Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

by Emily Nagoski

In short, emotions are tunnels. If you go all the way through them, you get to the light at the end. Exhaustion happens when we get stuck in an emotion.

Meaning is often misunderstood as “the thing we’ll find at the end of the tunnel,” but it’s not. It’s why we go through the tunnel, regardless of what we find on the other end. (Spoiler alert: meaning is good for us.)

American women are, on average, five feet four inches tall—doesn’t mean it’s true about any specific individual within that group. So if you meet an American woman who isn’t five foot four, there’s nothing wrong with her, she’s just different from the average. And there’s nothing wrong with the science, either; it’s true that women are, on average, five foot four—but that tells us nothing in particular about any specific woman we may meet. So if you read some science in this book that describes “women” but doesn’t describe you, that doesn’t mean the science is wrong and it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. People vary, and they change. Science is too blunt an instrument to capture every woman’s situation.

Dealing with your stress is a separate process from dealing with the things that cause your stress. To deal with your stress, you have to complete the cycle.

Stressors are what activate the stress response in your body. They can be anything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine could do you harm. There are external stressors: work, money, family, time, cultural norms and expectations, experiences of discrimination, and so on. And there are less tangible, internal stressors: self-criticism, body image, identity, memories, and The Future. In different ways and to different degrees, all of these things may be interpreted by your body as potential threats.

Stress is the neurological and physiological shift that happens in your body when you encounter one of these threats. It’s an evolutionarily adaptive response that helps us cope with things like, say, being chased by a lion or charged by a hippo.

“When I was coming to terms with a trauma I experienced, sometimes my body would go into this state where I felt out of control, and it scared me because I felt out of control during the trauma itself. Now I know it was actually my body taking care of me; it was part of my healing.”

We call it “the Feels,” and it’s nothing to fear. It’s a normal, healthy part of completing the cycle, a physiological reaction that will end on its own, usually lasting just a few minutes. Feels usually happen in extreme cases where the stress response cycle is interrupted suddenly and not allowed to complete. It’s part of the healing process following a traumatic event or long-term, intense stress.

Physical activity is what tells your brain you have successfully survived the threat and now your body is a safe place to live. Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle.

Breathing. Deep, slow breaths downregulate the stress response—especially when the exhalation is long and slow and goes all the way to the end of the breath, so that your belly contracts. Breathing is most effective when your stress isn’t that high, or when you just need to siphon off the very worst of the stress so that you can get through a difficult situation, after which you’ll do something more hardcore.

Positive Social Interaction. Casual but friendly social interaction is the first external sign that the world is a safe place.

Laughter. Laughing together—and even just reminiscing about the times we’ve laughed together—increases relationship satisfaction.

Affection. When friendly chitchat with colleagues doesn’t cut it, when you’re too stressed out for laughter, deeper connection with a loving presence is called for. Most often, this comes from some loving and beloved person who likes, respects, and trusts you, whom you like, respect, and trust. It doesn’t have to be physical affection, though physical affection is great; a warm hug, in a safe and trusting context, can do as much to help your body feel like it has escaped a threat as jogging a couple of miles, and it’s a heck of a lot less sweaty.

Every day, he suggests, kiss your partner for six seconds. That’s one six-second kiss, mind you, not six one-second kisses. Six seconds is, if you think about it, a potentially awkwardly long kiss. But there’s a reason for it: Six seconds is too long to kiss someone you resent or dislike, and it’s far too long to kiss someone with whom you feel unsafe. Kissing for six seconds requires that you stop and deliberately notice that you like this person, that you trust them, and that you feel affection for them. By noticing those things, the kiss tells your body that you are safe with your tribe.

Hug someone you love and trust for twenty full seconds, while both of you are standing over your own centers of balance. Most of the time when we hug people, it’s a quick, lean-in type hug, or it might be a longer hug where you each lean on each other, so that if one person lets go, the other person would fall over. Instead, support your own weight, as your partner does the same, and put your arms around each other. Hold on. The research suggests a twenty-second hug can change your hormones, lower your blood pressure and heart rate, and improve mood, all of which are reflected in the post-hug increase in the social-bonding hormone oxytocin.

A Big Ol’ Cry. Anyone who says “Crying doesn’t solve anything” doesn’t know the difference between dealing with the stress and dealing with the situation that causes the stress. Have you had the experience of just barely making it inside before you slam the door behind you and burst into tears for ten minutes? Then you wipe your nose, sigh a big sigh, and feel relieved from the weight of whatever made you cry? You may not have changed the situation that caused the stress, but you completed the cycle. Have a favorite tearjerker movie that makes you cry every time? You know exactly when to grab the tissues and sniff, “I love this part!” Going through that emotion with the characters allows your body to go through it, too. The story guides you through the complete emotional cycle.

Creative Expression. Engaging in creative activities today leads to more energy, excitement, and enthusiasm tomorrow.15 Why? How? Like sports, the arts—including painting, sculpture, music, theater, and storytelling in all forms—create a context that tolerates, even encourages, big emotions.

One thing we know for sure doesn’t work: just telling yourself that everything is okay now. Completing the cycle isn’t an intellectual decision; it’s a physiological shift. Just as you don’t tell your heart to continue beating or your digestion to continue churning, the cycle doesn’t complete by deliberate choice. You give your body what it needs, and allow it to do what it does, in the time that it requires.

Because you experience stress every day, you have to build completing the cycle into every day. Make it a priority, like your life depends on it. Because it does.

If you’re hiding from your life, you’re past your threshold. You aren’t dealing with either the stress or the stressor. Deal with the stress so you can be well enough to deal with the stressor.

To be “well” is not to live in a state of perpetual safety and calm, but to move fluidly from a state of adversity, risk, adventure, or excitement, back to safety and calm, and out again. Stress is not bad for you; being stuck is bad for you. Wellness happens when your body is a place of safety for you, even when your body is not necessarily in a safe place. You can be well, even during the times when you don’t feel good.

Positive reappraisal involves recognizing that sitting in traffic is worth it. It means deciding that the effort, the discomfort, the frustration, the unanticipated obstacles, and even the repeated failure have value—not just because they are steps toward a worthwhile goal, but because you reframe difficulties as opportunities for growth and learning.3

Suppressing is, “I didn’t let it get to me.” If something matters, it should get to you! It should activate a stress response cycle. Denying that you experience the stress prevents you from dealing with the stress—and we know from chapter 1 what happens if you do that. If you notice yourself acting as though you’re fine when you’re deeply distressed, again: ask for help.

If you want to try using this principle rationally, all you have to do is write four lists: What are the benefits of continuing? What are the benefits of stopping? What are the costs of continuing? What are the costs of stopping?

For so many reasons, quitting is hard, and we can’t tell you what the right decision is. But knowing the factors that shape our reluctance to give up, we can say this: If you’re feeling not just frustrated and challenged, but helpless, isolated, and trapped, like you want to hide in a cave, or like you’d rather put your hand in a toilet full of tadpoles than spend one more day doing the thing, you should definitely quit whatever it is.

Life is rarely perfect. Nearly always, there is a gap between how things are and how we wish, hope, expect, or plan for them to be. The quality of our lives is not measured by the amount of time we spend in a state of perfection. On the contrary, people of vision—think of the principal social justice leaders of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—see the largest gap between what is and what ought to be, and they know they will not live to see a world that fully achieves their vision of what’s possible. A gap between reality and perfection is not abnormal or a sign of dysfunction; it’s a normal part of life.

The quality of our lives, day to day, is measured by our freedom to choose to stay or leave. That freedom comes when we have abundance enough and safety enough to let go of what is broken and reach for something new.17

A goal is not a life—but it may be what gives shape and direction to the way we live each day. If our goals are what we want to accomplish, “meaning” is why we want to accomplish them.

So rather than aiming for “body acceptance,” practice “mess acceptance.” Turn toward the mess of noisy, contradictory thoughts and feelings with kindness and compassion.

When you engage in physical activity, you know it’s good for you, because: completing the cycle and also: doing a thing. You also know that most people probably assume you’re trying to “lose weight” or “get in shape,” and part of you might still actively want to change the shape of your body. That’s all perfectly normal. Move your body anyway—because it really is good for you—and smile benevolently at the mess. Some days it will be messy as hell, other days it will be calm and clear, and every day is just part of the intensely body-neurotic world you happen to live in.

All your body requires of you is that you turn toward it with kindness and compassion, with nonjudgment and plain-vanilla acceptance of all your contradictory emotions, beliefs, and longings. We’re not saying that “beautiful” is what your body should be; we’re saying beautiful is what your body already is.

Authenticity means “being totally yourself” and sharing the most intimate parts of yourself, including the parts people might judge.19 Being authentic requires trust, knowing that the person with whom you share these potentially rejectable thoughts and feelings will not betray you.

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.

“Rest” doesn’t just mean sleep—though of course sleep is essential. Rest also includes switching from one type of activity to another. Mental energy, like stress, has a cycle it runs through, an oscillation from task focus to processing and back to task focus.

Life in the modern developed world is such that many of us have a vast overabundance of virtually everything…yet often we can’t meet our basic, life-sustaining, physiological needs without feeling guilty, ashamed, lazy, greedy, conflicted, or, at best, defiant.

A growing body of research has established that we do our best at any given task for only a limited amount of time, energy, or attention, then our performance drops off, our attention wanders, and our motivation evaporates.2 But resting after a depleting activity eliminates the effects of fatigue.

Mental rest is not idleness; it is the time necessary for your brain to process the world.

Walking away from a task or a problem doesn’t mean you’re “quitting” or giving up. It means you’re recruiting all your brain’s processes for a particular task—including the capabilities that don’t involve your effortful attention.

Boredom is the discomfort you experience when your brain is in active-attention mode, but can’t latch on to anything to attend to.

When you work your muscles—especially your biggest muscles—you strengthen not just the muscles you’re using but also your lungs and liver and brain. Exercising one part of you strengthens all of you; exercising the strongest parts of you strengthens the rest of you most efficiently. The same goes for cognitive, emotional, and social effort.

Physical activity is not complete without sleep. While you sleep, your bones, blood vessels, digestive system, muscles (including your heart), and all your other body tissues heal from the damage you inflicted on them during the day. If you engaged in physical activity, your body will repair itself and grow stronger while you sleep.

“When you are broken, go to bed,” goes the French proverb. You are not complete without sleep.

So how much rest is “adequate”? Science says: 42 percent. That’s the percentage of time your body and brain need you to spend resting. It’s about ten hours out of every twenty-four. It doesn’t have to be every day; it can average out over a week or a month or more. But yeah. That much.

“I don’t want a doctor who’s been awake for twenty hours; I don’t want a lawyer who bills more than twelve hours a day—I know how sloppy work gets when somebody is fatigued—and you shouldn’t want an engineer who isn’t sleeping seven hours a night. Your work is crap if your brain isn’t rested.”

Most of us have spent our whole lives being taught to believe everyone else’s opinions about our bodies, rather than to believe what our own bodies are trying to tell us. For some of us, it’s been so long since we listened to our bodies, we hardly know how to start understanding what they’re trying to tell us, much less how to trust and believe what they’re saying. To make matters worse, the more exhausted we are, the noisier the signal is, and the harder it is to hear the message.

Each person’s madwoman is different. For you, maybe she’s more like a shadow, following you around, a perpetual reminder of what you’re not; or a spindly creature lurking under the bed until you put on some jeans that feel tight or send a text you immediately wish you hadn’t sent; or, as one friend of ours put it, “a whiny, annoying brat of a six-year-old who thinks she knows everything and will not—give me strength—shut up unless I take deep breaths for her, then she goes quiet.”

If you have beaten yourself up for needing to say no to a friend, that was the madwoman. If you have felt sure that a broken relationship was all your fault, that there had to be something more you could have done, that was the madwoman. If you, like so many women we know, have struggled when you look in a mirror, it’s the madwoman you see looking back at you.

When the unbridgeable chasm between us and expected-us looms, our madwoman assesses the situation and decides what the problem is. She has only two options: Is the world a lying asshole, with bogus expectations? Or is there something wrong with us?

Describe your madwoman, in words or illustration. Tune in to the difficult, fragile part of yourself that tries to bridge the unbridgeable chasm between you and expected-you. What does she look like? When was she born? What is her history? What does she say to you? Write out her feelings and thoughts. Notice where she’s harshly critical of you, shaming, or perfectionistic. You may even want to mark those places. Highlight them in different colors. Those are sources of exhaustion. Can you hear sadness or fear under her madness? Ask her what she fears or what she’s grieving. Listen to her stories—never forgetting she’s a madwoman. Remind her that you are the grown-up, the homeowner, or the teacher, and she can trust you to maintain the attic so that she always has a safe place to stay. Thank her for the hard work she has done to help you survive.