104 – Burnout Talk for Zagreb Anarchist Bookfair

Welcome to the Frontline Herbalism Podcast with your host Nicole Rose from the

Solidarity Apothecary.

This is your place for all things plants and

liberation.

Let's get started.

Hello. Welcome back to the Frontline Herbalism Podcast.

I hope you enjoyed the last episode which was a reshare about the prisoner support with the

Final Straw radio.

I've had some really nice comments about it.

So yeah, thank you for listening and yeah,

just like a shout out to other people doing that work who totally understand the

challenges involved.

Okay, so today I am going to be sharing a talk that I did for Zagreb Anarchist Book Fair

last.

Well on Friday.

Unfortunately I couldn't do it live as I didn't have any childcare help with Lee so I

pre recorded it when he was at nursery.

I yeah, wanted to put it on my website but I think it's like quite rushed.

I had a kind of block of 20 minutes and I ended up speaking for 26.

And I think what I'd like to do when I've got a bit more resources is kind of re record the

whole thing in a kind of more in depth way where I can really do the different points

justice.

So yeah, if you listen to this, I'm sorry about my kind of inaccessible speed of talking

really fast.

I know you can't see the slides so it's like

less of a pleasurable experience but I hope it resonates with people.

And I know this series is about like hubble support through repression, but I think

amazing major aspect of repression is burnout and I would like to kind of produce more

resources about recovering from burnout and how do we recover from chronic stress and you

know, how does that look like in terms of our adrenals and endocrine system and all the

things.

So yeah, so this episode is sharing that talk and the other thing I wanted to plug or two

things.

One is the Herbalism PTSD and traumatic stress

course is coming so ****** soon.

It's in 12 days.

Oh my God.

I need to promote it more.

Um, I've done shitloads of episodes all about the PTSD course.

And you can check out the course page that has got all the information on how it works on all

the modules on the sliding scale.

Like it is literally no one turned away from fun for.

No one turned away for lack of fun.

Sorry, I can't talk this morning.

Um, so please, please, please check that out.

It's only open twice a year.

So yeah, if you want to kind of join it then yeah, it, it is worth joining it soon.

And I really encourage you to join the waiting list because two reasons, one it means you

don't course because I will email you consistently telling you to enroll.

But secondly, I have a bonus of everyone.

I put everyone's emails into this kind of like auto generator tool and basically someone will

win a place on my practical herbal medicine intensive next summer.

So I teach two of these a year and they are a three day course where you learn everything

about medicine making and they're always lush and full of queer babes.

And yeah, I just want to give someone the opportunity to win a place for free.

I do have subsidized places and free places on the course and yeah, there's always like a

million applicants for those.

But if you're interested in joining that then I encourage you to join the waiting list for

the PTSD course.

The other thing I wanted to share is I recently launched on the old Instagram a thing

called Soothing Survival which is just literally five part email series.

So you get five emails nicely laid out into bullet points because that's how my brain

works.

All about different nervous system states and herbs that kind of indicated for them.

So I talk about the sort of like survival states like fight and flight and freeze and

shut down and yeah, it's literally a little bit about how that kind of survival response

like shows up like signs that you're kind of in it.

Signs that that state is maybe like you're maybe sort of stuck there and then ways to

shift that state and yeah, one sort of plan all like to explore that could potentially

help you shift that state.

So yeah, people have been loving it so far and appreciating how I communicate about the

different nervous system states.

So yeah, I'll put a link in the show notes and

yeah, it's like obviously completely free so please check that out.

It's just a short term little sequence of emails telling you all about yeah these

nervous system states and herbal support.

So anyway, I will stop talking now and you can

listen to the burnout talk.

Yeah, okay, thanks for listening.

Bye.

Hello.

Hello.

How are you doing?

So I'm yeah gonna do a talk about burnout.

I'm gonna introduce myself and this book that I put together called Overcoming Burnout and

then explore some of the kind of structural, biological and cultural factors as well as

like what can we do about it?

So yeah, I'm really grateful that you're here.

I'm so sorry to not be able to join live.

I'm yeah looking after my baby on my own at the moment and don't have anyone that can help

put him to sleep at this time of night.

So I'm sorry, here he is up cop cars at Soft

play.

I did like a joke Instagram post about him starting a toddler ABC group, hence the

graphic.

But I just thought I would,

yeah, share that with you.

So yeah, just a content warning I do mention

briefly are probably about prison and repression and I know and you know, different

forms of oppression and yeah, this is like potentially like difficult for some people.

And yeah, just I've only got 20 minutes and this is like such a ******* huge topic.

And I know that other people that are talking and facilitating a workshop have tons of

wisdom and you'll be able to all talk about this collectively.

I know everyone's got experience with,

with burnout and navigating their own like limitations and also all their kind of

challenges in anti FASC and other movements that we're part of.

So yeah, so many people have spoken about this topic before.

All right, so just mini introduction.

I'm Nicole. I'm from England.

My family are also Welsh and I've got Irish

lineages as well.

I've been a DIY herbalist since I was 21 and

I'm 37 now.

And I also did kind of four years of formal

kind of clinical training with the Plant Medicine School in Ireland.

And I, yeah, I run this project called the Soldier Apothecary where I focus on supporting

people with state violence with herbal medicine.

And yeah, I started organizing literally when I was like 10 years old.

I wrote to the Anarchist Federation.

I found a Malatesta book and was like, oh my

God, this is it.

Literally wrote to afed probably when I was like 11 or 12 being like, what can I do?

Like a handwritten letter by the way.

Anyway, so yeah, I've been organizing for a long time and gone through a lot of stuff in

terms of like repression and prison.

I did a three and a half year sentence etc,

but yeah, that's the kind of context that I'm speaking in.

So yeah, the mission of the Solidarity Apothecary is to support like revolutionary

struggles and communities of plant medicines.

You can find more at the old website solidarityapothecary.org and yeah, I focus on

supporting people with state violence.

Supporting people,

obviously not supporting state violence against them, but supporting people

experiencing state violence with like one to one support as a herbalist and care packages.

I wrote a book called the Prisoner's Herbal that goes to prisoners worldwide for free and

have been supporting a clinic in France that works of refugees and Forcibly displaced

people on the border.

And I do a lot of support for people that are doing kind of like intense organizing work.

And I also have a podcast.

And then beyond.

And before herbalism, my main sort of political organizing is like prisoner support

and prison abolition.

And yeah, I mean, I kind of grew up in the animal liberation movement and that's what got

me to prison.

And then since then I've mostly been doing

prison related things.

So. Yeah, so just a really brief context.

with chronic inflammation in my rib cage, hence the picture, like the illustration of

this book.

And I basically just started writing about my experiences in this series called Overcoming

Burnout.

And yeah, it just went really viral.

And like, I still to this day get so many emails from people all over the world being

like, oh my God, this resonates so much.

This was my experience.

Blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, and active distribution, who I know are at the book fair right now,

shout out to John for making this all possible in, you know, and other people in Active.

But yeah, they were like, let's put it in a book.

So we did.

And then that's the selling of that is what

funds all the prisoners herbal distribution.

So I'm super grateful for that.

And it's also been translated by some comrades to Spanish, but it's not on my website yet,

the Spanish version.

Okay, so let's ****** dive in to what is burnout?

So there's no, like,

definition, right. But I. I like to frame it as a state of emotional, physical and mental

exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress.

So my critical points here are that burnout is like structural,

burnout is cultural and burnout is biological.

And that every time we talk about burnout and we think about how do we recover from burnout

or prevent it, like, these are like inherently political subjects.

And that's what I'm gonna dive in today.

And yeah, throughout the presentation, I've

just got little pictures of plants because I'm a herbalist, so there's always pictures of

plants.

But this is a plantain with a gas canister in

And I think I wrote actually in the introduction to Burnout book, imagine saying

to someone, and this was, you know, before everything started in Gaza.

Imagine saying to a Palestinian, like, not burning out was like their responsibility.

Like, it's ******* nonsense, right? Like it is structural and determined by all

these massive political things that shape us and our bodies that are bigger than one

Individual.

Which is why we do need, like, collective responses and just, yeah, laying it down.

But with a nice picture of Hawthorne here.

Like, burnout is not that someone doesn't care

enough,

is not an individual failing or someone not, quote unquote, like, coping.

But it's also not.

Not experienced the same by everyone.

Right.

And also, like I've mentioned, it's not

something that we can, like, easily recover from, like, alone.

Sorry, same slide.

So, yeah, so some of the structural factors,

which I know will be really obvious to folks attending an anarchist book fair,

because, you know, I know you folks, like, connect these dots regularly, but it is worth

naming that burnout is, like, heavily, heavily classed and racialized and gendered in terms

of, like, who experiences burnout and how.

You know, it's often really related to, like, poverty and financial precarity and the sort

of stress of surviving in capitalism.

Caring responsibilities and caring labor is like a massive dynamic, you know, like the

sort of precedents.

Before I burnt out really hard, I was caring

for, like, you know,

a really sick friend with cancer and then another, like, best friend who died.

And then, you know, you know, my grandparents who all died, and I was like, a carer for my

nan for five years.

So it's like the kind of division of labor of who does this caring work is like a critical

piece as well, but also recognizing the kind of,

you know, the driver of burnout, which is wage labor.

Right.

And selling our labor for **** we don't want

to do but we have to do to survive.

Class is obviously a massive factor, like whether someone can access any kind of rest or

respite or whether they have, like, a safety net and what a feeling of a safety net does

for someone's nervous system, you know, whether they can just call their parents and

ask for support or whether if they don't,

you know, actually do that job, like they're on the streets.

Like, that's.

Yeah, it's a real, like, class division in

terms of.

Yeah, trauma and, like, the distribution of trauma,

access to support and health care.

You know, like, who can.

I mean, burnout prevention isn't about going to a spa.

Right? But I'm just saying that, like, whether you

can access healthcare to support you with your chronic disease or chronic inflammation,

you know, whether you can access, like, therapy or, you know, like, other forms of

support to, like, process trauma and, you know, like,

all of these things are potentially very inaccessible to groups of people in a targeted

way, obviously, in capitalism and, you know, in state violence.

But, yeah, it's kind of a Critical piece like disability and chronic illness, like I really

wrote about in the Overcoming Burnout book.

Like how I was like unlearning my ableism because I'd been a very normative kind of

quote unquote, like able bodied person, which I hate that term but you know, I hadn't

experienced illness like in that way.

And then suddenly I'm spending two years like with severe pain in and out of and then

navigating like the medical system and all the things I can't do because my energy is

limited.

And yeah, and then I got contributions.

I put a call out for people all over the

world, contacted me with their experiences of chronic illness and organizing and their

frustration with ableism in group spaces and what things could help them to participate in

social struggles because they really ******* cared but had,

you know, difficulties and limitations that other people had no comprehension of.

So yeah, that's a major factor again relating to class like housing instability and lack of

safety,

state violence, you know, things like state repression and massive drivers of burnout.

Like I know like, you know, the time I spent in prison and all the years before and after,

like navigating all this fear and uncertainty were like major drivers of my cortisol levels

and my stress levels that led to this kind of burnout moment.

And yeah, like I've mentioned, like all burnout is kind of worsened by oppression and

marginalization.

And I know those factors compound as well.

So what I didn't realize until I really started learning about this stuff when I got

chronically sick and then built on that over several years of clinical training is how much

burnout is really biological.

So you know, it's not just our kind of,

yeah, it's not just our attitudes or you know, blah, blah, capitalism, but it's literally

like our bodies can only cope with so much and we might have desires and intentions to keep

going but they're unlikely to be matched by like a physical ability to cope.

And you know that we do experience things like stress hormone cycles where if we're

constantly pumping out stress hormones that will have a longer term consequence on our

health in terms of reducing our body's ability to then cope with further stress.

And that's why things like class and trauma play a massive factor.

Because if someone like I'm bouncing into prison as a 21 year old growing up with a

single parent family on benefits, with loads of horrible abusive men in and out of our

life, like a lot of experiences of moving around and instability and you know,

my mum had very serious mental health issues when I was growing up, so it was like by the

time I got to prison, I was already like a state, you know, and already had been pumping

out those stress hormones for like, you know, two decades.

Whereas other people might land into that situation without that background and

therefore have much more physical capacity to tolerate stress.

And now I've got a baby.

I'm trying so hard to bring him up with

minimal stress and, you know, not having a lifetime of cortisol, you know, this kind of

stress hormone spike in his body.

Hormones are like really complicated and it's way more complex than I'm talking about now.

But I'm just saying that stress affects every physiological process in the body.

And also like I wrote a blog about the ecology of feeling that there are so many factors that

contribute to someone feeling awful.

Like, it's not just capitalism is awesome is

awesome,

capitalism is awful.

So therefore I feel depressed.

It is actually also capitalism is awful.

But I'm really deficient in magnesium, which

means I'm a major insomniac or, you know, I don't have enough B6, which means I'm having

panic attacks or my gut microbiome is really kind of disordered because of all the chronic

stress.

So therefore,

you know, my guts are really bad or I'm dealing with chronic infections.

You know, all of the things I'm basically saying like our ecology and our environments

like massively shape whether, you know, how we feel on a day to day basis and our kind of

experiences of burnout and our like, you know, potential risk of burnout.

And obviously there's like a whole other like environmental justice angle of who is being

exposed to, for example, a certain chemical and then that's creating chronic disease and

inflammation and you know, it's like super racialized like pollution and blah, blah,

blah.

Anyway, I'm just saying that biology is like a massive part of burnout.

And if you're struggling right now, it might be not just a quote unquote mental health

thing, but actually like a physical thing in your physiology that is really affecting your

ability to, to cope.

So yeah, there's also massive like cultural factors, right?

Like it is the water we swim in.

So like we are all coming to life with these

like inherited cultural worldviews which I know are different from, you know, place to

place.

But some of these are, you know, quite, quite like, have I got another side here?

No, like quite prevalent in movements for social change as much as just normal life.

So this kind of like macho social culture stuff and like emotional repression.

So when I Was a kid going through all the repression.

My sort of elders in the movement were always talking about, oh, prison is a holiday camp.

Like,

yeah, they were all talking about how, you know, prison's a holiday camp and, like, we

don't suffer compared to the animals.

So, like, you couldn't complain.

You know, it's like, really taboo to talk about burnout or trauma or anything else.

I've already mentioned ableism, but that, again, is like, a massive factor in our

movements.

Sanism and neurotypicalism.

It's like this pressure of, like,

just, you know, the culture are in.

Of, like, you have to be this, like,

neurotypical person who, quote, unquote, functions in society.

And if there's any, like, divergence of that, then that's, like, punished, you know, like,

if you,

quote, unquote, fail to cope, like, in, you know, that's how they frame it, then,

okay, what if, you know, you ******* get put in a ******* psychiatric hospital or whatever,

or get, you know, culturally, socially isolated.

Like, there's all these things.

I'm so sorry.

I've realized I've been talking for 13 minutes and I've not got very long left.

So anyway, I'm just saying it's like this cultural factor that, you know, is part of

kind of driving burnout is like, our inability to talk about feelings, to name our feelings,

to identify what we need to communicate with other humans.

And, yeah, just this, like, intense individualism and exceptionalism of, like, if

I just keep doing this, if I for a run every morning,

if I go swimming once a week, if I have sex, you know, every day, blah, blah, blah, like,

maybe I won't burn out or I won't be the one affected by, you know,

******* supporting people getting talked in prison, like, for ******* 20 years on end.

Like, we think we can be the exception to the rule rather than just recognizing, like, we

live in a really intense,

oppressive culture where the responsibility to not burn out is placed solely on the

individual.

And then, you know, we're really coming at things with this, like, intense, intense

Protestant work ethic.

And I really know this from having

relationships with people.

Like in the Basque country and stuff.

And the Spanish state is like, you know, like,

you really realize this, like, intense English colonial attitude to, like, work ethic.

And it's so ingrained in ourselves of, like, how hard you're meant to work and you're only

worthy if you're, like, productive.

You know, just this intense workaholism of, like, ignoring our feelings by,

you know, focusing on other tasks and projects.

And things.

And then, yeah, now this hangover of Christianity around judgment and criticism and

never doing enough and feeling inherently not good enough.

Like, and, you know, just this culture we're in where we're like, constantly tearing each

other down and criticizing each other and,

you know, like, yeah, just this.

I'm not talking about cancel culture in the

sense of like,

you know, the fashion.

Organize the ******* benefit gig somewhere.

Let's close it down.

I'm talking about the culture of fear people

have about saying the wrong thing, quote, unquote, wrong thing,

even if, you know, they are where they are on their particular political education journey.

And just this, like, intense fear of social isolation if we make a mistake, like, we will

lose everything.

We will lose our livelihood, our social group,

you know, whatever, if we just like, up even once, you know.

And like, we live in this, like, intense kind of culture of fear where there is this, like,

you know, these major drivers of perfectionism in what we do.

So. Yeah, and then, you know, so, like, just people living in normal society are really,

like, dealing with all this ****, let alone, like, oppression and structural violence and

poverty.

But then, you know, you throw in trying to ******* change it all and being involved in a

social movement and there's just like a whole other thing of, like, pressure on us.

So, you know, we're often organized in groups where like, like, the ******* workload is

insane.

Like, oh, sorry to use sanest language, but

like, you know, we put so much pressure on ourselves.

Like, oh,

our tiny group of six people have to stop six megaprisons from being built all over the

country.

It's like, come on, man, like six people versus, like this massive state.

And they're literally billions of pounds.

Prison building program.

And okay, like, the campaign was like, very effective, but.

But just the pressure we all put on ourselves is so intense.

And often, obviously there's this like, you know, these high stakes organizing where,

you know, if we don't do this, this and this,

maybe someone will ******* die.

You know, that's literally how it is.

You know, like, say, I know a lot of people in the Balkans do border solidarity work.

I mean, people are doing like, no borders work all over Europe.

But it's like,

yeah, like, if that rescue ship doesn't make it to those people, like, they will *******

drown.

And that level of, like, stakes is so high,

like on the sort of human psyche when we've just been evolved to like, forage plants.

Do you know what I mean? So,

yeah, I've already mentioned about perfectionism and high standards.

People are Often like really organizing with these like intense physical demands.

Whether that's, you know,

living at some sort of protest site or even just like having a job looking after a baby

and then trying to organize on top and having no rest, like, like, you know, our bodies are

often subjected to like really intense like the emotional weight of what we're dealing

with.

Like just, you know, the grief and the rage at the injustice in the world.

Like that, you know, it just weighs heavy on you.

Right.

And then trauma.

So, you know, I see trauma as like any kind of like wounding or distressing experience.

So there's like plenty of those if you're involved in a social movement, movement, you

know, if you think about state repression, like, not only are we trying to survive

capitalism, you know, the same as everyone else, and then being involved in this like,

weird movement where everyone is horrible to each other,

and then dealing with like the violence of the state, the fear of getting arrested, of

getting raided, of going to prison,

you know.

Yeah. And then just living where there's like a low priority on collective care where we

don't talk about what we need and our bodies need.

And it's very difficult to be like, I need a break.

And then.

Yeah, don't get me started on this last one

around fetishization of poverty that like our movements, you know, I understand anti

capitalism, obviously,

but like there's a glamour around poverty that is glamorized and anyone who's actually grown

up in real poverty, you know, doesn't share that.

But there is a real taboo around like earning money or trying to build a livelihood when

actually like, it's really important that we build infrastructure, you know,

whether that's workers, co ops, or even just investing in our own livelihoods.

Like me, for example, becoming a herbalist has been life changing in terms of like bringing a

tiny bit more financial stability to my life.

But so, yeah, so somehow we're meant to deal with all of this stuff without any money.

And yeah, it's like ****** out.

It's no wonder that everyone is like sick and

tired and burnt out.

Okay, so,

yeah, I guess like just moving on to like, what the can we do about all of this?

The first chapter in the first blog I wrote was called Confronting Denial.

And it was really about me addressing like where the am I in,

you know, how am I really feeling? And that means like confronting denial about

our workloads, like processing our grief.

We don't want to rest because rest means feeling, but we need to allow ourselves to

experience feelings.

And I had a really Amazing comrade who gave me

free counseling for like two years,

which was incredible at the time.

But she gave me this metaphor of a tap of you

don't have to open the whole tap and be flooded by it.

You can just let it out a little bit.

And I think that, yeah, I've carried that with me forever now.

So yeah,

I obviously encourage people to ask for support behind it before it's kind of like

quote, unquote, too late.

But yeah, on my website I've got a link here

to one of the blogs I really talk about, like the signs of burnout that are sometimes like

quite subtle around, you know,

like, not wanting to socialize, things like this that I encourage you to look at if you

want to kind of like, yeah, question yourself about how you're really feeling and what you

need.

So I wrote another blog which was called Transforming, Not Withdrawing, which was all

about like, everyone thought that I was just like writing this goodbye letter, right.

Like I'm just dropping out and it wasn't the ******* case.

Like, I desperately wanted to stay involved, but I just needed things to change.

Like, and it's all very well having amazing, you know, quote unquote self care when we,

we're not under all this strain.

But like, how the **** do we keep going and keep caring for each other?

Because I want this work to continue.

Like, I want people to be liberating animals

and protecting land from destruction and doing mutual aid work and you know, all the things.

So how can we transform our collectives instead?

And yeah, just some like super tangible examples from one of the crews that I was in

that I talk about in the book, which is, you know, we fundraise collectively for

counseling, for supporting each other in the collective.

We changed our kind of policy on our expenses of like, while I'm traveling and doing

workshops around the country or speaking tours or whatever, then we buy a decent meal.

Like we eat well,

you know, instead of getting a train at four in the morning because it's ten pounds cheaper

than one at like rush hour, we get the one when our body has had enough sleep even if it

costs our collective a bit more money.

So just, yeah, noticing our kind of needs of our body and trying to of respond to them

together.

You know, things like travel opportunities for people who haven't been able to travel because

of like their class context.

You know, like scheduling breaks and like

quality time off, prioritizing access.

Things like, sorry, things like childcare,

confronting the division of labor, like in our groups.

Reducing overwhelm, like less meetings, please.

You Know, like, thinking about how we communicate with each other and what is

necessary communication and what isn't.

Saying no to more things.

Like, I'm not gonna go and do another workshop, for example.

And here I am doing a talk at a book for.

Anyway,

focusing on, like, more achievable goals.

Like, okay, maybe we can actually stop a

massive prison building program, but maybe we can try and start a local group that can,

you know, challenge it in the,

you know, the planning system or, I don't know, just.

Yeah, making things a bit more achievable.

Don't get me started on this.

Around arrests and cannon fodder and,

you know, just rejecting a culture where it's okay for people to get arrested and go to

prison, even though they've maybe achieved nothing.

Like, I really hate this, like, civil disobedience stuff.

It's like,

do something and get away with it and have good security culture.

Like, I don't like repression used as a strategy because I've just seen behind the

scenes of people getting traumatized over and over again.

So, yeah, like, trying to have good security culture to kind of prevent this repression or

not prevent repression, but you know what I mean?

Like, buffer for the chances that someone's going to go to prison.

Group activities to process grief, like rituals or making altars at events with fallen

comrades,

or, you know, starting an accessible herbalism practice to support folks experiencing

burnout.

That's what I've done.

Okay, so, yeah, I've Talked for my 20 minutes now.

Yeah, that was very quick.

I'm sorry.

Just gonna share some resources.

So one of them is I teach this herbalism PTSD

and traumatic stress course, which just covers all of this ******* stuff.

It covers, like, the biology of burnout and chronic stress, how stress affects the body,

different nervous system states, different herbal support, nutritional interventions, all

of the things how we collectively respond to stress.

And it's open for enrollment really soon on the 22nd of September.

It's open for like 10 days or maybe 2 weeks.

And then I kind of close it down again.

But it's completely sliding scale, so no one is turned away for lack of funds.

You know, you can literally access it for nothing if needed.

So, yeah, please check that out.

I've got a podcast, Frontline Herbalism

Podcast, where I,

you know, have different interviews with different herbalists and organizers and other

things and talk about these sorts of themes.

I've obviously got the Overcoming Burnout

book.

Go and buy it from John Active.

It'll be at the book fair somewhere.

Or you can also buy the ebook online for three pounds.

I've got a book called Herbalism and State Violence if you're interested in more.

Sort of like the political opportunities of herbalism and that in practice.

Practice. And yeah, I also offer herbal care packages for people in different grassroots

collectives and people experiencing repression or leaving prisons.

So you can find it all@solidarityapothecary.org thank you for

listening.

I'm so sorry for talking so fast, especially when I'm sure people have English as a second

language.

So I'm sorry.

Anyway,

take care everyone.

And yeah, thank you for your time.

Thanks so much for listening to the Frontline Herbalism Podcast.

You can find the transcript, the links, all the resources from the show at Solidarity

apothecary.

Org Podcast.