Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #60 The Secret to Solving the Stress Cycle with Drs Emily and Amelia Nagoski

Episode Date: May 1, 2019

How do you experience stress? Women and men generally experience stress in very different ways and women are much more likely to feel overwhelmed and exhausted than men. But why is this? Guests on this week’s episode, Drs Emily and Amelia Nagoski believe that the reason lies in the fact that what’s expected of women and what it’s really like to be a woman in today’s world are two very different things—and women exhaust themselves trying to close the gap between them.  They explain the importance of separating the stress from the stressor. Stressors are the external forces that are giving you stress. Stress is an experience that happens in your body – it’s a physiological cycle that has a beginning, a middle and an end. And you can complete the stress response cycle even without fixing the problem and getting rid of the stressor. They explain the various ways in which we can do this – from laughing and crying to having a warm embrace with a loved one. We also discuss the importance of human touch and how imagination is a surprisingly powerful way of completing the stress response cycle.  Emily and Amelia share their own personal journeys and share some brilliant tips, that are simpler, easier and quicker than you may think. This is a really passionate and inspiring conversation – I hope you enjoy it! Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/60 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wellness and health and all of everything that is your biology does not stop with your skin. Your skin is not the outside of you. Jonathan Haidt describes human beings as 90% chimp, 10% bee. We are partially a hive species and we need other people. Hi, my name is Rangan Chastji, GP, television presenter and author of the best-selling books The Stress Solution and The Four Pillar Plan. I believe that all of us have the ability to feel better than we currently do, but getting healthy has become far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to

simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within as well as outside the health space to hopefully inspire you as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier because when we feel better, we live more. Hello and welcome to episode 60 of my Feel Better Live More podcast. My name is Rangan Chastity and I am your host. Before we start today, just wanted to let you know that my most recent book, The Stress Solution, Four Steps to a Calmer, Happier, Healthier You,

which has been a number one bestseller in the UK, is now available to purchase in the United States. You can get it from amazon.com in paperback or from Audible as an audiobook, which I am narrating. Now today's episode is all about something called the stress cycle. Did you know that women and men generally experience stress in very different ways and women are much more likely to feel overwhelmed and exhausted than men? and women are much more likely to feel overwhelmed and exhausted than men. But why is this? My guests on this week's episode,

Drs. Emily and Amelia Nagoski, believe that the reason lies in the fact that what's expected of women and what it's really like to be a woman in today's world are two very different things. And women exhaust themselves trying to close the gap between them. They explain the importance of separating the stress from the stressor. You see, stressors are the external forces that are giving you stress, whereas stress is an experience that happens in your body. It's a physiological cycle that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And you can complete the stress response cycle even without

fixing the problem and getting rid of the stressor. They explain the various ways in which we can do this from laughing and crying to having a warm embrace with a loved one. We also discuss the importance of human touch and how imagination is a surprisingly powerful way of completing the stress response cycle. Emily and Amelia share their own personal journeys and share some brilliant tips that are simpler, easier and quicker than you think. This is a really passionate and inspiring conversation. I hope you enjoy it. And before we get started, I do need to give a very quick shout out to our sponsors today who are essential in order for me to be able to put

out weekly podcast episodes like this one. Athletic Greens continue their long-term support of my podcast. Now you know that I prefer that people get all of their nutrition from food but I recognize that for many of us this is not always possible. Athletic Greens is probably the most nutrient dense whole food supplement that I've ever come across and contains vitamins, minerals, premartics and digestive enzymes in a whole food form. So if you're looking to take something each morning as an insurance policy to make sure

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slash live more. Now, on to today's conversation. Emily, Amelia, welcome to the Feel Better Live More podcast. We are so excited to be here. Well, you've made the effort to come to my house, which I'm very thankful for, which may have increased your stress levels or certainly reduced my stress levels. So thank you for that. You guys have got a fabulous book called Burnout, which I've been sort of diving into. And it's a very different book from the sort of books I've read before on this topic. And I want to explore that in this conversation today. But first of all, I think it's important to ask, what is burnout? Well, this is Emily. The technical definition

of burnout was established in 1975 by Herbert Freudenberger, and it had three characteristics. The first was emotional exhaustion. The second was depersonalization or a loss of empathy. And a third was a feeling of helplessness, like nothing you do makes a difference. Over the last 40 years, as they've done more and more research on these three variables, for women in particular, it's the emotional exhaustion that really characterizes burnout. Men and women burnout in slightly different ways. There's more of an emphasis for men on the sense of helplessness than on the depersonalization or the loss of the emotional exhaustion. But those are the three

variables that are the main factors. Yeah, you touched on a point there, which I think is really key. And that is this idea that women and men might react to stress a little bit differently. And your book is, I think, primarily aimed at women. Yes. Yeah. But you start off in the introduction with a phrase, which I think is worth reading out on the podcast. This is a book for any woman who has felt overwhelmed and exhausted by everything she had to do and yet still worried she was not doing enough. You've then put, which is every woman we know, including us. And I've got to say that's

probably every woman I know. And so why are women so overwhelmed and exhausted at the moment? Women, especially more than men, are overwhelmed and exhausted because of the patriarchy. Because we live, yeah, we have a, in the book we call it patriarchy and it's always followed by an ugh because we hate that word and it's such an uncomfortable idea. But one of the reasons it's so uncomfortable is because it is a power structure that's been in place for all of Western history. And in addition to denying women access to positions of power where they could make change to improve their own situations, it simultaneously denies that it's doing that to women, which is gaslighting. So at the same time that women are actively oppressed

and victimized by misogyny and systemic sexism, they are also being gaslit and being told, no, that's not happening to you. And that's an extraordinary kind of stress that not men, men don't have to interact with in the same way. Yeah, I think this really speaks to that whole idea that I see a lot as a doctor, a lot of women coming in who feel worn out, stressed out. They feel that they're trying to juggle a million different balls. They're trying to work. At the same time, They're still that sort

of idea that they're sort of responsible for running the household and looking after the kids. And many of my female friends just feel it's too high a bar to actually get to. Is this what the book is written for? Is it for women like that? It's absolutely that specific thing. It's about the fact that the bar feels too high because it is too high. In the book, we call the, there's this one phenomenon that we label it human giver syndrome. You mentioned women feeling like they're obliged to do all the housework, even in the most balanced nations in the world, which includes both the US and the UK, women are still doing 26 hours of housework and childcare per week compared to 10 for men. So women are just expected to do more,

even as it's getting more equal. And there's this wonderful, very dark, but very short book that I really recommend called Down Girl, The Logic of Misogyny by Kate Mann. It's a book of moral philosophy where she posits a world, this is just the cartoon version of it, where there's two types of humans. There are human beings who have a moral responsibility to be and express their full humanity, whatever the cost. And then there's the human givers who have a moral responsibility to give their full humanity to the beings, whatever the cost. Cape Man calls them the loving subordinates. They should give cheerfully whatever resources they have, their time, their money, their attention, their love,

their very bodies, even their lives, certainly their hopes and dreams, in support of the human beings. In real life, it's way more complicated than just this simple structure, but that baseline assumption that a woman has a moral obligation to give everything she has underlies so much of the cultural pressure that we feel to be perfect and perfect parents and look perfect and do all the things at work and be a leader on top of everything. In the book, we offer these characteristics of a human giver. You're supposed to be pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others. And any failure to be any one of those things means that you can be punished because you violated your role as a giver. And if no one else is going to step up to the plate and punish you, you will go ahead and punish yourself.

Just beat the crap out of yourself with harsh self-criticism. So is this a pressure that society is putting on women? Or is it something that women are putting on themselves? This is Amelia. It starts with society. The moment a child is born, often there's a celebration in the room. It's a boy or it's a girl. And if the way we raise children was gender neutral and truly equal,

then it wouldn't matter whether that child grew up to be a human giver or a human being. Well, it would matter. But it wouldn't matter whether that child grew up to be a human giver or a human being. Well, it would matter. But it wouldn't be. What happens now is that when we declare it's a girl, we also assume that this means a lot of things about this person in addition to what their role in biological reproduction is going to be. So this child learns from day one what it is to be a woman in the world, from how she is treated, from how the

women around her are treated, from how the men around her treat other men versus other women. So she learns this is who she's supposed to be. And taking the time to unlearn that and discover, oh, I don't necessarily have to be pretty, happy, calm, generous, attentive to the needs of others is a long process because you've also learned this other moral obligation half of it. Not only is this required of you, but if you don't succeed at it, you should be punished. And it shows up in our own thoughts about ourselves, the way we have this sort of like crashing emotional experience of self-criticism when we fall even a little bit short. I had an experience not that long ago where I screwed up.

I was supposed to go to a conference in, it was about 20 miles from my house. It was in my calendar for Sunday. But on Saturday, people called and were like, hey, Emily, are you upstairs? Because we're about to get started. My car's under a foot of snow. I haven't taken, I'm still in my pajamas, right? So I do what I can to fix that problem. But I'm instantly flooded with what we, in the book, we call it the mad woman in the attic, just like feeding the crap out of me for the ways that I have failed and fallen short. And the mad woman,

that self-criticism is there as the psychological construct I generated sometime around when I was 13. Her job is to bridge the unbridgeable chasm between who I actually am and who the world expects me to be, this perfect ideal human giver who never falls short, who never disappoints anyone. And I know we're going to talk about tips later, but I feel like it's really important when we're talking about something as universal as this mean lady in our head. The advice that we give people and the thing that I did in that moment is instead of trying to give yourself positive affirmations like, it's okay that I missed this thing, blah, blah, blah. is instead of trying to give yourself positive affirmations, like, it's okay that I missed this thing, blah, blah, blah. Instead, you turn toward this mean lady in your head,

this mad woman in the attic of your psyche, with compassion and kindness. And you thank her for the way she's trying to protect you. I listened to my mad woman who was screaming at me about how bad I was for missing this conference. And I said, so, but tell me why it matters so much. And she started talking about how afraid she was for me, that if people found out I was in any way flawed, they would never want to talk to me again,

that I would go unloved forever. And then she talked about how exhausted she was from holding on to so much fear for so long. So I'm having this conversation with my own psychology and being kind and compassionate with myself, which is so much easier toward other people. And so we turn the self-criticism into another person who lives in our head

so that it's easier to be compassionate with ourselves and be grateful for the role that the mad woman's trying to play in our lives, even though she's doing a little damage along the way. She can be a lot calmer when we listen to her with kindness and compassion. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's interesting hearing you talk about that. It made me think about a lot of the emotional work that I've been doing on myself over the last few years.

myself over the last few years and I fully appreciate and accept what you say that there is certain unique pressures on women in society that men probably don't need don't face in the same way although some would argue men have other pressures but I don't necessarily want to go down that route at the moment. Yeah it's just a different book. Yeah exactly but what's really interesting is that the idea of thanking that voice in your head for what it's trying to do. And a lot of these voices that are there to try and protect us, they come from our childhood, don't they? They come from experiences that we've gone through and these protective mechanisms have been there to try and serve us. And they serve us as children often. It's just they don't really serve us as adults. Is that what you're getting at? This is Amelia. Yes, absolutely.

The things we have left over from our childhood, which may have been learned specifically from our family of origin, we may have adapted. What's the term for strategies that don't work? Maladaptive strategies for coping from adverse experiences in childhood. Unfortunately, we had to not talk about adverse childhood experiences in the book because there wasn't room. But in particular, people who have any kind of trauma history, and women are indeed more likely to have a trauma history than men are. Um, you, you pick up maladaptive strategies for coping. And then when you grow up and you realize I don't fit in this world, we use the tall tree fairness test as the kind of symbol for this in the book, where, um, if you have a level open playing field and you grow up right in the middle of that field,

you can grow tall and straight and strong directly toward the sun and that's sort of like the white cis rich male is kind of what that represents no barriers between you and the sun women face more adversities and so they kind of grow up on a hill and they have to slant relative to the hill in order to reach the sun so if you took that same tree and put it on that supposedly level playing field that tree's gonna look weird and then that tree gets there and feels like well what the hell's wrong with me how come i'm and then you take women of color trans folks people who grew up really not fitting into the world that is designed for a very limited number of people and And they grew up on a rocky cliffside, battered and beaten by the waves. And then they grow twisted and gnarled, but strong

and sturdy, exactly correct and healthy for the environment they're in. You take that person out of that battered, broken environment and try to put them on that level playing field. And that tree is going to look field. And that tree is going to look weird. And that tree is going to feel like, well, what's wrong with me? And all the other trees are going to be like, what's wrong with that tree? And that tree says, look, there's a cliff and an ocean. And the trees who grew up straight in the middle of the field are like, there's no cliff. There's no ocean. What are you talking about? They haven't experienced it. So they don't believe that it's real. When we look at what the trees look like, we can see the truth of what that experience was.

And rather than shaming or embarrassing or disbelieving that survivor, instead, that survivor learns and is surrounded by other trees. I love that I'm talking about this person like it's a tree. Surrounded by other trees who are like, yeah, hashtag me too. I grew up on that cliff that happened to me I'm not the same shape as you but I had these other rocks to grow around I had these other kinds of waves oh and you take that strong tall tree that grew up in the middle of the field straight towards the sun and you give that tree any adversity at all and you stick it up on a cliff and it just falls over it has no capacity to cope with no resilience to cope with the kind of adversity that the gnarled up sturdy awesome trees do do you think and i appreciate i'm asking this

as a man but do you think that men in some ways or many men don't appreciate um the kind of pressures and expectations that are on women in society is it have we also sort of grown up with it so much that we think it's the norm and the reason i ask this is because um my daughter is uh nearly six and a half years old and things changed a lot for me when I've got a son and I've got a daughter. But since having a daughter, I think I have become acutely aware of how much discrimination there is sometimes against women in society. And, you know, if I'm honest, I'm thinking maybe I didn't realize it as much before I had a daughter. And that's just me being completely honest. Is this something you see

a lot? Literally yesterday, I was having this conversation with a friend I've had for 20 years, we've been friends right from grad school. And he too is now the father of a five-year-old daughter. And the combination of that and having harsh conversations with his wife about things, her over the years of their relationship pointing it out over and over again. Look at what's happening in the dynamic in the room around the gender. Look at how much time all these women at the pool spent getting ready to come to the pool and contrast that against how much time the men spent getting ready to come to the pool with their kids. Like over and over having it pointed out. It takes that sort of repetition. We call it in the book patriarchy blindness. And it's basically a normal part of life to be unaware of the kinds of adversity you are not experiencing. Of course, in the research, they call it the headwinds-tailwinds asymmetry,

where you're very aware of the headwinds that you're fighting against. And even people in positions of privilege and power do work really hard and they're aware of the ways they have to fight, but they're not as aware of the tailwinds, of the ways it's been easy for them. And it requires hearing it over and over and over again from the people who've experienced it in order for them to begin for the light to come on and they start to see that dynamic i had that experience myself i'm a white lady um and i it required formal training like multi-day trainings of sitting in rooms with people who were all different from each other and the people of color pointing it out to me hey white people did you notice how all the white people talked before any of the people of color talked? Oh, shit. Well, now I did. And but and once the light comes on,

it doesn't come back off, which is the good part. Yeah, you can't unknow what you what you know, right. And it's, I guess, you know, growing up in a family of Indian immigrants here to the UK and seeing and hearing and seeing all that sort of institutional racism that, you know, various people have experienced, including members of my family. It's, I guess, you know, that sometimes other people don't see it because they haven't experienced it. So it's not that they're trying not to see it. It's just, as you say, it's that blindness that needs pointing out. So clearly on one level, we need society to change and we need society to evolve. But on an individual level, what can women do who are experiencing this, who are, you know, getting close to burnout or feel overwhelmed and exhausted?

What are the things that they can do? Step one, and this is literally chapter one for this reason, is to separate the stress from the stressors. The stressors are the external forces that are giving you stress. Stress is an experience that happens in your body. It's a physiological cycle that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And you can complete the stress response cycle even without fixing the problem, without getting rid of the stressor. You don't have to smash the patriarchy before you feel better. You don't have to fold all the laundry before you feel calm. You don't have to empty the dishwasher and raise a child to be a contributing member.

You don't have to win the game before you get to feel good. This is so key, isn't it? Because I think the perception is that you do need to do those things. I will be calm when the laundry's done. I will only feel non-stressed when I've done all my chores and the kids are asleep. But you're saying it's not that. It doesn't work that way because stress itself was evolved into humanity to save our lives from lions chasing us across the savannah and laundry also stresses us out and we our bodies don't have a wide variety of ways of responding to stress so the way we respond to that threatening pile of laundry which is dooming us to social pariah hood. There's one actually in the room exactly where your head is now.

There is two big piles of laundry there and I can, I can feel it on top of me. Yeah. No one will ever love me until I fold my laundry. I'm doomed to die alone because of laundry. Yeah. That, that sense of threat. I mean, that is life threatening for human beings. If you are isolated from the herd, you're going to die. So it's perfectly natural for your body to respond to this sense of obligation, social obligation, as though it's being threatened. However, folding the laundry will not complete the stress response cycle. The stress response cycle

completes in various physiological ways, sleep, physical activity, affection, folding laundry is not on that list unless you make it pretty mindful. And yeah. And other things that are stressful that are really not like paying your taxes. It's very stressful, but your, your physiology has no idea that you have, you know, escaped the lion. That's not what that accomplishes. So you need to separate the stressors from the stress and manage the stress itself. If you feel like you're getting close to burnout, set the stressors aside for a moment. And we, I think in the book, have at least seven concrete specific ways that you can complete the stressor pump cycle. That include crying,

laughing, watching a 20 second hug. People love the 20 second hug. With somebody you love and trust enough to hug for 20 seconds, 20 seconds is way too long to hug a colleague at work, who you might like hug on their birthday for like two seconds with a pat on the back. 20 seconds is that it's not that hug. It's the hug of somebody that you can stand over your own center of balance or support your own weight in whatever way is comfortable for you. And you put your arms around each other and you let your bodies connect to each other. Wellness and health and all of everything that is your biology does not stop with your skin. Your skin is not the outside of you. Jonathan Haidt describes human beings as 90% chimp, 10% bee. We are partially a hive species and we need other people. So this is how the 20 second hug works. You connect physically with someone that you love

and trust. And in 20 seconds, your heart rate lowers, your blood pressure goes down and you return to feeling like you are safe yeah no i love it i absolutely love it particularly the things on um hugging and human touch and um i've interviewed on previously on the podcast someone called professor mcglone he's uh he's a researcher like world-leading scientist from liverpool john moore's university who has really investigated in a profound way the human touch nerve fiber and you know he helped with one of the chapters in my book on stress it was all about the power of human touch and what it does and we you know we don't

give touch do we the same importance as we give you know food is important for our physical health but we don't think of touch in the same way as as important for our mental health. Yes, I think that one of the reasons this has happened is a larger systemic problem where we have stigmatized the need to connect with others. There's a, especially in the US, but also I think it's here in the UK, a sense that the ideal is to develop from childhood to adulthood, to grow from dependence to independence. And complete independence and autonomy, we think makes us heroes and strong, the silent cowboy on the plane, completely self-sufficient. And we think that that's the heroic ideal. And that if we need to be touched, if we need to be close, if we need support, that's more than just, hey, can you help me carry this thing down the stairs?

If it's, hey, can you sit with me while I cry? It feels like that's a weakness and we're ashamed of that need. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So reflecting on what you said that you've got to separate the stressor from the stress. I think that's profound. I think that's so, for me hearing it, it's, it's, it's, you know, it really resonates. And I'm sure for the readers and the listeners of this podcast, it will as well, because I don't think we think about things like that, do we? We really don't think about, okay, so you have been stressed out and there the reality is there are infinite stresses in society now but there are some you know there are some core ways in which no matter what the stress is you can actually manage the stress um you you also mentioned i think laughing and crying um that takes you to

another point which is this whole idea that our bodies can store stress right is that something that you feel when you you know being you know you've been given torch you've been writing this book you talk to women about this is there an awareness that you know that our bodies hold hold on to stress and we need to release that stress from our bodies? You are asking the right combination of people. The first time I ever noticed that stress exists physically in my body and it needed to complete was when I was 14 years old and I didn't get the part I wanted in the high school play. And I was so deep in grief that I couldn't do anything but like lie on the floor and just sob. I surrendered my body to this emotion that I was experiencing. And I got to the end of it and I felt better.

It's like I had let it go. I knew that that and ever since then, like I can feel it in my body. I feel the way it moves through me. I give myself permission to let that happen. And I know that even though the world has not changed, I haven't fixed the situation that caused those feelings, I have helped my body to heal from the emotional hurt that was done. Amelia, on the other hand, literally thought that emotions were fictional,

that people were just like being dramatic. Do you want to hear? were fictional, that people were just like being dramatic. Do you want to hear? Yeah, I didn't figure out that a feeling that you feel is also a sensation in your body that needs to be taken seriously until I was maybe 34, 35. I mean, 20 years older than Emily was when she just intuited her way to it. We're genetically identical, raised in the same household, and she just had this understanding. And I just never did until, so one day, we tell this story in the book, I literally was in my therapist's office. And I was, I went back to therapy when I started my doctoral program because I knew it would be

stressful. And I know that therapy helps me with stress, but I kind of just figured I would be really stressed until the graduate program was over and then I'd be fine because the stress would be over. No, the very first time it happened, I was having a panic attack. I was freaking out and my therapist was guiding me through the physical sensations. And I was like, okay, fine, physical sensations, because that's a real thing as opposed to the feelings, which are like a fake thing. And so I talked about my feelings and my hair follicles and went on and on. And then I took a breath and she said, what do you feel now? And I felt bad because I lost it.

And I thought, oh, I'm such an idiot. I lost that. It's gone now. And I just, it's, how could I have? And she said, yeah, it just ends. If feelings begin, they just ends if feelings begin they just end if you let them yeah what are you kidding me how come somebody didn't tell me this before so we wrote this book for 21 year old Amelia who needed to be told hey Amelia feelings are an actual thing stress is a cycle it's a process that exists in your body it has a beginning a middle and an end and you

have to complete the cycle oh i mean it's so obvious afterwards isn't it but it's not when you don't know everything's obvious once you know it but i hear that and i think well isn't this the sort of stuff we should be teaching children at school primary school secondary school should we not be teaching them that actually stress is not just something that actually happens in our mind and stays as just thoughts and emotions, actually that there are physical changes in our body. And I think the other point is this, this lack of awareness. I think for me, certainly, and I'd be interested in your views on this, is that one of the big problems I think in society to do with health and well-being is that we're just a little bit disconnected. We don't notice. Once you start paying attention, and I've got to say, I've only done this in the last few years. I certainly was

not perfect at this at all. I've learned recently that actually when I start to get stressed or something at work or something in my home life is starting to bother me, my upper right back starts to get a little bit tense. I thought this has probably been going on for years. I never even noticed it. And actually just having that awareness is quite empowering because you start to go, oh, you know, I'm getting tense now on this. And maybe I need to just, you you know think about why that is or think about it I don't know it's almost like an early warning sign for me that hey something needs to change here it my right shoulder as a matter of no it's my left shoulder I was gonna say snap but

I can't now it was the mirror of it the mirror exactly yeah uh I was in the middle of getting a massage and my left shoulder was just like in knots. And I had this sudden realization, oh, my left shoulder is where I carry my imposter syndrome. And I was in the middle of a book tour for Come As You Are and like trying really hard to get people interested in talking about the science of women's sexuality. And I realized that I had been like putting on a lot of masks and trying to act like a expert and a professional. I have a PhD in 20 years experience. I am an expert and a professional, but like sometimes you feel like you need to put on the show. And that had shown up in my left shoulder as all these knots. And ever since then, when I feel the twinge in my left shoulder, I think, okay, am I trying to fake it for somebody

and for whom and why? I love that. I love that awareness that, you know, with all your experience, with all your expertise, you still, as many of us do, including myself, we feel that imposter syndrome. So I'm interested, that was, was that your first book? Yeah. That was your first one. This is your second book. So on the first book tour, you are feeling that awareness that you might have a bit of imposter syndrome. You're trying to prove that, hey, you know, I am an expert and I'm actually giving you this information that's going to help you. Having learned that, having become more aware of that, is it different this time around as you're going around promoting your second book? Yes, and it's different for complicated reasons.

I barely show up as a person in Come As You Are because it's not about me. It's about the science and about helping women. The book with burnout, it's much more personal and it's about us. Like Amelia in grad school was literally hospitalized twice. She has an identical twin sister who's a professional health educator. And I showed up in the hospital and I was like, what is what? She said, I don't know. I just feel like my body wants me dead. And I was like, okay, so here's some books that you should. And she started like learning these things that I didn't know all this time that she

had not known it. And the process of her learning this stuff, it was really a process of her learning that all the skills she used as a choral conductor, she's a choral conductor, this like ability to embody emotion and express it on the podium or on the stage. Oh, I'm supposed to do that in real life too, is what you're saying here. So there's a part of Come As You Are that's actually about the stress response cycle. It's in chapter four. And as I was touring, people kept telling me, yeah, Emily, all that sex science is great, but man, that section on the stress response cycle,

that was really life-changing. So I told that to Amelia and she's like, no, duh, because nobody teaches us that. And when I finally learned it, it probably saved my life. Twice. And I was like, okay, so we should write a book about that. So all this connection stuff that we talk about. We grew up in an alcoholic family. In an alcoholic family, you keep secrets. You do not feel your feelings. Our musician mother used to sing this song, Don't Cry Out Loud. It's like our family anthem.

Just keep it inside. Learn how to hide your feelings. Like that's what we heard when we were four years old. And so we're writing this book about how connection is so important and emotions are so important. And the research is just inescapable that connection is very important and we should make eye contact and talk to each other about our feelings. And we ended up knocking down the wall of alcoholic family of origin in the process of writing the book. So the book isn't just, it's full of practical, helpful things. But when you hold the book, you're holding the project that connected us to each other in a way we never have been before. So you asked, do I feel, is it different imposter syndrome this time? I can't fake it with this book because the book is

us. And like, I don't want to hide that. No. Yeah. Very powerful. Very powerful. The stress response cycle is something that we've mentioned a couple of times so far on this podcast. And I wonder if you could really be quite specific and let's get into a bit of detail. What is the stress response cycle? So the stress response cycle is it's designed to help us with short term kind of stressors, like Amelia said, being chased by a lion. So you see the lion, it's coming right for you. Your body floods with adrenaline and cortisol and all the things, and you experience all these physiological shifts. Your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure goes up, your digestion slows down, your immune system slows

down, your reproductive system gets deprioritized. And this is all to prepare you to do one thing, which is run like crazy away from the lion. So that's the middle. Bam, there it goes. You're running in the middle of it, trying to do something. And then there's only two possible outcomes. Either you get eaten by the lion, in which case none of the rest of this matters, or somebody in your village sees you coming and beckons you into their door. Come on, come on, come on. And you both lean your shoulders against the door and the lion roars and scratches and eventually gets bored and wanders away. And you, looking at a person who just saved your life,

you jump up and down, you celebrate. That is the complete stress response cycle. These days we are, alas, almost never chased by lions. Instead, our stressors are things like traffic or our jerky bosses or, you know, the patriarchy or family, kids, the pile of laundry, right? And running, I know, like when you're faced with a lion, you run. So when you're stressed out by sort of the administrivia of 21st century life, what do you do? You run. Physical activity is

what communicates to your body most efficiently that you have escaped that stressor and your body is now a safe place to be. So physical activity is the like most, and it doesn't have to be running. It can be like just jumping up and down, dancing it out in your living room to Beyonce. It can be literally just tightening every muscle in your body for a slow count of 10 and then flopping. It doesn't have to be physical activity. It can also be like rolling around on the grass with your kids wrestling. That's an awesome version of it. Affection is the next most efficient because it too is this really straightforward biological cue. You put your arms around this person who is your emotional home and your body knows, oh, look, I have arrived safely.

I have escaped the stressor and arrived. So you get out of your car after the terrible commute. Your body is still, like getting out of the traffic doesn't mean you're not still stressed out. You got rid of the stressor, which is the traffic, but the stress is still there. So you walk into the house and you put your arms around your certain special someone. And for 20 seconds, your body shifts from traffic into I am home.

I came home. So physical affection, that's the reason that it completes the cycle is because that is a cue your body understands as being safe now from the stressor. Creative self-expression is another of the major ones. So this can be music, it can be writing, it can be sculpture, theater, anything at all. It's like this cultural loophole in a world where we're not really supposed to express big feelings. The arts are one of those places where you're allowed. So we can take advantage of this loophole and go feel our big feelings on a stage or on a page. When a therapist recommends that you journal, they're not suggesting that like grammar or the construction of sentences is inherently therapeutic. What they are saying is that you need a place to put

the frustration and the rage and the fear so that it has somewhere to live that is not inside your body. Because once you get it out of your body, it can no longer make you sick. How many is that? That's three. And they're brilliant. All brilliant. I love them all. Particularly, well, all three of them, I think, are very, very powerful.

Amelia, I should say, just got off a plane and is very sleep deprived so this is sort of a an exercise and what does sleep deprivation do um sleep is a miracle everything happens in sleep you can finish the stress response cycle in your sleep uh probably everybody has had a dream about like beating the crap out of whatever the source of their stress is. And so your body goes all the way through it when you get enough sleep enough hours in a row. It repairs the damage done to your muscles and bones after physical activity. Physical activity is not complete without sleep. Learning is not complete without sleep.

Most of the memorization happens not while you're sitting there with your flashcards but while you are in your sleep. Learning is not complete without sleep. Most of the memorization happens not while you're sitting there with your flashcards, but while you are in your sleep and it's integrating all those new memories. Human beings are designed not to stay in one state of peak well-being. Wellness is not a state of being. It is a state of action. It is movement through the cycle of stress. It is oscillation from rest into action again, into rest and into action again. Our bodies, oh man, people don't like it when I say this number out loud. The amount of time that our bodies really need for us to spend resting is 42% of the day. That's 10 hours out of the day, approximately eight of which should be sleep. People vary in their sleep needs. I'm a seven and a half hour person. Amelia is a nine hour person. If she gets only eight, she really feels it.

a person who's been awake for 19 hours in a row, again, as impaired as a person who's drunk, and a person who's had only six or fewer hours of sleep every night for the last two weeks, again, as impaired as a person who's drunk. And the question is, would you drive to work drunk? Would you be at work drunk? Would you parent drunk? And it's impaired in many of the same ways, including the not really being aware of how impaired you are. Yeah, absolutely. Emily has an hour long talk that she does that's just about sleep. And I try to limit her when we talk about this at the same time, because people do get overwhelmed and like shocked by this. A, the importance of it, while they've simultaneously been neglecting it most people are sleep deprived at some level um but also because people feel bad that there are barriers that they feel like

they can't overcome uh it feels like well i'm never going to get eight hours of sleep so like things are terrible and i'm a failure as a human being but at the same time the rest of society is telling them that it's actually noble and powerful and strong of them to be so sleep deprived i only got six hours of sleep last night i was up so late working on my blah blah blah and it's like a brag to say oh i'm so sleep deprived whereas if you say i got the best night's sleep last night the response is more likely to be well that must be nice for you to indulge in that eight hours of sleep that your body physically requires, you selfish cow.

Yeah, you're right. That is the approach. And even in people who would have a great night's sleep, probably wouldn't feel comfortable saying, you know, how are you doing? Yeah, guys, you know, I feel great. I feel really refreshed this morning. Who says that? Even if you have done that, whoever says that to their colleagues, it's very rare, isn't it? One of the first times Emily gave her hour-long talk about the importance of sleep, it was to Smith College, which is a women's college in Massachusetts. And afterwards, she talked to people about why they weren't sleeping. And several of them talked about how they felt guilty for being asleep. Because if I'm sleeping, I'm only that's only good for me.

If I'm sleeping, it means I'm I'm resting and I'm giving up on work I should be doing on behalf of social justice and the future of guilty for sleeping. That's like feeling guilty for breathing. It's we should not be shaming people for taking care of their body's physiological requirements. Yeah, absolutely. But I guess, you know, the title of your book is burnout. So, um, a lot of people, a lot of women who feel as though they've got too much going on, that they are overwhelmed, that they don't have time for sleep, may also feel that actually they can't sleep very well because of this huge emotional burden they're carrying. They can't actually sleep. So in some ways they might listen to this and go, I love what they're talking about,

but the thing is, sleep's that important to complete the stress cycle, yet I can't sleep. So what would you say to those women? Sleep is only one of the seven things on the list. So is sleep is not available to you right now? Totally. And it is the case that if you're holding on to a lot of incomplete stress response cycles, then your body is going to resist sleep. You know, if you're in the middle of being chased by a lion, is that a good time for you to lose consciousness? Nope. So even if you do manage to fall asleep, your stress might actually keep you waking up over and over in the middle of the night, vigilant for where's that lion that's coming after me. So if sleep is not the thing for you, don't let sleep be the thing that you start with. Let it be

mindfulness. Let it be crying. Let it be just taking a slow, deep breath and releasing it slowly. crying. Let it be just taking a slow, deep breath and releasing it slowly. I want to talk about imagination because that's another one of the concrete specific evidence-based strategies for completing the stress response cycle. And Emily's been kind of alluding to it a few times when she talks about creative self-expression. That's working kind of through the incomplete stress response cycles on canvas or in sculpture or in music or on stage. And also when you wake up in the middle of the night all stressed out, that's usually not because there's a lion in your room, like there's no real stressor. But your imagination has sparked, has initiated a stress response cycle. But the good news is that your imagination has sparked, has initiated a stress response cycle. But the good news is that your imagination can also complete a stress response cycle.

And creative self-expression is one of those ways that you're using it. But you don't even have to create anything. You can just imagine that fantasy of like what would it feel like to just like bust out of that traffic. And all of a sudden my car now has helicopter thingies and I can just like fly over the traffic and you have that experience in your imagination it feels good just to think about and it kind of frees your body from that trap that it's in stuck in the car yeah yeah absolutely and oh the story I often tell so So when I was getting very, very burnt out in grad school, I was doing the things I was supposed to do. I was exercising. I was eating with like a low calorie, low fat, high fiber. I was doing, I was following the rules and doing it right. But I felt bad.

I didn't know what was wrong with me, but something was wrong. So when I learned about the ways the imagination could complete the stress response cycle, I added something to my elliptical machine workout, which is my favorite workout. I would imagine myself as Godzilla on the elliptical machine, tromping on the university where I was in school and facing all this, all the bad stuff that I was facing at the school. So when I imagine myself as Godzilla smashing those buildings and tromping the administrators into their cars and the parking lot,

it was very satisfying. And instead of ending my workout just kind of hot and sweaty and tired, I felt elated and exalted and like I had superpowers. Yeah, I mean, that really speaks, doesn't it, to the power of the mind and how powerful our brains are, our mind is, our imagination. And, you know, this, I was reading, I can't remember which book it was a few weeks ago, about sportsmen. And I know this for many years, a lot of sportsmen will, the night before, let's say it's a golfer, the night before they've got a big round or a downhill skier the day before a race, they will literally be in beds imagining, visualizing every single, like for the downhill skier, every single turn, every single flag they have to get

by or the golfer, every single hole, what shot shape they require. And they say that when they're actually out on the course or out on the mountain, actually they feel as though they've already done it because they played it so thoroughly in their minds. And I really love that idea that actually you can complete the stress cycle with just your imagination because we've all got access to our imagination. Because it's not just your imagination. Your imagination is a function of your brain. And when you imagine a thing, so this is a very famous study from Oliver Sachs, that if people are in an fMRI and they're listening to a piece of music and then they're in an fMRI and they're just imagining that piece of music, the same neurons light up and are active

because it's not just a function of like those muscles are engaged and so you're practicing. But when you imagine it, the same neurons go through that same cycle as if the muscles were actually engaged in the action. Yeah. But it actually isn't the case that everyone has a visual imagination that they can identify. Some people just like don't just they just don't have it and are really confused when people like me talk about like visualizing. I was just having a conversation yesterday with a group of cognitive scientists who were talking about how some people don't have visual imagination. So again, if sleep is not accessible to you, then don't choose sleep. If

visual imagination is not available to you, don't choose that as the way that you complete the cycle. The reason there are seven is because there is no script. There's no one thing that works for everybody. You have to find the thing that works for you in the context of the life you're living now. I think that's very empowering for people, isn't it? Because far too many times in the health world, we can be quite prescriptive and people think, oh, well, that's the way to deal with this problem. But I can't, that way doesn't appeal to me. And I really like that about your approach. And it's

about saying, hey, look, if sleep's not available to you, that's okay. You know what, choose something else at the moment. And maybe sleep is something that will be useful at some point in the future. The experience I've heard from a lot of women is that they get advice about what to do of how to fix a thing. Like I was doing, you know, eat right and exercise. People told me that'll take care of the stuff. And you think that if that doesn't work for you, then it's because there's something wrong with you and you need to go back to some other helper of some kind and get some other answer to what is the source of the problem that's stopping the solution from helping you the way apparently it helps everyone.

Why am I so broken and screwed up and wrong? just people vary maybe you need some other answer that's okay yeah and you guys provide seven which is great you mentioned creative self-expression and i really like that in particular well you mentioned many things but including journaling and for people who are listening to this who think oh i've heard of journ, but I've never really done it before. It sounds quite scary because I don't know what I would journal about. You know, can you give them some tips at all? Is it something that they should be practicing every day? Is it something they should be practicing when they get stressed?

Is it something for first thing in the morning or last thing at night? Or do these things really, you know, differ depending on who the person is? It absolutely differs depending on who the person is. There is one structure that a lot of people seem to like. That's a writer whose name I forget, but I'm sure you can look it up online. It's called Morning Pages. Yeah, I think Julia Cameron. Yes, Cameron.

Yeah, I think it's Julia Cameron. Her prescription is to write three full pages first thing in the morning, right as soon as you get up. And she describes it as like taking your shadow, your Jungian shadow out to coffee each morning. And it takes practice doing it every single day because it's actually quite difficult to allow the shadow, which is like all the dark, critical, mean thoughts to show up and be able to have a conversation with them in a neutral way. Three pages is way too much for some people. The morning is a terrible time for some people. The key really isn't what time of day you do it, but it's the time that you will do it that matters. And if you don't want to do three pages, set a timer for, you know, five minutes or 10 minutes or whatever time you feel like you have. And also not everyone

expresses their feelings verbally. I'm a writer, so obviously that works for me. But Amelia, would you write your feelings as a way to process them? I think you would just get analytical. So I, again, in therapy, trying to find ways to deal with my stuff. I tried journaling and I had to follow some very prescriptive advice and learn how to do it that worked for me. And I tried a lot of different things. In the end, I did find that dream journaling in a pretty strict Jungian analysis type way was a great process for me. But just kind of writing, no, it was not my thing. But luckily I'm a musician and I live through composers' expressions of human experiences as part of my work. So it's built into my life. Yeah, absolutely. I think whichever way people, you know,

want to creatively self-express, I think it's something... Our editor sings in the shower. Yeah, love it. Me too. And it's not just expression of something new that's yours, even just participating in someone else's performance, being an audience member alone, as long as you're not passively receiving the entertainment, if you are engaged in it. If a movie makes you cry and it feels so good to feel so bad, that's the pleasure of completing the stress response cycle yeah you really you're both really speaking to the idea that arts and culture is such a necessary

part of well-being i don't know what's going on in the united states but here in the uk you know funding for arts and culture is being cut all the time schools are no longer funding, you know, or they're getting much reduced funding for these things because they're not. Yeah, I don't think as a society we recognize just how important the arts is. And it's something that really makes me say I'm a musician as well. And I sort of find for me when I've had a stressful day, there's many ways I choose to de-stress. But sometimes just sitting with my guitar in the evening and singing for half an hour or even five minutes makes the world a difference you just sort of lose yourself in another world and when you sort of re-enter your normal world it all feels a little bit different even though nothing actually

has changed it but it just feels as though it's changed I could talk about this forever my undergraduate degree is in music education I am first and foremost a music teacher. I wish I'd known that. We would have gone down a different direction on this podcast. And if we only value skills that get people jobs, and we think that school is only for learning information, we are missing the point of what it is to be a human being in the world day to day and music, arts. Okay, I'm going to turn into a very long tangent. So I'm going to... But for people listening, just to be really clear, is that people who, let's say they want to play music, or is it people who want to go and watch music, or is it people who want to listen to music? It depends on what your goal is. over and over again for the past 20 years is that students in school who take music lessons with a certified teacher excel in the rest of their school life, not just in their academics, but in their social development and their leadership skills. And they're more likely to go to college,

whether you think that that's a valuable thing or not, but there it is. It's a correlation. whether you think that that's a valuable thing or not, but there it is. It's a, it's a correlation. So just learning to make music for so many reasons that I am not going to let myself go on a tangent about is good for you and your existence in the world. If your goal is to pour out your pain, then probably the way to do that is through making the music itself.

If your goal is to be led through your pain by someone who seems way to do that is through making the music itself. If your goal is to be led through your pain by someone who seems to be, you know, strumming your pain with his fingers, then just listening will accomplish that. I had a patient once who actually was very, very stressed out. This is, this was a, I think it was a, there was a, it was a man, probably about 45 years old, working two jobs, really, really stressed out. And I remember that, you know, I tried all sorts of things and we discussed meditation and mindfulness and, you know, he just, nothing seemed to work for him. But then I discovered that he was a huge music fan. And I said, well, what about if in the evening, you know, you just sit there on your sofa with your headphones on, listen to the music, feel the drumbeat, you know, listen to the

vocal, don't be scrolling Instagram and Facebook at the same time, you know, mindfully listen to your music. And I tell you, he would do that for maybe five to 10 minutes every evening. Within days, he felt like a different person. And this is not, you know, writing music or learning music. This is just consuming it and listening to it attentively. In music education and also music therapy, they refer to it as active listening as opposed to passive listening. It's a very different experience. Yeah. Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Guys, just to sort of come towards

the end of this conversation, which I've really, really enjoyed actually. Um, there's a line in your book, which, which really jumped out at me when I read it, which is the cure for burnout is not self-care. It's all of us caring for each other. Why did you write that line? We begin the book talking about Kate Mann's,, philosophical construct of a world with two kinds of humans, human beings and human givers. And what if all of us were human beings? Life would be brutish, nasty and short. We would all be competing for resources and feeling like we were all owed everything. What if we were all human givers? Then when one of us had human giver syndrome and felt obliged to be pretty, happy, calm, generous, attentive needs of others, if we'd given away too much, we'd be surrounded by people

who are also givers. And now we've created a system where everyone can give to each other and no one gets left behind. No one slips through any cracks we're all supported we're all held in the presence of each other's compassion yeah no i love it and it just it makes me think that we've really we've really got gone off track in society haven't we in the way what the way we do things in schools and jobs um what we value in society this competition you see on social media now there's sort of um this you know this competition you see it on instagram you see on facebook people you're trying to be supportive but actually competing as well and it's it's really quite toxic and i don't think we quite realize how toxic that kind of stuff is

because wouldn't it be great if we were all human givers to each other we're doing a thing on facebook um like as part of the book tour where we're posting pictures of ourselves on the plane and jet lagged and we're not posting like the pretty picture of the scenery and like the perfect duck face from the top down with our eyes looking bigger proportionally than they actually are we're just posting pictures of like the rough and dirty to try to point out the everything looks so perfect on social media. And that's not real. If we want social media not to be toxic and feeding us with this unrealistic demand that we appear perfect all the time, how we use a little line in the book, how much do I have to polish myself before I can

move without friction in the world? Well, you can move without friction in the world far less polished than you think you need to. Well, there's going to be friction. You have to accept the friction, I guess. But so that social media thing of like presenting this perfect self and never talking about the hard parts of success, for example, like we've written this whole book and it feels really great to have it done. But instead of, you know, just posting the like, here's this beautiful picture of my book with like some flowers and the beach in the background.

Like here's my book folded over my head while I'm asleep having a nap on the couch. Love it. I've got to say, I really enjoyed this conversation. This podcast is called Feel Better, Live More. My belief is that when people feel better in themselves, they get more out of life. And I always want to leave the listener where possible with a few actionable tips that they can think about applying into their own life immediately to improve the way that they feel. So

I wonder, we've covered many tips today. I don't mind if you repeat some of them, but some maybe three or four top tips for people who are listening. So if we're going to structure like 24 hours a day, seven days a week, looking at that calendar, you want to aim for at least seven hours of sleep every night if you possibly, possibly can. You want to think about something like half an hour physical activity pretty much every day. More is good. It also depends on the intensity. Do something that fills your body with joy. Eat a dark green leafy vegetable pretty much every day. Spend time paying attention to the people you love pretty much every day. And for me, the thing since we wrote the book, the one change that has really

transformed the way I live my life is I have noticed how different it feels to give to fellow givers, where their response is to give in return, versus what it feels like to give to someone who feels entitled to take whatever they want from me. And if I give them some of me, then they're just going to feel like I am supposed to give them more. I noticed that sensation. And I'm selectively choosing to give less to those people and allocate my resources more to the givers around me. And that one change has massively increased the amount of energy I have for my life. have for my life. Yeah, I love it. We were going to end there, but there's a really interesting point there for me, which is, I think some people listening will no doubt resonate with that, that there are some people in their lives who they feel just take. Vampires! Yeah, and it's just very draining to be around and that all they want is that you to do things for them and you do them for them, but you don't really get anything back in return. In fact,

you're sort of a negative balance because you've just drained yourself. So, you know, you've said you should try and what, give a little bit less to them. Is there any other tips on that for people who are thinking, you know, there's someone in my life who does that, but I don't want to cut them out of my life, but I don't want them to drain me as much i'm fortunate to be married to a fellow giver so this is not like my husband is a like and i'm like stuck with him um but so i'm fortunate that like people who are takers i can selectively remove from my life but suppose it's you know your boss and you can't leave that person it's about uh making a conscientious choice, noticing what it feels like, and putting up, even if it's just psychological barriers of like, this person is demanding something from me, and I'm going to smile and nod and not evoke a conflict, but I'm also going to just barely walk into it. Amelia

wants to. Yeah, I want to add that when you are in that moment where you're feeling like this person asks something of me, I gave as much as I could and they still want more. The first instinct for a lot of us is to have the mad woman's voice in our head going. It's because you're a failure. It's because you're not enough. It's because you're not good enough and you didn't do enough and you need to give more. And if you take that moment and notice, oh, that's the mad woman telling me that I'm never going to be loved unless I fold my laundry, and you turn toward her and say, hey, discomfort, hi, thanks for that information. I realize now that what's happening is that you're telling me I need to be more than I am because this person

expects me to be pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others, where I realized that actually I don't have responsibility to give everything I am to everyone around me. Yeah. And I guess the fundamental lesson there is it's about awareness, isn't it? And I think those tips that you finished off with, whether it be physical activity every day, rest, you know, surrounding yourself with people who give to you and, you know, those relationships that are important, you're really nourishing them. Ultimately, all of those things actually are going to help you and they're going to help one to increase their awareness. And once we're more aware, we can start to change things. So thank you for those tips. Thank you for making the journey to come and see me today.

Thank you for writing such a fabulous book. And I hope we get a chance to talk again at some point in the future. Thank you so much. Thanks. That concludes this week's episode of the Feel Better Live More podcast. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. I really like the idea of completing the stress cycle and in particular this idea that we can separate the stress from the stressor so that even if we

can't remove the stressors in our lives we can still complete the cycle. I hope you found one or two things that resonated with you that you can start to apply in your own life immediately. As always do let me know what you thought of the show today on social media. If you can remember, please do use the hashtag FBLM or the hashtag feelbetterlivemore so that I can easily find your comments. If you want to continue your learning experience now that the podcast is over, please do take a look at the show notes page for today. It is drchatagee.com forward slash 60

that's six zero where you will see an outline of what was discussed links to some fascinating articles about the nagoski sisters as well as links to buy their new book burnouts the secret to solving the stress cycle i know i spend a lot of time covering stress at the moment on the podcast but that's because as a doctor with nearly 20 years of clinical experience, I see this as one of the major sources of problems in my practice. Whether it's anxiety, depression, high blood pressure, gut problems, insomnia, stress even contributes to problems like high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. That's why I spent so long last year researching and writing

my most recent book, The Stress Solution. This book will basically help you understand where stress lives in your life, but then importantly will give you simple tips to take control so that you can feel happier, calmer and healthier. I think this book is relevant for absolutely all of us, whether you feel that you are stressed or not. You can pick up a copy of The Stress Solution in all the usual places as a paperback, ebook, or as an audio book, which I'm narrating. And as I mentioned in the introduction, the book is now available to buy in the US on amazon.com. So for those of you in America who have been asking me, you can go out and order your own copy right now. If you enjoy my weekly podcasts, one of the best ways that you can support them is by leaving a review on whichever platform you listen to podcasts on.

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