Understanding Burnout and Human Giver Syndrome - Amelia Nagoski

0:00You're listening to the Mindful Mama podcast episode number 581. Holy shmoly. Today, we are talking about understanding burnout and human giver syndrome with Amelia Nagoski.

0:14Welcome to the Mindful Mama podcast. Here, it's about becoming a less irritable, more joyful parent. At Mindful Mama, we know that you cannot give what you do not have, and when you have calm and peace within, then you can give it to your children. I'm your host, Hunter Clark-Fields. I help smart, thoughtful parents stay calm so they can have strong, connected relationships with their children. I've been practicing mindfulness for over 25 years. I'm the creator of the Mindful Parenting course and teacher training, and I'm the author of the international bestseller, Raising Good Humans, Raising Good Humans Every Day, and the Raising Good Humans Guided Journal.

0:54Hello, welcome to the Mindful Mama podcast. Welcome back. If you are a frequent listener, I'm glad to be hanging with you. I'm glad you're here. I'm grateful and glad that you are here. And today, we are going to be talking to Amelia Nagoski, co-author of the New York Times bestselling book, Burnout, The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle and the Burnout Workbook. Her job, as stated in her bio, is to run around waving her arms, doing whatever it takes to help singers get in touch with their internal experience. And we're going to talk about the idea of burnout when we're giving too much, often without realizing it.

1:33And we're going to talk about this idea of the human giver syndrome and its impact on mental health, stress, and burnout. And there's a bunch of strategies in here, very practical strategies. So listen, learn, listen again, share it with your friends who are burned out. And now join me at the table as I talk to Amelia Nagoski.

1:58Hi, I'm Dr. Lisa DeMoor, psychologist, mom, author of several books, including Untangled, and co-host of the Ask Lisa podcast. Each week, I sit down with journalist Rena Ninan, and we talk through the real questions that parents are facing as they're raising tweens and teens. We break down the science, share practical strategies, and try to make this whole raising an adolescent thing feel a little less overwhelming. Search for Ask Lisa, the psychology of raising tweens and teens, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Mindful Lama podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Me.

2:32Amelia Nagoski:It's my pleasure. Moving on from how we say bubbler slash water fountain, we'll talk about some things having to do with your book that you and you co-wrote with your sister a while ago. And I think it's so interesting because I, that you started out with this thing about the human giver syndrome and talking, you're quoting a philosopher, Kate Mann. And, but I was just thinking about that today because I was working with a client on a parenting issue and she was talking about how she feels guilty all the time. And we were talking about kind of setting some boundaries around bedtime. And I was talking to her about how she will, you know, it's so helpful for her.

3:20Amelia Nagoski:She will be such a better parent when she's getting all the sleep that she needs and that you can model healthy boundaries, etc. All these things. But she really had been indoctrinated into this. As I was reading again, this part about the human giver in your book, I was seeing this client all over it. And thinking about, I had thought about that this morning, how this is such a thing from the patriarchy. So tell us about this idea and where it comes from. Yeah, it comes from a book called Down Girl, The Logic of Misogyny by a moral philosopher named Kate Mann. And because she's a moral philosopher, she posits a world where there are two kinds of people with different moral obligations.

4:11The first kind of people are the human beings who have a moral obligation to be their humanity, to live it, to express it, to acquire whatever resources are necessary in order to be their humanity. And on the other side are the human givers who have a moral obligation to give their time, their lives, their bodies to the human beings. And remembering that it's from a book called Down Girl, The Logic of Misogyny, which group do you think she's saying women are? The givers. Yes, that's right. It's the human givers. And I think there are a lot of moms, especially, but carers in general and women in general who identify with being a giver, who feel like, yeah, I do have a moral obligation to give of myself to the people around me.

5:05I like that about myself. It feels like a healthy, good thing. And that is true. If everyone was a human giver, no one would fall through the cracks because there'd always be someone to turn toward you when you're in need. But we do not live in that world. We live in this world of giver and being dynamics where the beings feel entitled always to take from the givers. And that's when being a human giver becomes a syndrome, becomes a problem. That you feel that you have a moral obligation to be at all times pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others. and that if you ever fail in your moral obligation to be at all times pretty happy calm generous and attentive to needs of others then you yourself are a failure and because you're a failure you deserve to be punished and if there's no one else around to punish you you'll go ahead and punish yourself that's when being a giver becomes a syndrome um and uh that state means that we don't feel like we deserve to have resources for ourselves, that we are just tubes of toothpaste to be emptied until we have nothing left to offer and then discarded.

6:26And that's really dangerous and that could lead to burnout.

6:32Amelia Nagoski:Yeah, yeah. I see it all the time in clients is that there's this was holding up of like self-sacrifice as this beautiful thing or it's just you know and I see it in society all the time I see you know oh they're just and and and I guess there's you know is a you know there's a middle path I think obviously between being a human being and being a giver there's obviously we want to be giving we want to be generous in a lot of ways like that's wonderful and we don't want to be selfish necessarily but it's I do it is I do really see as this misogynistic thing that has passed down of course like from you know cultures where men were in charge and were powerful and women were property and were were a piece of that that they would indoctrinate this idea like it just and that just makes me so mad that we still have it You know?

7:35Amelia Nagoski:Yeah. This is in no way in the past. This is in no way in the past. This is absolutely right now. And it is not up to a giver to change. Being a giver is good for society. And being a someone who feels like you need to care for everyone else around you in your life. That's a great thing. It is up to the beings to recognize that they also have a responsibility to support the people who give to them, to give back. The cure for human giver syndrome is not become a being. The cure for human giver syndrome is to surround yourself in a little bubble of other givers. That's not so easy, though, when you're a parent.

8:21Amelia Nagoski:You're working. You're doing all of these things. and you might be on this road to burnout. Now you, I think either you or your sister, now this book was written by your twins, right? Yeah. Had an experience of burnout. Do you want to tell us about that first? What happened? Yeah, I was in doctoral school. Well, let me go back further. It really started when Emily wrote her first book, Come As You Are, The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life. it's a book about the science of women's sexuality and she would go all around the world talking to women about the science of women's sexuality and they'd come up after the talks and you know sign that book and you know the sex science that's great but you know what really changed everything for me it was that one part of one chapter about stress and managing feelings that really and emily was surprised because she spent all that time on the sex science.

9:20And I was not surprised when she told me because I had learned that same stuff in my conservatory training as a musician. What I did not learn was that I could use those same skills in my real life. And when I did learn to apply those skills daily, it saved my life. Twice. When I was in doctoral school, I burned out so hard I ended up in the hospital. Twice. And the first time, it was kind of too late, but Emily drove down from her house in Massachusetts to where I was in the hospital in Connecticut, And she brought me this like pile of peer-reviewed research of like, here's how burnout happens.

10:08Here's how stress is manifested in your body. And it changed how I live every day. And when I reminded Emily about all that story, she was like, we need to write a book about that. So that's how we decided to write Burnout.

10:24Amelia Nagoski:All right. All right. So what what burned you out and and how I mean, you you you've got better by reading a pile of peer reviewed papers. You're like, OK, I have more work to do. Hold on while I give me two weeks while I read these papers in the hospital, burnt out. I am a very literal person. I thrive on science and academia. I am I've never been like super touchy feely despite being a musician and an artist. I didn't get the touchy-feely part until I was explicitly taught it in school. But the thing that happened was in my doctoral program, I was a woman, at least a feminine. I now identify as agender because I didn't know agender was a thing back then.

11:11For those who don't know, what is that? Oh, I have a body that you look at me and go, that's a woman. But I have never felt like that identity is true for me. When I was a teenager, we were assigned to write a poem in high school English class where you say, I am an adjective noun, and the adjective changes every line, and the noun stays the same. I am a happy girl. I am an athletic girl. I am a musical girl. And I could not come up with a noun that described me because girl didn't feel true. Boy definitely wasn't true, but it felt like all the gender words had nothing to do with me. And then I learned that there's a name for that experience, and it's agender.

11:57But as a feminine-bodied person, that makes me a clear, small minority among conductors. And the vast majority of my professors were men who thought that a conductor looks and acts like a man. And I also found out later was diagnosed with autism. So I was also a neurodivergent person trying to fit into this like very neurotypical construct framework of the academic path. So this struggle I was having of not conforming to the expectations of the people who were in charge and me trying to like shave off parts of myself or stuff them down so that I would fit into this expectation meant that I was constantly striving for a literally unobtainable ideal.

12:53I cannot be a man. I cannot be neurotypical. It wasn't my academic work that was a problem. It was the way I was as a person. And so this disconnect between who I am and what was being expected of me outside of the actual just academic expectations tore me apart. It actually destroyed organs because it put me in this constant state of fight or flight, of fear, because these people control my future. They could decide not to give me this degree that I was working on. At the same time that I was a full-time student commuting 65 miles each way to campus with three part-time jobs and three teenage stepchildren, And I ended up in the hospital and doctors told me, yeah, this is just stress.

13:46You need to relax. And I was like, ow. Yeah.

13:58Stay tuned for more Mindful Mama podcasts right after this break. I don't know about you, but all of the to-dos and all of the calls and the appointments and our different schedules and our family can be really confusing and overwhelming managing that whole family schedule. I want my home to feel simple, warm, stress-free. Technology can actually help us with this. I am loving the Kozila Calendar Plus 2. It is the technology that helps take the mental load off. It's really, really easy to use and it really integrates seamlessly into your daily life. So basically it puts all of your calendars, to-dos, and reminders all in one place.

14:44Not in someone's pocket, but on a central place in your home on the wall. Sinks to keep everyone's schedules up to date in real time so you avoid conflicts. It really helps you with creating events and birthday parties. It has a reward system to encourage kids' independence. It has meal planning features. What I love about it is that instead of these calendars all just kind of being on these individual devices in our pockets, another reason to kind of pull our attention away from the communal space, it puts it up on the wall where we can look at it together and it syncs it all together. And it encourages kids who are developing independence and it helps kids with ADHD who benefit from structured routines.

15:25And it's so easy and effortless. That's why I love about it. Plus, the screensaver can display family photos, videos, and upcoming schedules when it's idle. Kozila even has voice assistant with AI editing and planning. I can't recommend this enough for more simplicity, for more ease. To bring it all together in one central place makes it so much better for your family. Go to kozila.com and use code HUNTER to get$30 off your first order at checkout. That's C-O-Z-Y-L-A dot com to get$30 off your first order with the promo code HUNTER. It's interesting because it, you know, I just had a conversation with Dr.

16:15Amelia Nagoski:Ross Green talking about kids who, you know, are having behavior problems and are challenging and thinking about how they have these, talking about this idea that they have these expectations on them and that they can't meet them. And that puts them into fight, flight, or freeze stress response. And it's similar, I think, sometimes with parents, right? Like, you know, for women, we're supposed to be pretty, as you just said, pretty calm, generous, happy, and attentive to the needs of others. And, you know, to be that ideal mother, parent, you know, for, and then we're trying to put ourselves in this box of expectations that we may or may not be able to meet.

17:06Amelia Nagoski:And that, and just the stress of having these expectations, holding them, whether they're, you know, whether they're societies or they're our own or whatever, it's making everything so much worse and so much harder for you to actually be the parent that your kid needs you to be. Yeah, because the thing is the parent your kid needs you to be is absolutely not the same thing as the parent that society tells you you ought to be. Your kid will tell you what they need from you. And the list of what society says you should do and be as a parent is not based on that. It's based on how we'll look from the outside when someone witnesses your relationship with your kid or how your kid acts or behaves or whatever.

17:59It's absolutely made up.

18:00Amelia Nagoski:Yeah. Or even depending on their point of view or which, you know, how they feel about whatever issue it is, you know, etc. Like it could be some people are expecting a view that things that are completely polar opposite behaviors or actions as a parent, you know, and yeah, exactly. The goals are unmeetable. And so when we keep holding ourselves up to these unmeetable goals, that constant striving puts us in that chronic stress state. Not to mention that the whole pretty, happy, calm, generous thing is actually a nice way to parent. Because look, when that stress happens, is activated in our bodies, in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, where we developed the stress response, this was supposed to be a thing that we use to save our lives, to escape from the saber-toothed tiger.

18:52So when we get that, you know, the fight or flight state is not like an imaginary thing, It's a cycle that happens in your body. Those neurochemicals that are released. We all know adrenaline and glucocorticoids and cortisol. Like we all know about those hormones. But the thing is, they get released and they tell every system in your body, do something different from typical right now in order to save our lives. Blood pressure, go up. Breathing, get faster. Nervous system, be on alert. Immune system, take a back seat. We don't need to worry about malaria because we're about to get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger or a reproductive system.

19:34We don't need to worry about reproducing right now. Babies are not going to happen if we get eaten by the saber-toothed tiger. So every system in your body changes. Your skin changes. If you've ever been getting like a breakout because you're stressed, that's because stress affects every system in your body. Um, so we're supposed to run and leap and jump and climb and escape and use all of those changed resources in order to save our lives. And then we complete the whole cycle and return to baseline. but when we really need to get out the door to get to work to pay the bills on time and the kid has not put on their shoes yet and you warned them 10 minutes ago in 10 minutes i need you to have your shoes on in five minutes i need you had your shoes on we are five minutes late why are your shoes still not on you want to fight or flight your body is full of stress hormones because your daily life you will depend on this moment right here and why can they not just put the shoes on.

20:38But the thing you do, the perennial question, in that moment, you cannot run away from your kid. Please do not do that. We as a society need you to not give up on your child and leave them by the side of the road. And you also can't fight your kid. It's just wrong. So instead, we smile and we're polite and we're gentle and we help. And that is what is good as a parent to do. And that requires us to stuff that stress response way deep down. But the thing is that we never completed the stress response cycle. So we need to deal with the thing that caused our stress, like the kid who needs our patience and our love and our support.

21:22We need to deal with that stressor in a separate process than the process we use to deal with the actual stress that happened in our body. That's the disconnect between the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, where the stress response was effective for getting rid of the stressor. And nowadays, when the stress response is no longer useful, now it's just a thing we have to manage separately.

21:48Amelia Nagoski:Yeah, yeah. It's this intense biological, as you discovered, you know, Oh, this intense biological system that is affecting every single thing. And yeah, we do have to, we have to, I think what you're saying in a way is like, you know, we can't just choose not to be stressed. We can't just think our way out of it. We can't just pretend it's not happening. No. You know what I mean? These are all. No. Yeah. And that is a thing that I believe. Yeah. If I just changed my mind. This is a thing that we are sold. change your mindset and you'll change your experience of stress. Stress has nothing to do with your mind.

22:26It's fully in your nervous system. It's fully in your body, your hormones and the electrical signals. Well, your mind and body are not separate. So what you think does... No, when I say mind like this, I mean your imagination. It's not a thing you can think your way out of. It's not part of your cognition. Stress has nothing to do with cognition is the more accurate way of saying that, more precise.

22:48Amelia Nagoski:Okay, okay. Well, for those, you know, for those people who are in this biological cycle, what are, you dove into it, you've read the thousand fewer research papers, what are some of the evidence-based ways that we can complete the stress cycle? At a population level, the most effective way is to, you're having fight or flight responses, to fight or flee. It's to run, to leap, to jump, to climb, to use your body in a way that tells it that it has the capacity to move you from danger to safety. So like when people say exercise helps you manage your stress, this is why. However, I do want to put the caveat that my sister is my identical twin.

23:40She can go for a bike ride and come back and feel the weight of the world lifted off her shoulders. She's a natural exerciser. This works well for her. I have never experienced that. We are identical twins raised in the same household. Physical activity does not work for me. Not physical activity alone. People just vary. So when the world says physical activity will help you manage your stress, like that's true for a lot of people, but it might not individually be true for you. And the world has like a moral thing to say about physical activity, like it's the best thing you can do for yourself.

24:15But it might not be. So that's just one way. Another way, which is, I think the most important way, is sleep.

24:25Amelia Nagoski:Okay, I want to come back to sleep. Because on the physical activity thing, I'm thinking about Robert Sapolsky's book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, You know, and why don't super-skeletters, right? Because they're stressed and they're in the savannah and you see them just like shake out their whole body, right? They do like what dogs do, like shake it out, right? So maybe you can't go for a run, but maybe you can shake out your hands and your shoulders or that kind of thing. Because just to think about, just to underline the idea that, well, this is a biological physical response and your muscles have gotten tight and there's blood flow to your muscles preparing you to run.

25:04Amelia Nagoski:Yes. And if you can't run, but you could maybe shake out your arms. You can. Or you can even just lay in bed and tighten every muscle from your head to your shoulders to your torso to your thighs to your calves to your toes and crunch them all and contract them all for as long as you possibly can. And it's not comfortable anymore, but you hold them a little longer and then you let them go. But then again, some people have medical disabilities that prevent them from accessing any kind of movement that effectively tells their body that their body has the capacity to move them from danger to safety.

25:42It is just absolutely not true that this will work for everyone. But we give a list of like a dozen things in the book that evidence has shown effectively allows your body to recognize that it has moved from danger to safety. So it doesn't have to be that one thing. It is, at a population level, the most effective. It's true. But that doesn't mean individually it's going to be true for a single person. Okay.

26:07Amelia Nagoski:And you were saying sleep. And I want to say that I just want to interject here that the book Burnout is great because you talk about this idea that, A, like the game is rigged in that we have all these pressures on us, especially women. And that, you know, that human giver syndrome. But you also taught, I love that you talk about the idea of the science of winning, you know, a science of being able to avoid burnout, beat burnout. You call this part wax on, wax off. Yeah. Because it's the idea of these repetitive, mundane tasks. So we're talking about this as if you're feeling a stress, you're trying to get out the door and we're saying, oh, Emily's saying, go for a run.