The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Blessing of Burnout: Samin Nosrat on the Faustian Bargain of Achievement and the Simple Substance of the Good Life

The Blessing of Burnout: Samin Nosrat on the Faustian Bargain of Achievement and the Simple Substance of the Good Life

We live in a bipolar epoch — on one end, the blamethirsty finger of cancel culture and politicized othering; on the other, the zeal for designating people, real human beings with real human lives, as secular saints expected to give us unremitting consolation, inspiration, and encouragement. Both are cages that dehumanize the caged, negating the tessellated variousness of their personhood, the complexity of their human experience. All the while, our cultural mythos of success is skinning life of joy on the crucifix of achievement.

Of all the ills that require our constant vigilance and courage, these three — ambition, blame, and worship — menace modern life more perniciously, because more subtly, than all the rest combined.

I have heard no one address their interplay more candidly and more vulnerably than chef and author Samin Nosrat in her contribution to Yo-Yo & Friends: In Conversation on Living Creatively.

Samin Nosrat

“Who serves best doesn’t always understand,” wrote the Nobel-winning Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. With her oceanic laugh and sunlit vivacity, Samin has been serving more than food for two decades — she has served, for millions, a model of being a conscientious objector to the warfare of cynicism destroying the modern spirit. She has also suffered the struggle, the strangeness, of being regarded as “a bringer of joy,” being expected to play that role while wading through a thick inner darkness, the tension between wanting to be of service but also needing the freedom to meet sorrow on its own terms — not the performative suffering and competitive trauma rewarded in our time, but that most inward, private, and subterranean current of soul-ache that demands everything of us and shows nothing.

In trying to find a way “to be truthful and authentic, and also share goodness,” Samin found herself reckoning with how she came to be the way she is:

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there has been so much sorrow and grief and loss in my life, from the very beginning. I’ve had to actively orient myself, almost as a survival mechanism, toward goodness and toward joy, toward love and friendship and nature and beauty, just to make it. And that is what I want to put out into the world.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and stationery cards.

And yet she found herself in a void of joy, puzzled by how this was possible given how hard she had worked at her life:

What happened was I spent my life in a singleminded pursuit of excellence, with the flawed (probably subconscious) belief that if I achieved the right combination of thing, that would make me feel okay, make me feel happy, make my parents finally proud of me. And then, somehow, I did achieve all the things I set out to do — and more — and it sucked the life out of me… There was an emptiness inside of me — I did all these things, I held up my end of the bargain, and it didn’t work. So now what…

I had to just sit there and be in that pain.

Burnout is often our best catalyst for transformation. But for Samin, that pain collided with another, vaster and more primal, until the two ricocheted into a revelation that turned her life around. Just as she was crouching there in the darkness of her burnout, her father suffered a traumatic brain injury. As he lay dying, they had the difficult conversations they had never faced. She reflects:

More than anything, watching him die in that way really brought me face to face with my own mortality and gave me a sense of such clarity that time is so precious and that the way I had been looking at life… “If I I’m good now and work hard now, then one day I’ll be okay, one day I’ll be happy, one day I’ll have joy, one day I’ll cash this in.” And I realized, oh no, no, no — there is no cashing it in: You have to spend it as you go.

Echoing Annie Dillard’s searing observation that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” she adds:

That really reoriented me to this sense that every day is my life… All of the small choices I make — that’s what I’m doing. And I have to have joy… And, actually, all the sort of boring and menial parts of my life are where, if I just make some small shifts, I can have a good life.

Couple this fragment of Yo-Yo & Friends — which features five other conversations about the creative life (including one with me) — with the pioneering psychologist Carl R. Rogers on the three elements of the good life, then revisit Mario Benedetti’s magnificent “Defense of Joy.”

BP

Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity

Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity

“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” William James wrote in his pioneering 1884 theory of how our bodies affect our feelings — the first great gauntlet thrown at the Cartesian dualism of body versus mind. In the century and a half since, we have come to see how the body and the mind converge in the healing of trauma; we have come to see consciousness itself as a full-body phenomenon.

Beyond the brain, no portion of the body shapes our mental and emotional landscape more profoundly than the tenth cranial nerve — the longest nerve of the autonomic nervous system that unconsciously governs the inner workings of the body. Known as the vagus nerve — from the Latin for “wandering,” a root shared with vagabond and vague — it meanders from the brain to the gut, touching every organ along the way with its tendrils, controlling everything from our heart rate and digestion to our reflexes and moods.

One of Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s little-known drawings of the brain.

In James’s lifetime, it was believed that synaptic communication within the brain was electrical. But when neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal discovered a gap between neurons — a miniature abyss electricity could not cross — it became clear that something else must be transmitting the signals between neurons. In 1921, the German pharmacologist Otto Loewi confirmed the existence of these theorized chemical messengers by stimulating the vagus nerve of a frog and discovering in the secreted substance the first known neurotransmitter. Every thought, feeling, and mood that has ever swept across the sky of your mind was forecast by your neurotransmitters and executed by your vagus nerve.

A century after James, while working with premature babies, the psychiatrist Stephen Porges uncovered two distinct vagal pathways in the nervous system — the much older dorsal vagus, which evolved around 500 million years ago in a fish now extinct to regulate fear response and activate shutdown, and the ventral vagus, a uniquely mammalian development about 200 million old, controlling our capacity for connection and communication. This research became the foundation of polyvagal theory — the science of how the interplay of these two systems shapes our sense of safety and danger, shapes our attachment styles and relationship patterns, shapes our very ability to tolerate the risks of living necessary for being in love with life.

In the decades since, no one has championed polyvagal theory more ardently than the clinical psychologist Deb Dana. In her book The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation (public library), written for therapists, she explores how trauma automates our adaptive responses in a survival story that puts the fear-based dorsal vagus in command to induce collapse and dissociation, and how we can rewire our neural pathways toward the emotional safety of the ventral vagal state, where our capacity for curiosity, connection, and change flourishes.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

Dana writes:

Connectedness is a biological imperative, and at the top of the autonomic hierarchy is the ventral vagal pathway that supports feelings of safety and connection. The ventral vagus (sometimes called the “smart vagus” or “social vagus”) provides the neurobiological foundation for health, growth, and restoration. When the ventral vagus is active, our attention is toward connection. We seek opportunities for co-regulation. The ability to soothe and be soothed, to talk and listen, to offer and receive, to fluidly move in and out of connection is centered in this newest part of the autonomic nervous system. Reciprocity, the mutual ebb and flow that defines nourishing relationships, is a function of the ventral vagus. As a result of its myelinated pathways, the ventral vagus provides rapid and organized responses. In a ventral vagal state, we have access to a range of responses including calm, happy, meditative, engaged, attentive, active, interested, excited, passionate, alert, ready, relaxed, savoring, and joyful.

This biological need for co-regulation with others is not dissimilar to the concept of limbic revision — “the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love,” and to have our own emotional pathways remodeled by the people who love us. This is only possible in safe relationships, and it is the vagus system that governs our sense of safety.

Central to polyvagal theory is the distinction between conscious perception and what Porges termed neuroception — the conditioned way the autonomic nervous system responds from within the body, without our awareness, to cues of safety and danger in the outside world. Because our vagal pathways are shaped by our earliest experiences of co-regulation in the infant-parent dyad, ruptures in that co-regulation — whether by abuse or neglect — condition the dorsal vagus to become dominant and make a neuroception of danger the default response, storying reality away from safety, nowhere more perilously than in intimate relationships. Dana writes:

Co-regulation is at the heart of positive relationships… If we miss opportunities to co-regulate in childhood, we feel that loss in our adult relationships. Trauma, either in experiences of commission (acts of harm) or omission (absence of care), makes co-regulation dangerous and interrupts the development of our co-regulatory skills. Out of necessity, the autonomic nervous system is shaped to independently regulate. Clients will often say that they needed connection but there was no one in their life who was safe, so after a while they stopped looking. Through a polyvagal perspective, we know that although they stopped explicitly looking and found ways to navigate on their own, their autonomic nervous system never stopped needing, and longing for, co-regulation.

Art by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little Wolf

Because we are physiologies first and psychologies second, but we are also storytelling and sensemaking creatures, our minds naturally create emotional narratives out of these unconscious vagal states — stories that, if we are not careful enough and conscious enough, may come to subsume reality. Dana observes:

The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state.

Our early adaptive survival responses of trauma train the autonomic nervous system on a default neuroception of danger, replacing patterns of connection with patterns of protection in a fear-based narrative. And yet these reflexes can be recalibrated by retraining our regulatory pathways.

Because the feeling of reciprocity is one of the most powerful regulators of the autonomic nervous system, a great deal of repair and rewiring can happen in relationships winged with true reciprocity. Dana writes:

Reciprocity is a connection between people that is created in the back-and-forth communication between two autonomic nervous systems. It is the experience of heartfelt listening and responding. We are nourished in experiences of reciprocity, feeling the ebb and flow, giving and receiving, attunement, and resonance.

Art from The Human Body, 1959.

But the great paradox is that if our earliest template of connection is marked by rupture and deficient co-regulation, our very notion of reciprocity may be warped, leading us to tolerate immense asymmetries of affection and attention, to mistake deeply imbalanced relationships for reciprocal. The grounds for optimism lie in the very real possibility of changing the template through safe and nourishing relationships — ones we may not so much choose at first, for trauma can taint our choices with unhealthy patterns, as chance into and only then choose to nurture. The payoff is a gradual transition from the dorsal vagal state into the ventral vagal, a gradual willingness to release the patterns of protection in favor of connection, allowing the kinds of relationships Adrienne Rich celebrated as ones “in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love.'”

Complement with the science of how emotion are made and how love rewires the brain, then revisit Toni Morrison on reclaiming the body as an instrument of joy, sanity, and self-love.

BP

Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance

Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance

One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives.

We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is the longing for an authority figure selling certainty, claiming the fist to be a helping hand. It is a touchingly human impulse, primal and pacifying — children turn to the parent to remove the overwhelm and uncertainty of a world they don’t yet understand and cannot carry. It is also a dangerous impulse, for it pulsates beneath every war and every reign of terror in the history of the world.

Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016), who thought deeply and passionately about the cracks in democracy and its redemptions, shines a sidewise gleam on this eternal challenge of the human spirit in a couple of pieces found in his Book of Longing (public library) — the collection of poems, drawings, and prose meditations composed over the course of the five years he spent living in a Zen monastery.

Leonard Cohen (courtesy of Leonard Cohen Family Trust)

In a timeless passage that now reads prophetic, he writes:

We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind… The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society.

In such periods, he goes on to intimate, love — that most intimate and inward of human labors, that supreme instrument for magnifying the light between us and lighting up the world — is an act of courage and resistance.

Cohen takes up the subject of what resistance really means in another piece from the book — a poem titled “SOS 1995,” that is really an anthem for all times, a lifeline for all periods of helplessness and uncertainty, personal or political, and a cautionary parable about the theater of authority, about the price of giving oneself over to its false comfort. He writes:

Take a long time with your anger,
sleepyhead.
Don’t waste it in riots.
Don’t tangle it with ideas.
The Devil won’t let me speak,
will only let me hint
that you are a slave,
your misery a deliberate policy
of those in whose thrall you suffer,
and who are sustained
by your misfortune.
The atrocities over there,
the interior paralysis over here —
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down.
You are being bred for pain.
The Devil ties my tongue.
I’m speaking to you,
“friend of my scribbled life.”
You have been conquered by those
who know how to conquer invincibly.
The curtains move so beautifully,
lace curtains of some
sweet old intrigue:
the Devil tempting me
to turn away from alarming you.

So I must say it quickly:
Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know —
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.
You are listening to Radio Resistance.

Complement with Thich Nhat Hanh’s poetic antidote to anger and Erich Fromm’s psychological antidote to helplessness and disorientation, then revisit Leonard Cohen on the constitution of the inner country and what makes a saint.

BP

Relationship Rupture and the Limbic System: The Physiology of Abandonment and Separation

Relationship Rupture and the Limbic System: The Physiology of Abandonment and Separation

“We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us,” Adrienne Rich wrote in framing her superb definition of honorable human relationships. It is a cruelty of life that, along the way, people who once appeared fitted to the task crumble in character when the going gets hard in that natural way hardship has of visiting all human lives.

When relationships collapse under the weight of life, the crash is not merely psychological but physiological — something less and less surprising as we learn more and more about consciousness as a full-body phenomenon beyond the brain. A quarter century ago, the pioneering immunologist Esther Sternberg began demonstrating how relationships affect our immune system. But there is no system they impact more profoundly than the limbic: our neurophysiological command center of emotion — something psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon explore throughout their revelatory book A General Theory of Love (public library), which also gave us their insight into music, the neural harmonics of emotion, and how love recomposes the brain.

Art by Maurice Sendak from a vintage children’s book by Janice May Urdy.

The profound disruption of relationship rupture, they observe, is related to our earliest attachments and the way our system processes separation from our primary caregivers — a primal response not singular to the human animal:

Take a puppy away from his mother, place him alone in a wicker pen, and you will witness the universal mammalian reaction to the rupture of an attachment bond — a reflection of the limbic architecture mammals share. Short separations provoke an acute response known as protest, while prolonged separations yield the physiologic state of despair.

A lone puppy first enters the protest phase. He paces tirelessly, scanning his surroundings from all vantage points, barking, scratching vainly at the floor. He makes energetic and abortive attempts at scaling the walls of his prison, tumbling into a heap with each failure. He lets out a piteous whine, high-pitched and grating. Every aspect of his behavior broadcasts his distress, the same discomfort that all social mammals show when deprived of those to whom they are attached. Even young rats evidence protest: when their mother is absent they emit nonstop ultrasonic cries, a plaintive chorus inaudible to our dull ape ears.

Behaviorally and psychologically, the despair phase begins when fretfulness, which can manifest as anxiety in humans, collapses into lethargy — a condition that often accompanies depression. But abrupt and prolonged separation produces something much more than psychological havoc — it unleashes a full-system somatic shock. Various studies have demonstrated that cardiovascular function, hormone levels, and immune response are all disrupted. Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon capture the result unambiguously:

Relationship rupture is a severe bodily strain… Prolonged separation affects more than feelings. A number of somatic parameters go haywire in despair. Because separation deranges the body, losing relationships can cause physical illness.

But harrowing as this reality of intimacy and its ruptures may be, it also intimates something wonderfully assuring in its mirror-image — just like painful relationships can so dysregulate us, healthy relationships can regulate us and recalibrate our limbic system, forged in our earliest attachments.

The solution to the eternal riddle of trust emerges as both banal and profound — simply the practice of continually refining our discernment about character and cultivating intimate relationships of the kind life’s hard edges cannot rupture, with people who are the human equivalent not of poison but of medicine, and endeavoring to become such people ourselves for the emotional ecosystems of those we love.

Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon write:

A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.

[…]

Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them.

This might sound simple, almost simplistic, but it is one of the most difficult and redemptive arts of living — for, lest we forget, “who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.”

Complement with Alain de Botton on the psychological Möbius strip that keeps us in unhealthy relationships (and how to break it) and David Whyte on the deeper meanings of friendship, love, and heartbreak, then revisit Hannah Arendt on what forgiveness really means.

BP

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