Every year we run this race, and every year we get to the finish line – the last couple of months of the year – ready to collapse, only to face the prospect of preparing for festive events and family gatherings, entertaining children and preparing ourselves for whatever fresh disaster hell our superheated global climate is readying for us.
It’s exhausting. But this year feels especially hard.
How often do conversations with family, friends and colleagues at the moment include at least one person commenting how tired they’re feeling? The news cycle keeps delivering horrors, shocks and moral affronts that drain our reserves. At the same time, we try to plough on with “normal” life: a calendar rammed with end-of-year events, office parties, school presentations, catch-ups with friends we haven’t seen for ages because we’ve been too busy; all the while many of us try to squeeze in a few more days of paid work because the dollar doesn’t stretch that far these days and we need all the money we can get.
In workplaces, homes, shops and schools, there’s a sense that much of Australia is running on empty; emotionally, physically and financially.
When it comes to reasons for anxiety and exhaustion, the cost-of-living crisis is high on the list. Rising prices for food and housing are never far from the headlines but wages aren’t keeping up.
At the same time, Australians have a problem with overworking. “We are a long-working-hours culture compared to other equivalent OECD countries,” says Dr Lisa Heap, senior researcher at the Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute. More than one in eight Australians work long hours, according to the latest figures. We also spend less time on leisure and personal care than the OECD average. “People who are in full-time employment [are] doing more hours than they’re paid for, and certainly more hours than they want to be doing.”
Many Australians save up their holidays for the end of the year but do little to take the pressure off during the year, says a Sydney psychologist, Amanda Gordon AM.
“Many people don’t pace their holidays during the year, and so there are many people who actually work 48 weeks and then have four weeks off,” she says. A survey found that one in five Australian workers have even more than four weeks’ leave banked, and 43% report their workload has increased in the last three months. “The fatigue is not only real, it is absolutely legitimate,” Gordon says.
She also sees a rush for psychological support to deal with the looming spectre of family conflict over the holidays; wanting to work out how to get through the pressure-cooker of the family Christmas table without things disintegrating into carving knives at 50 paces.
“Sometimes things have been going on for all of this year, since ‘last Christmas when we had the fight with Uncle Jack and how are we going to sit at the same table’, but we’ve got three days to fix it,” she says.
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While the end-of-year exhaustion is widespread, it is not evenly distributed. For people experiencing financial insecurity or distress, says Dr Cassandra Goldie, the chief executive of the Australian Council of Social Service, the holiday season is always stressful but this year things are particularly bad. “There’s no question that we’ve got far too many people now who just cannot make ends meet, at any time of the year,” Goldie says.
Acoss’s latest survey of Australians who were receiving any kind of government income support found nearly two-thirds of respondents were skipping meals or eating less to make ends meet, and more than 90% of renters were in housing stress.
“Then, of course, you come into the end of the year, and in a whole range of ways there’s expectations around additional spending,” Goldie says, whether it’s the office Christmas party or social catch-ups with friends. That increases anxiety and contributes to exhaustion.
For the general population this broader personal, emotional and financial anxiety and fatigue is also set against a backdrop of global conflicts and upheaval. The US election might have taken place on the opposite side of the planet but the nonstop campaign, odious rhetoric and the result which concerned many who value democracy and human rights played out in real time in the Australian media and on social media. It is impossible to avoid.
“It’s been a very difficult time for a lot of people, in particular communities, but also people who are feeling vicariously for those particular communities,” Gordon says.
Many are experiencing an underlying frisson of anxiety that means they are “not sitting comfortably in their lives”, she says. “They say, ‘I have a good life, everything is going well objectively, I’ve got enough to live on, I’ve got a place to live in, my family is safe and doing well, but I have this anxiety and I can’t sleep, or I find myself indulging in practices that I prefer not to.’”
Given our “negativity bias” invariably pulls us towards and into stories of drama and danger, leading to so-called “doom-scrolling”, there’s a growing awareness of the need to switch off from 24-hour connectivity to news and social media.
But that can be difficult to do when there is a global climate emergency that threatens every living thing on the planet. Looming inevitably at this time of year is summer in a time of global heating, or what Dr Chloe Watfern, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Black Dog Institute, calls Australia’s “disaster season’.
“Summer tends to be the time in Australia where we do see natural disasters at their worst, and we’ve seen a lot of them, in increasing severity, over the past years,” Watfern says.
What used to be the season of sun, surf (or turf) and sloth is now a far more mixed experience for many Australians, and a time we approach with a mixture of hope alongside fear, anxiety and dread draining our energy. “Memories of summer now are not only of the lovely Christmas family get-together, but evacuations and of sheltering and all those things that we now have to consider coming into the disaster season,” she says. This year is also on track to be the hottest on record, and in an Australian summer, that heat can be dangerous or even deadly.
There are no quick or easy solutions, either at the individual or societal level, for any of these issues. But Gordon says it can help to find some positive action that we can take, rather than be defeated by our fatigue.
“What you do [to combat exhaustion] is you don’t behave like an exhausted person,” she says. “You pay attention to your actual physical needs, but your emotional needs might be that you take action rather than hiding under the covers.”
She also recommends taking smaller holiday breaks throughout the year rather than trudging through stoically.
As someone herself on the climate frontline, Watfern is learning to let some things go so she can focus on what helps her feel better, like spending time in the outdoors, and slowing down so she can really be present in it rather than being “pulled in a million directions”.
“There’s always a lot of potential avenues to make change or to mobilise people,” she says. “But I’m also prioritising family and being out in nature.”
