Rage & Restore: A Smashing Good Time to Beat Burnout
Have you ever wanted to hit something really hard?
Put on some boxing gloves and smash a punching bag?
Take the printer-on-the-fritz into the backyard with your kid’s baseball bat and attack it, Office Space style?
Burnout and rage.
Women in particular are burned out.
Deloitte’s Women @ Work 2022 report released in April 2022 says it all - widespread burnout reported, fueled by rising stress levels with 46% of women surveyed feeling burned out.
And this is not the kind of burnout that a good sprint on the Peloton Tread or a facial with a glass of wine is going to fix.
This burnout is different. It’s systemic. It’s relentless. It’s debilitating. It’s downright exhausting.
But I’m not a doom-and-gloom person by nature. I’m a recovering control freak who likes to double down when I’m told I probably can’t overcome something. In my POV, there’s always a way to solve a problem.
Enter the Rage Room experience. Rage & Restore as I’ve so affectionately named it.
A chance to shake loose some of this rage and burnout that I’ve been carrying and packing on, giving it over to my friend, the trusty sledgehammer.
I designed Rage & Restore after a conversation - or perhaps many - with my work-wife and fellow mom. Burned out and overwhelmed with the double, triple and quadruple stress we felt during the pandemic, she had the brilliant idea to take out some of the stress on unsuspecting glass bottles at a Rage Room.
This sounded like a fun night out for some far-off future date when all our responsibilities had subsided and the pandemic was merely a bad dream.
After I read the book, Burnout: The Secret To Unlocking The Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski, PhD and Amelia Nagoski, DMA, this fun night out in the far-off future took on a critical new meaning.
As the Nagoski sisters explain, stress and stressors are two different things.
Stressors are the often outside - but sometimes internal - perceived threat that activates the stress cycle.
Stress is the body’s response, activated through neurological and physiological changes in the body when a stressor is present.
This activation presents as the Fight, Flight or Freeze responses. This is the body’s way of handling the stressor. Like any good story, it turns out, the response needs to have a beginning (stressor), middle (response) and end (completion).
It’s the body’s physical need to complete the stress cycle that we so often miss. We literally get stuck in the stress response cycle, wound up tightly like a yo-yo, even if the stressor goes away. And worse yet, the stress cycles accumulate.
Emily and Amelia suggest cycle-completion through deep breathing, laughter, crying, movement & exercise, a really good hug, etc.
When I reached the middle of chapter 4, “The Game is Rigged”, Rage & Restore crystallized. The Nagoski sisters invite readers to find ways to smash, to release rage, to make progress. I was going to put this into practice.
Rage Room Hypothesis
My hypothesis before the rage room experience was to expect a cathartic release.
But I believe the path to cooling rage and smashing burnout goes beyond the sledgehammer. Before the festivities began, my work-wife and I would write our top three rage-inducing thoughts on index cards. This was what we were going to take with us into the rage room.
I believe that not only is it a critical step to name the stressor, but there is release in bearing witness with another person. It’s like finding the light switch in the dark so the entire situation can come into the light and be seen.
Illuminating the stressor in black and white makes it easier to access, so each swing of the bat can be focused on overcoming the stress cycles created by that stressor. Saying these stressors aloud to another person when moments later there is a mode to release them feels truly transformative.
The discomfort of pairing the pain-fueled litany with the sledgehammer is to name the truth and then create a pathway to release. We are unwinding as many stress cycles as we can, releasing the yo-yo.
And when it’s complete and all the wares are sufficiently smashed, we’d drag our adrenaline-fueled bodies outside to the restorative part of the evening to talk about what we felt in the moment.
What emotions came up for us?
Did we feel them release their grip?
What was it like to wind up the sledgehammer and break something hard with intention?
What does it feel like with a few less stress cycles wound around us?
What was our favorite part of the experience?
How did it make us feel and how can we bring more of that feeling into our daily practice of shedding stress cycles so they don’t accumulate as much?
I believe it’s possible to put energy and intention behind the experience - to own self-care and self-advocacy and burnout transcendence - to be equipped to show up in the world as you intend to, not in a way someone else feels you should.
Ahead of this maiden voyage, I could picture what I think it would be like - what it might feel like. And I hoped that the experience would become something I could return to in my mind’s eye, to revisit the transformation anytime I need to smash a stress cycle.
I want to be clear that rage and smashing inanimate objects is not intended to promote violence. But sometimes to feel something new, you’ve gotta do something new.
Maybe for you to find something new to unwind accumulated stress cycles, you’d rather go to a paint pouring or paint throwing party (both potentially forthcoming Pull the Focus events) to unleash your creative inhibitions. Or maybe you want to join a running club even though your last run was to the supermarket in your car.
The point here is to shake things up. Get uncomfortable. Being stressed out all the time is certainly uncomfortable. It’s truly an uphill battle to embark on saving the world - or even showing up in it with kindness - if your own internal pressure cooker is about to explode.
So find a new way to release the pressure.
Rage Room - The Experience
In an unplanned twist, my day was spent much like it was for 467 pandemic days - caregiving while working, this time a sniffly kid. Fortunately, I no longer view days like these with the same anxiety that I did last fall - I’ve thankfully processed a lot of those mixed feelings forced upon me by the pandemic and choices we made to keep our family with limited exposures. But it still felt apropos.
After a day of child caregiving while working full time and general work irritations, I was ready to rage.
It was a beautiful spring evening and the event space (read: bar) was not packed. First, we sat for a bit to talk about our top three rages that we wrote on index cards.
Then it was time to get suited up. The staff at Kraken Axes in Washington, DC was awesome and their suiting-up process really sets the stage for the full-body experience - and as safely as possible.
Outfits covered every inch of skin. Knee-high (or higher if you’re super short like me) big heavy boots slipped on underneath black polyester coveralls that buttoned at the neck. Thick - yet flexible - gloves covered our hands and helped grip the tools (excuse me, weapons as they call them). Heavy, brightly colored helmets complete with large ear coverings and a face shield protected our heads and faces.
I felt butterflies in my stomach. But suited up to an inch of recognition, we were as ready as we’d ever be to face our rage and, as it turned out, our fear, too. After all, sometimes these emotions - rage and fear - are two sides of the same coin.
That was not part of my hypothesis about what the event would bring up, but in the clarity of hindsight, it makes so much sense. So much of my pandemic-specific stress and rage was fueled by fear.
When I’m stressed about toxic cultures, it’s my fear of control or worth that comes up. And when I worry about the state of the world and what it does to all the brilliant, capable women I know, it’s fear of what the world looks like with their voices silenced and their actions suppressed.
During our Rage Room orientation, we were told to choose our weapon from a milk crate overstuffed with smashing tools, but we were encouraged to try them all. They each have a special quality to smashing - turns out a sledgehammer versus a rubber mallet produce a different smash-feel.
Between bats and giant wrenches, crowbars and sledgehammers, we rotated through several options, but quickly each of us found our favorite. Hers was a long, indestructible rubber baseball bat. Mine was what appeared to be a dainty crowbar - dainty in comparison to the other weapons. But glass bottles were no match for the dainty crowbar. It sliced through bottles in the most unassuming way.
It’s not just about the tool, I guess, but the magic is in how you wield it. I could say that about a lot of things in life. The weapon reminded me of myself. Small in stature, but when aligned with its purpose and activated, it did pretty powerful things.
There’s a push-pull between keeping your eyes open and closing them during the smashing experience, which feels a bit like rage. Sometimes rage is so powerful that it’s hard to look at or see straight. And other times, rage needs witness to hold perspective.
By the end of our 15 minutes, we were a sweaty mess. The little bits of glass all around us were no longer our problems that we brought to the room - nor our problem (having a cleaning crew may tie for first for best part of the experience).
We felt our hearts racing - from the fear, the unwinding of the stress cycles and the force we used to hit things. I shot a video immediately after we finished and my friend said I was bringing the zen. I felt calm and complete, despite my racing pulse and sweaty hair.
We unlocked something in that room. We took control. What I took out of that room was a visceral feeling of completion of something to tap into when I get the next rage-inducing problem launched into my lap. And I’ll remember how the dainty crowbar, when focused on the outcome, can slice through even the biggest problem with clarity and precision.
So what do you think? Are you ready to come RAGE with me?
I promise I’ll share the crowbar.