Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cyclre (Emily Nagoski, Amelia Nagoski)

 

Man, I was feeling this one. It's been a tough year. This book was a light in the darkness. I listened to it while I was walking to school each day and it seriously brought light into my life while we've being thrust into at home learning. That, along with new budgets for next year, staffing and covid stressors made this a great and enlightening listen. I think it is full of great information whether one is feeling like they're burnt out or not. It's great anti-burnout information!

At the end of each chapter, the authors have a TLDR list. Really, they're just summaries with a trendy title. Somehow, the trendy title made them even better. 

Chapter 1 Complete the Cycle

• Just because you've dealt with a stressor, that doesn't mean you've dealt with the stress itself. You have to deal with the stress - complete the cycle - or it will slowly kill you. 
• Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the cycle, even if it's jumping up and down or a good old cry. Affection (a six second kiss, a twenty second hug, six minutes of snuggling after sex, helpless laughter) are social strategies that complete the cycle along with creative self-expression, writing, drawing, singing...whatever gives you a safe place to move through the emotional cycle of stress. 
• Wellness is the freedom to move fluidly through the cycles of being human. Wellness is thus, not a state of being, it is a state of action.

Chapter 2 Persist

• Frustration happens when our progress towards a goal feels more effortful than we expect it to be.
• You can manage frustration by using planful problem solving for stressors you can control and positive reappraisal for stressors you can't control. 
• When we're struggling, we may reach a point of oscillating between frustrated rage and helpless despair. Solution: choose the right time to give up, which might be now or might be never. Either way, the choice puts you back in the driver's seat. 
• Your brain has a built in mechanism to assess when it's time to quit. Listen to it's quiet voice. Or do a worksheet! Sometimes that's easier. 

Chapter 3 Meaning

• Meaning in life is good for you. You make meaning by engaging with something larger than yourself - whether that's ambitious goals, service to the divine, or loving relationships. Meaning enhances well-being when you're doing well and can save your life when you're struggling.
• Human giver syndrome is a collection of personal and cultural beliefs and behavior that insist that some people's only meaning in life comes from being pretty, happy, calm, generous and attentive to the needs of others. 
• The stress response cycle, the monitor and meaning are all resources you carry with you into the battle against the real enemy. 

Chapter 4 The Game is Rigged

• Women and girls, especially women and girls of color are systematically excluded from government and other systems of power. It's called the patriarchy. The patriarchy says it doesn't exist. It says that if we struggle it's our own fault for not being good enough, which is gaslighting.
• Human giver syndrome, the contagious belief that you have a moral obligation to give every drop of your humanity in support of others, no matter the cost to you, thrives in the patriarchy the way mold thrives in damp basements. The solution? Smash! See worksheet.

Chapter 5 The Bikini Industrial Complex

• The bikini industrial complex is a 100 billion dollar industry that tries to convince us that our bodies are the enemy, when in fact, the bikini industrial completes is itself the enemy.
• Bias against people of size can be more dangerous to our health than the actual size of our bodies and many of the things we do to try to change our bodies make our health worse.
• It is normal, nearly universal, to feel ambivalent about your body, wanting to accept and love your body as it is and at the same time wanting to change it to confirm with the culturally accepted aspirational idea. 
• Solutions? Embrace the mess. See yourself as the new hotness. Practice seeing everyone as the new hotness and tune into your bodies' needs.

Chapter 6 Connect 

• Connection with friends, family, pets, The Divine, etc. is as necessary as food and water. Humans are not built to function autonomously. We are built to oscillate between connection and autonomy and back again. We are all constantly co-regulating one another without even being aware it is happening: synchronizing heartbeats, changing moods and helping one another feel seen and heard.
• Certain kinds of connection create energy. When you share mutual trust and connected knowing with someone you co-create energy that renews both people. We call this the bubble of love.
• Sadness, rage and the feeling that you are not enough are forms of loneliness. When you experience these emotions, connect.

Chapter 7 What Makes You Stronger

• We will literally die without rest. Literally! Finding time for rest is not a #firstworldproblem. It's about survival. We are not built to persist incessantly, but to oscillate from effort to rest and back again. On average, we need to spend 42% of our time (10 hours a day) on rest. If we don't take the time to rest, then our bodies will revolt and force us to take the time. 
• Human giver syndrome tells us it is self-indulgent to rest, which makes about as sense as believing it is weak or self-indulgent to breathe. 
• Getting the rest your body requires is an act of resistance against the forces that are trying to rig the game and make you helpless. Reclaim rest, and you reclaim sovereignty over your own life.  

Chapter 8 Grow Mighty

• We each have a mad-woman in our psychological attic. She has the impossible job of managing the chasm of what we are and what human-giver syndrome has told us to be. 
• Self-compassion and gratitude empower us to recognize the difference between who we are and who the world expects us to be without beating ourselves up or shutting ourselves off from the world. 
• Self-compassion is hard because healing hurts and growing stronger can be scary - but it's worth it because healing helps us grow mighty enough to heal human-giver syndrome. 
• We don't have to wait for the world to change before we begin to heal ourselves and one another.

Conclusion: Joyfully Ever After

Notes:

• Joy doesn't come from within. It comes from connection with fellow givers.
• The stepping stone to joy is feeling like you are enough and feeling not enough is a form of loneliness. We need other people to tell us that we are enough. Not because we don't know it already, but the act of hearing it from someone else and equally the act of taking the time to remind someone else they're enough, is part of what makes us feel we're enough. We give and we receive and we are made whole.
• It is a normal healthy condition of humanity to need other people to remind us that we can trust ourselves. That we can be as tender and compassionate with ourselves as we would be as our best selves toward any suffering child. To need help feeling enough is not a pathology. It is not neediness. It's as normal as your need to assure the people you love that they can trust themselves, that they can be as tender and compassionate with themselves as you would be with them. This exchange, this connection, is the springboard from which we launch into a joyful life. 
  
• Wellness is not a state of mind but a state of action. It is the freedom to move through the cycles of being human and this on-going mutual exchange of support is the essential action of wellness. It is the flow of givers giving and accepting support in all its many forms.
• The cure for burnout is not self-care. It is all of us caring for one another so we'll say it one more time: trust your body. Be kind to yourself. You are enough just as you are right now. Your joy matters. Please tell everyone you know.

TLDR:

• Just because you've dealt with a stressor doesn't mean you've dealt with the stress. You don't have to wait until all the stressors are dealt with before you deal with your stress. Which is to say that you don't have to wait for the world to be better before you make your life better and by making your life better, you make the world better. 
• Wellness is not a state of being, but a state of action. It is the freedom to move fluidly through  the cyclical oscillating experiences of being human.
• Human-giver syndrome is the contagious false belief that you have a moral obligation to give every drop of your humanity, your time, attention, energy, love, even your body, in support of others, no matter the cost to you. 
• Pay attention to how different it feels to interact with people who treat you with care and generosity versus people who treat you as if they are entitled to whatever they want from you. 
• Humans are not built to function autonomously. We are built to oscillate from connection to autonomy and back again. Connection with friends, family, pets, The Divine, etc is as necessary as food and water. 

-Reread November 2024

-Reread December 2025 - This book hits home every time

Goodreads says:

This groundbreaking book explains why women experience burnout differently than men—and provides a simple, science-based plan to help women minimize stress, manage emotions, and live a more joyful life.

Burnout. Many women in America have experienced it. What’s expected of women and what it’s really like to be a woman in today’s world are two very different things—and women exhaust themselves trying to close the gap between them. How can you “love your body” when every magazine cover has ten diet tips for becoming “your best self”? How do you “lean in” at work when you’re already operating at 110 percent and aren’t recognized for it? How can you live happily and healthily in a sexist world that is constantly telling you you’re too fat, too needy, too noisy, and too selfish?

Sisters Emily Nagoski, PhD, and Amelia Nagoski, DMA, are here to help end the cycle of feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. Instead of asking us to ignore the very real obstacles and societal pressures that stand between women and well-being, they explain with compassion and optimism what we’re up against—and show us how to fight back. In these pages you’ll learn

• what you can do to complete the biological stress cycle—and return your body to a state of relaxation
• how to manage the “monitor” in your brain that regulates the emotion of frustration
• how the Bikini Industrial Complex makes it difficult for women to love their bodies—and how to defend yourself against it
• why rest, human connection, and befriending your inner critic are keys to recovering and preventing burnout

With the help of eye-opening science, prescriptive advice, and helpful worksheets and exercises, all women will find something transformative in these pages—and will be empowered to create positive change. Emily and Amelia aren’t here to preach the broad platitudes of expensive self-care or insist that we strive for the impossible goal of “having it all.” Instead, they tell us that we are enough, just as we are—and that wellness, true wellness, is within our reach. 

They also have a Ted video that explains their ideas well: