How to Give Fewer F*cks

They had already exchanged 21 WhatsApp messages that weekend, but it was the double ping she received en route to their Sunday dinner date that made 27-year-old Chloe’s adrenaline surge. “I’m so sorry to do this...” her friend Karen wrote, before bailing for the third time that month. Furious, Chloe stewed: her shoulders clenched, she wrote a passive-aggressive retort never to be sent, then realised that she’d also been lumbered with cancelling the reservation. Far from ending the weekend rested, she felt hopeless, mind-frazzled and shit.

This shit has a name –. “Emotions are based in the body, so emotional exhaustion becomes a kind of physical exhaustion when you don’t complete the cycle from stress-response to relaxation. For example, your muscles tense up without the release that’s supposed to follow.”