Top 200 Emily Nagoski Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “These changes in perception are not “just in your head.” People who are given a drug that will relax them and are told, “This is a drug that will relax you,” not only feel more relaxed compared to those who got the drug but not the information, they also have more of the drug in their blood plasma.11 Context changes more than how you feel; it can change your blood chemistry.”

— Emily Nagoski

102. “Let’s invent a ritual where women celebrate the transition into their postpartum bodies. I mean, it’s not just its appearance that changes, it’s what your body means, to yourself and to the world.”

— Emily Nagoski

103. “Emotional exhaustion happens when we get stuck in an emotion and can’t move through the tunnel. In Human Giver Syndrome, the giver isn’t allowed to inconvenience anyone with anything so messy as emotions, so givers are trapped in a situation where they are not free to move through the tunnel. They might even be punished for it.”

— Emily Nagoski

104. “Affection. When friendly chitchat with colleagues doesn’t cut it, when you’re too stressed out for laughter, deeper connection with a loving presence is called for. Most often, this comes from some loving and beloved person who likes, respects, and trusts you, whom you like, respect, and trust.”

— Emily Nagoski

105. “Dealing with your stress is a separate process from dealing with the things that cause your stress. To deal with your stress, you have to complete the cycle.”

— Emily Nagoski

106. “We thrive when we have a positive goal to move toward, not just a negative state we’re trying to move away from. If we hate where we are, our first instinct often is to run aimlessly away from the owl of our present circumstances, which may lead us somewhere not much better than where we started. We need something positive to move toward. We need the cheese.”

— Emily Nagoski

107. “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

108. “How do we work with the organic intelligence of the body to heal? Instead of managing what comes up from the body, we work with it, trusting its purpose and direction, while holding a very particular, healing framework.”

— Emily Nagoski

109. “Why we fall in love is attachment, which is sort of a biological pursuit of wholeness.”

— Emily Nagoski

110. “Being grateful for good things doesn’t erase the difficult things.”

— Emily Nagoski

111. “Novices who are thoroughly incompetent rate themselves as very confident in their ability to do a thing they’ve just learned to do. By contrast, genuine experts know how difficult their work is, so they are realistic about their competence and thus rate their confidence in their own abilities as moderate, even as their performance is, of course, expert-level.”

— Emily Nagoski

112. “And just as everyone’s genitals are normal and beautiful, so all women’s bodies are normal and beautiful. But mostly that’s not what women are taught. Mostly we’re taught that our bodies are supposed to be one specific shape, otherwise there’s something wrong with us. I’ll talk about that – and how to overcome it – in chapter 5.”

— Emily Nagoski

113. “And it’s a new kind of pain; it can’t be managed by the same strategies you’ve been using to manage the pain of the whip. You were good at managing that old kind of pain, and now you have to learn a whole new way to deal with this whole new kind of pain. As one client of “compassionate mind therapy” put it, if they started practicing self-compassion, they “would open up a well of unbearable sadness.”13.”

— Emily Nagoski

114. “If you’re feeling not just frustrated and challenged, but helpless, isolated, and trapped, like you want to hide in a cave, or like you’d rather put your hand in a toilet full of tadpoles than spend one more day doing the thing, you should definitely quit whatever it is.”

— Emily Nagoski

115. “Nonjudging is neutrally noticing your own internal states.”

— Emily Nagoski

116. “Love, according to the parable, is the pursuit of our own wholeness. We wander the earth in search of our lost half. And when two halves find each other, as Aristophanes says, “the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together;.”

— Emily Nagoski

117. “You get to decide what plants stay and what plants go, which plants get attention and love and which are ignored, pruned away to nothing, or dug out and thrown on the compost heap to rot. You get to choose.”

— Emily Nagoski

118. “Struggle can increase creativity and learning, strengthen your capacity to cope with greater difficulties in the future, and empower you to continue working toward goals that matter to you.”

— Emily Nagoski

119. “But the best romance novels are the ones where the se isn’t just gratuitous for the sake of entertainment.”

— Emily Nagoski

120. “You can’t make someone be patient any more than you can make someone have an orgasm. You create a great context, and then allow it to happen.”

— Emily Nagoski

121. “That’s why you keep trying mindfulness and green smoothies and self-care trend after self-care trend. But that instinct for self-preservation is battling a syndrome that insists that self-preservation is selfish, so your efforts to care for yourself might actually make things worse, activating even more punishment from the world or from yourself, because how dare you?”

— Emily Nagoski

122. “1. emotional exhaustion – the fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long; 2. depersonalization – the depletion of empathy, caring, and compassion; and 3. decreased sense of accomplishment – an unconquerable sense of futility: feeling that nothing you do makes any difference.1.”

— Emily Nagoski

123. “Meaning is not made by the terrible thing you experienced; it is made by the ways you survive.”

— Emily Nagoski

124. “Pessimists, by contrast, don’t always expect good outcomes and may view bad things, if they happen, as symptomatic of larger-scale problems that could have lasting impact.”

— Emily Nagoski

125. “When your brain is in a stressed state, almost everything is perceived as a potential threat.”

— Emily Nagoski

126. “The key to managing stress effectively is to make efforts to complete the cycle – unlock from freeze, escape the predator, kill the enemy, rejoice.”

— Emily Nagoski

127. “Second, our emotion-dismissing culture is uncomfortable with Feels. Our culture says that if the stressor isn’t right in front of us, then we have no reason to feel stressed and so we should just cut it out already. As a result, most people’s idea of “stress management” is either to eliminate all stressors or to just relax, as if stress can be turned off like a light switch.”

— Emily Nagoski

128. “Both feeling taken care of and taking care of others register in your stress response as “completing the cycle.”

— Emily Nagoski

129. “Art, used in the same way, can help. When mental health professionals suggest journaling or other expressive self-care, they don’t mean that the construction of sentences or the task of drawing is inherently therapeutic; rather, they’re encouraging you to find positive contexts to discharge your stress, through the creative process.”

— Emily Nagoski

130. “But in the nineteenth century, with the rise of the middle class, it became fashionable for a man to be able to afford a wife who was too weak to work. It was a status symbol, an advertisement of wealth, for a man to have a wife who not only didn’t but couldn’t contribute to the household income. “Delicate” and “fragile” became feminine virtues.”

— Emily Nagoski

131. “Self-compassion is hard because healing hurts and growing stronger can be scary. But it’s worth it because healing helps us grow mighty enough to heal Human Giver Syndrome.”

— Emily Nagoski

132. “John Gottman, in The Science of Trust, says that the problem is not lack of distance and mystery but lack of deepening intimacy.”

— Emily Nagoski

133. “But we think rest matters not because it makes you more productive, but because it makes you happier and healthier, less grumpy, and more creative. We think rest matters because you matter. You are not here to be “productive.” You are here to be you, to engage with your Something Larger, to move through the world with confidence and joy. And to do that, you require rest.”

— Emily Nagoski

134. “Happiness is predicated on ‘happenings,’ on what’s occurring, on whether your life is going right, and whether all is well. Joy arises from an internal clarity about our purpose.”

— Emily Nagoski

135. “At last, Sophie let herself dive in, and her world transformed. She said, “I thought love would just be like being me, plus knowing that if I’m bleeding to death somebody will call an ambulance. But it’s more than that. I see myself in his eyes, and I find new ways to know and love myself, at the same time that I find new ways to know and love him, and then I know and love us and what we are together, which is this thing beyond what either of us is.”

— Emily Nagoski

136. “The stress response cycle needs to complete, and just eliminating the stressor isn’t enough to do that. So.”

— Emily Nagoski

137. “Self-compassion is being patient with yourself through that process – and being patient with yourself when you need to take a break.”

— Emily Nagoski

138. “Redefining winning in terms of incremental goals is not the same as giving yourself rewards for making progress – such rewards are counterintuitively ineffective and may even be detrimental.12 When you redefine winning, you set goals that are achievements in themselves – and success is its own reward.”

— Emily Nagoski

139. “Creative Expression. Engaging in creative activities today leads to more energy, excitement, and enthusiasm tomorrow.”

— Emily Nagoski

140. “Lives may be experienced as meaningful when they are felt to have significance beyond the trivial or momentary, to have purpose, or to have a coherence that transcends chaos.”7.”

— Emily Nagoski

141. “But often there’s a huge resistant knot of beliefs that has to be untangled before the person can get there.”

— Emily Nagoski

142. “When she was happy and relaxed, she had one set of opinions about herself: self-confident and self-compassionate. When she was overwhelmed, she had an entirely different set of opinions about herself: self-critical and even self-abusive.”

— Emily Nagoski

143. “This is the upside-down world we live in: in most situations in the modern, post-industrial West, the stress itself will kill you faster than the stressor will – unless you do something to complete the stress response cycle.”

— Emily Nagoski

144. “This is what science can do for us, if we let it. If offers us an opportunity to lower our defenses and experience the ways that we are all connected.”

— Emily Nagoski

145. “2. Reserve thirty minutes of each day for a “stress-reducing conversation.” If your stress-reducing conversation partner is your life partner, you might also add a weekly hour-long “state of the union” conversation. Research recommends these as the standards for sustaining a satisfying relationship.39.”

— Emily Nagoski

146. “Because story goes where science can’t.”

— Emily Nagoski

147. “For a lot of people, the most difficult thing about “completing the cycle” is that it almost always requires that they stop dealing with whatever caused the stress, step away from that situation, and turn instead toward their own body and emotions.”

— Emily Nagoski

148. “Self-criticism is associated with worse health outcomes, both mental and physical, and more loneliness.”

— Emily Nagoski

149. “Physical activity is what tells your brain you have successfully survived the threat and now your body is a safe place to live. Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle.”

— Emily Nagoski

150. “Being with the tribe doesn’t replace the Feels built into completing the cycle. We need to discharge the stress response, complete the cycle, before our bodies can move on.”

— Emily Nagoski