How To Handle Constant Exhaustion (Without Blaming Yourself) | Jay Michaelson

0:04This is the 10 % Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

0:18Hey gang, here's a question. Do you feel constantly exhausted? Not just underslept, although many of us feel that too, myself included, but also generally fried. Today, we're going to hear from my friend, Jay Michelson, an incredible meditation teacher, author, lawyer, and more about how to deal with this general sense of fatigue being frazzled. Jay's got tons of practical strategies and not just the obvious stuff. We get into self-compassion, which he takes beyond mere cliche or bland exhortation. We talk about the disutility of feeling shame about using modern technological devices, which most of us need.

0:58We talk about something called micro naps and then something I had never heard of called brain machines. By the way, Jay is our Teacher of the Month over on 10 % with Dan Harris, my new meditation app. That means he's crafting guided meditations for the app and also participating in some of our weekly live meditation and Q &A sessions, which we do every Tuesday at 4, and you should join us. If you want to check out the app, you can head on over to danharris.com. There's a free 14-day trial. And if you can't afford it, just hit us up at support at danharris.com, and we'll give it to you for free.

1:31Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we will be right back with Jay Michelson in conversation with the executive producer of this show, DJ Kashmir. Jay Michelson, welcome back to the show. Great to be here. So today's question is about just being exhausted. How to handle just this constant, whether it's a low hum or whether it's a little louder than that, just this constant feeling that so many of us have and so many of us in our virtual community that we're building have of just being fried seemingly all the time. My first immediate response is both coming from me and a bit of dharmic advice, which is compassion and self-compassion.

2:19Like the first step, I have noticed myself that I can blame myself for being tired. Like I should somehow be better at it, especially because now there's like a whole industry of sleep advice and sleep counseling, which is good, right? But then if you're not succeeding at it, that must be your fault, or you're not being disciplined enough, or you're just whatever, you're wired badly, whatever it is. And then when I get tired, I think when most people get tired, we're not at our best cognitively. So even if we've absorbed a lot of good tips and meditations and stuff like that, we don't use them because we're depleted.

2:56Back when I was a lot younger, I used to run marathons. You're a different person at mile 20 than you are at mile 2. right? It could be a little bit of a moment of insight to what we mean about non-self and impermanence, right? You just change the conditions that you're under and you become different, right? You're a different person if you're, you know, like halt, hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, or all four, if you can manage that. And if people don't know that, just the H-A-L-T thing is also really helpful for being in relationship and self-regulation. Like you check in and if you're feeling one of those four things, you might consider halting, right?

3:31And not taking that step, not writing that email. So again, you're hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, because you're just not at your best. So when we're not at our best, I may be telling you right now, self-compassion is good, but you're not really going to feel that necessarily in that moment. So that's my first, like the first response I would say is, okay, here's where it is. And is it pleasant? It's definitely not pleasant. All right. I like feel a little self-compassion for this being. And maybe that gives you a little bit of comfort just in that, right? And self-compassion is not self-pity.

4:04It's not like going into a story about, oh, it's this fault, it's that, it's the other. It's just like, okay, this current moment situation has a little bit of suffering in it. The second thing I would say, and it's going to shape the way I want to talk about this, is what I think is a really important oscillation in mindfulness practice. And it's the oscillation between being with the difficult thing on the one hand and seeking an antidote on the other. And there is no perfect recipe for which of those two is right at any moment. It just has to be you learn how to do a bit of discernment over time, and that's how you do it.

4:41So let's say if you're in meditation, you're sitting still, and you've got a bunch of pain coming up, let's say like knee pain or something like that. So generally what you want to do is try to practice with it, which means can you just be present with what's happening? You feel it. You notice if it's changing. You do all those kinds of things. But you don't want to do that if that's all you're doing. You're just in agony or certainly not if you're at risk of injury. So at some point in there, you switch over. You switch from being with the difficult thing to getting an antidote for the difficult thing.

5:16In regular life, I think we more likely just reach for the antidote right away, which is fine. That's what we're wired to do. If you poke a microorganism, it'll recoil. It's not going to sit there and be present with the feeling of being poked. It's going to try to get out of there. So it makes sense that we do that too. It can really be helpful, though, to try to do that two-step, do that oscillation. Can I be with what's happening right now? Sharon Salzberg, a friend of the show, has said one time, it's not what's going on, and it's how you relate to it. So tiredness, feeling exhausted, feeling burned out or drained, those are not pleasant things, right?

5:57But you can still relate to those sensations in a way that is mindful, self-compassionate, attentive, and wise. You can grow wise even in relationship to the difficult thing. So what might that look like? So part of it is just, okay, here's where I'm at. This is what's true. I'm not denying it. I'm not running away from it. Another key teacher of mine, Sylvia Borstein, sometimes says that this isn't what I wanted, but it's what I've got. Not as a, oh, this is terrible. I didn't want this and I got it. It's like, okay, but this is what I've got. That cliche, it is what it is. This is what it's pointing to when it's not a cliche.

6:33This is what's happening, right? Right now, it's like this. Right now, there's feelings in the body, feelings in the mind. And you could even, if you have a moment to do it, do a little bit of mindfulness of what's really happening. So like, what's happening in the body? What are the feelings that you're feeling? Is it in the muscles, just in the eyes? Part of this is like diagnostic, like you might notice that you're dehydrated, for example, and go get a drink. So it's like the two sides work together. But part of it's just investigating what is, and building metacognition around these sensations.

7:07That's the whole enchilada of meditation, right? If you can just, all right, I can be present with these difficult feelings, whether again, body or mind or emotional, whatever they are, I can be present with these difficult sensations, then maybe I can be present with other difficult sensations, like when someone says or does something hurtful, or when I really, really, really want something and I may act in a way that's not so skillful or that could cause harms to others. That's what I mean by the whole enchilada. Like, after the Buddhist enlightenment, he still got stung by mosquitoes all the time.

7:41If you ever want to go down a fun Buddhist rabbit hole, there's now concordances of all of the texts and you can just look up bugs and they have a lot to say. They didn't have like bug spray in the 6th century BCE and Northern India and they sure had a lot of bugs, right? The point being like bad stuff still happened, right? And obviously I chose a trivial example like mosquitoes, right? But real bad stuff happened too. People died, there were wars, there were, right? But because he had done what he did and got to be all enlightened and stuff, he was able to be a little less reactive or not at all reactive to it and have that spaciousness.

8:13So that's what I mean by the whole enchilada. Can we be present with the difficult stuff, the difficult aspects of our experience with not wallowing into them, but not pushing them away either? Okay, but that was one side. At a certain point, it does become skillful to reach for the antidote. So like the general, I'll pause after this to see if you have a question or anything, but just notice like the goal is not to just sit there and grit your teeth and be some kind of superhuman who can be present with anything. It's just like, try that for a while. Get curious about this feeling of exhaustion.

8:50It might even be, you know, again, it might be something else. It might be hunger or it might be dehydration or something like that. But just like seeing where is it in the body? What's happening? What's my feeling tone? What's the mind? Is the mind really like dull, which it often is? Sometimes I'll also notice I'll be feeling sad And then I'll look inside and I'm actually really tired. And if I don't do that, I can go off into long stories about why I'm sad, right? Which usually don't end well, because they're sad stories. And I can go down a whole rabbit hole of self-psychoanalysis, which is generally not a good practice anyway, and then only later realize, oh, actually, I was tired.

9:30There's this great line in A Christmas Carol by Dickens where Scrooge sees the first ghost that comes to him on Christmas Eve, and he says to the ghost, you are a piece of undigested meat. In other words, I'm having a nightmare because I'm having a digestive problem. That's what you are. It would be great if I could do that, if we could do that, whenever that happens. I'm feeling bad and aversive and lousy. And you train the mind to look inside. Maybe it's not even that. Maybe it's just a piece of undigested meat. Maybe it's actually just feeling tired or, again, yeah, hungry or angry. Okay, so before we get to the antidotes, you've already laid out two really helpful moves we can make.

10:13One is to start with self-compassion. The other is, when it's feasible, is to be with what's happening, investigate it a little bit before trying to fix it or solve it. But on the first point, the self-compassion point, we've talked about this on the show for years and years. And I would just say, like, for me personally, it wasn't until several years worth of those episodes that I even started to dip a toe in those waters. Can you just say a little bit about the actual move? What is the move, the self-compassionate move to make if I'm whatever it is, walking down the hall and dreading the bedtime routine because I want to be going to bed myself, for example?

10:54what is the self-compassionate move there? That's some really good hashtag relatable content. I just pulled that out of thin air, Jay. That's not every day. Yeah. My daughter goes to bed late. And so I have even a different story when it's, I can't wait for bedtime to happen actually. So I can be free because like she goes to bed so late. I only get like an hour of like time to myself and in the evening. So yeah, I think I forget which guest it was that Dan had many years ago about self-compassion just talked about the fierceness of compassion oh yeah kristen neff probably yeah kind of like reframing it a little bit i think even without gendering it in a way like we have this like association of compassion with oh that's touchy-feely or that and sometimes it can be and touchy-feely is great i like hugs i like blankets that's fine but it can also be seen in a different light i'm not going to oh yeah i can curse now right i'm not going to fucking let these stories that i've inherited for my culture or my family or whatever own this mind like fuck you like i'm not it can compassion can look like that it can really be like i get here's this long story that i internalized when i was nine years old or whatever and i'm gonna stand up to it and it can actually feel like that it's not like i don't have to get like too far on that side where it's like war and battle or whatever, but it can be bravery and fierceness.

12:21It's like, no, this situation sucks. There are other situations that suck more. I'm not playing the Olympics of suffering, right? Like you're having to put your kids to bed is not as bad as some person in prison somewhere. But okay, we're not playing that game. We're just saying like, this situation sucks. And that's all I'm recognizing. And just like one of the moves that is classic in self-compassion is like, imagine it's someone you care about, right? Who's feeling that? Like, how do you feel toward that person? Of course, you'd see someone you love or a family member, friend, whatever, and they're suffering.

12:53You would feel, unless you're like a horrible sociopath who might be the president of the United States, you're going to feel compassion for that person. And so likewise, you just practice it that way and then just turn it on yourself. This is another line that teachers say lot. Imagine if you talked to other people the way you talk to yourself, right? They would leave, right? You would never do that, right? And so now imagine if you talk to yourself the way you would talk to another person. If you got a text or something from a friend who's like, oh my god, I'm so exhausted all the time. You wouldn't be like, buck up, loser.

13:28So imagine like you're talking to yourself the way you would talk to a friend who you really care about. Those are a couple of the ways the move could really look like. Love it. And then the second piece, and we'll talk about antidotes a bit of really just noticing what's going on before trying to fix it and maybe investigating a bit in order to free up space to deal with it differently. I mean, there was a, it brings to mind for me just a couple of days ago, my wife and kids and I were at like a family party that was in a hotel ballroom. I'm already triggered.

14:05I've already imagined how loud it is. It was loud. Yeah, yeah, it was loud. And this is an annual thing. We knew it was going to be late. So we got a room in that same hotel to stay in so that we wouldn't also have the drive home afterwards. And we don't usually sleep all four of us in the same room. And so I just didn't get very much sleep. The kids were in the bed next to our bed and tossing and turning and noise in the hotel. And when I woke, I can't even say when I woke up, like when the morning came and I was awake again, my two kids, six and three, they're obviously up first, the second an ounce of sunlight leaks in.

14:45And they're doing this thing where they're like whispering to each other and trying to not wake us up, but would forget that every couple of minutes. And I just remember like, there was a moment where I was like, okay, like, this is it. You're not falling back to sleep again. You didn't sleep well last night either. You're going to be really exhausted. And then just making a different choice. Like literally, I was like, but it is pretty cute that they're sort of kind of trying to let us sleep. And yeah, I just sort of reoriented. And I was like, I knew we had another long day ahead of us. We had one of my kids' birthday parties, like literally that day.

15:17Like it was just going to be a lot. Forget what I just said about the Depression Olympics. You win. Right, right, right. I won, I won, I won. But anyway, this is the story got way too long. But the point is that like, in that moment of realizing how tired I was and how tempting it was to go down the cranky, tired, exhausted path, like, I just grabbed for a different story, a different orientation. Later on, you know, that afternoon, I'd had a pretty good day for how tired I was. And there was no becoming less tired. That just wasn't on offer. But I could orient to it differently. And I mentioned to my wife that I'd made this decision when we woke up, and she was like, yeah, I was confused why you weren't more cranky.

15:54I thought maybe you were on drugs. Yeah, no, that totally tracks. I forget, I think it's one of Joseph Goldstein's early books about insight meditation, calls it like the practice of freedom, right? That is that freedom. And just that moment, even without the consequences, which were really positive, just the moment of freedom, where you're like, I can make this choice, right? And I find that's true even just in the moment of mindfulness of being tired, right? There's, oh, okay, there's, I'm hanging out, I'm with the tiredness, but like the part of me that's active right now is like this witness, right?

16:30This witness consciousness that's aware of the tiredness. And in that moment, I'm still tired, but I'm not like soaked in the tiredness. Like I'm not exhausted in that moment. There's that space of freedom, that space can feel really good, right? Like it's actually a positive sensation. And sometimes it's not there because you're just that exhausted. But when it is there, there's that little bit of space. And that is a little tricky when we talk about happiness, right? Because a lot of times, certainly in the classical Buddhist sources, but even just now in secular mindfulness, like happiness doesn't always mean happy, right?

17:03It's like the happiness of There's a freedom from suffering, even if it's just momentary. There's the joy that comes from the capacity to be mindful and being with the witness instead of just in the sensation, the dreck, the dirt, the tough sensation. And then it led to all those positive consequences. You had a pretty decent day, maybe you were a little less reactive, whatever, you got through it. For me, I would just have more coffee, but to each their own. And that's what I wanted to bring out, yes, the consequences. And even without them, And just that moment of freedom when you're lying in bed, that connects well, I think, to that attitude I had toward compassion.

17:40There's a little bit of fierceness in that. Yeah, I mean, I know exactly how to be grumpy. I can just push autopilot or whatever, and it's going to go, and I can do that. But actually, yeah, I'm going to do this weird thing, which maybe doesn't feel as natural. And I'm not going to always look on the bright side of life, but I can be just a little bit more mentally awake in a certain way. Love it. Okay, so we've talked about starting with self-compassion. We've also talked about bringing some awareness to maybe even some investigative energy to this feeling of exhaustion. What is it? What's the story?

18:17Where is it in my body? How am I relating to it? How might that be different? But then there is this third piece of there are things we can do to be less exhausted over time. And you gave the important caveat already that in a cultural moment of optimization around sleep and every other phenomenon. It's a slippery slope to talk about antidotes because it can quickly lead to self-blame. I knew the sleep hygiene rules, and I just didn't follow them, and I suck or whatever. But with that caveat, what comes to mind for you is some of the best practices for being with that exhaustion, but also trying to transform it a bit.

18:52Yeah, I want to quickly add one other caveat, which is like, there are also social conditions that cause this exhaustion, some of which are well beyond our individual agency and control, right? And, you know, you and I are still relatively privileged people, right? And we still experience a lot of exhaustion. Now imagine you had to take a second job because there's not a livable wage in this country and you can't get health insurance. I forget, there was a teacher who we worked with who you might remember which one it was, I'm blanking at the moment, but who's like, let's not let our capacities for self-care get in the way of critique of an unjust society.

19:28You and I are maybe not the most egregious victims of that injustice, but we do suffer as a result of it. We do live in capitalism. We do have this sort of... So that's just the second caveat. This doesn't solve anything, but it's just an awareness of... And that also, I guess it can solve one thing, right? It can address that self-blame, right? There's a meme that's around or something like, It's natural to be unhappy in a society that's structured the way that ours is, that's draining your dopamine all the time if you're online, and it's driving us to work ever harder, this or that. And yeah, we don't want to just inhabit a victim space all the time.

20:04But also, we want to recognize, yeah, some of this is larger than me. And likewise, the stuff we're not going to talk about, sometimes it does, like the end of that poem by Rilke, you have an experience and you realize you have to change your life. You may actually realize that something has to change. on a larger scale. We're not going to talk about that now because we're talking about like immediate antidotes in the situation that you're in. But often it's taking a look at that situation. Yeah. Okay. So, all right. That was a long caveat. I thought it was worth making. And I think also, like we do know, I'm not going to spend a lot of time here on get more sleep and make sure to have square meals.

20:40And so, yes, of course you should be doing that. There are some, you might think about like small incremental steps that mindfulness can help with. So for example, just screen hygiene, right? Not having the phone in the bedroom, like things like that. I know people have heard this stuff before, but where I think it's helpful, again, it's like inserting the mindfulness lens into that situation. It's just a very natural animalistic thing to want to stay on your phone and do something like that's why it works, right? There's a lot of really highly paid people who are designing this thing to be as addictive as possible, and that's how they get paid.

21:17So you don't stand a chance, right? If you know it a certain way. So where you can stand a chance is just recognizing that in the moment, where there's that desire to check the social media feed or scroll on TikTok for one more time, just see what's happening in that moment. Take the mindfulness and be like, okay, yeah, I see what's happening. I see that I want to do this. I also know that that want, those basic desires, again, for a dopamine hit or whatever it is, are being instrumentalized by a very large corporation. And in that moment, there can be a little strength, right? But mindfulness can provide that bit of spaciousness to have that thought.

21:57Because if you don't have the thought, you're just already in there. So that's the only place where I'll talk about screens and sleep and stuff like that from a mindfulness lens, because I think that the lens does add something to it. One thing I've been playing with again, And now I can't tell you it gets easier as the kids get older, but I've been playing with a lot of micro micro naps. And I've noticed that if I even if I'm at my desk chair and I'm working and I notice I'm really tired and it's not yet time for my 2 p.m. cup of coffee because I'm an 8 a.m. and a 2 p.m. person. So I can just start meditating and I can fool myself into thinking I'm meditating, but really I'm actually allowing myself to fall asleep.

22:36So I'm not like taking a nap, which I also strongly recommend. But if possible, if your life and work life allows for it. And if anyone is still carrying around nap shame, you could kiss that baby goodbye. We don't need that garbage. That's pure garbage. There are plenty of cultures that have structured their entire days around having a siesta in the middle of the day. So it is pure culturally constructed bullshit to have any negative thoughts about taking naps. But I'm going to talk about this micro-micronap. like i've noticed if i can even get one moment of sleep consciousness where like you start having a dream and some association that doesn't make sense oh that i must be falling asleep even if i just get that moment and meditation is how i do it that can actually really help and sometimes it might be more than one moment sometimes it might be a one minute micro nap sitting in a chair usually it's not usually it's like really short because i'm actually still involved in what i'm doing and i work at a desk.

23:33So it's easy for me to do. It'd be harder if I was a bus driver, but not recommended if you're driving a vehicle. I can do that little kind of micro nap. So just sort of pretending to meditate, I think can be something that's really helpful. So again, and these are antidotes like I want to spend that time being with what is, I want to just see it for what it is. It's a set of sensations. And now I'm like, okay, but I do need to do something about this because I'm feeling really shitty and this doesn't, or I'm not being able, I'm not able to work at my best or whatever it is, or I have to go pick my kid up at the bus.

24:04There's not a lot of, there's not choice to sit there and be mindful all the time. So the micro nap is number one. Number two, I am pretty sure that nobody on the show has ever suggested this before. I am a big fan of brain machines. The one I use is put out by a company called Mindspace. And it's called the, it's called for advanced meditators, the casino, which is a Buddhist meditation object, which is cute that it's called that it's one of those things that like flashes you wear these kind of goggles you lie down you wear some goggles and what seems to happen is this process of entrainment where your brain gets used to like the rhythm of the lights basically and it can go then be adjusted up or down so brain machines come with a variety of like pre-programmed patterns so you can do ones that energize you you can do ones that help you fall asleep that help you meditate that help you relax and it's funny because I haven't really talked about this ever before but I've been thinking about it because it is part it's not my daily thing but like when it's the middle of the day and I am really tired but I'm also really stressed right so you're tired and wired I can't just take a nap and I will actually reach for the casino the mindspace casino and do a session which could be 15 minutes sometimes that'll just lead to sleep right which again if I was stressed out before and couldn't get a nap I'm very happy with that result.

25:24Sometimes it'll just be a certain kind of like hypnagogic state where you're like half asleep, half awake, and I can wake up from that refreshed. Again, I'm pretty sure no one's recommended that before. I don't know why these devices aren't more popular. Mine is really cool. I don't get a commission. I don't have a referral code, although maybe now they'll advertise on the show now that they've heard it hyped by me. But it's a tool that's in my toolkit that as a parent in particular has been so useful. And there are so many of those times where I just remember, even as a baby, I'd be sitting there rocking the thing and just like desperately wishing I could sleep, right?