Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 409: For the Burned Out, Fried, and Exhausted | Emily & Amelia Nagoski

Episode Date: January 5, 2022

The final episode of our New Year’s Getting Unstuck Series features Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Our goal with this episode, as it has been with all the episodes throughout the series, is to arm you with new ways of thinking about where you might be stuck in your life and to give you new tools for getting unstuck. Emily Nagoski has a PhD in Health Behavior and is the author of the hit book Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life. Her twin sister, Amelia Nagoski, holds a Doctorate in Musical Arts. Together, Emily and Amelia are the co-authors of the New York Times bestselling book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. This episode explores:How Amelia was hospitalized for stress-related illness twice, and how learning the science behind burnout and emotional exhaustion helped save her life. The three characteristics of burnout, and why women in today’s society are particularly susceptible to one of the characteristics: emotional exhaustion.The “human giver syndrome,” a term created by Emily and Amelia, which they say is very common among women, and why things can be especially hard for women.Why it’s important to understand the difference between addressing stressful circumstances in our lives and dealing with the actual physical experience of stress in our bodies. A slew of evidence-based, ready-to-try-today interventions that people of all genders can use to “complete the stress cycle.”Content Warning: There are some references to sensitive topics, including sexual trauma, self-harm, domestic abuse, and violence. January 7th is the last day to join and complete the Getting Unstuck Challenge, a free 14-day meditation challenge from Ten Percent Happier to help you push through whatever is holding you back. Click here to get started.Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/emily-amelia-nagoski-409See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% half your podcast on Dan Harris. Hey gang, today we're going to talk about the science of why we get burned out and the science of how we can fix it. This is the final interview in our two week new year series which we've been calling getting unstuck. If you haven't listened to the previous episodes, go check them out. We've talked meditation, Dharma, psychology, and now, as I said, science. A little bit about today's guests, Emily Nagoski, has a PhD in health behavior,

and is the author of a hit book called Come As You Are, which is about improving one's sex life. Her twin sister Amelia Nagasaki holds a doctorate in musical arts. Together, Emily and Amelia are the co-authors of the New York Times best-selling book Burnout, The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. In this conversation, we talk about how Amelia was hospitalized for stress-related illness twice and how learning the science behind burnout and emotional exhaustion helped save her life, she believes. We talk about the three characteristics of burnout and why women in today's society are

particularly susceptible to one of the characteristics emotional exhaustion. We talk about something the twins call human giver syndrome, which they say is very common among women. A side note here to dudes, we talk about burnout in this conversation from a universal perspective here, but we also talk about why things can be especially hard for women and just to say if you want solid relationships with happy wives, girlfriend, sisters, mothers, daughters, and female co-workers, listen up. We also talk about why it's important to understand the difference between addressing stressful circumstances in our lives and dealing with the actual physical experience of stress

in our bodies. Finally, the twins dive into a slew of evidence-based, ready to try today interventions that people of all genders can use to, as they say, complete the stress cycle. Heads up that along the way, there are some references to sensitive subjects, including sexual trauma, self-harm, domestic abuse, and violence. While the subject matter is at times heavy, I will say the sisters are extremely funny. At one point, as you will hear, Amelia breaks into song. Our goal with this episode, as it has been with all of our episodes over these past two weeks, is to arm you with new ways of thinking about where you might be getting stuck in your life and to give you some new tools for getting unstuck.

To that end, we have also created a brand new meditation challenge over on the 10% happier app. January 7th is the last day to join and complete the getting unstuck challenge, which is a free 14 day meditation challenge from 10% happier and it's designed to help you push through whatever's holding you back. If you're not sure this challenge is for you, many of our users tell us that our challenges are a great way to start or reboot their meditation practice. Here's what one meditator had to say about one of our previous New Year's challenges, and I'm quoting here, I've been in a meditative rut for quite a while now, not experiencing new breakthroughs or meaningful

advancement. Within the first four days of starting and practicing the New Year's Challenge, I experienced real, meaningful, positive change. My wife even noticed that was much happier. It has blown open a whole new world to explore and experience." You can still complete the challenge if you join before Friday, January 7th. Download the app right now wherever you get your apps to join the Getting Unstuck Challenge for free. Okay, we'll get started with Emily and Amelia Nagoski right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different

way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our Healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelli McGonical and The Great Med meditation teacher Alexis Santos To access the course just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm all One word spelled out Okay on with the show

Hey y'all is your girl Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress singer and entrepreneur on my new podcast Baby this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby This is Skiggy Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast.

Emily and Amelia, welcome to the show. Hi, hello. You write something very compelling that I think is a good place to start. You have said that, and I'm quoting here, we wrote it meaning this book, because it's the book we needed ourselves. Can you tell me that story? Amelia?

Yeah, it started back in 2010. Let's pretend that's the beginning of the story. Around about that time, I was in doctoral school and I was hospitalized with stress-induced illness. I had abdominal pain. They couldn't figure out a cause. They told me it's just stress, go home and relax. But I was working three part-time jobs

and a full-time doctoral student and a step mother to three teenagers at commuting 65 miles each way to my school. Like, relax was not in the cards for me. That was not an option. I needed something that I could actually do to help me. And luckily, I have a sister with a PhD in health behavior. And she knew a lot of research.

And besides her PhD and other things, that's different about Emily is that she understands about how stress works in the body. She has always intuited and understood what's happening to her body when she feels stressed or really any kind of emotion. So when I was in the hospital, I started my mindfulness practice when I was 14, just to give you an idea.

What? And I started when I was like 37, so. So did I. The good news is it's never too late. So I was in the hospital and Emily drove down from, you know, her house to the hospital and just brought me this stack of peer-reviewed science about what the actual chemistry and physiology of

stress is. It turned out that's not all that I needed. I did need that, but I also needed someone to affirm to me and to show me that I wasn't imagining it, that the stressors I was facing were not things I could control, that the sexism, the misogyny, that is inherent in classical music, which is what I have my doctorate in, that that stress that I felt, the friction I felt between myself and the world I was in, was really, truly genuinely acting as a stressor on me. I wasn't imagining it, I wasn't making it up. And it turned out that the resources I needed were so far flung.

And what the book is is we brought all those far-flung resources together of biology and sociology and psychology and philosophy and music and art and stories and Disney princesses. and philosophy and music and art and stories and Disney princesses. Emily, what's the story from your perspective? My story is that in 2015, I published a book called Come As You Are, which is about the science of women's sexual well-being. And because the best predictor of a woman's sexual well-being is surprise, hurt overall well-being, there's a chapter in that book about stress and feelings and emotion processing. And then a whole lot of other chapters about the science of sex itself. And as I was traveling around with that book, people over and over kept saying to me,

yeah, yeah, all the sex science is great, Emily. But you know the one chapter that changed everything for me was that one chapter about stress and emotion processing. And I was surprised and I said that to Amelia and Amelia reminded me, hey, you know how when you taught me that stuff that you would eventually put in come as you are? And do you remember how it, you know, saved my life? She said twice. She said because she was hospitalized twice. And that was when I was like, oh, yes.

So we should write a book about that. So that's what we did. So just a, just I want to pick up what you said. So merely you were hospitalized twice, and you believe this, the information that we're going to dive into in short order, saved your life both times. Yes.

And also in the bigger picture, Emily and I are identical twins raised in the same household. And yet we are so different in the ways that we have responded to stress in our lives. Emily has always been a feeler who feels, and I have always been not. I've always been super great at focusing and getting down to business and repressing anything that's inconvenient in the meantime. Because this was my natural response to stress was to ignore it and to repress it and to shove it. As we have learned into my body to go hide,

I had a lot of chronic illness and chronic pain. And even from the time I was in my 20s, I didn't believe I'd live much past my 40s. I didn't think I'd live to see 55 for sure, because I was always so sick and always in so much pain. I thought I was just fundamentally broken. Nope, turns out I'm just fundamentally really great at repressing my emotions. And I needed to learn the skill of moving through the cycles to allow them to complete so that all of that physiological response that is the nature of emotion did not get stuck in my body and cause inflammation and disease. So, yes, say my life, not just like in the short term of like what I have lived through my doctorate, I don't know, but also little context.

I am a COVID long hauler. I am currently recovering from shingles. But in the big picture, the context of last five or 10 years, I've been the healthiest I've ever been because I haven't been like stuck in wondering why I feel so terrible all the time. Now when I get sick, I know like, okay, there's this structural problem. There's this whatever, but I also know what to do about the things that are not related to a current structural illness. Does that make sense?

It does make sense. And I'm really sorry about the long COVID and the shingles that stuff. That's just, that just happens to be right now. That's a passing moment of whatever. But I didn't, I felt like a lie when I was gonna say that I was the healthiest I've ever been, because clearly that's not true at this moment, but in my life, like this is, broadly speaking,

this is the time in my life when I'm 44 years old and I'm much healthier now than I was when I was 34. And I hope the things you're dealing with now pass quickly. Absolutely, yeah. So let me ask a foundational question. And we've covered burnout on the show before, but I do want to get you to describe

what exactly is burnout and what are the three components there in? The formal definition established in the 1970s says that burnout is a combination of depersonalization, which is where you have a decrease sort of like investment in your work. You take a step back emotionally so that you're not personally showing up in the work.

A decrease sense of accomplishment where you're working harder and harder and you feel like you're accomplishing less and less. And then the third is emotional exhaustion. And it's that emotional exhaustion for women in particular, but kind of for everybody, that is the real problem in terms of your personal biological physical health. Because the term emotional exhaustion,

it sounds intuitive, but what's an emotion? And how do you exhaust it? Which we spend, you know, a sounds intuitive, but what's an emotion? And how do you exhaust it? Which we spend, you know, a chapter defining, but the short version is that emotions are biological cycles that happen in your body. Millie doesn't love it when I use it a justive analogy, but, you know, digestion has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And you know that if you don't go all the way through that cycle, some not so great things can happen. Emotions are the same. They have a beginning when they're activated by some stress or by a loved one

or by a movie that you're watching. They have a middle where you go through the process and an end where you complete that cycle of activation and return to a state that is closer to peace and balance. Burn out emotional exhaustion happens when you get stuck in the middle of that emotional cycle. Feelings are tunnels. You have to go all the way through the tunnel to get to the lead at the end. And you have a whole treasury of advice for getting through this. Oh yeah, there's like a dozen concrete specific evidence-based

strategies for completing the cycles in your body when they get activated, yeah. The most important thing about the fact that stress is a cycle that happens in your body, that's really great news because it means that you can deal with the stress that's happening in your body even if you can't necessarily deal right away with the thing that initiated the stress in your body. When you separate those two things and deal with them in separate processes, it means that you can feel better right now even before whatever stressful is gone. But it also does mean that just because a stressful thing is gone doesn't necessarily mean that you've dealt with the stress in your body. So say there's some extreme example, like a global pandemic with safe, you still might be experiencing some feelings of stress

that are left over, even though your body is no safe and free, it might not know that, because it hasn't gone through the cycles, because the thing you do to deal with a pandemic is not the same behaviors that you engage in with your body to complete a fresh response cycle as you were involved to do it, you know, fight or flight kind of situation. Your advice is universal and applicable to anybody, but there's a huge emphasis in the book and in your work generally on women.

And so I do want to touch on that because your argument is that women experience burnout differently. How so? The research so far suggests that that emotional exhaustion I was talking about is the primary experience of burnout for women whereas for men, the primary experience of burnout is decreased sense of accomplishment, working harder and harder for less and less feeling of actually getting anything done.

Why is that? Ooh! Probably not biology, it's probably because of the ways women and girls are taught to behave around emotions, we're taught to behave like Amelia. We experience what Amelia and I in the book call Human Giver Syndrome,

where the rules of your life are that you have a moral obligation to be pretty, happy, calm, generous, and unfailingly attentive to the needs of others. And so if you pause to care for your own needs to complete your own physiological stress response cycle, for example, through physical activity or rest or a great big cry or a belly laugh or whatever it is you need, you are taking away energy, time, attention. You could be giving to somebody else. I know people say like you can't pour from an empty cup, but the thing is when you're a human giver, if I am really standing there with an empty cup as a human giver, people

don't say to me, oh, let me give you some water, Emily, what they say is, Emily, what are you doing with that empty cup? Don't you see Frankie over there? Has all that water and not enough cups? I mean, no, keep your cup. Good for you. Self-care is so important. Good for you. That's human giver syndrome. And it doesn't just happen. We adapted this language

from a book called Down Girl, The Logic of Misogyny, by a moral philosopher named Kate Mann. And as you can tell by the title, Down Girl, The Logic of Misogyny. It's by the role of misogyny and the patriarchy and how it exacerbates the situation for women by creating a system of oppression. But of course, systems of oppression are not binary.

It's not that all the men are bad and all the women are good, not even remotely close. But it does make a clear illustration of a system that has a population who feel entitled to what the others have to offer. And another part of the population who feel a moral obligation upon them to give everything

they have to the people in power. And power does not just come from masculinity, although power is inherent in masculinity in our society. That's the nature of patriarchy. Men have more access to positions of power that give them resources they need to stay healthy. But white people do too. So if you're a woman, yes, that is your place on the intersection of oppression,

but if you are a white woman, you've got something that is a privilege that gives you more access to power than a person of color. This also happens if you are not English-speaking in the United States, if you are non-Christian in the United States, if you are not fully able-bodied in the ways that the world expects you to be. If your mental health is not the standard default mental health,

if you are not neurotypical, basically what I'm saying is that everybody in the world has something that makes them not conform to the socially constructed ideal. So there's nobody who is unaffected by systems of oppression. So if you are walking around in a human body, what that means is that this cycle of stress completion is the same for everybody who's in a human body. And if you are a person who exists in the United States and the industrialized late capitalist West in general, you certainly have encountered a friction between who you are and who the world

rewards for conforming to a socially constructed ideal, Which is really what the book is about. Is how to make those two things reconcile and fix? When I was reading about both of you before doing this interview and reading about this, what you call the human giver syndrome, I just started trying to interpolate back into my personal history and thinking of like, am I doing this consciously or subconsciously? Am I bringing this attitude of entitlement to my relationship with, say, my wife or my mom

or my female colleagues? It's humbling to contemplate. Did you ask them? I just researched it. I did my research late today, right before I gave the interview. So I haven't had a chance, and I'm a little scared. But the only way to know the answer to the question, am I doing this, is to ask the people. And recognizing that like, if you are taking on the role of what Cape Man calls a human

being, who's sort of morally obliged to be competitive, acquis positive, and entitled in order to maximize their potential and therefore you feel entitled without even being aware of it to take and receive anything the givers give. If you're doing that to people who are in a giver role, the first time you ask, do you feel like I'm treating you as if I'm entitled to your emotional labor, for example, because they're human givers, their only right answer is no. You're great.

You're one of the good ones. You're doing it right. Don't worry. Everything's fine. So you're going to probably have to ask more than once and ask in different ways and contextualize the question and say, like, I'm actually asking. And I want to know about ways I could potentially be doing better. And it's not just you. We as white women who are cisgender and able-bodied, those

ways that we conform to the socially constructed ideal mean that we also can have a history of having treated people who are not English-speaking and white and able-bodied, et cetera, in the same way of just not noticing that society has given us entitlement. A sense of, oh, of course, this is how we treat those people who are different from us, and it's not conscious, but we can't help starting from a place where, yes, of course, we are guilty of having treated other people like we're

entitled to their time in their lives and their bodies. The thing to do now is just exactly what you did, which is to question, oh, have I done this? And to explore the ways that, oh, yes, you most certainly have, all of us have. And to, you know, get super honest with ourselves about our role. And this isn't most of what the book is about, but let me just take this opportunity to say that in chapter 8, we actually talk about how to process the experience of recognizing that, oh, I have done that, which is what we call it the Mad Woman in the attic as a concept it comes from Jane Eyre, which is a million-s' favorite book. That madwoman represents our brain's desperate attempt to manage the

unmanageable chasm between who we actually are and who the world expects us to be. Whenever we fall short of those expectations, the madwoman only has two choices. She can either become inflamed with rage at the world for having those obscene expectations of us, or it can turn toward us with that rage and shame us for falling short. And my madwoman throws balls of fiery lava at me. Like, you are a failure. You did this terrible thing. Everybody's gonna hate you. And it's really easy to become incapable of navigating the world when you let that swamp you. And so our advice is grounded honestly in self-compassion where you turn toward that cruel part of you with kindness and compassion. When you can have that like calm, curious, compassionate relationship with the cruel

list voice in your head. It allows you to create space for learning, recognizing when you've done harm, making amends and growing and learning from it as opposed to just beating the crap out of yourself for it. I want to say some words of appreciation. I don't know if this is going to land correctly, but it's on my mind. So I'll say it. One of the frequent criticisms I,

and we here at the 10% happier podcast, have received since the spring of 2020, when we started doing a lot. We had already been doing quite a bit on racism, sexism bias generally, but we started doing a lot more after the murder of George Floyd. And one of the criticisms is that we get occasionally is, you know, you're too woke, you're doing too much social justice stuff,

blah, blah, blah. And I started to get a little nervous because you guys are using the language, you know, systems of oppression, et cetera, et cetera. But I do want to appreciate, and, you know, I'm on your side. But I also really just appreciate that you were talking about this stuff forthrightly. And with zero detectable sanctimony and a lot of humor and self-awareness. So I just want to express some appreciation. There's actually a review of the book on Amazon that calls our book a feminist feminist screen, and I was like nailed it. Yes it is, but it's a solutions oriented feminist screen. That's right. This is no one of those books that just lays out like, look how terrible the problems are.

Systemic and justice, left and right. It's also like, by the way, you do not have to wait for the world to be a just place before you begin to feel better in your body and in your relationships. And in fact, we can't wait to feel better because the world, the status quo, really benefits from us feeling terrible and being so exhausted that we cannot fight. And so if we start now to complete our stress response cycles, to deal with burnout in ways that are actually effective, we are better, our relationships are better, our communities get stronger, and as each of those levels

get stronger, the forces of systemic injustice cannot win against us. The reason Audrey Lord said that self-care is an act of political warfare is because the survival of people who are systemically oppressed is the opposite of the continuance of injustice. There's so much here, so let's dive. I feel like this might not be what you thought you were in for. I apologize. No, that's not true. I, my team prepares me very well.

I didn't know you were going to be funny. So that's cool. But beyond that, you have not strayed from my expectation. Hey, if we're getting too deep and heavy, I do have a song about the Abyss. If you want to have an example of a thing that's a little more lighthearted. The Abyss is that chasm between who we are and who the world expects us to be. Do the song. Okay. Such a proud. This is the song about the Abyss. It's the chasm between who you are and who the world expects you to be. Who does the world say that I should be? And what do I do if I don't agree?

Rational me says that I am enough. My primate brain says not fitting is rough. Solutions are clear, I should be myself. And deal with the world when it puts me through hell. Or easier still is to be what they say That only requires I give my soul away To the others, others To opposite goals here ask you to choose

Whichever you pick there's something to lose But you're not alone we're all on this road and going together is a journey of hope Through the abyss Abyss That's the Abyss song. Put an EDM beat on it and you got to hit. Yeah. Okay. So I think we've covered a lot there on the big picture.

I think it's, if you agree, I think now might be a good time to talk about what to do about it tactically. So you start in the book with something you've already mentioned, but it might be a good time to talk about what to do about it, tactically. So you start in the book with something you've already mentioned, but it might be worth explaining what it means and how do we do it, completing the stress cycle. Okay, this is Emily again. I'm the public health person and so I'm taking over right now. So the fight or flight response, which is not just fight or flight, obviously it's fight, flight, freeze, fawn, tend to be a friend. It's the stress response activated by something that your brain perceives as a potential threat.

In our modern environment, the things our brain perceives as a potential threat tend to be things like money and traffic and work and relationships and our kids, or a global pandemic, the world's own literal fire, small stuff. Your brain receives that information and goes, oh, that might be a potential threat. And it activates the physiological stress response itself, which is the adrenaline and cortisol and everything that we are familiar with that evolutionarily is supposed to respond to things like lions. Now, the great thing about being chased by a lion

is that it doesn't last long. You see the lion, your brain activates a stress response, and it motivates you with the increase in blood pressure, the increase in heart rate, the changes in your digestion, changes in your immune functioning, changes in all your hormones. Its whole point is to help you to deal with the stressor, which is by running. So you start to run, and at this point, there's only two possible outcomes.

The first one is you get eaten by the lion, in which case none of the rest of this matters. Or you escape. So let's imagine a world where stress response activated. You start running. We're in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, so you're running across the Savannah, Africa, back to your village. Somebody sees you coming and waves you through their door,

and then you both stand with your shoulder against the door, and it's a very persistent lie and rors and charges, and you're working really hard together with this other person to save your life and eventually... The line gives up, and you watch it walk away, and it disappears into the trees and you turn toward this person who just helps save your life. And how do you feel now?

Relieved and glad to be alive and you love your friends and family and the sun seems to shine brighter, right? That's the complete stress response cycle. But in our world now, if your stressor is your traffic, then you're sitting in traffic with your shoulders trying to be your earrings, and all the same physiological stuff is happening. The change is to your digestion and your respiration and all the rest of it. And then you finally do make it home at the end of this terrible commute. And when you get home, do you suddenly feel elated and powerful and glad to be alive? And you love your friends and family. Or do you still kind of want to punch somebody in the face?

That is the difference between dealing with the stress or like if you make it home out of traffic, you dealt with that stress or versus dealing with the stress in your body. So instead of going into your home at the end of your difficult commute and then taking out your stress response on whatever mammal you see first, you stand outside and you tense up every muscle in your body hard, hard, hard for a very slow count

of 10 and a little bit longer than that. And your muscles are telling you, I really want to stop. I think I'm ready to stop 10 and a little bit longer than that. And your muscles are telling you, I really want to stop. I think I'm ready to stop and know a little longer. And then you, ah, flap. And you allow your muscles to relax just that little bit of physical activity can be enough of a cue to siphon off the most intense level of the stress activation in your body. And that physical

shift is the cue to your body that it is now a safe place for you to be. So because running away from a lion is what we're designed to do, physical activity of any kind, even as simple as just tensing up every muscle, is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle. Physical activity is obviously not available to everyone. Some people just are not natural exercises. Amelia, she thought I was making it up when I said that I would, you know, when I was in grad school, I would ride my bike to the top of the hill out in the country in Indiana

and I'd see a cow and I'd feel connected to the cow and the grass and the sun of the hill out in the country in Indiana. And I'd see a cow and I'd feel connected to the cow and the grass and the sun and the light beating up off the pavement. And I really felt this like magnificent peak experience. She thought I was inventing it because she'd never had an experience. There's people who are listening right now who are like, that's not real.

She made that up. And then there are other people who are like runners and swimmers and they know exactly that feeling that when you peak, actually you have this. And just for the people who think she's making it up, there's people in the world who actually feel that. Did you know? I didn't know. So physical activity, when you have that experience

of like you get done with your ride, no matter how reluctant you were to put on your shoes, you get back from your workout and you're like, oh, I'm so glad I did that. That was such a good idea. I feel so much better. That's your body completing the stress response cycle. But for all people who are disabled, of chronic pain, chronic illness, if you're trans and want to go to the gym, going into the locker room could be putting yourself in more danger, as opposed to actually dealing with your stress. So physical activity is not always available to everyone. Fortunately, there are at least six more concrete specific evidence-based strategies. My favorite is sleep. Sleep is one of those

things where I mean, like exercise. People are like, oh, exercise is good for me, Emily and Amelia. Thank you so much. I'm glad I paid $12 for this book. I just want to interrupt for one second because Emily has started talking about sleep. And she does have like an hour and 15-minute talk. She does. That's just like about sleep. So if you thought that the patriarchy thing was a tangent,

this, you really maybe need to like put a limit on how much time she spends on that. Let's just take it for granted that everybody knows somewhere between seven to nine hours. People very individually. I'm a seven and a half hour sleeper. Amelia, my identical twin is a nine hour sleeper. And if she only gets eight, she really feels it. People vary.

And yet when I was in high school, when I learned that people need eight hours of sleep and I would get eight hours of sleep and still feel tired. It was not enough for me. I thought I was broken and lazy because the world had told me that people need eight hours. And I really needed more than eight hours. And I thought I was sickly and weak. Nope, turns out if I sleep nine hours, I'm fine.

So there are injustices around, like I have light sleeper privilege, I have seven and a half hour sleeper privilege. I'm also an early bird. We have a brother whose natural go to bedtime is 3 a.m. It is really hard for him to find a job where he can sleep according to his body's needs. And if he can't sleep according to his body's needs, the work that he does is not going to be as high quality because his body is not going to be functioning at its best possible way. Exactly. And then the third structure of sleep to understand about yourself. So there's a number of hours of sleep, there's what is your natural circadian rhythm, and then

what is your sleep chunking for lack of a better words? For some people, the solid eight hours is great, but that's not biologically realistic for what humans are designed for. There's also bifasic sleep, where you have a first sleep and then you wake up for an hour or two and you have a second sleep that before the industrial revolution may have been how humans slept most of the time.

And there's multi-phasic sleepers, people who may have a solid chunk at night or by-phasic sleep at night, and then are nappers in the middle of the day. Many people are not natural nappers. If napping screws up your sleep at night, that's how you know napping is not for you. But if you are a napper,

there is nothing more productive you can be doing with your time than sleeping. Okay, I'm gonna stop talking about sleep because I really do want to talk about the other ones. There's imagination. Emilia, you talk about imagination. Imagination was the first thing that worked for me because sleep was not an option when I was in doctoral school. And physical activity was just not a thing that my body responded to the way that like Emily's did, for example. But when I learned that imagination can initiate a stress response cycle like when you're nervous about a job interview, right?

There's nothing there that's physically a threat your imagination has invented stress to initiate a stress response cycle. It's really good news because it means your imagination can also complete a stress response cycle. So I would imagine myself as Godzilla So I would imagine myself as Godzilla, tromping on the state-langrian institution where I was getting my doctorate. So like the parking lot and that long loop drive, you have to go around to find a spot to park it and the birther's all fast, rar-ra.

And I would imagine myself all the way through this while I was on the electrical machine or something else. But I wasn't what my body did. I didn't change anything that my body did. It was my experience of this story in my mind that led me through the complete stretch response cycle. And you don't have to lead yourself through like this. If you read a book where when you get to the end, you're like, oh yeah, or you watch a movie

and everybody walking out is just like, whoa, and like arms and the air and this pump. And that is the feeling of a complete stress response cycle. While your body was sitting in a chair, staring at a page, or at a screen, your body inside went through the stress response cycle, playing video games also gives a lot of people this feeling and this cycle completing availability. And it's just because when you participate in a story that is a complete stressor-spon cycle built in, which a lot of stories are, because that's how humans are, you benefit from it. You live through it also. And as a greater extension of that, the next one,

beyond imagination is creative self-expression, where if you take that imagination, that story, whatever was in your head, and you use it to create something outside of yourself, it could be a meal, it could be a painting, it could be a song, and you take all the feelings that are hard and you put them someplace safe. So they're not living in your body anymore. That can take you all the way through a stress response cycle. Emily, I don't know much time we have or how deep we want to go into the options and possibilities. For me, it's writing. The thing she wasn't sure, I would be willing to say is that, well, I write, you know, selfie-helpy nonfiction, mostly for women, most of the time. I also write romance novels. And it is a very good for my mental health. So when therapists

tell you to journal, they do not mean that the construction of sentences is inherently good for your mental health. They mean that you can take all those feelings, channel them through the writing out onto the page, and then it's not doing your body any harm, but it's also not taking out on any other person to do anybody any harm. So, for example, I got home from work after a particularly difficult day, and my usual go-to would have been like, go for a run and then take a hot bath, and my husband would bring me like an apologetic glass of wine. But this time I sat in my computer

and I took all of my stress and frustration and rage and I put it into my romance novel. I wrote my happily ever after with my hero on his knees begging for the heroine to accept him, hoping that he can be deserved by her. And what this looks like on the outside is me sobbing on my keyboard. And what it felt like inside was that the pages

of my difficult day, that story, were soaking in the rain and crumbling to pieces so that I could make new blank sheets out of it and write the ending that I wanted. So I used that creative outlet as a way to complete the story, to complete the physiological stress response in my body. I have another example of that in the form of a song, but it has a lot of the F word in it. Yeah, go for it. We'll just believe the F. This is just an example of a song, but it has a lot of the F word in it. Yeah, go for it. We'll just believe the F. This is just an example of a song that I wrote as a way of creative self-expression. And other people listen to it and they also have the experience of being like, ah, yeah.

So this is called the So Annoyde song. Is it plugged in? Did I turn it on? Why wanted f***ing work? Are the cables old? Is the connection loose? Why wanted f***ing work? I'm so annoyed, so annoyed Why wanted f***ing work? Is my sounds are selected? Is my web cam on? Why wanted f***ing work?

Did I join with audio or click on mute? Why won't it f***ing work? Oh yeah, I'm so annoyed, so annoyed, why won't it f***ing work? Every time I think I know what to do. It never fucking works. I reset what I expect then something new goes wrong. It never fucking works. Still I try. Still I try someday I'll make it work.

Based on a true story. So you can see how in a moment of stress making something can get you through to the other side so that it feels like, oh, the world is a safe place. This is the brilliant thing about our brains is that it doesn't really make a big distinction between what we very vividly imagine and what actually is happening in the external world. More of my conversation with Amelia and Emily Nagasaki right after this. Hey, I'm Aresha and I'm Brooke.

And we're the hosts of Wunderys Podcast, even the rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul Born Naked, we'll show you how Rue Paul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers,

opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. I recently quote unquote bought my son a drum set, my six year old son, but actually, I'm the one who plays it the most and it is a great stress reliever. Yes. Drumming. Good. That is a particularly good.

Not only does it use a lot of different limbs, but like the use and creation and maintenance of rhythm is something that our bodies are built to do. It is about cycles and pulses. And when you engage your body in those kinds of repeated systems, it's so good for you. Yeah. It actually helps people be loving. Be loving. I'm going to talk about the babies like to bounce study. Yeah. When we move together in time, it is shown that it increases behaviors associated with love, with community, with care. So for example, there's this research study on toddlers where you take a toddler and you

strap it to the front of your body, right? You know, in one of those carrying things. And when you bounce a baby, in one of those carrying things. And when you bounce a baby in one of those, they love it, man. Babies like to bounce the bounce, bounce the baby. So they bounce the baby and the baby is looking at another person who is standing opposite you.

And if that person bounces in time synchronously with the baby who is bouncing, oh, we bounce together at the same time, as opposed to bouncing A synchronously or bouncing in opposite directions, when the baby bounces synchronously with that person, and then a few minutes later that person sitting at a desk and drops a pencil,

that toddler is more likely to go pick up that pencil and hand it to the person because they have bonded more strongly just through the action of moving in time together. Our bodies are made to engage, to entrain with other humans, this physical proximity, if possible, but also any kind of visual or other sensory movement and sensing of each other together, because the self, the mind, is not contained within the skin. We are, as Jonathan Heitz says, 90% chimped, 10% B. We are a hive species.

We are meant to do great things together, and that really shapes who we are and how we thrive, not as individuals, but as a community. That's how we're made to do great things. When I was teaching at a college, I would do an annual relationship talk, just to teach about relationship and feelings. And in the year Frozen came out, I did a talk called Frozen and the Science of the Fields. Love is an open door.

And I was asking, Amelia, how can I make this? Like, really stand out and be a very good talk. And her solution was to make it a sing-along. So I did. I got videos of the songs with the lyrics of the bottom and the ball that bounces across and it's Friday night, it's seven o'clock, late September, a beautiful night. I have 300 college students coming to this talk on Frozen in the Science of the Fields and we get to the middle of the talk and I play let it go in the science of the fields and we get to the middle of the talk and I play let it go.

And I have 300 perfectionist driven, high achieving social justice, my students all singing. That perfect girl is gone. Their faces are shining in the light of a larger than life Elsa accessing her power for the first time fully in her life. And I was like, how do we get them to do this every single day? Students came up to me after that talk, in tears saying, that is exactly what I needed. And look, I put a lot of science into that talk. That's what I put the most effort into. And nobody was saying, Emily, thank you so much for the science of attachment.

That really, understanding the mechanism of oxytocin really is what I needed. No, what they needed was the singing, which is the thing that I gotta doctor it in. So, right. So we call it the magic trick, like the ultimate burnout beater is to combine all the different stress management strategies.

So you get physical activity, moving your body in time with other people because connection is also a way of ending the stress response cycle and for a shared purpose. Moving your body in time with other people for a shared purpose, dancing, singing, marching in a protest, praying at a worship service. Those are all things that create a magical shift in our chemistry. We don't need to do it often. But boy, if you can do it together, when you meditate in huge groups, man, it's different. Well, you brought up meditation.

So we've gone through a list of modalities for completing the stress cycle. We've talked about physical activity, imagination, sleep, creative expression. You mentioned connectivity or positive social interaction, but then you mentioned meditation. So is that another way or deep breathing? Those can be two separate things, but can meditation add or deep breathing be ways to complete the stress cycle? Absolutely. Okay. So fundamentally, at its most basic, if you pair it down to oversimplified, when you inhale, it engages the sympathetic nervous system,

and when you exhale, it engages the parasympathetic nervous system. So each exhalation engages the part of your body that makes you feel calm and safe. And his inhalation reminds you that you, you know, alertness and whatever, at a really basic, oversimplified biological level. I wouldn't necessarily call it meditation that has to be done.

Any kind of mindfulness, which we call being aware without judging. So just noticing sensory experiences, which you see here, taste touch smell, or breathing, or movement where you are attending to the sensations or to the experience internally or externally, and not judging it, not evaluating it, not saving it for later, just being like, oh, this is what's going on right now. That practice, I mean, there's piles and piles and piles of research that shows that that's really good for your mental health

in a lot of ways, but yeah, it can remind your body that it is safe and that it's capable of accessing safety, which is the sensation of being at the end of a complete stress response cycle. But since there are probably a lot of meditators listening, I want to make sure we put in the caveat that the calmness you may experience with meditation is not inherently a sign that you have completed a stress response cycle. I had a body-based therapist one time tell me there is a lot of freeze in the somatic

experiencing community, in the meditation community, in the yoga community, because there is not an acceptance or welcoming of big, sort of uncomfortable emotions. When meditation provides a space where you can allow your body to release a bunch of like gunked up junk that's dwelling somewhere in your mind or your body, that is a magnificent gift. If your practice is about finding a place of total peace and calm, you may be hitting the brakes instead of allowing the accelerator gas pedal stress response to come to its natural conclusion.

Does that distinction make sense? Yeah, let me see if I can take both of your answers and synthesize them, repeat them back to you, and then you can fact check what I've just said. So deep breathing, which is in my mind, a separate practice, but very much complimentary to mindfulness meditation, deep breathing sounds like there's quite a bit of evidence that that's a good way to complete a stress response cycle. Mindfulness meditation or just meditation generally, it really depends how you do it.

I'm hearing. If you're just trying to feel calm and there are meditation practices that will really do that for you depending on your aptitude, that might make you feel calm but it might not actually allow the stress to move through the system, whereas in mindfulness meditation, if you're doing, if you're applying mindfulness, at least to the extent that I understand that term, you're sitting back non-gege mentally

and with some warmth watching the stress come and seeing that it naturally passes. And so that would be a way to allow this dress cycle to complete. Yeah, talking about breath as a separate practice, remember that in the fight or flight response, one of the systems that changes is the respiratory system. So simply reenacting the deep breathing that you would do while you're running away from the lion. That's your body doing the thing. It's made to do to complete the stress response cycle. It is a built-in response. So, yes, breath as a separate practice. There are a lot of various different kinds of breath practice,

but at the most fundamental biological level, breath and deep breathing do tell your body. We did the thing and we are safe. When you are meditating for calmness, like that's in, you know, break glass of in case of emergency type meditation of like, I gotta walk in the door right now and I can't be like nervous and, you know, when I walk in there, I just need to be calm right now.

And you can just take all the whatever and like stick in the box and shove it in a corner to deal with later. The thing that needs to happen later is you pull that box out and you open it up and you let whatever was in there fly. You mentioned crying, that's another way as I understand it to complete a stress cycle. Totally, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So you know the thing about how Emily was like, could do physical activity. She could do crying too. Like in high school, she knew that she could come home, slam the door and sob for like four minutes and then feel better. Yeah.

And I was like, oh, crying doesn't solve anything. And that's because I didn't know the difference between dealing with the stress in your body versus dealing with the thing that caused your stress. Cause it's true that crying rarely solves the thing that caused your stress. But boy, yeah, it can take your body all the way through a complete stress response cycle. For those who people who are like me, who have never experienced the good tharsis of like letting a big old cry make you feel better, as they say that it's does.

a big old cry make you feel better as they say that it's does. The key to it is the non-judgment moment, not feeding the crying more thoughts about the thing that initiated the crying. So instead of ruminating on, I can't believe he said that or she did that. You've said all that stuff on a box, shoving the corner. Instead for the moment, you just deal with the stress itself by observing how hot do I feel along? Crying, how tense do I feel?

How much fluids are leaking out of my face while I'm crying? And you just notice without judging? Gosh, that's a lot of fluids. Or yeah, I'm super tense or who I'm kind of hot right now. And you just let the crying go. And it's a cycle and it just ends on its own. And then you are in a better physiological position, in better shape, to go deal with a thing that caused the stress, because you're no longer, you know,

in the moment of having a stress response. What about laughter? Again, it can't be like a gentle, you know, a single tear as you gaze upon. It has to, with laughter, it can't be that polite social laughter of, oh yes, that's wonderful. I'm so glad you like that polite, you know, social lubricant kind of laughter

that is most human laughter. It has to be the ridiculous, like uncontrollable, silly, loud, open mouth laughter that leaves you with like sore abdomen for an hour after it's over. Like if it's uncontrollable, that's your body has to go through this physical cycle to like make that big old catharsis happen.

Also, you can't laugh when your body feels like it's not safe. So your body knows that it's safe because it's laughing. It's a two-way street situation. One of the things I love in the research is that if you can't access belly laughter right now, just reminiscing about a time you belly laughed, especially if you're talking to someone with whom you have shared that kind of like embarrassing belly laughter. You're in the middle of a stressful situation and you just start reminiscing about that time that you laugh that way. That'll by itself again, our imaginations are so powerful that can make a shift in your

physiology and be a cue to your brain that your body is a safe place now. And also listening to other people laugh in the music recording industry. One of the very earliest kinds of records back a hundred years ago was laughing records. You could just buy a black vinyl disc and put it on your record player and it would just be people laughing. This was a product people bought because it was great and effective and there's definitely videos on YouTube now. That's like our version of it, but yeah, listening to others. More of my conversation with Amelia

and Emily Nagoski right after this. Okay, so we've just talked about a bunch of, really universal hacks for getting us, the hacks probably demeans what we've just talked about, but universal tactics and strategies. They're evidence-based interventions. Thank you very much. Okay, well, I like your language too. I won't even try to repeat it. That, we've just talked about all of that, which are, again, anybody can access this. However, you are, as we've discussed, you know, also trying to talk about the, also probably these are not the appropriate words,

but special challenges facing people who identify as women. And you use a term in the book, the real enemy. Can you hold forth on that a little bit? Yeah, we call it the real enemy because people don't like the word patriarchy. Why do you think that is? Because it's naming a thing and once you name a thing it's real and that's very very scary and people want to deny. No, that's not a real thing because if it were real, oh my god, that's really dangerous. But also there's the idea that when you know how to complete the stress response cycle, which is chapter one that when you know how to complete the stress-response cycle,

which is chapter 1, when you know how to manage frustration, which is chapter 2, when you know how to connect with something larger than yourself and make meaning, which is chapter 3, these are all ways to win the game. So chapter 4 is called the rict game because we've given you ways to win the game, and now we tell you how the game is rigged. It's just that when you exist in the world, your path through life has a certain number of obstacles in it. And if you are a woman, you have more and different obstacles than if you are a man. To accessing power or resources or whatever you need, just getting through day to day life. And it's not just the difference of masculinity or femininity. It's a difference of race, creed, and all of the other intersections.

In case people don't recognize it, we take the language of the real enemy from the Hunger Games. Katniss Everdeen is in this dystopian near future. We're recruited to play a game created by the dystopian totalitarian government that has children from all of the districts put into a glass dome and televised to fight each other to the death. And at a certain point, Katniss Everdeen, our heroine's mentor, says to her Katniss, remember who the real enemy is.

And she goes into the game and she's fighting for her life full fight her flight Her bow and arrow is out. She's ready to attack. She hears the rustle. She sees the guy and he says catness Remember who the real enemy is Because the real enemy is not these other young people who are forced into this game the enemy is the game itself game. The enemy is the game itself. So she lifts her bow and arrow and points it at the big glass dome and fights the system itself. And this is actually based in research of Martin Seligman's learned helplessness. When they did experiments about learned helplessness in humans, they would put the research subject in a room with a loud noise. And the subject would try to turn off the noise, and nothing they did with this machine flicking switches

and turning knobs, nothing would turn off the loud noise, and they would get frustrated and angry, and eventually they just give up and sit there, desolate and despairing while this noise just took over their ears. And that subject would leave the research study. And when they would leave and their feelings of despairing and disheartened researchers would say, you know what, that game was rigged. And there was nothing you could have done to win that game. That was the purpose. We just wanted to see how long it took you to get despairing. And as soon as the person knows, oh, there was no way I could have won.

Their spirits lifted and the despair evaporates. No, that's a very short-term situation where you can have your despair evaporate because of a few minutes you spent with a loud sound. When you grow up living in an oppressive environment, it takes a lot more reassurance. Oh no, the game is rigged. There's no way you could win. They're telling you how you're supposed to go through life as though that's instruction.

So when, no, no, no, no, no, the game is rigged. You can feel better because you're doing great considering the fact that you're not being told all the rules and that you're not allowed to have access to the things that will actually allow you to win as far as the game is concerned. Recognizing the game is rigged is one thing, but I assume you don't want us to get into learned helplessness. No, so how do you get out of learned helplessness? This is one of those places where the research made me a little bananas because the research

on learned helplessness, I'm sure you know, began with animals, specific dogs, for example. And I'll tell you what they decided the intervention was for humans, and then I'll tell you what the intervention was for dogs. And you'll see why we give the advice that we do. For humans, they suggested that the cure for learned helplessness was a mindset change. Be optimistic. Believe you have control. What they did for the dogs, so they yoked the dogs together so that the dogs could not get away from a shock. And when they yoked the dogs together,

so they could not get away from the shock, the dogs went in to learn to helplessness, they would just collapse so that when they were no longer yoked together and they could escape the shock, they didn't even try. So these dogs are receiving this uncomfortable but not dangerous shock and they're not even trying to get up and avoid the uncomfortable stimulus.

So what they did for the dogs was drag them over the threshold to the safety place. And again, drag the dog to safety. Zap drag the dog over to safety. Drag the dog over to safety. Show the dog that by moving its body, it could rescue itself from the difficult situation. It didn't tell the dog to have a different mindset. Learned helplessness is not learned the way you learn algebra. Learned helplessness is learned by the nervous system.

It's learned in the body. Yeah, technically learning algebra also happens in your nervous system. It's learned in the body. Yeah, technically learning algebra also happens in your nervous system. Whatever, whatever, whatever. You know what I mean? It's learned in the body. It's based in reality. The dog really could not escape. That is not a delusion.

That is not a misunderstanding of the world. That is based true based on its experience. So what we tell humans to do is to do a thing. It will not surprise anybody listening to us that we were fairly distressed after the 2016 election. The next day, Amelia built a flagstone pathway from her driveway to her house. She dug a trench, she moved stone.

She used her body to make a thing. Look, I did a thing. No, it didn't change the outcome of the election. No, it didn't create systemic change, but it showed, look, I am not helpless. There is something I can do. I wrote a lot of things. I did my job. My job is inherently designed to contradict the idea that women's bodies do not belong to them. So by my continuing to do a thing, I proved to my body that I am not helpless. I just wanna make clear about the kind

of learning of learned helplessness. It's not like frontal lobe, verbal processing, like higher level cognition. It is deep down in the brain stem learning amygdala level understanding. That's the difference that I meant. But also, the doing a thing is what shows your nervous system because your nervous system learns,

oh, I can do a thing like digging the trench. I did that thing, I did it. And through the moving, instruct my nervous system what it's capable of. Whereas the solution for the loud sound experiment of telling the person the game is rigged, it is a frontal lobe cognition kind of solution. But it also is a relief to understand that,

you know, when you evaluate what you have accomplished versus what you wanted to accomplish, you are not told the parameters and that your evaluation needs to be taken into consideration the whole big picture. Yeah. You didn't fail. That game was unwinnable. So are you saying to women there are at least two things you can do in the face of structural unfairness and injustice?

One is to just know that it's unfair and unjust and there's a relief in that. Yes, just knowing is intervention number one. It's real. If it feels like it's too hard, that's cause it's too hard. The second thing that I'm hearing is there are areas in your life where you do have agency, including your front yard, or your backyard, or wherever you can build a stone path.

And so do complete. The pathism metaphor, we know, right? But it's also a literal. Yeah, but it was also a little. Yes. So doing something, you may not be dismantling the patriarchy, but you are doing something meaningful to you, and that is a way to reduce the odds of burnout in the face of a juggernaut. It doesn't even have to be meaningful to you, because all you're doing here is you are not

dealing with a thing that caused your stress. You are making your own body recognize that it is capable of accessing safety so that you are capable of dealing with the bigger picture long-term, you know, smash the patriarchy stuff. So it can be literally make a meal, complete any task, do a thing, and a thing is anything that's not nothing. That is truly the best, goofiest, silliest sounding advice you'll ever get, that's actually the best advice. Do a thing. And if thing is anything is not nothing because your nervous system learns that it can get

to safety, access safety, which allows you physically to be in a state of wellness that allows you to, you know, change the world. I would add one other intervention and none of these things are just for women. They work for everybody. In fact, the more intersections of oppression you experience, the more important they are. And the other intervention is what Amelia and I call

the bubble of love, where you create a pocket of connection with others who take your well-being as seriously as you take there, well-being, where you do not subscribe to the rules of the outside world, where who you are is welcome and embraced precisely as you are with none of the nonsense expectations of like who the world says you're supposed to be. That bubble of love, human beings, as Amalia said, are not designed to do big things alone, We're designed to do them together. Look, we did not start this book. Thinking we were going to write the kind of book we wrote. And we were raised as, you know, a lot of people are

raised in a sort of like New England lock job, puritanical, no feelings allowed kind of home. Feelings were not a thing we were told. And so we're reading all this really very serious affective neuroscience, like right at the edge of my ability to understand and I've got a PhD in this stuff, the lesson over and over was love. It was turning toward each other, especially each other's difficult feelings

with kindness and compassion. It turns out the cure for burnout isn't any of this stuff we have been talking about. They all help, they are all good, but the thing is self-care is like the fallout shelter you build in your basement, because apparently it's your job to protect yourself from nuclear war, I guess.

The cure for burnout cannot be self-care. It must be all of us caring for each other. So I would say the last most important evidence-based intervention is what we call the bubble of love. So what does that look like? I can hear people saying, well, how do I create this bubble? I don't even, you know, we've, people have fewer close friends these days than they've

ever had. Yes. And loneliness is so dangerous. Yes. And we, by the way, kind of still in a pandemic in some ways. And so, yes. What do I do to make a bubble of love? That's, that can sound to some like a tall order.

The people who are in the bubble are the people who care about your well-being as much as you care about theirs. Who, like you, feel a moral obligation to give, because back with human givers syndrome giving is not the problem. Giving is not toxic or dangerous unless it is in the context of a human being who feels entitled and will suck a giver dry. If you are surrounded with givers who all feel that everyone around them deserves as much love and care as they have to offer, then nobody

slips through the cracks because once somebody starts to burn out, someone turns to them and says, oh, you need to go take a hot bath. And, you know, here's a beer and I will cook dinner. And afterwards, I will do the dishes and, you know, here's a beer and I will cook dinner. And afterwards I will do the dishes and then we can all sit on the couch and talk about our feelings. That's what the bubble looks like. And yes, I absolutely agree that it is hard to find the people who are going to be in that bubble.

And the closeness of friends is not a thing that's the same as it used to be, but I got to tell you, when Emily and I started writing this book, we didn't have a bubble or consider each other in a bubble. You know, that lock jaw, no England purechanical, no feelings thing, built up walls. People think of twins and sisters is like so close and bonded. We didn't have that, but we read all the science that said that this is how you do it.

So we were like, oh, research says we should like, you know, be sisters and stuff. And it turns out that when you're on one side of a wall and you're thinking, I could really use a bubble around me. I wish there was somebody here. And that person is on the other side of the wall. They're probably thinking what you're thinking, which is, I wish I didn't have this wall here. I wish somebody was in this bubble. And because of the stigma against emotion and meeting people and being too dependent on others, it takes such bravery to, you know, to go knock, knock, knock, do you want to build a snowman?

And have somebody be like, oh, yes, I knock knock knock, do you want to build a snowman and have somebody be like, oh yes, I'll open the door to you. It takes such bravery to be that person, but if you do, you're going to find out that the person on the other side is also feeling the same need because it's a universal human need. So if you will be the brave Anna and start knocking down the wall. God, it's awkward. Oh my God. It was awkward. It's very uncomfortable. Very awkward. It's very difficult just talking about it

is like I can't believe we're acknowledging that we love each other. Oh my God, feelings. Ah! Fred, like we're not like we still have that stuff inside us. You don't have to be perfect, but I'm telling you, if Amelia and I can build a connection like this, literally, anyway, it's not that we have it,

because we like to find this connection. Can I find this connection? We never ever had it. We had to create it because the science told us to. And if we can learn the skills to create it, anybody can, if we can do it, anybody can. Just to hang a lantern on something that you said there might have been explicit, but I at least heard it in the implicit.

You know, creating a love bubble doesn't just mean curating the most loving people in your life. You actually have to participate in this. So it's work to be in the bubble because you had a care for these other people. Yes, but it's the people who you would care for anyway. People are generally social. Remember the babies like to bounce and spontaneous pro-social behavior coming from 18 month olds? These people have existed in the world for 18 months and yet they are spontaneously pro-social.

That's how human beings are made to help each other, to give to each other, to care for each other. But it's natural. beings are made to help each other, to give to each other, to care for each other, but it's natural. It's going to come naturally to you when the external structure of being like, oh no, you have to be independent lone cowboy and that's the ideal autonomy. You know, development psychologically is a straight path from dependence to autonomy. That is not true.

Nope, the people are made, you know, 90% gem, 10% B, high species, social species. You're made to do this, so it's gonna feel great and you're not gonna have to push yourself to care for others, it's gonna come naturally. Given the context of COVID, like loneliness is a big deal, one in three American households is a solo individual. And at the same time, there are a lot of households where in the best case scenario you are locked in the house.

For days on end with your favorite people in the world. And you just cannot wait to get away from them. Please. How could I miss you if you never leave? Right. The deal about connection is this the same thing as everything else in our bodies, we're designed to oscillate into connection and back to autonomy and back to connection and back to autonomy. We're not designed to stay asleep all the time. We're designed to oscillate, interest and back to effort and interest and back to effort. We're not designed to stay asleep all the time. We're designed to oscillate, interest, and back to effort, and interest, and back to effort. We're designed to oscillate through the stress response cycle to relaxation, back to the stress response cycle to human beings. Wellness is not a state of being. It is a state of

action. It's that freedom to move through the cycles built into our mammalian bodies. And that includes into connection as deep as you are interested in going and out into autonomy as separate as you're interested in going. Final question. Can you just plug your book and any other resources that are out there

that people might want to look into after having listened to you? The book is burnout, the secret to unlocking the stress cycle. And please follow the nap ministry, the nap worship treasure hersy. We'll change your life. I will also say that due to the long COVID actually have been diagnosed now with autism and Alexa Thymia. So I've started a YouTube channel called Autistic Burnout. And if there's anyone in the audience who happens to be Autistic, I have made this channel where I talk about the content of the book and how it applies specifically to the Autistic experience. When we say if we can do it literally, anyone can do it,

literally. Yes, anyone would be better at this than we are. Yeah, yeah. I have a measurable, clinical inability to be aware of her own experience. Yeah, and also difficulty with social relationships and reciprocity and communication, like literally a measurable clinical deficit. So if I can do it, anybody can do it. Well, I really appreciate you doing that work and then sharing it with all of us. So thank you both, pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks again to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks again to Emily and Amelia. Remember January 7th is the last day to join and complete the free 14-day Getting Unstuck Challenge over on the 10% happier app. Download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps to join. This show is made by Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justin Davie, Kim Bikama, Maria Wartell, and Jen Poient with audio engineering from Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you on Friday for a bonus meditation from the one and only Sharon Solberg. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.

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