344. Burnout – A Feminist Book about Stress: An Interview with Emily and Amelia Nagoski

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Hello there, and welcome to episode number 344 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. I am so excited to share this conversation with you, I cannot even tell you. Today I am talking with Emily and Amelia Nagoski, authors of Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. I think this might be one of those episodes that you might re-listen to, because what Emily and Amelia have to say is incredibly wise and kind and so empowering and soothing, all at the same time. No kidding. Their own description of Burnout might be the best one: on Amelia’s Medium bio, it says, “a feminist book about stress.” And on Emily’s website, the description reads, “It’s for women who feel overwhelmed and exhausted by all they have to do, yet worrying that they’re not doing ‘enough.’” Sound like something that might apply?

Emily’s name you might recognize from previous podcast interviews. She writes romantic fiction as Emily Foster and is the author of Come as You Are, which is about the science of arousal and orgasm. Amelia is her twin sister, and she is a choral conductor, and during our conversation we take a little side trip into self-awareness of one’s own voice, the policing of women’s speaking styles, and then the larger picture of being aware of one’s own body.

The section on stress and emotional processing in Emily’s book Come as You Are partially inspired Burnout, along with the personal experiences of Emily and Amelia using the information that they learned in their own lives. We talk about how wellness has become an achievement, and how we as individuals can allow wellness to happen. There is so much practical advice, too. We talk about things that we can do to smash the patriarchy a piece at a time, including and especially sleep. Oh, sleep. I love sleep; sleep is everything. We talk a lot about what stress is, what it does to your body, and what you can do to better handle the effects of it through the stress response cycle. Short version: stress isn’t solved or dissolved by dealing with whatever it was that caused the stress in the first place. Stress is a cycle, and it is completed by action, and we have to complete within and through our physical bodies that process, and incomplete stress cycles tend to accumulate. But I do have very good news for you: we realize in the course of the interview – or at least I do – that reading romance is one way to help complete your stress cycle and your emotional cycle! To quote Amelia, romance novels are a nutritious part of this burnout prevention strategy.

Now, I do have a slight spoiler alert to share with you: at about forty-three minutes and twenty seconds in [43:20] until about forty-four minutes, thirty seconds [44:30], so just over a minute, I spoil the ending of How to Train Your Dragon 3: The Hidden World, so if you haven’t seen it yet and you still plan on seeing it, I do talk about the ending at about forty-three minutes, fifteen seconds [43:15], but you can skip ahead twice with thirty-second intervals if your podcast app allows that, and you’ll miss that section. We talk about that in the context of the importance of completing emotional cycles in the entertainment that we consume, and yes, this is part of why cliffhangers are so deeply upsetting.

Basically, I learned from this book that my body is trying to take care of me, and there’s a lot more that I can do to help myself out. Learning to take care of one’s own body is very difficult, and in this interview we talk about some of those concepts. However, the book Burnout explores them in much greater detail. We reviewed Burnout on Smart Bitches this week, and if you read our review – yes, of course I will link to it in the show notes – you know that reading this book changed a number of the ways that I treat myself, how I talk to myself, how I care for myself, and has heightened my awareness of how important it is to be more patient and gentle and understanding of what my body is trying to do. I cannot recommend this book more highly, and I cannot recommend this interview more emphatically. Amelia and Emily are, in their own words, trying to encourage us to change the world by caring for each other and not letting the world demand of us what we are unable to give. One key moment in the book is asking yourself the question, what if I could just decide that I was valuable, and it would be true?

I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I have.

This week’s podcast is brought to you by Hired by Zoey Castile. Inspired by the Magic Mike franchise, vibrant new voice Zoey Castile continues the Happy Endings series of modern, multicultural, and millennial-focused sexy contemporary romances with Hired, a humorous and relatable novel about figuring out your truth path in life. Politics and pleasure meet under the festive skies of New Orleans as a one-night stand between escort and dancer Aiden Rios and political daughter Faith Charles turns into so much more. For a man who makes his living pleasuring women, what happens when the only pay-out worth having is love? Hired by Zoey Castile is on sale now wherever books are sold and at kensingtonbooks.com.

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At the end of the episode, I will be telling you about the music that you are listening to, I will have a preview of what is coming up on Smart Bitches next week, I will have a terrible, terrible joke, but if you are looking for any of the things that we mention in this episode, they will absolutely be in the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast. We talk about a lot of books, a lot of articles, different links; there is so much that we cover in this interview, so if you are looking for some of the things that we mention, they will be in the show notes, never fear.

And if you have comments or suggestions or you just want to reach out, you can find me at [email protected], or you can leave a message at 1-201-371-3272. Our voicemail is always open for your suggestions, questions, requests for recommendation, and if you just want to tell a joke, that’s also fine.

This interview is really outstanding, and I am so grateful to Emily and Amelia Nagoski for talking to me about their new book. It is out this week. It’ll blow your mind, so let’s get started with this podcast.

[music]

Sarah: Thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview. I am so excited to talk to you about this book, oh my God!

Amelia Nagoski: We are so excited that you read it.

Sarah: Oh dude, seriously? I was like, nobody talk to me. I don’t care if you’re hungry; fuck off.

[Laughter]

Sarah: I’m going to read my book right now. Yeah, no, I was super – I, I have a, a review copy, which means that my highlights on my reading device don’t synchronize to a desktop, so I sat with my, with my Kindle open looking at all the things that I have highlighted. I think I highlighted, like, sixty-two percent of this book! I’m like, this is going to be a terrible interview; I’m just going to have big-ass quotes that I highlighted. That’s not useful to anyone.

Emily Nagoski: There are times when I’m like, okay, so what this interview should be is just, like, let’s read the book. Let’s just read the book –

Sarah: Yep.

Emily: – ‘cause that’s what the answer – yeah.

Amelia: I have a friend, we sent a digital copy to a friend of mine who has a, a three-year-old, and she’s like, I had to lock myself in the bathroom to read it, but I did. Yeah.

Sarah: Yep, done that. And, and three-year-olds are a stress cycle.

Amelia: [Laughs] Yeah.

Emily: Oh God.

[Laughter]

Sarah: So this is the only awkward and weird part: would you please introduce yourself, or selves, to the people who will be listening and tell them who you are and what you do?

Emily: Sure! I’m Emily Nagoski. I’m a sex educator. I wrote a book called Come as You  Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life. I also have written two romance novels called How Not to Fall and How Not to Let Go. And:

Amelia: I’m Amelia Nagoski; I’m Emily’s identical twin sister. I have a Doctorate of Musical Arts in Conducting, and I’m a college music professor at Western New England University.

Emily: And we promise we are two separate people, even though people do tell us we sound like we’re the same person. And together we have written a book called Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle.

Sarah: Now I know you’re going to get this question a lot, but I don’t know the answer, so I have to ask: how did you come to write a book together, because while you’re identical twins, your fields of expertise are slightly different –

Amelia: Yeah!

Sarah: – unless you see sex educating as a different form of conducting.

Emily: There are surprising overlaps? We had –

Sarah: Yeah! [Laughs]

Emily: – a realization at some point that my Master’s degree is in Counseling/Psychology, and Amelia’s Master’s degree is in Choral Conducting, and we recognized that oh, we both got Master’s degrees in how to listen and feel feelings. Hmm, I wonder if that says something about, like, what was missing in our family of origin. So we have some surprising points of overlap, including what Burnout is about. The reason – so when you write a sex book, especially a sex book about women, people assume the next book will be a book about men’s sexuality, or a book about couples’ sexuality, or even a relationship book, but as I was traveling around talking with people about Come as You Are and the science of women’s sexual wellbeing, people kept saying, yeah, all that sex science, that’s super great, Emily, thanks for that, but man, the chapter that really changed things for me was that chapter on stress and emotion processing. Thank you so much for that! And I was like, but I worked so hard to get all this sex science into the book, and I told Amelia. I was like, what’s going on with this? People really love this emotion processing section, and she was like, well, no duh. So you can, do you want to –

Amelia: Yeah!

Emily: – tell people?

Amelia: So this is Amelia. So when Emily was telling me that –

Sarah: Hi, Amelia!

Amelia: Hi! So people, when people were telling Emily about the feelings are hard and I need to learn about that, I, I already knew that because I’d been a, a choir teacher for many years and myself been through conservatory training where musical training is a lot about feelings. There’s a lot of, okay, there’s two sides to it: there’s the technical stuff, which is how to sing and how to read music, which is all deeply related to your fundamental humanity, so taking voice lessons is a little bit like therapy combined with yoga, about breathing and awareness and getting in touch with your feelings. There’s a lot of crying and confessing that goes on in voice lessons, as well as in choral rehearsals, and then when you train a performer to bring their own experience and their own life to their performance, you ask a choir, convince me that this is a true story that you’re telling, that you’re singing me this song because it’s a message that you need to communicate so desperately that you’re going to sing about it – right, it’s that important, you can’t just say it – so I’ve been working with my own feelings through musical training and trying to ask other members of the ensemble, hey, let’s work with your feel- – I know that it takes training, so I already knew that people were going to be surprised by the information Emily was talking about, because I have ta-, been teaching it. However –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amelia: – I did not know how to translate that fluidity of emotional change and honesty and vulnerability, I didn’t know how to do any of that outside of a podium and a rehearsal and a stage, and when I learned how to do it in real life it literally saved my life twice.

Emily: Like, Amelia was literally –

Sarah: Wow.

Emily: – in the hospital due to stress-induced inflammation. She got appendicitis; it was six times its normal size, had to be removed due to stress, because she was not doing this completing the cycle thing that we write about. So not only did we have different professional expertises that taught us the importance of this whole emotion thing, but we’d also had the personal experience of her learning how to use this information in her own personal life and having it transform her relationship with her body and with other people.

Sarah: Wow. Now with, with choral instruction, I know from my own music education, especially with the, with the voice, you’re already dealing, when you’re talking to a, a chorus of people who already know how to sing, pre-, presumably, I know I was always instructed about, like, you know, leading my voice around the room or putting it here or moving it there and moving my voice up and down my throat, which is not exactly what I’m doing, but I – it’s been a while. That required an enormous amount of awareness of my lungs and my diaphragm and my throat, and even now I’m aware, like, oh, my voice is tired; I’m going to shut the fuck up now. When you –

Amelia: That’s amazing that you have that awareness. That’s really great; a lot of people don’t.

Sarah: Oh gosh! I did an interview with Lorelei King, who’s an audiobook narrator?

Amelia: Mm-hmm, yeah.

Sarah: And we just, like, we went off! I had to edit it out. It was like twenty-five minutes of complaining about how loud restaurants are, and we hate going out to eat.

Emily: Hmm, yes.

Amelia: Yes.

Sarah: [Laughs] It hurts my voice! I’m tired, and my throat hurts, and I have kids! They talk, right?

Amelia: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: Like, all the time, and I have to answer, and then my voice hurts because I’m in this loud, reverberating, hard-surfaced, minimalist, crap restaurant, so yeah, I, I’m very aware. But one of the things that I loved about being aware of just that part of my body was that I was better able to listen when, like, well, my, my vocal cords are hurting; I have to shut up. I’m really bad at listening to, like, everything else! And it, it occurs to me from reading Come as You Are that women especially, we’re not taught to listen to our own bodies unless it’s for a productive reason. Does that make sense?

Amelia: Yes! I am sitting here trying to shut myself up, because I could go on about this exact thing forever. This is –

Sarah: Please do! I’m recording, and that’s why we’re here!

[Laughter]

Emily: Okay. Okay. It’s Amelia, by the way.

Amelia: The, yeah, this is Amelia. So this is one of the main points of overlap between our two areas of expertise, like, general wellneff and, wellness and health behavior versus –

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Amelia: – music-making? When I teach singers to sing, they have to be aware of their physical sensations. They have to know where their feet are, they have to know the state of tension or relaxation in their abdomen, they have to know if there’s tension in their butt or their legs or their knees and their shoulders, because your body is a single organism that works in coordination with many, many parts, and the only way you sing very well is when the, all the parts cooperate in a, in a smooth and – it’s got to be muscle memory, habit, but you don’t create that habit unless you are aware of, you know, problems so that you can turn to them and address them. So yes, and particularly voices. Oh my God, women’s voices are a problem in the twenty-first century.

Sarah: Aren’t they, though?

Amelia: I could talk about this for so long, like from, this is a whole thing for me; this is a soapbox for me. Okay, I’ll just give you the short rundown: there’s this thing called vocal fry, and people complain about it.

Sarah: Oh my God – [fries vocally] – I, I know.

Amelia: Right? Okay, exactly.

Sarah: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Amelia: Vocal fry is not inherently bad. It’s, it’s a register of your voice. You have chest voice and head voice and whistle tone –

Sarah: Yep.

Amelia: – and you have all these different registers, and fry is just one of them, and your voice is not intended to stay in any of them for too long, just like your body’s not intended to stay in any individual state for so long. So there’s this research that shows that people find deeper voices more authoritative. Well, guess what happens when you lower your voice: you go through head voice, down to chest voice, down to fry. The, the lower part of your register is vocal fry, so women who are trying to speak at a lower pitch to sound more authoritative push too far into the fry register, and then they get stuck there, and then people complain that their voices are annoying.

Sarah: Yep.

Amelia: [Laughs] Because they’re trying to conform to the thing that society has told them to do! And they’re not even aware of how hard it is on their voices, so they do this for sometimes years at a time, not noticing the damage they’re doing by pushing too hard and making their voice stay in one register for too long, and they’re not aware that it’s actually causing damage, and I, I should probably stop now, but, like, the, hmm, it’s a whole big thing, yeah.

Sarah: Yep.

Emily: But it’s an example of the way our fields actually overlap, ‘cause she’s talking about the ways patriarchy changes women’s behavior in ways that distract –

Sarah: I’m sorry, hold on. Hold on! Hold on. I think it’s patriarchy-ugh.

Emily: Patriarchy –

Amelia and Emily: – ugh!

Sarah: Thank you, yes.

Emily: [Laughs]

Sarah: Okay, I apologize for interrupting you, but I just –

Emily: No, no, you’re right! [Laughs more]

Sarah: – I had not completed the patriarchy stress cycle without the, the accessory –

Emily: Ugh, yes!

Sarah: – so I’m going to shut up now. [Laughs]

Emily: You’re right. This is an example of the ways that the patriarchy –

Everyone: Ugh!

Emily: – changes women’s behavior so that women feel like they’re conforming to the expectation, and their efforts to conform cause them to do things that result in damage to their bodies.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. I, I can’t think of any other examples of that. [Laughs]

Emily: Right? [Laughs]

Amelia: No, no!

Sarah: There’s, like, there’s not, like, fifty that just ran to the front of my brain!

Amelia and Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: Ah, dude.

Amelia: [Sighs] Yeah.

Sarah: So you realize there’s this overlap, and you realize that your own research into stress and how it affects your physical body plus the response to the stress chapter of Come as You Are led to, hey, this is a thing that we can talk about.

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: I know that you mentioned at the start of the book that everyone was, who, who you told about this project was like, okay, when can I read it?

Amelia: Yeah.

Emily: [Laughs]

Sarah: And when I posted about it on Instagram, I got, oh my God, I need that. What has, is that the consistent response so far to this project?

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: Pretty much, like, give it to me now?

Emily: So we’ve been working on it since October of 2015. That’s –

Sarah: Dude!

Emily: – when we had our first meeting with my literary agent, and it’s a bit like, think about what has happened to the world over that span of time.

Sarah: Whole lot of things.

Emily: Like, we’ve adapted the book as we wrote it. After the 2016 presidential election, for example, we’d been working on the book for a year. People knew that we were working on this book, and my friend started emailing me, not just in a state of burnout but a state of, like, despair and helplessness. Emily, I know that you’re writing a book about stress. What do I do? What can I do? What’s going to help? I feel so stuck. And I started emailing people chapters, and the feedback I got from them about, like, what was most helpful for them is what stayed, is what made it into the final draft of the book, so the process of writing it has been a process of being as much of a resource as I can to women as they need help and being granted the gift of their feedback to –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: – sort of distill the book into the messages that are the most valuable for women who are living their lives, trying to get through it. Peggy Orenstein, the author of Girls & Sex, she blurbed the book.

Sarah: Uh-huh.

Emily: She wrote, I mean, her blurb made me cry, because what she said is that the book made her cry in public twice, which, like, for me, that’s the ultimate measure of success, is if I can make somebody cry, especially on public transportation, I feel like I’ve really done something important for their life.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Yeah, generally speaking, getting someone who is reading your book to cry, especially if it’s non-stress – excuse me – if it’s nonfiction about stress –

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: – it, it is that same sort of, I think, visceral, powerful experience of not only being seen but feeling emotionally understood?

Emily: Yes.

Sarah: And if I could just tell you, I’m reading this book to prepare for our interview, and then I also have a library book, which automatically rearranges my reading schedule, because the library book has a timeline –

Emily: Yeah, they’re due.

Sarah: – and I have to, you know – right. Yeah, I, I have to – and it’s a digital, so they just take it. Like, I don’t even get to pay money.

Amelia or Emily: [Gasps!]

Sarah: They, like, nope, that’s mine. Yeah, they just take it back. And I’m really sad about that, but I have, like, okay, I’ve got to read this, so I’m reading your book alongside Good and Mad.

Amelia: [Gasps]

Emily: Ooh!

Sarah: [Laughs] It’s so good!

Emily: Yeah!

Sarah: These books are brilliant! It’s like the peanut butter and chocolate of, of stress cycles!

Amelia: Yes!

Emily: Yeah!

Sarah: I’m telling you, the two of you, like, the, the, the two books and the three of you could have, like, the most amazing time –

Amelia: [Laughs]

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: – because it’s so cathartic and wonderful to be like, oh yeah, everyone’s mad, and here’s how that works, and here’s how you can’t play that out in public, and then you go to your book, and it’s like, yes, here is why you can’t fulfill this stress cycle: because you’re not allowed to, because the punishment of expressing your emotions in this way is X, and I’m like, I just read about that! I just read about that in this other book! These two go together so well, so thank you.

Amelia: Yay!

Sarah: One of the things I really appreciated about your book is the idea that wellness has turned into some sort of achievement?

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: Like, like it’s a bar; like it’s, you have to check it off. Did I do my self-care today? And which automatically sucks the fun out of it. And that wellness is now a term that is used to sell people things!

Amelia: Yes.

Emily: Oh, Goop.

Sarah: I imagine this frustrates you.

Amelia: Yes.

Emily: Oh, Goop.

Sarah: God almighty, she’s got a new deal with Netflix, and I’m like, could you not?

Emily: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sarah: Like, I was so with you on Marie Kondo, but, like, this is not a good follow-up!

Emily: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: So how is it that you were – is that one of the first things that you, that you recognized? That wellness has become like a, like a task? Like an achievement?

Amelia: Oh yes. Back in the day, the – oh, this is Amelia – back before we were preparing to write the book, when I was just learning Tai Chi and mindfulness and trying to recover from this hospitalization, before it was a thing that I was thinking I should ever have to say to other people, I was learning that wellness and self-care and mindfulness are, can’t be goals, can’t be –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amelia: – tasks on your to-do list. It can’t be just another thing you have to do, right. It can’t be a product you have to go buy. It works most effectively when it’s just integrated, woven into your life as another thread, made, making the whole cloth of your life one that includes wellness.

Sarah: What was that phrase I read? I think it was on, I might have seen it on Tumblr, but that exercise is a celebration of what your body can do; it’s not punishment for what you ate?

Amelia: Yeah.

Emily: Yes. Exercise is not a way to earn permission to consume something delicious. Physical activity is not a thing you do in order to justify your existence. It’s not something you’re required to do to make your body conform to any culturally constructed –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: – aspirational ideal. It’s an opportunity to celebrate the experience of living inside muscle and bone and blood.

Sarah: Yes, and endorphins are dope.

Emily: Yeah! It’s, that’s –

Sarah: Like, literally and figuratively.

[Laughter]

Emily: Yeah! But physical activity is a, like, we, we have these bodies, and our world is not structured in a way to let us use them the way they are built to be used, so exercise, most of the time, is us trying to make the world fit our bodies. Amelia and I, just this morning, Amelia takes horseback-riding lessons, which she can talk about forever, but she took me for the first time. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to do it because I have a vestibular disorder. I don’t have good balance; I get motion sick. Am I going to get motion sick riding a horse? Turns out, little bit, yeah. But there’s something so different about sitting on a horse and moving with the organic animal way that an animal moves –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: – versus riding in a car or even riding a bicycle, these, like, static, stationary, relatively unresponsive machines. The way my body feels sitting with another body of this, you know, thousand-pound mammal that’s very sensitive to my internal state is, it felt so much more like what a body is built to do.

Sarah: Yeah! That’s, that’s really cool!

Amelia: Yeah, horseback riding –

Emily: Actually –

Amelia: – is a lot like singing, actually? They’re both really –

Sarah: Really!

Amelia: Yeah, they’re both really primal, and they depend on you not just – okay, so in your regular life, when you get super tense, and even if you’re aware enough to notice, I’m really tense, my muscles are really tight, I don’t feel quite right? Usually we’ll just keep going anyway, ‘cause it doesn’t matter; I’ll just push harder, and I’ll get it done; I have to get this done. Yeah? But when –

Sarah: Right, yeah!

Amelia: – when you’re singing or when you’re riding a horse, if you’re going to do well and feel good and not fall off, you know, a five-foot animal, you have to turn toward the tension and say, hey! Hey, tension, what do you, what do you need? What are you doing there? Can you, do you want to let go of that? Oh, you can let go! Great, now I can breathe deeper. And whether you’re on a horse or you’re making a sound with your voice, it allows you to do that thing better.

Sarah: Yes. I think I understand.

Emily: So wellness, instead of being, like, a goal that you push to achieve, when it’s functioning well in our lives, it is the thing that we allow to happen.

Sarah: So horseback riding is one way in which wellness is a state of action. What are other ways that wellness is a state of action, because I, in the book you say that it’s not a state of being, but it’s a state of action. It’s a thing that you fluidly do throughout your day to, you know, not feel crappy. What are other states of actions that, states of action that you, that you have found work for you?

Amelia: Well, that idea of expressing wellness as a state of action, not a state of being, came out of the process of writing the book, because we looked at all the causes of burnout. I mean, there are these eight chapters, and then there’s this practical advice of what you do about those causes, and we noticed a trend –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amelia: – across those chapters, which was that wellness is the freedom to oscillate in and out of states of being, from effort to rest, from independence to connection. These two examples are actually really superb, because they illustrate the ways our fucked-up culture is gaslighting us into burnout, ‘cause there’s a clear moral superiority associated with effort –

Emily: Of course.

Amelia: – but resting is laziness or sloth.

Sarah: Yes.

Amelia: It’s morally inferior.

Emily: Yeah. Literally a mortal sin.

Amelia: Yeah. The same way that independence –

Sarah: Yep.

Amelia: – is more valuable, and connection is kind of like, oh, you’re weak ‘cause you need other people.

Sarah: Right.

Emily: Yeah.

Amelia: So, so this, this goes back to the patriarchy, which doesn’t want us to be free to oscillate, and the patriarchy benefits –

Sarah: Ugh!

Amelia: – when we’re stuck, and I said patriarchy without groaning, so here it is: patriarchy – ugh.

Sarah: Ugh!

Amelia: Yeah.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Amelia: So –

Sarah: It’s very cathartic; thank you!

 

Amelia: Yeah, yeah, yeah! So one of the actions that feels best for me when I think of, like, I need to oscillate, I need to act and be free, is smashing. I imagine myself smashing the patriarchy; I’m imagining I’m accomplishing a tiny part of making the world a safel, safer place for all people – people of all genders, people of all colors – and the good news about smashing is that getting a good night’s sleep smashes a little piece of patriarchy. I smash a little piece –

Sarah: Oh yes.

Amelia: – of patriarchy when I look in the mirror and say, I am the new hotness, even better than the old hotness.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Amelia: One of the very first things we started, I started reading in preparing for the book was a bunch of Audre Lorde, and one of my favorite quotes from her is, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” So.

Sarah: Yes! Thank you. I love that.

Amelia: Yeah, oh! So when I need to remember that I deserve to feel comfortable and safe, I remember you can’t spell resist without rest.

Sarah: Yes, that’s very true! And I think about how many women are in my life who cannot rest, who can’t be like, yeah, I’m tired; I’m not doing that. Like, you have to keep going, you have to keep going, and no! That’s terrible for me! I know that’s bad for me!

Amelia: Yeah, if you don’t get the rest, the rest is going to get you.

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: Yes! Goodness, yes. I have a, I have, I have, I have inflammation courtship issues.

Amelia: [Laughs]

Sarah: We’ve had a very courtship, inflammation and I, and I’m allergic to most nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories, so I can’t take ‘em.

Amelia: Ugh.

Sarah: So I either have Tylenol or Percocet, which is, like, literally the worst. So if I don’t rest, I get inflammation that I can’t treat, and then I just get sick.

Amelia: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: And if, like, my kids bring home a cold, they’ll be sick for three days; I’ll be sick for, like, two weeks.

Amelia: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: So once I started saying, I’m going to bed; don’t fuck with me?

Amelia: Mm.

Sarah: I got sick a lot less.

Amelia: Yeah.

Sarah: I’m a big fan. I’m the, I’m the sleep commander, and my children won’t tell anybody at school their bedtimes –

Amelia: [Laughs]

Sarah: – ‘cause they’re really early. I don’t care. [Laughs]

Amelia: Yeah! You are so lucky to have a body that tells you so clearly how much sleep you need and doesn’t let you cheat.

Emily: Well, we don’t know that. Did you, Sarah, did you have to learn that, or do you just have –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: Oh yeah. I had to learn that because I also have polycystic ovarian syndrome, so I couldn’t get pregnant –

Emily: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and then once I got pregnant, my body was like, oh, wait, carry a whole other person?

[Laughter]

Sarah: [Snorts] That’s easy! Gosh, why didn’t you just say so? Go eat glazed doughnuts; I’ve got this. Now, I also couldn’t go into labor either, so I had no on-ramp and no off-ramp, but being pregnant, I am aces!

Emily: Right. Yeah.

Amelia: Like flying a plane is easy –

Sarah: [Laughs] Oh, I had to –

Amelia: – take-offs and landings, no.

Sarah: Right! Yeah, ex-, it was, it was exactly like that. Gestation, it’s like cruising at altitude: no big deal! But when I finally had children, and that takes a toll –

Emily: Yes.

Sarah: – and then I would get sick all the time, and I had pneumonia twice in three years. I was like, what is, what am I doing wrong?

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: And I was like, well, sleep, let’s, let’s, let’s go to sleep.

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: Sleep seems good, and that, starting from the foundation of have you had enough sleep has –

Emily: Yes.

Sarah: – led me to reframe – like, when I don’t get enough sleep, I eat badly!

Amelia: Mm-hmm!

Emily: Yes.

Sarah: I really like sodium. Sodium, when I don’t sleep, is, like, the greatest!

Amelia: Mm-hmm!

Sarah: Oh, love it! Mm, salt! So, like, just learning how that one thing –

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: – reframes so much, and then, yeah, like, like, Emily, you’ve been tweeting about the Nap Ministry, which blew the top of my head off.

Emily: Aren’t they amazing?

Sarah: Holy shit! Oh my God! I love it so much!

Emily: And people can follow them on Instagram, @thenapministry.

Sarah: Yes!

Emily: They’re amazing; follow them immediately.

Sarah: Oh, they’re incredible! But it’s like, resting is, is, is subversive!

Amelia and Emily: Yes!

Sarah: It’s like, resting is –

Emily: The revolution!

Sarah: – very, very powerful. It really is! Like, go to sleep; take a nap! One of the things I love about this book is how much work you do reframing.

Emily: Mm.

Sarah: And I look at that as, like, the hardest work. It is really, really hard to convince someone that the way that they see the world can be adjusted significantly if they just look at it this way. Like, reframing everything is so hard. Was it difficult for you to reframe your own stress cycles too?

Emily: [Sighs] Sort of? So I – this is Emily – I generated the stress response cycle language as a metaphor when I was writing Come as You Are because I needed a shortcut piece of language to help me talk about the physiology of stress.

Sarah: Right.

Emily: Super briefly, stress is this phenomenon that happens in your biology. Adrenaline and cortisol and glucocorticoids, oh my, that –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Emily: – flood you when you are being presented with a stressor. So there’s your stressor, that’s the external threat, like a, you know, being chased by a lion or charged by a hippo, and then there’s your stress, which is the physiological event happening inside your body, and we have somehow gotten to a place where we think that the way to deal with the physiological event happening in our body is to deal with the external circumstances, the lion or the hippo, and that is simply not true. Our body needs to go through a biological process just like digestion. It’s got a beginning, when you’ve got the onset of all those hormones and chemicals; it’s got a middle, when you do something about it; and it’s got an end, when everything just fades and returns you to a state of peace and balance. There is a cycle that has to complete, like everything else in our bodies. We have a menstrual cycle; we have a digestive cycle; we have a sleep cycle, right? And stress –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: – is one of those, and somehow we got to a place as a culture where we think that your stress, like if your stressor goes away, if you solve a problem at work like a grownup by having, you know, conversations with the people who are involved, then your stress should just automatically go away and you’ll feel better? No, you have to do the thing –

Sarah: No.

Emily: – that your body wants you to do, and your body does things like – when you’re being chased by a lion, what do you do? You run.

Sarah: You run!

Emily: So when you’re –

Sarah: Right.

Emily: – stressed out by the bureaucracy and administrivia of twenty-first century life, what do you do? You run in the twenty-first century way, which might be running. It might be Pilates; it might be horseback riding; it might be, like, you know, putting on Beyoncé and dancing it out for half an hour. You move your body, because that is what communicates to your chemistry that your body is now a safe place to be. So, and this is something that I have known intuitively literally my whole life. I can’t, I remember explicitly being fifteen years old and making the decision to let my body go through a stress response cycle and finish –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: – and it wasn’t until we were thirty-five?

Amelia: The early thirties, definitely.

Emily: Yeah – that I realized Amelia didn’t know this. That she thought that stress was – what did you think stress was?

Amelia: I thought it was imaginary, basically.

Emily: Yeah, that it was like a, it was a self-imposed sort of cognitive limit on what was possible, and she just needed to dismiss it and be like, no, it’s fine; I can do it.

Amelia: Well, the way it get talked about –

Sarah: I can rationalize myself out of it, yeah.

Amelia: Exactly! Well, how it gets talked about in sort of medical diagnoses of that thing that’s wrong with you? Oh, it’s just stress. If it’s just stress –

Sarah: Yeah.

Amelia: – then I ought to be able to be like, okay, so it doesn’t matter.

Sarah: Right, and you should be able to just handle it.

Amelia: Yes! It turns out “just handle it” means you need to do things to let it go. Or let it complete, not let it go; let it complete.

Emily: Let it finish –

Sarah: Right.

Emily: – in the way that your body feels, but we, nobody gets taught that. Instead what we get taught is to just stuff it, to just, like, cram it down in some part of your body. For me, it’s my digestive system, and, like, it just accumulates. Like, the more you have a stress response cycle activated and you’re like, no, everything is fine, I’m just going to keep going, I’m going to keep working, and you, like, shove it down, and it will sit there spinning and waiting for you for as long as it takes – talking decades – of incomplete –

Sarah: Yeah.

Emily: – stress response cycles just waiting in your body. And we’re talking about, this is not metaphorical; this is a physiological shift, an increase in adrenaline, which is an increase in blood pressure, which is an increase in wear and tear on your blood vessels, which is the route to heart disease, right?

Sarah: Right.

Emily: So we’re not talking about, like, just, like, an emotional state. There’s physiological stuff happening in your body when you don’t grant your body the opportunity to complete these cycles, and we, women in particular, right, we got taught we have to be nice, we have to be kind and generous and attentive to other people’s needs and not make anybody uncomfortable with something like our, you know, rage about the, hmm, patriarchy? Ugh. And so we, like, put a smile on our faces, and we don’t do it. We, we, we internalize all of our rage, and then it very gradually kills us.

Sarah: Yeah, you know, no big deal.

Emily: Right.

Sarah: Because we’re human givers, we’re sort of disposable!

Emily: Right, exactly!

Amelia: Exactly.

Sarah: One of the things that I loved about the way you write this – and this is true in Come as You Are as well – is that you’re, you’re, you’re both very good at describing a thing in a way that when you try to talk about it directly and describe it in a, in a scientific way or in an artistic way, there’s a good chance that somebody’s going to be like, I don’t get it. What are you –

Amelia or Emily: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – trying to say? But when you say, emotions are like tunnels, stress is a cycle, anxiety has an end, and exhaustion is when you get stuck in an emotion and you can’t move through the rest of the stress cycle, I felt like, oh, of course it is! How did I not know that? But I didn’t know that! Like, I really didn’t!

Amelia: You are not alone.

Sarah: Okay. I know I’m not, but still, like, how did I not know that?!

Emily: Yeah, yeah. That, that is the response that our publishing team had when we sent them the first chapter as a proposal –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Emily: – is, oh my God, the stress response cycle! It’s a cycle; it has to complete; duh!

Sarah: Of course!

Emily: Obviously!

Amelia: And once you know, it feels like you always knew.

Sarah: And you can recognize the pattern once, once you’ve reframed the –

Amelia and Emily: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Emily: Once you’re, like, sitting in traffic and you’re like, oh, this is a stress response cycle being activated while I sit here with my frustrated stewing in the stress juice, and when I get out of the car, just because I finished my terrible commute doesn’t mean my stress response cycle’s going to be complete. I need to go for a walk around the block –

Amelia: Yeah.

Emily: – to let my body return to a state of calm.

Sarah: Is Twitter half of a stress cycle?

Emily: It’s a stressor.

Amelia: It’s a, it’s a stressor, so it initiates a stress cycle?

Sarah: Yeah. But it doesn’t complete it.

Amelia: It –

Emily: No!

Amelia and Emily: Well –

Emily: Hmm.

Amelia: – it depends. So I definitely feel like Twitter is a stressor.

Sarah: Yes.

Amelia: It’s possible to curate your feed really carefully in a way that means that you have a lot of positive interactions, and you connect with your friends and your family, but avoiding some exposure to things that initiate a stress response is very difficult, ‘cause yeah, a stress response can be initiated by, basically, your imagination –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amelia: – stuff that’s on Twitter that makes you worry. Worry is your imagination coming up with things that –

Emily: Lions and hippos and –

Amelia: – yeah – that stress you out.

Sarah: I also noticed that my brain is particularly an asshole about waking me up at three in the morning to process something that I thought was fine?

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: Especially something I’ve just seen. And I realized this very recently: I can’t watch movies where there are ancillary characters who are killed to, to, to move the forward, move the forward progress of the protagonists?

Amelia: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: Because I will wake up at three in the morning and have to grieve for characters –

Amelia and Emily: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – all the time. This is why romance –

Emily: Yes.

Sarah: – is my safe genre, because I, my brain is like, grief is awesome! Let’s do it at three in the morning. You didn’t need sleep, right? How ‘bout a whole REM cycle, but just grieving all those people who died in mustard gas in Wonder Woman? Let’s think about that. And I’m like, no, I was sleeping, and it was great!

Amelia: [Laughs]

Emily: Yeah, but that’s the thing is what’s happening in sleep is that your body is completing emotional cycles that got activated.

Sarah: Yes.

Emily: In your case, the emotion happens to be so intense that it wakes you up –

Sarah: Yep.

Emily: – and you have to, like, lie there and let your body do what it – it’s like waking up with diarrhea, basically. Like, you’ve just got to –

Sarah: Brain diarrhea! That’s exactly what it is!

Emily: Yeah!

[Laughter]

Emily: You’ve just, you’ve just got to let it do its thing, and then you can go to bed again!

Sarah: Yep. And I, and I’ve learned to be a lot nicer to myself about it. Like, okay, brain needs to be awake. What can we do? Cats, cats, petting cats is good; we can do that for a while; that’s always good.

Emily: Yeah. One of the things that I learned when I was going through a lot of that, like waking up in the middle of the night and crying for twenty minutes and then going to back sleep –

Sarah: Yep.

Emily: – was, was that, that, that sense of kind of crying for no reason or crying over a, a fictional or imaginary thing –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: – was actually doing me some good getting over some latent, leftover things.

Sarah: Yeah.

Emily: Yeah, so I wasn’t just crying over that thing that just happened just now, but that was a, a thing that represented something else that I had not given myself a chance to grieve earlier in my life.

Sarah: Yes. It, I’ve noticed this with my kids: sometimes they can’t differentiate the feeling of something that has happened that day and something that has happened, like, two months before. The feeling is the same, so they’re mad about both instances.

Emily: Yes.

Sarah: Feelings don’t have a really good timeline or sense of time, which is fine, ‘cause I don’t either, so I’m totally flexible about this.

You also mention that there’s different ways of closing the stress cycle. You mentioned exercise, Pilates, dance, horseback, movement, creativity. Do you think that reading romance is a way to also close a stress cycle with vicarious emotional experiences?

Amelia: Absolutely, because it’s not a vicarious emotional experience. There’s actually no such thing as vicarious emotional experience? If –

Sarah: Oh, cool!

Amelia: If, if you are feeling empathically someone else’s feelings, even if it’s a fictional feeling, you are still experiencing that emotion! You, there –

Sarah: That’s true!

Amelia: – you can’t be like –

Emily: Yeah, you know when they do brain research –

Amelia: – I’m imagining someone else’s happiness, and –

Emily: – the same parts of the brain light up as if you’re, like, feeling it first person.

Amelia: Right. Yeah, so –

Sarah: No shit!

Emily: Yeah.

Amelia: Yes!

Sarah: Dope! Okay!

Amelia and Emily: Yes.

Sarah: I’m so happy to be wrong! This is great; bring it on. [Laughs]

Amelia: Yeah, yeah. So this is the flip side of worry: your imagination can initiate a stress response, and it can also complete a stress response cycle, so I cannot emphasize how significant arts and entertainment are to completing the stress response. All kinds of music and theater and movies and literature can be cathartic, because they’re a place where the normal rules about social appropriateness don’t apply.

Sarah: Right.

Amelia: We don’t have the same reasons to stop in the middle, so absolutely! You experience the emotions the characters experience. You may never experience the events they’re going through in real life, but you absolutely go through the emotional journey with them. So, yeah, every romance novel is a stress cycle completed: drama and turmoil and doing things to create resolution! And it makes me laugh, because this is one of the reasons people get so mad because Emily’s first book is part one of two –

Emily: Of the novels.

Amelia: – of the, yeah, her no-, of her fiction, the, her romance novels –

Sarah: Right.

Amelia: – so they get to the end of part one, and they’re like, what?! That’s, there’s a part two! ‘Cause it’s physically uncomfortable to be left with that incomplete cycle, so after the –

Sarah: We don’t like cliffhangers; we really get mad.

Emily: We hate cliffhangers, oh yeah.

Amelia: Oh, no, no, but this is, this is why! You’re like, I was expecting a happy ending! Yeah, and you didn’t get it, so –

Sarah: Didn’t get it!

Amelia: – yes, romance novels are definitely a nutritious part of this burnout prevention strategy.

Amelia and Emily: And –

Sarah: I love this!

Amelia: [Laughs] I’ve been to RWA conventions, conferences, and you’ve got the podcast, so you know, romance readers are a community, and that –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Amelia: – shared sense of value just makes it an even richer source of burnout prevention.

Sarah: Yes, because there’s an incredible amount of cathartic, empathetic connection when you meet somebody who had the same feeling about a book that you did.

Emily: Yes!

Sarah: It’s not just, oh, we read the same book and we liked it, but it was, we had the same emotional experience, or a similar emotional experience, or we both liked the book –

Emily: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – with different, different emotional reasons, but we still have like five hours of conversation about it; it’ll be great!

[Laughter]

Amelia: Yeah.

Sarah: This might, this makes a lot more sense that, now that I’ve – so I watched a, an early screening of the third How to Train Your Dragon, which does not end in a very happy way, though it ends in the way that the story has to end?

Amelia and Emily: Aw! Oh!

Sarah: I was devastated! Like, even though I knew the ending going in, I was devastated, and my kids were just like a hot mess. Because it –

Emily: Spoiler! Can I ask – and you can cut this out – does the dragon die?

Sarah: God no! Nononono.

Emily: Okay. Okay.

Sarah: No, but the, the, basically – you, you know all the characters, right?

Amelia and Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: Sort of? So there’s Hiccup and there’s Toothless? They end up having to be apart, and Toothless has to take all the dragons to the Hidden World because the world is no longer safe for them. And that was the ending that was, from the beginning of the, of the book series, the first line of the first book is, “There were dragons when I was a boy.” So –

Amelia: Yes.

Emily: Yeah!

Sarah: – they were going to a place where the dragons and the humans couldn’t be together, but the movie, at the end, it skips from them, the dragons leaving – everyone just sort of unbuckles their saddles and it’s like, all right, bye, guys! It was great, see ya! And then they skip ahead, and then they skip ahead another five years, and I’m like, but you skipped the grief! You skipped all the grieving! This is incomplete! And I couldn’t articulate that. Now that you’ve expressed it this way, okay, I get it! I was missing the complete emotional cycle of moving through grief!

Emily: Yeah.

Amelia: It’s one of the – so in Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, the moment when Gandalf falls, Peter Jackson stops the movie and lets us see Elijah Wood and Viggo Mortensen fucking crying. Like, he gives us –

Sarah: Yeah!

Amelia: – that moment of grief that Gandalf fell. Yeah, exactly.

Sarah: Yeah.

Emily: That’s good storytelling.

Sarah: And it’s, there’s one type of stories where you have – which I almost consider almost like emotional torture porn?

Amelia: Mm-hmm.

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: Like, like, this story is here to slowly remove your heart through your ribs –

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: – through a very small incision, and we’re going to take about nine hundred pages to do it. It’ll be great; just sit tight. But when you don’t actually fulfill the emotional portrayal, it is just as painful.

Amelia: Yeah.

Emily: Yep! When you skip over it and don’t show that it’s real, yeah.

Sarah: Yes! I know, I realize blue balls isn’t a real thing, but emotionally it’s like blue balls.

Emily: Yeah. ‘Cause you’re stuck!

Sarah: Right! It’s terrible.

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: [Laughs] One of the other concepts that I loved about Burnout was the idea of booting up your default mode –

Amelia: Yeah.

Sarah: – and that there are activities that let your brain take a break. Now, I was a total ass to myself, and I started, like, looking at how I spend time, like, on my phone, and I’m like, oh, you have too many games; you have to get rid of your games. And I read this book, and I was like, wow, that was really mean, Past Sarah!

Amelia: [Laughs]

Emily: Like, but you were, you were following the rules as they got taught to you, that you were not being productive! That you were not focused!

Sarah: Yes.

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: And it’s great that this book is coming along where I am reading different things, ‘cause one of the things I love about nonfiction about productivity is the work that sort of is like, how ‘bout you not be productive all the time? It’s actually better for you in a lot of ways?

Emily: Yes.

Sarah: One of the books that I, I did a podcast interview with the writer, and I got to give away copies, is a book called Company of One, and it talked about being, being small. Don’t scale! Don’t leverage! Don’t create silos! Just do the one thing you do –

Emily: Wow!

Sarah: – and do it well.

Emily: That’s awesome!

Sarah: Create the advice that – oh, it’s wonderful. My favorite piece of advice from that book is solve for enough. What is enough for you?

Emily: Hmm!

Sarah: Not enough for, like, a venture capitalist, and not enough for this Silicon Valley billionaire? What is enough for you? And then you identify what that is and work backwards. The idea of having a default mode, what is it – not only is it like when you ask, what am I doing when I feel most powerfully that I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing, but how, what am I doing when I feel the most chill?

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: That’s a hard question to answer too!

Emily: So I found the default mode network research and was tremendously relieved, as it sounds like you were, to be like, oh, it’s actually good for you to stop working on things and not – oh man, writers in particular, there’s a sort of lore about, like –

Sarah: Yes!

Emily: – writing five thousand words a day, and I just sit down and don’t get up from my desk until I’ve done XYZ, and I’ve never been able to do that. But I’ve always been really functional if I let myself sit there and write as long as my brain is interested in writing, and then I stop and go, like, run the dishes or run the laundry and just, like, let my mind wander. There’s this – for me, it’s a very distinctive state of mind where my brain is literally just doing whatever it wants to, daydreaming? It’s like a dreaming state?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: Stream of consciousness, but I’m awake and engaged in low-effort tasks. So if you look at, it was like, what can I do in order to turn this default mode network, this daydreaming system on in my brain? Low-effort tasks. Or things that use an entirely different set of skills from the thing that you need to rest. The default mode network turns on when you’re playing games, when you are, like –

Sarah: Yep.

Emily: – just waiting in line. When you’re driving is a time a lot of people experience default mode network turning on, and that’s your brain solving problems, completing stress response cycles, and being creative and generating insight that it can only get if you get out of its way and let it do its thing.

Sarah: Yes. Which is really gratifying when you figure that out, and then, like I said, you feel kind of dumb that you didn’t realize it before.

Emily: Except that everything in your life has been telling you that that’s you being lazy and giving up and not being persistent enough and not having enough motherfucking grit, for crying out loud.

Sarah: Oh, yeah.

Emily: So it’s weird for me to, like, look back on our childhood and see these moments when I was doing this stuff intuitively, even though it was against the cultural norms. We were, we were theater nerds in high school, and in the eighth grade we went to theater summer camp, and we were assigned to different groups, ‘cause we always got split up, and we were, I was in my group, working on the play we were writing. We’re all sitting around in a circle working really hard, and we got stuck on something, and I stood up and walked around, because we were stuck, and –

Sarah: Right, of course!

Emily: – this, one of the popular girls from school was like, Emily, where are you going? And I was like, I’m, I’m just going to go for a little walk here in the theater, and she was like, so what would happen if all of us did that? And now I know the answer is we’d probably find a solution to this problem a lot quicker if we all just, like, relaxed and let ourselves, let our brains wander instead of trying to force it.

Sarah: Yeah, get back in line.

Emily: Yeah.

Amelia: [Laughs]

Emily: Yeah, sit back down, do what your sup- – how dare you? How dare you allow your brain to do what it feels is right?

Sarah: And how dare you put your needs above everyone else’s?

Emily: Yeah! When everyone else’s needs is for you to conform to their expectations, behave yourself, stay in line –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: – don’t make anyone uncomfortable.

Sarah: Yep.

Emily: It doesn’t matter what your brain needs to be as creative as possible. It doesn’t matter what your –

Amelia: Follow the rules, even if the rules are terrible and hurting everyone!

Emily: Yes.

Sarah: Yep.

Emily: What matters is that we all behave ourselves according to whatever it counts as behaving, and those rules are not designed for anyone’s wellbeing.

Sarah: No. One of the things that I have found really good about disarming the things that I tend to beat myself up about is asking, all right, whose voice is that?

Emily: Hmm!

Sarah: ‘Cause it’s probably not yours, and who profits from you feeling this way?

Amelia and Emily: Yes!

Sarah: And then I get indignant.

Amelia: Good!

Emily: Yeah!

Amelia: That’s the appropriate response.

Emily: Then what do you do with your in-, with your indignance, indignancy?

Amelia: Indignance? I don’t know!

Emily: Indignantness?

Sarah: Indignant rage?

Amelia: Yeah.

Sarah: Depends.

Emily: So you, so you’ve got this anger that gets activated by your remembering that you’ve been manipulated into hating yourself –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: – and then what do you do with that rage?

Sarah: It depends on the subject of the rage, but one of my firm rules is that I’m not allowed to complain about something three times without doing something about it, because otherwise I’m just complaining, and I’m really eloquent when I complain. I know lots of curse words –

[Laughter]

Sarah: – it’s really listening, it’s great listening when I get angry. Like, my husband is like, I know you’re really mad, but I have to go laugh right now, excuse me, and I’m like, you’re laughing at me! He’s like, well you’re funny! I’m like, no I’m not! So most of the time I will go and start moving, and I will take the dogs for a walk or I will go do something movement-related or creativity-related, and that tends –

Emily: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – to defuse it?

Emily: Even complaining is one of the evidence-based completing-the-cycle strategies, because connecting with other people –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: – means that when you look in that other person’s eyes as you complain about something and they listen to you with empathy and compassion, that’s a reassurance to your body that you have landed in a safe place, that the world actually is a safe place. You’ve got this place to come back to; you have a home.

Sarah: Yes.

Emily: So all three of those things, physical activity, creative outlet, and connecting with other people are all, that’s, those are the three big ones!

Sarah: And reading romance also good.

Amelia: And, and rest.

Emily: There seems to be a conversation beginning, especially – it started, I think, in 2017, but here in 2019 there’s been sort of like viral article after viral article about burnout specifically and how it is caused by, well, basically, capitalism, which is not wrong. And the fact that people want to have that conversation, that they’re willing to locate the causes of it outside their own, you know, hypothetical failure to do all the things and drink the green smoothies and coordinate their time effectively and blah blah blah indicates to me that, yeah, there’s a new awareness happening.

And also, which is my, like, counselor/therapist training way of saying, but –

Sarah: But –

Emily: There’re these other articles that are causing burnout, that are saying burnout is caused by capitalism say that, well, then that means the only solution is, you know, a revolution! I’m like –

Sarah: Eh.

Emily: – I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for a revolution! I’m tired now! I need help now.

Sarah: Yeah.

Emily: I can’t wait –

Sarah: Right.

Emily: – for a revolution. And it, I am utterly convinced that revolution is not what we need. We don’t have to wait for the world to be a better place. We don’t have to wait for the world to be just before we can start to feel better. There are things we can do now, and mostly they involve a combination of honoring the way our mammalian bodies work, recognizing the stress response cycle and our need for connection and autonomy, our need for rest and effort in oscillation, in movement, and on the other side of it, honoring the ways that our wellbeing is tied to other people’s wellbeing and turning toward each other’s needs with kindness –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: – and compassion. We read a lot of affective neuroscience and computational biology, and I wanted the answer to be, like, about chemistry, and it was? But the words ultimately are, the answer is love, God damn it. Like, is all of us being kind and loving toward each other in our bodies and in this toxic world. God damn it.

Sarah: Yeah.

Amelia: And – this is Amelia – the, those articles that say capitalism is calling burnout and the only solution is revolution? I think that sense of there’s only one solution and it’s something that’s not achievable, that sense of hopelessness, that’s a –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: Helplessness.

Amelia: – that’s a, that’s a having given up; I give up. If you think the only answer is just turning all of society on its head, that’s you expressing the idea that you think that really nothing can be done, and we’re all going to be, I don’t know, asteroid on the earth, and we’re going to explode in a, like, Bruce Willis is going to have to dig a well on the Moon or something.

[Laughter]

Amelia: I, I think that sense of hopelessness and giving up is a symptom of burnout! And so instead of saying, I feel so terrible, and that means that things are terrible and impossible to change, instead we take care of ourselves and each other, and we start to feel better, and all of a sudden we have the resources and the strength to make change.

Emily: That’s the only way it’s going to happen.

Sarah: When you look at your own efforts to challenge the things that you’re soaking in all of the time, one of the things that really hit me was, Emily, you were writing about how the Bikini Industrial Complex does such a decimation to body image and self-assessment and our understanding of our values of, and, and the, the way that we understand our own bodies, and then you were worried about losing weight because you were giving a speech, and you knew that you were going to be perceived in a, in a different way, and a way that you wanted, if you were visibly smaller.

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: And I was like, yeah, I have so been there, and it is the fucking worst! How do you manage that sort of – it’s, it’s not even a balance! It’s two conflicting ideas that you have to negotiate with at the same time.

Emily: Yes.

Amelia: Yeah, it’s not a balance with two sides of – this is Amelia – it’s not two sides of, of a see-saw? It’s two sides –

Sarah: No.

Amelia: – of a coin.

Sarah: Yeah.

Amelia: They both exist at the same time, and one does not exist without the other, so that the only way to address it is constantly. Every breath, every day. You do the things, you get the rest, despite the fact that you have pressures to push harder. You connect –

Sarah: Yep.

Amelia: – with friends and family and ask for help, despite the pressure to seem like you don’t need anybody. And every time you break these rules, you turn toward the voice in your head telling you that you’re doing it wrong, and over and over, just thank her for trying to protect you.

Sarah: Yeah.

Amelia: I think that last bit is the most important and the least talked about. Like, sleep and mindfulness and gratitude practice, like, all that stuff you do every day, they’re good for you, but they’re not going to prevent burnout. If you’re still fighting the sense that you’re being selfish for taking care of yourself, like, all the yoga classes in the world can’t prevent burnout if you’re not sure that you deserve to feel strong!

Sarah: Yeah. That’s very true.

Amelia: So, hey, while we’re here, can I just say, for the record, you deserve to feel strong. You deserve love, you deserve to be cared for just as you are right now. You don’t have to lose ten pounds, nobody, none of you who are listening. Nobody has to lose ten pounds or get a promotion –

Emily: Or a hundred.

Amelia: – or finish your degree.

Emily: Or come out.

Amelia: You already qualify as fully human. You don’t have to do anything else. The, the patriarchy – ugh! –

Sarah: Ugh!

Amelia: – is, is constantly telling you, only certain people are good enough to get a happily ever after, but the patriarchy is a lying sack of shit, and you are, contrary to what you’re told, you are already worthy of love, just as you are right now.

Emily: You can quote me on that.

Sarah: So somebody’s going to be listening to this, and they’re going to have to pull over –

[Laughter]

Sarah: – and, like, wipe their eyes or, you know –

Amelia: Sorry, sorry!

Sarah: – somebody’s going to be walking – [laughs] – somebody’s going to be walking the dog, they’re going to have a leash in one hand and a poop bag in the other and be like, well, thanks a lot for that!

[Laughter]

Amelia: I feel –

Sarah: I can’t wipe my face with a poop bag! [Laughs]

Amelia: I feel like it’s an important thing to say, ‘cause we don’t say it –

Sarah: Oh, it’s absolutely important.

Amelia: – out loud –

Sarah: It’s absolutely important.

Amelia: – kind of ever. Like, there’s all these songs about, like, like, born this way and, like, I’m a good person. There’s all these songs that, that especially women love these anthems about being strong and, and good enough the way I am and, and I think there’s a reason that we want to hear that message and it’s so appealing to us –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amelia: – so why don’t, like, if I could write a pop song about it that would be a top-forty hit I would, but I don’t have access to that, so I’m just going to say it in whatever medium I have access to.

Emily: And recognize – this is Emily – that it’s all, it’s all a mess. Like, it’s a hot, big mess, and you’re going to walk around with a big stew of contradictory stuff going on, so the –

Sarah: Yes.

Emily: – the end of the story of me trying to lose weight for a conference I was attending, invited as a keynote speaker to give a message that was directly contradictory to the idea that I had to lose weight, but I knew I’d be taken more seriously if I did, because when you conform with the culturally constructed aspirational ideal, you get taken more seriously. The solution to that dilemma ultimately was, it turned out, eating in a way that made my body change was terrible for my migraines, so –

Sarah: Oh shit.

Emily: Yeah! – so, like, I, I had to stop doing that, and stopping ended the migraines, hurray, but it meant that my body, like, was never going to go to the shape and size where people would respond to it in a way that made me more powerful, and it did not change my internalization of the idea that my body was better and more respectable when it conformed with the Bikini Industrialization’s aspirational ideal. So I walk around every day in a body that I know is as healthy as my body gets –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: – and is not the shape that’s going to get me taken more seriously, but I just, and that doesn’t stop me from criticizing myself, but I know that that criticism is there because of the Bikini Industrial Complex, and I am kind to that internal voice, and I am realistic about what the external forces are. Like, it’s a hot mess inside my head –

Sarah: Yes.

Emily: – about my body all the time –

Sarah: Yes.

Emily: – and that’s, that is, that is me doing it right. That is me doing the best that it’s really possible to do these, given the world.

Amelia: And it is different for everybody. We’re a really good illustration of everyone’s experience is going to be – in my conducting training, one of the things I had to do was video myself, recording, conducting, and then watch the recording back and, like, reflect on what happened. And –

Emily: Can you imagine doing that?

Amelia: Yeah, I had –

Sarah: Dude, dude, I, I edit my own voice every week, and that sounds like extra hell.

Amelia: Well, I’ve been doing, I had to do it semester after semester after semester. I –

Sarah: Oh God!

Amelia: See? I got really used to it! I, I don’t mind it anymore, and so I actually find the sort of body positivity, I’m much more comfortable with how I look. We are literally identical twins, so that when my riding instructor walked into the barn today and looked at us, she went, you guys have, you could be twins! Wait, are you twins? And –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Amelia: – and, like, and –

Sarah: Yes, yes, we could.

Amelia: – Emily put on my helmet, and my instructor was just like, you just look exactly alike. So we look the same, but my feelings about my appearance are totally different from Emily’s feelings about her experience.

Emily: Yes.

Sarah: Wow.

Amelia: Can I tell the plump story?

Emily: Oh God, please do.

Amelia: Okay. So one of the reviews of Come as You Are –

Emily: Oh Jesus.

Amelia: – described Emily’s headshot, which is on the cover, described her as a plump young lady, and to this day, to this day!

Sarah: [Gasps] Motherfucker!

Amelia: Emily quotes that as, like, a, well, I’m a plump young lady.

Emily: [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh my God!

Amelia: It’s, like, stuck in her craw as something that’s just, like – argh-argh!

Emily: As if the shape of my body and my age and my ladylike-ness have anything to do with my expertise and capacity to write a useful book.

Sarah: Uh-huh!

Amelia: Oh yeah. But it is possible, with practice, to learn to, you know, swim in that water and, and keep your head above.

Emily: So I’m still learning. Amelia’s far advanced from me on that level.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Emily: Like, I’m more, I have my strengths, and Amelia has her strengths, and they’re sort of like spread out –

Amelia: Totally different.

Emily: – over the different –

Amelia: Yeah.

Emily: They’re totally different!

Amelia: Sure. Do you know about the Janice Lester from Star Trek? I find this, ‘cause I, I love the sci-fi, but the original Star Trek series ended with an episode about a woman named Janice Lester who wants to be a Starfleet captain, but apparently Gene Roddenberry couldn’t conceive of this utopian future where women get to be Starfleet captains, so Janice Lester takes over Captain Kirk’s body so that she can be a captain, and at the end she’s, you know, they take and put her back in her original body, and she’s dragged out – ahh!

Emily: I’ll never be a Starfleet captain!

Amelia: And Captain Kirk goes, she could have been as happy as any woman if only, if only.

Sarah: Oh.

Amelia: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! So, like, the finale of this show, of this, you know, utopian future, is based in the idea that a woman can’t have what a man can have, just because of her body that identified her as female, and therefore she can’t have some things, and that’s –

Emily: And the very ambition for a woman to want things men have instead of wanting things the women get is itself a disorder.

Sarah: [Sighs]

Amelia: Yeah. So being stuck in a body –

Sarah: Yeah.

Amelia: – that doesn’t give you access to power, whether that’s just because it’s female, identified as a girl at birth, or because it’s not the right color, or because it is neurologically different, that’s what I meant by, like, you have a body that doesn’t give you access to power. My body got cancer. Now I won’t be able to have the career I expected to have. That’s extremely frustrating!

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amelia: But it’s real, and you can still love a body that has required you to make new and different choices.

Emily: It’s, one of the reasons why the book is as long as it is, is because we had to address both the external sources of burnout, frustration, rage, despair, and the internal sources of it.

Sarah: Right.

Emily: And balancing those two things, making sure people – ‘cause the thing is, it’s a hot mess. There’s so much going on, and if it comes down to anything, it comes down to the skill of being able to notice the mess that’s going on inside you –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: – the mess that’s going on around you, and be able to turn toward all of it with kindness and compassion and patience, knowing that what’s true right now is not going to stay true, because wellness is a state of action, not a state of being. It’s, there’s, things are going to change and move; the more you allow yourself, you allow your body and life circumstances to flow through what your mammalian organism requires, the –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: – more your body will heal from the damage that gets inflicted from the outside and from the problems that arise from the inside.

Sarah: Among the parts of the book that most resonated was, yeah, this is, this is going to be hard. There’s a part early on in the book where, I think it’s the in-, introduction, where you said, how smoothly do I have to polish myself before I can move through the world without friction?

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: And that hit me real, real hard, just because I, I just, I’m very introverted! Just leave me alone! My God!

[Laughter]

Sarah: The fewer people I have to interact with, the better for everyone! But I actually like people, and I like hearing what people have to say. It’s, what I hate is the friction and the judgment and the, oh, you didn’t do that right. Oh –

Emily: Yes.

Sarah: – my God, this is exhausting and dumb. Could we not?

Amelia and Emily: Yes.

Emily: The management – oh man, we talked to this, we talked to this journalist who was very proud of herself for the saying that you can’t spell enough without no, which, yeah, right on! Totally! And let’s go the next step of, like, okay, so you establish your boundaries. For example, you’re a strong introvert. You know how much time you can spend out in a crowd before you need to go back to be alone and recharge in your hotel room or whatever, and so you say no to something, and –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: – the person’s response to that, only under really great conditions does that person go, I hear you! Thank you for setting a clear limit! I will see you later! A lot of the time –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: – they say, no, but I just need this one click, quick thing from you. No, but here’s why I actually need you to do the thing I need you to do, instead of for you to do the thing that you need you to do? Or –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: – like, but you’re, but you said you were going to help me! Or but you said you loved me! Or, like, I can see this doesn’t really matter to you, Sarah. Like, you said it mattered –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: – but I guess not, if that’s what matters to you right now. And so you have to defend your no, you have to protect it from this person’s insistence, and they push back, and eventually it becomes easier to just do the thing you said no to instead of continue to fight to protect your no.

Sarah: Yeah. Maintaining your boundary is much more effort and much more un-, unpleasant than just acquiescing to the request and then moving on.

Emily: Yeah.

Amelia: Which should not be true! Ideally, we would live in a world –

Sarah: No.

Amelia: – where people were all givers, were all looking out for the interests of everyone around them, wanted everyone around them to be healthy and happy!

Emily: Yeah, women don’t need to, like, work harder to set limits. Women don’t need more grit; what they need is more help.

Sarah: Like you said, the, the pressure of other women pushing us back in line.

Emily: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: I, right over the New Year, I was reading a book, Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done, which was, which was really about figuring out what to, what to do to achieve the space where you don’t have a next thing to worry about –

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: – and you can just sort of be? I loved this book, but one of the things that really hit me was the idea of call, of, of declaring it a jubilee year, where you just X out all of the things that are on your calendar and be like, I’m not doing that anymore. I’m only adding in, adding in the things that I want, and the place where, when I talk about this with my friends, the place where they all start is the PTA?

[Laughter]

Amelia or Emily: Wow!

Emily or Amelia: Uh-huh!

Sarah: And I was talking with a friend of mine, ‘cause I used to live in New Jersey, and now I live in Maryland, and one of my friends from, from when we lived in New Jersey was talking to me about how she said no to the PTA, and they keep coming back! She’s like, they are the mafia! They are the mafia!

Emily: Yeah.

Sarah: They keep calling you back in; you’re not allowed to say no! And whenever I talk about this – [laughs] – it is these organizations that are mostly built on the expectation of selfless, endless giving that will not –

Emily: Obligation, yeah.

Sarah: Yes! You’re not allowed to step out of line. You have to, you have to keep doing the thing that you’ve always done. You can’t say no.

Emily: And if you do say no, if they respect it, they respect it this way: how nice for you that you’re taking time for yourself. That must be really great.

Sarah: Uh-huh, yeah.

Emily: Yeah, it is! [Laughs]

Amelia: We talked to a journalist yesterday who asked us if we were givers and seemed a little surprised when we both went, oh yeah!

Emily: Yeah!

Amelia: And then she asked, well, do you find, after writing the book, that you, that you don’t give as much?

Emily: And we were both like –

Amelia and Emily: No.

Amelia: No. We both give more now, because giving isn’t bad. It’s just that we’ve learned how to give in places where it’s going to be a protected space, where someone else is going to be giving back to us and making sure that we’re never drained, our resources are never depleted, so we have more resources to give to those around us who we decide, this is where we want to put our energy.

Sarah: Right.

Emily: We’re less willing to tolerate the discomfort of giving to someone who feels entitled to take whatever it is they want. We can recognize what it feels like to give to someone like that, someone who feels like they can just take and have whatever, and punishes us for saying no –

Sarah: Ohhh.

Emily: – and feel the experience of giving with someone who is really generous with themselves and grateful and aware of what we’re giving and gives back and recognizes our no when we offer it, and we choose, when we can, to allocate our resources more toward that second person, and we just don’t allocate resources, we don’t open the door to the first person, when we have the choice. We don’t always, of course, because patriarchy – ugh.

Amelia: Ugh! [Laughs]

Sarah: There was something you said towards the end, that people who don’t trust or who are untrustworthy are energy drains.

Amelia: Yes.

Sarah: And it’s hard to learn that.

Amelia: Yeah.

Emily: Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t know why it is so hard to learn, ‘cause in principle, when you look at the mathematics of it? It’s pretty straightforward that if somebody betrays you, if they violate your trust, that’s a sign that you should maybe not trust them anymore?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Emily: And yet, because of this, because women are cast as human givers, we decide that if they violate our trust for some reason, it’s because we did something wrong. ‘Cause we somehow –

Sarah: Yeah.

Emily: – didn’t give in a way that clearly communicated what the other person needed to do in order not to betray us, and so we try to communicate more clearly with them next time. We take responsibility; it’s, we make it our fault that the other person was untrustworthy.

Amelia: Mm-hmm!

Sarah: Being is hard.

Emily: Yeah. I want it not to be, like, that the message of the book is like, ugh, shit’s so fucked up! What are we going to do? ‘Cause I feel like, I mean, your read it as a person who didn’t read it, I feel like where we get to in the end is, we’re going to change the world, and we’re going to do it by caring for each other and not letting the world demand of us what we are unable to give without killing ourselves.

Sarah: Yeah, my favorite part is the idea that you are welcoming the reader into your sisterhood?

Amelia and Emily: Mm-hmm, yeah.

Sarah: And that’s a big deal, because, I mean, having – my, my, my children are friends with many multiples, triplets and, and twins, and that relationship is extremely unique, but for you to be twins who are ident-, who are, who are inviting the reader into your sisterhood so that we can all care for each other the way that you demonstrate that you care for each other through the book, that’s a really powerful ending.

Amelia: Oh good! We mean it!

Emily: Yeah! It’s real! Yeah.

Amelia: ‘Cause we can’t do it without you.

Sarah: You can’t make progress without both acknowledging the things that are working against you, but also having compassion towards the people who are following the script that works against you.

Amelia and Emily: Yes, yeah.

Amelia: They’re doing the best they can with the resources they have available.

Emily: Just like we are.

Sarah: Yep. And it’s much easier sometimes if you just expect everybody to be in the line that you’re in, even though that’s not necessarily possible.

Emily and Amelia: Yeah.

Sarah: So I always ask this question: what are you reading that you want to tell people about?

Emily: Okay, first of all, we keep using this phrase, giver, human giver, and that comes from a book called Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny by a moral philosopher –

Sarah: [Distressed noises]

Emily: Yeah.

Amelia: [Laughs]

Emily: Yeah, that is the correct response. Kate Manne is her name. It’s, it’s quite dark, as you can tell by the title, but it’s short, which compensates. So it’s wonderful. It is where we got the language of human givers and human giver syndrome, and I’ve just, I can’t, the more people read that book, the better the world will be.

I also just downloaded the – doot-doot? – A Duke by Default by Alyssa Cole? It was on sale on Kindle for $1.99, so I just started reading it, and I’m already, like, deeply, deeply in love with these characters. [Laughs] I’m only on the second chapter.

Sarah: Aw!

Emily: So huge recommendation for that one. I – this is still Emily – I read recently a book – I got into, like, a housecleaning phase this past year. I read a book called How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind by Dana K. White, who writes a blog called –

Device: This is Audible.

Emily: Hey, shut up! I was just –

Device: You’re listening to the audio production of –

Emily: Shh! There we go.

[Laughter]

Emily: I was like, what’s, what’s, what’s her name again? And so I went to my Audible of it, and I pushed play, and so now you got to hear the thing. So it’s called How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind by Dana K. White. She writes a blog called A Slob Comes Clean?

Sarah: Yes!

Emily: It is a totally different way of approaching – like, I love the spark joy, KonMari, I love all that stuff, but this is from the point of view of a person who has –

[music]

Emily: Oh my God, phone. Jesus! Sorry.

Sarah: [Laughs] Your phone has recommendations!

Emily: It’s like, hey, talk about this other book too!

Sarah: Yeah.

Emily: A person who has never been good at cleaning or organizing, and how they finally worked out strategies that work for them in real life, even though they hate it and are not good at it. Stuff that works anyway.

Sarah: Wow.

Emily: It’s totally different, and I love it. Amelia?

Sarah: All right.

Amelia: Well, I listen to different things in one day. I, a lot of audiobooks, ‘cause that’s, that’s my thing! Can, can I just – you don’t have to necessarily include this, but I’ve got to say, I prefer an audiobook to a book-book for, not just because it’s like, okay, it’s more convenient, ‘cause I can be walking dog or doing the dishes. I prefer an audiobook because I’m a musician, and I can read a score on a page, and it’ll be me and the author and the ideas, and I enjoy that, me and the composer and the ideas, and I enjoy that, but I prefer listening to music being performed because there’s more musicians involved and more decisions get made, and I think it’s a richer experience to go through the journey of the music and that listening to a good audiobook is the same thing. There is an interpreter, and there’s another –

Sarah: Yeah.

Amelia: – richer layer, so I prefer audiobook.

Sarah: It is a performance, absolutely.

Amelia: It’s a – yeah, yeah, and it’s, it’s, there’s more to the book when it’s an audiobook. So anyway, I listen to different things under different circumstances. So for, I listen to more difficult books when I’m, like, cooking or doing something active or busy, so when I’m cooking these days, I’m listening to The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. It is, it is hard; it is deep; it is intense and personal and so great. I really enjoy it, but that’s my, that’s my make sure that my body has something to do while I listen to it.

And when I’m at school and I’m just doing, like, busy work like grading papers, I’m listening, re-listening, to one of my favorite books ever written: Kindred by Octavia Butler. Oh my God, that book!

Emily: Oh my God, that book!

Amelia: Oh my God, that book. Kindred – I mean, everything by Octavia Butler, Butler is, like, I, she has such a way of transforming you, transporting you into another world, and I love sci-fi, and I just think Octavia Butler is a genius, but Kindred in particular just, like, hooks me in the heart and breaks me open, and I just –

Emily: Yeah.

Amelia: – love it so much. But that’s another hard book, so when I’m, like, going to sleep and I need just, like, you know, read me a story so I can go to sleep, I listen to the Rivers of London series of books, which is a –

Sarah: Oh my God, that narrator!

Amelia: It is Kobna Holdbrook-Smith. I love those books so much, but, and there’s, like, some peril in it, but it’s so witty and charming, and I, I just, yeah, and I recommend them highly!

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this interview. I hope that you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. You can find Amelia Nagoski on Medium, and I will link to her Medium page. You can find Emily Nagoski at her website, emilynagoski.com. She’s on Instagram @enagoski, and there is a Facebook group for this book too, facebook.com/burnoutbookgroup. I will have links to all of the places you can find them, as well as all of the books and links and Instagram pages that we mentioned in this interview. I know there were a lot of them.

And if you have thoughts or ideas or you want to tell me something, please get in touch! You can email me at [email protected]. You can leave a message at 1-201-371-3272. You can tell me a joke, ask for recommendations, tell me what you’re thinking, respond to this episode. I love hearing from you; it’s a delight when you contact me.

This week’s podcast was brought to you by Hired by Zoey Castile. Inspired by the Magic Mike franchise, vibrant new voice Zoey Castile continues the Happy Endings series of modern, multicultural, millennial-focused, sexy contemporary romances with Hired, a humorous and relatable novel about figuring out your truth path in life. Politics and pleasure meet under the festive skies of New Orleans as a one-night stand between escort and dancer Aiden Rios and political daughter Faith Charles turns into so much more. For a man who makes his living pleasuring women, what happens when the only pay-out worth having is love? Hired by Zoey Castile is on sale now wherever books are sold and at kensingtonbooks.com.

The transcript for this episode will be compiled by garlicknitter. It is brought to you by the Patreon community. If you would like to have a look at the Patreon community, it is patreon.com/SmartBitches. Monthly pledges start at a dollar a month, and you are part of the group who helps me continue the show, makes sure every episode is accessible to everyone, that each episode has a transcript, and helps me pick books for our book club. We are selecting our second quarter book now, so if you would like to join in, please have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches, and if you are a member of the Patreon community, thank you so very much for your support.

The music you are listening to is provided by Sassy Outwater. This is Caravan Palace. This track is called “Maniac.” You can find this track on their two-album set Caravan Palace and Panic, and you can find the two-album set on iTunes and on Amazon. You can find Caravan Palace at caravanpalace.com.

Coming up on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books this week, we have a special post tomorrow, Saturday, March 30th, that I’m really excited about. This is a new project: Smart Bitches Cross Stitches! I have two patterns, brand-new, exclusive, completely handcrafted patterns from EC Spurlock based on Elyse’s Bachelor recaps. If you like cross-stitching – which if you haven’t tried it is stabbing something over and over again; it’s very satisfying – you might like these patterns, especially if you enjoy Elyse’s recaps. I will be introducing new Smart Bitches Cross Stitches patterns throughout the rest of the year. I hope that this is something that you are curious about, and if you want to try cross-stitching, this is a great opportunity.

Then this week we have a new edition of Hide Your Wallet, because it is the first of the month! It’s the first of April, in fact. Huh. Wonder what we have planned? We also have new reviews of books, a new edition of Soggy Bottoms, plus Books on Sale and Help a Bitch Out. I hope that you will stop by and hang out with us.

I will, as I said, have links to all of the things that we discussed and all of the books we mentioned. I know there were many; they will all be in the show notes.

And as always, I end each episode with a terrible joke. Are you ready for this week’s terrible joke? This one is particularly terrible, and it is from garlicknitter who went to California Adventure in Disney and saw Mater in Cars Land, and apparently he has a lot of bad jokes, and she brought one back for us. So this is by way of garlicknitter from Mater in Cars Land in California Adventure.

What do you get when the Popemobile backfires?

What do you get when the Popemobile backfires?

Holy smokes!

[Laughs] I like Mater. [Laughs more] Holy smokes!

And holy smokes, that is the end of the episode. On behalf of the Nagoski sisters and everyone who’s feeling a little bit burned out, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend. Thank you for listening to this episode, and we will see you here next week.

[oscillating music]