. We have to stay looking young. We have to run every day. We have to buy the newest cropped flared pant. But do we? Do we even realize what’s our choice and what’s pushed on us? What are the things we’ve taken on that we don’t need to take on? What’s the stuff that we don’t realize we are using as weapons against ourselves? The world is cruel enough—why are we internalizing and perpetuating that cruelty on ourselves?

No matter what, you are allowed to be exhausted. And you are allowed to rest. And you’re allowed to stop doing things you only do because you didn’t realize you had a choice.

Even though I ended up overhauling almost my entire life, you being exhausted doesn’t mean you have to quit your life. At all. It doesn’t mean you have to stop doing anything you like to do! I am not suggesting that you do what I did. It is not the only way to rest. Realizing you are burnt out just means it’s time to take stock of the things that are exhausting you, so you have more awareness. And maybe, with that awareness, you’ll end up doing something about the pieces that are within your control.

A lot of people are tired for some deep reason that they can’t quite pinpoint. If that’s you, it might be validating to realize: Hey, I’m tired. And this is why. And in the very least, I can be compassionate with myself while I figure out how to keep going in a sustainable way.

I’m going to go through some things that can and will exhaust us. As you read through, notice any of the things that may be at play in your life. If and when multiple things on the list apply to you, these probably have become compounding stressors.

AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF EXHAUSTING THINGS

THINGS BEYOND OUR IMMEDIATE CONTROL

Poverty and Financial Stress

This exhaustion is not just from the physical exhaustion of, say, working multiple jobs to feed your kids but it’s also from the chronic stress it breeds. Worrying about how to make ends meet, and if you’ll make ends meet, is traumatic and exhausting in every sense. We do not have equal access to education and job training. We don’t all get the same head start. And the minimum wage in the United States is unlivable. There is no equal access to good-paying jobs. Therefore: systemic exhaustion.

Oppression, Stigma, and Marginalization (Racism, Weight Stigma, Ableism, Homophobia, Etc.)

Being ostracized, stigmatized, or treated poorly is exhausting. I don’t mean that lightly. What I mean is that it’s dehumanizing and traumatizing, and trauma is exhausting. In fact, perceived stigma alone is a chronic stress that can be very bad for our physical health, not just our mental health. What that means is that if you’ve been treated poorly enough times, it’s a trauma, and you start to expect it. And even just the anticipatory stress hormones can run down your health and lead to chronic health problems. This isn’t something you can blame on the individual: Hey! Just stop being stressed by your oppression! No. The oppression is the problem.

Health Problems

Chronic health problems usually cause actual physical exhaustion. But, on top of that, worrying about health problems, worrying about paying for the treatment of health problems, and blaming yourself for health problems, are all really difficult, scary, and exhausting.

Living in a country where you could go bankrupt from having a health problem? Barbaric. And as much as our culture makes it seem like we have ultimate control over our health if we just eat well and exercise . . . we don’t. Sorry! That’s just way too simplistic. Tell that to someone who has struggled with health their whole life. Sure, tweaks in lifestyle can absolutely improve our health, but they don’t always. And as I’ve also explained earlier, sometimes the prescription for your health problems can create even more exhaustion, stress, and health problems. How fun.

THINGS WE CAN SOMETIMES DO SOMETHING ABOUT

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: How to Be Filled with Dread
• How to Not Be a Psychopath
• How to Be Cult Susceptible
• How to Secure a Miracle Tooth
• How to Email God
• How to Become Obsessed with Food
• How to Start Panicking about Your Face
• How to Focus on the Wrong Cure
• How to Let Everyone Know You Suck
• How to Try Every Diet
• How to Be Extremely Dramatic
• How to Pray for a New Face
• How to Be Obsessed with Beauty
• How to Have a Horrible Time in France
• How to Lose Feeling in Half of Your Face
• How to Be an Actual Cheese Grater in a Musical
• How to Not Know You Have an Eating Disorder
• How to Have No Blood
• How to Cope When Your Parent Has Cancer
• How to Join the Cult of Raw Veganism
• How to Make a Vision Tin
• How to Think Positive Thoughts, or Else
• How to Lose Your Ego for a Month
• How to Lose Your Voice
• How to Have a Nervous Breakdown
• How to Get Another New Face
• How to Become a French Woman
• How to Become Rich on the Internet
• How to Eat Like a Cavewoman
• How to Stop Dieting
• How to Rule Out Every Miracle Cure
• How to Heal Your Creative Soul
• How to Be a Receptionist Who’s Afraid of the Phone
• How to Feel
• How to Be Extreme about Everything
• How to Figure Out What’s Depleting You
• How to Figure Out if You’re ALLOWED to Be Tired
• How to Reconcile the Privilege of Rest
• How to Claim Rest
• How to Be OK Dying Alone
• How to Be Addicted to Busyness
• How to Sort of Do a Bad Job at Resting
• How to Take Things Off Your (Figurative) Plate
• How to Have Boundaries
• How to Heal Chronic Exhaustion
• How to Live
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author
• Also by Caroline Dooner
• Copyright
• About the Publisher