Top 200 Emily Nagoski Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 5

101. “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

102. “Allowing time and space for your body to move all the way through the cycle, to discharge stress and to connect wholly with your partner, is an essential part of creating a context that grants maximum access to pleasure.”

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski

104. “This is the tragedy of the madwoman. She whips us, and we achieve things. And so we think the whipping is why we achieved things and we’ll never achieve anything without the whipping.”

— Emily Nagoski

105. “2. Social Appropriateness. Sometimes the brain activates a stress response and you can’t do the thing it’s trying to tell you to do:.”

— Emily Nagoski

106. “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

107. “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

108. “We don’t need other people’s love in order to love ourselves; we don’t need a romantic partner to be ‘complete.’ But we need other people to teach us how to love ourselves best.”

— Emily Nagoski

109. “We’ve locked ourselves, culturally, into our own fear, rage, and despair. We must build time, space, and strategies for discharging our stress response cycles.”

— Emily Nagoski

110. “But survival is not recovery; survival happens automatically, sometimes even against the survivor’s will.”

— Emily Nagoski

111. “We need to discharge the stress response, complete the cycle, before our bodies can move on. “Home” is the place – physical and emotional – where we can discharge stress without being judged or shamed or told we just need to relax or forget about it. “Home” is where we receive our partner’s “loving presence.” People who listen with a loving presence are calm, attentive, and warmly attuned to the other person.”

— Emily Nagoski

112. “Realistic expectations can make all the difference-for instance, it’s normal for it to take six months to a year for a couple to get pregnant, and 15 percept of couples don’t conceive within that first year.”

— Emily Nagoski

113. “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

114. “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

115. “Recovery requires an environment of relative security and the ability to separate the physiology of freeze from the experience of fear, so that the panic and the rage can discharge, completing their cycles at last.”

— Emily Nagoski

116. “Images matter. They tell us what’s possible, what things go together, what belongs and what doesn’t belong. And we’re all just trying to belong somewhere.”

— Emily Nagoski

117. “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

118. “That means that somewhere inside them, they believe that if they’re isolated, that’s good; isolation protects others from their real, core badness. And if they’re suffering, that’s good; it prevents them from growing mighty, which might lead to them having power that they would inevitably fail to use effectively, or might even abuse.”

— Emily Nagoski

119. “From this point of view, intimate conversation, affection, and friendship are central to the erotic life of a long-term relationship.”

— Emily Nagoski

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Emily Nagoski

123. “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

124. “A final caution: Too often, we mistake dealing with the stressors for dealing with the stress.”

— Emily Nagoski

125. “No wonder “helping professions” are so exhausting – you’re confronted with people in need, all day, day after day. No wonder parenting is so exhausting – once you’re a parent, you’re never not a parent. You’re always going through the tunnel.”

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski

127. “You turn into a bunny hiding under a hedge. Imagine a rabbit being chased by a fox, and she runs under a bush to hide. How long does she stay there? Until the fox is gone, right?”

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski

129. “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

130. “Why is it dying?” to “Wow!” And it’s this: responsive desire.1 Responsive, in contrast to spontaneous desire.”

— Emily Nagoski

131. “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

132. “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

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. “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

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

— Emily Nagoski

136. “We saw in chapter 8 that there are three ways you can address the gap between where you are and where you expect to be. You can ask yourself, “Is this the right goal for me?” or, “Am I putting in the right amount of the right kind of effort?” or, “Are my expectations of how much effort this particular goal requires realistic?” All three of these are different kinds of reality checks.”

— Emily Nagoski

137. “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

138. “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

139. “But then, when women start to think concretely about it, they begin to discover a sense that they need their self-criticism in order to stay motivated. We believe it does us good to torture ourselves, at least a little bit. As in: “If I stop beating myself up for the ways I’m not perfect, that’s like admitting to the world – and to myself – that I’ll never be perfect, that I’m permanently inadequate! I need my self-criticism in order to maintain hope and to motivate myself to get better.”

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

144. “Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle.”

— Emily Nagoski

145. “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

146. “Remember, your body has no idea what “filing your taxes” or “resolving an interpersonal conflict through rational problem-solving” means. It knows, though, what jumping up and down means. Speak its language – and its language is body language.”

— Emily Nagoski

147. “Perfectionists set goals that are impossible – and if they somehow manage to achieve a goal, they assume that goal must be worthless and they set another, even more impossible goal. Which puts them in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction.”

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski

149. “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

150. “Breathing. Deep, slow breaths downregulate the stress response – especially when the exhalation is long and slow and goes all the way to the end of the breath, so that your belly contracts. Breathing is most effective when your stress isn’t that high, or when you just need to siphon off the very worst of the stress so that you can get through a difficult situation, after which you’ll do something more hardcore.”

— Emily Nagoski