Cori Kogan

“The good news is that stress is not the problem. The problem is that the strategies that deal with stressors have almost no relationship to the strategies that deal with the physiological reactions our bodies have to those stressors. To be “well” is not to live in a state of perpetual safety and calm, but to move fluidly from a state of adversity, risk, adventure, or excitement, back to safety and calm, and out again. Stress is not bad for you; being stuck is bad for you.”
― Emily Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

“When your conscientiousness impels you to take on more than you can handle, you begin to lose interest, even in tasks that normally engage you. You risk your physical health. 'Emotional labor,' which is the effort we make to control and change our own emotions, is associated with stress, burnout, and even physical symptoms like and increase in cardiovascular disease.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“The desire for the cool job that you’re passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon—and, as we’ll see, a means of elevating a certain type of labor to the point of desirability that workers will tolerate all forms of exploitation for the “honor” of performing it. The rhetoric of “Do you what you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life” is a burnout trap. By cloaking the labor in the language of “passion,” we’re prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“The problem with “everything” is that it ends up looking an awful lot like nothing: just one long haze of frantic activity, with all the meaning sheared away. Time has passed so quickly while I have been raising a child and writing books, and working a full-time job that often sprawls into my weekends, that I can’t quite account for it. The preceding years are not a blank exactly, but they’re certainly a blur, and one that’s strangely devoid of meaning, except for a clawing sense of survival.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times