Caitlin’s Creative Business Bookshelf - Episode 6: Burnout by Emily & Amelia Nagoski
We are looking at another book from my Creative Business Bookshelf today and it is a really, really good one. If you read no other self help book this year, you should make it this one. It is fantastic and a subject close to my heart as well.
And today we are talking about burnout, and more specifically the book Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski.
So I think everyone should read this book, basically, and I go into all the reasons why in this week’s episode! Listen below or read the transcript underneath.
I think everyone should read this book.
Obviously, I'm coming at this through the lens of being a business owner and talking about self employment and burnout in that context as well, but there's a lot in here for all of us. I think absolutely anyone would find this book a real treat to read.
It's very depressing in parts, not going to lie to you, but there is so much good stuff in here.
My experiences of burnout
I wish that I had read this when I was going through my stage of burnout.
Obviously I wouldn't be talking to you today if it wasn't for going through a burnout. I wouldn't be so passionate about creativity and creative self care.
There's so many things I wouldn't have done if I hadn't gone through that horrendous stage of burnout. But obviously at the time, you're kind of just going through it and I think that burnout was in danger a little while ago of becoming a bit of a buzzword and we all kind of knew how to identify it.
There wasn't really much practical support and I kind of had to find the answers myself really. And I think that's kind of the nature of it, because obviously when we go for a burnout, how it manifests physically and mentally is obviously very different for every individual person.
Basically, I wish I had read this when going through it. I think it would have saved me a lot of heartache, a lot of stress, a lot of mental health issues.
What’s great about the book
The reason I love this book is because I think it is so accessible as a self help book. It's really rooted in science and practicality as well as really talking about burnout in a really realistic way.
And I know that sounds a bit like of a strange thing to say, but I think sometimes when we talk about burnout, it can be like a little bit abstract, a little bit like unrelatable language wise. But I think this is really accessible. I think anyone reading this will understand it, will get what the Nagoskis are talking about. And there's loads of practical exercises in there too, and like really good practical exercises.
I was looking online before recording this and they have actually brought out a Burnout workbook to go along with the book, which, if it's anything like the actual book itself, I think would be really interesting to check out.
So I got this book from my local library, I think. Yeah, it was about December last year, which was quite a nice time to read it, actually, because we all know that December is quite an intense month for any of us. I found last December quite difficult because it was the anniversary of my burnout and around the anniversary of my burnout, it does kind of make me think, make me reflect. And I was definitely kind of feeling that real end of year pressure and wanting to take time off and negotiating all that. So the book actually found me at the perfect time because it definitely helped me to kind of move through a lot of the feelings I was having and to name them and to also do something practical about them, which I think is really important.
So honestly, even though I'd heard a lot of people talk about the book and say how amazing it was, I was a little hesitant to pick it up just because obviously I've read a lot of self help books in my time with varying degrees of quality.
But like I said, this book is really something that kind of elevates like above the kind of bog standard self help book, I think. And applying the business owner lens to it is a really fun and interesting exercise. And I mean, that's why I'm talking to you on this podcast as well.
Another reason why I'm doing that is because I love nonfiction and applying the business owner lens to nonfiction books is something I found I find really, really interesting.
There's a lot of feminism in here as well, which I was a huge, huge fan of. I wasn't expecting it, but I was pleasantly surprised by it. The kind of the feminist, anti capitalist lens it has to it as well, which is really refreshing because, again, that's not something you find in a lot of self help books, let alone ones that are more targeted to women, I would say.
And it's a very recent book as well, so I think it was first published in 2019 and as with any books released around that time, I do always wonder how a COVID lens would affect the content of the book. Because I think the conversation around burnout, I think as much as it was happening, I think it ramped up over COVID.
What is the book about?
So the subtitle of the book is about resolving your stress cycle, which is what the book kind of primarily focuses on. As much as the book is about burnout, it's actually kind of mainly about these stress cycles we seal in our modern everyday lives and how we kind of solve them.
So basically, back when we were cavemen, cave women, if a stressful situation came up, we would have that fight or flight instinct that we talk a lot about in psychology and I think most of us are probably at least vaguely familiar with it.
For example, you'd have a leopard chasing you. So then what happens is you kill it, you run away from it and the stressful event finishes.
And physiologically we used to recognise that that would finish, it would be over and we could move on. All our kind of hormone level spikes. Everything else would kind of spike and be over and it would kind of be done.
But obviously now we're in modern day times, 21st century things are a little bit different from back then, to say the least. And we don't get the chance to complete the cycle of stress in the same way because we don't have kind of like a clear end to things.
We don't have that moment where we kind of resolve the stressful thing because nowadays the stressful thing is we're overworked, we're getting emails late at night where we haven't taken a week off for years. And obviously those are events that physiologically and psychologically we can't kind of complete the cycle around, which leads to us feeling so stressed and so anxious and so burnt out because we don't have anywhere for this kind of spike in energy to go.
We don't have anywhere for all the stress responses in our body to kind of finish in the same way as we did way back, way back, way back when. S
o a lot of what's being discussed in the book are those stress cycles and how we can finish the cycle ourselves, thus avoiding anxiety and burnout. It's a concept I hadn't really thought about before, where burnout kind of comes from.
In particular, another big concept which is talked about a lot in the book is Human Giver Syndrome. And it's something that, as women, we're really, really afflicted with. And I'm going to read out the bit that talks about it because it sums it up a million times better than I did. So, basically, human giver syndrome is basically the expectation that women should be at all times pretty happy, calm, generous and attentive to the needs of others. Which means they must never be ugly, angry, upset, ambitious or attentive to their own needs. Givers are not supposed to need anything. If a giver doesn't obediently and sweetly hand over whatever a being wants, the giver may be punished, shamed or even destroyed.
I remember reading this in the book and thinking, oh, my God, if that's not true for us generally in society, which I think it absolutely 100% is, and I'm sure we recognise at least a little bit of ourselves in that description I've just read to you. I feel like that feels even more so true for business owners and people like us, right?
Especially those of us out there running a business who are on the more service based side of things. It definitely spoke to a lot of those kind of fears, a lot of those thoughts I had when I started my business back in 2020, which feels like a million years ago at this point. And as you may or may not know, I started my business as a virtual assistant and still do some of that work now.
But obviously any kind of service that you have where you're providing people with things, where you're giving things, the idea that we have to be giving all the time and we have to make others happy all the time and not having boundaries around what we do, that was a lesson I learned the really, really hard way.
So the discussion of human giver syndrome then kind of goes into how burnout is really prevalent amongst women because we've got this human giver syndrome. It's the result of a patriarchal society.
And the discussions of feminism in the book are great because I think they land exactly on the right side of not being overly preachy or patronising. I think how it breaks it down is really interesting and really, again, accessible. So even if you're a feminist killjoy like me or if you're someone who's newer to feminist ideas, there's something for both of us there, I think, and it's not too preachy, it's not too patronising, it's not too over the top. I think the balance is absolutely perfect.
Another thing I learned from the book, which I found really interesting, was burnout was actually coined as a technical term back in 1975.
So I was definitely very surprised when I learned that it had actually been kind of doing the rounds for quite a long time, actually. And it was a man who coined the phrase, which for some reason really surprised me. Not sure why. It just did. Herbert Freudenberger. I think I've pronounced that correctly, hopefully.
And when he came up with the term burnout, he defined it with three separate components, which were emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and decreased sense of accomplishment.
So the book delves into a lot of statistics and research and things like that. And obviously, because the authors are American, I believe a lot of the statistics are American as well. But, I mean, just one kind of statistic that I wrote down just because it was a lot 20% to 30% of teachers in America at the moment roughly have moderately high to higher levels of burnout, and similar rates are found among university professors and international humanitarian aid workers.
I do wonder how high the figures are for a self employed folk. I imagine the numbers will probably be on the higher end of the scale. I don't know if there's ever been any official research done into levels of burnout amongst self employed people, but, yeah, I'd imagine the numbers are quite high. Whenever I talk about this, whenever I talk about burnout, I rarely get someone say to me or I've I've
So I've touched on how burnout is defined. The fact that it has a bit of a vague list of symptoms and signs is something that I think is both helpful and not helpful simultaneously. Because I know that when I was going through it, I really struggled to kind of pinpoint exactly when I was going through it.
And it was only when I'd taken some time off, I had to take some time off and I was like, oh, no, this is that thing everyone talks about. I'm definitely having it. There's not like a clear list of symptoms that you can kind of cheque off, which I think is why I didn't recognise it quite later in the game, and why I wish I'd kind of had this book, really, because obviously it goes into the different symptoms, the different kind of signs, in way more detail. And like I said, having the fact that it is such a wide definition and a wide category is both helpful and not very helpful, because a lot of the signs you can recognise.
But the fact that it's quite a lot of them, I think, can mean that it's sometimes a little harder to pinpoint it a little harder to kind of name it for what it is, I think, but it was quite an interesting thing to think about. So that's kind of the theory behind the book and that kind of pertains to the first section of the book, which is mainly around what it is, why we struggle with it.
The practical bit
And then the second bit of the book is more dealing with the practical strategies. As I mentioned at the top of the episode, I think the practical bits of the book are where it shines even more. I think the exercises in here are fantastic.
I was really pleasantly surprised at how practical the exercises are, but also how detailed they are, how easy they are, how actionable they are. And it touches on everything for kind of searching for meaning in what you're doing, which is something that's incredibly relevant to us as business owners. Acceptance of our emotions, learning how to rest again, something that we're not taught a lot. And I think we could all do with learning a bit more about and leaning into a bit more.
An activity in the book was a time blocking template and you're encouraged by the authors kind of prioritise rest and where your work sits in it. I'm always going on about time blocking anyway, but I think in a context like this, where it's encouraging you to make sure that you factor in a certain percentage of time to rest and a certain percentage of time for other things, for example, smashing the patriarchy, which I love all about that.
That was a really useful exercise for me to think about because as much as I talk about time blocking my work and things like that, the percentages I assign to things are sometimes not where I'd like them to be. And I think that's true for all of us. It's a practice.
I time block for work, I time blocks for creativity. But do I always time block for rest? No, I probably don't actually. So that was a really interesting one for me to think about and wanted me to think about, not just for myself, but kind of sharing with you as well because I think that's really useful. That section as well also encourages you to obviously do a time blocking calendar for where you're at at the moment and then an ideal one.
So what would you do if everything was perfect or whatever? And then obviously you compare and you use one to inform the other, as it were, which is really fun exercise. And yeah, just like a really nice way of kind of assessing your time without kind of using it as a stick to beat yourself up with, which I think is really important when we look at this kind of work is to not guilt ourselves for all the things we haven't done, which is very easy to do.
Tuning into your purpose is something that's talked about at length as well, which is fantastic. I love to see that. Tapping into why we're doing anything as business owners is really helpful and useful because we don't kind of do it. I think we start our businesses with a grand vision sometimes, but we don't always remember to kind of dial it back and remember. And I know the times that I have been most stressed in my work are the times where I'm not feeling very connected to my vision at all. I'm not feeling very connected to the whole reason that I'm doing this in the first place.
This podcast has actually been a really useful exercise for me to tune into my purpose and like why I started this strand of my business.
Other tips recommended in the book are getting creative. Creative activities, obviously all about that. Resting and taking breaks are essential as well because you can be productive while you're resting. It's why we get all our best ideas when we're doing something like completely different. It's why we get ideas when we like walking around or having a shower or anything like that, really.
A summary
So, yeah, to round things off, this book is just great. This book is just great. I cannot say enough nice things about it and the reason I love it so much was obviously the big science basis. If you're someone who loves numbers and stats and things like that, you'll love it because it's not just another self help book.
It's really rooted in actual helpful things that are easy to bring into your everyday and that are accessible and not patronising and yeah, it's just great. And I think the more we talk about burnout, the more books people write about it, the more advice that we can get from people who've been there.
I just feel like the less we'll see it, the less we'll have business owners struggling, the less we’ll have experiences of burnout. It was very timely for me to pick up the book when I did because it kind of coincided with not just that year anniversary of hitting burnout for me, but also the time of year. I mentioned I read it in December of last year and it's a time when we're rushing around. It's very stressful. It feels quite high octane for us anyway, especially running our businesses and we're trying to I really felt that last year that there was so much talk about how you’ve got to finish the year strong.
And I kind of felt like I don't want to finish the year strong. I've been working hard all year. I don't want to finish the year strong. No shade to it. I think that's fine to aim for, but yeah, it's not always relevant.
So I really wanted to bring this book to your attention today because I think it's something that's relevant for a lot of us, especially if you are a woman listening to this who has to juggle other things like families, caring, responsibilities, all the other stuff that goes on in our lives.
And even when we drill down further and we look at the intersections around that as well, I think that it's a horribly prevalent experience for a lot of us. And like I said, I think the more we talk about it, the more we kind of name it for what it is and the more we share our strategies as well.
My strategy was getting creative and that's why I'm so passionate about sharing it with people now, is because for me, it really worked. It really worked to have something that was completely unconnected from my work, something that I didn't have to be good at, something I didn't have to achieve a goal in. It was just something where I could just be it's touched on in this book and I just think it's really important and I think the more we kind of share strategies.
The more we kind of share when we're having a bit of a shit time, I think the more we can kind of start to bin it off altogether, the more we can start to fight it, the more we talk about it, I think the less we'll see it honestly, honestly and truly.
I don't need to tell you that modern life is quite a lot. Way back when, in cave people times, there were obviously quite a lot of very intense things happening as well. But, yeah, modern life's hard. And I think the more books like this that are out there, the more books we kind of read like this, all the better. All the better.
Self employment is tough, and if you're going through it at the moment, I just want you to know that I see you and I'm sending you audio waves of love.
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