the secret to unlocking the stress cycle

Indeed, Burnout’s attention to structural causes of stress is so important and another way it stands out from much self-help literature. They engage with structural issues of racism and sexism, acknowledging that a great deal of our stress comes from harm baked into the system rather than our own individual choices. Similarly, they connect their ideas to exemplars drawn from their experiences with real people. Emily and Amelia ground their recommendations in science, examining how hormones, neurotransmitters, and other physiological markers of stress response influence our emotions (and vice versa).

There might be a few good revelations in here, but the value of this book isn’t in revelations it’s in relevance. I also appreciated how they frame everything in terms of “completing the stress cycle.” They distinguish between dealing with the cause of stress and dealing with the stress itself, acknowledging that the former action can be difficult but sometimes when we deal with the cause, we forget to deal with the stress that was caused. Some of the advice is very obvious, like the value of physical activity (though I am pleased how they emphasize that physical activity includes more than exercise!). I think that will be true for most of us who live with burnout. Now, I already knew a lot of what the Nagoskis share in this book.

Suffice it to say … yeah, this book is meant for me. Page xi of the introduction states, “Twenty to thirty percent of teachers in America have moderately high to high levels of burnout.” I nearly broke down crying when I read that, and we weren’t even into the book itself! I am a teacher in Canada, and you can read a little rant about my burnout here. It won’t fix your problems, but it might make life a little easier to bear. Instead, this is a book about recognizing and understanding where you are in your stress cycle and how you can manage that stress in a healthier way. It is a self-help book, but only in the most scientific and compassionate sense of that genre-the Nagoski twins make no promises of “curing” your burnout, and they evince a healthy skepticism of the self-care industry.

As the subtitle implies, this book promises to deepen our understanding of burnout. Burnout is, as the title implies, about the sustained sensation many of us feel when we have overextended ourselves and depleted our resources. I received this book nearly a year ago (maybe a whole year ago) from my friend and former teaching colleague Emma.

The secret to unlocking the stress cycle