How to Keep Going When You’ve Hit the Pandemic Wall
A strategy for moving forward
The texts started lighting up my phone a couple of weeks ago: “I’m running on empty,” said a friend. Okay, all my friends. And it wasn’t just us; Tanzina Vega, host of NPR’s The Takeaway, tweeted a similar sentiment.
Her tweet went so viral that she expanded it into a radio segment. In it, Dr. Suzan Song, director of the division of child, adolescent, and family psychiatry at George Washington University Medical Center, explains why so many of us feel so uniquely and entirely burned out. It’s not just pandemic fatigue; it’s a feeling of total exhaustion and overwhelmedness. We can’t focus, we can’t relax, and we can’t see the end in sight. It’s what Song calls a “collective demoralization.”
Song borrows a metaphor from Dr. Dike Drummond when she describes burnout as being overdrawn in your energy bank account. “At the bank, if you overdraw your account, they don’t close your account. They charge you fines and interest. So you actually accelerate your downward spiral when you go below zero.” She…
