You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mamma Mere acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on. For me, the first sign is always reading, as in I can't, which is awkward because reading and writing and reading and thinking and reading and talking is what I do who I am, so when I can't do it, I'm cut off from myself. For me, the inability to focus on anything longer than a SoundBite is the first sign of the disease of our post everything
world burnout. That might not be the canary in your coal mine yours. Might be sleep that you can't or you can't stop, or that, however much you do, you can't seem to recharge, or eating that you can't or you can't stop. It might be headaches, the eye twitch that keeps showing up, a rash, a dizziness that spins you suddenly off balance as you step off the bus. It might be your mood, a shortness, a low grind of frustration, irritation shifting into a fury about how everything
just doesn't quite ever so slightly work. Is it Perry or the big m?
Yes?
Probably? Is it something catastrophic come knocking to up end your life. Hopefully not hopefully, it's just burnout, just that crushing exhaustion and anxious flutter, just that inability to focus, to stop the endless fubbing and scrolling and incessant fritted multitasking, just the colds that keep showing up and never really leave, and just the gittering stress that keeps you in constant motion,
all glued to your bed. They say burnout is the modern disease, and they know what the common cure is, slow down, dar But that's easier said, because rest isn't real when it's served with the relentless guilt of what you should be doing. At work, with the pinging and
the dinging and the sorry to bother you. But at home with all the caring, the actual caring, the carrying and wiping and feeding and shopping and cooking, and the mental load of caring for anyone, a partner, a parent, a host of small people, sick, family, struggling friends, that scrolling mental list of what has to happen when, for who? How can all that just slow down? I'm asking, of course,
for a friend. Hello, I'm Holly Wainwright and this is mid the show for Generation X Women who are anything but Today's mid guest is Catherine May. She's a writer. She wrote a book that so many people read during those smudgy days of lockdown that it became a massive global bestseller and stayed on. It's called Wintering, and she
wrote it before the word COVID existed. It was all about her own experience of understanding a literal need to winter, to retreat, and that sometimes a winter can be forced on you by circumstance, like an illness or recovery, and sometimes it's a necessary period of time and rest and retreat, of pairing life back to the things that sustain us.
And it's also about literal winter and embracing that special kind of shift it gives us, rather than only railing against it, waiting for summer to come back with a blast. Wintering is a beautiful book, and I'm one of many people who found it nourishing during a difficult moment. You'll hear my own professional gush about that at the beginning of our conversation, and please forgive me. But Catherine May is more than Wintering, of course. Her most recent book, Enchantment,
is about finding beauty and awe in every day. She also has a podcast, A Substack is a parent and she lives in England by the Sea, which is where she was when I spoke to her about burnout. I listened to Wintering, actually, because one of my signs that things are going a bit lopsided for me is similar to one of yours. It's that I stopped being able to read.
Yeah.
Yes, And I had just moved two hours out of Sydney to the countryside, started anew much longed for but still quite discombobulating change. We went into lockdown. I'm sure you hear this story all the time, and I would listen to Wintering as I was walking our dog around this strange new place we'd moved to, and it was literally winter here in New South Wales at that time, and it was just so profoundly helpful to me. Catherine.
So I know you must get this a lot, but I wanted to thank you for helping me reframe that time instead of thinking I've moved away from my friends, I'm lonely, I'm in this strange place. How do I recombobulate I'm not able to go out and do all the things I'd normally do. Wintering really helped me see it as a period of transition and important restoration. So thank you for that.
Well, that makes me really happy to hear. I mean, I wrote it because I wanted to give that to people who it's delightful, but it's kind of worked.
It definitely has. I've listened to Enchantment too. I actually think your books are wonderful for audiobooks, so thank you for that. Anyway, I wanted to talk about burnout because I think there is something that a lot of women listening to this show will be experiencing or have experienced, and in Enchantment, you right, that burnout is what happens when you repeatedly ignore your own needs. I'd love you to talk to me a little bit about that.
I mean, I don't think it is necessarily a very modern phenomenon, but we are beginning to understand it as a pattern in the lives of people who are self identified as busy, let's say, which you know, is something that we have learned to put a lot of stock in this idea that we are so busy all the time, which means that we are in demand and needed, you know, which speaks to an anxiety of ours that we're not
good enough. And what that busyness often does is it it urges us to not pay attention to really ordinary signs of tiredness and exhaustion and jadedness and unhappiness. You know, we squash those down because the busyness, on one hand tells us that they're not important, but it also stops us from feeling them. We're in such a rush that
we kind of gloss over the top. And if you pair that with the messaging coming from the outside that that busyness is the right way to live what you've got, there is a kind of gaslighting of ourselves, which then means that the true exhaustion happens well after the time that we can really do anything about it. And I think that's what burnout is. It's this kind of combination of psychological and physical exhaustion that it's very hard to crawl back out of in a simple way.
You've written about experiencing burnout several times in several different ways, and one of your symptoms I've read about is similar to mine, the fact that you're it's the inability to read, which is writers it's very awkward, deeply ashamed of that when it comes and you write about distraction too, about needing and wanting to go and sit down and work, but you write about how you sit at your desk and instead your frinner between Instagram and Twitter and the
news and Twitter. And we've all been there as well. What have you learned about those sort of signs of that and what helps to bring you back in terms of your focus being so fractured.
I think over the last few years, I've really learned to flip over what I think about those moments when my attention is really scattered and all over the place, because I used to see that as the cause of my suffering, and now I see it as a symptom. You know. I used to think that, oh, my attention isn't good enough, and therefore I'm unable to read, and therefore i'm you know, or I'm not getting enough out
of life, or I'm not working hard enough. But actually what they are is often like an early signal that I'm very anxious or that I'm very overstretched. And when you start to read it like that, you know that flicking between Twitter and Instagram and the news and you know, all of these sources of information, you can begin to see them as reaching for safety, reaching for some kind of solid ground or something that tells you that everything's okay.
And the problem with those media is that they're never going to tell you everything's okay because they're not set up to do that.
Now, it's not good for their business model to tell you that everything's okay.
It's very good for their business model to keep us in this constant state of checking, actually in wonder and feeling like there's no resolution to anything, and also feeling like our response isn't good enough, or getting into conflict over those things, and you know, getting into conflicts that are really none of our business because they're not about things we know anything about. But we're still absorbed in that act of conflict anyway. And so we're turning to
anxiety machines in order to alleviate our anxiety. And it's no surprise that we're feeling correctly anxious under the circumstances.
Absolutely, and that that's not going to work. So, with all that busyness, all the balls in the air, and our plates over flowing, how do we find the little bits of awe and rest in fact in the day to day? That's next, I think to a point in the culture, we've sort of internalized that we do know what the cure for this is, which is it's meant to be mindfulness, meditation, exercise, diet boundaries. But some of
those things are just exceptionally hard to implement. And there's a moment in Enchantment where you were talking about your meditation process and how you've at times drifted away from it, and then suddenly you were like, maybe a man designed this process of me needing to take these two like time periods of time for me out of the day. Tell me about that.
Yeah, yeah, I mean I learned to meditate, Oh goodness me about twenty years ago now, And it came up even then. You know that this man who was teaching a group of mainly women to meditate, had these very very firm rules about how it is done. You know, it must be twenty minutes twice a day. It must be before you've eaten in the morning, it must be every single day, blah blah blah, on and on and on and on. And a woman sitting next to me at the time said, you know, what does your wife do when
you're doing all of this? You know who's looking after your children? And his response I think told me everything really at the time, which was, oh, she's really behind me meditating.
I bet she is.
She is. But you know, I think we do need to start really thinking about the solutions we're being offered, particularly the ones that are telling us that we don't have enough discipline or that we're not making enough time, because actually our sense of being overstretched is genuine. It's not some kind of thing that we've confected. And if
only we organized ourselves more, we'll do it better. And I don't think that's ever more clear than in the case of people who are caring for somebody else, which so many of us are. We don't get to map our days out like that because actually our lives are more about responding to the needs of somebody else, and
that's a good thing, right. We need to be able to do that with an our society, But we also need to be able to have a different conversation about what a kind of a life of contemplation or a life with a spiritual dimension is, because we can't just step away from those roles in order to you know,
take a two week you know, meditation. Really, it just isn't possible it's not a mindset issue, and therefore we need to start to acknowledge the spiritual life or the contemplative life, or the reflective life that's found in everyday life, because it is there. It's just not honored enough in our culture.
And you right about finding a lot of that in nature as many as many of us do and walking, do you have to work to find the awe in every day that's going to reset you? Or is there like a listen to me, I sound like I'm asking you for hacks, like, but is there which is? Which is the antithesis of what we're talking about?
Really?
But is it almost become a practice in itself to learn to find those moments throughout the day, in everyday life rather than this, Okay, I'm blocking out. You know, I've just done school drop off. Now I've got twenty minutes. You know, I love you? Yeah, why are you how I argue you feed it in?
Yeah? I am resistant to hacks and that's really because I was always looking for hacks until quite recently in my life, you know, and they always left me feeling really beref because there is no shortcut to looking after your engagement over the long term. You know, there's no one simple trick that you can click through to on
the internet that will solve this for you forever. In many cases, it's about lowering your expectation of what you're going to get from these moments and allowing yourself to have many small experiences rather than one big, expensive, costly
chance for lifetime experience. And it's also about the very boring, which is repetition and iteration, right, and keeping returning, and as part of that like failing all the time too, you know, constantly dropping off that wagon because things get busy and you've got a sick child at home, or you've got you know, an elderly parent who's demanding something for you, going back again to getting outside after that, repeat, repeat, repeat, For me, that is the very boring piece of advice
that we don't want to hear, but it is the one that works. You know, it's going to it as a human being.
It's interesting because you also have spoken about how back to the point about how busyness is almost a status, simple high status in our society. That rest is crucial, but rest is not the same as doing nothing. You say, yeah, this was very pertinent during COVID and people were advised to get over it. All those things. You've got a rest and people all be like, what's rest? Like I'm lying in bed, I'm watching TV on my phone in bed, you know, Like it's that kind of thing. And what
have we learned about that kind of restoration? Do you think?
Yeah? Because I see rest as a change in action. I'm very bad at the kind of rest that is simply sitting still, like I just I've never been able to do it, and I still can't. But what I find RESTful instead, just to give an example, is to go into my kitchen and cook something that's like a very long process, you know, Like I talk a lot of that. I love I love pickling things. It's just this sort of weird fetish that my entire family seems to have. But what I love about that is it's
not hard, it's not challenging, but it is slow. So you know, you have to chop everything up and you have to wait for the pot to boil, and you have to give it some patience. And while my hands are moving, my intention can kind of roam around a bit, and I can think, I certainly can't have my phone in my hand at that point. I mean, that's just one example, but I do think we need to reconceptualize rest and to take it away from this idea, this
link with me between rest and laziness. You know, rest is this essential part of restoring us back to equilibrium, and if we skip that step then we probably are doing ourselves harm. But equally, if we only see rest as sitting watching the TV, I just don't think that's very appealing to loads of us. I don't think we can rest like that, and it might not even be RESTful because it's not really restoring anything in us.
This explains why I have become a midlife gardener and I have a veggiebed, and I get teased a lot by all my call journalist pals in the city for my gardening. They're like, no, really, Holly, tell us more about your zucchinis and your tomatoes. But I've found, possibly like you, is that I'm not very good at sitting down and doing nothing either, But I feel just remarkably reinvigorated after I've spent some time with my hands and
the soil. It is absolutely owe to me to see a seed turn into a seedling, turn into a front turn into a plant, like that's it's become. I don't know, maybe that's sort of my kind of meditation in a way.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. And it's it's this process that pulls you back. I mean, presumably nearly every day you have to. If you're growing veges, you really do have to keep checking back in on them, don't you. And I'm a really rubbish gardener. Actually, I feel like I should be better at it, but I think I probably travel too much and I neglect everything. But I have
got that from owning a dog. You know, having been a committed cat person all my life, we got a dog because we saw this poor put that needed rescuing and we couldn't resist. And you know, you have to walk her every day, Like that's some basic contract you make with your dog. And that's that's actually brilliant because it made me realize the number of times I actually, despite knowing I love walking, would not have walked. I'd have let something else take over. I'd I said, oh no,
I've got to do this this morning. I won't do that for myself, but I will always do it for the dog. I have to do it for the dog that she gets really fed up with me.
Yeah, same in our house. It's it's it's sort of sacred time talking. I wanted to ask because your reference there that you're traveling a lot, and I think that one of the things that people think about burnout and reset and looking after yourself is that, well, life goes on and demands things of us, and certainly for you. You know, you are a best selling author. I'm sure that you are invited to do a lot of festivals and tours, and you know, it's not like you can
just turn off and retreat and winter. You know, what have you learned about how to sort of ride that wave of opportunity of doing something you love, which I assume that you do, you know, work around your books and your podcast and your newsletter and not letting burn out overwhelm you.
Yeah. I have to actually be quite firm with myself and say no to stuff, which is honestly, as an author, it's really hard. I mean, I have been writing since my mid twenties. I'm now forty six, she says, counting a frantically. And you know, like I've spent many years with very few opportunities to get my work out there, and now I have an abundance of it, and I really do have to be very selective about what I do.
And that means for me because my busiest time is over the winter in the UK, so not your winter, like you kind of catch me at the other end of the seasons.
But we're just heading into winter.
Yeah that's right. Yeah, and we're just the days are just warming up for us finally after a very long time. But you know, like I now have a lot of demand on my time over winter. Everybody wants to talk to me every suddenly. Members I exist a round about late September, and I just see this huge arctic in my own box. And still and every year I say to my system, it's fine, it's a few years after the book's release now, and they won't happen this year. It does, so you know, I do all I can
during that time. But what I won't do is books several days of events back to back. I keep too clear days a week in my calendar all year round because I need that I can't continually output, and over the summer I don't book anything. So July and August, you will not get yourself into my calendar unless you make me a really tempting offer because I need that break.
I need that fire break actually, and I think yes, for creative people, that's a really important thing to think about, is how is the sort of balancing outputting and inputting. The temptation is to sort of always output because that seems productive, that seems like visibly productive from the outside. But in order to make my work, I need quiet time, I need reading, I need thinking, and I need to not be hearing stuff from the outside. I need to
go inwards. I've learned to really assert that time doesn't make me popular with everyone all the time.
So if we all understand in theory how important it is to rest and recharge, why does it still come with a big serve of guilt. How do you stop yourself feeling guilty about doing well, nothing or close to nothing. That's what we're going to talk about next. I think that a lot of women, particularly in middle life, feel guilty about not maximizing every moment and squeezing every bit of productivity out of the day. So we've talked about rest, but how do you deal with the guilt that might
come alongside that. What have you learned about turning that off? Have you had to grapple with that yourself.
Yeah, I grapple with all the time. And you know, the guilt is real and it's not easily solved, and there's not much messaging that will ever tell you that you shouldn't feel guilty if you're needing resources instead of generating resources. What I would say that the technique that I've been trying to use for years now is to acknowledge that needing other people and to keep noticing and to keep trying to accept the need to rest in other people, and therefore to then not see myself as
an exception to that rule. It's not easy, though, I mean, I think, you know, we do have this desire to be productive and to be generating. The care is what puts us at the top of the pile, right, It's almost a power move. It's no surprise that we feel guilty and mid you know, the conversations that we have
at a societal level. I think this is structural. I don't think this is something for the individual to solve, really, But I just hope that the more we talk about it collectively, the more we can begin to accept it in each other and to create an environment. But it's much more normal. That's all we can really do.
I think there was another little light bulb for me in enchantment was you were talking about during lockdown. But I think this is also very relevant to maybe families with small children. You were saying that you and your partner or spouse had never argued so much, and you realized it was because you're in competition for scarce resources, the primary of them being time, and that it revealed
something primal. And that made me realize something about my family and many other families I know who are fighting about Well, if you say yes to that, then I can't do this. And if it's this time and that time, and if you work in that space, then I can't work in that That it is something quite primal. We are scrapping over a juicy steak, except it's it is literal time.
Yeah, And actually I would say that we're actually scrapping over what feels like survival to us, because often the ability to do our work is connected in our minds to you know, being able to eat, being able to keep shelter, and yeah, for me, during the lockdown, because I've always worked from home as a writer of this ley, the first thing that happened was that my husband moved next to me onto my desk to do his nine to five job, which I found I'm very I mean
obviously relate. God he I remember turning to him once, this is not my proudest moment, saying, do you know you grunt when you type?
My partner bangs when he types. It's this unbearable, And I was like, could you type more quietly? And he's no one has ever said that to me before. I mean, I've never had to share a working space with you before.
I know, it was awful, and I found that I because my work is really different. My work's like a lot of staring into space and thinking I couldn't think with somebody working next to me and taking phone calls, and so that meant that I was the one that
had to do childcare while he was working. And so but the logic of that is that my work then happened at these really awful edges of the day, like getting up at four point thirty in the morning to do some work and then working when he finished at five, And I felt like I was living this kind of borderline existence and it really it really made me think about how there is no equality in these moments. It's
just you're literally scrambling to do what you can. And mine was the work that broke the easiest because I didn't have an office that trying to you know, work simultaneously with me. It made me realize how fragile creative work is and how we don't, Yes, we find it really hard to give it the same value as other kinds of work.
It's so true, and shove it into these little gaps that we can find, which actually isn't conducive to deep creative work obviously. So I wanted to ask you just
to touch back on Wintering for a minute. You wrote a lot in that book about the necessity of ritual and marking chunks of time and passages that I found really interesting because in secular societies we've lost a lot of those kind of possible ceremonial moments that are like the beginning of a season and the end of the Why do you think that that is important to us to mark different periods of time in our lives and what are some examples of ways that you or we could do that.
Well, It's a question that I found so interesting that I'm now writing a whole book about I have a lot of thoughts, but I think i'd start by saying that ritual isn't something that was a big part of my life until I wrote Wintering. It was something that I felt very I felt a pulled towards, but I felt very awkward about that pull, and I didn't know how to express it. I have learned to recognize my need for that, and I think I think that that's about us coming to terms with the nature of time
itself in lots of ways. I think what our rituals do is they help us to understand the progress of human life. They help us to understand the cycles that are moving around us all the time. And what they're really about is a constant situating of us, of ourselves within these bigger movements over which we have no control, and so they're like a moment of agency set against asked forces that are that we're tiny in the context of.
And a lot of us don't do anything based on ritual or based on kind of pools or contemplation or reflection, because the only route we know to it is from kind of things like school assemblies.
You know, and yes, you know, maybe festival.
Yeah, that's right, or maybe those people who've walked away from organized religion, you know, see that as intrinsic to the thing that they walked away from. But I am so interested in figuring out how we maintain that ritual life, which I think is really fundamental to our humanity, outside of feeling like it's about kind of being disciplined or being told what to feel and think.
In the feeling tiny. I've heard you say about awe that, and this also resonated with me that when you were small and you thought about the scale of the universe, but you hated it, like it was it's an awful feeling to think of how tiny and insignificant you are, and you're like, that makes me feel strange. I don't want to think about that, but that as you have grown older and wiser perhaps or whatever we want to call that, you actually find it comforting. Why why is that?
Well? I just I remember the first time that somebody told me that the universe is probably infinite, that feeling so deeply unsettled by that, And I think I'm still thinking about what that means now. But actually, as an adult, I'm really glad to have that burden lifted off me of being the center of the world. I mean, I feel far too much like the center of my little realm already. I feel like everything is contingent on my
attention and my action all the time. And to step outside of that immediate family situation, that immediate friendship group, that immediate work situation, and to realize what a kind of minute spec I am in a vast first country, you know, vast town alone, a vast universe, and you know that for me, that's about the practice of humility, which I work on in myself A lot is understanding how small I am, understanding how insignificant my needs are
within this wider context, and therefore learning to kind of take action knowing that rather than thinking that I have to somehow claw my way to the top of a pile. It's a relief, honestly, it's a relief. Yeah.
It's interesting too, because in another interview I was doing, a woman said to me that she had to, as we were talking about earlier, say no to a lot of things because her mental health was suffering, step out of a lot of the responsibilities she had, and she thought that she was so central everything would crumble, but actually what she found is people stepped in and supported her, and I thought, I think that might be something that a lot of women who are caring and working and
working and caring need to hear a bit, you know that we can step away.
Absolutely Amen too. That the insight that I have to give people over and over again from Wintering is that you know, these things are not choices, Like if we don't act on our sense of burnout, our sense of dislocation, it will visit us anyway. You know, we can't infinitely push these things away, and it's actually a great privilege sometimes to let ourselves be cared for. It's you know, we need to understand that care is a cycle and
we can't choose to only output care. We must also learn to receive care, and when we do receive care from other people, despite what we've been trained to think that it's a weakness and that we're, you know, leeching on society somehow. Most people who give care for privilege to give it, and we must learn to be generous in being vulnerable enough to allow people to care for us sometimes because if we don't, if we hold all the caregiving to ourselves, we're actually being quite selfish and
quite self centered. Your children are waiting to care for you, Your parents are wanting to care for your friends are wanting to give care. The big skill is allowing that in and it's hard, but it's important to learn, you know.
I listened back to that conversation with Catherine May and it was like everything slowed down. Did you hear that? It was like the way I talk, so I ask questions, of course, the thoughtful way she answers them. Now you know that on me, I want to have a variety of conversations, ones that energize, ones that help, ones that nourish, and this was one of those for me, and I
hope for you too. I hope you're already sending a message to a frazzled friend about letting herself be cared for sometimes, or about how it's not her fault that she can't meditate twice a day every day in the chaos of her life. And I hope you're thinking about what rest means to you. And then it looks like a lot of different things, but it's not selfish or lazy to want it. I hope you feel like I do that. I just sipped a warm bowl of something.
Next week on MID we're bringing you something different again, almost the opposite. In fact, Helen Thorn is a comedian who's been through a lot in her first few years of being mid betrayal, divorce, loss, but we're talking about possibly one of the hardest things to talk about in public. We're talking about bodies, deep breaths. Come and join us on MID next week. Massive thanks to my excellent producer, to Elizabeth As and wherever you're listening to Mid, go
give us a like a review of Share. It means a lot. We'll see you back in next week.