NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “This book is a gift! I’ve been practicing their strategies, and it’s a total game changer.”—Brené Brown, PhD, author of Dare to Lead “A primer on how to stop letting the world dictate how you live and what we think of ourselves, Burnout is essential reading [and] . . . excels in its intersectionality.”—Bustle
This groundbreaking book explains why women experience burnout differently than men—and provides a roadmap to minimizing stress, managing emotions, and living more joyfully.
Burnout. You, like most American women, have probably experienced it. What’s expected of women and what it’s really like to exist as a woman in today’s world are two different things—and we exhaust ourselves trying to close the gap. Sisters Emily Nagoski, PhD, and Amelia Nagoski, DMA, are here to help end the all-too-familiar cycle of feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. They compassionately explain the obstacles and societal pressures we face—and how we can fight back.
You’ll learn • what you can do to complete the biological stress cycle • how to manage the “monitor” in your brain that regulates the emotion of frustration • how the Bikini Industrial Complex makes it difficult for women to love their bodies—and how to defend yourself against it • why rest, human connection, and befriending your inner critic are keys to recovering from and preventing burnout
With the help of eye-opening science, prescriptive advice, and helpful worksheets and exercises, all women will find something transformative in Burnout—and will be empowered to create positive change. A BOOKRIOT BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “This book is a gift! I’ve been practicing their strategies, and it’s a total game changer.”—Brené Brown, PhD, author of Dare to Lead “A primer on how to stop letting the world dictate how you live and what we think of ourselves, Burnout is essential reading [and] . . . excels in its intersectionality.”—Bustle
This groundbreaking book explains why women experience burnout differently than men—and provides a roadmap to minimizing stress, managing emotions, and living more joyfully.
Burnout. You, like most American women, have probably experienced it. What’s expected of women and what it’s really like to exist as a woman in today’s world are two different things—and we exhaust ourselves trying to close the gap. Sisters Emily Nagoski, PhD, and Amelia Nagoski, DMA, are here to help end the all-too-familiar cycle of feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. They compassionately explain the obstacles and societal pressures we face—and how we can fight back.
You’ll learn • what you can do to complete the biological stress cycle • how to manage the “monitor” in your brain that regulates the emotion of frustration • how the Bikini Industrial Complex makes it difficult for women to love their bodies—and how to defend yourself against it • why rest, human connection, and befriending your inner critic are keys to recovering from and preventing burnout
With the help of eye-opening science, prescriptive advice, and helpful worksheets and exercises, all women will find something transformative in Burnout—and will be empowered to create positive change. A BOOKRIOT BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
From the book
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.” Which is every woman we know—including us.
You’ve heard the usual advice over and over: exercise, green smoothies, self-compassion, coloring books, mindfulness, bubble baths, gratitude. . . . You’ve probably tried a lot of it. So have we. And sometimes it helps, at least for a while. But then the kids are struggling in school or our partner needs support through a difficulty or a new work project lands in our laps, and we think, I’ll do the self-care thing as soon as I finish this.
The problem is not that women don’t try. On the contrary, we’re trying all the time, to do and be all the things everyone demands from us. And we will try anything—any green smoothie, any deep-breathing exercise, any coloring book or bath bomb, any retreat or vacation we can shoehorn into our schedules—to be what our work and our family and our world demand. We try to put on our own oxygen mask before assisting others. And then along comes another struggling kid or terrible boss or difficult semester.
The problem is not that we aren’t trying. The problem isn’t even that we don’t know how. The problem is the world has turned “wellness” into yet another goal everyone “should” strive for, but only people with time and money and nannies and yachts and Oprah’s phone number can actually achieve.
So this book is different from anything else you’ll read about burnout. We’ll figure out what wellness can look like in your actual real life, and we’ll confront the barriers that stand between you and your own well-being. We’ll put those barriers in context, like landmarks on a map, so we can find paths around and over and through them—or sometimes just blow them to smithereens.
With science.
Who We Are and Why We Wrote Burnout
Emily is a health educator with a PhD and a New York Times bestselling book, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life. When she was traveling all over talking about that book, readers kept telling her the most life-changing information in the book wasn’t the sex science; it was those sections about stress and emotion processing.
When she told her identical twin sister, Amelia, a choral conductor, Amelia blinked like that was obvious. “Of course. Nobody teaches us how to feel our feelings. Hell, I was taught. Any conservatory-trained musician learns to feel feelings singing on stages or standing on podiums. But that didn’t mean I knew how to do it in the real world. And when I finally learned, it probably saved my life,” she said.
“Twice,” she added.
And Emily, recalling how it felt to watch her sister crying in a hospital gown, said, “We should write a book about that.”
Amelia agreed, saying, “A book about that would’ve made my life a lot better.”
This is that book.
It turned into a lot more than a book about stress. Above all, it became a book about connection. We humans are not built to do big things alone, we are built to work together. That’s what we wrote about, and it’s how we wrote it. IT’S THE EMOTIONAL EXHAUSTION
When we told women we were writing a book called Burnout, nobody ever asked, “What’s burnout?” (Mostly what they said was, “Is it...
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February 15, 2019 The authors, twin sisters with backgrounds in health education and the arts, define burnout as emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and decreased sense of accomplishment. They feel that women are destined for burnout because they're by nature victims of the Human Giver Syndrome, schooled to put others before themselves. Stress and stressors are two different things, according to the Nagoskis, and the secret to beating burnout is to first attack stress by completing the stress cycle before facing down the stressors. And finally, the authors suggest practical ways, including social connection, rest, and self-care, to increase wellness and lower stress. Each chapter concludes with a tl;dr (too long; didn't read) list that recaps important points. Some of the advice is self-help standard, but the Nagoskis do a good job offering ways to remind already overwhelmed readers that time can be found even in the busiest schedules to take care of the caregiver by rearranging schedules and accepting help. And in the end, giving to ourselves the compassion and gratitude we give to others will lighten our load.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)