by Penni Perri | Jan 29, 2026 | Uncategorized
I’ve been thinking about the current climate—spiraling turbulence, uncertainty, and the unsettling sense that the ground keeps shifting under our feet.
In my work with health care professionals and leaders, I’m noticing more people quietly slipping into survival mode.
It makes sense that people are hunkered down.
When the world feels unstable, the nervous system braces. We become hypervigilant, guarded with everything: energy, time, money—even the possibility of change. Even trust. Even hope.
We tell ourselves: Now is not the time to try something new.
Here’s the hard truth: If you wait for the world to stabilize before you come out of survival mode, you may be waiting a long time.
Survival mode isn’t weakness. It’s physiology. It’s what happens when your nervous system decides the world is not safe enough to relax.
It’s a protective reflex—automatic and intelligent—designed to help you respond to perceived threats. When your brain perceives sustained pressure (chaos in the world, uncertainty, constant demands, moral distress, lack of control), it does what it’s supposed to do:
– it prioritizes scanning for problems
– it narrows attention to immediate tasks
– it reduces access to nuance, creativity, and flexibility
– it shifts you into get-it-done mode
That mobilization can be lifesaving in acute moments. But when it becomes chronic—when the threat response becomes your baseline—your system pays for it.
Not all at once. At first, it’s subtle.
Then it starts to feel like you’re stuck in that one gear. You begin to feel like a machine—a machine that’s always on, always wound up and in overdrive. The constant “wired and tired” state leaves you with little energy for anything besides “just get through.”
Just get through this week. Just get through ’till vacation. Just get through the winter. And then you find a year has passed.
Survival mode is a trap because it keeps you moving while slowly stealing the very things that make your life feel worth living: emotional availability, agency, meaning, joy.
And that’s when survival mode quietly calcifies into burnout.
What if: You don’t have to wait for the storm to pass.
Because here’s what I’ve learned in this work: interrupting the survival mode/burnout cycle can be, in and of itself, a kind of shelter from the storm.
The goal isn’t to ignore external events. The goal is to stop letting external turbulence have the final vote over your health, your relationships, your career, and your sense of self.
When you stop bracing and start restoring internal resilience—when you reclaim agency over what you can control—you’re not denying the chaos around you. You’re creating stability within it.
You’re building the very resources that help you weather uncertainty without being flattened by it.
The more you let external events keep you in survival mode, the more you feel at the effect of those events. That’s the trap.
But the moment you begin to reverse burnout—even in small ways—you shift from reactive to responsive. From helpless to grounded. From depleted to replenished.
You become the shelter.
How to start climbing out (without a total life overhaul)
Leaving survival mode does not require a dramatic reinvention. It requires small, consistent actions that reduce the internal cost of bracing and restore a sense of agency.
Here are three starting points:
Step 1: Name the pattern (30 seconds, no judgment)
Ask yourself: Which feels most true right now?
– I’m primarily exhausted
– I’m primarily disengaged
– I’m primarily feeling powerless
Naming it is not trivial. It shifts you from “this is just me” to “this is a symptom, a state.”
Step 2: Turn toward what you can control
Pick one action that creates even a small increase in agency. For example:
– a boundary you’ve avoided
– a conversation you’ve postponed
– a request for support
– a neglected self-care habit
– a schedule adjustment
– a decision you keep delaying
Not ten things. One thing. Then make the decision and follow through. This act of honoring a decision creates a sense of reliability—a sense of being able to count on yourself to have your own back.
Survival mode hates decisions, hates agency. Because these enable you to leave the cave.
Step 3: Reconnect to meaning in a way that doesn’t exhaust you
Ask yourself: What part of this work still matters to me—and where have I stopped letting myself feel it?
You don’t have to force positivity. This is simply about re-opening one small channel of purpose—because purpose is not fluff. It’s your fuel.
If you can tell you’ve been stuck in survival mode—emotionally exhausted, disengaged, or feeling powerless—I want you to know: these are signals. Signals that survival mode has perhaps hardened into burnout.
Burnout isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s also not a badge of honor.
It’s a syndrome that can be reversed. Reversed, healed, and prevented.
If you’re reading this and thinking: This is me, let’s talk.
Book a Burnout Reset Plan Call (Zoom, 50 minutes) here
On the call, we’ll identify your primary burnout driver and map a clear reset plan—so you can start feeling like yourself again without needing to burn your life down to do it.
by Penni Perri | Dec 3, 2025 | Uncategorized
Each year at this time, I share the books that moved me most—the ones I found myself imploring friends to check out, the ones I stayed up too late reading, the ones that shifted something inside me. Books are more than mindless escape. Stories help us make sense of things; stories help us heal. Stories change us, and they help us change.
Here are the books that changed me in 2025, organized in a way that I hope helps you in your holiday gifting.
For the season itself—heartbreaking and heartwarming stories set at Christmas:
Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory and Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These are both slim volumes that deliver such emotional reward. Capote’s story captures the tender friendship between a young boy and his elderly cousin as they prepare fruitcakes each December, a portrait of love and loss rendered in beautiful prose. Keegan’s novella, set in 1985 Ireland, follows a coal merchant who discovers something troubling at the local convent days before Christmas and must decide what kind of man he wants to be. Both stories break your heart and somehow also lift it—reminders that small acts of kindness and connection matter more than we know.
For cozy winter nights curled up with a mystery:
Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series transformed me from someone who’d never picked up a mystery novel into someone utterly hooked. French’s writing is gorgeous, her psychological insight so sharp and true. These aren’t just mysteries to solve—they’re explorations of how the past haunts us, how memory shapes reality, and how we become who we are. Start with In the Woods and prepare to lose yourself in the twisting streets of Dublin.
For an epic journey into another world:
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet is an immersive trip into post-war Naples and the fierce, complicated friendship between two women over six decades. Beginning with My Brilliant Friend, Ferrante draws you into a world of poverty, ambition, violence, and love with such intensity you’ll forget your own life for a while. This is the kind of series that consumes you entirely, and that you’ll think about long after reading the final page.
For a dear friend who deserves to be celebrated:
Love and Saffron: A Novel of Friendship, Food and Love by Kim Fay unfolds through letters between two women in the 1960s. This book will make you want to write actual letters again—the kind with stamps and stationery. It will also make you want to cook, to savor, to slow down. Fay captures what it means to be truly known by another person, the kind of friendship that nourishes like a perfectly prepared meal.
For the curmudgeon in your life, who could use some wisdom (but would never admit it):
The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman is the perfect antidote to toxic positivity. Burkeman explores the “negative path” to happiness through Stoic philosophy, Buddhist meditation, and the acceptance of uncertainty. It’s self-help for people allergic to self-help; thoughtful and deeply human without a single affirmation or vision board in sight.
For escape into pastoral England with a timeless heroine:
Sometimes we need to step completely out of our own time and into another. In 2025, rereading Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was medicinal time travel for me. It felt like stepping through a portal—the wild beauty of the Yorkshire moors, the gothic mystery of Thornfield Hall, and at its center, a heroine who refuses to diminish herself for anyone. Jane is fierce, moral, passionate, and uncompromising in her quest to live and love on her own terms. She’s as relevant today as she was in 1847.
For women at midlife navigating what comes next:
Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck is a collection of essays that feels like a conversation with that straight-shooting friend who always makes you laugh. She turns the indignities of aging into comedy, while also breaking your heart with truth. Ephron writes about maintenance, vanity, mortality, and everything in between, with clear-eyed honesty. If you love this one, pick up her first book, Heartburn—semi-autobiographical fiction that taught me years ago to “be the heroine of your life, not the victim.” That lesson continues to guide me.
This holiday season, consider that in giving a book, you gift a potential transformation: A portal into another world, another perspective, another possibility. Because ultimately, stories do more than entertain. They help us live better, deeper, more connected lives.
For more recommendations, check out my December posts from last year and the year before.
by Penni Perri | Nov 20, 2025 | Uncategorized
The holiday season: a time of joy, connection, and celebration. And also, if we’re honest, a time when stress levels spike and our best intentions sometimes crumble under the weight of impossible expectations. Whether you’re hosting the family gathering, traveling to see relatives, or simply navigating the packed calendar of events, the holidays have a way of testing our ability to be our best selves.
I want to offer you three powerful tools that can transform your experience of this season. These tools—boundaries, letting go of manuals, and gentle expectations—work together to create the space for genuine connection, joy, and yes, even peace amid the chaos.
- Boundaries—Your Gift to Yourself and Others
One of the most loving acts we can do for ourselves and those around us during the holidays is to create clear and firm boundaries. I know what you’re thinking: “But the holidays are about giving! Boundaries sound selfish.”
Let’s start by clearing up that myth right now.
Is it selfish to wear a coat when it’s cold outside? To take your vitamins? Wear sunblock? Brush your teeth? Not at all. You do all of these things to keep yourself well and healthy, which enables you to contribute to your world and be there for those you love. Boundaries are self-respecting, not selfish—they are an essential way we take responsibility for ourselves and our well-being.
Boundaries are decisions—firm and loving decisions about yourself, your priorities, your time, and your capacity — what you will and won’t do in given situations. Boundaries don’t expect anyone else to change.
When you set a boundary, you are deciding with yourself and for yourself what’s important to you, what’s harmful to you, and how you will show up for yourself—no matter what—based on these decisions.
Holiday boundaries might look like:
– Deciding how many events you’ll attend in a given week
– Choosing not to engage in conversations about contentious topics
– Setting a budget for gifts and sticking to it
– Protecting time for rest and self-care amid the busyness
– Leaving a gathering when you’ve reached your limit
You can let people know your boundaries if you want, though this isn’t always necessary. If you decide to share your boundaries with someone, it often works best when done in the spirit of connection and clarity. For example: “I want to spend time with you this holiday season, but I need to protect my evening routine with the kids. I’d love to meet for coffee one morning instead of doing late-night get-togethers.”
While there can be discomfort when setting boundaries, think of it as the same kind of discomfort felt during a good workout or when tackling a goal—there is so much positive emotion on the other side of the discomfort.
Boundaries are actually a prerequisite for connection. It’s hard to genuinely be present with others when we are disconnected from ourselves. When we say “yes” to everything and everyone, neglecting our boundaries, we are often simmering in so much resentment toward others and ourselves. Resentment prevents connection and over time, damages relationships.
In her book Rising Strong, Brené Brown notes that people with strong boundaries are more able to generate and feel compassion for others. A boundary is a way of filling our own cup with love and self-respect. Without that for ourselves, we will not have those things available to give.
Boundaries make room in our lives for the things that really matter to us. When we allow ourselves to say no to what doesn’t align with our truest values and desires, we can then say yes more fully, less grudgingly—because we’re not living life like a pat of butter spread too thinly across toast.
2. Letting Go of Manuals
Sometimes the most powerful tools in our personal development are the ones we must unlearn. Let me introduce you to a concept that transformed my relationships: Manuals.
It is our human nature to attempt to control all that we can in our environment—often and especially, other humans with whom we have close relationships. We create intricate rules for these particular humans about how they should feel, act, and behave in order for us to feel certain emotions. In effect, we create manuals for them. Then, we decide what it means when they do or don’t follow these manuals, and worse, we create rules about how we should feel based on their actions.
Sound familiar? During the holidays, our manuals go into overdrive:
– The whole family should spend loads of “quality time” together
– Dad should compliment the meal I spent all day preparing
– My sister shouldn’t bring up politics at dinner
– My partner should know what gift I’d love — without me telling him
– The kids should be grateful for all we do
Notice the word “should” in all of these statements? This word is a key signal that you’re writing a manual, and setting yourself up for disappointment, resentment and guilt. When we create manuals for others, we essentially outsource our emotions to them. It’s crazy, right? In our attempt to control someone else, we inadvertently give away all our power. These thoughts about how someone should or shouldn’t behave and what we should therefore feel or not feel—these thoughts pretend to protect us, but instead actually create a lot of struggle and negative emotions.
Here’s the thing: our emotions are an inside job, created by us through our own thoughts. No one else “makes us happy”—or sad, or mad, or anything else. Our emotions come from the thoughts we think. Period.
I get it—this is hard to take. I’ve written many, many manuals in my time, and suffered accordingly.
This holiday season, ask yourself: What unwritten rules do I have for my loved ones? How much are my emotions predicated on the actions of others? Notice your manuals without judgment, and then practice releasing them. You might be amazed at how much lighter you feel.
3. Gentle Expectations
It’s helpful to think of our minds having both a zoomed-out, macroscopic setting, and a zoomed-in, micro setting. While a generally optimistic mindset serves us well in many ways, high expectations about upcoming events can calcify into a kind of playbook about how things should be, creating frustration, disappointment, and what Byron Katie calls “arguing with reality.” Our expectations, if set too high and too rigidly, front-load pressure into our experience of anything—especially those events we’ve deemed to be positive, special, or fun.
Have you ever noticed that it’s often harder to be your best self with the people you most adore? Have you noticed a certain tension or strain when you’re finally in the situations you’ve anticipated and looked forward to? Holidays, birthdays, family gatherings—there is a fine line between the pleasure of anticipating these cherished events and the tendency to write a playbook for How This Should Feel and How Everything Should Go. And of course, How Everyone Should Behave. (Notice how this connects to our manuals?)
Whether you’re preparing a holiday dinner or unwrapping gifts on a cozy morning—what’s for certain is you will be having a human experience. Human experiences contain a mix of positive and negative emotions. You will bring your imperfect humanness to it, and the other humans sharing this experience will bring their humanness to it as well.
Expectations are powerful, and they are, in fact, just stories we are telling ourselves. These stories have the power to enrich or to poison any experience. What is the story you’re telling yourself about how things should be as you anticipate the coming holiday season? Are there places where your expectations are amplifying pressure, and how might you loosen that valve?
As you plan and look forward to the holidays—the family gatherings, the special meals, the gift exchanges, or even just getting through a typical December workday—the tool I offer you is this: Let your expectations be gentle. Gentle expectations are not low expectations. This is not “Let me predict the ways this could end up being a disaster.” That thinking sends our brain into primitive, protective mode, hunting for evidence.
Gentle expectations are held loosely. Gentle expectations allow for the mixture of positive and negative emotions in any situation. Paradoxically, when we allow for the negative, we are more open to the positive when it comes around. When we are preoccupied by a narrative about how things should be, we miss out on what is.
Gentle expectations allow things to be what they are and the people you love to be who they are—because they will. Your two-year-old will be a two-year-old. The weather will be less than cooperative. Your outspoken relative will share their unsolicited opinions, as they do every year. Much of your experience will not, in fact, resemble what’s documented in your friends’ Facebook and Instagram posts. You’ll get tired, angry, hungry, short-tempered, even on the days that the calendar tells us should be special.
Let yourself be human anyway. Meet all of it—your own humanness and that of others, and the unpredictable messiness of this human experience—with openness, compassion, flexibility. No matter what we plan and anticipate, so much of this life is out of our control. Our expectations are in fact a tool that we can control, that we can calibrate. Let your gentle expectations be a kind of raft that allows you to ride the waves of whatever life brings.
How These Tools Work Together
You may have noticed as we’ve gone through these three tools how they interweave and support each other.
When you set clear boundaries, you’re already practicing gentle expectations—you’re acknowledging that you can’t do everything and be everything to everyone. You’re accepting reality as it is, including your own limitations.
When you let go of your manuals, you’re freeing others to be themselves, which naturally leads to gentler expectations about how the holidays will unfold.
When you hold gentle expectations, you’re less likely to write detailed manuals for others, and you’re better able to recognize when you need to set a boundary to protect your own well-being.
Together, these tools create space for what the holidays are truly meant to be about: genuine connection, presence, and love—the messy, imperfect, beautifully human kind.
This holiday season, I invite you to experiment with these tools. Start with whichever one resonates most strongly with you. Notice what shifts when you implement it. Be patient and compassionate with yourself as you practice—these are skills we develop over time.
The goal isn’t a perfect holiday season. The goal is a real one, where you can show up as your whole self, love the people around you without conditions, and find moments of genuine peace amid the chaos.
