Even though you’ve dealt with the stressor (by getting out of traffic), your body still needs you to deal with the stress itself by completing the stress response cycle.

You’re still in the middle of the stress response. If you have a difficult commute home, once you get home, you don’t instantly feel peaceful and relaxed in your body.

Often we expect that solving the problem that activated the stress response will end the stress response cycle, but in fact the process of dealing with most modern stressors, like traffic, kids, money, relationships, etc., is separate from the process of dealing with the stress itself. If we can move all the way through the stress response cycle, we stay healthy. Like all biological processes, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s how we deal with stress-not what causes it-that releases the stress, completes the cycle, and ultimately, keeps us from burning out, says Emily.Īnd as Amelia learned, you can’t control every external stressor that comes your way: “The goal isn’t to live in a state of perpetual balance and peace and calm the goal is to move through stress to calm, so that you’re ready for the next stressor, and to move from effort to rest and back again.”Įmily: It is the biological response to anything the brain perceives as a threat.

“The good news is that stress is not the problem,” they write. In their book, the twin sisters identify the difference between stress and stressors and explore the cycle of stress. “We’ve lost count of the number of women who have told us they have been hospitalized or have experienced chronic illness as a result of intense, long-term stress.” The result of their research and work is Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. The bridge between stress and pain proved to be a short one. “Whereas men notice their exhaustion and have cultural permission to rest and be cared for, women are expected to tolerate a degree of stress so profound, they might end up hospitalized.”Īmelia and Emily Nagoski started researching the notion that stress can somehow get stuck in our bodies and that, in extreme cases, it can even lead to medical problems. Like it or not (and we go with not), there is “a cultural expectation that women will just give and give until they have nothing left,” says Amelia Nagoski.

Burnout emily