A review by emilyinherhead
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Amelia Nagoski, Emily Nagoski

emotional informative inspiring medium-paced

5.0

You deserve respect and love; you deserve to be cherished. You deserve kindness, right now, just as you are. Not when you lose ten pounds, or a hundred. Not when you get a promotion or finish your degree or get married or come out or have a baby. Now.

This is a simple yet revoluntionary book. It uses science to discuss how we hold unresolved stress in our bodies and what this does to us in the short and long term, as well as how we can “complete the cycle” to purge this stress from our systems. It doesn’t just look at stressors we can control, however—there is a full section devoted to how society is broken and how especially women and nonbinary folks are targeted by patriarchy and “Human Giver Syndrome,” making our struggles with stress even more pronounced and inescapable.

I took a lot of valuable information from these pages, but the two most important, those that will likely stick with me longest, are the ideas of completing the cycle and making enough time for rest. I’ve been thinking about and working on these two goals every day since finishing the book and I can already see improvements in my life. This is absolutely a book to read and annotate and hug and keep and re-read, again and again.