Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

by Emily Nagoski

Many of us have grown into world-class ignorers of our own needs, just as we were taught to be. We don’t even notice that we’re ignoring our needs. Our bodies are sending us all kinds of signals, but we live from the neck up, only attending to the noise in our heads and shutting out the noise coming from the other 95 percent of our internal experience.

Imagine that your body is the body of someone who needs your c...

Instead of just looking at your body to evaluate her well-being (we know that you can’t tell anything about a person’s health by the shape or size of their body), turn to her and ask her how she feels: “What’s wrong, honey? Are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired? Lonely?” She can definitely tell you, if you listen. You might have to stop what you’re doing, take a slow breath, focus on the sensation of your weight on the floor or the chair, and actually ask out loud, “What do you need?” You may receive the answer as a...

Your body needs to breathe and to sleep. She needs food. She needs love. She dies without them. And there is nothing she has to do, no shape or size she has to be, before she “deserves” food and love and sleep. It’s not her fault if she’s sick or injured. She’s still the astonishing creature she was on the day she was born, a source of joy for those who care about her. She’s yours. She’s you.

Bodies are imperfect, and sometimes they let us down. They are susceptible to disease and breakage and entropy. Our bodies can disappoint us, and the world can punish us when our bodies aren’t what they “should” be. So we are not suggesting that you “love your body,” like that’s an easy fix. We’re suggesting you be patient with your body and with your feelings about your body.

Your body is not the enemy. The real enemy is out there—the Bikini Industrial Complex. It is trying sneakily to convince you that you are the problem, that your body is the enemy, that your body is inadequate, which makes you a failure.

This stuff is difficult and messy. After you finish this chapter, you are going to have dinner with friends and hear them talking about calories and fat and whether or not they “deserve” to eat dessert or how nice it must be for you “not to care what you eat.” You are going to hear family members criticize themselves or others for the way they’ve “let themselves go.” You’re going to want to explain to them that people don’t need to earn the pleasure of delicious food, that de-prioritizing conformation with the culturally constructed ideal is not failure, and that “fat” doesn’t mean “unhealt...

tl;dr: • The “Bikini Industrial Complex” is a hundred-billion-dollar industry that tries to convince us that our bodies are the enemy, when, in reality, the Bikini Industrial Complex 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 conform to the culturally constructed aspirational ideal. • Solutions: Embrace the mess. See yourself as “the new hotness.” Practice seeing everyone as “the new hotness.” And tune in to your body’s needs.

connection. A 2015 meta-analysis, encompassing seventy different studies and over three million research participants from around the globe, found that social isolation and loneliness increased a person’s odds of an early death by 25 to 30 percent.3 In describing the results of a 2018 study on the health impact of loneliness, a chief medical officer for an insurance company described loneliness as having “the same impact on mortality as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.”4 Also in 2018, the United Kingdom’s government created a Commission on Loneliness, framing it as a public health issue with the same health impact as living with a chronic disease like diabetes.5

An identity grounded in autonomy is considered stronger, superior, and masculine. An identity grounded in connection is weaker, inferior, and feminine.

It remains popular wisdom that healthy people should feel 100 percent whole, with or without a romantic partner or the approval of others or the support of a family or community. Social connection should be a “bonus,” not an essential component to our well-being—a supplement, not a staple. No wonder the first waves of feminists considered independence the ideal.

This is the heretical truth: No one is “complete” without other people—and ...

We don’t mean you “need a man” or any kind of romantic partner. We mean you need connection in any or all of its varied forms. And it is also true that the lifelong development of autonomy is as innate to human nature as the drive to connect. We need both connection and autonomy.

Simply sharing physical space with someone—mere co-presence—can be enough to synchronize heartbeats. We automatically mirror the facial expression of the person we’re talking to and experience the emotion that goes with those expressions, and we involuntarily match body movements and vocal pitch.7 We are all walking around co-regulating one another all the time, synchronizing without trying, without even necessarily being aware that it’s happening.8 Your internal state is profoundly contagious, and it is profoundly susceptible to “catching” the internal states of the people around you at work and at home and at the grocery store and on the bus.

Sharing space with anyone else means sharing energy—literally. Connection moves us at the level of our atoms. Each particle we are made of influences and is influenced by the particle next to it in an unending chain that exists on the smallest and largest scales you can imagine, and every scale in between. Swing a pendulum near another pendulum that’s the same size, and they will gradually entrain, often swinging in the same direction at the same time. We’re made of energy. The nature of energy is to be shared, to spread, to connect one thing to another. Sharing space with other people means that our energy influences theirs, and theirs influences ours. It’s physics. And psychology. And unavoidable. And amazing.

Social connections fuel your body just as eating nutritious foods and taking deep breaths do.16 If Human Giver Syndrome is a virus, the Bubble of Love is the environment that fuels your immune response.

People who don’t trust or are untrustworthy are energy drains.

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.

But strategic inauthenticity is part of trust, too.20

Polite, socially acceptable suppression of our rage is “inauthentic,” insofar as we are not sharing our full selves. And that is part of trust, too. Part of being trustworthy is meeting expectations and staying in line, as if you were a well-behaved woman.

When the people in our Bubble can turn with kindness and compassion toward our difficult emotions, and we can do the same for them, it strengthens the Bubble like nothing else.

four signs that you have to disengage from your autonomous efforts and seek connection. Each of these emotions is a different form of hunger for connection—that is, they’re all different ways of feeling lonely:

When you have been gaslit.

When you feel “not enough.” No individual can meet all the needs of the world. Humans are not built to do big things alone. We are built to do them together. When you experience the empty-handed feeling that you are just one person, unable to meet all the demands the world makes on you, helpless in the face of the endless, yawning need you see around you, recognize that emotion for what it is: a form of loneliness. Find your people. Call your friends and commiserate; consume all the YOU GO, GIRL! social media memes you like; watch Wonder Woman or Hidden Figures or Moana or whatever immerses you in a story of women working with a team of men, a team of women, or nature and the divine itself.

When you’re sad.

many of us have been taught to treat our sadness: keep it under control, because it makes others uncomfortable. (Because, again: human givers.)

Sadness is the beacon; it is the Bat-Signal. Though many of us were taught that we should mask our uncomfortable emotions, the truth about sadness is that we find our way out of that tunnel most efficiently when we have a friend who calls through the darkness, “I’m right here!” or better yet, someone who can take our hand in the dark and say, “Any step we take together is a step toward the light.”

When you are boiling with rage.

many of us have been taught to swallow our rage, hide it even from ourselves. We have been taught to fear rage—our own, as well as others’—because its power can be used as a weapon. Can be.

It’s all in how you use it. We don’t want to hurt anyone, and rage is indeed very, very powerful.

Bring your rage into the Bubble with your loved ones’ permission, and complete the stress...

“Yes!” say the people in your Bubble. “That was some bullshit you dealt with!” Rage gives you strength and energy and the urge to fight, and sharing that energy in the Bubble changes it from something potentially dangerous to something safe and potentially transformative.

we need other people to teach us how to love ourselves best.

The point is connection is good for us. It is not weakness; it doesn’t mean we’re “needy.” It makes us stronger.

positive social interaction and affection complete the cycle.

tl;dr: • 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’s 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.

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.

“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. The idea that you can use “grit” or “self-control” to stay focused and productive every minute of every day is not merely incorrect, it is gaslighting, and it is potentially damaging your brain.

“You don’t have to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm.” But according to Human Giver Syndrome, you definitely should. As “human givers,” women live with the expectation that we give every part of our humanity, including our bodies, our health, and our very lives. Our time, energy, and attention should go toward someone else’s well-being, not be squandered on our own. What’s the matter with you, you lazy, selfish monster, sleeping seven hours a night? Get back in line, with the rest of us exhausted, righteous givers.

As Audre Lorde put it, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

We are built to oscillate between work and rest. When we allow for this oscillation, the quality of our work improves, along with our health.

Rest makes us more persistent and productive.

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.3

Running in the background of your awareness is what neuroscientists call the “default mode network,” a collection of linked brain areas that function as a kind of low-grade dreaming when your attention is not focused on a task.5 When your mind is “wandering,” your default mode network is online. It assesses your present state and it plans for the future, a little like a chess-playing computer, rapidly scanning the board and running simulations to see what would happen if you made a particular move. And it’s doing it without active intervention from you.

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.10

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.

This is active rest: working one gear while resting the others.

It turns out that the physiological, cognitive, emotional, and social benefits of spending a third of our lives unconscious outweigh even the costs in time, opportunity to do other things, and inattention to threats. Our whole body, including our brain, is working hard as we sleep, to accomplish life-preserving tasks that can be best achieved when we’re not around to interfere. Quite simply, we are not complete without sleep.