Beating Burnout with Amelia Nagoski

0:04 This is Crappita Happy and I am your host Castunn. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist. I'm mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappita Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy. And more happy. Emily and Amelia Nagoski are identical twins who co authored a book called Burnout, The Secret to Solving Your Stress Cycle back in twenty nineteen. In the book, that make the argument that the gap between what it's really like to be a woman and what people expect of women is a primary cause of burnout because we are exhausting ourselves trying to close the gap between the two. They offer suggestions for how you can complete the biological stress cycle and explain why that is so important, and they also argue that rest, human connection, and being kind to yourself are key to recovering from and preventing burnout. I've been excited to get either Emily or Amelia or both of them on the podcast for a very long time, so I was thrilled that after all this time, we were finally able to make it happen. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Amelia Lagoski. Amelia, Welcome to The Crappy the Happy Podcast. It is such a pleasure to meet you today.

1:35 It's my pleasure to be here. I talk about your book Burnout. The title the book that I've got the copy that I've got is called Solve Your Stress Cycle. I think it's got different titles on different versions. But I've been talking about this book since it came out a few years ago and have really really wanted to get you or your sister Emily onto the show to talk about the book because I talk about you all the time. So I really appreciate that we can finally make it happen. Amelia. Let's start, I guess, with the definition of burnout, and once we get that over and down with them, we can get into the rest of the conversation. But I really feel like that's an important place to start. We all kind of know what it feels like to be burnt out, but there is a technical kind of definition for it.

2:18 So what is it? Yeah, it was first kind of fight in the nineteen seventies, by a research psychologist named Herbert Freudenberger, who defined it as having three primary characteristics. The first is emotional exhaustion, the second is decreased sense of accomplishment, and the third is depersonalization, so feeling emotionally exhausted, so drained, depersonalization. Nothing you do matters, It doesn't matter if you're the one doing it. It has no like larger wide scale and decreased sense of accomplishment, which is that what you're doing. Oh, I got that kind of. Confused with depersonalization, but a decreased sense of accomplishment and depersonalization, Yeah, they're related anyway. But the most signific one, especially in women, as it's been found in the research since that established definition, is emotional exhaustion. It is the most overwhelming and impactful of the three characteristics. But it's important to know that it is not a mental illness. It's not a medical diagnosis.

3:18 It's a condition that's brought on by external factors. Yeah, it's right now. I was also interested. So back in twenty nineteen, there was a lot of hohoha around about the fact that the ICD ten had I think was the ICD ten or eleven that the 'round eleven now yeah, round eleven now had included burnout as an occupational phenomenon. Was that happened before or after you published this book, because your book came out in twenty nineteen, didn't it. Yes, we were not considering the medical definitions or ramifications. I mean, the reason things get included in the ICD is for like insurance purposes to see what is going to get paid for by insurance companies or other kinds of medical payment systems. And for example, the WHO also recently included burnout in its things that it is studying and measuring because they're impactful to a population. But again, the purposes of them including that definition are not to help individuals who are trying to figure out what's wrong with them and why they feel the way they feel their jobs. The WHO or the ICD is to tell providers and institutions and governments who control policy, Hey, your policies are creating this impact, so here are the changes you need to make to prevent that. Yeah that makes sense.

4:40 Yeah, yeah, no, yah, it definitely does. I was just it was interesting to me remains interesting to me that they very specifically say that this is an occupational phenomenon. It's to do with the workplace, and it shouldn't be generalized. And obviously, you me, everybody who has ever had anything to do with burnout. Knows that very clearly. There are a lot of situations in life, experiences in life that can contribute to burnout. I mean, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced sense of efficacy happen in lots of areas of life, not just work, right. And indeed, the job of the WHO. The reason that they were being specific about this is work related is because that's the only kind they were concerned with. Like parental burnout and social justice burnout and caregiver burnout are all things that of course impact people and are very real, but they're not the Who's business.

5:31 You're right, right, yeah, And now you also, you say in the book that you had a very personal experience of burnout, So you're partially motivated to write this book because you had had that experience. Do you want to tell me about that? Yeah? I have a doctor of Musical Arts. My expertise is choral conducting. I stand in front of acquires and help them sing their best the love that's my real job. But it was in getting my doctor degree in music that I became an expert in the science of burnout because I have an identical twin sister, who is Emily Nagoski, PhD, who had already written a New York Times bestselling book called Come As You Are, The Surprising You Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life. And so this book about the science of women's sexuality. When Emily would talk about it with women, they would come up to her and say, you know, yeah, yeah, oh, that sex science was great.

6:25 But you know, the one thing that really helped me was that like one part that was about you know, processing feelings and dealing with your emotions and stress, because it turns out the number one predictor of a woman's sexual well being is her overall well being. So Emily was like, but I talked about so much in that book, why is that the one thing? And I reminded her that when I had learned those things, well, I had originally learned them in my conservatory training as a musician, like for the purpose of performing on stage, for expressing emotion and being a performer, but I didn't learn to transfer that skill to my everyday living and when I did learn it, and that's the stuff she practically addresses in her book In Practical Ways. That saved my life right twice. And so when I reminded her of that, she was like, Uh, well we should write a book about that.

7:19 Yeah. I was hospitalized twice in my in my doctor program for stress induce stillness. Yeah. Wow, And it's serious. It is serious. So what you're saying is that as a as a conductor, you're learning to like process feelings with your body basically or but not actually having fully comprehended that you need to do that, not just when you're conducting, like in your in the rest of life. I need to be processing my feelings are they're going to be stuck in my body. Yeah. There was a very specific moment when Emily had brought me this stack of peer viewed research and I'm reading a book about emotions and stuff, and it says on the page emotions are held in the body. And I just felt this stab in my chest, like some kind of truth had just kind of cracked me open.

8:15 And I sat on my kitchen floor sobbing for and called Emily and was like, this book says that emotions are in your body, and she was like, you're a conductor. How can you not know that? And like I knew that at some tiny service level. Would look, all my emotions, my whole life have been in my body this whole time. Oh my god, that is such an overwhelming thought because I had never processed them or felt them, or like let them do what they are supposed to do. So yes, of course, all those times my body reacted to things with their normal neurochemical responses, the stress response, which prepares you for fight or flight. Every time I actually felt that, I just like shut it down. But like, where did all those neurotransmitters go. What happened to all that muscular preparedness to fight or flee? Well, it just got it just got stuck. And you know, poisoned.

9:14 Me, right, And that is exactly literally. It's inflammation is what it causes and where in your body and how it causes that inflammation and what impact that has on your health will vary from individual individual. But that had happened to me to the point that I that I needed, you know, emergent urgent acute medical intervention. Yeah, it's scary stuff. It's scary stuff. And when you say, like how did I not know that? I think that many people and I know many people listening to this, like you can understand something, but intellectually yeah yeah, you know, but that often that doesn't still translate to you. Oh oh you mean I've got to actually you mean feel it? I mean yeah, you feel it in my body?

9:55 Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. And for I mean Emily and I are identical raise in the same household, and for her, feel your feelings is a natural, self evident thing. She her awareness of her internal sensations and her internal states is so loud to her. Her body communicates her at such a volume, communicates with her at such a volume that she can't ignore it. The slightest thing goes wrong, and she's like, wait, I have to stup everything and fix whatever's wrong. And I am the literal opposite end of the spectrum where I have to sit so still and quiet to hear any kind of sensations or to get any kind of instructions from my body as to what it needs. And so there's just no telling who where on the spectrum you fall. Maybe everybody in your family seems to like know how to listen to your body, and you're like, but I don't even know what those words mean. The good news is for people who think that that sounds like this woo meaningless expression, listen to your body. Always hated that expression. But it is a learnable skill. It's a thing you can learn to do with practice and get better at you can.

11:07 That is good news. So one of the key I mean right up front in the book, one of the first concepts that you introduce, which was so profound to me, and I'm a psychologist, is that you have to complete the stress cycle. So this idea that the stress has to move through you can you just talk us through that? Yeah, this is the foundation of why stress impacts your health. That in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, we developed a stress response cycle to save us from things with teeth and claws that could run forty miles an hour, so that you know, when here comes the sabertoothed tiger. Little you know, proto us down by the water would see yeah tiger and get flooded with adrenaline and cortisol and corticoids and all of the neurotransmitters electrical signals to change every system in our body to prepare us to save our own lives by running away. That's the choice right now.

12:09 I think with the saber tooth tiger, you're not gonna punch it in the face. So your heart rate increases, your respiration gets deeper, all to provide more oxygen to your muscles so they can burn that oxygen to get you away faster and stronger. Now, these things might happen above the level of conscious awareness. You can feel your heart pounding, you can feel your breath getting deeper or harder. You might feel like your skin prickle or your hair stand on end, or kind of a flush of the blood moving. But there's a lot of stuff happening below the level of conscious awareness that even you, you know, super inter receptive people will not be aware of. Like, your immune system is a system that takes a lot of energy. So in the moment of fight or flight, one of the messages that get sent is your immune system learns I need to like take a back seat right now, because who cares about malaria when there's a tiger.

13:04 There's a saber tooth tiger about to mal us to death. And your reproductive system takes a lot of energy and it also gets the message, hey, hey, like chill out. We don't need to worry about babies right now because sabertoothed tiger. So these systems get altered without our conscious awareness. And when we're running away from the tiger, we run, we we climb, We hied in the cleft of the rock, and then we look out and the and the and the tiger's walking away like we escaped. That's we're fine, we're safe now. And we had run and we had burned up all of that energy, used all of the preparedness that our body created in order to save our lives.

13:45 And what that feels like at the end is this huge relief. Like it might feel very calm and it's like warm and open to the universe, or it might feel like excited and jumping up and down and the sunshine and it's brighter and the sky is bluer, and want to hug your friends and family and tell the story to everyone. But we definitely feel a shift from danger to action to recovery where we return to a baseline where our body knows that it's safe and in the twenty first century, it's not tigers and we cannot escape them. The things that cause our stress with fight or flight so we need to deal with the things that initiate a stress response cycle by not fighting or fleeing, by smiling and being polite and standing in line and waiting our turn and filling out the forms and voting.

14:39 But that doesn't mean that the fighter flight didn't happen. So the secret is to separate those into two processes, where you're dealing with a thing that causes your stress in a separate process from the process of dealing with the stress in your body. Yeah, so stress or versus stress. The thing that causes you the stress, and then this stress in your body is well, in the situation you just described, we've burnt it off, like, we've moved it through. It's done its job. It's got us to safety. Yes, Whereas now when I'm just stressed about my emails and my deadlines and my you know, my commute, you know, like exactly, I don't I work from home.

15:20 But for people, you know. The whatever it might be that it's causing that stress, I can deal with all of that, but I'm not. I'm not moving it through my body exactly, So exactly doing. Something to work that all of that adrenaline and cortisol and everything else that's pumping through me to get it out, Yeah, to complete. The stress response cycle, so that you can return your body to a state of knowing that it's safe. And the important thing for me was understanding that that stress can build up below the level of conscious awareness. That doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Just because I don't feel it doesn't mean it's not there. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, So I don't want to spend it low because people can read it in the book. I mean, you know, you just said, you know, running, that's exercise.

16:05 That's a good one. At a population level, it is the most efficient any kind of movement of your body. So this is why we should move our body like regularly. Yeah, but understanding that, Like my identical twin sister raised in the same household with me, it was always a natural exerciser. She could like go for a bike ride. She doesn't want to go, She's like, oh, I know I should. So she gets on the bike and she goes for a ride, and she like crests the hill at the top of the Pennsylvania farmland and can see the cows and the chickens and the moon and this whatever is up and she feels like at one with everything, and she gets back and she's like, yeah, I feel better, And I thought she was making that up because like people vary, and Emily and I are identical twins, and yet our experience of the efficacy of physical activity for relieving stress is the polar opposite. Some people, it's just not as true. And there's also just like practical matters, like you might have a physical disability that prevents you from getting the kind of physical movement that tells your body that it's capable of moving you from danger to safety.

17:14 Or you might live in a neighborhood where you go for a walk to like complete that stress response cycle and you get cat called, and now your physical activity has become a source of stress instead of a way of relieving your stress. Or maybe your trans and you go to gym and if you dare to use a locker room, you might be taking your life in your hands. So it's just not as simple as physical activity can help manage your stress, Like there's so many factors that say that sometimes that's just not true. Sometimes it's just not going to happen because we live in the twenty first century. But if you can find a way to move your body in a way that reminds it that it has the capacity to protect you. It's good for you.

17:56 But the good news is there are so many other ways, and we name like twelve in the book. Yeah. Among them are laughter, just a good night's sleep if you have access to that, and honestly, if you change anything about your life to manage stress better, let it be improving your sleep quality. And again we have a whole chapter about sleep, and there are whole books written about sleep that I'm sure you've talked about sleep a lot. It's important, yes, Yeah. And also social connection connection to nature or other people or animals, or a divine loving presence or your own innertal any sense of connection can also help creative self expression using your imagination. These are all things that can help complete the stress response cycle. So if you're like all those runners who are like, yeah, makes you feel so much better and the way to the world is lifted on my shoulders. If you're that person with the runner, go do it. But if you're not, if you're like me, there are so many other things, and you probably know you've probably done a thing where you you know, for me, it was like get out of a rehearsal and you feel like fresh, like like you've shed a skin, or like you've you know, just eaten the most nutritious salad you've ever had, and you feel just like strong and powerful.

19:09 And that for me, that was that was music. So if you can imagine whatever in your life you've ever felt that like refreshed, powerful, ready for anything, or it's just euphoric joy, ecstasy, that that might be the thing that you that does it for you. Yeah, that's the important thing, isn't it finding something that works for you? And the other thing, the really talient point that you make in the book is that, you know, when we're talking about burnout and being you know, emotional exhaustion and being chronically stressed, because you can come home and go for you run or listen, you know, do whatever it is that you do, or call a friend and vent and complete the stress cycle and then you go back the next day, like you know, then you go back into the same job the next day. So for some of us, it might be the job, it might be the relationship, it might be care caring for somebody else who's chronically ill. But sometimes we can't escape immediately.

20:05 The thing that's causing us the stress. So at the least we can do right is to support ourselves to somehow try to at least complete the stress cycle. Absolutely. So this is how we define burned out of the book is the feeling of being overwhelmed and exhausted by everything you have to do, and yet still somehow worried you're not doing enough. You're doing so much that you can't possibly do anymore. But clearly you're supposed to be doing more. Like that feeling of overwhelm, Yeah, you're probably burned out if that's the case, and yeah, Step one is to find a thing that makes you feel that ready for anything connected to something larger than yourself, something that eases your discomfort without just being numbing.

20:52 And good. I mean, maybe the first thing to do is to numb, like if you have to numb to get through a moment. We are not anti numbing. It's part of the process. If you went to a hospital with a wound, you would be really mad if they didn't give you some numbing, and they and also be bad medical care if they tried to like heal a wound without numbing it first. That would be bad medical care. Because we know that pain slows healing, and that is true for your mind too. You need to be able to handle pain or discomfort so that it doesn't slow your process. However, if all they did was numb you up and then send you on your way, you would also be mad because that is also bad medical care. It needs to be tolerable.

21:32 But then you need to do the uncomfortable stuff too, like washing it out and sewing it up, and so if you need to temporarily, just know that that's not the end, that's just the beginning. So think of whatever that thing is that is not just numbing, like you know, animal crossing or whatever, and find the find like the instead of animal crossing, like the shoot them Out adventure game where you go rescue the princess and at the end of the game and you want to like stand up and cheer and your heart is pounding. It's that physical experience doing something with your mind and or body that gets you feeling like you have escaped the tiger, like you have won and succeeded and crossed from danger to safety.

22:17 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. Another really important point that you introduce in the book. And I talk to my people that I work with and in the communities that I'm in. I talk about this concept all the time too. The idea of human giver syndrome tell us about human givers Amelia. Yeah, we adapt this idea from a book called Down Girl, The Larger Good Misogyny by a moral philosopher named Kate Mann and being a moral philosopher, doctor Man positive world where there are two kinds of humans, human beings who have a moral obligation to be their humanity. Human beings have a moral obligation to express and live their humanity and to acquire whatever resources are necessary in order to accomplish that. On the other side, there are the human givers, who have a moral obligation to give their time, their lives, their bodies, their humanity to the human beings. And remembering this is from a book called Down Girl, The Logic of Misogyny, which one do you think she's saying? The women are, that's right, human givers. Yeah, and a lot of women are like, oh yeah, I'm a giver, like for sure. And this is not to say that being a giver someone who feels a moral obligation to give your time, your life, your very body to the people around you is bad. That's kind of a natural human state.

23:40 And indeed, if we lived in a system full of only human givers, no one would ever burn out because everyone around them would also feel a moral obligation to give to that person, so nobody'd ever fall through the cracks. However, we lived in this unbalanced system. And I also want to mention here that she does talk about it as a misogynist system. But this is not just a gender dynamic between beings and givers. It's a power dynamic. So any aspect of someone's heritage or character that gives them greater access to power in this world. So in America, it's being English speaking as a first language. It's being white, it's being thin, it's being Christian, it's being educated any it's being cis, it's being able bodied. Like anything that you have that makes you conform to the very narrow socially constructed ideal, it's a point of power that would inform you that you are entitled to everyone else's time and lives and bodies. That any way that you do not conform to that very narrow socially constructed ideal is a thing that informs you that you do not deserve.

24:48 Until you conform, you do not deserve care or wellness. So human giver syndrome becomes a danger when you are a giver who feels the moral obligation to give in a system that feels entitled to take everything you have. And so it shows up, we say in the book, human giver syndrome shows up as the feeling that you have a moral obligation to be at all times pretty happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others, and that if you at any time fail in those moral obligations to be pretty happy, calm, generous, and attentive needs of others, that you should be punished. You are a failure. You should be punished, and that this is just normal and true.

25:32 This is just the way the world is. I mean, you know, women are just supposed to give, you know, that's just the way the world is. And it's normal and true, and this is how we just have to learn to deal with the world as it is. Nope, Nope, nope, that's human giver syndrome. That's a thing that can be healed. Yeah, And I share that concept with the women that I work with and everybody immediately immediately relates that clearly the human gives a woman. I understand that these other different power dynamics in race and culture or religion, but women versus men, definitely, all of the women can clearly relate to them being the human givers. And even when you can, you say, oh no, I don't. I don't feel like morally obligated to be all of those things.

26:20 Then you look at people's behavior, like then you look at how we sent up our lives and the things that we attend to mentally, the things that we're constantly thinking about, and one hundred percent we all subscribe to that like whether and I feel like when I I revisited the book before talking to you, and I thought, yeah, like it's so ingrained that we're almost not even consciously aware of it, but it is the foundation of everything that we do every day. It's there, it's there. I think in the book we describe it as being like the cat pie and the carpet, right kind of you might like stop smelling it or forget where it came from, and it's just always there and terrible and like, but the process you have to go through in order to get rid of it is you know, you've got to excavate and scrub.

27:11 Yeah, and it's confronting, like because it's it's also true that when you choose to stop subscribing to that idea, and we see it for the women in the world. I'm going to use women as an example. Majority of my audience as women, the women in the world who say, well, I'm not going to worry about caring anymore, and I'm not. It's I think it's becoming more and more acceptable these days. But the ones who say, well, I'm not going to do my hair and wear that thing and put on makeup and I'm not going to care about how much I weigh or you know, it's just all of the things and I'm going to just speak my mind and not really couch it in niceties and politeness. And we're attacked for it. Women are crucified for that.

27:54 Yes, yes, and every other Yeah. This is the thing is, you can't just choose not to live in this system. It's not like human giver syndrome, is I mean, there is a degree of like subscription, the belief that this is like normal and true in the way the world is. But if you exist in the world, you are going to be told that you must conform to this system, that you must be this kind of person. And yes, the degree to which this has changed varies around the world. It's still much worse in a lot of Africa, in the Middle East and even Asia than it is in the West. But in the West it still very much exists as the default. I mean, if you are, for example, a SIS, straight white woman in a heterosexual marriage, and your SIS, straight white, thin educated husband also shares the household duties with you and is an equal partner and parent to you, and you live in a little bubble of like really lovely gender equality and mutual giving, that's amazing.

28:59 But you know that exists against a background of assumption of the opposite. You know that this is non standard. This exists for you as a choice that you make every day, so you can create it for yourself. But because we're always aware that we are doing that choice to make things better and different, we still know that the gym Cleaver default exists in everyone's mind as the beastline. Yeah, and I would say that even if you're in that relationship and you've got all of that, you know, gender equality and I would like to think that my relationship is like that. But you know, when it. Comes to we should get a cleaner, who do you? Reckon finds the cleaner? Who who hires the cleaner? When we have to get a house sitter in to look after the pets and type up the instructions for the pet sitter or find the.

29:47 Babysitter or you know who's who do you? Reckon takes that responsibility. And my husband's going to listen to this and he's going to go, heyne, second, you'd only just have to ask me, and I'd do that, but you know what, by default ask by default exactly right? Yeah, why should I have to ask you? Like, doesn't it seem self evident that needs to be done? Oh? Yeah, I have Like I have a sis, straight white educated husband. And when he's older than I am, so he retired and I was working full time and I would get home from work and like there was dinner made and like the house is clean. I was like, this is like having a wife. And he was so insulted that I had described him as a wife. And I was like, I am a wife. Why do you think that was an insult? And he kind of like was like, oh, a little bit of like misogyny left over where I think about things that are feminine as being bad and I don't want to be like it was.

30:37 It was one of those confronting moments for him. But like he is great, he is fantastic, But like even in the best relationships, you still understand that there is this underlying course. And that's what I mean. That's what I mean. Even if you think it doesn't apply, it does. It's it's we've all got to say. It's always yeah, in all of us. We've all got white supremacy, we've all got all of the it's all just programmed to be because we live in a society that has told us this is true. Subconsciously from the day we were born. We've been programmed with ideas that are not our own ideas, and luckily we can replace them consciously, cognitively. But like, underneath the substrate is built. It's a foundation of white supremacists, heteronormative, exploitatively capitalist patriarchy.

31:23 Thank you, Wow, that was a mouthful, but that is true. That's what it is. I made a song of white supremacist, is hab normative, exploitatively capitalistic, patriarchy. I call it the Wushnell. Yeah, I love it. Back to burnout so human give us syndrome. This is kind of a big contributing factor right to why we feel so emotionally exact, the underlying fund. To believe that we don't believe we don't deserve care, that we don't deserve time to go get physical activity, that that that cat collar is just normal, and that the stress response it initiates in us is we can't take a compliment. No, it's because your body sense is danger and that's valid. Yeah, it's the it's the underlying belief that we don't deserve safety and sleep and nutritious food, uh, and time for ourselves and to you know, not give up our health on the altar of other people's convenience.

32:39 Yeah, and that's the that's the biggest challenge that I find with the women that I talk to to this idea that and I know that you say in the book the answer is not self care. We'll get to that, but even the idea of just doing something taking care of my self and my needs is somehow selfish. And it's this guilt. That comes up in people like how could I do? How guilt for sleeping. Oh yeah, the reason that guilt is the reason why self care can never be the care for burnout. What we really need is to be surrounded by we call them the book, the bubble of love, just other people in our lives who care about our well being as much as we care about theirs, so that they are the givers to us. They turn toward us when we are having difficult feelings, and they remind us that we deserve care and protection and safety, that we deserve to know how loved we are, no matter how little we conformed the socially constructed ideal, and that we don't have to wait to conform before we deserve that care and that love.

33:42 And the point that you make, which is so valid, And this is interesting for me too, because I one of the big things that I've been talking about a lot in the last few years is imposter syndrome and the feeling of not being good enough, and and the fact that this is not necessarily an individual problem, Like we have to talk about the fact that the world is set up to make you feel like you're a worst lesson, that you don't belong and you'd make this exactly the same point for burnout, which is probably the first time I've ever come across anything on burnout at the time that your book came out, which actually directly addressed the fact that this is not your fault. If you're emotionally exhausted and depleted and cynical and feeling like you nothing that you ever do is good enough, no matter how hard you work and how long you work and all of the rest of it, that nothing will ever be good enough. That this is not an individual problem to be solved. The game is rigged, is what you say.

34:36 Exactly. Yeah, there's there's rat research. Psychologists often do kind of research on rats. So in this. Situation, but the rats are not put in any kind of danger or any kind of you know, pain. They just make them uncomfortable. They just stress them out a little bit by like tilting their cage or you know, wetting their bedding, and it's just real annoying. And those just low level, non life threatening chronic stressors have a huge impact on the capacity of that rat to perform well in other kind of tests later that chronic low level stress. And we also live in a system that not only is constantly tilting our cage and wetting our bedding down metaphorically, but it's also telling us that it's not doing that right. So you turn on the news and it's saying, you know, oh, we don't need feminism anymore. Like, let's ban these books that talk about I mean, this is happening in the US. I don't know how widespread this is around the world, but you know, let's let's stop people from being informed about the truth about you know, diversity and how awesome it is that the world is full of different kinds of people and that no, they are not dangerous to us just because they're different from us.

35:52 That we don't we don't need to worry about this, We don't need to think about it. We don't need to These aren't problems anymore. We live in a in a post race society. We see COVID means that we all learned that we can all work from home now, So it's fine. Like worker exploitation isn't happening. What are you talking about? Union busting? Unions? Are unions are corrupt? Don't you know? Unions aren't there to protect workers. Companies will protect workers. Corporations with the primary objective of posting shareholder profits will definitely prioritize worker wellness and safety for sure, without any government intervention or or or collective bargaining action. That's, oh, we don't need that at all. Yeah, we're being gas lit all the time. So we're not only fighting the actual oppression itself, we're also fighting the lie that's telling us that it's not happening. Yeah, right, it's it's intense and complicated. And I don't mean to say like, oh, oppression, Like I mean, there are places in the world where women can't drive, where women can't get an education, where women can't safely leave their houses. In the West, it is.

37:02 It's still a matter of bodily autonomy and physical safety for it is. Yeah, for women and for anybody who's not a CIS man basically. Yeah, exactly. And even isn't it interesting that you even said that, Like, you know, there are some countries where we can't even drive, so it's not that bad, but you know, like we still feel that that's good either. It's not that good either. It's not that good either. In Australia where I come from. I don't know what the stats are this year, but certainly in recent years it's been one woman every week is killed by a male partner or former partner. I don't know what the stats are where you are from, but it's pretty it's pretty horrific. And yeah, it's not just relationship violence, but and also all of this, of course, is exponentially worse for women who are not CIS, women who are not neurotypical, women who are not white. In the United States, in particularly the missing and murdered Indigenous women do not get looked for, not get investigated. It's the rights of danger for women.

38:05 And again, the less you can form to the socially constructed ideal, the more mainstream it is for someone to explicitly believe that your body doesn't matter and that you don't deserve safety or protection. It's why those the anti trans laws are happening the way they're happening, because, well, that person doesn't conform to a socially constructed ideal and therefore is not a real person and does not deserve protection. And they couch it in terms of like protecting an otherwise oppressed community. But that's just a lie. It's a physic it's an actual lie, it's a literal lie. And just for anyone who's listening, who's still like, is not sure about the trans thing? No, gender is not binary. Biological sex is not binary. It's not X and Y.

38:48 It's so much more complicated than that. And if you don't know that, if all you had was high school biology and you're like, there's only two s, Nope, it's just more complicated than that. And also, culturally, gender is also not binary around the WAD world. It is a white supremacist ideal that holds gender as binary. So many indigenous cultures around the world hold gender as a spectrum that it is a white supremacist ideal to insist otherwise. So, like, if anybody's listening, it wasn't sure about that. I know, I keep talking about the cis heteronormative, exploitatively capitalist patriarchy, but in particular that's you know, the cis heteronormativeness is it's taken headlines lightly and I and I just wanted to make sure that I put in that, like just in case anybody wasn't sure.

39:29 Yeah, yeah, no, got it. Biological sex not binary. Gender not binary. And so you started writing this book about burnout, and you talked about the stress cycle and then what as you and then it becomes like the stress cycle becomes like literally like the part of the first chapter, I think, and then the rest of these whole book is actually about so much more than managing the stress cycle. It's about all of. These issues of human givers, syndrome and the patriarchy and the need for us to actually well, what you talk about is creating meaning. As one of the solutions to preventing an overcoming burnout is to connect with something larger.

40:13 I think that would be really useful to talk about that. Yeah, the first three chapters of the book are about tools that every human carries within them to help feel their absolute best. And one thing that's built inside every single person in the world is a stress response cycle. Everybody's got that. But we've also every single person has access to a sense of meaning, and we define meaning as the feeling of being connected to something larger than yourself, of being part of something greater. In the actual psych research about meaning, that research is a mess. Their definitions are sloppy, like it's just the research is rough. But what we kind of condensed down from what all of the research seems to share in common is that the way you create that sense of meaning which is like your like your structure response cycle, a thing that's built inside of you in order to make you feel like the best kind of human you can feel like is doing something that feels like you're leaving a legacy or heeding the cult service uh, or even just being part of a loving, connected community. I actually I actually wrote a song because we were talking about meaning is being vitamin why. It's like vitamin D, where like your body makes it meaning vitamin why get it out? Why? If that's where you get meaning from is your body makes it?

41:36 And in my tune, like I always remember leaving a legacy behind, or heating the call to serve men kind or loving someone that's enough. I love it. Yeah, that's how I remember the three things that the research says is like send it to a song. This is what you get when you combine a musician with some burnout research. You get you get a song version, you get funny songs about wellness interventions. It's a love that's right. Great way to remember it though, that is very I like that. Do you want me to sing it? I'll sing the whole thing. Yeah, it's very short. Okay, can you right here?

42:17 Okay, okay, so the premise is that it's vitamin y and you get it. It's like a nutrient, so like meaning is a leafy green, and then it's like cabbage. But cabbage is not technically a leafy green. So this is not the most accurate song. But whatever, See a baby a g meaning is a leafy. Green, Grow it yourself by the sun, play your connector sing with me, leaving a leg cbehind. We're heeding the call to serve mankind. We're loving someone. That's enough, laughing someone.

42:59 See a bb ag really meaning is a leafy Get it because cee a bb ag and eo notes in the scale. Oh god, little music I. Found there as well. I love it. I h I appreciate that. Have you played that on another podcast or is that an exclusive? I'm pretty happy with. I don't think I've performed that song in another podcast. I think I think I might because it's gonna it takes a lot of explanation and context to get that song, which is why it's not like I've got other songs that stand alone really well. The cabbage song does not standalone.

43:39 Well. I am a new fan of the cabbage song. Thank you for that. So okay, getting back to meaning meaning meaning? So what do you say to the people who are going to say this is what I contend with when I talk to women all the time. Well, I get my sense of meaning from and you did mention service. And so how do I separate my human giver syndrome from the fact that I actually genuinely like. To do for others. I'm a helper, I'm a supporter, I'm a giver. Uh yeah. The difference is are you giving and supporting because it makes you feel like you're something larger or because you feel in more obligation to give until you are sucked completely dry and have nothing left to offer.

44:31 The difference is the feeling that it gives you when you do it. The difference is the reaction of people who receive your care and your gifts. Do they feel entitled and be like, yep, that's exactly how it should be. Now please give me more? Or is it thank you? This is a wonderful gift, and now here is my gift and return to you. Yep. And I think that there are questions that you know, really you talked about before about having to be really still in sit with your feelings, And I think some of these questions require people to to just really kind of get really honest with themselves about what drives You know, we talked about it being so ingrained, so unconscious, all of that human giver stuff and the infiltration of those patriarchal kind of ideas, and so I think it takes a bit of kind of self reflection and unpacking to get to the core of what drives some of those behaviors.

45:22 But you're right looking at how what is the response back? And are you giving until you're basically bled dry? That's that's a useful yeah. Benjamin, is anybody in that community giving back to you? Do you feel loved and cared for also? Or do you feel like you don't deserve loving care like, oh, of course they don't have to give anything back. No, no, no, no, no, this is a one. This is I just get you need you need to be surrounded with people who who care about your well being as much as you care about theirs. And now you are just as willing to receive, because that's the That's the other kicker, isn't it? Like so many people give, give, give, give, but not very good at the receiving for whatever reason. That is unconscious perhaps beliefs that they're ye deserving, not worthy. Yeah, that's not my role here.

46:07 Yeah no, And sometimes it's not even unconscious. Sometimes well, sometimes we believe it explicitly, but many times we are explicitly told, I mean through the stories that we accept as normal and natural in our lives about who among our parents was the one who cared for us? And how did that dynamic look Among our neighbors and the people that we know, how are their family dynamics working. Who is the giver there? Does anyone there turn toward a caregiver and offer care and return and let them know that they deserve and are worthy of that care, or or do we live in a world where it's perfectly natural for someone to say I got nine hours of sleep last night and I feel amazing, and then someone replies, oh, well, good for you. Self care is so important. I mean, I was up till three making cupcakes for Becky's birthday party, but you got nine hours of sleep. I mean, good for you. Self care is so important, And that kind of like sarcastic rejection now turns your nine hours of sleep from something that maybe helped relieve and complete some old structure response cycles into something that is now like making you worry? Am I doing it wrong? Am I selfish? Do I not deserve this?

47:20 And instead, if that conversation could go, I got nine hours of sleep and I feel amazing. I was up till three bacon cupcakes for Becky's birthday party. What was I thinking? I wish I had nine hours of sleeping the other versus, Yes, you deserve nine hours of sleep, And I hope tonight when you get home, Becky stands guard in front of your bedroom door so nobody disturbs you, so you can get fully all the sleep that you need, because it is your family's job to turn toward you and let you know that you deserve that love and care and resources for yourself. Yeah. Yeah, Becky's seventeen, now, come on, yeah, I can relate to that. Obviously. The book came out in was first published in twenty nineteen.

48:03 I believe you're the author, you know, twenty nineteen. Yeah, And it's. Full of really great exercises and tools and you know, lots of this more detail about the things that we've talked about, but some really really helpful little exercises and tools and opportunities to write things down and reflect on things so important. But now there is an entire workbook about can we talk about. Because it turns out, yes, we learned that. Okay. The book is eighty thousand words and has twenty pages of references of like scientific citations, And it turns out not everybody learns best that way. Some people are like, I don't need to know. I don't need all the receipts.

48:43 I just want the results. Just tell me what to do. We were like, that's that's valid. So yeah, we turned it into a workbook with just like if you want to know the hows and whys and the details, then the book is for you. But if you're just like I just want to feel better, like right now we have the workbook. Yeah, well I am one hundred percent getting a hold of the work book. I love a workbook. And so is it the same exercises that are in this book or is it more exercises around all of. These Yeah, it's some of the same, like the twenty four hours, the twenty four seven worksheet, which is people are in the In the rest chapter, it turns out you need to have like a certain ratio of rest to effort in your in your life, it's like forty two percent of your time needs to be spent doing things that refuel you. So where do you find that time?

49:32 So there's a sheet of like twenty four to seven seven days a week, what do you actually do with your time? And then what in your ideal world would you be doing? And then looking at the differences and you just need to like physically fill it out and see. And when I did this for myself, I mean it's so eye opening of like, oh no, wonder, I feel terrible. This is my schedule. I need to change something. So that's the same in both books, Like there's a the book, there's a smash in some patriarchy worksheets, but there's a lot more like step by step. And also we answer questions that people have asked us since the book came out, like specifically, what does it mean when someone says listen to your body? How do I do that? Since the book came out, both Emily and I have been diagnosed with autism level one they used to call it Aspergers and I along with that, have alexithymia, which is that condition where you just have a clinical deficit in your capacity to recognize your own internal experience. Yeah, so I was like, oh, so the reason that I never I can't listen to my body like this is just this is a thing that goes along with my sensory processing differences.

50:45 It's just my own internal sensory processing is not awesome. But again, it's a learnable skill. So I go through I created a step by step process of like this is how I have learned to listen to my body. Here's what that means. Because we always get one or two questions from an audience that's like, how do I listen to my body? And I'm like, oh, yeah, I got you. I got you. It doesn't happen instantly, but it's a thing you can learn to do. We also got a lot of questions about sleep, of course, and whenever we talked audiences, so there's a lot of just like really practical, here's the things you can do about your sleep. But also then keeping in like making sure that we keep in context the fact that like you can do all this great stuff for your sleep that's really practical, like keep your bedroom dark and quiet and cool.

51:30 That's the vast majority of the population is gonna do well with that. But of course everyone's different, Like if you need white noise or you like to listen to an audiobook to fall asleep, because that's me because like not just toddlers like to be read to sleep, like some of adults do too. Like there's that practical stuff, but then always making sure it's connected to the bigger picture and remembering like why are you not already doing this, Like what are the messages that you receive? What how do you feel when you think about getting a full night sleep? Do you feel guilty? Like, let's unpack some of that, and it's really really step by step practical love it. Yeah, you just raised a really good point. You know so many women that I know, and I'm sure it's the same over there as it is in other parts of the world where in adult women are being diagnosed getting late diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders and ADHD. Right, so neurodivergence, and it's exploding because nobody ever knew how to diagnose women before, like girls and women present so differently and so oh but now we know, and so now suddenly.

52:32 Everybody is not everybody, of course, it's like one of us. It's like it's not a not a big deal, but. It's a full percent of us. It seems like a lot. But and then so it seems like so many people that people go, oh, everybody's just jumping on the bandwagon. Everybody just wants to get right useful. But it is interesting in relation to this idea of burnout right and this let this idea of trying to meet expectations that the impossible expectations that would try to meet. And if you put that in the context of like having like a neurodivergence, like that extra complicating factor. Oh yes, oh yes, because he didn't know that way it were extra complicating yep, right, no, Or when I was in my doctorate trying to like brine like I'm good at school. I have always been an a student.

53:24 If I put my mind to anything academic, no problem at all. And in fact, the schoolwork of my doctor program was the part I loved best. I loved doing the research and like I mean, I took this one class that was about the history of notation, where we look at eight hundred year old music manuscripts and try to like transcribe the notation into modern notation. And it was like language and math and ciphering all combined and it was the best. But the challenge of that class was was telling my professor I don't have time to do the whole thing, and I get like three quarters done, You like, where's the rest? I'm like, I ran out of time because I am also a stepmother to three teenagers and working three part time jobs and commuting sixty five miles each way to get to this campus. And this is not my only class. Like, no, I didn't finish.

54:12 I mean, I love doing the work, but like, I don't mean to insult you here, but are you aware that I'm a human being? Like he definitely did not see me as a human being. But anyway, this is why I try to keep it so intersectional and to keep talking about race first language, whether you're sis or trans, whether you're straight or elsewhere on the LGBTQIAA plus spectrum, because it is not just gender that makes the difference. It is everything about you that does not conform to the socially constructed ideal. So if you are not the socially constructed ideal body shape or size or color, or the hair on your body is located in a quantity, or is a texture or a color that is unacceptable, like it's it's everything. So it's really important to me. Yeah, No, And it was really important to me before or I was diagnosed, and also now I'm physically disabled because I have long COVID, so it has always been really important.

55:08 But now that I know a little bit more about why I feel so like I don't conform to people's expectations and why, first of all, why I'm good at explaining with the socially constructed idealists because I'm so far outside of it that I can see it a little more clearly than people who are closer. Yeah, So I think that's one of the things I've learned through just having the diagnosis. Yeah, and it's so important and I think that well, hopefully this has been an enlightening conversation for other people listening too, because I think you're right. We see things from our own perspective, you know, and there are many, many, many, many many other perspectives. And I think in the last few years we've been more confronted with the range of different diversities, you know what I mean, Like I'm from Australia, I'm from got country Australia, why, you know, And and but.

56:03 We all see it news. You know, we all saw the George Floyd, we all saw black lives, and it all seem like people getting much much more vocal about white fragility, and you know, this whole thing about neurodiversity and the gender stuff and. The trans issue, the trans issue. You know, all all of that sort of stuff. We're just our eyes are being opened, and I think that's a really good thing because it's very easy to just be We've got our own little blinkers on, and we see the world through our own little perspective, and there's there's just so much more that we're blind to. You talk about patriarchy blindness in the book, but you know there's a lot of blindness. Yes. We were actually called out for calling it patriarchy blindness by a woman who was blind, and we were like, oh man, in our chapter about like taking for granted physical ability and seeing differences, we we've used a term that was probably pretty pretty ablest. Oops, ironic and oops.

57:02 So I mean we are we are all of us confused by and our vision is clouded by our own privileges. We look okay, we talk about the headwinds, tailwinds, asymmetry, so when the wind is that you are back and you are moving, you probably don't even notice it. But when you have to walk against the wind, it's so hard. And biologically it makes sense that our bodies remember adversity and challenge because that is when we are at risk. Your bodies don't remember when things are easy because it doesn't have to because like you were safe and you didn't have anything you needed to learn from that. So we don't even notice when things are made easy for us because we have the wind at our back. We only notice the headwinds. So the headwinds tailwinds asymmetry is a thing. So in order to learn from the headwind's tailwans asymmetry, we talk about the tall tree fairness test.

57:57 So if you imagine the playing field is level and like all of the trees are growing at the same rate and the same height, and they have the same exposure to the sun. But like, it turns out not all the trees are growing up on that field. Some of the trees are growing up on a cliff side, bashed by the waves and the wind. And if you take that tree which had to grow up gnarled and craggy to survive, on those cliffs and you put it on that level playing field, and it's like, this isn't comfortable. I can't thrive here? Is it because that tree is crazy? Is because that tree is making things up and all the other trees are like, what are you talking about? That's not that's not real. We've never seen that, Like, look at that tree. That tree tells you it's truth just in its existence. So when someone who's different from you says, this is my experience and it's real and true and valid, and you're like, but I've never seen anything like that, How could that possibly be true? Everything I've learned says that what you're telling me is not possible.

58:57 That person lived that real thing, So believe them. The world is bigger. Than your field. There are cliffs too. I actually loved that part of the book. And I just did an episode of this podcast last week about cognitive biases and why we believe the things that we did. It was a very limited discussion. It was mostly about why people believe conspiracy theories and why everybody's supporting Russell Brandt. But that whole idea of those cognitive biases is it is explained so well by those metaphors, and I think that that is a really probably good place to stop. I'm going to obviously tell everybody to go who hasn't already been told by me to buy your book, because I have been talking about it for a few years now.

59:39 But I'm going to tell them now to go by the workbook. And I really really appreciate it, and I am so grateful for you making the time today, Amelia. This has been a really fun and enlightening discussion. Thank you so much, it's been my pleasure, and thank you for the Cabbage song. Of course, Burnout and the accompanying Burnout Workbook are now. Available in all bookstore. If you enjoy the show, please do think about giving us a five star review. On Apple Podcasts, click the plus button to subscribe to that you never miss an episode, or subscribe to my email list castdone, dot com Forward slash subscribe, and obviously the new Instagram page at Crappy to Happy pod or on Facebook Crappy to Happy Community is our Facebook group. Thank you so much again for being here and I cannot wait to catch you next week from another episode of Crappy to Happy