Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

by Emily Nagoski

We humans are not built to do big things alone, we are built to work together. That’s what we wrote about, and it’s how we wrote it.

But when it was first coined as a technical term by Herbert Freudenberger in 1975, “burnout” was defined by three components:

1. emotional exhaustion—the fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long; 2. depersonalization—the depletion of empathy, caring, and compassion; and 3. decreased sense of accomplishment—an unconquerable sense of futility: feeling that nothing you do makes any difference.1

Exhaustion happens when we get stuck in an emotion.

Your body, with its instinct for self-preservation, knows, on some level, that Human Giver Syndrome is slowly killing you. That’s why you keep trying mindfulness and green smoothies and self-care trend after self-care trend. But that instinct for self-preservation is battling a syndrome that insists that self-preservation is selfish, so your efforts to care for yourself might actually make things worse, activating even more punishment from the world or from yourself, because how dare you?

Can you guess what the enemy is in this book? [Cue ominous music] The Patriarchy. Ugh. Most self-help books for women leave this chapter out and instead discuss only the things readers can control, but that’s like teaching someone the best winning strategy of a game without mentioning that the game is rigged. Fortunately, when we understand how the game is rigged, we can start playing by our own rules.

patriarchy.These women are composites: In the same way a movie is made of thousands of still images, edited together to tell a story, they are composed of fragments of dozens of real-life women.

But it’s important to remember that science is ultimately a specialized way of being wrong. That is, every scientist tries to be (a) slightly less wrong than the scientists who came before them, by proving that something we thought was true actually isn’t, and (b) wrong in a way that can be tested and proven, which results in the next scientist being slightly less wrong. Research

So. We try to be as science-based as we can be, but we’re aware of its limits. That’s where the art comes in. As science fiction author Cassandra Clare writes, “Fiction is truth, even if it is not fact.” This is what storytelling is for—and in fact research has found that people understand science better when it’s communicated through storytelling! So side by side with the neuroscience and computational biology, we’ll talk about Disney princesses, sci-fi dystopias, pop music, and more, because story goes where science can’t.

The “cheese” of Burnout isn’t just feeling less overwhelmed and exhausted, or no longer worrying whether you’re doing “enough.” The cheese is growing mighty, feeling strong enough to cope with all the owls and mazes and anything else the world throws at you.

“Dread is anxiety on steroids,” Amelia said, remembering her own days teaching middle school music, “and the anxiety comes from the accumulation, day after day, of stress that never ends.”

To deal with your stress, you have to complete the cycle.

Let’s start by differentiating our stress from our stressors.

But what are the words that describe the emotion of “freeze”? Words that might feel right: Shut down. Numb. Immobilized. Disconnected. Petrified. The very word sympathetic means “with emotion,” while parasympathetic—the system that controls freeze—means “beyond emotion.” You may feel disengaged from the world, sluggish, like you don’t care or nothing matters. You feel…outside.

start. A simple, practical exercise is to breathe in to a slow count of five, hold that breath for five, then exhale for a slow count of ten, and pause for another count of five. Do that three times—just one minute and fifteen seconds of breathing—and see how you feel.

“Yeah. That’s how it works. If anxiety starts, it ends.” “It just ends?” “Yeah. If you let it, it just ends.”

4. Your body feels out of whack. Maybe you’re sick all the time: you have chronic pain, injuries that just won’t heal, or infections that keep coming back. Because stress is not “just stress,” but a biological event that really happens inside your body, it can cause biological problems that really happen inside your body but can’t always be explained with obvious diagnoses. Chronic illness and injury can be caused or exacerbated by chronic activation of the stress response.

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.

Wellness is not a state of being, but a state of action.

The Monitor knows (1) what your goal is; (2) how much effort you’re investing in that goal; and (3) how much progress you’re making. It keeps a running tally of your effort-to-progress ratio, and it has a strong opinion about what that ratio should be. There are so many ways a plan can go wrong, some of which you can control and some of which you can’t, all of which will frustrate your Monitor.1

controlling what you can control makes the rest of it more bearable.

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

With positive reappraisal, you can acknowledge when things are difficult, and you recognize that the difficulty is worth it—it is, in fact, an opportunity.

When something feels uncomfortable, you’re probably doing something that creates more and better progress than if it were easy. Just

You’ll find a worksheet at the end of the chapter to help you brainstorm incremental goals that will keep your Monitor satisfied, but the super-short guidelines are: soon, certain, positive, concrete, specific, and personal.11 Soon: Your goal should be achievable

without requiring patience. Certain: Your goal should be within your control. Positive: It should be something that feels good, not just something that avoids suffering. Concrete: Measurable. You can ask Andrew, “Are you filled with joy?” and he can say yes or no. Specific: Not general, like “fill people with joy,” but specific: Fill Andrew with joy. Personal: Tailor your goal. If you don’t care about Andrew’s state of mind, forget Andrew. Who is your Andrew? Maybe you’re your own Andrew.

Part of recovering from a loss is turning toward your grief with kindness and compassion, as well as completing the cycle of stress brought on by failure.

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?

Remember to consider both the long-term and the short-term costs and benefits.

Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren made news when, as she was attempting to speak in the Senate, she was silenced by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Senator Warren’s goal, when McConnell stopped her, was to read a letter from Coretta Scott King about the racist judicial record of then-Senator Jeff Sessions. McConnell said, in what would become a notorious comment, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

But raise your hand if it gets exhausting. Raise your hand if you’ve wanted to quit. Raise your hand if you’ve asked yourself, 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? Us too.

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.

If our goals are what we want to accomplish, “meaning” is why we want to accomplish them.

REDEFINE WINNING

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

And not knowing why is, itself, a profound type of suffering.

You can chart the progress of women in America by the things Disney heroines sing about in their “I Want” songs.

This chapter is about “meaning” as a power you carry inside you that helps you resist and recover from burnout. A woman’s need for “meaning in life” is not fundamentally different from a man’s, but the obstacles that stand between women and their sense of meaning are different.

Meaning is the feeling that you “matter in some larger sense.

“Meaning,” in short, is the nourishing experience of feeling like we’re connected to something larger than ourselves. It helps us thrive when things are going well, and it helps us cope when things go wrong in our lives.

terms of your personal well-being, there is no right or wrong source of meaning; there’s just whatever gives you the feeling that your life has a positive impact.

Human Giver Syndrome

“Human Giver Syndrome.”

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.

Malala Yousafzai: “I raise up my voice—not so I can shout, but so that those without a voice can be heard.”

Human Giver Syndrome goes so far as to insist we’re wrong to see ourselves as heroines battling an enemy. A giver has no needs and thus has nothing to fight for. Joseph Campbell himself, father of the “Hero’s Journey” framework, summarized it succinctly when presented with a “Heroine’s Journey” to consider. He said, “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realize she’s the place people are trying to get to.”21

In a sense, 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. But how can we escape or defeat the villain in our own story when we’re busy policing others to keep them from defeating it?

Human Giver Syndrome will try to stop you from pursuing meaning. Your job is to not stop. Keep engaging with your Something Larger. Use planful problem-solving. Keep completing the cycle. #Persist.