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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC Studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Hey, you want to spend some time with us IRL, in real life? I want to extend an invitation to All Of it listeners, join us for a live broadcast of All Of It in WNYC's Greene Space. It is happening on Friday, February 10th. The band Yo La Tengo will be joining us along with a special guest, to be named. Tickets are, get this, pay what you wish, but you have to reserve them. For more information about the event, go to wnyc.org/thegreenespace. That's wnyc.org/thegreenespace for our live show Friday, February 10th with Yo La Tengo. Can't wait to see you there.

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I said that backwards, Yo La Tengo. I know. Earlier this month, New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern abruptly stepped down after serving for nearly six years on the job. She has been credited with her swift and successful responses to the Christchurch mass shooting and the COVID pandemic, but also had to manage a polarized country and faced sexism and misogyny. She resigned basically due to burnout. Let's listen to a bit of her resignation speech.

Jacinda Ardern: I am leaving because with such a privileged role comes responsibility. The responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead and also when you are not. I know what this job takes and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It's that simple.

Alison Stewart: She went on to say she had, "No plans, no next steps." In the intro to the book, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, authors Emily and Amelia Nagoski write, "When we told women we were writing a book called Burnout, nobody ever asked, 'What's burnout?' Mostly they said, 'Is it out yet? Can I read it?' We all have intuitive sense of what burnout is. We know how it feels in our bodies and how our emotions crumble in the grip of it, but when it was first coined as a technical term by Herbert Freudenberger in 1975, burnout was defined by three components. One, emotional exhaustion, the fatigue that comes from caring too much for too long. Two, depersonalization, the depletion of empathy, caring, and compassion. Three, decreased sense of accomplishment, an unconquerable sense of futility. Feeling that nothing you do makes any difference."

Joining me now to discuss more about burnout and to take your calls is Emily Nagoski, co-author of Burnout. Hi, Emily, welcome to the show.

Emily Nagoski: Hello.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, have you experienced burnout? If so, when? Can you pinpoint why? How did you get through it? Give us a call. (212) 433-9692, (212) 433-WNYC. Or you can tweet to us or DM us on Instagram @allofitwnyc. What are some things that you've found have helped you when you feel burned out? Have you changed your work habits recently, or maybe just quit your job or you're thinking of quitting? We'd like to hear from you. (212) 433-9692, (212) 433-WNYC. Maybe you're a parent working outside of the home and you're trying to balance responsibilities, or you're somebody who feels overworked, or maybe a manager who needs ideas on how to keep your team from feeling burned out, we like to hear from you as well. (212) 433-9692, (212) 433-WNYC. Social media is @allofitwnyc.

Our screeners are standing by, so while we answer some phone calls, let's get into this conversation. Burnout was coined in the 1975. As you wrote in your book, in 2019, it was officially recognized as a diagnosable condition in the United States. When you think about that span '75 to 2019, what have been the main contributors to burnout, Emily, and how have they changed?

Emily Nagoski: It actually changed much more just since 2020 when all of us were forced to recognize the ways in which women's roles have not become as stable and secure as we thought they were. Women's role in the workplace, their pay, everything is back to where it was in the 1980s when my mother was a working mother.

Alison Stewart: When you mean it's rolled back, in what ways? What's an example?

Emily Nagoski: More and more women are being forced out of the workplace because they don't have access to affordable childcare. There is a pay gap situation ongoing and increasing, particularly for women of color, of course. The kind of work that women are expected to do is in those caring, helping industries. When women take jobs in other fields that are traditionally masculine, there is strong blowback.

Alison Stewart: In your book, you talk about the human giver syndrome, will you explain what that means and how it contributes to burnout?

Emily Nagoski: Sure. This is a term we made up for the book to describe the moral obligation that some people are taught, that they have to be pretty, happy, calm, generous, and unfailingly attentive to the needs of others. This is in contrast to human beings or what I've started to call human winners who have a moral obligation to be strong, confident, competitive, and independent. All of us, if we fall short of this moral obligation, we deserve to be punished or humiliated. If there's no one around to punish us, we will just beat the crap out of ourselves.

Alison Stewart: It's so interesting you call it the human giver syndrome. Is that something that people find themselves falling under when they get into businesses, places where they're expected to help make money for somebody else, or is this something that we're culturally taught from the time there's a pink aisle and there's a blue aisle?

Emily Nagoski: Oh, yes. Day of birth, people label you, it's a girl or it's a boy, and they hand you a user's manual of how you're supposed to live inside this body. Everyone gets a bad deal when it comes to which book they get because some emotions are allowed in the human giver syndrome manual, and some emotions are allowed in the human winner manual for human winners. Basically, all you get is winning, angry, and horny. When you're a human giver, you're allowed happy, sometimes you're allowed sad, and you're allowed empathy. That's pretty much it of the acceptable emotions.

Because that first defining characteristic of burnout is emotional exhaustion, imagine if you're not allowed to express your rage, like you cannot inconvenience other people with something as uncomfortable as your rage, and so you sit on it, you hold onto it, and it just stays inside you and oxidizes into your body and causes disease.

Alison Stewart: I was actually having this conversation with somebody last week about how we do not teach how to deal with anger productively, because anger in itself is not a bad thing. It's a normal emotion, [chuckles] but we don't really learn how to express it productively.

Emily Nagoski: Yes, rage is a normal emotion. It is built into the mammalian brain. It is the motivation to attack and destroy a threat. There is nothing inherently dangerous about any emotion. You can sit and experience in your body any emotion. It is the choices we make about what to do with that emotion that determine whether it is safe or not. The thing I say over and over so often, people roll their eyes at me, is feelings are tunnels. You have to go all the way through them to get to the light at the end.

Rage is a tunnel. You have to release it. You have to allow it to come out of your body and your mind, not by feeding it thoughts, not by repressing it, by just allowing to you engage in some creative self-expression, like knitting and/or physical activity is a really efficient way to let it out of your body. The primal scream exists for a reason because it's a way to let it out of your body in a way that's not going to do you harm or anybody else.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Emily Nagoski. The name of the book is Burnout: The Secret To Unlocking the Stress Cycle. Let's take a few calls. Avril is calling in from the Bronx. Hi, Avril.

Avril: Hi.

Alison Stewart: You're on the air.

Avril: Hey, yes, so I am actually quite fascinated with your conversation this evening because as I was telling the previous person I was talking to, I'm a nurse. I've been a nurse for 23 years. During COVID, I was doing travel nursing all over the United States. After two and a half years of doing that, I got so tired. It was really hard for me to literally get up in the mornings. I tried. I really, really tried. I have a 12-year-old at home and a 20-year-old that's in college. She goes to college from home, so she's still at home. I really did try to get up every day and be there every day with my children and just be a mom.

After a while, I could barely do that. I was still working part time, and I literally had to just stop working for a whole nine months. I did nothing but sleep, get up, eat, shower, and go right back to sleep

Alison Stewart: How are you feeling now? Are you feeling better?

Avril: Yes, I literally just started working again last year in November. I started working the 18th of November of last year, and I've been back to work full time but-- [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: I'm going to dive in here, and I want to get Emily to respond because you've given us a lot of information, Avril. Thank you so much. I'm glad you're feeling better. I want to follow up on a couple of things that Avril said, and then maybe you heard something special out of it. I want people to understand the difference between being tired and just done for the day with something and being truly emotionally exhausted. What are some signs for people? Because it really sounds like Avril was just truly emotionally exhausted.

Emily Nagoski: The main sign is that the rest that you have the opportunity to get is inadequate to recover from the energy that you spent in the previous day, which that overwhelming fatigue, inability to get out of bed, it's-- She actually named the most important treatments for burnout, which are getting more rest, getting more help, and whenever possible, changing or even leaving the situation that's generating the burnout. That's what differentiates burnout from mental health diagnoses like depression and anxiety, burnout can be treated without therapy or medication.

Alison Stewart: Can be about changing what's not working, basically.

Emily Nagoski: Right.

Alison Stewart: Identifying what's not working and doing something you can to change it, if you can, if you have the means to.

Emily Nagoski: Especially rest and help.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Kathleen from Rockland County. Hi, Kathleen.

Kathleen: Hello. I was saying to your screener that I think what would be really helpful for people who are feeling stressed out is to have some sort of outlet, whether it's running or a hobby that they're pursuing. My own personal hobby is miniatures. I've been doing it for many years, but really in earnest when my mother's health started declining a few years ago. I was just taking on more and more responsibility for her, and I just needed an outlet where I could just check out for a while. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Kathleen: Something that I was getting some satisfaction from and something that was actually resulting in a finished thing that I can enjoy afterwards, but also with the pandemic. She passed away, and then the pandemic hit, so that's when I really took it up. I was working in retail at the time, which was very stressful. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Oh, sure.

Kathleen: I was feeling very burnt out. It was great to have something that I could just dip into that would take me away from all of that stress.

Alison Stewart: Kathleen, thank you so much for calling in. Emily, your reaction to what Kathleen has done for herself?

Emily Nagoski: All of chapter one in burnout is concrete, specific, evidence-based ways for going all the way through the tunnel of difficult feelings, and creative self-expression is one of them. Having something creative that you do that gives you a productive place to put all the difficult feelings. We also talk about the different kinds of rest. Yes, sleep is absolutely essential, but rest can also be a changing of gears. Doing something that doesn't require any of the same brain areas that you use when you were doing the work that drains your energy.

Alison Stewart: What are some other concrete steps?

Emily Nagoski: As she was saying, physical activity, super important. Not accessible to everyone all the time, equally-

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Emily Nagoski: -and not everyone is a natural exerciser. Connection is a really important one. Whether it's connection with other humans, connection with different animals, connection with the nature and a landscape, or connection with the divine is very important. Feeling that you have returned to a place of safety inside your own body is the ultimate test of whether or not it's actually helping. Connecting in any of those ways helps your body feel like you have come home and are safe again. Just as physical activity, look, your body works. You can run away. Even if you can't-- The process of dealing with our stress is separate from the process of dealing with whatever it is that caused the stress. Even though you can't run away from your problems, you can run the stress out of your body so that you can return to the relaxation response.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Rob, calling in from Chatham, New Jersey. Hi, Rob, thanks for calling in. You're on with Emily Nagoski, co-author of Burnout.

Rob: Hi. Sorry, my question kind of changed while I was on hold, but-

Alison Stewart: That's okay.

Rob: -does the book make any reference to universal healthcare and how constrained people feel that they can't just leave their job when they need a break?

Emily Nagoski: Not precisely. We do have a chapter on the patriarchy, specifically white supremacist, cis-heteropatriarchal, rapidly-exploitative late capitalism of which universal healthcare is a part. Our book is about solutions that people can implement in their lives today. There are, of course, policy solutions that help with this. Interestingly, the first ever research, that work that Herbert Freudenberger did in the '70s was on air traffic controllers who were burning out. What he implemented as a strategy to help them not burn out is not any form of self-care. They developed computer programs to manage the most burnout-inducing tasks of air traffic control. The cure for burnout is not self-care, it is all of us caring for each other, and that includes at a system level.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Emily Nagoski. The name of the book is Burnout. Listeners, have you experienced burnout? If so, when? Can you pinpoint why? How did you get through it? (212) 433-9692, (212)433-WNYC, or you could reach out via our social media @allofitwnyc. Maybe you're struggling to balance responsibilities in your life. (212) 433-9692, (212) 433-WNYC. Maybe you could share the moment you knew you were feeling burned out. My guest is Emily Nagoski. You're my guest as well. We'll have more with this conversation after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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This is All Of It. My guest is Emily Nagoski. She's co-author with Amelia Nagoski of the book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. We are talking about burnout. We were motivated for this segment, Emily, because of the Prime Minister of New Zealand saying, "Yes, that's it. I'm going to go spend time with my kids, and I'm going to take my kid to school, and this has been a lot." What did you think when you heard that, as someone who has been writing about this and researching this? [silence] Oops, I thin you're muted, Emily. There you go.

Emily Nagoski: To me, the most powerful thing of hearing that was that she was willing and able to say out loud, "My tank is empty and therefore, I'm going to stop." To acknowledge that there are limits of living in a mammalian body is a radical act that most people do not feel that they are allowed to do. One of the things I love about human giver syndrome is it is the answer to why most of the self-care cliches don't work, like you don't have to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm. If you're raised as a human giver, it's like, you don't have to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm, but you do have two legs and you still have both of your arms, and some people in your community are really cold, but no, no. You know what? Self-care is really important. Good for you. You go ahead and don't set yourself on fire. Jacinda Ardern didn't fall into the trap.

Alison Stewart: For someone who finds himself in that trap, is really having a hard time saying out loud, "I'm burned out and there needs to be some changes made," what counsel would you give them?

Emily Nagoski: I would direct them to Chapter 2 of the Burnout workbook, actually, where there are worksheets where you can assess whether or not it is time to quit. There are orderly ways to do this, intellectual, cognitive. What are the good things about change? What are some not so good things about change? What are good things about staying the same, and what are some not so good things about staying the same? You look at that grid and you assess where there are ways to get the good stuff and minimize some of those not so good stuff.

Ultimately, we live in a mammalian body that was evolved for the explore-exploit problem. If you're a little squirrel rummaging in a patch of ground for nuts, at a certain point, your body is attuned to the land and it knows that there is a threshold that you cross where it is a better payoff to take the risk of changing where you are and transitioning to a new place because you've gotten what you can out of this experience. We all have this internal squirrel of our mammalian body that can tell us whether or not we're done. The main problem is that if you were raised as a woman in particular, you were taught to believe other people's opinions about your body far more than you believe your body's own internal experience.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Will, calling in from Rockland County. Hey, Will, thanks for calling in. You work in a really fast-paced place, it sounds like.

Will: Yes, it's an automotive repair, well known, I was telling your screener, without mentioning the names, but people come in, and I wanted to ask-- Unfortunately, I got late in the conversation. I was having lunch and I turned the radio. I'm so happy for this topic. People come in with a minor accident, let's say, a tire blowout or a flat repair, and it turns into a big, "Can you do it in five minutes? Because I'm on my way to Boston." Or they're always going somewhere. People are always going somewhere. It's the most aggravating, frustrating situation for me because I take time to take care of my car and my personal self, and I don't understand how people don't do this. They don't plan for anything.

I understand if you're driving on a road and you have a blowout, it's an emergency, therefore, you got to accept the fact that it happened. It's going to take time. They come in. I've [unintelligible 00:20:36] actually I almost had fist fights with people. Mostly older men that are very nasty, very aggressive. Then the worst is, they put out these negative reviews on Google. Our company is very strong on reviews now. I just don't know. I have to walk away sometimes because the amount of time that it takes to do an oil change at a full- service shop-- [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: To do it the right way and the way that you want to do it, but it sounds like, Will, that they're putting a lot of pressure on you and that external pressure, Emily, could help lead to Will burning out.

Emily Nagoski: Exactly. Everybody in this situation is experiencing an emotion that Amelia and I decided to call foop, which is the point at which you are oscillating between frustrated rage and helpless despair. You're like, "No, I'm going to get this done. Nobody's going to get in my way." Then also, "I can't do it. What am I supposed to do? I feel helpless and trapped in this situation." Everyone we know has experienced it. We never found a name, so we called it foop, which is like poop with an F.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles]

Emily Nagoski: The thing to do when you're there, there are a lot of evidence-based interventions, but planful problem solving is one of them. If you know ahead of time people are going to be reacting in this irrational way and not doing the work that they should be doing to manage their own emotions, plan for it ahead of time, develop strategies for nodding and smiling, and saying, "I hear that, that's very important."

There's also a positive reappraisal, which is the sort of thing, it's like, whenever it rains, look for a rainbow. No, no, no. Rainbows don't actually necessarily contribute anything to your life if you are struggling. Instead, look for what actually does this bring to my life? Like, "Oh, this is a learning opportunity. Hooray for me to enhance my ability to relate to people who are in a difficult state." Oh, boy.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Jodi on Line 4 calling in from Bergen County. Hi, Jodi. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Jodi: Hi. Yes. During COVID what happened was I had a therapy business for nearly 28 years. My husband was dying and my kids were in high school. My two children were in high school at the time. I already was burnt out on my therapy business. I had been doing it way too long. I had doctors tell me that physically, because I did medical massage therapy and I dealt with a lot of death and dying.

What I decided to do since Phil Murphy canned us, which was a blessing in disguise in March of 2020, as my husband was dying and I wanted to be there for him and for the kids, I really threw myself into my writing, which I'd been doing since I was seven. Here I was in my late 50s, and I basically decided to reinvent myself. The other thing I decided to do, because I had 30 years in three different areas of athletics, earning money as a professional on the side, besides being a full-time working mother. I decided that I would get outside every single day and try to recapture my old ultra running spirit. I used to be an ultra runner before I was a professional fighter.

Alison Stewart: Oh, wow.

Jodi: I would go out and run at least 2 miles every single day. I decided to do this for at least two years because I had never done it more than a year and a half. I said, "I'm going to do this." As my husband was getting sicker and we didn't want anybody in the house, I would keep my phone on me and run around the block so that one of my kids could say, "Hey, dad needs to go to the bathroom," or whatever it was. This is what I did, and that's how I got through my burnout, even though-- I let myself take naps. I used to get mad at myself because I had to be really tough for all of my sports.

Alison Stewart: I'm smiling. Reason I'm laughing, Jodi, is because Emily just-- I can see her in the Zoom, just put her fists in the air when you said you take naps. Emily, why would the fists went in the air because?

Emily Nagoski: Not everyone is a natural napper, but if you are, there is literally nothing better you can do for your overall well-being than add additional sleep in the middle of the day. It improves mood, it improves learning. Everything about it is incredibly good for you. You're doing a lot of things right, including protecting time for what feels right for your body, including making sure you move every day, even if it means carrying your phone with you and coming back as soon as there's something someone needs. The nap is so spectacular. Congratulations. I have lost count of the people who've told me they feel guilty for sleeping.

Alison Stewart: You give some advice to avoid burnout. Finding something larger is key. When you say, finding something larger, what do you mean?

Emily Nagoski: Meaning in life is a kind of psychological nutrient. The way you develop vitamin D3 is you go out in the sun, and so your body makes vitamin D3. When you connect with your something larger, which is a purpose or meaning or something larger than yourself, when you connect with it, your body makes meaning. Meaning is not something you find, it is not something that you look for, it is a thing that you make by connecting with your something larger.

I'm really lucky to know explicitly what my something larger is. I'm here to teach people to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies. A lot of people's sense of meaning and purpose comes from their family. Taking care of these kids, making sure they get to adulthood as good people. For some people, it is serving mankind, for some people, it's leaving a legacy. Connecting with that something larger not only nourishes you so you can be at your best when things are going well, it protects you when things are at their worst because we carry our something-- Even though your something larger is something outside yourself, we actually carry it inside us all the time. The more we connect with it, the more we are protected when things go wrong.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Samara on Line 1, calling in from Flatbush. Hi, Samara, thank you so much for calling in.

Samara: Hi. As an immigration lawyer working with undocumented clients, I have found meaning that way. However, they are justifiably panicked and eager, and it's very hard to reassure them since there are no guarantees and there is so much waiting. They often have to wait and wait and wait for employment authorization or for an answer about their application. I feel their stress and often, they think that I'm not working hard enough on their behalf.

Alison Stewart: That's tough.

Samara: It's hard not to feel a sense of burnout. I don't know if you have any reflections on that.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much, Samara, for calling in. I did want to get to her call because there's this-- Sometimes people have these jobs and they are in situations where they take on a lot. Even just living in this world and watching the news and trying to be an informed citizen, you can take on a lot. Not in the same way Samara is obviously, but you can take on the world's burdens and ills, especially if you want to be politically active, if you want to do something to change the world. How can you avoid burnout when you are somebody in one of these positions where you're the kind of person who wants to stay engaged, but also does not want to burnout?

Emily Nagoski: It's been so many of the callers, nurses and therapists and lawyers who are trying to help people who are in a potentially life-threatening situation. For me, the most important thing when it comes to engaging with your something larger, when that something larger is huge and essential to the world and to you is to remember, with these big issues, it's like we're standing on a shoreline with buckets, trying to move the shoreline one bucket of sand at a time. Of course, it's going to seem hopeless when you look out at the vastness of the ocean of the thing you want to change, but you look to your left and you see an infinite number of people with their buckets doing their best. You look to your right and you see an infinite number of other people with their buckets doing their best.

The most important thing to remember is that we are not alone. The reason that connection is so important is to remind us that we are allowed to work as hard as we can, and then to rest, to allow our bodies to heal because it's not just one person. You're not alone. You don't have to do everything. There are other people who are carrying this weight with you. The more you allow yourself to access that sense of connection and that sense of support within this big problem that is not going to be solved within any of our lifetimes, the more we can continue working and making progress so that we're a little bit closer for the next generation.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. I've been speaking with its co-author Emily Nagoski. Emily, thank you so much for taking so many of our listeners' calls. We really appreciate it.

Emily Nagoski: It's my pleasure.

[00:29:42] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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