Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski The cure for burnout hint it isnt selfcare TED
Transcriber:
[How to Deal with Difficult Feelings]
Cloe Shasha Brooks: Hello, TED community.
You are watching a TED Interview series
called “How to Deal
with Difficult Feelings.”
I’m your host, Cloe Shasha Brooks,
and a curator at TED.
Today, we’ll be focusing
specifically on burnout,
both personal and professional,
with the help of two experts,
Dr. Emily Nagoski and Dr. Amelia Nagoski.
They are identical twin sisters
and the coauthors of a book about burnout,
for everyone who is overwhelmed
and exhausted by all they have to do,
who is nevertheless worried
that they’re not doing enough.
Let’s dive right in.
You coauthored a book called “Burnout:
The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle.”
And the inspiration for this book
was actually based on
a personal experience
that you had with burnout, Amelia.
Can you tell us more
about that experience?
Amelia Nagoski: Well, it began
with me going to school
while I was getting my doctorate
in musical arts in conducting.
I ended up in the hospital,
and I had abdominal pain,
which they diagnosed as stress induced,
told me to go home and relax.
And in fact, I had no idea what to do.
But luckily, I have a sister who
has a PhD in health behavior.
So when I’m in the hospital,
just in pain, laying there,
not even really understanding
how I got there or why.
And I honestly didn’t even believe
that stress could cause
physiological symptoms.
And Emily said, “How did you
not know that?”
I’m a conductor and a singer.
I have learned in my musical training
to express my feelings with my body,
to use my body as a vehicle
for expressing emotion.
And it occurred to me
that if it was true that I didn’t just
have those feelings onstage –
I had them all the time, my whole life –
and if that was true, wow,
that was a lot of feelings.
So I didn’t even want
to believe this was true.
But once Emily brought me a huge
stack of peer-reviewed science,
I couldn’t deny anymore, yes,
stress manifests in the body
and can turn into symptoms of illness.
CSB: So, OK, well, let’s start
with some definitions.
What are the three components of burnout?
Emily Nagoski: So, according to
the original technical definition
from Herbert Freudenberger in the 1970s,
burnout, which originally
was inclusive only of the workplace
but has expanded now,
involves depersonalization,
where you separate yourself
emotionally from your work
instead of investing yourself
and feeling like it’s meaningful;
decreased sense of accomplishment,
where you just keep working harder
and harder for less and less sense
that what you are doing
is making any difference;
and emotional exhaustion.
And while everyone experiences
all three of these factors,
over the 40 years since
this original formulation,
it turns out that, broadly speaking,
for men, burnout tends to manifest
as depersonalization in particular.
And for women, burnout tends to manifest
as emotional exhaustion.
So anyone can experience burnout,
But your specific way of experiencing it
is probably going to be different,
depending on who you are.
AN: And the factors that lead to burnout
are not just professional ones.
They are parenting and social activism
and anything where
you need to care and invest,
where there are ongoing demands
that are unmeetable expectations
and unceasing demands.
That is the formula, no matter
what context it’s in, for burnout.
CSB: Your work is around the stress cycle
and how we can complete it.
So, will you talk a little bit about that?
EN: Oh, yes! This is my favorite part.
So, the main thing
people need to begin with
is that there is a difference
between your stressors,
the things that cause your stress,
which is what Amelia was talking about –
the unmeetable goals and expectations,
your family issues and money …
Those are your stressors.
And then there’s your stress,
which is the physiological thing
that happens in your body
in response to any perceived threat.
And it’s largely the same
no matter what the threat is.
And evolutionarily,
we know the threat response as being
the fight, flight, freeze response
intended to help us run away from a lion.
So when you’re being chased by a lion
across the savanna of Africa,
what do you do?
You run, right?
So you use all this energy
that happens in your body,
all this adrenaline and cortisol,
every body system has been activated
to help with this escape
from the perceived threat –
your digestion and your immune system
and your hormones.
Everything is focused on this one goal,
including your cognition.
Your problem-solving is focused
just on this one problem,
and it will not let go,
because your life is at stake.
But you manage to get back
to your village,
and the lion gives up,
and you jump up and down and shout,
and people come and listen
to you tell the story,
and you hug each other,
and the sun seems to shine brighter.
And that is the complete
stress response cycle:
it has a beginning,
when you perceive the threat;
a middle, where you do something
with your body;
and an end, where your body
receives the signal
that it has escaped
from this potential threat,
and your body is now
a safe place for you to be.
Alas, we live in a world
where the behaviors
that deal with our stressors
are no longer the behaviors
that deal with the stress in our bodies.
We are almost never chased by lions.
Instead, our stressors are “The,”
capital T, capital F, “Future,”
or our children,
or a commute is, like,
the classic example.
When people have commutes,
it’s one of the most stressful
parts of their lives,
and your body activates
the same adrenaline and cortisol
and digestion and immune system,
and you finally get home, right?
You have dealt with your stressor.
Do you suddenly jump up and down
and feel grateful to be alive,
and the sun seems to shine brighter?
No, because you’ve dealt
with the stressor,
but that does not mean that
you’ve dealt with the stress itself.
This is excellent news, because it means
that you don’t have to wait
for your stressor to be gone
before you can begin to feel better,
because you can deal with the stress
while the stressor still exists.
Good thing, because most of our stressors
are what are called “chronic stressors,”
that are there day after day,
week after week, year after year.
And I hope people are like, “OK, so how do
I complete the stress response cycle?”
And we have a list of, like, a dozen
concrete, specific, evidence-based ways
to help people deal with
the stress response cycle.
But just taking the example of a commute:
you get out of your car
or you get off the bus,
and your shoulders
are trying to be your earrings,
and you’re grumpy and cranky
and still thinking about the jerk
who did I don’t know what.
And what you do is jumping jacks
in your driveway,
or you go for a long walk around the block
or you just tense
every muscle in your body,
standing outside your apartment door,
holding your breath, tense, tense,
tense for a slow count of 10.
Even just that little bit
of using your body
is what communicates to your body
that your body is now
a safe place for you to be.
You have to separate
dealing with the stress
from dealing with the thing
that caused the stress.
AN: And this need to deal with the stress
in a separate process from dealing with
the things that cause your stress
is why the doctor is telling me to relax
was not going to be an effective
means of recovering from burnout.
I had to deal with the stress in my body.
And if, let’s say,
you get out of your car,
and instead of doing
jumping jacks, you just say,
“OK, I’m going to relax now.
Relax now. You, relax!”
Not effective, right?
You’ve relaxed, but you haven’t changed
your body’s physiological state
into one of safety.
CSB: Totally.
And our first question from the audience.
OK, from Facebook, someone asks,
“How do you know whether
what you’re experiencing is burnout
or something else?”
EN: Yeah, ask a medical
professional for sure.
And there’s a lot of overlap between
burnout and lots of other experiences,
including depression and anxiety and grief
and rage and repressed rage –
we’ve all got it.
So our layperson’s definition
of burnout is, as you said,
that feeling of being overwhelmed
and exhausted by everything
you have to do,
while still worrying
that you’re not doing enough.
CSB: Mm hmm.
EN: If you feel like you are struggling
even to get out of bed
and get the basics done,
that goes beyond burnout.
Burnout is where you can show up for work,
but you spend your whole day fantasizing
about being at a different job.
AN: It’s important to know that “burnout”
is not a medical diagnosis,
it’s not a mental illness.
It’s a condition related
to overwhelming stress.
So it’s not like it puts you
in this different state
where you’re going to be trapped,
and you have to have
13 years of therapy and whatever.
It just means that you need to be
completing your stress response cycles.
CSB: Work burnout is just such
an important thing to talk about,
I think, for so many,
and I’m curious if we can
focus on that for a moment.
Like, what are some of the earliest
warning signs of professional burnout?
AN: Let’s say there’s two kinds of people.
There’s Emily people,
who are aware of what’s going on
in their bodies at all times.
And if they have signs of burnout,
they notice it just right away
because that’s how they do.
And then there’s people like me,
who never know what
their body is experiencing.
I didn’t notice I was burning out until
I was literally in the emergency room.
But one of the things that causes burnout
is our inability to recognize
the hard stuff welling up inside us.
And the solution is to be able
to turn toward the difficult feelings
with kindness and compassion and say,
“Oh, I feel stressed. I feel unreasonably
angry right now. I’m so cranky.
I wonder why that is,”
and instead of just trying to,
like, tell yourself to relax,
ask that feeling, “Why are you there?
What do you need from me?
What has to change?”
EN: One of the primary barriers
to listening to your body
is a fear of the uncomfortable feelings
that are happening in your body.
One of the things I say over and over,
we say it over and over in “Burnout,”
is that feelings are tunnels.
you have to go through the darkness
to get to the light at the end, right?
Feelings are tunnels. Stress is a tunnel.
You’ve got to work all the way through it.
Not that the stress is bad for you,
it’s getting stuck in the middle
that is bad for you,
never having an opportunity
to take your body through the cycle.
One of the reasons
why people don’t do that
is because they feel afraid
of their uncomfortable
internal experiences.
When I first started learning
this stuff explicitly –
we grew up in a family where
uncomfortable feelings were not allowed,
and the idea that feelings were tunnels,
I was just like,
“I don’t think that’s true.
I’m pretty sure that uncomfortable
feelings are caves with bats and rats
and snakes and a river of poison.
And if I begin to experience
my uncomfortable feelings,
I will be trapped forever in the dark
with the rats and the bats.”
I began a practice of noticing when
my body was experiencing a sensation,
allowing it to be and allowing it
to move all the way through.
And as I practiced that
with gentle emotions,
I began to be able to practice it with
more and more intense emotions,
both positive and negative,
intense emotions.
So that now when I’m confronted
with big, difficult stuff,
I trust that my body will go
all the way through the feelings
without me being trapped
in the dark with predators.
AN: And I started doing it 20 years after
Emily did, but it’s never too late,
you can always recover.
CSB: Let’s bring up another
audience question.
“How can you talk to
your manager or supervisor
about the fact that you’re experiencing
burnout and get real support?”
A question from Facebook.
EN: If you’re in a workplace
where you don’t feel like
you can say to your boss,
“My mammalian body
is having mammalian needs,
and I need to adjust my work situation
to accommodate the fact
that I live in a monkey suit,”
know that we consult all the time
with gigantic corporations
that are making active efforts
to incorporate acknowledging
people’s emotional and physical needs,
checking in at every meeting,
saying, “Where are you at?”,
asking people to become aware of
and more clear in expressing
how they feel
and promoting the idea that managers
should be ready to cope
when their supervisee comes in
and has a bunch of feelings
that they need to process
and move through.
So it exists. People are working on it.
I feel optimistic.
And I also know that there’s
a lot of workplaces
that are trapped
in this sort of, like, industrial,
super patriarchal, rabidly
individualistic mindset,
where you just need to protect yourself
against the toxic culture
by creating a bubble of love at home,
where everyone in your household
cares for your well-being
as much as you care for theirs.
CSB: How can people who feel truly stuck
take a first step towards wellness?
And how do you define wellness, too?
AN: We define wellness as:
the freedom to oscillate through
all the cycles of being human
from effort to rest,
from autonomy to connection …
And we always say that the cure
for burnout is not self-care,
cannot be self-care.
How can you be expected
to “self-care” your way out of burnout?
You can’t.
What you need is a bubble
of love around you,
people who care about your well-being
as much as you care about theirs,
who will turn toward you and say,
“You need a break.
I’m going to help you with this.
I’m going to step in in that way,”
or even just give you 15 minutes
for you to yell about whatever
the problems you feel at that moment
and just be on your side and go, “Yeah!
I can’t believe that happened to you!
I’m so on your side,” for 15 minutes.
Just that can give you
enough of a release
to feel a little bit better
to take one more step.
The cure for burnout is not self-care.
It is all of us caring for each other.
We can’t do it alone. We need each other.
EN: Making that happen in real life is,
of course, easier said than done.
And one of the things
that is my little reminder to myself
is that when I feel like I need more grit,
what I actually need is more help.
And when I look at
Amelia’s life, and I think,
“She needs more discipline,
she needs more perseverance,
she needs to work harder,”
what she actually needs is more kindness.
That’s the baseline culture change
that’s going to end burnout forever.
AN: And usually the next question
people ask us is,
“I don’t have anyone like that in my life.
I am the leader, I am the one
who’s doing all of the things.”
And the solution for that is probably
closer than you think.
I mean, I grew up in a household
where feelings were, like, not allowed
and we were not close our whole lives.
And then we started reading the research
that said that connection and sharing
support was the way out of burnout.
And we started trying,
and we, like, broke down
this 30-year barrier of, you know,
societal and family pressure not to, like,
feel our feelings around each other.
And it turns out that if you
feel like you’re isolated,
there’s probably someone on the other
side of that wall, it turns out,
who wants just as much as you
to connect with someone else.
And we’ve been isolated
because we’ve been told
that it’s stronger to be independent.
It’s not true.
We’re going to be healthier
and stronger when we work together.
There’s probably someone already waiting
who also wants the kind
of relationship that you are desiring.
CSB: I think that’s just so nice to hear,
too, in the pandemic,
when we’re all feeling so isolated.
We have one final question
we’d like to bring up from the audience,
that we’ll have to keep brief.
So let’s bring that up.
OK. “What can you do about burnout
if you are a teacher,
where every day is filled with stressors?
AN: I taught school for five years.
That’s how long I made it.
I burned out after four years
and then I pushed through one more year.
If you have any possible means
of reducing the everyday stressors
by getting involved
in administrative decisions,
that’s great, but that’s
almost never the case.
The thing, number one, is to complete
the stress response cycle.
You can exercise if that works for you.
A good night’s sleep will do it.
How do I get a good night’s sleep
when I have to get up at 5am?
You have to go to bed earlier,
and that means your whole family
has to give you permission
to go to bed earlier.
They have to cherish your sleep
the way you cherish theirs.
You can use your imagination
and imagine yourself pummeling
all of the stressors into the ground.
And you recover from that,
because your imagination
doesn’t know the difference
between pummeling the stressors
in your imagination
versus pummeling them in real life.
And you surround yourself
with a bubble of love,
other teachers who can support you
and tell you, “Yes, you deserve care.
You are a valuable, educated,
wonderful human being.
You are not just, you know,
Darth Vader dealing with these kids.
You are a valuable person who deserves
resources, who deserves care,
who deserves love, who deserves
freedom to oscillate.”
CSB: Thank you both so much
for joining us together
and for teaching us about burnout
and the stress cycle.
This has been really illuminating.
So, thanks for your time.
EN: Thank you so much. AN: Thanks.