Years ago, I read and reviewed the book Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski, and I felt then, as I do now, that every woman and every person who has relationships with women should probably read at least part of that book.
Recently, I grabbed another book, this one by the Nagoski sisters, titled Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagoski, and after reading it? I’m convinced women everywhere should read this one, too. Just the name alone was enough for me to pick it up, and knowing how Emily Nagoski handled research and interpreted data in her previous book, I knew they would do the same with this one. But if the name isn’t enough for you to want to pick it up, let me share a brief review of this little book.
From the very start of the book, you’ll know if it’s for you, since the authors open it with this line: “This is a book for any woman who has felt overwhelmed and exhausted by everything she had to do, and yet still worried she was not doing ‘enough.’”
If you’re at all like me, you read that and immediately said, “Yes, please!”
This book is incredibly readable. The Nagoski sisters have used interviews with women across multiple backgrounds to create two composite characters whose stories thread through the book at the beginnings and ends of chapters. And in between these illustrations, there’s tons of fascinating research that helps build a fuller picture of the stress cycle and how bad some of us – namely me – are at completing the cycle.
I was actually really surprised to have it spelled out in such plain terms that stress and stressors are two very different things, and while we can sometimes deal with the stressors that cause the stress, many more times we’ll still be in that stress response. “This is the upside-down world we live in: in most situations in the modern, post-industrial West, the stress itself will kill you faster than the stressor will–unless you do something to complete the stress response cycle.”
In case you want to cut to the chase, the Nagoski sisters outline a number of things that help us to deal with the stress, rather than the stressors. Unsurprisingly, though I admit it grudgingly, exercise is the number one way to deal with stress, and as they point out, “most of us are walking around with decades of incomplete stress response cycles simmering away in our chemistry, just waiting for a chance to complete.” The other ways to complete the cycle they mention are deep breathing exercises, positive social interactions, laughter, physical affection, crying, and creative expression.
As I read this book, it introduced me to some concepts I’d never heard of before. The biggest one that has had an ongoing impact on my thoughts is that of “human giver syndrome,” coined by a philosopher named Kate Manne which essentially boils humans down to two classes: human beings and human givers. According to Manne, “human givers are expected to offer their time, attention, affection, and bodies willingly, placidly to [human beings].” And, as the authors explain, women are more frequently and more likely to fall into the “human giver” role than men.
It’s a concept they explore throughout the book and well worth the time to read for just that alone, in my opinion.
But they lay out other things that surprised me as well. For example: did you know that the body mass index (BMI) chart and its labels “were created by a panel of nine individuals, seven of whom were ‘employed by weight-loss clinics and thus have an economic interest in encouraging use of their facilities’”? Some of our major stressors around body image and body weight have been created by people with a vested interest in keeping us spending money to change things about ourselves by constantly being assaulted by information about how our bodies are wrong.
I found the chapter on “the bikini industrial complex” especially interesting because I had no idea about the people involved in bringing the BMI into our doctors’ offices. But perhaps what I needed from that chapter especially was one of the strategies outlined to deal with the bombardment of information that attacks us over body image. And that was to ask my body what it needs. As the authors pointed out, “our bodies are sending us all kinds of signals, but we live from the neck up, only attending to the noise in our heads and shutting out the noise coming from the other 95 percent of our internal experience.” Ouch. I don’t know who needs to hear it, but it’s okay to ask your body what it needs instead of just letting a number on a scale or an image from a screen dictate what you’ll give it.
You might be reading this asking if the book ever turns from depressing to hopeful, considering so much of what I’ve shared already is more negative than positive. And I’ll be honest: there’s a lot in this book that’s eye-opening to some negative things we experience that cause burnout. But the authors give a lot of strategies to manage stress, help us find our “something larger” to pursue that brings joy and satisfaction, and even deal with our internal critics who can oftentimes be loud and cruel.
There’s not quite enough space to fully explore all the things this book taught me or the ways it’s changed my perspective on stress, but I would wholeheartedly recommend it to any woman who’s ever felt like she’s too much and not enough all at once.
