Episode 08: The Monitor

Frustration. Everybody feels it. Emily and Amelia discuss the science of how frustration works, and strategies for managing it.

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The worksheets from Burnout are here.

TRANSCRIPT:

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Episode 7: The Monitor

Emily Nagoski: [00:00:00] Hey everybody, this is Emily Nagoski-

Amelia Nagoski: [00:00:07] And Amelia Nagoski

Emily Nagoski: [00:00:09] And you are listening to the Feminist Survival Project 2020: a podcast for feminists who are overwhelmed and exhausted by everything they have to do, and yet somehow still worry that they're not doing enough. Speaking of enough... This is an episode about frustration.

This is an episode about that feeling you have, that you are doing everything you can, you are working at 500% and you are still not making adequate progress toward whatever your goal is. I was so excited when I found the science that explained the nature of this experience and therefore what the solutions were to this experience.

This one's going to be a lot of me teaching this thing pretty much word for word, the way I've been teaching it for the last 10 years, cause that's, that's how important it is.

It has completely transformed the way my marital euphemism deals with his job. He self-employed. And how do you manage the workload of being self employed where everything is your job?

So let's just dive right into the science and you'll figure out as we go why this is so great.

Okay, so there's a thing in the research, and we'll put a link to the research in the show notes. There's a thing that's technically known as "criterion velocity and the discrepancy reducing slash increasing feedback loop."

And as soon as I say that, everyone falls asleep. Right?

Which is why I have made up this metaphor of there's, like, a monitor in your brain, not like the lizard monitor, but like a little watcher, like the judge on a tennis court. There's somebody who's noticing and the monitor knows what your goal is. The monitor knows how much effort you're investing in this school and she knows how much progress you're making. And she has a very strong opinion about what the ratio of progress to effort is supposed to be. My standard example for this is driving to the mall. If you are, and I've traveled all over America and on average, how long does it take to drive to the mall?

Amelia Nagoski: [00:02:25] 20 minutes, 20 minutes, 20 minutes from anywhere to the mall.

Emily Nagoski: [00:02:28] The exception is Vermont, where it takes an hour. So it takes 20 minutes on average. That's your expectation. Your little monitor's opinion about how much effort it should take to achieve this goal of getting to the mall. Let's say your goal at the mall is to buy a present for your niece's birthday.

So you get in your car. And it just so happens that there's very light traffic. You're just zipping along. You get all green lights, and how does that feel?

Amelia Nagoski: [00:02:53] Yayyyy

Emily Nagoski: [00:02:54] Like the whole universe is aligned for you. You have manifested this drive. It feels delightful. And, uh, but then suppose you're stuck behind somebody who, like, stops too soon for a red light.

And then you know how once you get one red light, you get all the red lights and people are being stupid and you start to feel-

Amelia Nagoski: [00:03:15] A little frustrated.

Emily Nagoski: [00:03:16] Frustrated. It's taking a little more effort to achieve your goal, than your monitor thinks is appropriate. Frustration can take a few different flavors.

That frustration might be, like, straightforward, angry frustration, like, "This dude just needs to get out of my way. I'm just trying to get to the mall and this person will not get out of my way." So this is anger frustration.

There is the disgust frustration of, "Ugghh, it doesn't even matter. Screw you guys. I'm going home." as Cartman would put it.

And then there's the anxious version of the frustration of like, "I have to go to the mall. I was supposed to buy a present for my niece two weeks ago and I didn't do it, and I'm going to be a bad aunt if I can't get this present."

The anxiety version of the frustration, but whatever that frustration is-

Amelia Nagoski: [00:04:00] None of these are choices. None of these are states that you think through rationally, they're just an automatic response to the lack of progress relative to the amount of effort.

Emily Nagoski: [00:04:11] This subconscious mechanism in your brain. This monitor makes you feel this thing. It just emerges in your body and suddenly your hands are clutching the steering wheel and your heart is beating faster and your jaw feels tense and maybe your digestion starts to churn or your respiration rate changes.

You start to feel stressed, see, because there's a potential threat out there in the world, and that potential threat is the traffic-

Amelia Nagoski: [00:04:37] Slowing your progress.

Emily Nagoski: [00:04:38] But suppose, it's not just that you're stuck behind somebody who's going too slow and making you get all the red lights. It's that there's really heavy traffic, and then there's an accident and it's all down to one lane, and you're just like, stop and go. Your frustration shifts, not just a frustration, but up to-

Amelia Nagoski: [00:04:58] Rage

Emily Nagoski: [00:04:58] Rage.

"Rraaaaarrrgh".

That's the escalation that happens when you're investing so much time and effort into a goal way beyond what your monitor believes is the appropriate amount of time and effort to go into this goal. And then the really big deal happens.

At a certain point, your monitor switches its assessment of your goal of getting to the mall from being attainable. "Yes, you can get there" to being unattainable. So if, as a totally hypothetical example, you're, I don't know, for example, parked on I-95 South of Philadelphia at three o'clock in the morning, sometime in fall of 1999.

And, uh, there's a tractor trailer that has an accident that closes every lane of traffic in the southbound highway. And you are parked, stopped, on I-95 for an hour, this is a completely just random off the top of my head example that has nothing to do with anything I experienced in 1999... Where you go from being frustrated and enraged, like, "get out of my way, I'm just trying to get home."

Your brain switches its assessment and all of a sudden it decides this goal is not attainable. You are never going to get to the mall or home and it pushes you off an emotional cliff into a pit of despair. And you go from being like, "Get out of my way, I can't believe this" to, "*sobbing* I'm never gonna get there. I just wanted to go home. When can I go home?" At which point, when I teach this, most people are thinking of some specific relationship they've had, some specific semester, they've had, some jobs they've had, projects they've worked on. There's usually something where you're like, "Aahhh".

Before that happens or sometimes after it happens, there's a moment, a pivot point where you may be oscillating between the frustrated rage and the helpless despair. This is a feeling everyone we know has had, but there is no name for it. So we gave this feeling a name. When you are oscillating between the frustrated rage of "Nothing's going to stop me from doing this, I'm going to get this done. These little people all just need to get out of my way" to the helpless despair of "I can't do it. I'm never going to be able to do it," we call that oscillation "Foop". Like poop with an F, Foop. And it's an experience all of us have.

So this is where frustration comes from. This is the complete emotional process and cycle of the monitor.

But unlike, for example, the stress response cycle, there is far more complexity and choice about what happens with the outcome. When you think about the structure of the system, where you've got this little monitor that knows where your goal is and you're investing effort in it, and then there's the opinion about how difficult the effort could be.

We've got three different targets for solutions, right? So option number one is going to be changing the kind of effort you're investing. Solution number two is going to be just making a decision to change your brain's assessment of how hard it's going to be. And then our third option is going to be changing the goal.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:08:21] Which might mean quitting. Giving up.

Emily Nagoski: [00:08:24] And if that makes your heart beat faster, don't worry. We're going to talk about it. Yeah. So, first: changing the kind of effort you're investing. When you're getting stressed out and frustrated, it's easier to have the solution just be to work more and harder. To, like, when you're driving to the mall to be that jerk who, like, scoots around people and tries to get through and pass instead of just, like, going with the flow and accepting it. It's easier to just work harder.

But if you can take one step back and think to yourself, am I investing the right kind of effort to make the kind of progress I'm looking for? You might be able to see that there are actually different ways of approaching it. This is really important when it comes to burnout, because one of the primary causes of burnout is people investing the wrong kind of effort in trying to solve their problems. So this is called the exhaustion funnel.

We will put a link in the show notes to some research on the exhaustion funnel, but here's basically how it works. Suppose your calendar is 100% full. You are doing family, you are doing work, you are doing your life, you are doing things and it's all in balance and then life throws you one extra thing.

It could be a family member who needs help. It could be a work project. You can't resist saying yes to. Something. One more thing gets added. And so now your calendar is overfull. And then what? So what do you cut out? What's the first thing to go when your life is a little too full?

Amelia?

Amelia Nagoski: [00:09:54] Sleep.

Emily Nagoski: [00:09:55] Sleep is the first thing to go. So in that full calendar, you had, you had a balance of things that gave you energy and things that used up your energy. Which one of those is sleep?

Amelia Nagoski: [00:10:07] The one that gives youenergy.

Emily Nagoski: [00:10:08] The one that gives you energy.

Do not worry. We will have at least two episodes just about sleep.

Yeah, but it's, the thing we do is we cut out sleep because we're Human Givers and sleeping is selfish after all. People feel guilty about it and so they sleep less and they make sure they're meeting everyone else's needs and making sure that we're accomplishing all the things. The first thing we cut is sleep.

So now we have more than a hundred percent of what we can do and less than a hundred percent of what we need in order to stay energized.

So now we're doing even more with less energy coming in and we start to get really exhausted. We start to feel like there's even less we can do, so we've got to cut something else out.

What's the next thing we cut?

Amelia Nagoski: [00:10:44] Uhhh, exercise?

Emily Nagoski: [00:10:46] Exercise is a very common one. Bothering to cook healthful food and make decisions about that.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:10:53] Grocery shopping for actual food.

Emily Nagoski: [00:10:55] Yeah. And, like, chopping vegetables and the time consuming-

Amelia Nagoski: [00:10:59] So much easier just to stop at the drive through.

Emily Nagoski: [00:11:01] So much easier. Yeah. So, like, and again, was that something that gave you energy or something they used your energy?

Amelia Nagoski: [00:11:07] Definitely gives you energy.

Emily Nagoski: [00:11:08] So now you have just as much to do and you have even less stuff giving you energy. This is the exhaustion funnel. Until you are down to just the things that drain your energy. And almost nothing that actually gives you energy and you find yourself wondering why you feel so exhausted. So if you can take a step back out of the sucking vortex of the exhaustion funnel, you will notice that there's an opportunity to make a different kind of choice.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:11:37] This is made more complicated by the fact that when you are sucked into the exhaustion funnel, you are rewarded by society. You are persistent. You are showing grit. You are self-sacrificing. And boy, is the world really proud of you for having done that and sacrificing for others. Good job, Human Giver, so busy and tired.

You're doing that woman thing like you are womaning up the wazoo. Way to woman, woman. Nicely done.

Emily Nagoski: [00:12:03] We do not make this choice for no reason. We make this choice because we could potentially be punished for making a different choice.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:12:10] Yes. If you get a full night's sleep and you still get the exercise that you need and you spend time cooking food that is nutritious for you-

Emily Nagoski: [00:12:17] And are therefore saying no to other people's needs in order to create the space and time-

Amelia Nagoski: [00:12:22] How dare you.

Emily Nagoski: [00:12:23] You need to get back in line.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:12:24] Girl, no.

Emily Nagoski: [00:12:25] But you know what? Self care is so important, so good for you.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:12:30] So when you back up and look at the exhaustion funnel and you see the opportunity to make a decision where you're not getting sucked into the funnel, that's a risk.

Emily Nagoski: [00:12:39] So there are costs to doing things the way you've been doing them. You're not doing them for no reason. And there's costs to doing things in a different way. There are benefits to doing things the way you've been doing them. And there are benefits to creating change. The benefits, you're looking for a strategy where the benefits are going to outweigh the costs. And you might decide that there is no change you can make.

This is the place where we're going to put a link to a worksheet, which is, it's just a grid for decision making reasons. What are the benefits of staying the same? What are the benefits of changing? What are the costs of staying the same? What are the costs of changing? You fill out that form, you do the list and then you make a decision based on the cost benefit analysis.

We're going to talk more in more detail about that and marginal value theorem, also known as "the squirrel" when we get to changing the goal. But for now, know that the decision of putting in a different kind of effort is - we are not saying that it is straightforward or easy.

We are not judging you for doing things the way that you've been doing them. You're not doing it this way for no reason. But, if you can find a different kind of effort to invest on your way to a goal, like for example, choosing to get rid of other people's needs and instead actually meet your own basic biological drives, then you can avoid the exhaustion funnel by changing the kind of effort you are investing in the goal.

That's solution number one is changing the kind of effort. I'm going to give another example, which is sex related. That was the context where I first started learning about this. So, for guys, we give them a script for how to get sex out of women. This is the heterosexual script that people are handed, and we also tie it to their identity.

By the way- "Getting sex from women." If you can put your penis in a vagina, that's how we know you're a real man and you are worth anything on this earth. PS, women are slightly morally inferior to you, but they are the gatekeepers to your value as a human being. And it turns out that script that we give men for how to get the sex is a very ineffective script.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:14:57] Whaaaaat?

Emily Nagoski: [00:14:57] A profoundly frustrating script. So they're doing the things that they've been taught to do. They're trying their best and it's not working, and they start to get-

Amelia Nagoski: [00:15:06] Frustrated.

Emily Nagoski: [00:15:06] Frustrated. And so they amplify their efforts, they start doing more of the stuff, and they don't try things outside the script because that would be a departure from their masculinity, which is part of their worth, but they feel like a failure anyway. And as their, their, frustration escalates, they get enraged. And then at a certain point, the little monitor pushes them off an emotional cliff into a pit of despair, decides their goal is unattainable, and remember - their whole identity is connected to this goal - so to give up on the goal is to give up on their entire self worth, value, and they end up in a pit of despair

Amelia Nagoski: [00:15:44] And they join a chat room and talk about running people over on the street. Or actually do it.

Emily Nagoski: [00:15:50] Or carry a gun onto a college campus. Nobody ever died because they couldn't get laid. Sex itself is not a drive, but, uh, a lot of people have gotten killed because we give men the wrong script for getting sex and we tell them that their entire identity depends on it.

🎵🎵We're screwing men over. 🎵🎵

I know. So change the kind of effort that you're investing in the goal is the whole solution right there. That's, like, the beginning of a fix.

Okay. Change the kind of effort.

To wrap up this first solution. I want to talk about the de-motivator from despair.com that hung over my desk the entire time I was writing my dissertation. It was a picture of a penguin waddling away from the camera and underneath it it said limitations.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:16:39] Until you spread your wings,

Emily Nagoski: [00:16:41] you'll have no idea how far you can walk.

I found this genuinely inspiring cause it meant like you don't have to give up on your goal. You're just not going to get there the way you thought you were going to get there. There is no right or wrong way to achieve your goal. Just because you can't fly there, it doesn't mean you can't go. You can still go even if to walk every step of the way, accepting that it's just going to be a different way of doing it.

Is like, you're going to have grief, you're gonna have frustration, you're gonna have rage that the world lied to you about the ways you are supposed to go about achieving this goal.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:17:21] I have wings. What are you telling me? I can't fly. I was told I have wings are flying. Oh, turns out no society lied to you.

Emily Nagoski: [00:17:27] Yeah.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:17:28] So. Sometimes wings are for swimming.

Emily Nagoski: [00:17:30] You process all those feelings. You move through the tunnel. You complete the cycle while still doing the work that it takes to achieve the actual goal you had. That brings us to the second, which is welcoming the idea that your assessment may have been wrong.

This is just going to be really, really difficult. So what this looks like in real life is, you know, if you start climbing a mountain thinking you're just going to zip up the mountain, and then it turns out to be really, really hard, you're going to get frustrated really quickly and potentially give up.

But if you begin climbing the mountain. Knowing ahead of time, it's going to be the most difficult thing you've ever done. Sometimes you're just going to take one step and that'll be all you can do, and then the next day you take a one more step. When you have that assessment, when you're like, Nope, walking is how it's going to be, and it's just going to take 10 times longer than I thought it was.

And that's okay. That doesn't mean that I'm a failure. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with me. It means, again, that there was a difference between what I was taught to expect and what is actually true. And my job in this moment is to embrace what's actually true, which, uh. Yeah.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:18:37] One of my favorite ways this manifests in the real world is when the developers of apps that give you directions in traffic came up with like a little image on the sidebar that shows you "this is how long you're going to be stuck in traffic.

This is how long it's going to take. This is how bad it is." Traffic used to be so frustrating, you discover, you drive up and all the traffic is stopped in your traffic. What caused this and how long is it going to be and what's going on. You feel so helpless and hopeless and you're just parked there on the highway at 3:00 AM in Philadelphia, but now you've got an app and you can, it shows you there's an accident, a mile and a half ahead. This is going to take nine minutes. And then it shows, like, a little bar on the side and when it's down to eight minutes, and seven minutes. And these have gotten very good and very accurate - really accurate, and it's so much easier and less frustrating and enraging to go through traffic when you know there's a light at the tunnel. Here's where the light is this-

Emily Nagoski: [00:19:31] Here is how long it's gonna take you to get through it.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:19:34] Yeah.

Emily Nagoski: [00:19:35] Oh, it makes all the difference in the world.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:19:36] Because then you know how hard it's going to be. All right. This is going to be nine minutes of misery, or 20 minutes of misery. 20 minutes of misery would have been, it would have made me want to die in 1999. But now I know I'm going to be stuck in this traffic for 20 minutes. I'm just going to, like, listen to my audio book.

Emily Nagoski: [00:19:54] Listen to my podcasts.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:19:55] Because I know how hard it's going to be.

Emily Nagoski: [00:19:56] Yeah.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:19:56] So I'm ready and it's fine.

Emily Nagoski: [00:19:58] We hope that you can approach 2020 in that way. Yeah. It's gonna be hard.

It's just going to be terrible.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:20:02] It's gonna be terrible. And now you know. That's fine

Emily Nagoski: [00:20:05] And you're carrying with you a toolkit that already has a bunch of tools in it. You've got separating the stress from the stressor. You've got completing the stress response cycle. You've got recognizing human giver syndrome and the strategies for dealing with that-

Amelia Nagoski: [00:20:17] Engaging with something larger than yourself to create meaning.

Emily Nagoski: [00:20:21] So you're already really empowered in the sort of, like, macro goal of surviving 2020. And within all the macro goal, there's the micro goals of achieving certain benchmarks. And you can use the idea of either changing the kind of effort you're investing or accepting how difficult those goals are to help you.

And that brings us to our third strategy. What was strategy number one?

Amelia Nagoski: [00:20:47] I can't remember.

Emily Nagoski: [00:20:49] It was changing the kind of kind of effort.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:20:51] Yeah. And the second one was, uh, change, uh, your expectation of how difficult it's going to be.

Emily Nagoski: [00:20:57] Changing, technically known as the criteria and velocity.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:21:00] Your assessment of the difficulty.

Emily Nagoski: [00:21:01] And the third one is changing goals. And this is where Amelia comes in as the practical expert.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:21:08] Yeah. Because making music is all about establishing patterns and predicting what's going to happen next. It's one of the reasons music is so satisfying. That our brains love discovering patterns and music is made of patterns.

So it feels really satisfying to feel when those patterns come to a predicted conclusion. It feels amazing. So, when you are in a situation where the music defies your expectations, that can be a little bit thrilling. Like, "Ooh, my expectations were defied," and then it's even more exciting. As long as eventually you get to the thing that you expected, that's fine.

So when you record music, it's even more frustrating because you are physically invested in making the music.

And maybe it's really satisfying sometimes. Maybe sometimes people stand in the studio with headphones on and they just jam and they go from beginning to end and it feels really good to go through the cycle and to follow the expected, predictable pattern.

But that's not how it's ever been when I've recorded classical music. You sing the first 20 measures and then the producer comes on. The voice of God over the air and says, "Lovely singing, choir. I just need you to go back to measure three. The Sopranos were a little bit under pitch."

And then you do it again. The first 20 measures again. The Sopranos fix their pitch and the guy comes back and says, "Lovely singing, choir. I just need you to go up to measure seven this time. The tenors, you missed that dotted eighth note. The team needs to come on the end of four, please."

And then you go back and you do it again, and then you've done it 14 times and the 15th time the guy comes back on the monitor arm says, "Lovely singing, choir. It's a little dry. Can we, can we put some of that color back in?" And, like, what puts color in a voice is emotion and intention. When you feel a thing, it comes out in your voice, but you've done this 14 times now and you are out of the neurotransmitters that mean emotion for that song. So like, no, physically, no, you can't, but you just have to do it anyway.

It's extremely frustrating and draining. So I learned about the monitor and I taught a choir that I was singing with about the monitor, and we learned that we can set a new goal instead of the goal being the unspoken assumed goal of creating a perfect recording of this piece of music from beginning to end, our new goal is something that follows these criteria. Here's the list:

The new goal has to be soon, certain, specific, concrete, positive and personal.

I'll do it again. Soon, certain, specific, concrete, positive and personal.

So when we were recording, uh, we had an engineer named Andrew and he was a little cutie patootie and everybody's really excited about Andrew.

So I suggested, okay, let's set a new goal and our goal is going to be to fill Andrew with joy. So that soon we can ask, you know, right in here, Hey, we could, he could be filled with joy like right now, soon. Certain. We know that Andrew loves this job. He loves this choir. He's gonna be able to do it. Certain.

Soon, certain, specific. Joy is specific, like he's not frustrated. He's not bored. He's not just pleased. He's filled with joy.

Emily Nagoski: [00:24:21] And it's Andrew.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:24:22] Andrew specifically.

Emily Nagoski: [00:24:23] Not fill the world with joy. Andrew.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:24:25] Soon, certain, specific, concrete. Which means you can measure it.

"Hey, Andrew, are you filled with joy?" And he could say yes or no.

Positive. It's a thing that we actually want to achieve. Of course, we want to fill Andrew with joy-

Emily Nagoski: [00:24:42] It's not avoiding suffering.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:24:43] No. It's not just about, you know, let's get through this so that we don't kill each other or ourselves. Let's actually make something that we want to achieve. Positive and personal.

It's our goal that we want. Nobody's come in and told us, you know, Andrew's not demanding, "You must fill me with joy." No, it's our goal that we chose. So. Soon, certain, specific, concrete, positive and personal.

And I gotta tell you, it worked. We were in this recording session and it wasn't until the second day that we really started to feel drained and frustrated and feeling like, "Oh, we've done this 800 times. How come we can't? Why are we still doing this?" And somebody piped up from the back row is Andrew was moving a cable around in the sanctuary.

"Uh, Andrew, are you filled with joy?" And Andrew actually stopped for a moment. He did not know that we had set his joy as our goal, but he just stopped and looked up and went, "Yeah, I really am."

Oh, yay. Everybody in the room just felt lighter and better and was like, we achieved our goal. Like, we haven't done the thing that we all thought we were here to do, which is to make this perfect recording. But our actual goal, the goal that we set for ourselves, we achieved.

It was very satisfying.

Um, in relation to this, I have a demotivator from despair.com in my office right now. And it says "Potential". And it has a beautiful, backlit, glossy photograph of French fries. And it says, "We can't all be astronauts."

Emily Nagoski: [00:26:16] Change your goal.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:26:17] Change your goal.

Emily Nagoski: [00:26:19] So it's really important that this new goal that you set, not just be like small incremental goals on your path to the real goal.

The research shows that that actually makes stuff worse.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:26:30] Yes.

Emily Nagoski: [00:26:30] This has to be you changing your actual goal. That larger thing isn't your goal anymore. Your real goal is whatever this soon, certain, specific, concrete, positive, personal goal is that you set for yourself.

The research has found it's effective. We've both personally experienced that it's effective.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:26:48] I have another illustration of it.

Emily Nagoski: [00:26:49] Oh-

Amelia Nagoski: [00:26:50] I take horseback riding lessons. And horses are really intuitive and they understand what you want from your posture and from the alignment of your body, and- when I am thinking about, "I'm going to transition from a walk to a trot." As soon as I think I'm going to transition from walk to a, t- I haven't even got through the word "trot" in my mind, and the horse is already trotting. Not because I have consciously chosen to, like, give the aides and the signals that I know tell him to trot. Just 'cuz he felt me thinking it through the intentions of my body.

And that's really frustrating for him when he knows that, like, "Girl, I know you want to trot. I know we're going to trot. Let's just fucking trot, please."

Um, so I have to think to myself out loud, I'm going to walk 'til C, I'm going to walk 'til C, my goal is to walk 'til C, and if I begin to even think like, "I'm going to start trotting at C or I'm going to start trotting a little early," the horse knows.

And that, okay, in this metaphor, your monitor is the horse. Your horse knows if you're secretly, like, heading for some other goal and it's going to get really frustrated.

So. Genuinely have a goal that is your real goal and do not start trying to, like, manipulate the backwards - 'cuz that horse is going to try trot away with you and you're going to fall off.

Emily Nagoski: [00:28:03] This is helpful when you're talking to children, too. I remember working with a group of children who were, they were dancers in a dance class in their costumes, and they were performing to the song Hard Knock Life. They were the orphans from Annie, which means some of them had brooms.

And they were playing with their brooms.

And so, instead of telling them not to, like, twirl their brooms out and potentially clock someone on the head. The goal I gave them was: one part of the broom has to be touching the floor all the time. You give a concrete, specific, positive thing for them to do,

Don't tell them what not to do. Tell them what to do.

I'm going to walk to C. One part of the room has to be touching the floor all the time. That's changing the goal.

And then there's quitting. Talk about the squirrel.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:28:54] This is- Marginal value theorem is the body of research that covers it. But really what it boils down to is that little mammalian part of our brains that we share in common with squirrels and other adorable little woodland creatures.

Emily Nagoski: [00:29:08] It's not even mammalian, it's also birds.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:29:09] Ooh, birds. Like, okay, great- animals. Animals. Deep in our ancient brain we share this resource with them, but squirrels are a little bit better at using it than we are because they face less social pressure than we do.

Um, so a squirrel has a little patch of woods that she lives in and she eats up all the nuts and the seeds and the everything she can find, and she stores them away for winter and she starts to use up all of the resources that are available in that little patch, and she has to decide, do I move onto another patch?

Or if I move onto another patch, will that be more dangerous than staying in this patch? And she's not, like, taking a survey. She's not Googling how many acorns are in the next patch. She's got a little voice inside her brain that's saying, "Yes, it's safe. Go get more nuts. Go get more acorns-"

Emily Nagoski: [00:29:59] In the other patch. Go explore.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:30:00] Go explore. It's safe, you'll be okay. Whereas, if maybe she hears a potential threat in another patch, she's definitely gonna shut down and choose, "Nope, I am not going over there."

Emily Nagoski: [00:30:12] So we suggest that when you're making a decision about whether to continue in the patch where you are, or to let go of that patch and move on to a different patch - also known as quitting. Do I stay at this job and continue to invest my time and effort here, or do I go to a different job? Do I stay in this relationship and continue investing my time and energy here, or do I let it go and try on the possibility of a different relationship?

Do I stay with this major in school, this degree program? There's all these different choices we make about whether to continue or whether to quit. And so make, make yourself a chart. Good things about staying. Good things about leaving. Cost of staying, cost of leaving.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:31:01] Being sure to take into account those social external pressures that are not just the things that you are intentionally choosing to plan for or choosing to work your way around if they're going to be barriers, but also what are going to be the consequences socially, of maybe defying someone else's expectations.

Emily Nagoski: [00:31:19] Because we live in a world that falsely equates quitting with failing.

Yeah. It's not failing. It is not that you failed. It's that you chose a different direction for yourself. And there are some people who feel like the direction you were on is the direction you're supposed to be on. And the fact that you changed directions means that you "failed" at that direction.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:31:39] And which means not just that you failed, but that you are a failure. Yeah.

Emily Nagoski: [00:31:44] So there's all kinds of costs, and those social costs are the things that make all this noise. If you were gender socialized feminine, in particular you, you were taught to believe other people's opinions about your body and your life choices more than you believed what your own internal experience was trying to tell you.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:32:05] So that little squirrel voice in our heads that tells us, "Yes, go explore" has been shouted over by external societal pressures that say, "You must conform. You must stay in your patch. There's only certain spaces where you belong."

Emily Nagoski: [00:32:19] What we suggest: The squirrel. The squirrel does not need a worksheet.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:32:24] Just no.

Emily Nagoski: [00:32:25] What the squirrel needs is to listen to what her brain is telling her. Yeah.

So I don't know where your squirrel lives.

I very much feel my squirrel, like, deep in my gut, sort of in the, like, big swollen part of my belly. Where's your squirrel live?

Amelia Nagoski: [00:32:38] I am really bad at the squirrel thing, but it's very heart centered.

Emily Nagoski: [00:32:43] Chesty area?

Amelia Nagoski: [00:32:44] Yeah.

Emily Nagoski: [00:32:45] Yeah. The part of you that knows. And it takes... For some people, like, the voice of their squirrel is very loud. My squirrel is pretty loud.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:32:54] Mine is loud, but the volume on external expectations is even louder.

Emily Nagoski: [00:33:03] Yeah. So what are the things you do in order to be able to hear your squirrel?

Amelia Nagoski: [00:33:07] You have to physically stop. I have to physically stop moving, stand actual still and make the choice to listen, turn your attention inward. And the only way that I could do that step one of learning to do that for me was identifying the truth that that inward voice has value... Which I did not know until pretty late in life.

I really assumed that the things that people expected of me must be correct. That must be real. Nope. So I had to go through all the way of that journey of learning. Oh yeah. My, my inner voice. Knows things, is a part of me that's wise, as one of my therapists helped me learn. So learning that it has value and that I should listen to it, it could be good for me to turn and listen to it.

And once I decided that ,actually hearing it is not difficult. It just takes a little focus.

Emily Nagoski: [00:34:05] It's remembering to pay attention, to turn your attention toward it, right? Instead of just listening to the outside voices,

Amelia Nagoski: [00:34:12] Yeah. Decide that it matters and then decide to listen. And then while listening, keep making the decision over and over again to listen and that it matters.

Emily Nagoski: [00:34:20] And a great cue that it is a time to go ahead and listen to your own internal experience is if you find yourself asking everyone you know for advice about your situation. That's you, like, looking outside, the squirrel, like asking all the other squirrels, "Do you think I should leave this patch or do you think I should continue working in this little patch?"

So, quitting. It is not easy or simple, but also it, it actually is extremely simple. It is just one decision to make, which is, "Is it worth it for me to continue staying here?" And there is a part of you that just knows that you've invested all you can in this job or this relationship or this project, and you can let go now.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:35:07] So with huge problems-

Emily Nagoski: [00:35:10] PS: You are enough already.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:35:13] With these huge problems that are not fixable by any individual or even by an individual generation. Our relationship to that goal, so like eliminating white supremacy, you're not going to live to see the end of white supremacy. We're not gonna live to see the end of misogyny and the patriarchy that perpetuates it.

We're just, we're not going to solve that problem within our lifetimes, but we are going to please, hopefully, make progress towards eliminating those things so that the next generation has less work to do and the generation after that has less work to do. So when you have in your mind, "We need to end white supremacy."

Well, that's, that's not a realistic goal. And when you feel like it's you and the buckets of the ocean, here's where we go back to engaging with your something larger and recognizing that you are not supposed to have to be enough on your own. You are enough because you're surrounded with other people who are also working towards the same goals.

Their little tiny bits and your little tiny bits working together. Remember that you're not alone when you're frustrated.

Emily Nagoski: [00:36:18] Yes. Feeling not enough as a form of loneliness. Yeah. See previous episode.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:36:24] Yeah.

Emily Nagoski: [00:36:26] That's this episode of the Feminist Survival Project 2020. If any part of this was written, and not much of it was, it was written by us Emily Nagoski

Amelia Nagoski: [00:36:34] And Amelia Nagoski.

Emily Nagoski: [00:36:35] To the extent that this podcast was produced, it was produced by my marital euphemism. Amelia did the music.

And you can follow us on Instagram or Twitter at @FSP2020. You can email us about your monitor and about your little squirrel and about the choice you made to quit that one time. Or the way you struggled.

Amelia Nagoski: [00:36:53] Did you know that your inner voice has value or did you always believe what society told you mattered more than what you wanted?

Emily Nagoski: [00:37:00] What do you do in order to be able to hear your internal voice? Is it really noisy and loud or does it get stifled by all the outside voices?

Amelia Nagoski: [00:37:08] What consequences have you faced for quitting, but when was it the right decision anyway?

Emily Nagoski: [00:37:13] When did you stay too long somewhere because of everyone's opinion about where you should be-

Amelia Nagoski: [00:37:20] instead of your own.

Emily Nagoski: [00:37:22] Also, if you just want to say nice things, that's also good. Yeah. We hope this helped. If it did, and you find yourself wanting to have a conversation about the monitor and frustration and how we manage the decision to quit or changing the kind of effort, please do share it, rate and review. That helps other exhausted feminists find the podcast and hopefully you'll join us next week for another episode of the Feminist Survival Project 2020. Until then, thanks for listening.