Book Quotes — Burnout

by: Emily Nagoski
“For the givers”

Complete The Cycle

Stressors — are what activate the stress response in your body.

• Anything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste or imagine could do you harm.
• These are external stressors: work, money, family, time, cultural norms and expectations, experiences of discrimination.
• Internal Stressors: self-criticisms, body image, identify, memories, The Future.

Stress — is the neurological and physiological shift that happens in your body when you encounter one of these threats. Its an evolutionarily adaptive response that helps us cope with things like being chased by a lion.

Here comes the lion, what do you do? You Flight. You Freeze.

Just because you’ve dealt with a stressor, that doesn’t mean you have dealt with these tress itself. You have to deal with the stress to complete the circle.

Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the cycle. Even if its just jumping up and down or a good old cry.

Affection.

wellness is the freedom to move fluidly through the cycles of being human. Wellness is thus not a state of being ist is a state of action.

Why we get stuck?

1. Chronic Stressor — chronic stress
2. Social Appropriateness. Sometimes the brain activates a stress response and you can’t do the thing it's trying to tell you to do.
3. It’s safer.

Freeze

• Flight — more likely to survive by trying to escape. The flight is fear- avoidance. Freeze — play dead.
• Twenty and sixty minutes a day does it for most folks. You should complete the stress response cycle on most days.
• Body language. Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle.

Other ways to complete the cycle

• Physical Activity
• Breathing — deep. slow breaths downregulate the stress response. Slow count of five, hold that breath for five, then exhale for a slow count of ten.
• Positive Social Interactions. Casual but friendly social interaction is the first external sign that the world is a safe place. Reassure your brain that the world is a safe, sane place.
• Laughter
• Affection — likes, respects and trusts. Hug someone you love and trust for 20 seconds.
• Spirituality — Our capacity to complete the cycle with affection doesn’t stop with other human beings. Just petting a cat for a few minutes can lower your blood pressure. Role of Spirituality in a person's well being = meaning of life.
• Creative Expression — create a context that tolerates, even encourages big emotions

How do you know you’ve completed the cycle?

You might experience it as a shift in mood or mental state or physical tension as you breathe more deeply and your thoughts relax.

How does it feel? Its a gear shift. The more regularly she exercises, the more easily she gets there. She’ll feel better at the end of a run, but not done. If you’ve spent a long time accumulating incomplete stress response cycles indie your body, you may have this experience.

Holding on to your worry or anger, you’ve probably got a whole lot of accumulated stress response cycles spinning their engines, waiting for their turn, so it's going to take a while before you get through the backlog. Thirty minutes of anything that works for you: exercise, meditation, creative expression, affection.

If you’ve hiding from your life, you’ve passed your threshold. You aren’t dealing with either the stress or the stressor. Deal with the stress so you can be well enough to deal with the stressor.

Wellness happens when your body is a place of safety for you, even when your body is not necessarily in a safe place. Wellness is not a state of being, but a state of action.

Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the cycle. Even if it's just jumping up and down or a good old cry.

Persist

You analyze the problem, you make a plan based on your analysis, and then you execute the plan. Deciding that the effort, the discomfort, the frustration, the unanticipated obstacles, and even the repeated failure have value

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

Genuine experts know how difficult their work is, so they are realistic about their competence and thus rate their confidence in their own ability as moderate.

Redefine winning, you set goals that are achievements in themselves. And success is its own reward. I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere that I needed to be.

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

Finding our thoughts and feelings go back again and again to your suffering, ask for help. Recognize the stressors.

Nobody makes me feel better, I have to do that myself! I have to find things to enjoy about things that are not enjoyable. I have to find a way not to complain about things I don’t like or want in my life. Don’t try to make me feel good. Complain if you want to.

Frustration happens when our progress towards a goal feels more effortful than we expect it to be. You can manage frustration by using planful problem solving for stressors you can control, and positive reappraisal for stressors you can’t control.

Meaning

Food poisoning you know why it's happening. You can accept it because you know the way. That's the power of meaning. We can tolerate any suffering if we know why. How can I respect myself, if I can't let go? What kind of person am I? What is love? what matters?

Positive psychology. Meaning. Promote happiness in people who are otherwise healthy. In the happiness enhancing approach, meaningful activities are described as ones seeking to use and develop the best in oneself. Life has meaning when a person contributes something positive to the world by the time they die. Meaning is the feeling that you matter in some larger sense.

People with. greater senses of meaning and purpose in life experience better health and are more likely to access preventative healthcare services, to protect that health. Develop greater overall wellbeing, relationships and hope as well as reduced psychological stress and improved physical health.

Meaning 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.

Meaning is what sustains us on the long hard journey, no matter what we find at the end. Meaning is not found, it is made. To make meaning, engage with something larger than yourself. Like a God, you believe dream you have for the future. Eat your greens

1. Pursuit and achievement of ambitious goals that leave a legacy.
2. Loving, emotionally intimate connection with others as in raising my kids so they know they're loved no matter what or loving and supporting my partner with authenticity and kindness.

Your life has a positive impact.

Ask your closest friends to describe the real you, the characteristics of your personality and your life that are at the core of your best self. Think of a time when you experienced an intense sense of meaning or purpose or alignment or whoever it feels like for you. What were you doing? What was it that created that sense of meaning?

Your something larger is within you

The call isn't out there at all. It's inside me.

Whatever calls you, whether its the ocean or art or family or democracy, isn't out there. It's inside you. Like all the cycles and rhythms we describe in this book, it comes and goes, accelerates and decelerates, falls away and rises again. Like a tide, inside you. No matter what forces oppose you, whether its Human Giver Syndrome or natural disasters or personal loss, nothing can stand between you and your Something Larger.

You hear the call in your heart.

When you engage with the something larger that's waiting for you inside your own body, linking you to the world.

The Game is Rigged

Every human can complete the stress response cycle, manage their Monitor and engage with their Something Larger.

His brain has learned that trying doesn't work, that nothing he does makes a difference and so he has lost the ability to try. Learned helplessness. Humans, who repeatedly find themselves in bad situations from which they cant escape may not even try to escape. Their central nervous system has learned that when they are suffering, nothing they can do will make a difference. They have learned they are helpless.

A lot of us are carrying around decades of incomplete stress response cycles because Human Giver Syndrome told us we had to be happy and calm and not make other people uncomfortable with our anger. Move, sing, scream, write, chop wood. Purge the rage. Complete the cycle.

You do something — helplessness can be unlearned. When you feel trapped, free yourself from anything and it will teach your body that you are not helpless. Do a thing. To care for your small patch of the world.

Your goal is to stabilize you. Everybody can do something. And something is anything that isn't anything. We unlearn helplessness by doing a thing. A thing that uses our body. Go for a walk. Scream into a pillow. Just keep swimming when things are difficult. If you just keep swimming, you’ll find your way.

Exposes and names a source of pain so old and deep we have learned to ignore it or treat it.

The biniki industrial Complex

Her body is full of needs — needs for food, sleep, diaper changes, being held. Yo-Yo dieting ultimately causes changes in bring functioning that increase insulin and leptin resistance. Which leads to the actual disease. Our bodies reflect our morality and indeed our very worth as human beings. Thin people, by contrast, are self-controlled and nice and clean and smart.

Defended weight tends to go up and we age and almost never goes down. 80kg. How to transform this? Your body. Your Choice. I choose 73kg.

1. Practice body acceptance
2. Embrace Body diversity
3. Listen to your body

Mess acceptance. Turn toward the mess of noisy, contradictory thoughts and feelings with kindness and compassion.

Physical activity, its good for you, because of completing the cycle and also doing a thing. Move your body anyway — because it really is good for you — and smile benevolently at the mess.

Beauty — a definition that comes from our own hearts and includes our bodies as they are right now, we can turn toward our bodies with kindness and compassion. New Hotness — a strategy for teaching ourselves to let go of body self-criticism and shift to self-kindness. How you look today is the new hotness.

All your body requires of you is that you turn toward it with kindness and compassion, with nonjudgement and plain vanilla acceptance of all your contradictory emotions, beliefs and longings. Beautiful is what your body already is.

Hi Body, what do you need?

What it feels like inside your body?

I deserve food and love and rest and health. My body is the body of someone who needs my care. What’s wrong honey? Are you hungry? thirsty? tired? lonely? she can definitely tell you, if you listen. You might have to stop what you're doing take a slow breath, focus on the sensation of your weight on the floor or the chair, and actually ask out loud, what do you nee? But she will give you an answer.

How much sleep? Loving attention from whom? What kind of food? Your body needs to breathe and to sleep. She needs food. She needs love. She deserves food and love and sleeps. Source of joy for those who care about her. She’s yours. She’s you.

Practice seeing everyone as the new hotness. And tune in to your body needs.

Connect

When you were little, what did you eat when you were hungry? Food was either scarce, low in quality, or laden with guilt and shame would answer it very differently.

Social connection is a form of nourishment, like food. Early experiences shape our present-day relationship with food, so our early experiences of connection shape our present-day relationship with other people. The fundamental need for connection. Contact with another person is a basic biological need; loneliness is a form of starvation. No one is complete without other people. TO be complete without social connection is to be nourished without food. We get hungry. We get lonely.

We stay in social groups and develop a mutual connection with our peers, which are shaped by the ways we connected. Sharing space with anyone else means sharing energy. We’re made of energy. The nature of energy is to be shared, to spread, to connect one thing to another. Sharing space with other people means that our energy influences theirs, and theirs influences ours. Its physics. And psychology and unavoidable and amazing.

Having positive relationships of all kinds, including friends, BFFs, besties, buds, bros and the fam.

High self-reported satisfaction with the relationship, predominantly positive attitudes toward one's partner, and low levels of hostile and negative behaviour. I'm satisfied with my relationship. High-quality relationship. People tend to take better care of themselves when they’re in a high-quality relationship.

The people around us will reciprocate in proportion to what we give them is called trust. Money, time, attention, actual cupcakes or compassion for our difficult feelings. If we turn towards someone with our difficult feelings and they turn in to our feelings without judgement or defensiveness it helps us to move through that feeling, like a tunnel to the light at the end. Are you there for me? Trustworthy people are there for each other, and that mutual trust and trustworthiness maximizes wellness for both people.

She forgives her but she would be wise to put her on the periphery of the bubble. People who don’t trust or are untrustworthy are energy drains.

Authenticity means being totally yourself. Being authentic requires trust, knowing that the person with whom you share these potentially rejectable thoughts and feelings will not betray you.

When the people in our bubble can turn with kindness and compassion toward our difficult emotions, and we can do the same for them, it strengthens the bubble-like nothing else. Coming to understand an idea by exploring it within its context. you put yourself in the shoes of the other person, to try on their point of view. You suspend your doubts, judgements, criticisms, and personal needs in favour of exploring their perspective because you want to understand.

Knowing yourself better by learning about others is healthy.

Huger for connection — when you feel not enough. Humans are not built to do big things alone. We are built to do them together. The truth about sadness is that we find our way out of that tunnel most efficiently when we have a friend who calls through the darkness. You can leverage your rage in a match or practice. Use your body. Jump up and down get noisy, release all that energy, share it with others.

Connection — with friends, family, pets, the divine, is as necessary as food and water.

Certain kinds of connections create energy. When you share mutual trust and connected knowing with someone you co-create energy that renews both people. We call this the Bubble of Love.

Sadness, rage, and the feeling that you are not enough are forms of loneliness. When you experience these emotions, connect.

What makes you stronger

Rest.

Mental energy, like street, has a cycle it runs through, an oscillation from task focus to processing and back to task focus. Rest makes us more persistent and productive. Resting after a depleting activity eliminates the effects of fatigue.

When her team is struggling at the office, go play or rest. Mental rest is the time necessary for your brain to process the world. Her brain needed to be any low demand task that allowed her default mode to come online

Accomplish life-preserving tasks that can be best achieved when we are not around to interfere. We are not complete without sleep. If you’re not going to sleep, better not exercise.

Review right before bed then sleeps for 7 hours. your brain will soak up the information like grass absorbing rain after a drought. Emotions are not complete without sleep. Sleep deprivation is a form of torture. When you are broken, go to bed. Sleep is medicine for you.

If you make only one change after reading this book, let it be getting more sleep. Sleep is miracle Sleep is essential not only for your own personal health but also for your emotional health and relationships so it's not even remotely selfish. Give yourself permission and opportunity to rest. If you’ve dealt with the stressors but haven’t dealt with the stress itself. Complete the cycle, so your brain can transition into rest.

You need 42percent of sleep

• 8 hours sleep
• 14 hours work
  30 mins stress reducing conversations
  30 mins physical activity
  30 mins paying attention to food
  30 mins wild card

Rest is a first step to listening to and believing your body. The madwoman in the attic.

You deserve respect and love you deserve to be cherished. You deserve kindness right now just as you are. As with body acceptance, we can’t say you’ll end up living a life free of self-criticism. We can say you’ll live a life of more self-kindness, which will lead to greater joy, better health, stronger readerships and greater capacity to cope when you’re struggling.

Mad Women

What does she sound like?

The shadow the hurt little girl, the downtrodden teenager, the perfect version of ourselves. What's yours like? What does she look like? when was she born? what is her history? What does she say to you? Write out her feelings and thoughts. Notice where shes hardly critical of you, shaming, or perfectionists. What she fears or what she grieving. She can trust you to maintain the attic so that she always has a safe place to stay.

Joyful ever after

Happiness is predicated on happenings.

Joy arises from an internal clarity about our purpose. When we engage with something larger than ourselves, we make meaning, and when we can resonate, bell-like with that Something Larger, that's joy.

Joy comes from connection with fellow givers. We need other people to tell us that we are enough, not because we don’t know it already, but because the act of taking the time to remind someone else they’re enough is part of what makes us feel were enough. We give and we receive and we are made whole.

Wellness is a state of action. Trust your body. Be kind to yourself. You are enough, just as you are right now. Your joy matters. Please tell everyone you know.

I have a tradition to pass a book to someone who reminded me of them when reading it. This book goes to — Stephanie Gilmour.

NEXT STEPS

• Emily Nagoski Come as you are the surprising new science that will transform your sex life.
• TED Talk — The keys to happier, happiest sex life. Confidence and joy are the keys to a great sex life.