Podcast Episode 282: How Science Can Help You Kick Burnout By Completing Your Stress Response Cycle Transcripts

Please note: Transcripts for the No Guilt Mom Podcast were created using AI. As a result, there may be some minor errors.

Amelia Nagoski: If you experience a sense of connection, That is what makes it an effective experience of connection. It’s that you felt it and you felt safe in it because your body was able to shift into that state where it no longer feels like it has to be on guard and ready for danger.

JoAnn Crohn: Welcome to the no guilt mom podcast. I am your host, JoAnn Crohn joined here by the lovely Brie Tucker.

Brie Tucker: Well, hello, hello, everybody. How are you?

JoAnn Crohn: We have an interview for you today that like, we’ve been looking forward to for a very, very long time. And we were so excited that she agreed to come on the podcast. It is Amelia Nagoski who co authored the book burnout with her sister, Emily. And oh my gosh, Brie, we were just super excited.

Brie Tucker: Oh, yeah, yeah. I was telling, I told Amelia that , every year there tends to be a book that is really influential for you. That like, you share with our community, and Burnout has been the book of 2024.

JoAnn Crohn: Every year, every few months, I would say I find it over

Brie Tucker: like from looking at it from the outside, there is one book or one title that it feels like you just continuously share tidbits from

JoAnn Crohn: and over

Brie Tucker: over and over again.

And this is definitely one of the featured ones of this year. So

JoAnn Crohn: it is very good. So many great stories. Amelia shares a lot of the stories. Well, not a lot, two of the great stories and burnout. Cause I mean, you have to get the whole book guys, go get the book. And in the workbook, and as I say a lot in the episode, like the audio book is just amazing.

It’s delightful. It’s absolutely delightful. Emily and Amelia take turns reading it. Amelia told us in here that her husband actually improvised the music in there to go along with it. Like it’s, it’s awesome. So Amelia Nagoski is the coauthor with her sister, Emily of the New York times bestselling book burnout, the secret to unlocking the stress cycle and the burnout workbook.

Amelia says her job is to run around waving her arms and making funny noises and generally doing whatever it takes. To help singers and other folks get in touch with their eternal experience. She also shares some songs that are burnout related, uh, which we broadcast live in our podcast, Facebook group. Which if you’re not a member of yet, we have

Brie Tucker: are you not

JoAnn Crohn: The link is in show notes. We have the

Brie Tucker: us?

JoAnn Crohn: join us. We go on live with these guests. You could have your own questions answered. We work everything in everything in, so we hope you enjoy our interview with Amelia.

Amelia, it is so wonderful to have you here on with us. We talk about burnout all the time on the podcast, and this is a book that you wrote with your twin sister, and I have to say, I listened to the book on audible. So like both of your voices are in my

Amelia Nagoski: Awesome. We are so proud of the audiobook. I’m just going to brag for one quick second. In the audiobook, almost each chapter has like a moment where it gets like kind of emotional. Like that was our intention, was to make it sort of like drive home the The emotional impact and we wanted music underscoring that. And so my husband is a very gifted pianist and composer. He improvised underscoring for that. So when you hear the piano

JoAnn Crohn: cool!

Amelia Nagoski: it’s, it’s, that’s my husband playing. I’m very proud of that.

JoAnn Crohn: And he just like impro That’s amazing. That’s amazing. Can you tell us a little bit about what led you and Emily to write the book?

Amelia Nagoski: Yeah. it started because, , Emily had written her first New York Times bestselling book, uh, Come As You Are, The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life. and, It,

JoAnn Crohn: by the way.

Amelia Nagoski: totally the best.

Brie Tucker: a minute. I think my husband has that book.

Amelia Nagoski: You are a lucky lady.

Brie Tucker: When he got it, he was like, wait a minute, this isn’t what I thought it was.

Amelia Nagoski: It’s about the science of women’s sexuality and um, yeah.

Brie Tucker: Yeah. he’s gonna love me for that

Amelia Nagoski: a, there’s a,

JoAnn Crohn: Yeah.

Amelia Nagoski: Emily’s new book is called Come Together and it’s about sustaining strong sexual connections in a long term relationship, so maybe you’ll like that one too.

Brie Tucker: All right. All right. Sorry. I don’t know why that’s that’s that moment where it just pops out of my head I’m sure he’s gonna enjoy that later when he listens to the episode. Love you, hon. Love ya.

Amelia Nagoski: he read it? Cause, you know,

Brie Tucker: He started. He started and then again, again, he was like, this is a little different than I was expecting, but it’s still good.

Amelia Nagoski: of the anatomy of sex organs, I think, is how it starts. And like, you need to know that in order to understand. Whatever. Anyway,

JoAnn Crohn: now I wanna read, I

Amelia Nagoski: yeah. You really

Brie Tucker: do. I’ll share it. We have a copy.

Amelia Nagoski: It made my marriage better. And, Just shifting back to the Burnout book, Emily had just written Come As You Are, and yes, it starts out with the, you know, the evolution of the anatomy of the sex organs, and it’s 80, 000 words of the science of women’s sexuality.

But when she was on tour, promoting the book, talking to women, When they came up to her to like, talk to her in person, they said, you know, what really, really impacted me was that one part of one chapter about stress and feelings, which Emily included, because the science says that the best predictor of a woman’s sexual well being is her overall well being.

so she, Talked about how stress and feelings can impact, your interest in sex and, that she was surprised by that. She thought, but it’s all the other, the anatomy and the biology and the site. Like, that was, that’s what it was. But I wasn’t surprised at all when she said that, because. I had attended a conservatory at that point for my master’s degree, so I already knew how I had been taught in an academic context how to like feel and process and express my emotions.

So I knew that it was a skill that could be taught and learned, in a way that she had kind of taken for granted and I was like, no, you need to teach people. What I had not learned. At the conservatory was to do this any place but on stage. When I learned that I could apply this. Every day, it saved my life, twice.

And she said, we should write a book about that. And the book is Burnout. It’s the book that I needed when I was in my doctoral program, when stress impacted my physical well being so intensely. I ended up in the hospital twice, with stress induced pain. The doctors were like, yeah, we don’t know what’s wrong with you. Go home and relax. It’s just stress, they said. It’s just, yeah, yeah, yeah,

JoAnn Crohn: relax.

Brie Tucker: love the just relax part.

Amelia Nagoski: For the record, that is not an evidence based intervention for what was wrong with

JoAnn Crohn: Yeah. No,

Amelia Nagoski: shit up. And I, oh I’m sorry, I’m swearing. Is that gonna be a,

JoAnn Crohn: it’s okay. It’s

Amelia Nagoski: if you want to read Burnout. It, there’s, there’s, we do not. Edit.

Brie Tucker: Yeah.

Amelia Nagoski: of reasons for people to be angry about the world we live in today. And, , we just go ahead and express our anger , when we need to anyway. so I had needed this information. , and so we wrote the book because , Doctors were telling us the wrong things.

Therapists didn’t know how to connect it to physical well being. , so we started looking at what the science said about the ways that large scale social forces influence. , an individual’s mental and physical well being, and kind of the myth of the mental versus physical dichotomy.

JoAnn Crohn: Yeah. And it’s amazing. Like the first chapter of burnout. I mean the stress cycle in particular, totally blew my mind. And you had the

Amelia Nagoski: Yeah, there’s a reason that’s the first chapter. Cause if you don’t read any the rest of the book, if you don’t read it, at least you’ll have gotten that. Which alone can change everything.

JoAnn Crohn: I mean the, the whole thing, it makes so much sense about the stress cycle. Do you mind sharing that story that you had in the book about the stress cycle? About the person who would like run from the tiger? They would like complete the stress cycle, but like we don’t Yeah.

Amelia Nagoski: person you’re referring to is like an imaginary proto person who’s like, in my mind, there’s a cartoonist named Erica Moen who actually made a cartoon of chapter one, like a, uh, graphic novel explainer of chapter one. And she drew like a cave woman in like a pink animal skin toga with a bone in her hair, like Bam Bam from the Flintstones.

So I always picture that. That person. So this like, you know, Bam Bam hair, animal skin, toga, you know, staff, we, it’s probably, this is, that’s not science, but it’s how I imagine this, like, proto mammal. Down by whatever the water is in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness and they look up and they see a tiger and what happens in the body of that proto mammal way back in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness.

Well, What it evolved to do was to have a physical physiological response that we call the stress response. And yeah, it’s cortisol and adrenaline, you know, the glucocorticoids, which communicate to literally every system of the body to prepare you to, Fight or flee. Everybody’s familiar with fight or flight, but the idea of fight or flight had never rung true to me in the, like, this is the thing that happens in your body.

These aren’t feelings you have, like in a, I have the impression that this is true. No, It is a cycle that’s happening in your body. There are hormones that change how your body feels and acts. so for example, you probably notice your heartbeat accelerating, your blood pressure increasing, your breath getting deeper.

Why do these things happen to deliver oxygen to your muscles so you can run faster or for longer, but there’s also stuff that happens that you are not consciously aware of. , for example, Your reproductive system takes up a lot of energy. , so when the stress response happens, your stress response tells your reproductive system and you can just like, take a back seat right now.

We don’t need you to work so hard because who cares about babies when this lion is coming? Your immune system takes up a lot of energy. And one of the things this stress response does is tell your immune system, yo, yo, we’re not worried about malaria right now because we’re about to get eaten by this tiger.

So like, could you run a little faster? Here’s the oxygen. So all the energy the immune system was taking up can now be redirected to saving your life immediately in this moment. it affects your skin. it affects your, you know, if you feel the, Hair standing on end, if you feel your skin tingle, your blood moves from the surface of your skin in deeper, so that if you get cut, you’re less likely to bleed to death. Um, your cognition changes. Cognition takes maybe the most energy. of everything the body does. , how, when you sit in your chair all day, doing nothing but thinking about a problem or studying and trying to learn and you’re exhausted and you’re like, I didn’t even do anything today. No cognition is a very high energy, high investment activity.

JoAnn Crohn: That’s very comforting, Amelia. Just that alone. I will take from this one. It’s a

Amelia Nagoski: It’s a Yeah. Yeah. Because I feel I’ve told myself

JoAnn Crohn: that. Yeah. definitely.

Amelia Nagoski: instead of, Allowing your full brain to do everything that it’s possible to do in the stress response kind of gives you a little bit of tunnel vision so that you weren’t distracted by anything and you can just focus on getting away from the tiger. And this all happens in seconds.

and then what happens is you use all those changes to save your life. You run, you jump, you leap, you climb, you hide in the cleft of the rock, and then you. Look out, and the tiger is walking away. It gave up on you and it feels that you’re no longer a threat to it or whatever, but you are safe. You have used all of those physiological changes to save your life.

And you have experienced the full stress response cycle. It has a beginning and initiation, a middle where all those changes happen in your body. And then you use all of those changes and then you return to where you were prior to Before it all started, you’re back to your baseline and it might feel calm and like safe and like you’re kind of at one with the universe or it might feel exhilarating and you want to jump up and down.

Like, I don’t know what it feels like for every individual, but definitely the thing it has in common is it feels safe and Normal and usually some sense of connection to something or like, you want to tell this story to somebody, right? so that is the complete stress response cycle. , Physically, it’s what happens in your body and what you have evolved to do.

we don’t live in a world where tigers are a threat anymore. Mostly, now the things that initiate a stress response are, you know, That ding from your phone when someone you don’t like has texted you back, or your boss has emailed

JoAnn Crohn: Emails, emails all the

Brie Tucker: Text message from the ex husband. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I get it.

Amelia Nagoski: And like the tax bills come due, or any bill has come due,

Brie Tucker: Or you hear your dog get ready to throw up on the Yeah.

Amelia Nagoski: Yeah. And you hear that, you hear that dog throw up noise in the next room. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

JoAnn Crohn: All of these things like you really can’t control and like you don’t have an

Amelia Nagoski: can you fight or flee to solve those problems?

JoAnn Crohn: They’re constantly there and like something I love in your book is like what you then suggest and what the issue is plaguing so many of us women, , in terms of that stress cycle. And we’re going to talk about that right after this. I was trying to figure out how to fit it in. Cause it’s such a good story and I didn’t want to tell any of it of yours.

Amelia Nagoski: Yeah. So you can’t fight or flee your way out of the things that initiate your stress response cycle. the good news is that we can deal with the stress that happens in our bodies by itself. We don’t have to use that in order to solve our problems for our body to know it’s safe. In other words, we can make our bodies know that they are safe in a separate process than we use to actually make our body safe. Does that make sense?

JoAnn Crohn: So since we can’t do that, like our stress cycle is just kind of never ending unless we take something to do it, unless we

Amelia Nagoski: Yeah, it’s interrupted in the middle. it’s flightus interruptus. Yeah, fightus, anyway. Yeah, it’s interrupted in the middle. So instead of using up that chemical, electrical thing that was initiated, it gets started and it never comes to its natural conclusion. Unless we find an opportunity to do that, but like I was saying, the good news is you can complete that stress response cycle in a separate process than the process that you use to deal with a thing that actually initiated that stress response.

Brie Tucker: As opposed to what our, prehistoric biology has taught us to do. There is another way to hotwire it.

JoAnn Crohn: So how do you recommend people deal with it then and like finish that stress response cycle?

Amelia Nagoski: on a population level, the most efficient way to do it is physical activity. Because when you’re being chased by a lion, what do you do? You run. at a population level, that is the most efficient thing. So if you’re a person who knows that if you go for a run, you come home feeling like the weight of the world has been lifted off your shoulders.

If you’re that person, or you go for your bike ride, or your Zumba class, or whatever, and you already know, yeah, man. When I get the opportunity to do that, it always feels right. That is my identical twin sister who was raised in the same household with me. She knows that physical activity lifts the weight of the world off her shoulders.

And you know, is the feeling of the completed stress response cycle. Whereas I thought she was making that up. And remember, we’re identical twins who were raised in the same household. And my relationship to physical activity is the opposite. opposite of hers. I have never felt that way from physical activity and I was always like an exerciser because I’m a good girl.

I do what I’m told, you know, like I follow you tell me I’m supposed to do the exercise. I will do the exercise, but it had never made me feel like that. baseline return to safety thing, because individuals vary. And at a population level, yes, that is the most efficient thing. And statistically, the most likely thing to work for people, maybe not, because people vary.

Also, I want to validate that The other reasons why people don’t get the physical activity that’s necessary for them. If your body is not able to get you to the physical exertion, that makes it feel like it is capable of moving you from danger to safety. That is valid and real. so it’s just not that simple to say, well, exercise will manage your stress for you.

Also. If you’re going for a walk to, you know, be exercised to complete the stress response cycle, and you get cat cold. Now you don’t feel safe, and now the thing you were doing to manage your stress and, and complete the stress response cycle has initiated a new stress response cycle. You know, if you’re trans and you’re trying to use the gym, if you dare go in the locker room, you could be taking your life in your hands.

So it’s just so much more complicated than exercise will help you manage your stress. Like the real world is not that simple or straightforward. And we read that garbage in magazines all the time. Well, it’s physical activity. You need to blah, blah, blah, but it’s, lies. And the world is just more complicated than that.

So. The good news is that there are so many other ways to complete the stress response cycle. It doesn’t have to be physical activity. If that’s not the one that works for you in your current life circumstances, I’ll just cut straight to people’s favorite, which is connection, which for most people is connection with other people.

, even just as light a lift as going in and saying to your barista, hi, I’d like a tall vanilla chai latte. Hey, I really like your earring. And they’re like, thank you very much. Here’s your latte. Just that is enough to tell your body that it doesn’t have to be on guard or alert, that the world is safe enough to have this casual safe interaction.

And I know nobody wants to have those casual interactions with strangers. It’s very awkward. But there’s actually research that shows that when you like just say hi and comment on the weather to the person next to you on the bus, you both have a better day.

Brie Tucker: Right. Oh,

JoAnn Crohn: My kids get on me so much that I talk to strangers way too often. Like they’re like, what mom? Like you don’t even know them. Why are you talking to them? And I think Brie

Amelia Nagoski: is a safe place.

Brie Tucker: my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. My kids used to tell me like, okay, mom, we can go to this place, but you got to promise you’re not going to talk to everybody because it takes forever.

Amelia Nagoski: well, that’s a different matter if you’re taking up time like that’s but

Brie Tucker: You’re

JoAnn Crohn: a dip.

Brie Tucker: is slightly

Amelia Nagoski: it is good. But it is good for you.

Brie Tucker: I love the connection. I love the connection so much. I just want to keep bringing it in.

Amelia Nagoski: Yes. Yes. And you are like the vast majority of people. And again, at a population level, that is the kind of thing that’s going to help people’s bodies. Remember that the world . Is a safe place and that their bodies have access to move from a feeling of danger to a feeling of safety.

When I say feeling, I don’t mean they have the general impression. I mean, their bodies are in a state of readiness to face danger, and you can shift that physically to a state of feeling comfortable in the world.

JoAnn Crohn: And I like how you said Amelia, too. Like the world is a safe place, and that’s what connection really proves to your body at like a physical level. Exactly. And if you’re like, no, the world is not a safe place, which, like, if you live in a state that has banned abortion, you do not live in a safe place. And if you’re a

Amelia Nagoski: person with a uterus, um, you

Brie Tucker: It’s tough to feel safe

Amelia Nagoski: safe place. It’s, it’s hard to feel safe, but. You don’t need to feel safe in the, you know, white cis heteronormative exploitative lit capitalist patriarchy. You can feel safe

Brie Tucker: Say that three times fast.

Amelia Nagoski: white supremacist cis heteronormative exploitative lit capitalistic patriarchy. Yeah, I made a song out of it, so it doesn’t sound quite so just full of despair. White supremacist Anyway, Even if you can’t feel safe because we do live in a deeply repressive environment that punishes us for any way that we do not conform to a very narrow socially constructed ideal, , you can feel safe in a loving relationship.

right? and that relationship can be with a spouse, with a friend. It can be with a, divine presence, with a loving, holy figure, with nature, with the ocean, with an animal, with your own inner child. If you experience a sense of connection, That is what makes it an effective experience of connection. It’s that you felt it and you felt safe in it because your body was able to shift into that state where it no longer feels like it has to be on guard and ready for danger. Does that make sense?

JoAnn Crohn: Like, it makes so much sense. And, , that I think is the power of two of women coming together and being there for one another and supporting one another is because we’re all kind of. Forced with these pressures with this very narrowly defined, vision of what it means to be successful in society, what it means to like survive in society. something that we call all of our women in our balanced community, there are badass, sexy bitches

Amelia Nagoski: Yeah,

JoAnn Crohn: because I mean, we are badass. And you actually like in the book, you talk about how women are really survivors and are able to persist. And we’re going to talk about that right after this. So Amelia, you were talking about how, . to feel safe like we need connection and that some people do well with physical activity. But also in the book, you talk about how women tend to be survivors more than the men do. And it comes down to this experiment that we were talking about having to do with rats. Can you tell us about that?

Amelia Nagoski: yeah, there’s an experiment on rats, , to see the difference between how rats will persist in the face of danger and they give the rats what’s called the forced to swim test, which sounds really bad, but it’s just you put the rats in a tank and they swim. And they swim and they try to find land and they keep going until they give up.

And what they measure is how long the rats swim for before they give up. And when I say give up, what happens is they kind of go into like a dead man’s float with their arms and legs splayed and their, you know, head all just relaxed so that they can serve energy for as long as possible. and, They measure this when the rats are in like a normal healthy state and then they stress the rats out mildly by like spraying their bedding with water or tilting their cage.

It’s this mild chronic stressor is how they define it. and it’s just a little bit uncomfortable all the time, which is kind of like what it’s like to be a woman. I mean, but it’s also what it’s like to not conform to the socially constructed ideal in any way, you know? so, these stressed out rats.

divided by sex, male or female, , when they stress the rats out, how long do they swim before they give up? The male rats give up swimming when they’re stressed real fast. And the female rats don’t give up. They keep going way longer than the male rats. Like, I think it might be like twice as long. , so, This is like an illustration about, is there something about, female biology, the estrogen? We don’t know what the difference is. There is a possibility that there’s something physiologically different about, you know, a female rat that makes it persist longer.

And if you remember, back when we were writing the book, , there was a meme about hashtag persist because Elizabeth Warren was trying to read into the congressional record, the words of Loretta Scott King denouncing, one of the senators and Mitch McConnell basically shouted her down and scolded her and she just kept reading and reading and yet she persisted, Mitch McConnell said of Elizabeth Warren. So I think the name of the chapter, even as hashtag persist,

JoAnn Crohn: That was the first time I heard that story too and like how that phrase came about. It was so interesting to me. Yeah.

Amelia Nagoski: Yeah. So it turns out that female rats, hashtag persist, and maybe there’s a biological thing to the like, how women react in the face of hopelessness that we keep trying. Now, this is good news because like, yeah, women are going to keep trying, but also like, it’s really bad news because the subject hashtag persist is also when to quit, when to give up.

Because when you keep trying in the face of hopelessness, What if you never succeed and what will that do to your physiology? Because it will affect your physical health. yeah, so that’s what that

JoAnn Crohn: Yeah, it makes it so interesting too, because women do persist, like we do extraordinary things, all the time, and women, like general day to day, like especially moms taking care of kids, like juggling your career, taking care of all the household stuff, like there’s so much.

So much and it’s interesting that you, you talk about the rats and how the female rats persisted because I almost wonder like if sometimes it works to our detriment too, because we have this pain tolerance almost, that is so strong that we won’t ask for help. We will do it on our own for so long until we’re like run into the ground because it’s affected us so

Brie Tucker: and then once we’re running to the ground, then we tell ourselves that we didn’t do a good enough job and that’s

Amelia Nagoski: Right. Right, right, right. right. Yeah. And so this, as you talk about this, like tolerance for the discomfort of, laboring in the face of hopeless, helpless despair, did, were we born with that tolerance? Like maybe, but also we are told by the world that this is our only option, that if we don’t keep swimming, we’ll drown, that there is no give up and float and conserve energy and wait it out until.

Rescue happens, or you get to land, you know, we are taught that if we’re not the ones pushing and sacrificing, you know, the rescue squad is too exhausted as Bjork has written in a song that whose title I can’t remember. Sorry, that we shouldn’t expect other people to pick up the slack. But the truth is that how wellness happens is not with each of us individually doing our self care.

Like it’s about. a bubble of love, a community of people who care about your well being as much as you care about theirs. And all of us in the bubble reminding each other, you deserve resources. You deserve sleep. You deserve, by the way, completing the stress response cycle also at a population level.

Well, no, this is just true for everyone. Good night’s sleep can help you complete a stress response cycle. And yeah, which among the billions of other awesome things that sleep does for you. And if you. Take nothing from burnout or this particular episode of the podcast. Let it be that you deserve more sleep.

You will feel better if you get more sleep. And if you only change one thing about your life to increase your wellness, let it be getting more sleep. but how you do that in a world where. We play the stress Olympics where you get a medal if you’re more stressed than everybody else, if you sacrifice more, if you stay up later and give up more, you, win like, no, you deserve to feel great every day. and you deserve to have a community who will stand guard in front of your bedroom door and not let anyone interrupt while you get the sleep that you need. And they all. Do the rest. They don’t let the household drown. Impaction.

JoAnn Crohn: it reminds me, like, you guys are going to have to get, Amelia’s book burnout for this, because I will not tell you the whole story. I’m just going to tell you the tease of the story, but it reminds me of in your book, Amelia, how you guys were talking about a woman who was so stressed.

She like, stopped going to the bathroom during the day. And then she like, she couldn’t like use the bathroom. She got like a bowel obstruction or something like that. Impaction?

Amelia Nagoski: So, among all the systems that stop taking up energy when you’re having a stress response, no, your bowels may react by just, like, purging everything all at once. And if you’ve ever had, like, nervous diarrhea, you know what that is, or IBS, is one of those stress induced illnesses where chronic stress tells your digestion, an emotional tummy. That’s what I call it. An emotional tummy. and, okay, so your brain and your, um, stomach. Like your brain is just a cluster of neurons. It’s the most dense cluster of neurons you’ve got in your body, but you have another cluster of neurons around your heart and another one down around your digestive system. And they’re all connected to each other by the vagus nerve.

And this is all deeper research that is like, we definitely don’t have time to talk about, but like your stomach is a brain. your, your gut has intelligence and that’s not like a, an exaggeration or a euphemism. That’s like, that’s genuine intelligence working in the way that the intelligence in your brain works with like efficient neuron activity. but one of the ways that stress can affect your digestive system is your digestive system decides, Oh, there’s stress happening right now. So I’m going to like not do anything while, while we’re I will just sit here. And, um, yeah, bowel impaction is a thing that can happen.

JoAnn Crohn: do any, yeah. But I brought up the story because you said like how, you know, women deserve to have people take care of them, and specifically the story of this woman in the book, like she just was so much more happier and relaxed because like her body actually told her to stop, but she could not do the things and everyone else had to pick up the slack and that whole stress load coming off.

Such a difference in everything. And I think that was such a powerful story. And that shows me that like, Hey, I have a choice to step back here. I do not have to do this until burnout. If I let other people pick up the slack, I could have a happier frame of mind. I could have better. A physical frame of mind. Like I, everything could be better. I don’t have to be this stressed.

Amelia Nagoski: Yeah. And we tell that one story, which is, by the way, a completely true story, but like my hospitalization was not. Um, but it was another one of those like wake up calls where you end up in the hospital going, something is wrong with my life if my stress is putting me in the hospital, if it’s giving me so much pain that I feel like I’m going to die, I need to accept help or I, you know, exactly, exactly. You totally nailed the message.

JoAnn Crohn: It really, gives me a new like insight on those celebrities that you see that are put into the hospital for exhaustion. And I’m like, okay, there’s a lot of stress going on over there that they’re, they’re putting the hospital for that. Well, Amelia, what do you have coming up that you are really excited about? Oh,

Amelia Nagoski: I got sick with coven in 2020, you know, like everybody and my body never recovered. so I have been, trying to recover from long coven for 4 years. Um, so if there’s anybody who hadn’t heard of long coven or didn’t know, like, That the, you know, SARS CoV 2 virus could cause chronic illness, like, hey, here’s your PSA. so that’s what I’m doing. we did though just record the audiobook version of the workbook version of Burnout. Cause we did learn that like our 80, 000 word book with like 26 pages of references was not everyone’s medium of choice for learning about the science

JoAnn Crohn: But the audio book was unbelievably entertaining.

Amelia Nagoski: yeah, oh good, I’m so glad. But, like, there are people who are like, I can’t read a book right now, I’m too stressed to do that. So, like, we, we created a workbook that was for people , who want results and don’t need the receipts. If you want the receipts, they’re in the main version of the book. But if you just want to know how do I feel better right now, that’s the workbook. And then we made an audio version, and I think that just came out recently because I just recorded it over the winter. And that one has songs in it.

JoAnn Crohn: Does it have the white supremacist song? Because I would love that.

Amelia Nagoski: The white supremacist song right now, it’s just the chorus. White supremacist says it’s a normative, exploitatively capitalistic patriarchy. I call it the wooshnelp.

Brie Tucker: seeing, like, Mary Poppins dancers in the back with, like, the If

Amelia Nagoski: percent. Yeah. Yeah.

Brie Tucker: you need a backup dancer for the song, whenever you decide to, you know, do a video for it,

Amelia Nagoski: Yeah.

JoAnn Crohn: there. Brie’s there as a backup dancer. Well, Amelia, it has been so amazing to get to talk to you. Like, I, I so enjoyed the book. and just as an aside, every time I look at myself in the mirror, I’m like, I’m The new hotness. which is

Amelia Nagoski: are the new hotness. There’s a new hot There’s a new hotness song, by the way.

JoAnn Crohn: Oh, yay.

Amelia Nagoski: And a bubble of love song. Yeah.

JoAnn Crohn: Bubble of love. I call, I say love bubble all the time. I think I got that from your book. Actually. I got that for, yeah.

Amelia Nagoski: Do we have time for me to sing a little bit of song or no?

JoAnn Crohn: please, please. Please. Everyone wants songs.

Amelia Nagoski: New hotness or bubble of Well, let’s do the bubble of love cause we’ve actually talked about the bubble.

JoAnn Crohn: Okay. Cause you have like a ukulele or guitar, right? When we

Amelia Nagoski: I I do have my ukulele. I was just tuning it cause you gotta keep stuff tuned. Okay. here’s, the bubble of love song. It goes, I want to do and be everything that the world has demanded of me. Sometimes I feel I won’t deserve love, not until I’m productive enough. That’s when I need supplementary help to reinforce my boundary. In my bubble of love, I am enough. In my bubble of love. Anyway, that’s the first verse. That’s what I want to.

Brie Tucker: You can’t, you can’t listen to that and not bop along happily.

Amelia Nagoski: I did want it to feel the way that being in the bubble feels.

Brie Tucker: it. Oh, I think you nailed it. I

JoAnn Crohn: Being in the bubble feels like being in Hawaii. that’s, I think,

Amelia Nagoski: Yeah.

JoAnn Crohn: of love territory.

Amelia Nagoski: who care about my well being as much as I care about theirs. We guard each other from outside messages, showing each other we care. Anyway,

JoAnn Crohn: I love it.

Amelia Nagoski: Okay.

Brie Tucker: I want, to sing along now.

Amelia Nagoski: Oh,

JoAnn Crohn: is

Brie Tucker: like a little heart bubble.

Amelia Nagoski: Oh yeah. That would see, that would use creative self-expression and connection all in combination. Creative self-expression is another way you can complete the stress response cycle, by the way.

Brie Tucker: Okay.

JoAnn Crohn: amazing. Well, thank you, Amelia, so much for coming out with us. , this has been like so unbelievable. We’ve been looking forward to this interview for so long and, we will talk soon.

Amelia Nagoski: Great. Thank you.

JoAnn Crohn: How delightful was Amelia? She was so much fun.

Brie Tucker: fun. Like at the end of our podcast episode, I’m like, if you want to hang out again, girl, we’re down for this. we got a balance group. Come chill with us. We are happy. Like I wouldn’t, I want to make the sing along with her. Like we’ll put the

JoAnn Crohn: sing along?

Brie Tucker: caption at the bottom and I’ll just do a little heart hands and

JoAnn Crohn: Oh, like the bouncing ball by the heart

Brie Tucker: love bubble. Yes.

JoAnn Crohn: Heart hands? Yeah, the love 

Brie Tucker: song. I want to hear the new hotness song.

JoAnn Crohn: Oh, yeah. The new hotness is so good. They I mean, they devote, like, a whole chapter to body image in the book. And it’s Also delightful. It’s just a wonderful book all around like it really relates to I wanted to ask her about the book on your best behavior the other one I’m obsessed about who were interviewing her later on to which guys You know what, her interview might be happening very soon in our podcast Facebook group when this episode comes live. So you should really go and join our podcast Facebook group. Like this is not a gentle hit. This is an all out like go do it.

Brie Tucker: yes, by the time this one airs, we will have just interviewed the author you’re referring to. we will have just interviewed her a couple of days before.

JoAnn Crohn: Yeah. So like you

Brie Tucker: Time travel.

JoAnn Crohn: group. You’re missing out. You’re missing out. but yeah, Amelia was wonderful. And the book burnout is wonderful. Go and get it. it is going to change your whole perception of everything that you go through as a woman and make you so much kinder to yourself. So till next time, remember the best mom’s a happy mom. Take care of you. We’ll talk to you later.

Brie Tucker: Thanks for stopping by.