Top 200 Emily Nagoski Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle.”

— Emily Nagoski

152. “Positive Social Interaction.”

— Emily Nagoski

153. “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

154. “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

155. “Our stressors are lower intensity and longer duration – “chronic stressors,” they’re called, in contrast to “acute stressors,” like straightforward predation.”

— Emily Nagoski

156. “Attachment is love.”

— Emily Nagoski

157. “But you can recognize the pain as part of the healing, and you can trust your heart to heal, just as you trust your bones to heal, knowing that it will gradually hurt less and less as you recover.”

— Emily Nagoski

158. “The quality of our lives is not measured by the amount of time we spend in a state of perfection. On the contrary, people of vision – think of the principal social justice leaders of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – see the largest gap between what is and what ought to be, and they know they will not live to see a world that fully achieves their vision of what’s possible. A gap between reality and perfection is not abnormal or a sign of dysfunction; it’s a normal part of life.”

— Emily Nagoski

159. “This is the most common reason we hear when people resist self-compassion. They’re worried that if they stop beating themselves up, they’ll lose all motivation, they’ll just sit around watching Real Housewives of Anywhere and eating Lucky Charms in a bowl full of Bud Light.”

— Emily Nagoski

160. “Anyway, our fellow apes eat insects out of each other’s fur; maybe bath bombs and body glitter are the modern human equivalent.”

— Emily Nagoski

161. “You can chart the progress of women in America by the things Disney heroines sing about in their “I Want” songs.”

— Emily Nagoski

162. “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

163. “There is and always will be a chasm between you and expected-you. What matters is not the size of the chasm or the nature of the chasm or anything else. What matters is how you manage it – which is to say, how you relate to your madwoman. Turn toward that self-critical part of you with kindness and compassion. Thank her for the hard work she has done to help you survive.”

— Emily Nagoski

164. “Flight is fear – avoidance – whereas fight is anger – approach – but they’re both the “GO!” stress response of the sympathetic nervous system. They tell you to do something.”

— Emily Nagoski

165. “All she had to do to accept their help was let go of her impulse to be in control and make everything perfect.”

— Emily Nagoski

166. “Only by making sure we have as much energy coming in as we have going out can we all stay committed to the people, work, and ideas we love.”

— Emily Nagoski

167. “Completing the cycle requires that, instead of hitting the brake on our stress, we gently remove our foot from both the accelerator and the brake and allow ourselves to coast to a stop.6 To do that, you create the right context and trust your body to do its thing.”

— Emily Nagoski

168. “Every Disney heroine has an “I Want” song, in which they explain what’s missing in their lives. Moana feels called by the ocean. Tiana is “Almost There,” saving money to start her own restaurant. Belle wants “adventure in the great wide somewhere.” The tradition goes all the way back to Snow White, singing “Someday My Prince Will Come.” You can chart the progress of women in America by the things Disney heroines sing about in their “I Want” songs.”

— Emily Nagoski

169. “A smell that seems pleasant when it’s labeled “cheese” smells gross when it is labeled “body odor.”

— Emily Nagoski

170. “Emotions are physiological cascades that want to complete their cycles, and they will complete those cycles when you allow them to; they want to be travelers, not residents. They want to move on. Let them.”

— Emily Nagoski

171. “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

172. “Ask your closest friends to describe the “real you,” the characteristics of your personality and your life that are at the core of your best self.”

— Emily Nagoski

173. “Givers are not supposed to need anything. If they dare to ask for or, God forbid, demand anything, that’s a violation of their role as a giver and they may be punished. And if a giver doesn’t obediently and sweetly hand over whatever a being wants, for that, too, the giver may be punished, shamed, or even destroyed.”

— Emily Nagoski

174. “During President Barack Obama’s first term in office, his women staffers struggled so much to get their voices heard that they coordinated an “amplification” tactic, where when one of them made a key point, the others would repeat it, crediting the original speaker. Even President Obama, a self-declared feminist, needed active intervention to create gender balance.”

— Emily Nagoski

175. “Freeze happens when the brain assesses the threat and decides you’re too slow to run and too small to fight, and so your best hope for survival is to “play dead” until the threat goes away or someone comes along to help you. Freeze is your last-ditch stress response, reserved for threats that the brain perceives as life-threatening, when fight or flight don’t stand a chance.”

— Emily Nagoski

176. “Concrete. Specific. Detailed.”

— Emily Nagoski

177. “If you want to try using this principle rationally, all you have to do is write four lists: What are the benefits of continuing? What are the benefits of stopping? What are the costs of continuing? What are the costs of stopping?”

— Emily Nagoski

178. “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

179. “Your brain has a built-in mechanism to assess when it’s time to quit. Listen to its quiet voice. Or do a worksheet; sometimes that’s easier.”

— Emily Nagoski

180. “If you carry a purse laden with the complete contents of a drugstore, you already know about planful problem-solving. If you write lists, keep calendars, or follow a budget, you know what planful problem-solving entails. It does what it says on the label: you analyze the problem, you make a plan based on your analysis, and then you execute the plan.”

— Emily Nagoski

181. “As Perel puts it in her TEDx talk, “In desire, we want a bridge to cross.”

— Emily Nagoski

182. “You may do all the things you’re supposed to do, without getting where you’re trying to go, only to end up somewhere else pretty amazing.”

— Emily Nagoski

183. “When you get right down to it, self-criticism is yet another form of stress... Literally, our stress hormone levels increase.”

— Emily Nagoski

184. “That’s why it’s so important that we give it a name: We call it “the Feels,” and it’s nothing to fear. It’s a normal, healthy part of completing the cycle, a physiological reaction that will end on its own, usually lasting just a few minutes. Feels usually happen in extreme cases where the stress response cycle is interrupted suddenly and not allowed to complete. It’s part of the healing process following a traumatic event or long-term, intense stress.”

— Emily Nagoski

185. “Attachment is about survival; relationships are about survival. When they are threatened, we do whatever it takes to hold on to them, because there are no higher stakes than our connection with our attachment objects.”

— Emily Nagoski

186. “We might do these things when we don’t know how to complete the cycle or when the feelings just hurt too much.”

— Emily Nagoski

187. “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

188. “And then you look at those four lists and make a decision based on your estimates of maximizing benefit and minimizing cost. Remember to consider both the long-term and the short-term costs and benefits. And if you decide to continue, remember to include completing the cycle in your plan.”

— Emily Nagoski

189. “Meaning is often misunderstood as “the thing we’ll find at the end of the tunnel,” but it’s not. It’s why we go through the tunnel, regardless of what we find on the other end.”

— Emily Nagoski

190. “Andrew paused in moving a microphone cable, considered for a moment, and nodded. He said, “Yeah. I really am.” Redefining winning made the recording session far less agonizing. But better still, a year later, when the group met again, several singers approached Amelia privately to tell her, “That Monitor thing? That’s changed, like, my whole life.”

— Emily Nagoski

191. “We’re not saying that “beautiful” is what your body should be; we’re saying beautiful is what your body already is.”

— Emily Nagoski

192. “To feel normal is to feel that you belong.”

— Emily Nagoski

193. “Positive reappraisal involves recognizing that sitting in traffic is worth it. It means deciding that the effort, the discomfort, the frustration, the unanticipated obstacles, and even the repeated failure have value – not just because they are steps toward a worthwhile goal, but because you reframe difficulties as opportunities for growth and learning.3.”

— Emily Nagoski

194. “Your body, with its instinct for self-preservation, knows, on some level, that Human Giver Syndrome is slowly killing you. That’s why you keep trying mindfulness and green smoothies and self-care trend after self.”

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski

196. “Choose what feels right for you and ignore what doesn’t feel right.”

— Emily Nagoski

197. “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

198. “The solution is to practice replacing self-criticism with self-kindness.”

— Emily Nagoski

199. “Great! Just notice any apparently causeless emotions or sensations or trembling and say, “Ah. There’s some Feels.”

— Emily Nagoski

200. “Each person’s experience of survival is unique, but it often includes a kind of disengaged unreality.”

— Emily Nagoski