Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

by Emily Nagoski

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.

“and the anxiety comes from the accumulation, day after day, of stress that never ends.”

Engaging in creative activities today leads to more energy, excitement, and enthusiasm tomorrow.

If anxiety starts, it ends.” “It just ends?” “Yeah. If you let it, it just ends.”

If you’re hiding from your life, you’re past your threshold. You aren’t dealing with either the stress or 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.

Your Monitor switches its assessment of your goal from “attainable” to “unattainable,” and it pushes you off an emotional cliff, into a pit of despair.

it comes to us the same way it comes to the bird and the squirrel—in a quiet intuition that is outside rationality. We simply hear the voice inside us saying, “You’ve done all you can here. It’s time to move on.”

Humans—especially women—have an extraordinary capacity to ignore this voice. We live in a culture that values “self-control,” “grit,” and persistence.

How much more do I have to do before I’ve done enough? How much of myself do I have to give? How smoothly do I have to polish myself before I can move through the world without friction?

That’s the power of meaning. We can tolerate any suffering, if we know why.

Human Giver Syndrome is the first villain in our story. It tries to make you ignore your Something Larger, because you’re supposed to dedicate all your resources to Human Beings.

None of us chooses the landscape in which we’re planted. If you find yourself on an ocean-battered cliff, your only choice is to grow there, or fall into the ocean.

What makes you stronger is whatever happens to you after you survive the thing that didn’t kill you. What makes you stronger is rest.