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Tell me if this sounds familiar.
You get home exhausted and then what you call rest is really doom scrolling for an hour and then binging Netflix for the other three.
You wake up tired and you call it a motivation problem, but it's not.
It's burnout training.
If you keep doing this, you'll shrink into a two-dimensional work machine.
Less patient at home, more reactive at work and weaker in negotiations, because your emotional control is already spent before the conversation even begins.
In this episode, you'll get three resets that actually work.
How to stop your workday from expanding and taking over your life.
How to take breaks that actually restore focus instead of draining it.
And how to build guardrails so your default choices don't sabotage you.
Dr Guy Winch is a clinical psychologist, bestselling author of Emotional First Aid, and his new book Mind Over Grind is a manual for surviving the modern workplace without losing yourself.
And he'll show you why the advice of just take a break always fails and what to do instead.
Let's jump in.
Guy, thank you for coming back on.
It's always a pleasure to nerd out with another psychology nerd here.
So thank you for coming back on.
Appreciate it.
It is my pleasure.
Thank you for having me.
Yes.
And, you know, I shared how much I love your writing and it's obsessive at this point.
So I'm very excited to know that you've got another book coming out.
So can you tell us about that?
Yes, the book is called Mind Over Grind, How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life.
And it's essentially a manual for what is going on with you psychologically mentally emotionally, when you are at work, when you are either stressed at work or pressured at work, or you're very devoted, and when you love your work, when you're highly engaged.
Our mind operates in all kinds of interesting ways of which we are not aware, some of which we are, some of which we are not, but it's actually impacting us and it's infiltrating us in all kinds of ways, especially outside of the workplace.
We might be aware of some of the things that happen in the workplace, but it's having an impact outside the workplace, which is really causing this epidemic that we see of work stress and burnout that keeps going up even as our awareness increases goes up.
Yes, and this is.
This is great, because i think the timing of the release of this book is perfect.
It's so necessary now and just by the title, i know that most of the people listening were are going to be intrigued, but i really want to paint a very vivid picture here.
When it comes to burnout and stress and the unique challenge of being engaged in the workplace today versus in the past, What is it about this time that's making it so uniquely challenging?
Well, if we look at stress and performance and how stress impacts us, it's a bell curve.
In other words, with very little stress we don't do as well because there's no real pressure to do much.
And so we're not as focused.
We're not as attending.
When stress goes up, there's a Goldilocks spot there, at the top of the curve, in which the stress is causing us to pay enough attention and to make enough of an effort to that.
We're bringing forth all our abilities and then we're doing best.
But past a certain point, the stress becomes too much.
And then we don't manage it well.
And we start actually to mismanage it, to self-sabotage.
It starts having a very, very negative impact.
And then we see all the performance goes down.
And stress in the current workplace has been going up year after year after year.
We're seeing this in surveys.
And we're seeing burnout rates go up because of it.
You know, the numbers, surveys are very, very, each survey has a different number.
And I usually tend to go with more conservative numbers.
But 60 to 70 percent of people are experiencing burnout symptoms, if not full burnout.
Many, many people are coming home at the end of many nights feeling absolutely depleted, absolutely drained from their jobs, even if they love their jobs.
And what happens then, and the kinds of things that happen as a result, is we take our eye off what's actually important, off our relationships, off our self-care, off who we are as people.
And we don't realize the degree to which we're compromised by this accumulation of chronic stress.
Pressure demands the hustle culture needing to work so many jobs at once, getting home after a difficult day, and then you have parenting to do.
And that's another job.
And having so little time to just be you, to get in touch with who you are, to figure out what your needs are, to take care of them.
And it's impacting us in all these global ways.
And I think I saw that people weren't aware how much they were being impacted, how much they were shrinking from three-dimensional people to two-dimensional kind of cutouts of work drones in a certain way.
And there's much we can do individually ourselves, to combat that, to be aware of it and to combat it.
And so I wanted to write a book that helps people.
A pay attention like here's what you need to notice.
Here's what's going wrong.
And here's what you need to do about it.
This is not about how you change the workplace because that's a bigger endeavor.
And I don't think any one book can solve that for you or any one person can do it.
But this is how to survive the workplace we have now.
Yes.
Oh, this is this is great.
And I think one of the most important things that you mentioned that a lot of people don't recognize is that there is a Goldilocks zone of stress, because we often just blanket say stress is bad.
We want none of it, not just a little bit, but none of it.
But we recognize that there's a level of stress which is adaptive, but then it can go too far over the edge and it becomes maladaptive.
And I want to speak to the skeptics out there. because there is a small contingency.
Let's describe them as the back in my day folks, or the this generation is too soft types of folks where they say well, you think back to the industrial age, people were working long manual hours and they still had to come home with their families.
And when you think about some of the, The technological advancements that we have today, the living today is easier than it's ever been.
So why does there seem to be more stress now than in the past?
So that's I hear people say such things.
I want to be clear.
This is not Kwame saying such things.
But I want to make sure that we address that very clearly, because I think there are a lot of leaders who might adopt that type of suck it up and deal with it type of mentality and not fully understand the psychological underpinnings of what it is that you're discussing.
First of all, we apparently know the same people because I get that quite a bit myself.
And what I say to people when they tell me oh, in the industrial age, we work 16-hour shifts and managed
I'm like, yes, we did.
We were miserable and dead at 50.
But fine, if that's what you want.
Not for me personally.
I've exceeded apparently that age.
But truly it's like if you're comparing life to the industrial age or even into 1920s and 30s and the greater generation, and just suck it up.
Yes, misery is an option and many are living in misery.
The question is, Must they?
And is there not a better option?
And what I'm suggesting, by the way, is not work less.
It's work smarter.
It's not cope less.
It's cope smarter.
So, for example, when you know I am not suggesting by any means that we have no stress because we need some
In fact, what I'm suggesting is because of that Goldilocks zone, you just need to lower the stress you have to below that line, not entirely. just enough to be able to breathe, to be able to have oxygen and to be able to give oxygen to other aspects of your life.
We know, for example, that when one person is chronically stressed at work, their spouse can begin to develop symptoms of burnout because of the transfer of that stress, those pressures, that tension, the drainage that happens and how it gets transferred and played out in the home arena.
So these are not just issues that are impacting us.
They are impacting our families.
They are impacting our loved ones.
They are causing a lot of illness and disease, costing the economy billions and billions of dollars in lost productivity and lost revenue.
There's actually a big price that we pay those people who are saying, oh, just get tough about it.
You can get tough about it.
Your body will give out at some point.
You know, when you get into burnout, your productivity takes a drop, And so where's the gain there of driving people into burnout?
It's like it doesn't even work in terms of the finances.
It doesn't even work in terms of the long-term prospect of effectiveness and optimization.
You're not optimizing.
You're just driving people off a cliff.
And then what?
Yep, this is great and you articulated this perfectly because yes, there were people in the past who lived under worse conditions and that doesn't mean that they were living well.
And if you could bring them today and let them speak, they're not going to say, I was loving that.
They were surviving it, but they weren't enjoying that.
And I think also something that I hear very frequently is when somebody is burnt out, a lot of times they will just say okay, I need a break.
And what often happens is they take a break and then they come back, and then they go straight into the same level of burnout within a couple of hours or days.
And what is it about the psychology of burnout that makes us so ill-equipped to actually meaningfully tackle it when it comes upon us?
We are trying to look for solutions externally.
We will take a break from work and therefore we will be able to get some you know, some oxygen and lower the levels of our stress.
And then we will come back and really within a few days if not a week, some people a few hours you're going to be right back to where you were.
And why I wrote this book is the solution is not external.
I mean, again, it would be great if the workplace changed.
The current workplace ain't changing anytime soon.
But the solution is not external.
Neither do we need it to be.
Because the lower lying fruit, the thing that we all have access to that could make a huge difference is this
It's our mind.
And that's where we need to make a change in how we manage ourselves psychologically, in how we think about what we do, or rather, to start to think about what we're doing, to take control of this apparatus rather than be on the autopilot, because the autopilot will fly us into a mountain time and again.
We did not evolve for this workplace.
We evolved to be hunter-gatherers and to do well with those pressures.
And those pressures were we went on a hunt every whenever.
And that was very stressful, but that was it.
Then we had a rest for a while.
Here we are switched on.
We are in fight or flight from morning till night until we go to bed with no breaks, with no rest.
Our systems are galvanized in that way.
They are overused.
They are overtired.
The wear and tear is tremendous.
We did not evolve for that.
And so our natural way of being, our automatic way of thinking and responding, the autopilot that we go on when we are stressed, does not do us any services.
Now, we have to be on it for a lot of the time, but not for most of the time.
And there are critical moments in which we have to disengage and be more thoughtful and much more intentional about how we're conducting ourselves, what we need, what we should do, what we should not do.
And that's the manual that I'm trying to convey to people like there is a much more sophisticated way that you can approach this in the changes that you make and how you manage yourself in this condition.
Hmm.
See Guy, it seems as though the road to mental and physical wellness is paved with a series of uncomfortable truths.
Because I think a lot of people were feeling what you were saying, saying yes, burnout is very, very important and it's real.
And everybody's like, yes, this is great.
I'm hearing the crowd listen as we're talking.
And then you said, wait, the solution is not necessarily to work less.
And people are like, wait, wait, no, no, no, I'm not on board.
And now it sounds like we have to do mental work as well, because it is very nice and convenient to believe and hope that the solution is external, because that allows us to blame other people and export responsibility to other folks.
So it's their problem, not ours.
And we can kind of step back and we don't need to really do anything.
But the reality is there is a lot of mental work that's required.
We have to work on ourselves.
And a lot of times we now have a different challenge that people don't want to do that.
So I don't just want to jump to the solutions yet.
I want us to figure out what often holds us back from implementing the solutions you're going to discuss, because I think that's a very important part too.
So I'm going to use this analogy.
I work out, I have a personal trainer.
And at this point, a lot of what my personal trainer does is correct my form so I don't get injured.
You get older, you get injured a lot.
And it turns out that doing the exercise correctly is way harder than doing it with a cheat, because you move your wrist a little bit this way to compensate and this and like oh, now I can lift it.
Like yeah, but you're going to injure yourself because doing it correctly is more difficult, because then the pressure is just on the muscle rather than dispersed to other joints and muscles and tendons that you don't want it to be dispersed to.
And that's the unfortunate truth about emotional health.
It actually takes effort.
It's not an easy, it's not an easy, oh, do it correctly and then it'll be easy.
No, it takes effort.
It takes mindfulness.
It takes especially going against what you feel like doing.
What we feel like doing is often the very wrong thing for us when we're under stress.
And so that you know it leads us.
Our mind constantly leads us down the wrong path because it's easier there.
Our coping mechanisms.
And I talk about this And people are like oh, don't get into coping mechanisms.
That's too complicated.
I'm like, it's not that complicated.
Coping mechanisms are like airbags in cars.
They see a collision coming.
They deploy to cushion us.
But when we are fatigued, when we are stressed, there's much less air in the bag.
It doesn't do a good enough job of protecting us.
And then we default to the automatic.
And the automatic thing is we'll just get emotional relief right now.
This is a, you're stressed by this.
I know, surf social media for 10 to 15 minutes, then you will feel better.
You know, that's the default, right?
You know, the default is you get home from a draining day and you're like, I am wiped out.
I need to sprawl out on the couch for five to six hours now and binge screens Netflix, whatever the thing would be, because I'm feeling drained.
Well, you're not drained physically, right? you're drained mentally.
And if you do that, you're going to wake up tired the next day because you just spent your rest time doing exactly what you did all day looking at screens.
And your brain is like, I'm not sure I can tell the difference.
For good reason, there isn't much of a difference.
And so that's the default.
That's what comes easy.
Is it easy to get yourself, when you feel so mentally and emotionally drained, to get up and go to the gym or get up and do the endeavor.
That kind of actually reactivates you.
And you know that when you do force yourself, you come back despite the expenditure of energy.
You come back feeling more energized and more refreshed afterwards.
But getting yourself off the couch, that was really, really difficult.
The default is like I should just sprawl here and not move, because that's what I feel, And the feel like when we are under these conditions is usually incorrect and unuseful.
So, yes, it's difficult to do the emotionally healthy thing.
It's unfortunately so.
That's why we're so emotionally unhealthy a lot of the time.
We're getting into the default of the autopilot, but we really have to disengage it.
This is brilliant.
Almost as if you've written a book on this.
Yeah.
This is so good.
And it's so fascinating because I think one of the things we have to fully appreciate, in order to level up, is the fact that a lot of the things that our default system, our automatic decisions, will lead us to do are the exact opposite of the things that we need to do.
Because we've really convinced ourselves that scrolling social media is easy and that's the way we decompress, but it's the exact opposite of what our brain needs.
Thank you so much.
I recognize.
The later the night goes, the harder it is for me to peel myself off the couch and go to bed, because my discipline reserves have been depleted and I cannot do the thing which is get off the couch, go brush my teeth and go to sleep.
But if I allocate that just a little bit of effort at that moment, now I can avail myself to rest.
And it seems as though it's not just that we don't know.
It's that a lot of these systems are designed for us to do the opposite of what we want to do.
Social media is highly addictive.
A lot of times, we find ourselves creating environments that facilitate bad decision making rather than good decision making.
So, when it comes to this, I'm wondering what kinds of things can we do in our life to create better decision architecture, so the automatic decisions that we make lead us to the right end point?
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Well, it starts with having some knowledge about what the right versus the wrong decisions are.
In other words, what the impact is of the surfing social media, for example, versus doing something else.
I talk about this in the context of even when you take breaks at work.
A most natural thing to do on a break is grab a phone and look at social media.
What we don't do is pause to ask ourselves, what do I need in that moment?
I just finished doing a lot of very intense focusing, or I just sat in a meeting that was highly conflictual and I'm all tense.
Is social media what I need right now?
Or maybe those 10 minutes walking around the block especially if around the block there's some greenery and just really getting into a different headspace.
Maybe I need to call my grandmother, because she always makes me feel good and reminds me of such and such.
In other words, it starts with being able to accurately even ask yourself, what do I need right now?
What would be different than what I just had, what would a break for me constitute in this moment?
And what it would be, and this is why it's laborious, because what it would be for you is different than what it would be for me.
And what it would be for you this Tuesday is going to be different than what it would be for you next Tuesday, or before that meeting and after this one.
So you really need to do that on a very regular basis.
Just ask yourself, what do I need?
What would refresh me right now?
You need to develop your own toolkit of go-tos that make you smile, that relax you, that remind you of, of the other context, that remind you that this is a means to an end most of the time, as opposed to an end unto itself, and and and.
So that takes a little bit of thought, but that's where the the, you know the, the automatic, the default systems come in and like oh, don't just think, just do the thing that's right there, your phone is so available.
That's why it's such a problematic tool, because you don't have to get up.
You don't have to move.
You don't have to think.
You just do the thing and start doing this, and then 10 minutes have passed and you're like okay, break over.
But you're not going to feel any more refreshed or your ability to think and to concentrate isn't going to get replenished and revitalized, which it might need to be during certain points during the workday.
Yes, you're so right.
And I want to hone in on one word that you said.
You said toolkit and developing your own personal toolkit, because there have been times in my life where I've said to myself okay, I've forgotten what I consider fun.
Let me write down the things that I think are fun.
And I said oh, I'm going to write down the things that are fun, things that are restful, things that restore me.
And I never complete the list.
I'd get like a few things and never complete it.
And I think to myself now today, hearing you, How much better my life would be if I would have actually taken the time to do that inventory and almost looked at it as a menu of mindfulness that I could go to.
Because, again, the default decisions are leading me in one direction.
And I think for a lot of high achieving professionals there's this consistent sense of urgency which kind of goes to the grind mentality where it's like a constant competition.
A lot of times you flip on social media and somebody's like I worked 16 hours a day and that's not enough.
And somebody else says, well, I worked 26 hours yesterday.
And now you feel super inadequate.
And so instead, if you could just say, all right, what am I feeling?
What do I need?
Let me refer to my list.
And then I could figure that out.
I think that would, it requires some discipline, but I think the payoff would be significant.
And I've also spent some time and I don't know this might be speaking like of things I don't fully understand.
But I long ago not that long ago because, given social media is new, I realized I don't want the algorithm showing me some of the stuff that it's showing me.
So I'm going to train the algorithm to make it show me what I want it to show me, so that I know works for me.
So, for example, puppies will do it for me a lot of the time, and specifically vishla puppies, because my brother has vishlas and I helped him raise one of them.
And so vishla puppies.
Now all you need to do is search for vishla puppies and then spend time with your eyeballs on a few of the videos, and the algorithm will begin to realize oh, he likes that.
We should show him more of that.
And then when I see any political video in my feed, especially if I'm looking at reels, I will identify this and then I will look down literally so my eyeballs are not looking at the screen and do this, so it realizes I'm not looking at that.
And I'm literally, over time, got it to stop showing me.
So now what it's showing me is it's showing me Vizsla puppies, again admitting that I'm a sucker for it.
If you don't know what they look like, you should try them.
And stand-up comedy.
But again, if it's too political, look down.
Not looking at that, because it can tell how long your eyeballs.
So I'm literally training the algorithm like you.
Show me what I will find useful in that moment.
And I don't want to see the other stuff.
And again, I might be completely speaking out of turn.
I'm not a computer scientist.
This is just my own personal experience.
But the algorithm responds to your eyeballs and where you're looking in the phone.
And so I spent time training it to like, no, I don't want to see that.
And I don't want to get my news from social media, in fact.
I want to curate it and get it once, twice a day in very specific headline packages so I don't get lost in it, so it doesn't compromise me more.
I want to look at it at specific times of day where I can recover from it, since you often need to recover from the news, I feel.
Now, you can let it enrage you.
You can go down that rabbit hole to one end.
I don't enjoy spending my time feeling outraged, enraged, and upset.
I would rather not.
So, as tempting as it is to feel justified in whatever the outrage of the day is, whichever party you follow, whatever your political affiliation, outrage is the thing that the algorithm wants to feed you, no matter what side you're on.
I'm not interested in that diet.
It's not good for me.
So I literally try and fight back with the algorithm by literally where I'm looking and how long I'm spending on things to make it take that stuff, And I don't see much of it at all.
So I think that worked for me.
But there may be a computer scientist sitting there going like.
This guy is an idiot.
He has no idea.
That might be true, but I'm just sharing my experience.
This is absolutely brilliant, Guy.
And I think for me, this is my five-star point.
So listeners, if you've been listening to Guy, if you're at this point, give Guy some love.
Give us five stars.
Shout him out.
Because I think this is great.
And it might be, for a lot of people, the single best thing they do for their mental health today starting to reshape the algorithm.
Because, with social media, and especially for both of us as thought leaders, we recognize that it's important for us to use social media effectively.
But what you're demonstrating there with that strategy is that it's important to not be used by social media as well.
And there are these different, very simple strategies we can employ.
And, I think, kind of widening our aperture back to what we were talking about before.
The things that you've discussed thus far and have not been very difficult to understand, they will be slightly difficult to employ with regularity because it takes some time to build these habits.
And so how do we make this manageable for the person who's listening and saying OK, I'm vibing with this?
How do I start this in a meaningful way that also is optimized for sustainability?
So I think everyone should start where they need to make the change.
In the book, I follow five people that I've worked with over a course of time.
So it's not just a bunch of chapters about things and here are stories about individually.
For each chapter you're literally following the trajectory of five different people in the workplace and what they went through, each of them obviously different and goes through different things.
Obviously none of the journeys are great, because otherwise there wouldn't be a fun book to write about it.
Um, so they go through challenging things, but they, you know, you know ones at high level, ones that you know, a manager, one's a project manager, one's an assistant, like you know, like they it's different people at different levels of the workplace, but like how they deal with certain things and then it's through them that we learn the tools and you will identify with certain aspects of them and then, and through them, you will learn the tools.
But but here's one place i want to start because this is something basic.
When i give talks um, you know, in companies, different places i always say to the audience like, tell me what time your work day ends, and people will say oh, at six or or at seven or at eight, you know, and some people are honest enough to go never and whatever.
But what I say to them is like okay, you need to change that definition, because your work day does not end when you either leave the office or close your laptop at work.
Your work day ends only when you stop thinking about work because again, your mind doesn't care if you're in the office, if your laptop is open, if you're ruminating about work, if you're thinking about work, if you're absorbed in the struggles of the day, you're at work.
And for many people that definition is a little scarier because they are putting in ridiculous amounts of overtime hours that they're not paid for being at work mentally when they're not.
And I'm not talking about doing that productively.
I'm not talking about when you open your laptop to get a couple more hours of work done in the evening.
I'm talking about when you're just ruminating about it, when you're just playing through that annoying thing that happened, or worrying about this future presentation, or dealing with this client or the colleague that you're in conflict with.
And maybe I'll say this to them.
Maybe I'll say that to them.
And having all of that, it's hours.
It can be hours a day.
It can be certainly many, many hours a week.
And that is unpaid work. work time that is not beneficial.
It's actually quite damaging.
And that's a good place to start.
Define when your workday ends and then start to establish guardrails so that you indeed stop thinking about work after that time and then be able to use that time for you for whatever's important for you.
But it starts with a boundary.
It starts with a guardrail.
It starts with a clear definition in your head about when you're working and when you're not.
That goes to the psychological rather than the practical.
This is...
Terrifying.
Guy, this is terrifying because I realized that I've never not worked for the last 10 years, apparently because it's so hard for me to turn this off.
I love this.
I love what I do.
And being a business owner has a different level of stake in the game, too.
So it's hard to turn it off.
But it's so funny how, when it comes to emotion management, emotional intelligence, it always starts with self-awareness.
And being able to just become aware of our thoughts, engage in a bit of metacognition and be able to start to steer the ship in a direction with some level of intentionality.
Because when you realize that we are constantly thinking and different studies show different numbers, but it's thousands of thoughts every day, depending on the study you talk about.
And the majority of them are uncontrolled thoughts that often lead us in the wrong direction and apparently lead to burnout.
That is really quite terrifying.
But it seems as though, if we're able to manage this, if we're able to become more self-aware, become more mindful and learn how to turn off this thinking about work and direct our thoughts in other directions, it seems like this would not just be a catalyst to fighting burnout.
It would be a catalyst to all sorts of other benefits surrounding emotional intelligence.
Yes, because it would actually force you to be in touch more with what your feelings are, with what your needs are.
But you're absolutely right.
And I'm in the same boat as you.
I mean, I was in the boat in which I thought, but if you're, I'm self-employed.
So I have zero people to blame for any kind of burnout other than me.
And yet I start the book with a story of burnout, my own.
And the idea is that when we are passionate about what we do, when we're enjoying what we do, we really lose sight because we're like but I'm excited about it.
Yes, but you can't be work, all work.
Where is the other parts of you?
Where are the, you know, like you said earlier, something I want to address.
You said like, I started making a list of things that I think are fun.
And I cannot tell you how many people I work with and speak to that when I say to them what do you find fun?
They blink at me in some kind of stupor because they don't have a single thing.
Because it's like fun.
Oh, I remember fun.
Or they don't remember fun.
But they don't.
It's not something that they, it's not a part of their daily life.
Fun is not a word that they would attribute.
Like they might have had a fun day at work, something worked, you know was successful.
But i'm like no, where are you unknown?
Like parts of our identity are complex, like other than your professional identity.
Where's everything else?
Where's the personal identity?
Where's the relational identity?
Where's the familial identity, the communal, the spiritual, the religious, like all?
Where is all of that?
You know and, and people are sometimes like, oh no i, i go to church all the time and i'm like be honest, to network and they go well, And I'm like
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All right, let's talk about something that's actually a negotiation skill.
Taking care of yourself before you show up to negotiate with anybody else.
Because if you're tired, stressed, and running on fumes, you're going to make worse decisions.
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So it's like, you know, like we get lost.
Yeah, you're so right.
And it's funny going back to our friend Dory.
She brought that up on the podcast.
She said, what do you do?
That's fun.
And everything was tied to productivity.
And I said, oh, my gosh, I'm becoming a boring person.
What's happened to me?
And I think there are some hidden underlying beliefs that might hold us back.
And I'll talk about myself, and I've heard other people say this too.
Think a lot of well-meaning parents would say hey no, get your work done and then you can have play.
You can play afterwards.
You need to get your work done.
But now we live in a world, especially with a lot of remote work, being hyper connected, we always have our phones, which means we're always somewhat tethered to work in some capacity.
So in the past you could say finish your work and then you could play.
But now we have a world where work technically could never be finished, especially with the definition of work.
As you're working, if you're thinking about work, then we almost never give ourselves permission to play.
And so, for those people who are now recognizing that this is them, how do we start to rewrite these mental rules that we've created, maybe subconsciously, about postponing play for after work?
So I had the conversation with somebody about this actually just yesterday.
And this person is one of those you know.
They have kids a little bit older than yours and they work very, very hard.
So it's like you know, you get up at six in the morning, you start doing some work, then you get the kids ready, then you go to work, then you come home, you take care of the kids, then you have dinner, then you do a little bit more work and you go to bed.
And I'm like, well, that just sounds terrible.
But they have this feeling that well, I have so much to do, that if I have time, let me just do more work.
But many of our jobs today are unending in the sense of you can work 24-7.
You could.
And in other words, we're not in a factory manufacturing cars in which we finish our shift and we're done.
You could always.
You know people like in your position in mine, self-employed business owners, et cetera.
There's always more you can do.
And so the demand, the expectation just doesn't stop.
And what I said to her is like use your calendar and the hour before you go to bed.
If you go to bed at 930, from 830 to 930, put in your calendar a different color and write every day.
Be unproductive.
Hmm.
In other words, this is not about getting something done.
This is about be bored.
And literally she looked at me and she goes, unproductive like reading for pleasure?
And I'm like yes, it's so sad that it has to be labeled unproductive reading for pleasure, as opposed to just read for pleasure.
But yes, read for pleasure would be considered unproductive.
Like watching... some silly thing on TV that you can just, the guilty pleasures, unproductive.
Just go for a walk, without necessarily getting in steps or like you know, like just for the sake of, and if you struggle to find something to do, I said, just stare at the wall and drool.
I don't care.
But just like make it un, like don't be purposeful all the time.
Yeah.
The guy when I come home, when Whitney comes home and she sees me drooling looking at a wall, I'm going to send her your episode.
Yes.
By the way, when you do that, the time pass is really slow.
It feels like you've been, you know, like you've had a great vacation.
But actually, one of the things that I started doing is float therapy.
So a couple times a month doing some of the float therapy.
So you get in a pod, you float around in magnesium.
It feels like you're just out in the universe.
No sound, no music.
And it's weird.
It's very strange, the sensory deprivation tanks.
But I think one of the things that's most interesting is that I feel less of a – like a drive – to to check the like the phone check the messages the the cravings are gone essentially it's like i'm addicted to mental stimulation and when i go into that i realize oh i don't need that and i actually feel better without it how long is the session about an hour see that's a long time i mean i mean it's you know you're probably in there for the first time for five minutes and going like has it been an hour yet because it's like feels like an eternity So to train your brain to just not have to like look at the clock or look at this, that's a really useful, I mean, it's probably not something everyone can do, but it's like a very useful mechanism.
The thing everyone can do is meditation.
You could certainly meditate in that way, if you find a quiet space and you're not interrupted, and learn to quiet your mind and just keep bringing your thoughts back to the breathing and to counting and to experiencing the breathing.
The breath coming in and out is a version of that.
It's a different one, but it's the same thing about.
No, your mind doesn't get to run all over the place right now.
What if it were just needed to be calm?
And that's something we could really all benefit from, because we're in this world where we're constantly mentally occupied.
You're right.
I forget the name of the philosopher, but I believe it was.
A French philosopher from about the 1800s said all of the world's problems boil down to a person's inability to sit in a room alone.
You know, and it's.
It's so funny to see just how much of the challenges of life are associated with this.
And, you know, one of my favorite types of videos to see are the transformation videos.
Somebody says, OK, I used to be like this and now I'm like this and now I feel so much better.
Whatever the transformation has to happens to be.
But one thing that I haven't heard very frequently, and now this is your opportunity to create a new genre content guide.
This is great.
How did it feel back when you were experiencing burnout?
And how does it feel now?
Because you're a highly productive and highly esteemed thought leader here.
And I think a lot of folks can't even fathom what it feels like to still be effective and successful and mentally well at the same time.
Okay, so.
By the way, I'm not going to wave the flag of mental wellness necessarily, because it's a constant battle.
I have to watch it all the time.
It's not that I figured it out.
Like, you know, when we talk about to say ruminating about work, I've conquered that.
But what conquering that means is not that I don't ruminate about work.
It means that I certainly do, but I catch it more quickly.
I get rid of it more quickly.
I shift my mindset more quickly.
I label it more quickly.
I immediately – now you're ruminating.
Come on.
Step out of it.
So I'll address it more quickly and more effectively, not that it doesn't happen.
People like us, we'll say yes to things.
I'm sure this happens.
I say yes to things and I can't quantify it.
When I say yes to something that's interesting, how long exactly it will take, how many hours I will have to devote to it.
I have an estimate, but often it goes beyond.
And I can certainly find myself having said yes to, oops, a few too many things.
And then I'm like, oh, I'm starting to feel that drain.
So A I've trained myself to know what it feels like when I'm starting to feel.
You know what are my symptoms when I start to, you know, exceed that Goldilocks zone of stress?
Well, one of my first symptoms is resentment.
I start feeling resentful that I have to do something because I'm not addressing my needs.
I'm not getting enough oxygen.
I'm not because, you know, I want to be doing other things.
I know that.
So I start to feel annoyed or resentful at an obligation.
And it's whatever obligation is before me.
But that's a sign that oh, you took on too much, because you should not have to feel resentful for the thing that you said yes to if you're basically enjoying it.
If you're feeling resentful, you took on too much.
And then I immediately start thinking of, okay, let's look at my schedule.
What can I take off?
What do I need to build in?
So what it looks like when you're healthy is that you just catch it sooner.
You make the corrections more quickly and more effectively, and you know what they are, and you know how to catch and you know where – you know what affects you first.
And so, like, you can get more sophisticated about managing yourself.
But there is no state in which you don't have to manage yourself.
I am managing myself now way more than I ever did.
But it's effective.
It's allowing me to do as much, if not more, and to still have a life that I'm really, you know, a feel fulfilled by, and to be both happier and more productive.
I mean, this is really about having it all, but it requires that self-management getting more sophisticated and having more self-discipline in those ways.
The videos about self-improvement and transformation, they're always external.
And, you know, you can do the route internal.
It would be terribly boring because you're like, this is me before and this is me after.
And, okay, look, I look the same.
But really, I feel much more enriched.
You know, that would not be a good video.
But that's the ones we need.
You know, again, not on video, but it's that.
It's getting control of this and managing your life in a much more proactive you know intentional, deliberate way.
Brilliant.
This is so encouraging because I think a lot of folks will try to go on this journey and they have unrealistic expectations.
And they say, listen, I'm not like Guy Winch yet.
I'm not floating on a lotus leaf, having achieved nirvana.
You know there's going to be a constant challenge, but it is about getting better at balancing that.
And again, going back to self-awareness, becoming more self-aware and recognizing when we're off track so we can get on track faster.
I think that's incredibly, incredibly beneficial.
And also I want to make sure, with the time we have left, that I bring in Simone to ask a question, because he's always listening and always has really great questions.
And I know he's been excited about this too.
So Simone, you want to hop in?
It looks like and correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like we have to create a trainer inside of us.
That is ourselves too right.
So it's like a personal trainer.
So I have to create my personal trainer.
But that personal trainer that I have inside of myself tells me that the more I work, the better the results.
So how can I train my internal trainer to actually understand that sometimes it's better to have some time and to change the mindset of okay, if I don't do this, I won't get to the goal I want to get?
So how can I go through that self that maybe doesn't understand myself?
So look, first of all, trainer, a coach, most coaches are very clear.
I mean when people are usually athletic coaches that overtraining is dangerous, that you will injure and you will exhaust.
And so most coaches are quite aware and they're quite actually strict about now you need to go home.
Now you need to rest.
Now you need to eat.
Now you need to do this.
So that is a big part of becoming a good trainer, and i and i like the analogy of trainer or coach, because but being a good coach and being a sophisticated one, not just one that just say you know more pain, more gain, you know more gain, what is it like?
A lot of pain and gain anyway, but my my my, no pain, no gain whatever, My point being, this is about getting to know yourself.
I say this in the book.
Everything that I'm recommending in the book is a general recommendation that you need, through trial and error, to figure out what is the dosage for you, what works for you?
And so, in other words, when part of you that's saying hey, be more productive, that part might be good.
But where's the limit of that?
What's the part that's looking out for your personal life? for your relationships, for the fun?
What's the part that's looking out for your not getting burnt out?
What's the part that wants you to actually enjoy experiences?
And what are the experiences that you remember?
I ask people, like when you do a year in review, which we've all done recently, when you do a year in review, you should review, like what were the things that stood out for me this year?
And usually they're experiences.
Usually they're experiences that are about connection and about relationship and about sharing things with others as opposed to like.
Oh, I landed the Kapinski account and I finished my taxes on time.
No one says that when they're reviewing what was meaningful for them that year.
And so when you start thinking about well, what's meaningful for you, then those are the things you want to make sure you have more of in your life.
And how can you get more of them?
And when have you not had enough of them?
And how can you introduce them in such a way that you are enriched?
And again, it's not about taking time off work.
It is.
You'll take time off work, but you will come back stronger.
You'll be more productive.
You'll be more creative.
You'll be more engaged because it was worth doing for the things that are meaningful for you.
And whatever that is for you, you need to figure out.
But that's the work of figuring it out trial and error and asking yourself these questions and then making sure that your internal trainer coach whatever the internal voice is is looking out for you in those ways.
And I'll just say one other thing.
So like I try and manage myself well, but there are nights in which I'm like I should really do this.
And I am so not in the mood to do this.
And so I will say like, you know what?
You'll get a pass for tonight.
That's fine.
Tomorrow, do it.
But if you need to just not do the right thing tonight, not do the emotionally healthy thing tonight, not even do the healthy thing tonight fine, don't.
You get a break.
You don't have to do it all the time.
In other words, it's not about being, you know, strict all the time.
You know, that's not good either.
But getting to know yourself.
And then the next night when you don't like okay, you got the buy that the night before, now do it and getting back to it,
So not letting yourself slide too much.
But again, it's that balance and learning yourself and what works.
You know what I mean?
And when's the night you can slide without the slide continuing?
Oh, if I do that during the week, I keep sliding because I'm tired.
But if I give myself that by on a Friday, then I can usually, you know, jump back on a Saturday.
Like it's figuring it out through trial and error how to manage yourself in a way that's not too harsh sometimes but that actually just gets you the results you want.
It allows you to get up in the morning feeling more refreshed, more excited about what you're doing.
It's really personalizing in that way.
Wow.
That's so good.
So good.
And very helpful too, because it's not just about having that trainer in your mind.
It's about having a good trainer, a good coach who actually does what's best for you.
And the other thing that's encouraging but also challenging about this is how rooted it seems as though this is rooted, very much so, in authenticity.
Because like you said earlier, what works for me might not work for you and vice versa.
And it seems as though there needs to be a healthy dose of protecting your mind.
So, for instance, you talked about how essentially you can protect your mind from things online that you don't want to see because of the way it changes your emotional state.
And when you think about beliefs, I've heard people describe it this way.
A belief is just a thought that you've thought a number of times.
And a lot of times we are hyper exposed to the beliefs of others that perhaps might work for them but could be incredibly toxic for us.
And so, when it comes to the relationships we have not just with the media, but also with the people around us, I've found it very helpful to sometimes protect myself from sharing things.
What it is that I'm doing for my own mental health, because I might talk to somebody who is a part of grind culture.
And I said, you know what?
I took a break.
I meditated a little bit.
I did the sauna.
I did a float tank and I felt really good.
And they're like, why weren't you working, bro?
Now I feel bad.
And so it sounds like we have to do a better job of protecting ourselves, so we can give ourselves the license to do what's best for us, while at the same time recognizing that other people may disagree.
And that's completely OK.
Right.
Because I think that there's so many experts out there, right?
And people also, sometimes they're just not expert.
They just happen to be successful, or they happen to be influential, or they happen to be popular, or they happen to be wealthy.
And then it sounds like, well, I'm wealthy, so clearly what I did is correct.
And therefore, clearly you need to do what I did.
And as psychologists, we know that it's very, very individualized.
And, as I said earlier, it's not just individualized that what works for me might not work for you, but what worked for me now might not work for me next month, because my context has changed.
My circumstance has changed just a little bit.
You have kids, so something's going on with your kids that taxed you a little bit more.
It left you with a little less bandwidth.
And so you have to adapt and strategize based on the context of whatever is going on in your life.
And so that's why it requires yourself to be thoughtful all the time.
But I don't like the generic.
This is the answer do A B, C and D.
It's like take the principle and then adapt it to you based on experience, based on trial and error.
The scientific method is you try it, it either works, it has the effect, or it doesn't.
And so that's the ultimate arbiter of what you should be doing.
Yes, so true.
And to give a nod at least to negotiation and communication here.
I want you to paint the psychological picture of what happens when you are having a tough conversation, whether it's a negotiation or a conflict, and you are feeling burnt out and stressed going into that.
What's the impact?
Well A, you are not going to be effective because you need both mental and skills and cognitive skills in a negotiation, and emotional intelligence skills right.
Because you need to be very aware of what's happening, what the maneuvers are, what the speech is and what the subtext is.
And you need to be able to assess where the other person is and emotionally where they are.
And all of that is very taxing mentally.
So if you're coming into that stressed, if you're coming into that burnt out, coming into that with 80 of your firepower mentally you're not going to be as effective you're going to give in where you shouldn't because you just don't have the strength to do another round and again it's you're not going to say to yourself oh i'm tired i'm not going to have the strength to do another round we're smart your brain is going to concoct an excuse like oh that's probably all they're going to move and so i can't get them to move any further right and there's so many aspects in a negotiation that are unconscious, that we are not on top of.
I don't know if you've discussed this and haven't heard all your episodes.
You've heard some, obviously.
But you know, for example, the studies that show that when people were, you know that the seat they were on impacted their negotiation skills, that when people were brought into a room and they sat on a hard chair, they were harder negotiators.
And when they were put on a soft chair with a lot of padding, They were softer negotiators because of the embodiment, of the cognitive embodiment that impacts us.
It's the same with our clothing.
When you're in a negotiation, wear the clothing that makes you feel hard tough like a hard ass, because you will negotiate more strongly and more effectively in that clothing.
As to the clothing that makes you feel approachable liked, etc.
You will be softer.
And so all these little unconscious influences really impact us, and we can't utilize them.
We can't utilize our emotional intelligence to read somebody accurately when we are fatigued and resentful and burnt out and stressed, because we are not reading ourselves accurately, let alone.
Emotional intelligence is about our ability to distinguish our feelings, to distinguish the feelings of other people and to negotiate that with them in effective ways.
We are compromised. when we're stressed.
So even when you're having a negotiation, when is it and how are you preparing for it?
And preparing for it doesn't just mean mentally preparing your boundaries where you will go, where you will not.
It means preparing mentally to come out of – if you just had a difficult meeting before, you need a buffer to come out of that, to refresh mentally so that you can come in with your – again with all your coping mechanisms and with all your – the skills you have in peak form, rather than depleted because you just had to have a screaming argument with your coworker about whatever beforehand.
That's not going to advantage you.
So it's all about reading.
You know, like again, how you manage your mind and recognizing that how you do that has big, big influences that you're going to go in with your IQ.
You know like 20 points shaved off if you're too stressed out or too upset.
Emotions, when we're activated emotionally.
That takes a lot of bandwidth for us to manage that behind the scenes.
That bandwidth is coming out of your mental bandwidth.
It's a finite reservoir.
We share it.
So you're just going to be more distracted.
Here's a silly one, but I'm going to give it.
If you, you know like, if you get to work and you're like shoot, it's our anniversary and I completely forgot.
And I need to remember to get flowers.
I need to remember to do this.
You're going to be so preoccupied during a negotiation because you have to snooze.
Alarm the get flowers, don't forget.
Get flowers, don't forget.
You're preoccupied.
You're not going to be there.
So all these different things really impact us and certainly stress and certainly burnout.
But all these different things,
And it's all about managing your mind and getting to know your mind so that you know.
Here's what I'm feeling, here's what I need.
Here are the go-to tools that I can use to give myself that and get myself up to peak form in the moments in which I need to be.
Brilliant.
Knock that one out of the park because it's so important.
We talk so much about negotiation skills, what to do, what not to do, what to say, what not to say.
But we don't spend enough time talking about why we cannot do what we need to do or say what we need to say when it's time to do or say it.
And a lot of times is because we are not in the best cognitive positioning going into the conversations.
And if we're not able to manage our emotions effectively, we're not going to be able to use our skills as effectively.
And we're recognizing that the emotion management process starts before you're triggered in the conversation.
It's the days and weeks leading up to that that could lead us to underperform here.
So I think this is great.
And I think this is a great way to end the episode too, Guy.
And I appreciate you coming back on the show.
I appreciate you writing another book.
So thank you for that.
So before you go, can you remind the listeners about the new book and how they can get in touch with you to work with you?
So yes, the new book is called Mind Over Grind, How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life.
It's available in hardcover, e-book, and audio book, which I read.
So if my voice is not annoying, you can have that as an option.
And it's available wherever books are sold.
It'll be independent bookstores.
By all means, go to those online in whatever format.
And people can reach me at guywinch.com, G-Y-W-I-N-C-H.com.
Through there, you can have access to my stuff, social media, what have you.
And if people are buying the book and reading it, you can also write to me and let me know what you think or if you have questions about it.
And I always welcome people to give feedback, because it's all very nice to talk to you and to talk to other people who are in the field.
But I'm also curious to hear from people who are just, oh, I just...
Joe Schmo from Iowa and like, here's what worked for me and this didn't.
And that helps my thinking as well.
So I always welcome that feedback.
Amazing.
Guy, thank you so much for joining us.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
It's been a pleasure.
