Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski
Kindle & Audible: US or CA
Morning Readers & Happy Monday!
Starting a new month of reading & UGH! This book. This was a serious love/hate relationship. It took me over a month to read, when I can normally find enough time to read a book through in a few days. I read in small chunks & while I was severely tempted to put it down, for good, there kept being these little moments where I found myself thinking ‘huh’ & ‘grabbing the highlighter’.
I did love how Emily and Amelia sourced so much of their research and cited the studies referenced in their work. While I do realize this was a Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Readers’ Favorite Science & Technology in 2019, and AI was not utilized as it is today, it still felt a little AI-esk. Not dry per say, they include many stories and anecdotes to help the reader relate to the research, and I did end up highlighting quite a few quotes, but similar to ‘The Mountain is You’ it just… fell a little flat for me.
Although, like I said, there were some moments:
- Emotional exhaustion- the fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long. 2. Depersonalization- the depletion of empathy, caring and compassion. 3. Decreased sense of accomplishment, an unconquerable sense of futility: feeling that nothing you do makes a difference”
“Science doesn’t offer perfect truth, only the best available truth. Science, in a sense, is not an exact science…. Science is too blunt an instrument to capture every woman’s situation… Science is often expensive, and who pays or it can influence the outcome and whether or not the results are published”
“Fiction is truth, even if it is not fact. A story goes where science can’t”
“Dealing with the stressor and dealing with the stress are two different processes, and you have to do both. You have to, or else your stress will gradually erode your well-being until your body and mind break down…If she let the stress accumulate inside for her days or weeks, one workout won’t get her all the way there. She’ll feel better at the end of a run, but not done. If you’ve spent a long time accumulating incomplete stress response cycles inside your body, you may have this experience, too.
The sudden, overwhleming burst of pain, so intense you can no longer contain it, … It’s out of proportion to what’s happening in the here and now, but it’s not out of proportion to the suffering you’re holding inside… that eruption is a sign you’re past your threshold… deal with the stress so you can be well enough to deal with the stressor.”
“A goal is not a life- but it may be what gives shape and direction to the way we live each day. If our goals are what we want to accomplish, “meaning” is why we want to accomplish them. …That’s the power of meaning. We can tolerate any suffering, if we know why. And not knowing why is, itself, a profound type of suffering… to have significance beyond the trivial or momentary, to have purpose, or to have a coherence that transcends chaos.”
“It comes when you cry as you say your kid will probably never know how hard you had to work, that is the whole point of all that hard work, so that she would never needs to know how hard you had to work”
I could really relate to a couple of these quotes, I just felt that the method of dealing with them wasn’t really there. There was one concept, however, of a inner ‘madwoman’ that I hadn’t heard before though.
“each person’s madwoman is different. For you, maybe she’s more like a shadow, following you around, a perpetual reminder of what you’re not; or a spindly creature lurking under the bed until you put on some jeans that feel tight… Again, and again women describe their madwoman as an uncomfortable, even unpleasant person… and they describe her fragility, vulnerability or sadness”
What was interesting was that I DIDN’T resonate with this. Sure I have the voice in my head that says the usual, you have no relationship, no child at home to care for, no formal education, no job, you’re useless. But my ‘madwoman’, girl, she’s off the hook. Something between a Viking/hippie that wants to ride like the wind across Canada with nothing but her horse, or jump a sailboat to Australia even though she’s never sailed. She was the one who had me living in NS for 2 months on a horse farm at 14 years-old for my high-school mandated volunteer hours, or gearing to move across the country for an internship at the Vancouver Aquarium at 16, with dreams of studying Orcas on the Pacific coast. It takes everything in me to keep this wild-hearted ‘mad woman’ at least somewhat realistic and not drowning in shark infested waters somewhere off in French Polynesia.
Like I said, there were some good takeaways from this book, and I wouldn’t immediately dismiss it, but I would wait for it to go on a kindle sale (hello, $2.99) or borrow it from a friend.
That being said, if you do feel like you’re dealing with burnout, I hope you give yourself the grace and time to heal and regroup. Be gentle on yourself, the world is hard enough as it is.
-Anna R.
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Kindle & Audible: US or CA
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