How excitement can lead to brain injury survivor burnout

Everybody has experienced burnout after they have been overly busy. Usually this is with work or chores. If you’re a bit of a party animal it could be after a heavy night out. However, when you have a brain injury even activities which aren’t too physical but are bundles of fun can be too much. 

Most of you will know by now that I am a MASSIVE animal lover. I’m one of those nutters who tell creatures “you’re so cute, I could eat you!” (Here’s a random fact for you: the part of the brain that registers cuteness is close to the area responsible for aggression.  The urge to squish the cute animal or child is known as cute aggression, but I will come back to that.) Therefore you can appreciate how excited I was to join James’ family for a day out to Longleat Safari Park. For my international friends, this is a remarkable old country estate belonging to Alexander Thynn, the 7th Marquess of Bath. It’s in the English countryside and Longleat house dates back to the 15 hundreds, and has an incredible 130 rooms. In 1966 it opened as the first drive through safari park outside of Africa. It’s a wonderful place because even Lions can roam in a contained field rather than a cage like we are used to seeing in Zoos. If you’re wondering how this works, just watch Jurassic Park, the key locking system is pretty much the same.

There were 2 moments that I got really over excited at – hand feeding some deers that poked their heads in the car window, and feeding sea lions from a boat. There were so many beautiful animals and we were there all day, so there’s far too much for me to write about here, but I think you get the picture.

The price for all that excitement; brain injury survivor burnout.

I want to start off by saying that I wouldn’t change my animal experience for anything in the world. However, I was absolutely exhausted for over a week afterwards. It had caused me to burnout with mental exhaustion. Usually people suffer from this when they have been under prolonged stress. But brain injury survivors can be subjected to this even when it’s a positive situation that they are responding too. As the injured brain is already having to work significantly harder than an uninjured one, even a raised heart rate and release of happy chemicals and hormones can seriously deplete your energy levels. 

How cute aggression can contribute to mental exhaustion.

Katherine Stavropoulos, Ph.D. is a specialist in the brain’s reward system and headed up a deep study into what is happening when people like me want to squish cute things. She said “My hypothesis is that cute aggression serves as a ‘regulating’ response when people are feeling too overwhelmed by something cute,” explains Stavropoulos. “I think when people are overwhelmed by how cute something is, and their reward system is really activated, there might be this need to regulate that overwhelming feeling, and cute aggression may serve that role.” In other words this sounds like it relates back to what I was saying earlier about the amount of energy your brain is using. The positive experience of seeing the cute creature gets paired with a negative emotion, like wanting to squish them. This is thought to be happening because you have become overwhelmed by their cuteness, and therefore you are less likely to be able to give it the care and attention that it needs to thrive. I don’t quite know if that means we are only steps away from when animals eat their offspring when food sources are scarce, but it sounds like it could be.