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Why You’re So Tired
And how to build your resilience to the stressors of this crazy year.
Even before Covid-19, a lot of us were pooped — wrung out, over capacity. And with Covid, a lot of us are even more tired. But let’s not just talk about why, but how to build your resilience to the stressors of this crazy year that’s not over yet.
For the past 27 years, my life has been wall to wall content creation: writing This is True and some combination of the Honorary Unsubscribe, Randy’s Random, the True Stella Awards, the Uncommon Sense podcast, and other projects.
But I’m finding myself a lot more tired lately. Is it just that I’m getting older?
No, says Dr. Ann Masten, a professor at the University of Minnesota who studies resilience in human development.
What is resilience, in psychology speak? “There’s general agreement that resilience refers to positive adaptation to adversity,” she says, “but my own view is that we need to think of resilience as the capacity of a system. I think what we’re seeing right now, in the midst of this catastrophic pandemic, is that we all depend on the resilience of many systems in our lives. We’re learning how interdependent we are, and how much we depend on the support of other people, our health care system and many other emergency systems in our…
