Feeling Depleted Quotes

When we find ourselves in a midlife depression, suddenly hate our spouse, our jobs, our lives – we can be sure that the unlived life is seeking our attention. When we feel restless, bored, or empty despite an outer life filled with riches, the unlived life is asking for us to engage. To not do this work will leave us depleted and despondent, with a nagging sense of ennui or failure. As you may have already discovered, doing or acquiring more does not quell your unease or dissatisfaction. Neither will “meditating on the light” or attempting to rise above the sufferings of earthly existence. Only awareness of your shadow qualities can help you to find an appropriate place for your unredeemed darkness and thereby create a more satisfying experience. To not do this work is to remain trapped in the loneliness, anxiety, and dualistic limits of the ego instead of awakening to your higher calling.

Jung was the first to propose the model of psychic energy, suggesting that for introverts, energy flows inward, while for extroverts, energy flows outward. Introverts tend to embrace this definition. It fels right for us because we know exactly what it feels like to have our energy depleted when we have sent too much flowing outward.

The refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. Not only is there an impoverishment of our emotional and sensory life, flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstaticâ but this psychic numbing also impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies.

Many of the people I’ve worked with in family groups have been that obsessed with people they care about. When I asked them what they were feeling, they told me what the other person was feeling. When I asked what they did, they told me what the other person had done. Their entire focus was on someone or something other than themselves. Some of them had spent years of their lives doing this—worrying about, reacting to, and trying to control other human beings. They were shells, sometimes almost invisible shells, of people. Their energy was depleted—directed at someone else. They couldn’t tell me what they were feeling and thinking because they didn’t know. Their focus was not on themselves.

I used to feel guilty about spending morning hours working on a book; about fleeing to the brook in the afternoon. It took several summers of being totally frazzled by September to make me realize that this was a false guilt. I'm much more use to family and friends when I'm not physically and spiritually depleted than when I spend my energies as though they were unlimited. They are not. The time at the typewriter and the time at the brook refresh me and put me into a more workable perspective.

If you’ve ever met an energy vampire (and you probably have), you’ll get the distinct feeling that this person has an intense need to prey off the vitality of others. There is a kind of acute neediness present in energy vampires which can be quite overwhelming and depleting to those they come in contact with.

I liked having a person who was so strong; that way I could borrow some of his strength when I was feeling depleted.

It was tiring, all that smiling and sharing and speculating about the weather, and she always left a gathering, no matter how intimate, feeling depleted, as if she’d accidentally left behind some vital layers of herself she’d never get back.

What is there to see if I go outside? Don't tell me. I know. I can see other people. I don't want to see other people. They look awful. The men look like slobs and the women look like men. The men have mush faces framed by long hair and the women have big noses, big jaws, big heads, and stick-like bodies. That depresses me. Its no fun to people-watch anymore because there's so little variety in types. You say it's good to get a change of scenery. What scenery? New buildings? New cars? New freeways? New shopping malls? Go to the woods or a park? I saw a tree once. The new ones look the same, which is fine. I even remember what the old ones look like. My memory isn't that short. But it's not worth going to see a squirrel grab a nut, or fish swimming around in a big tank if I must put up with the ugly contemporary human pollution that accompanies each excursion. The squirrel may enliven me and remind me of better vistas but the price in social interaction isn't worth it. If, on my way to visit the squirrel, I encounter a single person who gains stimulation by seeing me, I feel like I have given more than I've received and I get sore. If every time I go somewhere to see a fish swimming, I become someone else's stimulation, I feel shortchanged. I'll buy my own fish and watch it swim. Then, I can watch the fish, the fish can watch me, we can be friends, and nobody else interferes with the interaction, like trying to hear what the fish and I are talking about. I won't have to get dressed a certain way to visit the fish. I needn't dress the way my pride dictates, because who's going to see me? I needn't wear any pants. The fish doesn't care. He doesn't read the tabloids. But, if I go out to see a fish other than my own, I'm right back where I started: entertaining others, which is more depleting than visiting the new fish is entertaining. Maybe I should go to a coffee house. I find no stimulation in watching ordinary people trying to put the make on other uninteresting people. I can fix my own cup of coffee and not have to look at or talk to other people. No matter where I go, I stimulate others, and have been doing so all my life. It used to be I'd sometimes get stimulated back.

The way I feel now— broken and empty and depleted— this is what happens when I let the feelings come.

If happiness is determined by expectations, then two pillars of our society – mass media and the advertising industry – may unwittingly be depleting the globe’s reservoirs of contentment. If you were an eighteen-year-old youth in a small village 5,000 years ago you’d probably think you were good-looking because there were only fifty other men in your village and most of them were either old, scarred and wrinkled, or still little kids. But if you are a teenager today you are a lot more likely to feel inadequate. Even if the other guys at school are an ugly lot, you don’t measure yourself against them but against the movie stars, athletes and supermodels you see all day on television, Facebook and giant billboards.

I’ve also learned that the more we diminish our own pain, or rank it compared to what others have survived, the less empathic we are to everyone. That when we surrender our own joy to make those in pain feel less alone or to make ourselves feel less guilty or seem more committed, we deplete ourselves of what it takes to feel fully alive and fueled by purpose.

90 percent of the serotonin in our bodies—the neurotransmitter that when abundant makes us feel happy, and when depleted makes us feel depressed—is produced in our guts, and gut microbes play a major role in regulating its production (Yano et al. 2015).

We know what it feels like to have our energy drained by too much interaction. It feels like my brain is tired, almost like a muscle would be tired. The more depleted my psychic energy is, the slower my thoughts come, the harder it is to speak full sentences or focus on what’s going on around me. My senses become even more sensitive; noise and fuss are more overwhelming. And I become tense, irritated, cranky. That’s when I know I need to stop, sit down, let my brain relax and put up its metaphorical feet.

Her death leaves me both depleted and emboldened. That's what tragedy does to you, I am learning. The sadness and wild freedom of it all impart a strange durability. I feel weathered and detached, tucking my head against the winds and trudging forward into life.

Big data makes us feel as though we can and should know everything there is to know on earth. But this is a fool’s quest, and it leaves everyone involved feeling depleted and lost. We

It is entirely possible to feel someone’s pain, acknowledge their suffering, hold it in our hands and support them with our presence without depleting ourselves, without clouding our judgment. But only if we are honest about our own feelings.

I sat down at his tombstone, and I cried out everything within me. I cried until I felt depleted. I did not say a single thing. I did not feel any need. I had talked to Harry in my head and my heart for so long, for so many years, that it felt as if we transcended words. He had been the one to help me, to support me, through everything in my life. And now I needed him more than ever. So I went to him the only way I knew how. I let him heal me as only he could. And then I stood up, dusted off my skirt, and turned around. There, in the trees, were two paparazzi taking my photo. I was neither angry nor flattered. I simply didn’t care. It cost so much, caring. I didn’t have any currency to spend on it.

We only compound our feelings of depletion if we deal with them by giving up activities that normally nourish us,

Leaving the day to itself, you close the door behind you and pour a bowl of cereal, then another, and would a third if you didn't interrupt yourself with the statement - you aren't hungry. Appetite won't attach you to anything no matter how depleted you feel.

The Vampire Test. It’s a simple way to know who you should let in and out of your life. If, after hanging out with someone you feel worn out and depleted, that person is a vampire. If, after hanging out with someone you still feel full of energy, that person is not a vampire. Of course, The Vampire Test works on many things in our lives, not just people—you can apply it to jobs, hobbies, places, etc.

The struggle to live up to an “ideal image” of who we should be in order to feel safe misdirects and depletes our energy.

With each passing sunset, our hope grows depleted, and we no longer feel like passengers of anything. We are souls adrift.

I just feel so . . .” She shook her head. “Depleted. Like Arnold and the kids just take and take and take and there’s nothing left where I used to be.

Narcissistic and toxic relationships leave you feeling depleted in a variety of ways: feeling like you aren’t good enough, chronically second-guessing yourself, often apologizing, and/or feeling as though you are losing your mind, helpless, hopeless, sad, depressed, anxious, unsettled, no longer getting pleasure out of your life, ashamed, guilty, and exhausted.

I don't know what woke me up tonight . . . What I am certain of is this: my body feels depleted, like a foreign country after a war. And yet I cannot go back to sleep. I think of you.

It was true that she didn't have many friends, not of the flesh-and-blood variety, but the fact did not upset her. It was tiring, all that smiling and sharing and speculating about the weather, and she always left a gathering, no matter how intimate, feeling depleted, as if she'd accidentally left behind some vital layers of herself she'd never get back. --Part I: The Satchel> Chapter 1

I’m filled with so much shame and anxiety every time after I eat, I literally don’t know what to do to make myself feel better except throw up. And after I’m done, I half do. Half of me feels depleted, exhausted, like there’s nothing left, which is helpful. The other half of me now has a splitting headache, a sore throat, vomit sliding down my arm and tangled in my hair, and even more shame on top of the initial shame since now I’ve not only eaten but thrown up, too. Bulimia is not the answer.

I often think that parenting is really an exercise in our own development and growth; when we have kids, we are confronted with so many truths about ourselves, our childhoods, and our relationships with our families of origin. And while we can use this information to learn and unlearn, break cycles, and heal, we have to do this work while also caring for our kids, managing tantrums, getting by on limited sleep, and feeling depleted. That’s a lot.

I've also learned that the more we diminish our own pain, or rank it compared to what others have survived, the less empathic we are to everyone. That when we surrender our own joy to make those in pain feel less alone or to make ourselves feel less guilty or seem more committed, we deplete ourselves of what it takes to feel fully alive and fueled by purpose.

Depression’s defining symptom is anhedonia, the inability to feel, anticipate, or pursue pleasure. Chronic stress depletes the mesolimbic system of dopamine, generating anhedonia. The link between childhood adversity and adult depression involves both organizational effects on the developing mesolimbic system and elevated adult glucocorticoid levels, which can deplete dopamine.

as the research shows, the more time you spend around rotten apples – those lousy, lazy, grumpy, and nasty people – the more damage you will suffer. When people are emotionally depleted, they stop focusing on their jobs and instead work on improving their moods. If you find that there are a few subordinates who are so unpleasant that, day after day, they sap the energy you need to inspire others and feel good about your own job, my advice – if you can’t get rid of them – is to spend as little time around them as possible.

Over the years, I’ve learned that it’s important that we give ourselves treats—which may sound self-indulgent or frivolous, but it’s not. When we give more to ourselves, we can ask more from ourselves. Treats help us to stick to challenging goals, resist unhealthy temptations, and shrug off small irritations. When we don’t get any treats, we can begin to feel burned-out, depleted, and resentful.

The examen is a form of personal inventory. At day’s end, spend time in prayerful reflection on your day: your comings and goings, routines and disruptions, work and play, discoveries and disappointments. Think about who you met, or missed. Think about your moments of aloneness. In all, ask two questions: when was I most alive, most present, most filled and fulfilled today? And when was I most taxed, stressed, distracted, depleted today? A simpler, and more spiritually focused, version of those questions: when did I feel closest to God, and when farthest?

Emotional exhaustion follows fast on the footsteps of physical and mental depletion. I feel my lifeblood draining away in an oily spigot of inner turmoil. Questions abound and personal survival hinges upon sorting through possible solutions and selecting the most fitting answers. Is my pain real or simply an illusion of a frustrated ego? What do I believe in? What is my purpose? I aspire to discover a means to live in congruence with the trinity of the mind, body, and spirit. Can I discover a noble path that frees me from the shallowness of decadent physical and emotional desires? Can I surrender any desire to seek fame and fortune? Can I terminate a craving to punish other persons for their perceived wrongs? Can I recognize that forgiving persons whom offended me is a self-initiated, transformative act? Can I conquer an irrational fear of the future? Can I accept the inevitable chaos that accompanies life? Can I find a means to achieve inner harmony by steadfastly resolving to live in the moment free of angst? Can I purge egotisms that mar an equitable perception of life by renunciation of the self and all worldly endeavors? Can I live a harmonious existence devoid the panache of vanities?

In a reverse way, sharing my mother's long, slow dying consumes my creative energy. I manage one angry and bitter story, and feel better for it, but most of me is involved in Mother's battle. Watching her slowly being snuffed out is the opposite of pregnancy, depleting instead of fulfilling: I am exhausted by conflict.

The more we diminish our own pain, or rank it, compared to others have survived, the less empathic we are to everyone. That when we surrender our own joy to make those in pain feel less alone or to make ourselves feel less guilty, or somehow more committed, we deplete ourselves of what it takes to feel fully alive and fueled by purpose. And sometimes when we can't acknowledge the pain of others while experiencing our own joy, we close our eyes, insulate ourselves, pretended that there's nothing we can do to make things better, and opt out of helping others. This ability to opt out of suffering and injustice or pretend everything is okay is the core of privilege...The goal is to get to the place where we can think 'I am aware of what's happening, the part I play, and how I can can make it better, and that doesn't mean I have to deny the joy in my life.

Blazing? Droplets of thoughts can soothe it all. Don't feel depleted. Bask in the residue. That remains!

Alcohol is liquid sugar. It’s more depleting than restorative. To feel your best, you shouldn’t be having alcohol every day, even red wine.

No one truly measured a mother's touch until they could no longer feel it. No one missed a mother's love until the well was depleted.

I need my coping mechanism. I need the depleted feeling I get after a good purge.

It’s unsurprising that so many empaths these days seek solitude as a form of protection against feeling emotionally depleted. Our environments are so hectic and constantly busy that allowing our senses to be completely open often results in a sensory overload. How can you tell where you begin and others end when there is so much frantic energy surrounding you?

Just as Cam left Ivo Jenner’s apartments, St. Vincent met him in the hall. There was a scowl on the blond man’s face, and a vein of chilling arrogance in his tone. “If my wife finds comfort in trite Gypsy homilies, I have no objection to your offering them. However, if you ever kiss her again, no matter how platonic the fashion, I’ll make a eunuch of you.” The fact that St. Vincent could stoop to petty jealousy when Ivo Jenner was not yet cold in his bed might have outraged some men. Cam, however, regarded the autocratic viscount with speculative interest. Deliberately calibrating his reply to test the other man, Cam said softly, “Had I ever wanted her that way, I would have had her by now.” There it was— a flash of warning in St. Vincent’s ice-blue eyes that revealed a depth of feeling he would not admit to. Cam had never seen anything like the mute longing that St. Vincent felt for his own wife. No one could fail to observe that whenever Evie entered the room, St.Vincent practically vibrated like a tuning fork. “It is possible to care about a woman without wanting to bed her,” Cam pointed out. “But it appears that you don’t agree. Or are you so obsessed with her that you can’t fathom how anyone else could fail to feel the same?” “I’m not obsessed with her,” St. Vincent snapped. Leaning a shoulder against the wall, Cam stared into the man’s hard eyes, his usual reserve of patience nearly depleted. “Of course you are. Anyone could see it.” St. Vincent gave him a warning glance. “Another word,” he said thickly, “and you’ll go the way of Egan.” Cam raised his hands in a mocking gesture of self-defense. “Warning taken.

when it was first coined as a technical term by Herbert Freudenberger in 1975, “burnout” was defined by three components: 1. emotional exhaustion—the fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long; 2. depersonalization—the depletion of empathy, caring, and compassion; and 3. decreased sense of accomplishment—an unconquerable sense of futility: feeling that nothing you do makes any difference.

Memories in care are slippery because there’s no one to recall them with as the years pass. In a few months I would be in a different home with a different set of people who had no idea of this moment. How could it matter if no one recalls it? Given that staff don’t take photographs it was impossible to take something away as a memory. This is how you become invisible. It isn’t the lack of photographs that erodes the memory. It is the underlying unkindnesses, which make you feel as though you don’t matter enough. This is how to quietly deplete the sense of self-worth deep inside a child’s psyche. This is how a child becomes hidden in plain sight. Family is just a set of memories disputed, resolved or recalled between one group of people over a lifetime, isn’t it? And if there is no one to care enough to dispute, resolve or recall the memory, then did it happen?

Unlike cognitive load, ego depletion is at least in part a loss of motivation. After exerting self-control in one task, you do not feel like making an effort in another, although you could do it if you really had to. In

Every day, without realizing it, we engage in all manner of activities that diminish our willpower. Willpower is depleted when we make decisions to focus our attention, suppress our feelings and impulses, or modify our behavior in pursuit of goals. It’s like taking an ice pick and gouging a hole in our gas line. Before long we have willpower leaking everywhere and none left to do our most important work. So like any other limited but vital resource, willpower must be managed.

We need to upgrade from female empowerment to female engagement. No matter how confident or empowered a woman feels if they don't act or work towards their vision and mission, that power depletes. How do we help take our sisters to their next level?

1. emotional exhaustion—the fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long; 2. depersonalization—the depletion of empathy, caring, and compassion; and 3. decreased sense of accomplishment—an unconquerable sense of futility: feeling that nothing you do makes any difference.1

I was too busy. But with what? I constantly obsessed over what other people—many of them complete strangers—were posting on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or my fraternity group chat. My time was being eroded by a hundred little distractions every day. I was literally clicking my life away. I realized something else—I was depleting my sexual energy in a downward spiral of online porn consumption. I was investing my sexual passions and fantasies into digitized non-companionship. I was desensitized, enervated, lonely, weary, and way too young to feel all those things at the same time.

Imagine your child has an emotional bank account. The currency in this bank account is connection, and their behavior at any moment reflects the status of their account, how full or depleted it is. I mentioned earlier the idea of this “connection capital”—when we really connect with a child, see their experience, allow for their feelings, and make an effort to understand what’s going on for them, we build our capital. Having a healthy amount of connection capital leads kids to feel confident, capable, safe, and worthy. And these positive feelings on the inside lead to “good” behavior on the outside—behavior like cooperation, flexibility, and regulation. So in order to create positive change, we have to first build connection, which will lead kids to feel better, which will then lead them to behave better. But note, behavior comes last. We cannot start there. We must start with connection.

I give you "The Human Hymn" for the times when you feel depleted, desolate and defeated. I am the Vedanta, I am the Bible, I am the Quran, I am the God Cell. I am the Torah, I am the Suttas, I am the Hadith, I am Humanitas. I am the Son, I am Jehovah, I am the Qi, I am Bismillah. I am the Vivek, I am the Ananda, I am the Bodhi, I am the Sattva. I am the Sat, I am the Shri, I am Akaal, I am Brahmasmi. I am the Prophet, I am Aminah, I am the Mother, I am the Krishna. I am the Beginning, I am the Anth, I am the Journey, I am Ananth. I am Creation, I am the Ravager, I am Qayamat, I am the Creator.

Positive thoughts and feelings add energy to our system. An optimistic perspective, a feeling of appreciation, or a gesture of kindness, for example, are energy assets. Negative thoughts and feelings deplete our store of energy. Anger, jealousy, and judgmental thoughts, for example, are energy deficits.

To suggest that someone requires a hug is to say something potentially, but only potentially, demeaning. It’s suggesting that they are, at least for the moment, rather like a child. They have the same kinds of emotional needs that we come to think of as essentially childlike. To need a hug is to admit that one is incapable of coping on one’s own, that one requires protection, guidance, the help of someone wiser and more capable, that one needs to have one’s troubles and anxieties reinterpreted by a more mature mind. It is to say, in shorthand, ‘I am at the moment like a child and I need someone else to be, for a while, like a parent.’ Yet even if we don’t usually like to admit it, there are in fact many times when we should be able to revert to a childlike position. There are moments of adult life when one seems petulant, scared, shy and sure that everything suddenly feels totally unfair. One’s ability to look after oneself is terribly depleted. At such times, to get ourselves back together, we need someone else to take the burden from us. We require the equivalent of what the parent does for the child. We are in need of someone to pat us on the head, to put us to bed early, tuck us in and hold us tight.

One part of him recoiled in instinctive horror at the daily waste, the inundation of destruction and death that inexorably assaulted the mind and heart; once again he saw the faculty depleted, he saw the haunted looks upon those who remained behind, and saw in those looks the slow death of the heart, the bitter attrition of feeling and care.

It is possible to die through the love of certain people, even as by their hate. There are absorbing passions, under the breath of which we feel ourselves depleted like the spouses of vampires. Not only do the wicked torment the good, but unconsciously the good torture the wicked. The gentleness of Abel was a long and painful bewitchment for the ferocity of Cain. Among evil men, the hatred of good originates in the very instinct of self-preservation; moreover, they deny that what torments them is good and are driven to deify and justify evil for their own peace. In the sight of Cain, Abel was a hypocrite and coward, who abused the pride of humanity by his scandalous submissions. to

Thinking Out Loud So self-destructive I’m waiting for the implosion  For the Universe’s infinite wisdom to cave in my chest and abolish all my fears  To be driven so deep into the possibilities that I am blinded by the light  Until all I can do is close my eyes and be forced to once again dream genuinely Before the day of naysayers and doubts  I’m in the stairwell hiding from the people hiding from the noise  Can they see my insecurities as vividly as I do?  Do they possess that kind of vision?  Or are they so lost in their own self-turmoil that they don’t even notice I’m defeated, depleted A remnant of a dreamer gone mad A hopeless romantic who hasn’t been fed An artist starving for Life, to Live 

Doubt often leaves its victims in a state of desperation. There is an inner anguish associated with doubt. Like a lingering headache, it pounds with every beat of our heart, enslaving us with inner turmoil. Doubt can leave us emotionally wasted. Lonely. Confused. Depressed. Feeling hopeless. Wanting to give up. It can even lead once sold-out believers to contemplate suicide as they abandon all hope and embrace nihilism.17 Doubt’s lingering effects drain and deplete our intimacy with Jesus, making us feel fake around more confident believers. At times we even feel hypocritical as we doubt in the dark, away from possible ridicule or condemnation. Doubt can suffocate us. That’s why the church must respond. And fast.

It’s the best of jobs. It’s the most difficult of jobs. It can bring you the greatest joy. It can cause the greatest pain. There is nothing as fulfilling and exhilarating. There’s nothing so depleting and exhausting. No area of your life can make you feel more like a success when everything is going well. No area of your life can make you feel more like a failure when things go wrong.

It is within your power to release yourself from mortal bonds. To be free of them.” “What? I don’t need to worry about the cold?” “Nope.” “Right.” She stuffed icy hands into the pockets of her jeans. “And apple strudel?” “Mind over matter.” A reluctant smile found her face. “Well, we’ve already established that you can breathe for me.” “Don’t underestimate yourself.” Daniel smiled back briefly. “This has to do more with you than me. Try it: Tell yourself that you are not cold, not hungry, not tired.” “All right.” Luce sighed. “I am not…” She’d started to mumble, disbelieving, but then she caught Daniel’s eye. Daniel, who believed she could do things she never thought she was capable of, who believed that her will meant the difference between having the halo and letting it slip away. She was holding it in her hands. Proof. Now he was telling her she had mortal needs only because she thought she did. She decided to give this crazy idea a try. She straightened her shoulders. She projected the words into the misty dusk. “I, Lucinda Price, am not cold, not hungry, not tired.” The wind blew, and the clock tower in the distance struck five-and something lifted off her so that she didn’t feel depleted anymore. She felt rested, equipped for whatever the night called for, determined to succeed. “Nice touch, Lucinda Price,” Daniel said. “Five senses transcended at five o’clock.” She reached for his wing, wrapped herself in it, let its warmth spread through her. This time, the weight of his wing welcomed her into a powerful new dimension. “I can do this.” Daniel’s lips brushed the top of her head. “I know.

He'd aged out of his role and into the next one, his life force depleting with every exertion. Wisdom and power leaking from him with each passing day and night. He'd played his role for so long he'd lost himself in it, before some separation that happened gradually over decades and then you waking one day to feel it, some distance that had crept in overnight. Some formal space you could no longer cross.

You may be surprised to know that all of this ultimately comes down to one thing: your attention. If you’re feeling that you’re in a cognitive fog: depleted attention. If you’re feeling anxious, worried, or overwhelmed by your emotions: hijacked attention. If you can’t seem to focus so you can take action or dive into urgent work: fragmented attention. If you feel out of step and detached from others: disconnected attention.

This was the feeling that Ms. Hempel couldn't shake: a conviction that she spent her days among people at the age when they are most purely themselves. How could she not be depleted when she came home, having been exposed for hours, without protection, to all those thrumming radiant selves? Here they were, just old enough to have discovered their souls, but not yet dulled by the ordinary act of survival, not yet practiced in dissembling.

She didn’t feel whole with Aldo inside her. Instead, she felt splintered; like she became, in his hands, an infinite number of pieces, an entire infinity herself. Like she and eternity and omnipotence were the same, or like omniscience could be equated to the sound of his ragged breath in her ear. She wanted him to mess her up, deplete her, to deliver her to something lesser, something baser. Something less inclined to rational thought, and instead diminished only to sensations.

For most men, ejaculation involves spewing their energy and semen out through their genitals. Afterward, they feel they have released stress. The superior man’s orgasm more often explodes up his spine and into his brain, from there raining down through his body like an ambrosial bliss of rejuvenation. The technique for converting depletive orgasms into rejuvenative orgasms involves contracting the pelvic floor near the genitals and drawing energy upward along the spine, though the use of breath, feeling, and intention.

WHEN I DESCRIBED THE TUMOR IN MY ESOPHAGUS as a “blind, emotionless alien,” I suppose that even I couldn’t help awarding it some of the qualities of a living thing. This at least I know to be a mistake: an instance of the pathetic fallacy (angry cloud, proud mountain, presumptuous little Beaujolais) by which we ascribe animate qualities to inanimate phenomena. To exist, a cancer needs a living organism, but it cannot ever become a living organism. Its whole malice—there I go again—lies in the fact that the “best” it can do is to die with its host. Either that or its host will find the measures with which to extirpate and outlive it. But, as I knew before I became ill, there are some people for whom this explanation is unsatisfying. To them, a rodent carcinoma really is a dedicated, conscious agent—a slow–acting suicide–murderer—on a consecrated mission from heaven. You haven’t lived, if I can put it like this, until you have read contributions such as this on the websites of the faithful: Who else feels Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer [sic] was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him? Atheists like to ignore FACTS. They like to act like everything is a “coincidence.” Really? It’s just a “coincidence” [that] out of any part of his body, Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of his body he used for blasphemy? Yeah, keep believing that, Atheists. He’s going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible agonizing death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he’s sent to HELLFIRE forever to be tortured and set afire. There are numerous passages in holy scripture and religious tradition that for centuries made this kind of gloating into a mainstream belief. Long before it concerned me particularly I had understood the obvious objections. First, which mere primate is so damn sure that he can know the mind of god? Second, would this anonymous author want his views to be read by my unoffending children, who are also being given a hard time in their way, and by the same god? Third, why not a thunderbolt for yours truly, or something similarly awe–inspiring? The vengeful deity has a sadly depleted arsenal if all he can think of is exactly the cancer that my age and former “lifestyle” would suggest that I got. Fourth, why cancer at all? Almost all men get cancer of the prostate if they live long enough: It’s an undignified thing but quite evenly distributed among saints and sinners, believers and unbelievers. If you maintain that god awards the appropriate cancers, you must also account for the numbers of infants who contract leukemia. Devout persons have died young and in pain. Betrand Russell and Voltaire, by contrast, remained spry until the end, as many psychopathic criminals and tyrants have also done. These visitations, then, seem awfully random. My so far uncancerous throat, let me rush to assure my Christian correspondent above, is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed. And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half–aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)

Feeling stressed and feeling overwhelmed seem to be related to our perception of how we are coping with our current situation and our ability to handle the accompanying emotions: Am I coping? Can I handle this? Am I inching toward the quicksand? Jon Kabat-Zinn describes overwhelm as the all-too-common feeling “that our lives are somehow unfolding faster than the human nervous system and psyche are able to manage well.” This really resonates with me: It’s all unfolding faster than my nervous system and psyche can manage it. When I read that Kabat-Zinn suggests that mindful play, or no-agenda, non-doing time, is the cure for overwhelm, it made sense to me why, when we were blown at the restaurant, we weren’t asked to help problem-solve the situation. We were just asked to engage in non-doing. I’m sure experience taught the managers that doing nothing was the only way back for someone totally overwhelmed. The non-doing also makes sense—there is a body of research that indicates that we don’t process other emotional information accurately when we feel overwhelmed, and this can result in poor decision making. In fact, researcher Carol Gohm used the term “overwhelmed” to describe an experience where our emotions are intense, our focus on them is moderate, and our clarity about exactly what we’re feeling is low enough that we get confused when trying to identify or describe the emotions. In other words: On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m feeling my emotions at about 10, I’m paying attention to them at about 5, and I understand them at about 2. This is not a setup for successful decision making. The big learning here is that feeling both stressed and overwhelmed is about our narrative of emotional and mental depletion—there’s just too much going on to manage effectively.

Weakness is a feeling of depletion, a constant draining of energy. There are countless ways that people experience and express feelings of weakness and depletion. It can manifest as the perpetual sense that tomorrow, or next year, things are going to get better—but they don’t. Being an adult without a direction or a sense of greater purpose is also a form of weakness. The face of weakness can appear as frustration, anger, isolation, or addiction. Weakness personified is a persistent and cunning thief, creeping into your life and the lives of your children masked as hope and constantly nagging, “Look at me, fix me, improve me, and then you will be happy.

Myth #3: Fasting Causes Low Blood Sugar Sometimes people worry that blood sugar will fall very low during fasting and they will become shaky and sweaty. Luckily, this does not actually happen. Blood sugar level is tightly monitored by the body, and there are multiple mechanisms to keep it in the proper range. During fasting, our body begins by breaking down glycogen (remember, that’s the glucose in short-term storage) in the liver to provide glucose. This happens every night as you sleep to keep blood sugars normal as you fast overnight. FASTING ALL-STARS AMY BERGER People who engage in fasting for religious or spiritual purposes often report feelings of extreme clear-headedness and physical and emotional well-being. Some even feel a sense of euphoria. They usually attribute this to achieving some kind of spiritual enlightenment, but the truth is much more down-to-earth and scientific than that: it’s the ketones! Ketones are a “superfood” for the brain. When the body and brain are fueled primarily by fatty acids and ketones, respectively, the “brain fog,” mood swings, and emotional instability that are caused by wild fluctuations in blood sugar become a thing of the past and clear thinking is the new normal. If you fast for longer than twenty-four to thirty-six hours, glycogen stores become depleted. The liver now can manufacture new glucose in a process called gluconeogenesis, using the glycerol that’s a by-product of the breakdown of fat. This means that we do not need to eat glucose for our blood glucose levels to remain normal. A related myth is that brain cells can only use glucose for energy. This is incorrect. Human brains, unique amongst animals, can also use ketone bodies—particles that are produced when fat is metabolized—as a fuel source. This allows us to function optimally even when food is not readily available. Ketones provide the majority of the energy we need. Consider the consequences if glucose were absolutely necessary for brain function. After twenty-four hours without food, glucose stored in our bodies in the form of glycogen is depleted. At that point, we’d become blubbering idiots as our brains shut down. In the Paleolithic era, our intellect was our only advantage against wild animals with their sharp claws, sharp fangs, and bulging muscles. Without it, humans would have become extinct long ago. When glucose is not available, the body begins to burn fat and produce ketone bodies, which are able to cross the blood-brain barrier to feed the brain cells. Up to 75 percent of the brain’s energy requirements can be met by ketones. Of course, that means that glucose still provides 25 percent of the brain’s energy requirements. So does this mean that we have to eat for our brains to function?

At least you've brought gifts. What's in the basket?" She rummaged through the contents. "A few sweetmeats and lozenges. Packets of raisins. But mostly it's Aunt Thea's surplus cosmetics and remedies. She sends away for every product advertised in every ladies' magazine. I like to see them put to some use." He blinked at her. "These are your gifts?" "Your men have depleted our stores of food, and I didn't have time to prepare anything else." "What are they supposed to do with-" he held up a brown bottle and peered at the label- "Dr. Jacobs' Miracle Elixir?" He plucked a small jar out next. "Excelsior Blemish Cream?" "Women are women, Logan. Every girl needs a bit of luxury and a chance to feel pretty now and then.

The years of the war blurred together, and Stoner went through them as he might have gone through a driving and nearly unendurable storm, his head down, his jaw locked, his mind fixed upon the next step and the next and the next. Yet for all his stoical endurance and his stolid movement through the days and weeks, he was an intensely divided man. One part of him recoiled in instinctive horror at the daily waste, the inundation of destruction and death that inexorably assaulted the mind and heart; once again he saw the faculty depleted, he saw the classrooms emptied of their young men, he saw the haunted looks upon those who remained behind, and saw in those looks the slow death of the heart, the bitter attrition of feeling and care.

Some feel absolutely incapable of ever saying no to other people, even though they know that to say yes means that their own resources will be taxed to the limit or beyond. They feel guilty doing something for themselves or having plans of their own. They are always ready to serve others at the expense of themselves, not because they have transcended their own physical and psychological needs and have become saints, but because they believe that that is what they “should” do to be a “good person.” Sad to say, this often means that they are always helping other people but feel incapable of nourishing or helping themselves. That would be too “selfish,” too self-centered. Thus, they put other people’s feelings first, but for the wrong reasons. Deep down they may be running away from themselves by serving other people, or they may be doing it to gain approval from others or because they were taught and now think that that is the way to be a “good person.” This is a kind of faux selflessness. This behavior can create enormous stress because you are not replenishing your inner resources, nor are you aware of your attachments to the role you have adopted. You can exhaust yourself running around “doing good” and helping others, and in the end be so depleted that you are incapable of doing any good at all and unable to help even yourself. It’s not the doing things for others that is the source of the stress here. It is the lack of peace and harmony in your mind as you engage in doing all the doing.

These days, most Americans who are unashamedly prejudiced know better than to say so, except to a secure, like-minded audience, given that many people live and work in environments where they can be slapped on the wrist, publicly humiliated, or sacked for saying anything that smacks of an "ism." However, just as it takes mental effort to maintain a prejudice despite conflicting information, it takes mental effort to suppress those negative feelings. Social psychologists Chris Crandall and Amy Eshelman, reviewing the huge research literature on prejudice, found that whenever people are emotionally depleted—when they are sleepy, frustrated, angry, anxious, drunk, or stressed—they become more willing to express their real prejudices toward another group.

I've read every letter that you've sent me these past two years. In return, I've sent you many form letters, with the hope of one day being able to give you the proper response you deserve. But the more letters you wrote to me, and the more of yourself you gave, the more daunting my task became. I'm sitting beneath a pear tree as I dictate this to you, overlooking the orchards of a friend's estate. I've spent the past few days here, recovering from some medical treatment that has left me physically and emotionally depleted. As I moped about this morning, feeling sorry for myself, it occurred to me, like a simple solution to an impossible problem: today is the day I've been waiting for. You asked me in your first letter if you could be my protege. I don't know about that, but I would be happy to have you join me in Cambridge for a few days. I could introduce you to my colleagues, treat you to the best curry outside India, and show you just how boring the life of an astrophysicist can be. You can have a bright future in the sciences, Oskar. I would be happy to do anything possible to facilitate such a path. It's wonderful to think what would happen if you put your imagination toward scientific ends. But Oskar, intelligent people write to me all the time. In your fifth letter you asked, "What if I never stop inventing?" That question has stuck with me. I wish I were a poet. I've never confessed that to anyone, and I'm confessing it to you, because you've given me reason to feel that I can trust you. I've spent my life observing the universe, mostly in my mind's eye. It's been a tremendously rewarding life, a wonderful life. I've been able to explore the origins of time and space with some of the great living thinkers.But I wish I were a poet. Albert Einstein, a hero of mine, once wrote, "Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open." I'm sure I don't have to tell you that the vast majority of the universe is composed of dark matter. The fragile balance depends on things we'll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Life itself depends on them. What's real? What isn't real? Maybe those aren't the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on? I wish I had made things for life to depend on. What if you never stop inventing? Maybe you're not inventing at all. I'm being called in for breakfast, so I'll have to end this letter here. There's more I want to tell you, and more I want to hear from you. It's a shame we live on different continents. One shame of many. It's so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won't be awake for another five hours, but I can't help feeling that we're sharing this clear and beautiful morning. Your friend, Stephen Hawking

Then there are the metabolic costs of switching itself that I wrote about earlier. Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task. And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We’ve literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to compromises in both cognitive and physical performance. Among other things, repeated task switching leads to anxiety, which raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which in turn can lead to aggressive and impulsive behaviors. By contrast, staying on task is controlled by the anterior cingulate and the striatum, and once we engage the central executive mode, staying in that state uses less energy than multitasking and actually reduces the brain’s need for glucose.

Our power connects us to life in ways ordinary people can never understand, her teacher had said. That’s why using our gift makes us stronger instead of depleting us. We are tied to the power of creation itself, the making at the heart of the world. For Corporalki, that bond is woven even more tightly, because we deal in life and the taking of it. The teacher had raised his hands, and Nina felt her pulse slow just slightly. The other students had released gasps and looked around at one another, all of them experiencing the same thing. Do you feel that? the teacher asked. All your hearts, beating in shared time, bound to the rhythm of the world? It had been the strangest sensation, the feeling of her body dissolving, as if they were not many students wriggling in their classroom chairs, but one creature, with a single heart, a single purpose. It had lasted only moments, but she’d never forgotten that sense of connection, the sudden understanding that her power would mean she was never alone.

What happens when the mediators lose their legitimacy—when the shared stories that hold us together are depleted of their binding force? That’s easy to answer. Look around: we happen. The mirror in which we used to find ourselves faithfully reflected in the world has shattered. The great narratives are fracturing into shards. What passes for authority is devolving to the political war-band and the online mob—that is, to the shock troops of populism, left and right. Deprived of a legitimate authority to interpret events and settle factual disputes, we fly apart from each other—or rather, we flee into our own heads, into a subjectivized existence. We assume ornate and exotic identities, and bear them in the manner of those enormous wigs once worn at Versailles. Here, I believe, is the source of that feeling of unreality or post-truth so prevalent today. Having lost faith in authority, the public has migrated to the broken pieces of the old narratives and explanations: shards of reality that deny the truth of all the others and often find them incomprehensible.

Her thin face was given a touch of shrewdness and decision by the straight line of her nose, the fine long carving of her chin. Beneath the sallow minutely pitted skin in her cheeks, and about her mouth, several frayed nerve-centres twitched from moment to moment, jarring the skin slightly without contorting or destroying the passionate calm beauty that fed her inexhaustibly from within. This face was the constant field of conflict, nearly always calm, but always reflecting the incessant struggle and victory of the enormous energy that inhabited her, over the thousand jangling devils of depletion and weariness that tried to pull her apart. There was always written upon her the epic poetry of beauty and repose out of struggle—he never ceased to feel that she had her hand around the reins of her heart, that gathered into her grasp were all the straining wires and sinews of disunion which would scatter and unjoint her members, once she let go. Literally, physically, he felt that, the great tide of valiance once flowed out of her, she would immediately go to pieces.

Now that she was twenty-two, the words were there in her head, jumbled. The feeling was still too hot to approach but was slowly beginning to make sense. If she would just give herself the time and space to think about it, to examine the thing she’d spent her whole life avoiding, she would realize that what she wanted to say to her mother was that she was the one who had no idea—no idea how badly Ky and people like Ky needed a break. No idea how speaking perfect English and having an office job and being born in Australia didn’t mean what any of them thought it would mean. No idea how hard it was to walk the narrow path where everyone expected her to be quiet and smart and hardworking and good—a narrow path not even laid out by her or people like her. No idea how it felt to suffer the slow death of a thousand cuts: from the things people said, from the way people looked at her. The looks she got when she knocked on doors, walked into a room, boarded a flight; the way they saw her skin before they saw her, wanted her to shut up and be grateful, expected her to take a joke when she was the joke. The way she was expected to feel lucky, so lucky, like her life was abundant and full, when all she felt was depleted and diminished. It made her feel crazy to be called lucky, and her mother had no idea.

Hence, if we follow out this idea, their opposition must not be conceived as something to be done away with, but on the contrary as something useful and life-promoting that should be preserved and strengthened. This is a direct attack on the predominance of the one differentiated and socially valuable function, since that is the prime cause of the suppression and depletion of the inferior functions. It would amount to a slave rebellion against the heroic ideal which compels us to sacrifice everything else for the sake of the one. If this principle, which, as we saw, was developed in particularly high degree by Christianity for the spiritualizing of man, and then proved equally effective in furthering his materialistic ends, were once finally broken, the inferior functions would find a natural release and would demand, rightly or wrongly, the same recognition as the differentiated function. The complete opposition between sensuousness and spirituality, or between the feeling-sensation and thinking of the introverted thinking type, would then be openly revealed. But, as Schiller says, this complete opposition also entails a reciprocal limitation, equivalent psychologically to an abolition of the power principle, i.e., to a renunciation of the claim to a universally valid standpoint on the strength of one differentiated and adapted collective function.

This is a new idea you might want to write down. Having your own life is authentically irresistible because it keeps you (and him) from losing yourselves in the relationship. If you imagine that people are like rechargeable batteries, having your own life keeps you fully charged. When you focus all your time and attention only on him, there’s no possibility for you to get naturally recharged by life—by other friends, activities, adventures, nature, the universe. Your energy depletes; this is apparent in how you look and feel. You start pulling on him for all of your energy, and he feels exhausted and resentful. The conversations get dull. You begin to nitpick and nag. “What do you want to do?” and “I don’t care—whatever you want to do” is all you ever seem to say to each other. When you devote all of your time, energy, and attention only to each other, it drains both of you and slowly erodes what could be an otherwise wonderful relationship. Having your own life is a natural way to keep yourself centered so you have more to contribute to your partner and the other important people in and aspects of your life. Let’s be honest. Success is sexy. When you live an inspired and energized life, men naturally find you irresistible because you are irresistible. Invest in your health, create community, make a difference, learn new skills, have fun, and share yourself with others. This is what will keep him wanting more, more, more. Men are no different from women in this respect. They want to be with someone who is expressive, engaged, and active in life. They want a woman who can introduce them to new things and is both interested and interesting.

A series of surprising experiments by the psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues has shown conclusively that all variants of voluntary effort—cognitive, emotional, or physical—draw at least partly on a shared pool of mental energy. Their experiments involve successive rather than simultaneous tasks. Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. In a typical demonstration, participants who are instructed to stifle their emotional reaction to an emotionally charged film will later perform poorly on a test of physical stamina—how long they can maintain a strong grip on a dynamometer in spite of increasing discomfort. The emotional effort in the first phase of the experiment reduces the ability to withstand the pain of sustained muscle contraction, and ego-depleted people therefore succumb more quickly to the urge to quit. In another experiment, people are first depleted by a task in which they eat virtuous foods such as radishes and celery while resisting the temptation to indulge in chocolate and rich cookies. Later, these people will give up earlier than normal when faced with a difficult cognitive task. The list of situations and tasks that are now known to deplete self-control is long and varied. All involve conflict and the need to suppress a natural tendency. They include: avoiding the thought of white bears inhibiting the emotional response to a stirring film making a series of choices that involve conflict trying to impress others responding kindly to a partner’s bad behavior interacting with a person of a different race (for prejudiced individuals) The list of indications of depletion is also highly diverse: deviating from one’s diet overspending on impulsive purchases reacting aggressively to provocation persisting less time in a handgrip task performing poorly in cognitive tasks and logical decision making The evidence is persuasive: activities that impose high demands on System 2 require self-control, and the exertion of self-control is depleting and unpleasant. Unlike cognitive load, ego depletion is at least in part a loss of motivation. After exerting self-control in one task, you do not feel like making an effort in another, although you could do it if you really had to.

Archangel Raphael This is the realm of healing Love. As natural healers from the heart, you who carry this realm innately project blue healing rays through your hands. As a Raphaelite, the way your Soul emanates its gifts is through this healing energy. You don’t need to do anything outwardly for healing Love to be radiated to others. Raphaelites have a tendency to overexert this healing influence unnecessarily. It works on the level of being, not doing. In essence, healing naturally occurs wherever the frequency of Love is present. You Raphaelites can overextend yourselves based on your feeling that everything needs healing, feeling that it’s your job to bring that healing Love wherever it is lacking. That is an endless, exhausting, fruitless task. Love is the same energy as life force. You are here to help us to return to the natural state of wholeness through the power of healing Love. You are always present with understanding and care. You are loving individuals who have a tendency to deplete yourselves by attempting to fill the seemingly endless needs of others. Your challenge is to discern who is part of your Soul plan to extend your energy toward and how to do it in a way that does not leave you depleted. You are here to show people that Love is an infinite commodity universally available. It is not yours to personally give to others. When a Raphaelite feels the need to personally give the divine Love they inherently feel connected to, to another, as though it belongs solely to them, it can become a caretaking exchange, which is disempowering to both people. This caretaking level of love is different than the frequency of divine Love. Healing as Love is not meant to be at the level of caretaking. It is not for you to say, “I’ll give all I have to you, because it feels so natural to do so, and it doesn’t matter if I get anything in return.” This state can lead to the expectation for others that you are here to fill their needs for Love. The Raphaelite is here to remind us that divine Love is the healing force moving through everyone. You must visualize or feel an umbilical cord from your heart to the source of divine Love. This is how Love, in fact, feeds us all. The channel from our Creator to our heart is filled with divine Love. When we feel thanksgiving for the eternal presence of Love, it ignites the miracle of healing that hasn’t held a place for Love. We can co-create as Love with those around us freely and appropriately from this place and this place alone. Remember, healer, to heal yourself first in this way and you will have much to give and will be rewarded joyously in return for that gift. The Raphael realm can be tapped into any time by anyone requesting the healing balm of Love that is vital to our life nourishment. We are designed to know this healing Love as a natural flow of our heart’s expression.

Antonia Valleau cast the first shovelful of dirt onto her husband’s fur-shrouded body, lying in the grave she’d dug in their garden plot, the only place where the soil wasn’t still rock hard. I won’t be breakin’ down. For the sake of my children, I must be strong. Pain squeezed her chest like a steel trap. She had to force herself to take a deep breath, inhaling the scent of loam and pine. I must be doing this. She drove the shovel into the soil heaped next to the grave, hefted the laden blade, and dumped the earth over Jean-Claude, trying to block out the thumping sound the soil made as it covered him. Even as Antonia scooped and tossed, her muscles aching from the effort, her heart stayed numb, and her mind kept playing out the last sight of her husband. The memory haunting her, she paused to catch her breath and wipe the sweat off her brow, her face hot from exertion in spite of the cool spring air. Antonia touched the tips of her dirty fingers to her lips. She could still feel the pressure of Jean-Claude’s mouth on hers as he’d kissed her before striding out the door for a day of hunting. She’d held up baby Jacques, and Jean-Claude had tapped his son’s nose. Jacques had let out a belly laugh that made his father respond in kind. Her heart had filled with so much love and pride in her family that she’d chuckled, too. Stepping outside, she’d watched Jean-Claude ruffle the dark hair of their six-year-old, Henri. Then he strode off, whistling, with his rifle carried over his shoulder. She’d thought it would be a good day—a normal day. She assumed her husband would return to their mountain home in the afternoon before dusk as he always did, unless he had a longer hunt planned. As Antonia filled the grave, she denied she was burying her husband. Jean-Claude be gone a checkin’ the trap line, she told herself, flipping the dirt onto his shroud. She moved through the nightmare with leaden limbs, a knotted stomach, burning dry eyes, and a throat that felt as though a log had lodged there. While Antonia shoveled, she kept glancing at her little house, where, inside, Henri watched over the sleeping baby. From the garden, she couldn’t see the doorway. She worried about her son—what the glimpse of his father’s bloody body had done to the boy. Mon Dieu, she couldn’t stop to comfort him. Not yet. Henri had promised to stay inside with the baby, but she didn’t know how long she had before Jacques woke up. Once she finished burying Jean-Claude, Antonia would have to put her sons on a mule and trek to where she’d found her husband’s body clutched in the great arms of the dead grizzly. She wasn’t about to let his last kill lie there for the animals and the elements to claim. Her family needed that meat and the fur. She heard a sleepy wail that meant Jacques had awakened. Just a few more shovelfuls. Antonia forced herself to hurry, despite how her arms, shoulders, and back screamed in pain. When she finished the last shovelful of earth, exhausted, Antonia sank to her knees, facing the cabin, her back to the grave, placing herself between her sons and where their father lay. She should go to them, but she was too depleted to move.

When we reflect on our daily lives, we might look back at a day that was very stressful and think, “Well, that wasn’t my favorite day this week.” When you’re in the middle of one of those days, you might long for a day with less stress in it. But if you put a wider lens on your life and subtract every day that you have experienced as stressful, you won’t find yourself with an ideal life. Instead, you’ll find yourself also subtracting the experiences that have helped you grow, the challenges you are most proud of, and the relationships that define you. You may have spared yourself some discomfort, but you will also have robbed yourself of some meaning. And yet, it’s not at all uncommon to wish for a life without stress. While this is a natural desire, pursuing it comes at a heavy cost. In fact, many of the negative outcomes we associate with stress may actually be the consequence of trying to avoid it. Psychologists have found that trying to avoid stress leads to a significantly reduced sense of well-being, life satisfaction, and happiness. Avoiding stress can also be isolating. In a study of students at Doshisha University in Japan, the goal to avoid stress predicted a drop, over time, in their sense of connection and belonging. Having such a goal can even exhaust you. For example, researchers at the University of Zurich asked students about their goals, then tracked them for one month. Across two typically stressful periods—end-of-semester exams and the winter holidays—those with the strongest desire to avoid stress were the most likely to report declines in concentration, physical energy, and self-control. One particularly impressive study conducted through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, in Palo Alto, California, followed more than one thousand adults for ten years. At the beginning of the study, researchers asked the participants about how they dealt with stress. Those who reported trying to avoid stress were more likely to become depressed over the following decade. They also experienced increasing conflict at work and at home, and more negative outcomes, such as being fired or getting divorced. Importantly, avoiding stress predicted the increase in depression, conflict, and negative events above and beyond any symptoms or difficulties reported at the beginning of the study. Wherever a participant started in life, the tendency to avoid stress made things worse over the next decade. Psychologists call this vicious cycle stress generation. It’s the ironic consequence of trying to avoid stress: You end up creating more sources of stress while depleting the resources that should be supporting you. As the stress piles up, you become increasingly overwhelmed and isolated, and therefore even more likely to rely on avoidant coping strategies, like trying to steer clear of stressful situations or to escape your feelings with self-destructive distractions. The more firmly committed you are to avoiding stress, the more likely you are to find yourself in this downward spiral. As psychologists Richard Ryan, Veronika Huta, and Edward Deci write in The Exploration of Happiness, “The more directly one aims to maximize pleasure and avoid pain, the more likely one is to produce instead a life bereft of depth, meaning, and community.

When you complete a certain task, do not quickly jump to the next one. You are likely to feel motivated at that point and feel energetic enough to finish off with the next task in line; however, do you remember the lesson on willpower? It depletes if you exhaust yourself and when you are exhausted, your inclination towards temptations increases. To keep this from happening, when you complete a task,

When the feelings of fear and anxiety overwhelm us, it depletes our kidney both energetically and physiologically, and may result in symptoms such as lower back pain, anxiety, intense thirst, hypersensitivity, coldness, poor memory, impotence, prematurely graying hair, and frequent urination.

Acetaldehyde also depletes niacin, or vitamin B3, which your cells need to burn fat and sugar for energy—and when your cells can’t burn fat stores, you gain weight and feel lethargic. Niacin also plays an important role in the production of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that affects mood and sleep, as well as the production of a coenzyme

Romantic love is a glorious tragedy for the soul. Losing love leaves us depleted in the blackened landscape. Chard by our obsessions we feel lost, alone, and desperate. In our weakened condition, we glean a new wisdom, a seasoned humility, and a rising sense of decorum.

Sort pills. Write note to family. Fold blanket. I am alone. Alone in a dark, unfamiliar room filled with piles and piles of stuff, reminiscent of a neglected storage locker. I know researchers are observing me from behind one-way glass—that this is an experiment in empathy, that we are, in fact, on the sprawling campus of a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey, that I can rip off the headphones at any moment and return to my present life, my real life—but this offers me no comfort. I can barely see through the goggles. My feet hurt. Every step is agony, the sharp plastic spikes digging into my soles. Sort pills. Write note to family. Fold blanket. I try to make out the shapes around me. I see an ironing board, a stack of sweaters. A ball of twine. My determination to cross items off any to-do list—always a strong suit of mine—feels slippery. Suddenly, I am a child playing hide-and-seek in the dark. Counting. Eyes squeezed shut. Terrified. Wondering if anyone will ever find me. Blanket. Pills. Note. I keep repeating the words like a prayer so I can remember them through the terrible din. The inside of my head is a needle against a scratched record, skipping, skipping. I feel my way around a cluttered table. A pill case! I try to pick it up. I barely feel it in the palm of my hand. After several tries, I get it open. Then I begin to sort the pills as best I can. Most of them spill to the floor, and I am suddenly, irrationally furious. I move around the table, supporting myself on my hands to take the pressure off my feet. I push an iron out of the way, a magazine, a wooden hanger. The notebook. I find the notebook. My gloved fingers won’t close around a pencil, so I hold it the way a child would, in my fist. By now it all feels nearly futile. I’m on the verge of tears. What is the last task? Through the static, I remember: the blanket. I have to fold it. By now I’m dizzy, depleted. What difference can it possibly make? Who cares? I do a shitty job of folding the blanket and then—then I just sit down in a chair and wait for M. to rescue me. —

One of my earliest memories is from around age three or four—sitting in a dress by myself playing with a doll. I was fine playing, but the sense was that there was no connection. There was nobody around; I was completely isolated. This was safe, but there wasn’t a sense of happiness, only that I had figured out how to protect myself.” “By being alone.” “By being alone and yes … without feeling contact. “There are other fragments that come up. For a long time I’ve had this image of lying in what felt like clouds; I was on a bed of clouds with a grey and colourless sky above me and this one ray of sun hitting me, but it was cold. The sense of really being completely alone, that even this ray, which might be love, wasn’t. I saw that learning not to feel was what I had to do in order to survive.” Such experiences — or the conclusions Harriette drew from them—left her isolated in life, or in relationships that, she felt, depleted her more than they nurtured her. Her intensive therapy was aimed at developing emotional competence. Emotional competence is the capacity that enables us to stand in a responsible, non-victimized, and non-self-harming relationship with our environment.* It is the required internal ground for facing life’s inevitable stresses, for avoiding the creation of unnecessary ones and for furthering the healing process. Few of us reach adult age with anything close to full emotional competence. Recognizing our lack of it is not cause for self-judgment, only a call for further development and transformation.

The voice of the inner critic is mean, unforgiving, punishing, and downright hurtful. When you allow it to run roughshod over your happiness and emotional well-being, it can wreak havoc on your peace of mind and leave you feeling anxious, fearful, and depleted.

I was tired, and the residual pain from my injuries was like a slow leak from a tire, depleting. Over the course of the day, I could feel myself go flat.

Running around trying to be worthy and please everyone is exhausting and ultimately leaves us feeling depleted.

Setting Up Your Body, Mind, and Environment Preparing your body, mind, and space is a critical step on your channeling path. Preparation in each of these areas will support your clear channeling. Channeling in a chaotic place with a toxic body and cluttered mind makes channeling more challenging because the instrument you are using is taxed or strained. Empowering Your Body Empowering your body includes being aware of what you put into your body and how you move it. I invite you to become aware of your body’s milieu if you are not already. What do you eat and drink? What products do you put on your body? Is your body tolerating electronic device exposure, such as from the amount of time you use your phone and computer? Are these empowering your body to function optimally? Use your intuition to be impeccable with what you put into your body. Apply the discerning method I described in chapter 9 to learn about each of these things. For example, ask your body what it needs to nourish it most appropriately before eating or drinking. Expect that you will get an answer. Be still and listen. What is your body telling you? You may find that the answers you receive about what your body needs change day by day and over time. Sometimes your body needs more protein. Sometimes your body needs electrolytes and minerals, which channeling can deplete. You may also notice that your body needs more water when you channel more often. Sometimes you need more nature time with movement. Sometimes you may need to be still and silent. You can do this discernment process for anything you put in or on your body and for how you move your body. It might feel strange to do this at first, but you’ll find that it becomes second nature with practice. You might notice that when you channel, you don’t feel so great the next day. You might feel tired, be sore, or have other unusual physical or mental symptoms. Feeling lousy the next day doesn’t mean that channeling hurt you. Usually, these symptoms are channeling revealing “stuff” you can clear. Channeling can act as a detoxifier. If you experience this, you can support your detoxification pathways. Rest. Drink lots of water. Take an Epsom salt bath. Take more minerals and eat nutrient-rich foods. Gentle movement, stretching, or yoga can support your body. Ask your body what it needs. All these steps to empower your body will strengthen your channeling and your life in general.

I know makeup and all the luxury I enjoy is frivolous, fun and indulgent – it’s not a necessity when you look at life’s bigger picture. However, it can also bring joy and make individuals feel great. I’m aware we don’t need to wear makeup all the time and that finding confidence in our skin is the ultimate dream, but when we feel depleted and spent it’s nice knowing there’s a way of giving a little boost when it’s needed.

Drudgery is not simply about being bored, though it can include that. Roles that lead us into drudgery deplete far more energy than they give to us; they often involve difficult, intractable people or problems; they make us feel restricted, unappreciated, or disrespected. Drudgery sounds mild, but it can have immensely serious consequences, including burnout and depression. The most objectively meaningful role in the world can still sap us of our joy and energy if it does not match who we are and what we can give.

What’s my truth? What do I want and need? What makes me like myself? Who do I think I am? These are then replaced by Who do you think I am? How do you think I’m doing? What do you need me to need? and Who do I need to be so that you will like me?

Be conscious about your consumption of information. When you consume information, your nervous system consumes it, too. Be mindful of how you feel in your body as you consume various kinds of information. Do you feel replenished and restored or depleted and fearful? Disconnecting from media that activates anxious feelings can be helpful.

In Scientific American, Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi looked at the ways that “television addiction is no mere metaphor,” noting that EEG studies show diminished mental activity during television viewing compared to other activities. Viewers describe themselves as “relaxed” and “passive” while watching, yet while the sense of relaxation ends when the set is turned off, the feelings of passivity and lowered alertness continue. Survey participants commonly reflected that television had “somehow absorbed or sucked out their energy, leaving them depleted,” with “more difficulty concentrating after viewing than before.” Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi equate this effect with the first law of physics: “A body at rest tends to stay at rest.”13 Further corroboration of this can be seen with studies linking the alarming rise in childhood obesity to increased time spent watching TV.