How To Beat Burnout (with Amelia Nagoski)

Are you feeling burned out on politics? If the answer is no... please let us know your secret!

But if you are feeling burned out like us (and basically every woman we know), then this episode is for you.

We were joined by the wise and funny Amelia Nagoski this week to talk about her book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. Amelia wrote the book with her twin sister Emily after Amelia got so stressed and burned out that she ended up in the hospital. What they ended up learning was so helpful (and honestly, revolutionary) that they wanted to share it with everyone.

Katie, LaFonda, and Amelia had such a great conversation about what causes burnout, how to see it coming, and how to move past it once it happens. And in the meantime, Amelia helped us understand why getting involved on a local level isn't just strategic, it also helps us feel better. (You know, only our very favorite topic.)

Don't miss this episode for some practical guidance on managing stress and burnout as well as mind-blowing science on why our bodies and brains work they way they do.

For a transcript of this episode, please email comms@redwine.blue.

You can learn more about us at www.redwine.blue or follow us on social media! 

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Transcript

How To Not Lose Your Sh!t Episode 26 - “How To Beat Burnout (with Amelia Nagoski)”

LaFonda: Hi everyone. Welcome to How to Not Lose Your Shit. I am LaFonda Cousin, part-time yoga instructor, self-care advocate, and the chief people officer here at Red Wine and Blue. 

Katie: And I'm Katie Paris, the founder of Red Wine and Blue. 

LaFonda: This week we are joined by Amelia Nataski. She wrote a book with her twin sister Emily called Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. I think a lot of people, especially women in activism, are experiencing burnout right now, so it's super helpful to hear from an expert about how we can stay engaged while not losing our shit. 

Katie, you heard Amelia and Emily on some of your favorite podcasts before this, like We Can Do Hard Things, which we know that you love. What was it like getting to talk to Amelia directly and hear from her about burnout? 

Katie: It was absolutely incredible. So, you know when you listen to a podcast where you're getting a lot out of it, but you're sort of having to make a lot of mental leaps, like sort of applying the conversation you're hearing to your own life and you're like, “I think it applies like this. Let me see if I can draw this line here.” I constantly listen to things and I'm not only applying it to my own life, but to Red Wine and Blue, to activism, to the problem you're trying to solve, to getting, you know, inviting more women into community engagement and politics and trying to figure those things out. 

And I think sometimes a problem out there that I'm constantly struggling with, and I think at Red Wine & Blue we do a really good job at this, but it is the perpetual problem we're trying to solve is how do we make a bigger tent so that more women feel welcome to engage in politics, especially when the people who run politics have basically ruined it for everybody else, right? So we've gotta figure out how something that's inviting people wanna be a part of. 

And so I'm always... I have listened to Amelia's conversations in the past because I thought there's something there for us, like people perceive getting involved in civic and political engagement as like, “that's gonna burn me out. That's just too much.” And so I have listened to her before in trying to apply it to our work and to be able to ask her directly about our work and how… oh my gosh, it was just so mind-opening in terms of understanding. 

Cause for myself, I do find this work, actually, like… not doing it to me is more stressful than doing it, even though doing it can feel hard sometimes. And she helped me understand why. She helped me understand what goes on in my body that makes that true, and I haven't ever really understood it fully before on that sort of more organic, physical, what is actually going on inside your body level. So I just can't wait to share this conversation.

LaFonda: Yeah, I say this a lot, but honestly I think this is probably one of my favorite conversations and it was one of those conversations where you're listening and it feels engaging in the moment, but I'm also making mental notes about what I need to go back and listen to so that I can like look in my own journal, think about the things that I didn't complete the stress cycle on where am I in my own life. Like I think that completing the stress cycle is one of the things that I took away from that conversation immediately in my brain, like I think that I'm probably someone who doesn't complete the stress cycle often. That was, that was a flag for me. 

And so I think everyone should really listen to the completing the stress cycle part. So if that is my, that is my takeaway, I feel like it should be everyone's takeaway, but like there was just so much information that I felt like I'm, I need to go back and listen so that I can like, look things up and understand a little bit more and go to the workbook. And I just, yeah, I, this was a really, really good conversation and I'm so, so glad we had Amelia on.

Katie: Me too. I can't wait for people to benefit from this as much as we have, especially as we re-listen and re-listen and re-listen. 

LaFonda: Mm-hmm. 

Katie: And I think that the thing about completing the stress cycle is that I think when people hear about that initially, it can sound like what we're saying is like, “go revisit the stress, think about it more,” and it is the opposite of that. It's understanding that unless you complete the stress cycle, you will stay in the dark middle of the tunnel and never get out and see the light. And she gives us concrete tools or completing it so that we can get back into that light again. 

LaFonda: Mm-hmm. 

Katie: And yeah, that's, I just, I, this conversation was so interesting, but also so practical.

LaFonda: Yeah. 

Katie: So, all right, let's give it to the people!

LaFonda: Today we are joined by the co-author of Burnout, the Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle and the co-host of a podcast called The Feminist Survival Project. Both projects were created alongside her twin sister, Emily. Amelia, welcome to the pod. 

Amelia: Thank you so much.

Katie: We are so excited to have you! LaFonda knows how excited I've been about it. 

LaFonda: Katie is very, very excited for this moment. I'm excited to have you too. Katie is… Katie's very, very excited to have you. 

Amelia: Great! 

Katie: Yes. Welcome. 

LaFonda: We love it. Welcome. We love it. 

Katie: I'm ready. I'm ready.

LaFonda: Alright. So you and your sister's interest in burnout started when you were hospitalized for stress and pain while you were in graduate school. What happened and what did you learn from it? 

Amelia: Well, what happened was, um, I had no idea what was coming until in the middle of the night one night, I was in so much pain, I thought I was gonna die. So my now husband drove me to the emergency room and the next morning Emily was on the road on the way to come be like, “oh my God, my twin is in the emergency room.” And, and bringing with her like stacks of research about what happens when you have stress, like what happens in your body. 

And I had always kind of had the impression that stress was like an idea, something that people talk about, but it's not biological. I had never understood that emotions happen in your body. And uh, and when I learned that and that I could deal with the stress that happened in my body in a separate process than the process I used to deal with the things that caused the stress in my body, I actually started to get better. 

Katie: Most of us do have a general idea of what burnout is. Kind of like you were saying, you had a general idea of what stress was, but, but how do you define burnout? And are there signs that we can see like we know it's coming before we hit full on burnout? And then we're really gonna get to my question, um, which is, are any of us immune to burnout? 

Amelia: Question one, how do we define burnout? It was originally defined by a research psychologist named Herbert Freudenberger in the 1970s. He identified three primary characteristics, which are emotional exhaustion, decreased sense of accomplishment, and, uh… a third thing, I talk about this all the time, but my, I have long COVID and brain fog and sometimes my brain doesn't work. 

Katie: Those two things are great, I'm already learning. Keep going. Yep. 

Amelia: It turns out that in the research, women's experience of burnout is primarily the emotional exhaustion part and men's experience tends to focus more on the decreased sense of accomplishment.

We in the book define burnout as the experience of being overwhelmed and exhausted, and yet still worried that you're not doing enough. And can you see it coming before you end up in the hospital like me, absolutely. The decreased sense of accomplishment and the emotional exhaustion and the third thing that will, I promise, eventually occur to me. If you notice those in advance, you can go, “oh, oh, maybe I'm headed towards burnout” and, you know, do the things that we talk about in the book to to head it off. 

However, I do wanna make it clear that your capacity to notice your internal experience and to identify, are you emotionally exhausted, does rely on kind of an innate capacity to your talent for noticing your internal experience. Since we wrote the book, Emily and I have both independently been diagnosed with autism and we have sensory differences. And one of the things that are part of the diagnosis, and I am on a very far end of the spectrum that is a clinical deficiency, inability to sense my own internal experience. Uh, it has a name, it's called alexithymia. It is a stupid name that doesn't mean anything, but what it's like is I have no idea what's going on inside my body unless I consciously and intentionally turn toward it and pay attention to it. And I've gotten a lot better with practice. 

But Emily is on the other end of that spectrum. She is hyper aware all the time of her internal experience. So for her, she could never get all the way into burnout because her body would be screaming warning signals at her before she ever got that close. And insisting that she do the things that she needs to do to make sure she's acquiring resources and receiving the care that she needs so that she can tolerate existing. Whereas I can tolerate existing in a lot of very, very unhealthy circumstances before I, before I start to notice, “oh, I might need to start paying attention.” 

Katie: Okay. So I'm getting the sense that my question about like, is anyone immune from burnout… 

Amelia: No. 

Katie: The answer is no. But, but I, but I think that there might be something to this that some people are immune to noticing it, you know? Like kind of what you're saying, like you're almost there. And I feel like I'm a little bit more on your end than on your sister's end. And I, I love this because I feel like I can really learn from you. Like I think I'm pretty good actually at talking to other people about noticing it within them themselves, but like real talk, not so good for myself. As LaFonda knows. 

Um, okay. So can, can we get some coaching for that particular unique circumstance that may not be so unique?

LaFonda: Yeah. How did you get to, like, are you at a place where you're better at trying to tune in to where you are, um, so you don't get there again? 

Amelia: Yeah, it is a learnable skill. I mean, it's like music. I'm primarily trained as a musician and you know, I'm not a deeply gifted musician, but I have a lot of training and practice and experience, and that is what makes me better at it than most people. Not my inherent gifts or talent. In that same way I have gotten to be about average at noticing my own internal experience with practice. 

LaFonda: Good.

Amelia: This kind of practice starts easiest when you start to notice things through your, the five senses they teach you about when you're a kid. Um, you know what can you see, hear, taste, smell, touch. The things you can imagine are also sensory experiences that you can turn your attention toward and see if you can really investigate the sensory experience of that. 

We have two other senses that are proprioception, which is the, the sense of your place in space, your sense of balance, your sense of, you know, can I reach that thing if I stretch my arm out or is it too far away? And there's also interception or interception where it's your just understanding plain old of what's happening inside my body. And those might be defined as like emotions, feelings, which are biological, physiological states or just regular old, like, do I have pain in me now that I'm just not noticing? 

LaFonda: Mm-hmm. 

Amelia: A lot of us experience pain that we don't notice until it goes away and then we're like, “oh my God, I've been carrying that pain around without even noticing it. Whoa.” 

LaFonda: Yeah. Yeah. 

Amelia: As far as alexithymia goes, as a clinical diagnosis, about 10% of people fall into that category of the general population. Most of that 10% are men, but among autistic people, about 50% of autistic people have clinical diagnosable alexithymia. Um, so it's not all that common.

But it's super common, especially for women, to believe that their own understanding of their internal state is flawed and unreliable, and that they need to depend on other people to tell them how they feel. Because this is what we are trained to do. We are trained to believe, you know, our doctor, our expert, we should trust that person to tell us whether we're healthy or not.

And a lot of women experience the denial of their own sensations when they go to a medical professional, especially women of color, especially fat women, especially gender nonconforming women. Um, basically the less you conform to like a very narrow, socially constructed ideal, the more likely you are to experience this disconnect between what the world says you are and what you feel you are inside yourself. 

Katie: Okay, but follow up question. So like how you have developed an expertise, I think based on your diagnosis, your understanding of yourself, of how to tap into these senses with more intention. Can you just like, what is you do? Do you have any practical tools like how, how to do that? 

Amelia: Absolutely. Once I got this diagnosis and started understanding how I had improved my ability to do this, I made a podcast episode a Feminist Survival Project podcast episode in like 2021 that was just how to feel your feelings. How to improve your interception. It's also in the Burnout workbook. There's an appendix for people. Because “feel your feelings" is a big part of how to deal with and manage stress. So I made an appendix of how to feel your feelings. 

But I'll just tell you the very basics. It's how I started talking about this, which is start noticing your basic five senses they teach you about in elementary school. When you're eating something, notice the flavor and the texture and the sensation of warmth or coolness. Notice the smell, the sound it makes when you're brushing your teeth or taking a shower. Just notice the physical sensations, the things you hear, smell, taste, touch. 

Katie: I'm getting it more now, so it's not like notice when you're having those feelings of stress and overwhelm, it's more just like notice all the time so that when that comes, you tap into it better. Okay. 

Amelia: Exactly. Yeah. We know that like the pathways of of noticing can grow and become stronger just with practice. And it takes paying attention and, you know, making an effort to turn toward first easy things and then the more difficult things will become more easy. 

LaFonda: It's almost like you have to know your, you have to learn what your baseline is to know when something doesn't feel right.

Amelia: Absolutely, yes. 

LaFonda: Yeah. So what if you do miss it? So what if we're in a place where we miss the signs and then we get to the place where we are burned out? Then what do we do? Because you say in the book, the way out of burnout is to complete the cycle. So then how do we do that? 

Amelia: Yeah. Uh, so stress happens in the body. It is an evolutionary adaptation to help us keep ourselves alive, right? So in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, the stress response was designed to help us fight or flee so that when we see a saber-tooth tiger or whatever, our bodies are prepared to run, leap, jump, climb, hide. And that changes every system in our body.

Most of them, well, some of them you’ll notice, like we'll be consciously aware of. So like your heart rate, your blood pressure, your breathing, you can feel all that change to deliver more oxygen to your muscles. You can run faster. Very simple, understandable things. Uh, and then there's stuff that happens below the level of conscious awareness. Like your immune system, your immune system takes a lot of energy. But when you have that stress response in the moment of your, your body deciding this is a threat, I need to fight or flight my way out of this, your immune system gets the message, “Oh, I better take a back seat because my body needs all this energy to run.” 

Your reproductive system. Below the level of conscious awareness, your reproductive system is using so much energy. But when that stress response happens, your reproductive system gets the message, “I'm gonna take a back seat. 'cause who cares about babies when you might get eaten by this saber-tooth tiger.” Uh, your cognition changes, your skin changes. Every system in the body.

So that means that in the modern day, when most of the things that our body senses as a threat cannot be fought or fled from, that means that we are having this stress response, but never completing it by doing the thing that the stress response is preparing us for, right? Nowadays, instead of fighting or fleeing, we stand in line and we're smiling and being polite to the guy even if he seems kind of threatening. Cause the safest thing to do when a guy is just doing inappropriate things is smile and be nice, because otherwise we might trigger an even worse response. So to keep ourselves safe, we like stuff the fear down and we ignore it, and we never complete that stress response cycle.

So the good news is that you can, in fact, deal with the stress in your body in a separate process than the process you use to deal with the thing that initiated the stress. So for example, you smile and be nice and deal with the guy, and then later on, you go to the gym and do the running, or you tell your body that it has the capacity to move you from danger to safety by doing some other physical activity: hula hooping, dancing it out to Beyonce in your kitchen, just laying in bed and squeezing every muscle in your body until you can't hold it anymore but you'll hold it for just another couple of seconds and then you let everything go. And your body knows, “oh, oh, I'm safe here.” 

There are so many other things that also can help tell your body that it has the capacity to move you from danger to safety. And that includes a good night's sleep. In REM sleep, your body re-experiences stuff from the past and can process it in ways that allow it to come all the way through the stress response cycle. Um, imagination just reading a book or watching a movie or playing a game that is heart-pounding, that leads your body through the experience of being the hero who slays the dragon and rescues the princess or whatever. You're sitting on your couch and only your thumbs are moving, but your heart is pounding anyway. Your breathing is quicker. You can feel yourself experiencing as though you were actually physically engaging in this fight. Your brain doesn't really know the difference between doing things in real life versus imagining them. So in that way, you can also move through a stress response cycle in your imagination. 

You can do it by creative self-expression, of pouring out the difficult feelings into like, your knitting circle, knitting up some booties made of your frustration and rage. Uh… creative self-expression, imagination, sleep, a big old laugh, a big old cry, and connection with other people or with your pets or with nature or with a divine loving presence or with your own inner child, or just any presence that makes you feel seen and like you belong. Connection that will tell your body that it's safe here. 

All these ways to deal with the stress that are, these are just the evidence-based ways. You probably have ways that, you know, make your body feel safe that have not been studied, but they're just as valid. 

Katie: So it sounds like the options are pretty vast, but the one thing we all probably do the most was not on your list, which is think about the thing that happened that stressed us out over and over and over and over again.

Amelia: Yeah. Rumination, cognition, not part of the stress response. 

LaFonda: So suppressing it is not completing the cycle is what I'm hearing. 

Katie: Yes. That would be staying in the cycle as opposed to completing. 

Amelia: Right, right, right. Just reinforcing it and imagining it over and over again. So this is actually one of the things that I, that I mentioned was like, a big old cry can help you move through the stress response cycle. Cause it purges all the emotions. That's what's happening when you cry. Unless you're like me, where you really internalized the idea that crying doesn't solve anything. And it is true that crying very rarely deals with the thing that is causing the stress to happen in your body. 

But once you learn that stress, like the stress itself and the stressor that causes the stress are separate things, then you know that, like… oh, I'm just gonna cry and focus on the crying itself and whatever initiated this crying, you know, “I can't believe she did that. I can't believe he said that,” you put it in a box for later to deal with in its own separate process. And you just think about the experience of crying. You don't feed it more thoughts about what upset you in the first place. You just let the crying happen on its own.

And it's a cycle, like all emotions it has a beginning, a middle and an end. And after five, maybe seven minutes, it just ends. And you, you have a good cry and you feel better, and that's a real thing. So my, again, identical twin, raised the same house with me, as of like middle school knew that she could come home from school, slam the bedroom door shut and collapse against it and cry until the weight of the world is lifted off her shoulders. And she can like move on with her day.

And I was like…. “That's nothing. What? Why does crying help? Because it doesn't solve the problem.”

Katie: Right. 

Amelia: And I was in my thirties at my shrink’s office and it took a woman with a PhD from Yale to teach me how to cry. 

Katie: I love this. It's totally a reframe on what's productive. Some of us can be like, “That's not productive. That's not productive. Onto the next, onto the next.” It’s me. What, what I'm learning from you is like that's the least productive thing I could actually possibly do is say “Onto the next. Onto the next.” Because you're never completing the cycle and just perpetuating the stress. That's really, really alarming.

Amelia: Yeah. And because stress is a cycle that happens in your body, you've got those hormones and electrical signals in your body, and if they never get used up by completing the stress response cycle, they sit there. The changes that happen to your immune system and your reproductive system never get the signal to switch back. And this, in the long term, can cause damage. Physical damage and illness in your body. 

LaFonda: As someone who's experienced panic attacks as a result of stress like this all makes a ton of sense to me.

Katie: Okay. So what we're learning is that anyone, everyone can and does experience burnout. But you have, you've pointed out that women and people of color, women of color in particular, are more likely to experience something that you talk about in the book as Human Giver Syndrome.

And this is where some people are more likely than, well, some people are basically encouraged to follow your dreams, “you can do anything,” while other people are told to sort of have a moral obligation to support those people, those other people who are gonna pursue their dreams. 

So I'm really interested in how this connects to the work that LaFonda and I do in like civic engagement in politics because we see this all the time. There are many women in activism who they just cannot stop taking care of other people at their own expense, but they do it because they genuinely care. So how do we continue to care and support our community, especially in this freaking moment, and not burn out?

Amelia: I have an answer to this, which I'm so glad that I have an answer to this question! And that is that being a giver by default is the ideal thing to be. Right, and it feels so normal for women especially, who are raised to believe that they have a moral obligation to give and share and support and turn toward the people in need around them. If the whole world was filled with people who believed that, who felt that obligation and felt permission to act on it, then the world would be a place where nobody burned out because anytime anybody started to fall through the cracks, there'd be someone there who would turn toward them to lift them up and provide them resources. 

Being a human giver only turns into a syndrome when you exist in a society where half the population is told that they have a moral obligation to be their own humanity, to acquire whatever resources are necessary in order to achieve that, and as a result of that dynamic, which I think we can all recognize, um, being a human giver becomes a syndrome. Because instead of feeling the need to just give and receiving care in return, we start to believe that we have a moral obligation to be at all times, at all times, be pretty happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others. And that if we fail at any time, our moral obligation to be pretty happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others, then we are a failure. And since we have failed, then we deserve punishment. And if nobody else is around to punish us, we'll go ahead and punish ourselves.

And we start to believe that this is not just like a dangerous situation, but like this is just the way the world is. Women are givers. Of course they are. Men are the ones who live their humanity, and the women are the ones who support them. This is adapted from a book of moral philosophy called Down Girl, the Logic of Misogyny. So this is about the gender dynamic, but this dynamic is not just a gender dynamic. It is a power dynamic. Because masculinity, in the world we live in now, is a key to the doorway to power. 

But it's not the only one. Whiteness is another one. Education is another one. Wealth is the biggest one. Being cis is another one. Being straight is another one. Speaking English as a first language in the United States is a key to power. Being able bodied, being neurotypical. All these things give you access to power and if. Any of these ways you don't conform to this ideal you, you have less access to the power you need to make the world safe for you.

Did I, did I go all the way to the answer to the question or did I get distracted? 

Katie: Well, I mean, ultimately it is, how can we continue to be, like you say, if the world would actually all work the way we would imagine… I mean, it sounds actually like really the world we all wanna create, right? That like if everyone was a giver, and those of us who feel very wired to be givers though, because that is not the world in which we live, not today… how can we continue to care and not get the burnout?

Amelia: The simple answer now that we have all that context is yes, yes, divest from your relationships with human beings who feel, um, the moral obligation to take from you. Anyone who feels entitled to your time or your life or your body, you need to divest from that relationship so you don't feel that constant drain, that constant sucking away of your resources. And invest in the relationships with the other givers around you. Make, make those the relationships that matter. 

Katie: I love that. And that's, that's kind of big. 

Amelia: And it feels sort of misleading. Like, “oh, isn't a human being something we should all aspire to be?” Nope. That's one of the powerful rhetorical devices you use, is being a human giver instead of a human being is actually the goal, the thing that will make the world a better place. And so it, it asks us to kind of redefine what a human existence can be. 

Katie: Yeah. 

Amelia: And what being a human giver, surrounded by human givers, means is that you accept care. 

Katie: Yes. 

Amelia: That you allow others to help you. That you, sometimes you're standing on the beach trying to push the ocean away when you've just got buckets of sand. You can't do that by yourself ongoing forever, which is what we're trying to do when we're trying to smash the patriarchy. Uh, so sometimes what you do is you have to hand the bucket to the person behind you and let them take over while you go in the back of the line and take a rest and somebody takes over from them.

And that that is the ideal way to avoid human giver syndrome, to understand that it is not a normal and natural way to exist, to be asked to empty your cup for someone else's convenience, to sacrifice your wellbeing on the altar of their… yeah, their convenience. 

Katie: I feel like this is something that I am getting better at, like, you know, as I get older, as I get further and further into my forties, you know? And I see women who are a decade older than me being even better at it. And it's just like, God, how can we get better at this at a younger age? You know? And like, isn't that how we change our culture? 

It's not just about the amount of attention and energy. It is the quality of it. It is the how, right, it's not just the amount. I think that's what I'm hearing. I mean, this like resonates for me. I recently felt, I got a few months ago, I would say maybe close to burnout, like definitely a sense of overwhelm. And I was talking with my mother, who's a psychologist and, and pretty smart on some of these things. I was saying, “I'm feeling pulled in every direction. It's this, it's this, it's this, it's this, this.” And she kind of asked me to do a reset and say, “which direction is it that you're actually feeling like called to?  To sort of reroute you, you know, in why you do any of this?” 

And the result of it ended up being me actually saying, “yes” to getting involved in something in my own community. It was, you know, hyperlocal, really impacting like, is my community going to contribute to this whole ICE problem or not, you know? And it has created more work in my life, the fact that I said yes to it, but it is so at the core of why I do all of this. It is because, you know, I'm raising my family in this community, I live in this community because we are not the kind of community that is going to contribute to the data infrastructure that is serving ICE.

And, and so doing this work and connecting with other people in my community and doing it has actually regrounded me. It has done that. And so, but I've been confused about why. But what you're saying is helping me understand why in this instance, adding something more, actually helped me out of that hole I was feeling like I was sinking into, 

Amelia: Yeah, this, this makes me really wanna talk about the little monitor, which nobody ever asks me about, but it's chapter two in the book because it's one of the most important things.

But it's this process in your brain that keeps track of what your goals are, how much effort you're making towards that goal, and how much progress you're making towards that goal. And if the effort to progress ratio becomes too high, like… you're like, “I'm gonna go to the mall. It's gonna take 20 minutes.” But it takes you 40 minutes 'cause there's so much traffic? Once you get to the mall, you're like, “I'm never gonna go to the mall again. This was horrible.” 

But like, say you get all the green lights and you get to the mall in like 10 minutes, then that feels really good because your effort to progress ratio is really low effort to really high progress. When you set a goal that is easy, like going to the mall, then your brain expects easy, low effort. When you set a goal that is to demolish ICE, that's a big, that's, that's Everest.  

Katie: Yes.

Amelia: Your body knows, this is gonna be a long uphill battle. But because your brain is keeping track of little monitors, keeping track of how much effort you're putting in, how much progress you're making, and what the goal is, then you work so hard that you'd think it would be exhausting, but you're making an appropriate amount of progress relative to that effort. Then your brain's like, “yes, this is correct. This is how it ought to be.” And it does not feel frustrating. 

Katie: That is so cool. So this is why not only like taking action locally in your own community, not only is just like the most effective thing you can do because you know, just like, as a matter of fact, like where you live, you can have a disproportionate, your voice has a disproportionate impact 'cause there's less people who live in your community than all of the United States or all of the world. 

But also what you're saying is it's not just more effective. It's like it's going to decrease your sense of stress and burnout because of that monitor, you're staying in a better ratio in terms of effort and felt impact. So it's not just about that sort of, it's got not only the external value, but an internal one. 

Amelia: Yes. 

Katie: So cool!

Amelia: Because you can see results. When we work on a global level, again, this is moving the beach, right? 

Katie: Yeah. 

Amelia: Buckets at a time. That is not a goal we're gonna see the result of. None of us will live to see the end of the white supremacist, cis-heteronormative, exploitative, late capitalist patriarchy. We're just not. But we are going to see a reduction in it in some ways around us.

Katie: Yep. 

Amelia: I, I believe that to be true. But it's not gonna feel satisfying because we're gonna put a lot of effort in for very little result. But when it's just our neighbors, we can see the improvement that happens. So our bodies are more able to be like, “aha, results!” That's the scale of perception that our bodies are capable of.

Katie: Thank you so much for spending this time with us. I am going to be re-listening to this conversation over and over because I feel like there were like, I don't even know at least four chapters of, well, I mean, you touched on a lot of different chapters from your book, but I just mean there were various parts of this conversation that carried so much like revelation paired with actual tools and concrete guidance for not only understanding myself better, but like the context we're doing our work in. 

We have this big mantra at Red Wine & Blue, which is when they go low, we go local. And we always have been, have talked about it, you know, in terms of this like, how to have that high impact work. But I'm understanding it at this deeper level that is so exciting to me and I can't wait to share with our team and with our members and how it's just, it's all coming full circle. 

Just thank you for your work and, and how you just continue to go deeper with it, with yourself, with your sister. It is helping so many people, including us. 

Amelia: I'm so glad. There's two things that I always wanna say that I have somehow managed not to say outright. 

Katie: Great. 

Amelia: And that is, if you're gonna change one thing about your life to make it, you know, make stress more manageable, let it be getting more and better sleep. Sleep is the most important thing. I did mention it as like REM sleep, but like there's actually a whole chapter about sleep and rest. So let that be the main thing that you do if you're looking to make any changes. 

And also, just like you're talking about, the cure for burnout is not gonna be self-care. It's gonna be all of us turning toward each other. All of us caring for each other. 'cause getting that good night's sleep doesn't happen on its own. It happens because you are, you have permission to rest. And somebody else takes over for you while you are getting the, you know, caring for your body through rest.

LaFonda: I think this can end the podcast forever now. Cause rest and community is the self-care. I think that's, that's what we've learned. 

Amelia: Yeah. A hundred percent. Rest and community. 

LaFonda: You, you've solved it for everyone!

Amelia: Put it on a t-shirt. Everybody gets one. 

Katie: Yes!

LaFonda: Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today for, um, solving self-care for us. Where, where can our listeners go to learn more about you and your work and your sister and maybe buy the burnout book? 

Amelia: The title is Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. In the United States. There's also a workbook 'cause we learned that some people don't have time to read an 80,000 word book with a lot of science. Some people just want results and they don't need the receipts. Uh, and we also, there is an audiobook version if sitting down and reading a book is, you ain't got time for that. And there's now an audiobook version of the workbook which features songs by me.

Katie: Amazing. That's so cool. Thank you, Amelia. 

Amelia: Thank you.