The cure for burnout is not “self-care”; it is all of us caring for one another.
So we’ll say it one more time:
Trust your body.
Be kind to yourself.
You are enough, just as you are right now.
Your joy matters.
Please tell everyone you know.
tl;dr:
? Just because you’ve dealt with a stressor doesn’t mean you’ve dealt with the stress. And you don’t have to wait until all your stressors are dealt with before you deal with your stress. Which is to say, you don’t have to wait for the world to be better before you make your life better—and by making your life better, you make the world better.
? Wellness is not a state of being but a state of action. It is the freedom to move fluidly through the cyclical, oscillating experiences of being human.
? “Human Giver Syndrome” is the contagious false belief that you have a moral obligation to give every drop of your humanity—your time, attention, energy, love, even your body—in support of others, no matter the cost to you. Pay attention to how different it feels to interact with people who treat you with care and generosity, versus people who treat you as if they are entitled to whatever they want from you.
? Humans are not built to function autonomously; we are built to oscillate from connection to autonomy and back again. Connection—with friends, family, pets, the divine, etc.—is as necessary as food and water.
For the givers
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Humans are not built to do big things alone; we are built to do them together. Our names are on the cover, but there are scores of humans without whose assistance and support this book wouldn’t exist. Here are some of them: Thanks to our brilliant and delightful literary agent, Lindsay Edgecombe. She sold this book not once but twice, and never wavered in her conviction that a “feminist self-help” book was a great and even necessary idea.
Thanks to our spectacular editor, Sara Weiss, who explained the book to us several times, so that we didn’t lose track of our Something Larger, and gave us permission to be super-feminist and also feminine.
Thanks to all the women whose lives went into the composite women’s stories. We hope we’ve done you justice. Thanks to all the people who replied to our Facebook questions. You proved that it’s possible to have a substantive, insightful conversation on Facebook—even about intensely emotional topics. Thanks to Charles Carver for writing about the discrepancy-reducing feedback loop, among a great deal else, and for talking to Emily on the phone for an hour. Thanks to Julie Mencher for referring us to Women’s Growth in Connection, which turned out to be the missing piece of the Burnout puzzle.
Thanks to our husbands, without whom we very literally could not have written the book, but more specifically, thanks to Emily’s husband for the illustrations, and to Amelia’s husband for the music in the audiobook.
We started writing Burnout in 2015 and finished in 2018. A lot changed over those years, to put it mildly. #Shepersisted was born in that time, as were the Trump presidency and Brexit. Hillary Clinton became the first presidential candidate to apologize for losing an election. “Incel” entered the public vocabulary, while the #MeToo movement became a global conversation. Maxine Waters reclaimed her time, Emma González called BS, and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford explained the impact of trauma on memory to the U.S. Senate judiciary committee.
In short, the world needs a book about women’s survival more now than it has in decades. Writing the book helped us through these difficult years. We hope it offers something in return to all these people who enriched this book, our lives, and the world.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Freudenberger, “Staff BurnOut Syndrome.”
2. Hultell, Melin, and Gustavsson, “Getting Personal with Teacher Burnout”; Larrivee, Cultivating Teacher Renewal.
3. Watts and Robertson, “Burnout in University Teaching Staff”; Cardozo, Crawford, et al., “Psychological Distress, Depression.”
4. Blanchard, Truchot, et al., “Prevalence and Causes of Burnout”; Imo, “Burnout and Psychiatric Morbidity Among Doctors”; Adriaenssens, De Gucht, and Maes, “Determinants and Prevalence of Burnout in Emergency Nurses”; Moradi, Baradaran, et al., “Prevalence of Burnout in Residents of Obstetrics and Gynecology”; Shanafelt, Boone, et al., “Burnout and Satisfaction Among US Physicians.” Another meta-analysis found a range of burnout among ICU professionals between 0 and 70 percent. Van Mol, Kompanje, et al., “Prevalence of Compassion Fatigue Among Healthcare Professionals.”
5. Roskam, Raes, and Mikolajczak, “Exhausted Parents.”
6. Purvanova and Muros, “Gender Differences in Burnout.”
7. I.e., women, but also all femmes and people of color.
8. Manne, Down Girl.
9. Manne, Down Girl, 49.
10. Patashnik, Gerber, and Dowling, Unhealthy Politics.
11. Friedman and F?rster, “Effects of Motivational Cues.”
CHAPTER 1: COMPLETE THE CYCLE
1. Hippos kill five times as many people as lions—about five hundred people a year—but that’s nothing compared to humans; we kill a hundred times that many people in a year. Gates, “Deadliest Animal in the World.”
2. Especially “heart rate variability” (HRV), a measure of how adaptive the cardiovascular system is in response to changes in stressors. Regarding acute stress: Castaldo, Melillo, et al., “Acute Mental Stress Assessment.” And regarding chronic stress: Verkuil, Brosschot, et al., “Prolonged Non-Metabolic Heart Rate Variability Reduction.”
3. For example, Marsland, Walsh, et al., “Effects of Acute Psychological Stress”; Valkanova, Ebmeier, and Allan, “CRP, IL-6 and Depression”; Morey, Boggero, et al., “Current Directions in Stress”; and Song, Fang, et al., “Association of Stress-Related Disorders.”
4. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t.
5. Similar but not identical—e.g., brain activation varies depending on the nature of the stressors. Psychosocial stressors activate brain areas associated with emotion regulation more than physiological stressors, while physiological stressors activate motor processing more than psychosocial stressors do. Kogler, Müller, et al., “Psychosocial Versus Physiological Stress.”
6. Sofi, Valecchi, et al., “Physical Activity”; Rosenbaum, Tiedemann, et al., “Physical Activity Interventions”; Samitz, Egger, and Zwahlen, “Domains of Physical Activity.”
7. Epley and Schroeder, “Mistakenly Seeking Solitude.”
8. Sandstrom and Dunn, “Social Interactions and Well-Being.”
9. Bazzini, Stack, et al., “Effect of Reminiscing About Laughter.”
10. Scott, “Why We Laugh.”
11. Grewen, Anderson, et al., “Warm Partner Contact.”
12. Walsh, “Human-Animal Bonds I.”
13. Christian, Westgarth, et al., “Dog Ownership and Physical Activity”; Richards, Ogata, and Cheng, “Evaluation of the Dogs”; and Keat, Subramaniam, et al., “Review on Benefits of Owning Companion Dogs.”
14. Delle Fave, Brdar, et al., “Religion, Spirituality, and Well-Being.”
15. Conner, DeYoung, and Silvia, “Everyday Creative Activity.”
16. Amy Speace, a singer-songwriter who works with Bessel van der Kolk.
17. Science proves what mothers know: sighing is a sign of relaxation at the neurological level. Li et al., “Peptidergic Control Circuit.”
CHAPTER 2: #PERSIST
1. Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema, and Schweizer, “Emotion-Regulation Strategies.”
2. McRae, Kateri, and Mauss, “Increasing Positive Emotion.”