Consumption culture burned me out

Part two: investing in what is actually restorative

Silver Lake, CA x Lani Trock

Part 2

There I was, cleaning my own pee off the floor of a hotel room. Not because I’d been drunk or 9-months pregnant—because I had worked myself into such an exhausted and delirious state that I couldn’t drag my body from my bed to the toilet. I don’t even remember it happening. Nic and I just found the soaked carpet in the morning.

If you read part 1, you’ll know how I got there. I was spending 12-hour days building my breathwork practice in L.A., spending a third of my income on fistfuls of Erewhon supplements, and making myself wholly unwell while striving to "make it" in the L.A. wellness scene. 

What follows is how I finally, painstakingly shifted my focus from consumptive wellness to actually taking care of myself.

For the first part of that burnout cycle I did what most of us do, I avoided rest. I tried to feel better with supplements, acupuncture, reading, and special diets. It was so ingrained in me to keep consuming that I couldn’t see how much it was preventing me from the medicine I desperately needed, the medicine of rest. I believed that if I could come up with the right formula for my burnout, I would get better faster. Then I could get back to my fabulous life on paper.

But no amount of special potions or smoothies could save me from what I knew to be true: the hustle and the striving were taking me down.

After nearly a year of excessive discomfort and exhaustion, I yielded to the screams from my body, the pee soaked floors, and the internal voice that had been whispering, Slow down, to me for months. 

So, I slowed down.

Care over consumption

I moved out of Los Angeles and settled in the Oakland hills. I reduced my expenses. I cried a ton. I started to untether myself from the hustle and the fantasies that hard work and fame would make up for how bad I felt about myself most days. 

I began to practice the deep and intensely uncomfortable work that I’d guided my clients through for years. The work of paying attention to the signals from my body. The work of honoring my body’s needs for nourishment, rest, play, and nature. The work of noticing each time I wanted to obsessively consume a supplement, podcast, or self-help book. The work of not consuming the thing and sitting with my sadness, fear, or anxiety instead. The work of slowly, one breath at a time, learning to tend to my own needs rather than constantly reaching out for something to change how I feel.   

In Oakland, I felt freer to do this work, to practice less consumption and more care. It turns out that walking in the Redwoods, exploring how to feel safer in my body, reducing blue light, and unpacking why I was so addicted to working, to hustling, to trying to be famous, were actually enormously restorative practices. I even wrote a book about the importance of rest.

Flash forward eight years, and I haven’t confronted a cycle of deep burnout in several years. All that chaotic consumption in L.A. ultimately pushed me to practice investing in what is actually restorative. Turns out, there isn’t a supplement for it. 

Care over consumption in my life today is similar to how it was back when I landed in Oakland. This looks like time walking and playing on the land with the kids, making sure we get to the river a few times a week while it’s still hot, brushing Elsa (my giant Pyrenees), drinking water, remembering to forgive myself, stretching, staying committed to my writing practice, cuddling with Nic, and calling close friends for brief catch ups.

Something I have been reflecting on this summer is how confused I was about care, not just when I lived in L.A. but for much of my adult life. I thought care was something you had to buy for yourself, like flowers, supplements, a SoulCycle class, or an expensive face oil. This is what our capitalist culture and now billion dollar wellness industrial complex wants us to believe too, that care and consumption are one and the same. 

What is far more radical and nourishing to explore, I think, are what care and restoration can look like outside of that structure:

How can we nurture ourselves outside of consumption?

What might that look like? How might that feel?

What might that shift for us and our communities?

It took moving out of Los Angeles to recognize how much consumption culture was driving my life. When you’re in the middle of something, it’s hard to know what’s real. When everyone around you is hustling and striving, it’s hard to notice that you’re also hustling and striving. It’s hard to notice that you are caught in a current of energy that is much bigger than you are, one that has far reaching cultural messaging, and one that keeps dangling shiny carrots in front of you, ever so slightly out of reach.

Our family recently took a trip to Los Angeles. Each morning I made my way into Erewhon for a $22 matcha latte with fresh coconut whip cream. Yes, you read that correctly. A $22 latte. It was the epitome of consumption. Each trip to the tonic bar at their newly opened Pasadena location, I joked that it was my morning self-care ritual. I placed my latte order right next to the sign of the Hailey Bieber’s skin smoothie that broke the internet, chuckling to myself. Ten years ago I would have been elated to have my own branded smoothie at Erewhon. My own wellness-approved status symbol that I had in fact made it and that everyone should be drinking what I am drinking. Can you even imagine?!

I enjoyed my matcha to the last drop, got back in the car where Nic and our children waited, and headed north. Back to the Sierras where we moved four years ago. Back to our afternoon walks through the Oaks. Back to regularly-priced lattes from our country coffee shop.