What if I’m too tired and exhausted to set goals for myself or take action for a bigger cause?

Taking our mental health issues seriously might just be the most hopeful thing we do for this world.

Last week I started a Q&A series answering some great questions I received about hope. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I believe that there’s no single answer or truth to these questions. Instead, I try to offer different perspectives to help you find your own.

This week, I’ll tackle a topic that is very close to my heart. It’s a topic I’ve written and spoken about for many years, and many of my coaching clients have struggled with it at one point or another.

Mental health.

More specifically, I want to focus on whether trying to push ourselves to create a hopeful world is possible if we’re already exhausted, anxious, or depressed.

This week’s question is: What if I’m too tired and exhausted to set goals for myself or take action for a bigger cause? 

Again, a great question.  

Before I answer, I should share a story from my own life to give some context. 

About four years ago, I was in a low place, mentally and literally. I found myself on the kitchen floor, struggling to find enough inner strength to get up. ​​At that moment, finding any real value in my life was hard.

However, I was fully functional. I went to work and completed my chores but felt dead inside. I cried on my way to work nearly every morning, yet I was in a leadership role and managed big budgets. As soon as I stepped through the office door, I put on a can-do attitude and made it through the day.

The condition I was dealing with was depression. It was the result of a few years of overextending myself for other people, neglecting my own needs and using work as a distraction to avoid focusing on my real issues. I guess you could also call it burnout, but because I had already suffered burnout earlier in my life and didn’t have any problems with my work-life balance, I knew the condition was more personal than professional. My symptoms were those of depression: lethargy, lack of joy, low self-esteem and lack of self-worth.

I felt alone and isolated. It was as if I was waking up to a completely different world than everyone else. My world was sad and dark so I had to hide it from others and pretend to be okay.

Goal-setting is a great tool for certain situations but not for all

What pulled me through this time was a combination of psychodynamic therapy, daily gratitude journalling (I thought it was BS at first but I quickly changed my mind), working on a creative project, and friends I didn’t need to hide my true feelings from.

I had previously done cognitive behavioural therapy and learned about goal-setting and other mental health tools. They had helped me immensely with my burnout, but now, they didn’t work at all. They gave me a theoretical understanding of how I could change my mood, for example by getting up from the floor and calling someone. However, I found it impossible to do either. And feeling unable to do the things that would make me feel better made me feel even worse.  

If someone had then suggested that I focus whatever was left of me on cutting down my CO2 emissions, doing voluntary work or exploring a more meaningful career path, it would’ve likely made me sink lower, not fly higher.

Even though those types of goals could have theoretically made me feel better, I wasn’t equipped to deal with much else than myself and my pain. I know it sounds self-centred, and it was. 

Also, it must be mentioned that taking action for a cause is not a cure for all types of anxious thoughts and mental health problems. In fact, activist groups are known to have a tendency for mental health issues. People involved in activism can develop a special kind of burnout that comes from working for a cause you’re unable to fully solve, such as climate change.

What eventually worked for me was acceptance. I had to fully come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t of much use and say no to many things that were beyond my capacity. Luckily, I had people and professional help who took my pain seriously, aka didn’t tell me to just get a grip.

Being seen and heard made me respect myself more. Only after I found this level of self-love could I start setting goals for a better future and taking steps to move forward. This development took about two years.

The point of this story is not to say that all mental health stories are like mine or that my experience makes me a mental health professional.

However, I can relate to the feelings of alienation that come from struggling with mental health. I can also relate to the feelings of incapability and shame that come from not being able to gather enough strength to do anything productive.

We need to empathise with these feelings if we want to find the stamina we need as humans and communities to bring about positive change in this world.

Why mental health is an acute problem in this world

According to the World Health Organisation, approximately 280 million people globally suffer from depression. This is a high number if you compare it with the 24 million who are diagnosed with schizophrenia or the 55 million with dementia. The COVID-19 pandemic increased the prevalence of anxiety and depression worldwide by 25% and this development affected adolescents and women the most.

UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children 2021 report states that depression and anxiety cover 40 per cent of the mental illnesses of adolescents. A girl quoted in the report explains: “Even if you are ambitious, you will not be able to achieve your ambitions because you are psychologically totally defeated.”

Social psychologist and the author of the 2024 book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt, argues that what makes people, especially young people depressed and anxious these days is the social isolation that results from living our lives on devices instead of the physical world. 

According to Haidt, it’s not the crises of the world that bring us down but our loneliness when dealing with them.

He refers to research about global crises such as the Vietnam War that gathered people together to resist and revolt. These crises energised them instead of paralysing them. “People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely or useless,” he writes.

Haidt also argues that modern activist groups deal with mental health issues largely because their activism takes place online. That’s different from, let’s say, the 1970s hippie movement, where people gathered in fields to smoke weed and rally with flowers around their heads. 

Whether we can blame our devices for our mental health problems is one thing. The bigger trend we need to pay attention to is whether our poor mental health is keeping us from taking positive action for ourselves and for our communities. 

How to take care of our minds and take action for the causes we care about?

Obviously, there is no single cure for all mental health problems, and the solutions are not merely personal but systemic. We need actions from governments, schools, mental health professionals, parents of young children, and non-profits. 

But because this newsletter is a person-to-person exchange, I’ll offer some thoughts and strategies that make me feel like I can take positive action in this world despite the size of the world’s issues, and keep my depressive tendencies at bay.

However, if you’re dealing with an acute mental health condition, the best thing you can do for yourself and others is get help from a licensed therapist.

When I was living my darkest days, I channelled a lot of my depressed energy to finish my first book. It dealt with the clarity I gained about work-life balance through my earlier burnout. When the book was published in 2019, I was given a voice to speak about mental health publicly and meet people who had gone through similar struggles. I also received beautiful letters from people who felt like my writing had helped them. 

Speaking about my struggles openly made me feel less alone. Learning that my work could positively impact another made me feel worth something.

I found a sense of community in the invisible mass of people who resonated with my book's message. 

That is why, to this day, I continue to publicly share my personal struggles and thoughts about them through my writing. It’s my way of connecting with people I wouldn’t otherwise meet. 

Finding an action that can help both the giver and the receiver is a special kind of empowerment.

I’m not saying everyone should write a book or share their stories publicly. However, writing has proven to be a form of active hope for me.

I also find some mental health advice directed at activists hugely helpful in inspiring action and defeating hopelessness, whether you’re an activist or not.

Sadie Morris, an editor of Georgetown University’s Earth Commons Institute’s magazine, writes that activists can protect their mental health by “1) cultivating a mindset of a Lifer and 2) finding community”. 

A Lifer refers to someone who’s committed to their cause for their entire life and even beyond. By doing so they understand that results don’t come easy and the cause they’re working for won’t be solved in their lifetime. This gives them longevity instead of disappointment and reminds them that progress is better than perfection. Finding a community to work with offers them the support they need to keep going despite tough times. 

I also recommend reading this beautifully written essay by climate communicator Mary Anaïse Heglar describing her burnout experience. One of her key points is how easy it is to claim burnout but how difficult it is to actually do anything about it. She argues, “We live in a society that encourages us to give ourselves permission to feel bad, but never to feel better.”

Then she continues:

“Climate change demands that we build a new world, so we might as well build one we want to live in. If I have anything to do with it, it will be one in which Black women can say, “I’m tired. I need help. I can’t carry on,” and where they’re not only believed, they are held.”

I would also recommend the aforementioned Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation to anyone interested in exploring the relationship between technology and our depressed and anxious mental states.

On that note, it’s probably a great idea for all of our mental health to carve out time for some IRL connection with the humans around us. Face-to-face contact supports our mental health regardless of whether we’re suffering or not. 

And from my personal experience I can say that taking our mental wellbeing seriously is necessary to help us move on from talking about it. As long as we don’t tackle whatever condition we’re dealing with, it’s easy to get stuck in a feeling of incapability and lack of agency.

Once we accept our experience, understand its causes, develop the necessary empathy to deal with it and find support to move forward in life, we claim back our power and start to see ourselves as capable beings. 

So whatever you or someone near you might be dealing with, try to find a way to be honest about it.

That in itself is a way forward.

Become the hope you wish to feel in this world.

With kindness,
Aurora