Episode 01: Separate the Stress From the Stressor
Wellness is a state of action. The cure for burnout isn’t self-care, it’s all of us caring for each other. And when we embrace those things, we’re not taking a break from fixing the world, we are already fixing the world.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Episode 01: Separate the Stress From the Stressor
Emily Nagoski: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. I'm Emily Nagoski.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:00:09] I'm Amelia Nagoski.
Emily Nagoski: [00:00:11] And this is the very first episode of something we're calling the Feminist Survival Project 2020. Our goal with each episode is to provide something you can use today to make life a little less overwhelming. And a little more joyful.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:00:28] Every episode will be different but Emily's going to summarize the three main themes to the approach of wellness we're going to use right here at the top.
Emily Nagoski: [00:00:35] Okay. First, wellness is not a state of mind or a state of being. It is a state of action. It is moving freely through the cycles and oscillations of living and in mammalian body. What this looks like in practice is granting your body the opportunities it requires- So, pausing for a moment because my pit bull Thunder is currently lying on her back with her paws soft and resting just looking incredibly peaceful and happy.
And the reason we have animals in our lives like this is because they teach us how to be by simply being themselves and Thunder right now is teaching us how to be super soft and happy. She's a good girl.
Okay. So, first things first: Wellness is not a state of mind nor is it a state of being. It is a state of action. It is moving freely through the cycles and oscillations of living in a mammalian body. What this looks like in practice is granting your body the opportunities it requires to rest and to work. To connect and to be independent. To feel stress and to find your body's way to safety. That's the first thing.
Second, the cure for Burnout is not self-care. Self-care is the fallout shelter you build in your basement because apparently it's your job to protect yourself from nuclear war.
The cure instead is simply care. It is all of us caring for each other.
What this looks like in practice is: when you think you need more grit, what you need is more help. When you think you need more discipline, you need more kindness and when you look at others and think they need more grit, what they need is more help. And when you think they need more discipline, what they need is more kindness. That's the second thing. And third of our main themes these two key ideas are part of a larger solution. Not just ways to survive while we work toward the solution when the needs of our bodies take up as much space as they require and when we turn toward each other's needs with kindness and compassion, we are already rejecting the forces of white supremacist cisheteropatriarchal wildly exploitative post industrial capitalism.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:03:28] This is good news and bad news, because it means the system has a vested interest in preventing you from doing either. It will try to steal your body's freedom to rest and love and feel safe.
It will try to block you from turning toward other people's experiences with kindness and compassion. A lot of what we're going to talk about on the podcast is how oppressive systems sneak into our lives and especially into our ability to practice care and what we can do to eradicate it.
Emily Nagoski: [00:03:58] So. Wellness is a state of action.
The cure for burnout isn't self-care. It's all of us caring for each other. And when we embrace those things we're not taking a break from fixing the world. We are already fixing the world. The first time I read that summary to my marital euphemism. He said, "So you're the opposite of lean in, kinda. You're lean on."
Amelia Nagoski: [00:04:27] Yeah.
Emily Nagoski: [00:04:28] Yeah. Fuck "lean in," kinda.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:04:31] Yeah.
Emily Nagoski: [00:04:32] Let's lean on each other and help each other keep moving forward. We are all to some degree wounded by this culture that separates us from each other, turns us against each other. So we all need help.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:04:47] Let's call those three themes the summary of a user's guide to a feminist survival kit. That's how you use the gear you keep inside your survival kit.
Emily Nagoski: [00:04:58] And that brings me to the first piece of gear we're going to offer for this kit. Here it is. Are you ready? Separate the process of dealing with your stress from the process of dealing with your stressors. Let us break that down.
First of all, let's talk about your stressors.
These are the things that cause your stress and you know what they are. It's traffic and deadlines and your family and climate change and your terrible boss and the patriarchy. It can also be internal stressors like self-criticism, residual trauma reactions.
Your stressors are the things that activate stress in your body. They're anything your body receives as a potential threat.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:05:49] We're going to have a whole episode on evidence-based strategies for dealing with stressors. But the short version is: planful problem solving and a solution focused frame.
Okay. So, say your stressor is getting through a degree program that is deeply sexist or otherwise oppressive. Every time you go to class or even every time you think about going to class, stress is activated in your body.
Emily Nagoski: [00:06:10] Stress is this physiological response to those stressors. Stress happens in your body. The emotions we associate with stress- that's both the flight emotions of fear everything from worry to anxiety to terror. And the fight emotions of anger- everything from annoyance or frustration up to rage. Those emotions happen in your body. It's an evolutionary adaptation designed to help us survive potential threats, like for example being chased by a lion.
So let's imagine that you're in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, the savanna of Africa and you see a lion. It's coming right for you. What happens next? You run. When you see the line your physiology undergoes a massive shift in response. Your heart rate accelerates, your blood pressure increases, your breathing rate increases, your pupils dilate, blood moves away from the surface of your skin so if you get caught, you don't bleed as much. Your immune system shuts down, your digestive system, shuts down, your reproductive system slows down, your attention shrinks down to the here and now, to information relevant only to the immediate circumstances. You can't think outside this immediate problem.
All these changes happen so that you can run like hell without getting the distraction or metabolic burden of the rest of your physiological, cognitive and emotional self getting in the way. So, you run. Let's imagine you successfully run back to your village and someone sees you coming in, gestures you through their door and then they slam the door in the face of the rampaging lion. You stand with your shoulders against the door while the lion pounds against it and roars and scratches and then, at last, the lion gives up. It huffs and walks away to go look for different prey. You watch it disappear and then... And then, you look at this person who just saved your life. And how do you feel?
You're relieved, you're exhausted ,you're grateful to be alive. You love your friends and family. The sun seems to shine brighter. Your respiration rate returns to normal. Your heart rate slows, your blood pressure reduces, your pupils return to normal, your immune system comes back online, your digestive system comes back online, your reproductive system comes back online.
Your attention expands to Encompass the world beyond this one stressor. Your body knows because you ran and you were protected that it is safe now. You know your body is a safe place for you to live. And that, friends is the complete stress response cycle. This is the secret apparently no one has told anyone or we keep forgetting.
Stress is a cycle.
The solution to stress is not to just relax. It is to go through the cycle. It has a beginning a middle and an end just like all of our biological cycles. Digestion too has a beginning, a middle, and an end and if you don't get to the end... Some not so good things would happen, right?
If stress is a cycle that means all those fear and anger-related emotions are cycles just like our biological cycles. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Emotions happen in your body. They are physical phenomena.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:09:49] And for a wide variety of reasons, most of us are walking around with years or decades of incomplete stress response cycles in our bodies, just waiting for a chance to complete. Our bodies are amazing this way. All that stress will just wait for us. It'll set up camp in some organ system or other and hang out until we provide it with a way to complete. In the next episode we'll describe a dozen evidence-based strategies for helping your body complete those stress response cycles.
And if you're already feeling that in your body and you're hungry for ways to help your body, skip the rest of this episode and just go on to the next one. But the bottom line is we are not designed to hold on to all this stress. Our bodies will do it for us, but they pay a price. If we think about the cardiovascular system: your blood vessels are designed to cope with a gently flowing stream of blood with the occasional short term fire hose of stress induced high blood pressure.
But if that blood pressure stays high for extended periods of time, that fire hose of pressure starts to physically damage the blood vessels and those damaged spots are where plaque accumulates gradually over the years and that's how stress leads to heart disease.
Or the digestive system. Stress alters gastrointestinal motility- more specifically it delays gastric emptying food moving from the stomach to the colon. And it accelerates colonic transit- food moving through the colon. That's how stress can cause IBS and acid reflux and the variety of other gut issues.
The bottom line is you have to deal with the stressors and with the stress itself. And those are usually completely separate processes. Trying to deal with your stress by dealing with your stressors is like trying to digest by doing the dishes. Trying to process your rage or fear by addressing the professor or boss or patriarchy that activated the rage or fear is like trying to digest by doing the dishes.
For sure, it's a necessary part of the process of living a modern life, but it's not what's going to help your body move through the cycle. We have to separate the process of dealing with the stressors from the process of dealing with the stress.
Emily Nagoski: [00:12:01] And again, that's good news. You know what it means. It means you can move through the stress response, even when the stressor is still present in your life. You can do something to find your way back to the relaxation phase of the stress response cycle, even if your stressor isn't gone yet, even if the lion is still outside your door.
So, Amelia is the person I think of when we get to this part. So, uh, would you like to tell your story? Tell the nice people?
Amelia Nagoski: [00:12:36] I would love to.
I really believed that the only way to deal with stress was by dealing with the stressor. I also believed that once I dealt with the stressor, my stress would just be gone. If I noticed myself getting progressively sicker and sicker or in more and more pain, I thought that was just my body being a shitty broken body. I really believed that the only way to deal with the stress was by dealing with the stressor. I also believed that once I dealt with a stressor, my stress would just be gone. If I noticed myself getting progressively sicker and sicker or in more and more pain, I thought that was just my body being a shitty broken body. Like you were the Arnold Schwarzenegger one and I was the Danny DeVito one from that movie "Twins" where one gets all the strength than the other one is all the extra weak stuff. So, yeah, I believed I was fundamentally broken but also that stress is basically just imaginary and any physical consequences from stressful situations was a coincidence.
So before I learned to separate the stress from the stressor, I had to learn that stress is a cycle that happens in your body that all feelings, including stress, are real and happen in your body. They aren't just a plot device for Lifetime channel movies.
I feel like I need to explain why I didn't believe feelings were real because there are definitely some listeners who don't know what that means or who aren't sure themselves what they truly believe about feelings. I never believed in feelings because society told me my whole life that feelings are a woman thing, a weakness thing and because I was strong and a leader I didn't have to fall for that hysteria.
I didn't believe feelings were real because of internalized misogyny. It's the same reason lots of men are distant from their emotions. For me, it meant I instinctively shut down any emotion before I was even consciously aware of it. It interfered with my musicianship and performing, for sure. And learning conducting was the first thing that clued me in to the possibility that maybe feelings were real and that they were in my body and ready to accomplish some stuff, but I really compartmentalized that just to my conducting.
Until I was about 32, when I went to the emergency room for the first time, and you gave me all those books on how to meditate and manage stress and I was like, but you manage stress by doing the work- and, no turns out the stress happens in your body. Unless you deal with it, it stays in your body and slowly tears your body apart. In this case it tore my appendix apart and they had to take it out.
But as part of that journey, I learned a lot about stress. The most helpful thing I started was practicing Tai Chi. It's recommended for stress and I saw a big Tai Chi thing at the Olympics the previous summer and thought they look like conductors. Conductors should be able to do that. I couldn't of articulated why. When I think back to it, it's the same kind of calling I felt in the 8th grade when I knew I would be a conductor. I didn't know why but it ended up being exactly what I needed. Tai Chi opened up a whole universe to me, made me rethink how everything works, how my body is organized, how my feelings exist in my body and out of it. And how who I am is part of something larger.
These are ideas that 32 year old me would have thought sounded like hippy dippy nonsense. But once I walked through the Tai Chi door, it was like Doctor Strange getting booted into the mirror dimension for the first time like, oh my God, the world is so much bigger than I imagined. So, yeah now I could see the Yin and the Yang see how my instinct to shut down all my feelings had shown up in my body my whole life, literally from the moment I was born, when I didn't breathe for the first five minutes after I popped out. I always thought that shutting down was just normal and correct. Now, I could recognize that my body could tell me things. Holy cow. My body could tell me what it needed? I could trust it and believe it and I didn't need a medical professional or a fitness Guru to tell me what was true about my body.
When I have feelings I can actually feel them. They are real. Holy shit feelings are real. My feelings are real. I am real. Holy shit. It turns out I'm a person. I did not know that until I was in my mid-30s. And I didn't know I didn't know I was a real person. It really was like developing superpowers.
I went from feeling helpless and broken to feeling like I was a real person with the capacity to interact with the world in a healthy way. I'm still working on realizing that capacity, but at least now I know I have it. My life has changed a lot since that first ER visit. I finished my doctorate, I moved to another state, I wrote a book, and hell, yes. It has been stressful. Sometimes it has been overwhelming and exhausting like when I had to live at your house for six weeks because I sold my house and the lawyers wouldn't let me move into my new one. You, me, two husbands, three cats, four dogs, Jesus -
That
Emily Nagoski: [00:17:23] was really easy. (laughter)
Amelia Nagoski: [00:17:25] Okay, but it doesn't matter what the stressors are because I've learned how to listen to my body and do what it needs when tells me to complete the stress response cycle.
Emily Nagoski: [00:17:35] So, when I look back on your story, first of all, I don't know how we could have gotten so far into life with such different ideas and for me not to have known that you didn't know that you were a person who had feelings.
But I also see your stress as, like, moving gradually through your GI tract.
You had tonsillitis when you were in high school at 15, you had your tonsils removed, and then you had acid reflux that had you, like, going to the college Health Center in the middle of the night because you were like, "What is going on with me?" And then you had appendicitis in grad school and and these days it's endometriosis of the bowels.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:18:21] That is roughly true. As a kid it was mostly upper respiratory infections. My immune system was like, "No thank you, please" and in retrospect I can see that I stored all my rage and my tonsils for 15 years - that's not a metaphor for anything - until they were so big they choked me. They got stuck together when I inhaled because of the Bernoulli effect, you know physics.
I was sick all the time in college and there's a trend of ailments that were doing everything they could to slow me down, shut me down. It was my knees and I was about 22. I were knee braces for years, went to physical therapy, nothing helped. And then my lower back- I threw my back out for the first time in undergrad once or twice a year every year thereafter, but I very rarely get serious back pain now. Hmm... I wonder why?
Emily Nagoski: [00:19:05] Oh, I have a lot of back pain these days.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:19:08] Hmm. The knee pain's 99% gone and also I was diagnosed with. adult-onset asthma in undergrad and that's mostly gone after I recognized that I was wheezing instead of feeling my rage and despair. I don't want this to sound like medical diagnosis aren't valid. Sometimes bodies just get screwed up for mechanical or chemical reasons, you know germs are real, but for me the overwhelming number of elements that were bogging me down from a very young age were because I wasn't aware that my body had all this stuff going on and that I was repressing and holding on to it. I was way sicker than people who know that feelings are real and that feeling them as an okay thing to do.
Emily Nagoski: [00:19:45] Yeah, the story when we were kids that I got sick once a year. I got badly sick when I was sick, but it was once a year.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:19:52] Yeah, you literally got an award I think in third grade for perfect attendance and it didn't even occur to me that perfect attendance was like a thing people could do. Hmm. Yeah. So I know that it's the emotion stuff that fixed the physical stuff because it's mostly fixed now. None of it was fixed by medical interventions, except like the removal of problematic organs, which isn't so much fix the problem as remove the problem. It was only when I started completing the cycle that I started to feel like I have a real body a normal, not broken body, a fundamentally good body.
Emily Nagoski: [00:20:26] I feel like this is a piece that has been missing from the conversation around burnout, especially for women. We have not talked about the physical impact because burnout is emotion.
It's the exhaustion of emotions which necessarily means it's an exhaustion on some level of our bodies. And unless we know how to turn with kindness and compassion toward our physical bodies. We're not going to solve the whole burnout problem. So that's our job in The Feminist Survival Project.
This first tool that we've put in the toolkit is separating the stress from the stressor.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:21:02] Which includes recognizing that stress is a real thing. A physiological process. A cycle that happens in your body.
Emily Nagoski: [00:21:09] And wellness, as we said at the beginning, wellness is not a state of mind. It's not a state of being. We're looking to help you get to a continual place of Zen and peace or whatever.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:21:20] It's not about not feeling stress. You're going to feel stress.
Emily Nagoski: [00:21:24] Wellness is a state of action. It's allowing your body to move freely through the cycle and not just this cycle, but all the cycles of being human. The rest and effort cycle. The connection autonomy cycle. But those are other episodes and there are all kinds of cultural obstacles that stand between us and our ability to move through the cycle.
We will talk about those soon. Please see the Human Giver Syndrome episode.
The next episode will be a dozen concrete, specific, evidence-based options for completing the cycle. If you're interested, you can also find a more detailed description of the science about this in chapter 1 of our book Burnout
Amelia Nagoski: [00:22:11] And that's it. Is it the first episode of the feminist survival project 2020.
Emily Nagoski: [00:22:16] If any of this was written, it was written by us, Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski. To the extent that it was produced. It was produced by my marital euphemism. If there's any music,
Amelia Nagoski: [00:22:25] I wrote it kind of sort of.
Emily Nagoski: [00:22:28] Except yeah. We want to hear from you. You can follow the podcast on Instagram or Twitter at @FSP2020 as in "Feminist Survival Project" and email us at feminist survival project 2020 at gmail.com.
We want to know when you figured out that emotions exist.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:22:47] Did you know that stress is a real thing or did you think it was some kind of metaphor or metaphysical something out there?
Emily Nagoski: [00:22:55] Have you been taught that if you can just, like, fix the problems in your life your stress will just go away? We want to know. We're here to give you information, yes, but the other part of what we want to do with this is have a conversation that feels like if you sat down next to us at a bar and started talking about how difficult your life is the way we would listen and relate and also have, we hope, really useful information.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:23:24] People have asked me about like the book tour stuff and publicizing the book - is it, "do you find it exhausting?" they asked, to go around and talk about the book and, like, in some ways, yes, but the most enriching, refueling part of going on tour and talking about the book has been hearing women's stories about stuff that they learned. How they were hurt and then how they recovered. That doesn't just they're not just offloading on to me.
It actually helps me and refuels me and makes me feel a sense of purpose for sharing my story with greater authenticity, knowing that when we share our stories back and forth, it actually doesn't drain either one of us. It gives all of us more energy, more, hope, more resources.
Emily Nagoski: [00:24:08] *Magic* And that's how we're going to get through 2020.
I hope this helped. Thank you for listening. See you in the next one.