Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

by Emily Nagoski

Self-compassion: it’s hard at first.

So an assessment with observational distance might be, “It matters to me that I treat everyone fairly, and it sounds like that’s not what happened. I’m always trying to do better.” It’s really strange, the experience of “That is not what I meant to do, and yet that is what happened, as far as this new information is concerned.”

There are two techniques that really get the job done, and neither involves gratitude-for-what-you-have. The key is practicing gratitude-for-who-you-have and gratitude-for-how-things-happen.

If you want to go big, write that person a letter expressing how they helped you.21 You might even want to give it to them. You might even—and this is only if you want a super-burst of gratitude—read the letter out loud to them. A “gratitude visit” like this can boost your well-being for a full month, or even up to three months.22

A Long-Term Gratitude Lifter is gratitude-for-how-things-happen. At the end of each day, think of some event or circumstance for which you feel grateful, and write about it: 1. Give the event or circumstance a title, like “Finished Writing Chapter 8” or “Made It Through That Meeting Without Crying or Yelling.” 2. Write down what happened, including details about what anyone involved, including you, did or said. 3. Describe how it made you feel at the time, and how you feel now, as you think about it. 4. Explain how the event or circumstance came to be. What was the cause? What confluence of circumstances came together to create this moment?

When you are cruel to yourself, contemptuous and shaming, you only increase the cruelty in the world; when you are kind and compassionate toward yourself, you increase the kindness and compassion in the world.

Being compassionate toward yourself—not self-indulgent or self-pitying, but kind—is both the least you can do and the single most important thing you can do to make the world a better place.

tl;dr: • We each have a “madwoman” in our psychological attic. She has the impossible job of managing the chasm between 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.

“Happiness is predicated on ‘happenings,’ on what’s occurring, on whether your life is going right, and whether all is well. Joy arises from an internal clarity about our purpose.”1

tl;dr: • Just because you’ve dealt with a stressor doesn’t mean you’ve dealt with the stress. And you don’t have to wait until all your stressors are dealt with before you deal with your stress. Which is to say, 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.