We’ve all heard the dreaded term “burnout.” But what does it actually mean? In this episode, we are joined by Emily and Amelia Nagoski, authors of Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. The twin sisters talk about their personal experiences with burnout and how emotions are explicitly linked to physical wellbeing. “The cure for burnout is not self-care. It’s all of us caring for each other,” Amelia says. Plus, they offer tips on how to complete the stress response cycle, like having a big ol’ cry, getting a good night’s sleep, moving your body, and seeking connection with others.
We’ve all heard the dreaded term “burnout.” But what does it actually mean? In this episode, we are joined by Emily and Amelia Nagoski, authors of Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. The twin sisters talk about their personal experiences with burnout and how emotions are explicitly linked to physical wellbeing. “The cure for burnout is not self-care. It’s all of us caring for each other,” Amelia says. Plus, they offer tips on how to complete the stress response cycle, like having a big ol’ cry, getting a good night’s sleep, moving your body, and seeking connection with others.
For a transcript & to shop this episode, click here.
Please make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode!
To shop books and products mentioned in this episode visit: indigo.ca/podcast
Heather Reisman:
Hi, I’m Heather Reisman, and this is Well Said, a podcast on the art and science of living well. This podcast is brought to you by Indigo. Today’s episode is hosted by Shivani Persad, a wonderfully curious journalist and a fellow booklover.
Shivani Persad:
This week we’re talking about burnout. After the year we’ve had, just about everyone knows the feeling. You’ve been going and going for what feels like forever: work piled on top of personal issues, piled on top of all of the other concerns around the world. You’re exhausted and you can barely hold it together, until eventually you can’t anymore. Our guests today offer up solutions.
Amelia Nagoski:
We need to understand that when things go bad—when there’s a trouble or a problem in the world—it actually genuinely truly is an opportunity to grow and develop for something good to happen.
Shivani Persad:
That’s Amelia Nagoski. She and her identical twin sister Emily co-authored Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. Emily has a PhD in health behaviour and an MS in counselling. She’s also the author of The New York Times bestselling book Come As You Are. Amelia has a doctorate of musical arts. She’s an assistant professor and coordinator of music at Western New England University. She’s also a choir conductor, so she knows a thing or two about bringing out people’s authentic voices.
Emily and Amelia Nagoski, welcome to Well Said. Thank you for being with us today.
Emily Nagoski:
Thanks.
Amelia Nagoski:
Glad to be with you.
Shivani Persad:
So, we want to start at the beginning. You co-authored Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. Can you talk about your own experiences with burnout? Amelia, I’d like to start with you.
Amelia Nagoski:
My first experience with burnout was as a public school teacher. I finished my degree in education and became a teacher. At the end of five years teaching high school, I was just done. And I continued on. I got my doctorate. And by then the burnout turned into physical ailments so bad that I ended up in the hospital. And the abdominal pain I was experiencing went undiagnosed; they didn’t know what was wrong with me. “It’s just stress,” they said. “Go home and relax.” And I was like, “I’m getting a doctoral degree, working three part-time jobs, and a stepmother to teenagers. That’s not an option for me.” So Emily started bringing me books on stress and emotion. And one of the books I was reading, and it said on the page that rage can be stored in the body—that rage is held in the body. And I just started crying and collapsed on my kitchen floor and called Emily. “This book says that emotions are held in the body. Is that true?”
Emily Nagoski:
And I was like, “How could you not have known that already?”
Amelia Nagoski:
And I did know. Because as a conductor one of my jobs is to express emotion with my body to communicate emotion with my body. The thing is I hadn’t ever really wanted to admit that emotions are held in your body, because if that was true, oh my god, so many emotions, an entire lifetime’s worth of rage that I had never consciously felt—that I had just repressed and stuffed away, because I was so polite, because I was such a good girl, I was never angry—so it ended up almost killing me.
Shivani Persad:
And Emily, what about you?
Emily Nagoski:
We’re identical twins: genetically identical, raised in the same household. And my experience is very different. I have been able to hear my body’s signals, in an almost overwhelming way, from really early on. I remember being in high school, 14 years old, auditioning for the school play. I had these very big emotions about auditioning for the school play. And I didn’t get a part. And I was so sad. But I knew. Like I could hear my body saying, “What you need to do is go to your room and have a good hard cry.” And I did. I went up, and I had like the kneeling on floor, fluids dripping down your face, 14-year-old kind of sobbing. And at the end of it I was like, “(sniff) ahhh” and I felt better, and I totally let it go. And so my exhaustion and burnout shows up just as me sort of short-term feeling stressed out and overwhelmed. And I do get cranky and unpleasant to be around, (laughing) as Amelia can attest.
Amelia Nagoski:
That is a slight understatement.
Emily Nagoski:
(laughs) But overall, because of my capacity to hear my body’s signals early on, I just don’t cross that threshold. I’ve never been hospitalized for anything.
Shivani Persad:
So I would assume that would help you guys writing the book too, then. Right? Because, you know, Amelia has the experience of somebody that needs it explained to them, whereas, Emily has the experience of somebody who almost sometimes feels it too much.
Amelia Nagoski:
There’s a lot of us who are raised to believe that it is not okay or safe to express your emotions—that when you feel things strongly that imposes something on other people and it’s just rude, I mean, at best rude, or says something about who you are as a human being that is inferior to someone who is like in control of themselves, and sophisticated, and refined.
Emily Nagoski:
We read a lot of Victorian novels.
Amelia Nagoski:
So if there’s something true that you have to say about how emotions manifest in the body, it needs to be walked back 14 steps, so that people who don’t already believe it, people who don’t already know it, can understand not just the fact that it is true but to be convinced about the science of why it happens.
Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. And how what happens in your body is linked to that your emotions are truly explicitly linked to your physical well-being.
Shivani Persad:
So Emily, can you explain that from more of a scientific standpoint? Because you say emotions are held in your body, but what does that exactly mean? Can you tell us where are emotions held in your body? And how are emotions held in your body?
Emily Nagoski:
What a good question (laughs). And it’s one of my favourite things to talk about. OK. So let’s take stress, for example. Stress is the physiological reaction your body has to a potential threat. Most of these threats are in the environment. So if you see something that your brain perceives as a potential threat, it activates—vroom—the stress response: adrenaline, and cortisol, and glucocorticoids, oh my—and it changes virtually every physiological system you have. Right? So in this second, almost regardless of what the threat is—whether it is you’re being chased by a lion or you are thinking about the patriarchy—your body reduces its immune functioning, the digestive system changes, your reproductive system is impacted, your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure goes up, blood moves away from the surface of your skin and from your extremities so that if you get cut you will not bleed as much. All of these are changes to help you survive the kind of threat that we were exposed to in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. And in that environment, our stressors lasted minutes. And then it was over. And we would do something about that stress. We’re like, if you’re being chased by a lion, what do you do?
Shivani Persad:
You run away.
Emily Nagoski:
You run, yes. And if you imagine that you actually manage to run back to—we’re on the savanna of Africa, an environment where we evolved—we run back to our village, and somebody sees us coming and they wave us inside, and we both put our shoulders against the door, and the lion roars and claws at the door but eventually gives up and huffs and walks away. And you see the lion walking away, and you realized you escaped. You’ve done it. And you feel this elation: you’re glad to be alive; you love your friends and family; you feel one with the grass and the sun and the cows. Right? That’s the complete stress-response cycle. It has a beginning when it’s activated, a middle when you behave according to your body’s chemistry, and an end when you actually survive. All of our body systems are like this; they are cycles with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where the behaviours that complete the cycle are not the same as the things that deal with the thing that caused our stress in the first place. Like, if you’re being chased by a lion you run, and that helps you to deal with the stressor and with the stress. But if you’re thinking about the patriarchy, you cannot literally run your way out of the patriarchy.
Shivani Persad:
Amelia, can you walk us through the stress cycle and how to complete it?
Amelia Nagoski:
Yes. So because your body evolved to respond to stress with some kind of physical action, even though we live now in an environment where you cannot complete the stress-response cycle by solving the problems that caused your stress, you can complete the stress-response cycle separately. You don’t have to wait for the problem to go away before you can start to feel better.
So. You can complete the stress-response cycle by telling your body that it’s safe by doing the things that it knows make it safe—like running. Physical activity is the number one most efficient way to tell your body that it is safe, and it runs through the complete stress-response cycle, and you get to the end and, you know, you’re safe. This never worked for me, honestly—I know that people get like a runner’s high. I have never ever had that experience. So I kind of thought that was made up. It turns out it’s true. And there’s plenty of people right now who are listening and going, “Yeah, when I go for that run, when I work out, when I dance it out to Beyoncé in my kitchen, like I definitely feel better.” So if that’s you, great. But if you’re not, luckily there’s like so many other things that complete the stress-response cycle.
The next most effective one, that’s probably really fundamental to everyone, is a good night’s sleep—any kind of rest is going to help but really a good night’s sleep, seven to nine hours. One of the things that happens while you sleep is, well, first of all, you’re physically resting, but your brain also deals with and processes all the things that you experienced that day, and indeed your whole lifetime, and so that when you wake up—people say, “Oh, sleep on it, you’ll feel better in the morning,” not because the problem has changed but because your body has found that it is safe, gone through a complete stress-response cycle—and you wake up and you’re ready to face whatever the problem is, rested and in a better state of mind, knowing that you’re safe as opposed to in an alert, stressed state.
Should I do some more? Like a big old cry. People say that crying doesn’t solve anything, but of course crying solves something. It solves being stressed out in that moment and so freaked that you can’t even work or have any capacity to respond to a problem. So in that moment when you cry, you may not be solving the problem but you are completing the stress-response cycle. There is kind of a trick to it, and that is to set aside the things that prompted the crying. So whatever it was—whatever she said, whatever he did—you put that on a shelf for a minute, and just turn toward the experience of crying. And a lot of us have had this experience of walking in the front door, getting home from work, slamming it shut, and just collapsing to the floor and sobbing. And you just pay attention to the experience: how hard am I breathing; how hot do I feel; how many tears are rolling down my face; how much snot is coming out of my nose? And you turn toward the experience of the crying and you cry until it ends. And it does, because it’s a cycle. When you feed the experience the thoughts—if you keep going back and ruminating on the what-she-said or what-he-did—it’ll keep re-sparking it, re-igniting it, and making the cycle start over again. So for that moment, put it on a shelf, focus on the experience, move all the way through the end. Maybe like 10 minutes. Then, if after maybe that long, you’re still not through the cycle, that’s when you need to ask for help.
And in fact, another thing that can tell your body it’s safe and complete the stress-response cycle is connection with other people. Even just the smallest little thing like having a friendly exchange with your barista. “Hey, I’d like a chai latte and I love your earring.” And they say, “Thank you very much. Here’s your chai latte.” That is enough to tell your body, “The world is a safe place. People can be trusted. I am safe.”
If you want to go big on affection and connection, there’s the 20-second hug. Twenty seconds is potentially an awkwardly long time to hug someone, unless you really love and trust them, but that is in fact the point. When you connect your body with someone else’s body—you both support your own centre of gravity, put your arms around each other—and stay there until you feel the physical shift that lets you know, “Oh, my body recognizes I am home, I’m with this person, I am loved, I am safe.”
Six-second kiss is another one. Again, it’s not about the six seconds. What does John Gottman say? It’s long enough to be an event.
Emily Nagoski:
Not so long you make the kids late for school.
Amelia Nagoski:
And the point is that you kiss until your body goes, “Oh, right. This isn’t just that ‘(lipsmack) see you later, Honey,’ but like I’m safe with this person.”
So that was physical activity, a good night’s sleep, a big old cry, connection and affection at a variety of different levels. There are—it doesn’t have to be running away from the lion. We can separate the stressor and not worry about solving the problem, and just deal with the stress itself so we can start to feel better right now, which puts us in a better state and gets us better prepared to go deal with those large stressors that we can’t control.
Shivani Persad:
During this pandemic, we’ve had to redefine a lot, because we’re now connecting in different ways. But even before the pandemic, loneliness was starting to get recognized as an actual health issue. How can people who are struggling with loneliness start to foster a meaningful connection?
Amelia Nagoski:
The thing to know, to start with, is that yes, it is true that connection is a biological need—just like sleep, just like water. Without connection you will die. For elderly adults, loneliness is as bad for their health as 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness is a drive. It’s a hunger. You can starve of loneliness. If you deprive a child of connection to a loving caregiver, they will die just as surely as they would die if you deprive them of food or water. It is a real biological need. It is not, you know, a weakness because you need other people. It is a real biological drive.
Emily Nagoski:
I think, though, that one of the primary barriers that’s stopping people from getting the connection they need is not a lack of access to other people—because we do have all this technology that’s allowing us to get this—I think for more people the barrier to getting the connection they need is a sense of shame that they feel lonely. A sense of shame that they need someone else, that they ought be independent; they ought to be enough on their own. But we are not built to do big things alone. We’re built to connect with other people.
Research psychologist Jonathan Haidt says, of human beings, that we are 90 per cent chimp, 10 per cent bee. We’re a hive species. And bees don’t feel ashamed of their need for other bees, and neither should we.
[music]
Shivani Persad:
One of the ways that you talked about completing the stress cycle was that it could be just as easy as taking a nap or lying down. In the book, you note that science says our brains and bodies need us to spend 42 per cent of our lives resting. You say, “We’re not saying you should spend 42 per cent of your time resting. We’re saying that if you don’t take the 42 per cent, the 42 per cent will take you.” And I found that as such powerful way to explain it. Emily, would you mind talking a bit more about that?
Emily Nagoski:
Rest is a miracle. And just as all of our physiological processes are cycles, rest is also a cycle—on many different time scales. So if we just take like a 24-hour cycle, we’re not designed to rest all the time, but we’re also not designed to work all the time. And the approximate ratio that our body requires of rest-to-effort is about 42 per cent rest. That’s seven to nine hours of sleep. I have tended to be about a seven-and-a-half-hour sleeper. Amelia is a nine-hour sleeper. Again we’re genetically identical, and we still vary. If you are sleeping nine hours a night and you feel rested, that’s just how much sleep you need. If you are sleeping nine hours a night and you don’t feel rested, that might be a sign of a larger problem and you can talk to a medical provider.
So figuring out the amount of sleep that you require is important. There are other factors like: what time of day does your body want to be asleep, in what size of chunks does your body want to get that sleep? But sleep isn’t even the only form of rest. It is really important, and a biological drive, you literally die without adequate sleep. You can die of sleep deprivation. But there’s also the default-mode network, which is this system of brain areas that come online when your mind is wandering—when you are daydreaming. And it turns out that when you can toggle from active, focused labour with your brain to daydreaming—the sort of like mind-wandering that happens while you’re driving, where you’re fantasizing about things—and then toggle back to focused effort, that when you can oscillate freely from one brain state to the other, that is predictive of being well in just about every domain of your life, including your emotional life and your intellectual life. It is not that being bored is the thing that will help you; it is that daydreaming itself, just letting your mind wander, turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream—to quote The Beatles.
Many times we mistakenly believe that rest is about like total stillness—of both mind and body. But no, physical activity—because it improves the quality of your sleep, because it improves the clarity of your thought, it stabilizes your emotions—physical activity, for people who are natural exercisers is restful. And you can engage in default-mode network while you are exercising.
There’s also the stress-reducing conversation. This is a suggestion from John Gottman, where it’s a very specific kind of half-hour conversation between partners, where Partner A talks first and talks about like things that are going wrong—just complaining about the nonsense of life—and Partner B listens—not to solve the problems, not to offer advice—just to be supportive, and empathic, and reinforce the idea that “We are on the same team, the two of us together.” And then Partner B does their complaints about all the things—all the nonsense and the bullshit—and Partner A responds just with empathy, and compassion, and reinforcing the idea that “We are on the same team.” It’s not about solving the problems; it’s about dealing with the feelings that are caused by the problems.
So those are just some of the things that qualify as rest. And yes, total of like 42 per cent, only some of that is sleep. But sleep is the one you’ll die without.
Shivani Persad:
You talk about planful problem-solving and positive reappraisal. Can you break those two down for us?
Amelia Nagoski:
Yes. These are ways of actually dealing with the things that cause your stress. So we put those in two categories: stressors that you can control; and stressors that you cannot control. For stressors you can control, there’s planful problem-solving. So if you’ve ever made a list, you have done planful problem-solving. If you carry around a purse full of the stuff you’re going to need for the whole day, if you have three kinds of wipes in your backpack right now, you are planful problem-solving, because you’re ready for whatever is going to happen.
Emily Nagoski:
Amelia is thinking about those days when we used to fly.
Amelia Nagoski:
Yes. Because I had three kinds of wipes. Yes, you have to have that bag with you when you’re on the airplane.
Emily Nagoski:
You are, capital-R, Ready.
Amelia Nagoski:
Yes. You anticipate, “There’s a problem that’s going to happen. How do I solve it?” And you’re ready to go. The good news for women is that we generally are socialized to be the people who plan and solve the problems.
Emily Nagoski:
We keep the calendars. We keep the drugstore in our bag. We keep the lists. We know when everybody’s birthdays are.
Amelia Nagoski:
For stressors you cannot control, there is positive reappraisal. And I am the one who talks about this, because I’m the one who had to be convinced that this was real. For a lot of people who are optimists, they tend to believe that things that go wrong are just things that go wrong. They don’t suggest that the world is a permanently terrible place. But for pessimists, who believe that when things go wrong it’s the because the world is inherently bad—that’s me—we need positive reappraisal. We need to understand that when things go bad—when there’s a trouble or problem in the world—it actually genuinely truly is an opportunity to grow and develop for something good to happen.
The science actually says that when things are hard, that’s an opportunity for growth. People actually do a better job, and they learn more, and they grow as people when things are harder. When students are given an assigned reading in a very easy-to-read font and then they’re given a comprehension test, and then some of the students are given the assigned reading in a difficult-to-read font and they’re given the same comprehension test, who does better on the test—in both the immediate and the long term?
Emily Nagoski:
The students with the more difficult font.
Amelia Nagoski:
Yeah, with the more difficult font! It’s very irritating, they don’t enjoy it, but the fact is they learn more. People who work in groups that are homogenous feel really good about the process of solving whatever problem they’ve been given. And people who work in groups that are heterogeneous feel really frustrated and like, “This didn’t go great,” but they come up with better solutions.
Shivani Persad:
How do things like race, economic status, and privilege factor into burnout?
Amelia Nagoski:
They are huge. Most of the research into burnout—well, the research into burnout began with professional burnout, with certain kinds of work leading to certain kinds of results, because of unmeetable goals and unfulfillable expectations. So society presents the same kind of unmeetable goals and unfillable expectations to certain kinds of people. If you are white and male and cis and straight and rich and thin. If you conform to this one single ideal of who it is to be a person with power, you’re going to have fewer barriers, fewer obstacles; you’re going to find it easier to meet the expectations, to fulfill the goals. If you, in any way, do not meet any of those expectations, you are not ever going to be able to meet those expectations. And that is a source of stress, a source of friction, that is going to lead you to feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by everything that you have to do—because you do have a lot to do—and yet somehow feeling that you’re not doing enough, because the world is actively telling you, “You haven’t done enough yet.”
So at all the intersections of oppression, we share this frustration of our inability to be what the world demands that we be, which is white and male and straight and thin, and whatever the other requirements are to have access to power. Of course we’re frustrated; of course we’re overwhelmed. We literally can never be those things. And what we need is a world that lets us be who we are. And we’re not going to have that anytime soon. Hence the big picture of addressing burnout in terms of both dealing with the stress in our body—so we can feel better right now—and also dealing with the stress in our body so we can feel better right now, so that we can work to create the long-term change so that the things that are causing our stress are reduced for the next generation.
Shivani Persad:
You say that wellness is not a state of being, it’s a state of action. What’s one thing that women can do today to start moving forward?
Amelia Nagoski:
Ask for help. When you think you need more grit, what you need is help.
The cure for burnout is not self-care. It’s all of us caring for each other. We wrote a self-help book. Like it’s called “self-help.” And what the real thing is that helping yourself is never going to be enough; don’t let those other books lie to you. When you feel like you need more grit—“I ought to be working harder”—ask for help.
[music]
Shivani Persad:
At the end of every episode, we like to ask our guests about what they value most. What book changed your life?
Emily Nagoski:
If I were going to just pick one, it would be The Hite Report, Shere Hite’s 1977 huge tome on women’s sexuality. Even though it was published in the ’70s, it is still revolutionary and transformative. And when I read sections of it to my students, it sounds to them like it could have been written a month ago.
Shivani Persad:
What book changed your life, Amelia?
Amelia Nagoski:
The most important book in my life is Jane Eyre. I read it when I was 16, for the first time, and I have read it almost every year since then, at least once a year. It seems like it’s this, you know, 19th-century novel that’s about, you know, how much it is people get stuck by prudish social norms, but it’s not about that at all. It’s about becoming an adult; it’s about becoming an individual; about forgiving yourself; about forgiving the people who have hurt you in the past. About becoming the person who you’re supposed to be, not just by holding onto things that you value and believe are true—although that’s part it—but also by turning toward the challenges that you face and being honest about the things that you’ve done wrong in your life, and allowing that to become part of who you are. It’s probably the best novel ever written.
And I think that everyone should read it. It’ll make your life better.
Shivani Persad:
One thing you both talk about in the book is the difference between joy and happiness. So for both of you, we would like to know what brings you joy.
Amelia Nagoski:
Just a moment of joy that I can think of very quickly is the experience of sitting on my back porch and watching my dogs romp around in the backyard. It doesn’t have to do with what’s happening right then and watching them play, but it is about the experience of knowing that I live in a place that’s safe—I’ve provided a place that’s safe for these two little animals—and that we live in a world that can create an experience that’s so natural for all of us.
Shivani Persad:
Emily?
Emily Nagoski:
I think the experience of joy I’ve had most recently—I’ve been in the process of writing an update and revision to Come As You Are. I’ve been through five passes of copyedit pages. And on the very last round, I read the introduction out loud, looking for like what little words would I change. And I made myself cry reading it, because after all the years it has been since I originally wrote that text, I still feel the intense longing to communicate the science of women’s sexuality in a way that changes people’s lives.
Shivani Persad:
I think it’s amazing that your own writing made you do that. That’s awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Emily Nagoski:
Thank you.
Amelia Nagoski:
Thank you.
Shivani Persad:
For more ideas to help you live well, including the book featured in this episode, visit indigo.ca/podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. And don’t forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
Well Said was produced for Indigo Books and Music, Inc. by Vocal Fry Studios.
The information provided in this podcast should not be relied upon by our listeners as medical advice, even where it has been presented by physicians or medical practitioners. Any information presented in this podcast is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The views expressed throughout this podcast represent the views of the guests and do not necessarily represent the views of Indigo.