#126: Why you should care about emotional frailty
You know what frailty is, and you definitely want to avoid it. But have you heard of emotional frailty? No, of course not - I've just made it up. But if you've ever felt like you're completely winning at life, and then some tiny little setback knocks you sideways, leaving you wondering what's wrong with you and why you suddenly can't cope, emotional frailty is to blame. Emotional frailty is invisible, it's dangerous - and often, the culture around us encourages us to do exactly the sorts of things that exacerbate it. It's time to fight back. Your Imperfectionist friend is here to show you how.
Find the Wheel of Life exercise here.
Episode transcript:
Are you emotionally frail? How would you know?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello, imperfectionists, I hope you’re doing well. We finally made it, didn’t we? We got through January. All 87 weeks of it. Congratulations to all of us. Would you believe it, I actually had a really productive January. I discovered a new, extremely effective productivity tool - although, sadly, it’s not one I can easily implement long-term. I’ll tell you about it anyway. Last month, we got our bathroom redone. Everything was replaced, including the walls and floor. I didn’t do it myself - don’t be daft - I got a professional in. I meant to arrange all this last summer, but it became one of those things that I put off and put off, until water started dribbling through the ceiling below, so I had to spring into action, which meant that for a couple of weeks last month, there was a plumber working in the house. Now, it turns out that it’s pretty obvious if a plumber is plumbing. There’s a lot of noise. You might have heard some of it in the background in the last episode. Plumbers, unlike academics, can’t sit there looking like they’re working when they’re not. So, there he was, working away in this completely obvious way, banging and drilling, lugging heavy stuff in and out of the house. At some point - and for absolutely no reason, and definitely not because of anything he did or said - I decided that he probably thought that what I was doing in my office upstairs was not proper work. There I was, sitting at my desk, not needing to drill or hammer anything, and definitely not generating a huge pile of stuff in the garden that provided quantifiable visual evidence of how productive I was being. And so, in order to avoid the completely imaginary negative judgment of the plumber, I found myself working extra hard to compensate. If I even considered taking a nap or doing some knitting, I would immediately feel reprimanded by the noise downstairs, which was the exact opposite of slacking off. I didn’t even realise I was doing any of this until about a week in, when I noted with surprise that I’d made more progress than I’d expected. At that point, I wondered what would happen when the plumber finished his work, and normal levels of dubious productivity were restored. I found myself contemplating whether I could afford to get any more work done on the house, just so someone potentially judgmental would be here working, and how the cost of that might stack up against the accelerated productivity I would get as a result. Sadly, I don’t think I can justify trying that out. But, if there are any scientists listening who are interested in exploring this, I hereby volunteer myself as a test subject. I am - selflessly and in the name of advancing humanity’s collective knowledge - willing to allow my house to be entirely refurbished. For the rest of you, if you’ve been putting off hiring the sort of person who will crash and bang around your house as they fix things, go ahead and make that call - especially if you’ve got a deadline looming. Your productivity will be the better for it. You’re welcome.
Right then. Onwards. I’m not going to talk about productivity in this episode, beyond what I’ve just said. I want to talk about the opposite, in fact - at least, it’s what many of us tend to think of as the opposite of productivity. The antithesis of productivity, even. The importance of resting, taking care of yourself, and looking after your energy levels. I’ve talked about this before, of course, but I want to offer you a new take, because I know how you like to roll your eyes about it, and how, although you might begrudgingly acknowledge that in theory it might be important to get enough rest and down-time, in reality you ought to spend every waking moment working hard and advancing yourself.
You’ll be familiar with the idea of frailty. The British Geriatrics Society defines it as (quote) ‘a distinctive health state related to the ageing process in which multiple body systems gradually lose their in-built reserves’. That reference to reserves is crucial. It means that you have as much strength as you need, day to day, but no more. If you’re frail, you might have absolutely no problem at all going about your business - until something goes wrong. The moment you need to draw on a bit more strength than you usually need, you’re in trouble. Because of that, the British Geriatrics Society goes on to explain that frail people (another quote) ‘may be low consumers of health care resources and not regularly known to their GP (until they become bed bound, immobile or delirious as a result of an apparently minor illness)’. Frailty might mean you’re fine, until you’re not. You’re out there winning at life, and then you get knocked down by a feather.
Frailty is a big part of why we’re encouraged to strength train, do cardio, and care about our bone density. Because doing all those things makes you stronger, fitter, and more robust than you need to be most of the time, they also make you more resilient when it matters. If life throws you a curve ball - you trip over when you’re getting off a bus, you need to run from a tiger, or whatever - you have a bit extra in the tanks, something you can dip into to get out of the sort of difficulty that you don’t face every day.
That’s physical frailty, anyway. Bodily frailty. I’ve been talking about the sort of frailty that affects the ‘body systems’, to use the terminology of the British Geriatrics Society. What I want to talk about next is something else - something that’s not generally prioritised as a thing to invest time and energy in avoiding. Emotional frailty. I wondered whether I might have made that term up, but a quick Google search reveals that I’m not the first person to use it, although the same Google search reveals that it’s not a widely-used term with a single agreed-upon definition, and in any case the way in which other people have used it is not the way I’m going to use it here. By ‘emotional frailty’, I don’t necessarily mean something associated with old age. It’s something I’ve seen in coaching clients who aren’t anywhere near the age when they might experience physical frailty. I view an emotionally frail person as a person who doesn’t have any emotional reserves to draw on. They might seem completely fine, while it’s all smooth sailing. They might be the sort of person you look at enviously, thinking, ‘I wish I was as capable and organised and productive and successful as them’. And then something happens - maybe not even something super dramatic - and they collapse, sometimes with a sense of confusion, because they feel like although the thing that happened was less than ideal, it wasn’t that bad. Sometimes they book some coaching with me, and during the first session while we’re getting to know each other and I’ve asked them to tell me a bit about themself, they paint me a picture of textbook success and satisfaction, until. Something happens that knocks them sideways. A friend betrays them - maybe in a dramatic, obviously awful way, but often not. Someone close to them gets ill - maybe with something devastating, but often not. Their relationship ends - and maybe they think this is terrible and don’t know how they can carry on without the other person, but often they weren’t into them anyway. And suddenly, they feel everything, themself included, collapsing like a house of cards. It’s confusing. Why has this happened? they wonder. Why am I reacting like this? Why can’t I shake it off? Why am I lying in bed all day crying when I don’t even care that much?
The answer is emotional frailty. They didn’t have any reserves. They needed something extra to draw on, and found they didn’t have it. They were holding everything together just fine, but - secretly, invisibly - they were incapable of holding anything together the moment it became less than just fine. Just as someone who is physically frail can be crushed by a minor ailment, someone who is emotionally frail can be crushed by a minor stress. And in both cases, from the outside, it might be difficult to see it coming.
Now, we know about physical frailty, and unless you live under a rock, you probably know what you ought to be doing to avoid or minimise it, even if you’re not actually doing it. We don’t tend to hear about what to do to avoid emotional frailty - admittedly because I’ve made it up. We even valorise the sorts of things that exacerbate it: taking on more and more, pushing ourselves, striving, raising our standards, giving 110%. You might do this yourself, but even if you don’t, some of the people you admire are probably doing it.
So, how do you know whether you’re emotionally frail? Does everything feel rosy until something goes wrong, at which point you just kind of melt? Well, maybe. Sometimes. But, after thinking about this and reflecting on conversations that have come up with coaching clients and colleagues and in my own experience, I think that there can be signs. Things that, if you know what to look for, you can take as warnings that you don’t have any reserves to draw on and that you need to take action to create a bit of an emotional buffer. Think about how you feel when you contemplate an extra, unexpected demand. Imagine that, tomorrow, your car breaks down on your commute. Your landlord decides to sell your home and you’re faced with the prospect of the time, effort, and expense of moving. Your roof starts leaking and you have to find the money for the repairs and the time to organise it all. You start to hear whispers about redundancies at work. A project that you’d assumed was finished turns out to need more work. The keynote speaker for the conference you’ve organised pulls out. How do you feel when you think about things like this? Even the most well-rested and capable among us aren’t going to welcome any of these things, and the chances are that no matter who you are, you’ll be sent into a spin by stuff like this. For some people, after spending some time shaking their fist at the sky, they’ll rally and switch to problem-solving mode. What just happened is a nuisance - perhaps a huge nuisance - and they’d rather not have to deal with it, but they soon recalibrate to a state of ‘I’ll manage’. They absorb the blow and carry on. For other people, though, when something goes wrong, even when it’s something that ought to slot into the category of ‘it’s a pain, but it’s not the end of the world’, they can end up in a bit of a panic. Instead of ‘I’ll manage’, it’s ‘How the hell will I manage?’ People like this find it harder to rally. Maybe they’re sent into a bit of an existential crash. I don’t mean, necessarily, that they can’t deal with the problem - people are incredibly strong, often stronger than they realise - but perhaps they find themselves pushed to their limits, where they get ill, or if they don’t get ill, they find themselves reflecting on what the point of it all is and how much more of this they can take and whether some huge change might be in order. Being able to distinguish an emotionally robust person facing a crisis from an emotionally frail one isn’t necessarily about their response in the immediate aftermath. But a month later, two months later, six months later - the emotionally robust person is bouncing back (perhaps licking their wounds in the process), and the emotionally frail person is signed off work sick. How do you think you’d cope with a crisis? If you find yourself seriously thinking that it might crush you, it’s time to take notice. Not because you’re right - you might not be - as I said, often we’re stronger than we think. But, safer to heed the warning signs than to wait and find out.
Let’s say that you think you might be emotionally frail. What can you do about it? Well, you can try doing some emotional strength training. That doesn’t mean pushing yourself relentlessly to your emotional limits, the way you might be doing now. That’s not how people strength train, and if they did, they wouldn’t get stronger. Strength training - pushing yourself to the limits of your strength - is something you do occasionally, perhaps a few times a week, and in between you’re resting. The improvements in strength come during the periods of rest, not during the workouts themselves. If you’re always lifting and never resting, you don’t get stronger, you just get injured. You can think of your emotional strength in a similar way. If you want to grow from the emotional stress in your life, rather than be defeated by it, you need to factor in rest and recovery.
So, if you want to be emotionally robust, how do you make that happen? What does it look like to factor in enough rest? Taking a long bath? Getting an early night? Doing a 10-minute mindfulness meditation during your lunch break? Well, maybe. I mean. I’m not against any of those things. But I worry that some of you do things like that - begrudgingly and guiltily, in some cases - while also viewing it as completely unproblematic and even virtuous to be operating at full emotional capacity most of the time. It’s common to think we ought to be taking on more and more, raising our standards, saying yes to growth and opportunity, all of the time, unless there’s a very good reason not to do so. We receive an email at 10pm and they think the best course of action is to reply to it, because we’d only be sprawled on the sofa watching Netflix anyway. We get asked to join another committee, and we think we ought to say yes, because we’re selfish if they don’t. We can’t see how not to do things like this and still be an acceptable human.
What’s needed is a bit of nuance around the way we think about our commitments. Often, when we think about whether we should take on some new commitment, we think about it all in terms of what we ought to do, morally, or in terms of etiquette or social or professional norms. We ought to take on that commitment in order to ensure we’re a good colleague. We ought to say yes to that request because it’s part of the give-and-take that underpins healthy relationships between friends or neighbours. We ought to do something because the person asking deserves our help. We’re preoccupied with how much of ourselves we owe to other people.
It’s a good thing to give thought to how to fulfil our obligations, just as long as we’re not short-changing ourselves in the way I talked about in the previous episode. But sometimes, these normative considerations are a distraction from important prudential ones. Those involve oughts, too. When we say things like, ‘I ought not to drink too much alcohol’ and ‘I ought to take more exercise’ and ‘I ought not to stay up so late when I’ve got work the next day’, we’re not talking about ethics. The ‘oughts’ here are prudential. We ought not to do these things because they will lead to bad outcomes for ourselves, not because of other people. Sometimes, there are conflicts between the different oughts, like when you ought to fulfil your professional obligations, but doing so would involve working yourself into the ground, which, prudentially, you ought not to do.
When thinking about whether we’ve taken on too much, lots of you are really tuned in to the oughts that have to do with what you owe to other people, but less aware of the prudential ones. You know exactly why it’s bad to let other people down. You’re a bit more fuzzy about why it’s important to take a break once in a while. You’re used to hearing people like me tell you it’s important, but you’re not wholly convinced. By contrast, you do understand the prudential oughts when it comes to taking care of yourself, physically, and you know why they’re important, even if you don’t do them. So, what I’m trying to do here, by talking about emotional frailty, is to bring those fuzzy prudential oughts around your emotional wellbeing into focus by comparing them to the much less fuzzy prudential oughts around your bodily health. I hope that will give you a way to safeguard your emotional wellbeing, even when that involves drawing back from doing things for other people, things that you ought - ethically, professionally, socially - to do. Because, of course you ought to do the things you ought to do - at least, when there are no conflicting obligations. But very often there are conflicting obligations - it’s just that they’re easy to overlook.
So, here’s a question for you to ponder. How are your emotional reserves? Do you have more to give, if you really needed to? If you’re worried that your reserves are running low, what can you do to build them up? Are there any areas of yourself and your life that you’ve been neglecting - friendships you’ve let slide, hobbies you haven’t done in a while, pockets of space that have been crowded out by work - in other words, changes that you could reverse in order to safeguard your emotional resilience? You might find the Wheel of Life exercise helpful for this - you can find it on the Resources page of The Academic Imperfectionist website, and I’ll put a link to it in the episode notes.
It’s not always possible to make the right sort of changes, of course. There are bills to pay, promises to keep, deadlines to meet. We don’t always have the luxury of dropping the things that cause us stress. What we can do, though, is avoid adding to this stress by failing to realise that we’re entitled to factor our emotional wellbeing into the equation when we’re deciding where to spend our time and our energy.
Can you think of a change you can make today, large or small, to guard against emotional frailty? If so, I’d love to hear about it, and to share it anonymously on the podcast, so please do get in touch via the contact form on my website.
Next time, my friends!
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
Enjoy the show?
Please leave a review in Apple Podcasts.
Don’t miss an episode - subscribe using the links below!