Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

by Emily Nagoski

Exhaustion happens when we get stuck in an emotion.

As science fiction author Cassandra Clare writes, “Fiction is truth, even if it is not fact.”

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.

Your entire body and mind change in response to the perceived threat.

Flight is fear—avoidance—whereas fight is anger—approach—but they’re both the “GO!” stress response of the sympathetic nervous system. They tell you to do something.

Freeze is special. Freeze happens when the brain assesses the threat and decides you’re too slow to run and too small to fight, and so your best hope for survival is to “play dead” until the threat goes away or someone comes along to help you. Freeze is your last-ditch stress response, reserved for threats that the brain perceives as life-threatening, when fight or flight don’t stand a chance.

Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle.

One example of affection is the “six-second kiss” advice from relationship researcher John Gottman. 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.

Another example: Hug someone you love and trust for twenty full seconds, while both of you are standing over your own centers of balance.

Like a long, mindful kiss, a twenty-second hug can teach your body that you are safe; you have escaped the lion and arrived home, safe and sound, to the people you love.

An example of self-defeating confrontation is, “I stood my ground and fought!” Standing our ground is important in principle and can be effective when we’re not overwhelmed, but not when we’re stressed and out of control.

Suppressing is, “I didn’t let it get to me.” If something matters, it should get to you!

Avoidance has a couple different flavors. There’s “I waited for a miracle to happen,” which abdicates personal responsibility for creating change, and there’s “I ate until I couldn’t feel my feelings,” which numbs you out.

Perhaps the most reliably maladaptive response to distress is “rumination.” Like a cow chewing its cud, we regurgitate our suffering over and over, gnawing on it to extract every last bit of pain. If you find your thoughts and feelings go back again and again to your suffering, 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? And then you look at those four lists and make a decision based on your estimates of maximizing benefit and minimizing cost.

DECISION GRID Should I stay or quit: ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ (e.g., my job, my relationship, my diet, my place of worship, my substance use, my habit of overcommitting…)

Our tendency to cling to the broken thing we have rather than let it go and reach for something new isn’t just a result of social learning. The stress (fear, anxiety, etc.) underlying the belief changes our decision-making, so that the more stressed we feel about change, the less likely we are to do it.

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.

You can chart the progress of women in America by the things Disney heroines sing about in their “I Want” songs. Though what they sing about changes, there is one constant: a heroine feels called by something.

Think of Human Giver Syndrome as a virus whose only goal is to perpetuate its own existence. You were infected with it as soon as you were born, inhaling it with your very first breath. And, just as the rabies virus makes dogs aggressive and bovine spongiform encephalopathy makes cows “mad,” Human Giver Syndrome changes human behavior in order to perpetuate itself—even if it kills the host (that’s us) in the process.

If you were raised in a culture shaped by Human Giver Syndrome, you were taught to prioritize being pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others, above anything else.

Moana’s Something Larger is the ocean; she feels it calling her. As she tells Maui, the ocean chose her for her mission. Almost no one agrees with her. Her family wants her to stay home and be chief of her island. Maui is skeptical that the ocean would choose “a curly-haired non-princess” who can’t sail. Then some terrible things happen and Moana drops into the pit of despair. She even tells the ocean to “choose someone else.” But the ghost of her grandmother, the “village crazy lady” who always believed in her, appears and nudges Moana to remember who she is. As Moana considers what has brought her to this pivotal moment, she realizes (in song form): “The call isn’t out there at all / It’s inside me!” The call was never coming from “out there”; it was coming from inside her own heart. She was the “chosen one” not because something outside her chose her and called across a distance, but because something in her own heart was calling, and so, without even knowing it, she chose herself. “Moana” is the Maori word for “ocean”; Disney made the lesson nice and literal.

Human Giver Syndrome is a collection of personal and cultural beliefs and behaviors that insist that some people’s only “meaning in life” comes from being pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others.

This sort of bias is called the “headwinds/tailwinds asymmetry,” because people tend to notice their adversarial headwinds and not their helpful tailwinds.

Signs of compassion fatigue include21 • checking out, emotionally—faking empathy when you know you’re supposed to feel it, because you can’t feel the real thing anymore; • minimizing or dismissing suffering that isn’t the most extreme—“It’s not slavery/genocide/child rape/nuclear war, so quit complaining”; • feeling helpless, hopeless, or powerless, while also feeling personally responsible for doing more; and • staying in a bad situation, whether a workplace or a relationship, out of a sense of grandiosity—“If I don’t do it, no one will.”

People who love and support people who live through traumatic experiences are co-survivors.

As the saying goes, “Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something.” And “something” is anything that isn’t nothing.

The Bikini Industrial Complex, or BIC, has successfully created a culture of immense pressure to conform to an ideal that is literally unobtainable by almost everyone and yet is framed not just as the most beautiful, but the healthiest and most virtuous.

Weight and health. Not the same thing.

BMI is nonsense as a measure of personal health.

eating disorders have the highest mortality of any mental illness—higher even than depression—killing 250,000 people a year.21 The thin ideal makes us sick. And it kills some of us.

Maybe you don’t look like you used to, or like you used to imagine you should; but how you look today is the new hotness. Even better than the old hotness.

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.

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.

Contact with another person is a basic biological need; loneliness is a form of starvation.

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

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

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.

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.

Rest makes us more persistent and productive.

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

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, Matthew Walker

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?

Some madwomen are more protective than destructive; some are more sad than angry; some have a sense of humor. They are the shadow, the hurt little girl, the downtrodden teenager, the “perfect” version of ourselves, the madwoman in the attic yelling terrible things that echo through the house. What’s yours like...

In her memoir, Yes Please, Amy Poehler describes her madwoman as a demon that “moves its sour mouth up to your ear and reminds you that you are fat and ugly and don’t deserve love.”

As Brené Brown says, “Guilt is, ‘I made a mistake.’ Shame is, ‘I am a mistake.’

Perfectionism is a lot of different things—some of them generally benign or even beneficial, and some potentially very toxic.5