During the pandemic, life was all about survival. We humans were constantly in fight or flight mode to avoid getting sick while protecting our families from illness, surviving financially, and agonizing about how this would impact our kids.
Since then, our society has never fully recovered. We’ve gone from racial protests to political strife, climate disasters, and the lasting mental health repercussions of isolation from one another for far too long.
As a result, says Aditi Nerurkar, a lecturer at Harvard University and author of The 5 Resets: Rewire Your Brain and Body for Less Stress and More Resilience, around 96 percent of us are facing at least some level of burnout, the mental exhaustion caused by chronic stress.
“Chronic stress has become the new normal,” says Nerurkar. “And it manifests in the body in many different ways.”
