Worse, Human Giver Syndrome says that path is not for everyone. Imagine an infant boy who learns to talk and walk and feed himself and control when he poops and pees; he learns to read and count and do chemistry; and he shifts from wanting to be held by his mommy to wanting to leave home and be independent, at which point he is a full-fledged human being. An infant girl, on the other hand, is supposed to grow independent up to a point, but then the next step is marriage and babies, at which point she is a full-fledged human giver. An identity grounded in autonomy is considered stronger, superior, and masculine. An identity grounded in connection is weaker, inferior, and feminine.
It remains popular wisdom that healthy people should feel 100 percent whole, with or without a romantic partner or the approval of others or the support of a family or community. Social connection should be a “bonus,” not an essential component to our well-being—a supplement, not a staple. No wonder the first waves of feminists considered independence the ideal.
This is the heretical truth: No one is “complete” without other people—and we mean this literally. To be complete without social connection is to be nourished without food. It doesn’t happen. We get hungry. We get lonely. We must feed ourselves or die. We don’t mean you “need a man” or any kind of romantic partner. We mean you need connection in any or all of its varied forms. And it is also true that the lifelong development of autonomy is as innate to human nature as the drive to connect. We need both connection and autonomy. That’s not a contradiction. Humans are built to oscillate from connection to autonomy and back again.
This chapter begins Part III: Wax On, Wax Off, where we describe daily choices and actions that will fight the causes of burnout—the enemies we named in Part II.
“Wax on, wax off,” as Mr. Miyagi instructs Danny LaRusso in The Karate Kid. “Don’t forget to breathe.” Breathing: another cycle, another oscillation—breathe in…breathe out.
“Connection” Is Literal
As twins, we have one pure talent, an ability bestowed on us from on high, with no training or effort on our part: the three-legged race. That’s the children’s field-day game where you tie one kid’s left ankle to another kid’s right ankle, and the pair runs down the field together, racing against other pairs of kids. At eight years old, we kicked ass at the three-legged race; we left everyone in the dust.
The same mechanism that allowed us to synchronize on the playground was also at work on the school bus: when one of us was being bullied and started to cry, the other started crying, too—seemingly out of the blue. We don’t even remember which of us was being bullied. There was no string tying us to each other as there was on the playground; there was only the emotional attunement that synchronized our feelings. But that attunement and synchrony are as concrete, as real, as the string.
Science has just begun to be able to measure this phenomenon. Two-person neuroscience (2PN) is brand new and researchers are still trying to establish the most valid and effective ways to measure, in the brain, the experience of connected synchrony, but so far the results are astonishing.6 When people watch a movie together, their brains’ emotional responses synchronize, even if they’re strangers. Simply sharing physical space with someone—mere co-presence—can be enough to synchronize heartbeats. We automatically mirror the facial expression of the person we’re talking to and experience the emotion that goes with those expressions, and we involuntarily match body movements and vocal pitch.7 We are all walking around co-regulating one another all the time, synchronizing without trying, without even necessarily being aware that it’s happening.8 Your internal state is profoundly contagious, and it is profoundly susceptible to “catching” the internal states of the people around you at work and at home and at the grocery store and on the bus.
This mutual co-regulation begins from the earliest moments of our lives, and it shapes our brains.9 The exchange of loving looks between infant and adult caregiver releases dopamine, a neuropeptide famous for bonding us with others and facilitating the growth of neural connections, while the exchange of negative looks between infant and caregiver releases cortisol, the infamous stress hormone, which disrupts the production of neural connections.10 You spent the first two years of life assuming that what you felt was what everyone around you felt—checking in with the adults around you to see how they felt, and adopting their feelings as your own. Not by choice; by instinct. If the grown-up holding you is calm and relaxed, then your nervous system knows it can be calm and relaxed, too. If that grown-up is stressed and anxious, then there must be something to be anxious about, so your nervous system puts you in that state, too.11
By the age of two or three, a child still can’t survive on her own, but she begins to understand that other people have internal experiences that are separate from hers. By adolescence, she might be able to survive on her own, but humans don’t go off alone, the way many other animals do. We stay in social groups and develop mutual connections with our peers, which are shaped by the ways we connected (or, more technically, “attached”) with our caregivers as infants.
Sharing space with anyone else means sharing energy—literally. Connection moves us at the level of our atoms. Each particle we are made of influences and is influenced by the particle next to it in an unending chain that exists on the smallest and largest scales you can imagine, and every scale in between. Swing a pendulum near another pendulum that’s the same size, and they will gradually entrain, often swinging in the same direction at the same time. We’re made of energy. The nature of energy is to be shared, to spread, to connect one thing to another. Sharing space with other people means that our energy influences theirs, and theirs influences ours. It’s physics. And psychology. And unavoidable. And amazing.
And what does this do for us?
It’s easy to hear “Connection is important!” and think it means something intangible, like emotional connection, gal pals cheering you on, romantic partners listening and holding you while you cry, and hearing your kid say, “I love you.” And it is that. Connection is a feeling.
But it’s also pragmatic. Life is complicated and expensive and time-consuming. We need help.
Julie needed help. Her—oh, God—“bowel retraining” required, among other things, half an hour every day for—oh, God—“toilet time.” To create that time, she had to offload some of the other things she was doing, things that still needed to get done, just not by her.
Her mom showed up for her; she cooked big meals on Sundays and brought them over, frozen, in containers. Diana’s friends’ parents showed up, helping with carpooling. To Julie’s amazement, all her friends showed up. One friend spontaneously organized a shared calendar, where everyone volunteered to bring food on different days or take Diana out.
You know who else showed up? Her husband.
It’s time to introduce you to Jeremy. Like Julie, he’s an English teacher. He wrote his master’s thesis on E. M. Forster. He has long eyelashes and intelligent brown eyes. When their daughter was obsessed with Tangled, he perfected a “smolder” look, just like Flynn Rider’s, and it worked as well on Julie as on Diana. He always called the plumber or the contractor or whoever else needed to be called and scheduled and met to keep the house standing. And he loved Julie. He didn’t understand how they had grown so far apart. All he knew is when he tried to help, he got scolded. So he stopped trying.
After Julie’s poop episode, she sat down with him for a serious talk, despite her dread of the fight it could trigger.
She explained the situation (one of the benefits of a long-term intimate relationship is you get to a point where you can talk frankly about each other’s poop), and she asked for what she needed: time.
He said, “Well, the house has to get cleaned. If we hired cleaners, we’d have to organize stuff before they come and I don’t want the hassle. I can do it myself, if you’ll just let me do it and not tell me how.”