Burnout: The secret to solving the stress cycle

by Emily Nagoski

Human givers must, at all times, be pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others, which means they must never be ugly, angry, upset, ambitious, or attentive to their own needs.

Dealing with your stress is a separate process from dealing with the things that cause your stress.

Many of us were raised to be “good girls,” to be “nice.” Fear and anger and other uncomfortable emotions can cause distress in the people around you, so it’s not nice to feel those things in front of other people. We smile and ignore our feelings, because our feelings matter less than the other person’s.

Be nice, be strong, be polite. No feelings for you.

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

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.

“I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere that I needed to be.”

Über-foop. So how do you know when it’s time to stop the planful problem-solving, drop the positive reappraisal, and just … quit?

Science has an answer for when to walk away—sort of. It’s framed in terms of an “explore/exploit problem,” as in “Should I explore new terrain, or should I exploit the terrain I’m in?”

What are the benefits of continuing? What are the benefits of stopping? What are the costs of continuing? What are the costs of stopping?

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.

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?

That thing people do, when they tell you you’re imagining the discrimination? They’re gaslighting you. And that feeling you have when someone is doing it to you but you’re not sure because maybe they’re right and you’re overreacting and being too sensitive? Like you can’t trust your own senses, except what your senses are telling you is unambiguous? That’s feeling gaslit. You’re filled with simultaneous doubt, fear, rage, betrayal, isolation, and panicked confusion. You can feel that a situation is wrong, but you can’t explain why or how. So you worry that you misunderstood something, or you feel inadequate for being unable to articulate your objection.

Gaslighting creates deeply uncomfortable feelings of being trapped, while making you believe you put yourself in that trap, which just makes you angrier and sadder and less hopeful.

So how much rest is “adequate”? Science says: 42 percent.

We’re not saying you should take 42 percent of your time to rest; we’re saying if you don’t take the 42 percent, the 42 percent will take you. It will grab you by the face, shove you to the ground, put its foot on your chest, and declare itself the victor.

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

“Our best” today may not be “the best there is,” but it’s the best we can do today.

James Baldwin famously said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Less famously, right before he said that, he said, “And furthermore, you give me a terrifying advantage: You [white people] never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about you than you know about me.”

As Brittney Cooper writes in Eloquent Rage, “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.”

The stepping stone to joy is feeling like you are “enough,” and feeling “not enough” is a form of loneliness.

The cure for burnout is not “self-care”; it is all of us caring for one another. So we’ll say it one more time: Trust your body. Be kind to yourself. You are enough, just as you are right now. Your joy matters.