Your job or your sanity? How to not lose both (w/ Guy Winch)

If we accept that work-life balance is a necessity, then why are stress and burnout still increasing? Guy Winch is a psychologist and was the first guest ever on the How to Be a Better Human podcast. Guy returns to the show six years later to share strategies on how to stop indulging in unhealthy ruminations, start identifying harmful triggers, and why it’s necessary to change your perspective and view problems as solvable. Featured guest Follow Guy Winch on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/guywinch/?hl=en, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/guywinch/, and at guywinch.com/ https://www.guywinch.com/Buy Mind Over Grind https://www.guywinch.com/books/mind-over-grind/ by Guy Winch Connect with the team Follow Chris on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/chrisiduffy/?hl=en and at chrisduffycomedy.com https://chrisduffycomedy.com/Buy Chris’ book, Humor Me https://t.ted.com/ZGuYfcL Watch How to Be a Better Human videos on YouTube at TEDAudioCollective https://www.youtube.com/TEDAudioCollectiveFollow TED on X https://x.com/TEDTalks, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ted, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TED, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences/, and TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoksFor the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Chris Duffy?

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• 1:19Chris Duffy?

  You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Today's guest is psychologist Guy Winch. And Guy was actually the very first guest we ever had on this podcast way back on our very first episode more than six years ago. Guy is back today to talk about his new book, Mind Over Grind: How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life. Now, I think we're all aware of how a terrible job can dominate our thoughts and keep us up at night. I once worked at a place where the boss threw a plastic trash can at the wall and in the middle of a meeting would loudly shush people who he didn't like, like, shh, shh, shh, stop talking. Now, that was not a fun job. I was very stressed and I spent a lot of time worrying while I was working there.

• 2:02Chris Duffy?

  But what Guy points out is that our lives can get taken over by work, even when the jobs are good, even when we like what we're doing and we respect the people who we're working with. In other words, figuring out how to reclaim your life from being just about work, that is something that applies to all of us. In today's episode, we are going to get a lot deeper than just saying you should have a work-life balance. Okay, great. What does that really mean? We're going to figure out what is going on in our psyches, what we have control over, and how we can reclaim our mental space and energy. To get us started, here is a clip from Guy's TED Talk where he's explaining how obsessing over work played out in his own life.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  I wanted to be a psychologist since I was a teenager, and I spent years pursuing that one goal. I opened my private practice as soon as I was licensed. It was a risky move, not getting a day job at a hospital or a clinic, but within one year, my practice was doing quite well, and I was making more money than I ever made before. So, why wasn't I happy? Why did I feel so burnt out? For a few terrible weeks, I questioned whether I'd made a mistake. What if I had chosen the wrong profession? What if I had spent my entire life pursuing the wrong career? But then I realized, no, I still loved psychology.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  The problem wasn't the work I did in my office. It was the hours I spent ruminating about work when I was home. I closed the door to my office every night, but the door in my head remained wide open, and the stress just flooded in. I decided to keep a journal for a week and document exactly how much time I spent ruminating. And I was horrified by the results. It was over 30 minutes a night when I was trying to fall asleep. My entire commute to and from my office, that was 45 minutes a day, totally checked out for 20 minutes during a dinner party at the colleague's house. Never got invited there again.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  And 90 minutes during a friend's talent show, that coincidentally was 90 minutes long.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  In total, that week, it was almost 14 hours. That's how much downtime I was losing to something that actually increased my stress. That's what made me realize that I still loved my work. But ruminating was destroying that love, and it was destroying my personal life, too.

• 4:39Chris Duffy?

  How do we get those hours of our lives back? How do we find that love again? How do we reclaim our personal life? We are going to find out right after this short break. I know, I really teased you there. But it is quite literally my job to introduce these podcast ads. So I promise you, we will be right back with those answers in just a moment.

• 5:08Chris Duffy?

  We're talking with Guy Winch about how to stop work from taking over our lives.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Guy Winch. I'm a psychologist and I'm the author of Mind Over Grind: How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life.

• 5:21Chris Duffy?

  So Guy, in this book, Mind Over Grind, you have a lot of really compelling and for me, surprising statistics. But they also line up with what I think a lot of us are experiencing in our day to day experience of work. For example, you talk about how 43% of workers have high stress and 67% are reporting symptoms of burnout. Burnout being when unmanaged job stress leads to mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion and shutting down. So for me, one of the things that really strikes me about that statistic is 67%, that's the majority of people. That means that experiencing burnout is the norm. And as a clinician, you see that in your practice as well.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  I'm seeing it truly everywhere. And it is quite unusual that it's the majority of people. And what's even more unusual, that that's at the same time that the awareness of stress and burnout has increased significantly, as has the awareness of the importance of work-life balance over the past few years also has increased tremendously. So as we're becoming more aware that this is important and work-life balance is important and beware of stress and burnout, stress and burnout are actually peaking at the same time.

• 6:29Chris Duffy?

  Yeah, there's this deep irony that like people know about the things and yet. There has been almost no improvement on them. In fact, if anything, they've gotten worse.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:37Chris Duffy?

  Do you, do you think that a part of that is because knowing that we're suffering from a thing makes us feel worse about suffering from it?

• 6:46Speaker 03

  In part, but I think what the real problem is that we tend to think that to resolve stress and burnout, we have to fix something in the workplace. The problem is that stress and burnout are no longer contained to the workplace. That's the whole point of this book. It is spilling over and impacting our life outside of work. And then it's operating like a pinball machine, like the work stress shoots out and then it dings our personal life and it dings our relationship and it dings our life at home and it dings our ability to sleep and recover and then impacts work, which then impacts that, which, and so it's dinging around between work and life outside of work. And the ball of stress is staying in play much, much longer. And that's why it's not being resolved.

• 7:27Chris Duffy?

  Something I thought was really interesting in your book as a strategy, but also as just a disclaimer that you gave is pretty early on in your book, on page 11, you say, in short, this book will not help you change your workplace. Right? You say, I'm not going to change the reasons why you're burned out, but it will help you survive the workplace you're in. And I feel like for me, when I am in a situation where it's a stressful job and things aren't working well and there's not good communication and the systems are all set up badly, I feel this desire, like if I could change the way these things were, then my job would be good, then my mental health would be better. And you make a really strong case in here that like, that isn't a bad goal to strive

• 8:10Chris Duffy?

  for, but that you don't need that to happen for you to have a healthy relationship with your job.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  Well, it's more that in many workplaces, you trying to do that can get you in trouble, can get you onto the next round of layoffs, can get you penalized because for being a troublemaker. In other words, the workplace at large today is much harsher. And so if you're actually trying to change things, it can really cause problems. And some people, when they start speaking up, do lose their jobs. As a result, or they don't get promoted, or it really costs them. And because I don't know where the reader works. And maybe in some workplaces that would work, but in some it will literally be dangerous for them. I don't want to recommend it, period. And I say like, you know, I I'm not going to suggest that because it can be dangerous for some people.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  And I don't, I don't know what your company is like. Many, many companies are like that, where they'll be very upset.

• 9:06Chris Duffy?

  Hmm.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  If you actually try and suggest that they change how they do things. And also, like, there are many books that are suggesting that the workplace should change. It ain't.

• 9:15Chris Duffy?

  Hmm.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  So it's it's aspirational, but let's be practical. You know, that's not happening anytime soon, apparently. So how do you survive in the workplace you have? What do you have control of? And the one thing you have control of is you and how you think.

• 9:30Chris Duffy?

  We were talking before we started about how like you were the very first episode of How to Be a Better Human. You were the first, the first guest. And over the years of talking to you and getting to know you, I I really have always admired how you are very practical. But you're also, sometimes people pair being practical and real and real world focused with being kind of pessimistic or cynical. And you're not that. You you believe there's a real possibility for change, but you're just hard-nosed about what is in your control.

• 9:59Speaker 03

  Realistic is not pessimistic.

• 10:01Chris Duffy?

  Hmm.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  I'm realistic. If I thought there was room to maneuver without danger, by all means, I would say it. I'm being realistic. I've seen time and again where people have spoken up in certain ways. And they did lose their jobs for it, or they got penalized for it. And and so being realistic, I don't want to put people at danger here.

• 10:22Chris Duffy?

  Hmm.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  Besides, there is a huge difference you can make by managing yourself differently. By changing how you're thinking, changing how you're approaching things on your end.

• 10:33Chris Duffy?

  Hmm.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  This is the is the last untapped resource we have to make the workplace a better place. Is our perceptions of it, our way of thinking about it, our way of behaving in it. And since it's an untapped resource to my mind, let's tap that one. Because that's a safe way to do it, and it's also a healthy way to do it.

• 10:51Chris Duffy?

  So what are some of the biggest things that people are getting wrong? Right now.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  Here's a very simple example. People will say to me a lot of the time, oh, but you don't understand. My job is super stressful. I have such a stressful job. I have such a terrible job. I really hate my job. It's a huge problem to say that to yourself, let alone to other people. Because psychologically, here's what happens. When you say my job is really stressful, I hate my job, I hate my boss, etc. That means that you are setting yourself up psychologically to experience every day, all day, as being stressful and hateful. And the thing is, there is no job that's stressful from start to finish. There are stressful moments, and there can be many of those moments. But there are moments that are not stressful. There are moments that are easier.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  There can even be some moments which can be slightly, slightly enjoyable for different reasons. But if you're saying to yourself, I hate my job, you won't be able to experience those good moments as good. You won't be able to benefit from them. You won't be able to lower your stress because of it. So by saying to yourself, my job writ large is super stressful, you are setting yourself up to experience much more stress on your job. Instead, what you should do, again, realistically, is say to yourself, oh, it's Monday. I have four very difficult meetings, but a couple of decent hours in between. Or I have, this is a really difficult day, but I have a fun lunch hour with a colleague. In other words, just be realistic.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  Don't give the bombastic holistic statements about something that is hateful or stressful or difficult, because then you are likely to experience it that way, even when not all of it is.

• 12:33Chris Duffy?

  This ties into a few different ideas in your book that I really was struck by for my own personal relationship with work. One of which being that you talk about how there's actually a Goldilocks zone of stress. Because I sometimes get in this zone of thinking like. What I would love is if my job was not stressful. And you talk about how, well, that's actually not true. We don't want a job that has zero stress because that would be boring and not fulfilling because it wouldn't be challenging us at all. But we also don't want a job that is pure, constant stress all the time at a very high level. So just that reframing for me was a really interesting way of thinking about my life and my work, that I don't actually want zero. That's not the goal.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  This is the framing from studies about how stress impacts performance. When there's very little of it, we don't perform as well because there's no stakes. We're not fully engaged. But as we go up and stress and there's more stress, then we become more engaged. We're paying more attention. We're trying harder. And there is that Goldilocks zone at the top where, where we are fully engaged, where we're really paying attention and doing our best. Past that zone, when the stress exceeds, we start going down the bell curve on the other side. And that's when we start making mistakes. We start second guessing. We start performing less effectively. Now, what that means is that you sometimes just need to dial back the stress a little because a little will put you back in the Goldilocks zone.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  So it's not just that we don't want any stress. To correct for the stress we have, and this is trial and error that will tell you, because most of us have that feeling of, of, oh, this is too much for me now. And every time I get one more task, I feel like pounding the table and going, ah, you know? But if it, if we take one thing off our plate that's meaningful enough, suddenly like, oh, now I can get my arms around it. So it also tells us the correction we need to make might not be as big as it seems when we feel totally stressed because we're not correcting all the way back. We're not dialing all the way back. We're dialing back enough to get into the breathable performance level.

• 14:32Chris Duffy?

  This is also another one of the ideas that I, I was really struck by and that I'm going to definitely be chewing over in my own life was the idea of thinking about things, whether they are challenging or threatening and how there's quite a big difference in how you view it, even though the situation might be identical. So if you view it as a challenge or a threat. Can you talk a little bit about that?

• 14:53Speaker 03

  So challenge versus, versus threat theory is the prevailing theory in. Sports psychology today. Specifically, what it says is when an athlete takes the field or the stadium or the run or whatever the thing is, the stakes are high, et cetera. Whether they perceive the event as a challenge that they have the training for, that they have the skills for, a challenge they can rise to. Or a threat, in other words, they are there to avoid failing. They're worried about not doing well. Makes a huge difference, not just psychologically, but literally in the brain chemistry that goes on around the event. When you're aiming to succeed, it's a very different mindset than when you're aiming to avoid failure.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  And people don't make that distinction clearly. So if you're like, oh, I hope this doesn't go badly. It's a very different mindset than I'm gonna try and kick it, hit it out of the park. And it's a shift in mindset. Now, we don't have full control over that mindset because sometimes we have these unconscious fears, you know. But to the extent that we can prepare so that we feel we are prepared, to the extent that we can remind ourselves of our skill sets and our preparation and our experience so that we can get into the, I am going in to try and really succeed. Then we're in a challenge mindset as opposed to like, I'm worried this might not go well. And there we're in a threat mindset and performance changes significantly between challenge and threat.

• 16:22Chris Duffy?

  So I want to give you a real example and I'm gonna try and anonymize this just a little bit because I want to make sure that I don't share too much of this person's story without them wanting it to be shared publicly. But someone who I'm very close to has worked in a field for a long time. And they have decided that, you know, I'm not sure this is the right field for me in my entire career. Maybe it is, but I'm not sure. So they recently took another job that is in a new field, somewhere they haven't worked before. And it's not a giant leap, like these skills apply, right? So they used to be in a public facing role in politics. And now they've worked into a public facing role in a large corporate environment. But they've never done the things that are required in this job. And it's really challenging.

• 17:06Chris Duffy?

  It's harder than they thought it would be. And they're not really liking the day to day of the job. They don't feel like they're doing well, which is a big part of why they don't like it. But for them, their whole framework around this is this is an experiment.

• 17:20Chris Duffy?

  I'm going to do this job and I'll find out if I want to be in a different field or if maybe I would rather be in the field that I've been in for a while. Maybe that actually is the best place for me. What advice would you give to someone in that situation? Because it seems like they're kind of framing it in the way that you're talking about of a challenge instead of a threat.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  How long have they been in the new?

• 17:39Chris Duffy?

  Only a few months, maybe two or three months.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  Right. There is a huge learning curve in every new job we take. So even if they were going from this political situation to that political situation, they would need some time to get up to speed to the local culture where they are, the local, how things are done, the way they are, et cetera. Certainly when they're switching industries in that way, they have to get used to the norms. You know, no one says to you when you get to those kinds of places, oh, here are our norms. This is the way we do things. This is what you should and shouldn't say. This is what's sanctioned and what isn't. This will make you frowned upon. This will not, you deduce it. You have to have your eyes wide open. And this is at the same time that you're getting your arms around, literally just functioning in that new workplace.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  Our first few days on a new job are stressful because we literally don't know where the toilets are. Do you know what I mean? And so it's like, everything is difficult. So, yes, it's good that they're framing it as an experiment, but when you're doing something like that, I would really put a moratorium on figuring out how you're doing for a while until you get the hang of it. Because until you get the hang of it, it's not a normalized playing field. It's not an even playing field. You're literally trying to learn a lot of stuff. And when you're trying to learn a lot of stuff like who is that person? Who do I go to for this? What this person said that, what does that actually mean? That's taking away bandwidth from your ability to actually focus on just doing the job job part.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  So it's only once they really onboard fully and really get a handle of on the job, of the job, that they can start to gauge how they're doing in it. And then start from there to assess like whether it's something, you know, because again, there's a lot of onboarding, there's a lot of learning curve that's required before you can bring your full abilities forth in any switch like that.

• 19:27Chris Duffy?

  And especially when we're in a new situation, or it doesn't even have to be a new job. It can be you have a new manager or you've moved into a new group at your work. I think a lot of people feel this acute fear and anxiety that you're going to lose your job, that you're going to be negatively regarded or that you're not going to be good enough.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  This is our minds. Works. Any new situation involves a lot of uncertainty. And anytime there's uncertainty, it's fertile ground for anxiety. It's new. We don't know. We we moved to the new team and I wasn't fully embraced, whatever that means to that person, but maybe that's not a team that's all gushy or warm and maybe they're respect you tremendously, but they don't demonstrate. You don't know yet. You have to understand if if it's new, if it's uncertain, it's likely anxiety. And and then you need to just break it down into like, OK, but what's the likelihood that the fact that that person didn't look at me in the meeting means that they hate me and I'm about to lose my job?

• 20:29Chris Duffy?

  Yeah, you have a great example in the book where one of your clients is says says to you, my boss walked past me and didn't even acknowledge me. I know for sure I'm not going to make partner at the law firm. We're going to not be able to pay the mortgage. We're going to lose the house. And you say, OK, let's pause for a second. Is that the only explanation for why he might have walked past you without saying anything? And your client says, what other explanation could there possibly be? And you say, gas?

• 20:54Speaker 03

  It was after lunch.

• 20:55Chris Duffy?

  I thought it was such a hilarious. Yeah, maybe gas or he's having a bad day. There's just and it is true, right? Like that, if you were full of gas and about to burp, you wouldn't want to say hi to your direct report either.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  You went with burping, very good.

• 21:07Chris Duffy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it could be anything.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  And also, what's the culture there? Do the bosses typically tell you if there's something that they don't like about your performance or isn't an ambush style? Well, now we're telling you that, you know, there were all these things you weren't doing well and nobody ever told you about. Like, like, reason it through and talk yourself down because it's most likely anxiety. Now, if you have a lot of pieces of evidence and it does fit the culture and it does fit the circumstance, then maybe you have something to worry about. But you better have a lot of pieces of evidence before you get there because otherwise you are just freaking yourself out.

• 21:39Chris Duffy?

  OK, now, listeners, please don't be freaked out, but we're going to take a quick ad break and we will be right back.

• 21:51Chris Duffy?

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• 22:34Chris Duffy?

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• 24:44Chris Duffy?

  And we are back. Let's say someone had one of those days at work where, from their perspective, everything seemed to go wrong. And by the time they're heading home, they're just full of adrenaline and anxious energy. What are some coping strategies that they could use to kind of come down from that rush so that they can actually enjoy their time off rather than spend all of the night thinking about what happened during the day?

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Well, okay, so first of all, if everything went wrong, you know, then you're only responsible for what went wrong on your end, you know, like what you did wrong. You know, in other words, you know, if you pitched a client well and the client didn't want the account, yes, it might add up, et cetera, but there's only so much you can do. You did your part, but if you made a mistake, if you, you know, omitted something in the document, if you, you know, whatever the thing is, you know, if you said the wrong thing in the meeting and, you know, people were concerned about it, then what you need to figure out is two things. On the way home, or if you can, take a minute, figure out, okay, what can I learn from that? What's the takeaway from that? Don't say those kinds of things in a meeting. Or even when the client says, oh, this sounds great and I'm pretty sure we're gonna do

• 25:52Speaker 03

  it, assume that with that client, that doesn't necessarily mean they're gonna do it because then they can still change their mind. Or, you know, double check your work, even if you think you did, triple check it if you must, because you might still make like- Get a takeaway. The minute you get a takeaway or more than one, or hopefully there can be several, then you're like, OK, I have a little bit of an insurance policy for the next time. So that will freak you out a little bit less. Do you need to do damage control? And so what's the damage control you need to do? Do you need to check with someone like, hey, did that go down as poorly as I thought it went down? Or was that just me? Like, you know, call a colleague to make sure or check with your boss and say, hey, I know this didn't do great. I just need to know if I should be worried about it or what can I do to prove myself in other ways? Like, figure out a strategy for dealing with it.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  Once you have a strategy, it's much easier to let things go. If you don't have a strategy, you can just ruminate about everything that went wrong and what might happen. And once you have a strategy of A, what to learn from it and B, how to cope with it, it will be much easier for you to let it go when you get home. Talk to me about rumination. What is it and how does it work? So rumination is a form of self-reflection. It's complicated in psychology. The way I refer to it is in a simplistic way in this book, just in terms of the psychological research and theory. It's about repetitive thoughts, about distressing, upsetting or anxious thoughts, distressing, upsetting events that occurred or anxieties that you have going forward. To ruminate means to chew over. That's what how cows digest, right?

• 27:22Speaker 03

  So when you're ruminating, you're just chewing things over, but in a very, very unproductive way. What you're really doing is you're spinning around in the emotion the rumination causes. If it's resentment or if it's anger or if it's distress or if it's worry, you're just spinning around in that emotion. So for example, one of the things we ruminate about a lot is rudeness and incivility. And so like, you know, if a colleague like shuts you up at a meeting with a rude hand gesture and then, you know, like no one says anything and the boss actually agrees with their point, you're. I can't believe that happened. That's so annoying. They trying to shoot me down. Why are they so competitive? That was uncalled for. You can spin about that.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  And what you're spinning about is the injustice, the resentment, the anger, the frustration of it. The worry that, you know, does that mean the boss likes them more than me now? And what we tend to do in those situations is we will then, for example, have an hour's worth of fantasy conversations with this colleague that we will never have.

• 28:23Chris Duffy?

  Yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  How we'll tell them off. We might have these mic drop moments and all these fantastic things. We'll go to the office and we'll do this to them and we're not going to do any of it. But what we've done in that hour or more of ruminating about fantasies and about everything that happened is we have activated our stress response. We have flooded our body with cortisol. We have put ourselves into fight or flight. We have activated ourselves. And what we have also done is we've made ourselves completely checked out of whatever else is going on at the time in our after hours. We're not listening. You know, I know so many people that, you know, they have to keep rewinding the movie because they just lose it. They just keep going back into the rumination or they're sitting there with their kids and they're not listening to anything their kids are saying like, uh huh, uh huh, uh huh.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  And the kids can tell if they're preoccupied. And so rumination is something that's involuntary. These are intrusive thoughts that we get. But they're very, very damaging. They're very unhealthy. They predispose us towards depression, towards anxiety. When they're chronic, they can predispose us towards cardiovascular disease. They impair our sleep. They impair our eating because then we seek comfort foods to comfort ourselves from the crappy mood we put ourselves in. And so ruminations are really, really destructive and they're very, very common. And the more stressed out we are, the more prone to ruminative thought we are once we get home. And the biggest issue about it is you just spent another two to three hours that night at work, quote unquote.

• 29:52Chris Duffy?

  Yeah. This was one of the ideas that I underlined three times in the book, that your workday only ends when we stop thinking about work.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:01Chris Duffy?

  For most, for many of us, that means that we are working a 24/7 workday.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  And all that overtime is unpaid.

• 30:07Chris Duffy?

  Yeah.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  And not only it's unpaid, it's damaging you mentally, emotionally and physically. So it's a lose, lose, lose, lose, lose proposition. So what's the solution? How do you, how do you stop that from happening? Okay. You can't prevent ruminations from popping into your head. They're intrusive thoughts. You can prevent the several hours that follow of indulging them. Okay. So step number one, you have to recognize when a thought is a rumination. And you know it's a rumination because it starts to upset you. And you feel that viscerally, where you tend to feel that level of upset. So if it's like resentment and your stomach is churning, your shoulders are tight or your chest is tight.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  Like wherever you tend to feel that feeling, you're gonna act, because you're activating that feeling. So you know, recognize that I've had that thought for the third time now. Why am I replaying the upsetting thing that happened? I'm ruminating. That's the first thing you have to do is label the thing I am ruminating right now. And understand that that means I'm doing something that's unproductive, that's harmful, that's really sabotaging me in all kinds of ways. I won't sleep well at night, I'll be more irritable the next day, all of it. So label, number one. Number two, you want to convert the ruminative thought into a problem that can be solved. In the same way we spoke earlier, you want to develop strategies, if they're necessary, around what to do.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  If the colleague was dismissive, you know, in a meeting, it might not require any activation. But you can think about, do I need to address this? Do I need to address it with a colleague? Do I need to learn something from it so it doesn't happen again? Do I need to observe if that colleague does it to other people? And then maybe speak to them that, you know, we talked to that colleague and say, you know, dude, I don't know if you realize, but you're being really disrespectful. In meetings, do we arm ourselves with a response in the moment? So that if it happens again, we could say, that hand gesture was very disrespectful, please don't do that. And at least we've said something like, but we have to pose it as a problem to be solved. So once you've figured it out, it's much easier. To let the rumination go. It'll pop into your head and then you'll just know I'm not indulging that. I'm not doing that.

• 32:18Chris Duffy?

  What do you do if the rumination is about something that is somewhat outside of your control? You know layoffs are coming. For example, this is a situation that arises very frequently, I think, for people is you know, you know that your job is not secure.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  That job uncertainty is very, very difficult. You know, it's not an anxiety is an unrealistic kind of diffuse worry. But if you know layoffs are coming and you know that there are two departments that do what you do, yours and the other companies, and not everyone is going to survive. It's pretty realistic. What's your plan? Do you have a strategy? Should you start looking for another job right now? What can you do to make sure that if they're choosing specific people, you can be one of the people who survive? What are they looking for? Because again, when you have a full Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, literally have all three, then there's no point to worry because you've already figured out what you can do.

• 33:14Chris Duffy?

  You talk about how the idea that we don't have any time, that we're so overwhelmed, that a lot of it is real, like we have to be at work. We have a job that requires a lot of us. But also a lot of it is then we miss out on opportunities to recharge or opportunities to be unplugged because we won't allow ourselves to. And we're not even aware of that often.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  And all the moments of life that are actually meaningful and gratifying, like our time with our family, our time with our friends, or doing the things that actually we enjoy that are meaningful to us. Like one of the thought exercises I sometimes will have people do, and it's a distressing one for them, is that if you could take an eraser and erase work out of your life, it's not what's left, it's what parts of you are left.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  Because if your work self, if your professional identity is taken away, is there enough left over? Are you giving enough oxygen to the parts of you that are not work? Are you, is there enough in your life that isn't work? That is fulfilling, that is meaningful, that will be left over?

• 34:20Chris Duffy?

  It's a really powerful question, yeah, I mean, it, just for myself, I, I, I think it forces me to think about like, well, what would be left if I erased? And I think that I'm at a moment in my own life where I would feel okay about it. But I can feel the desire to push more of the stuff that would exist without that eraser away and get more into the erasable work part, right? Like, there's a real drive to say like, I want to give more of myself to my job. I want to give more of myself to success as defined only in professional success and get rid of the things that are not as important. And I'm putting that in big quotes, you know?

• 34:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, but the thing is, you know, the, I mean, part of why I wrote that book is there was so many, there's so much free time. We could wrestle away to give ourselves those things, to nurture ourselves in a certain way, to give oxygen to certain aspects of our personality that we're not getting, to get more out of our time with our friends and our family and all of that. Because so much of it is lost without our realizing it to these ruminations about work or to being worried or like, you know, people go on, on holidays and, and, and they spend most of the time decompressing or like worrying about work or like, you're on holiday. You know, and, and they're like, oh, I just don't know how to switch it off. It's difficult to switch off, but there are certain techniques I talk about in the book about switching off. And one of them is how to deal with ruminations.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  And the other one is framing things as life is a task. So for example, our brain is really, respects calendars. Because when we used to using a calendar, it tells us what we need to be doing when. But when the evening comes, it's just blank for a lot of people.

• 36:00Chris Duffy?

  Yeah.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Unless there's an engagement, dinner with this, a movie with that. And I'm suggesting that it should never be blank in the evening. Because if the task is veg out.

• 36:10Chris Duffy?

  Uh huh.

• 36:11Speaker 03

  Do nothing. Personal time. Hang out, you know, whatever. When you put them in your calendar, your brain becomes clearer. Oh, that's actually a task now. I'm supposed to unwind now. I'm supposed to, you know, go to a lower gear. I'm supposed to de-stress. Because when we're at work, we are in fight or flight all the time. And, and our bodies are not used to being in fight or flight all the time. We need breaks from it. And, and those breaks should be happening in the evening. We should be using that in the weekends to recover from, not from work, from fight or flight, from being in activation all the time.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  Because we're not designed for that. But if you're still thinking about work, if you're still revved up, you're not getting a break. That's where the burnout happens. That's where disease and illness happens. That's where, you know, like, quality of life gets eroded. So marking that in the calendar, reminding yourself that no, this is a time to de-stress. This is time to not be in fight or flight, to just be.

• 37:16Chris Duffy?

  When I was working as an elementary school teacher, it was really unbelievably difficult for me to stop thinking about work. I would lie in bed at night just thinking about the things that the kids were going through and what I could do to help them and whether it was in my control or out of my control and what I could have done better. And I would just be spinning. And, you know, the job I do now, it involves a lot of uncertainty and a lot of public speaking in rooms full of strangers, things that other people might be stressed by. But for me, it's so much less stressful. Those stressful elements, they just don't bother me nearly as much.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  Yes, I mean, I think we all have certain things that stress us out more than other things. But for example, you know, being a teacher, being in healthcare, being in a helping profession, it's difficult to leave it at the end of the day. I don't know if when you're an elementary school teacher, if you had the wherewithal, which most people don't, but if you had the wherewithal to know that I'm allowed to worry about these kids up until seven o'clock. But it is really important for my stress level, quality of life, burnout, et cetera, that at seven o'clock, I have to stop and pivot to me.

• 38:24Chris Duffy?

  Yeah, certainly did not have that wherewithal.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  But if you did, it might have been easier to do. If you did, it might have been easier to be like, okay, I'll worry until that time. But now it's, it has to be about me. Otherwise, work will have invaded my life entirely.

• 38:37Chris Duffy?

  It makes me think about one other thing that you discuss, which is that a lot of us overestimate how good we are at compartmentalizing our work stress. We underestimate how much it affects our family, our friends, our children. We think that, oh, well, this is just something about me. But people are often very shocked to learn how much it is affecting the other people in their life. If you don't take the time to recharge, it actually bleeds over into these other relationships much, much more frequently than people want to believe.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  There's, there's research that shows that if one member of a couple is really stressed out in an ongoing way, the other member of the couple will start to develop symptoms of burnout. Other research shows that when mum, one person in the couple is really stressed, and again, chronically, the other member will lose their sex drive. Because it's not appealing to be with a stressed out person. So it kind of dampens their sex drive. We're really like in a difficult, stressful situation at work all hours of the day. We cannot switch on a dime. When you come home, it's very, very common. I see this all the time where, where you, you come home from work and your, your five

• 39:47Speaker 03

  year old is running to the door to, hey, daddy's home, mommy's home. And you stiffen because you're not, you're not there yet. And it feels like an intrusion as opposed to a loving gesture. And how many times have somebody come home and, and, and when their family is just trying to engage them in a normal way, is thinking, they just don't get what I go through. When you're thinking, they just don't get what I go through is, they don't. Because A, you probably haven't explained it. And B, if that's so true, then you need to do something to get your head straight before you get home. Because it's not fair to them.

• 40:21Chris Duffy?

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• 41:32Chris Duffy?

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• 42:05Chris Duffy?

  Okay, I want to ask a question for you now, of you personally, which is along the lines of what we're talking about here.

• 42:13Chris Duffy?

  It's easy for me to imagine a lot of what we're talking about in the structure of, you know, you're an assistant at a company and the job is really stressful and you're getting treated poorly and it's a tough thing. I think it is harder and messier in my mind when you are your own boss or you are doing something that you really care about, that you believe in, that in some ways is like, this is your passion. And you talk about in the book how writing for you was this like huge release. Like in graduate school, you found that taking a vacation was not as relaxing as taking some time to write. And now you have this book. A part of having written a book is getting out there and doing podcast interviews and trying to promote the book and trying to get out there and talk to people.

• 42:56Chris Duffy?

  And that is a task that certainly does not have like a 9:00 AM start time and a 5:00 PM clock out time. So how do you manage that for yourself?

• 43:05Speaker 03

  This is my fourth book. I learned some lessons from the first three.

• 43:10Chris Duffy?

  Okay.

• 43:11Speaker 03

  But one of them is, and I did a, an excellent job implementing a lot of what I say in the book, most of it.

• 43:18Chris Duffy?

  Okay.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  And not so great in some of it. But where I did, one of the places I did a really good job is the, the stop time.

• 43:24Chris Duffy?

  Hmm.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  And it was a little easier for me because I'm a morning person in terms of where my energies and creativity lies, but deep work happens much more in the morning. I'm not as effective come night, especially after a long day. So I decided that by seven o'clock, sometimes it was 7:30, I am done.

• 43:43Chris Duffy?

  Hmm.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  And I have to pivot to whatever the evening is about. Again, even if the evening wasn't about anything, even if it was, I'm just going to veg out, then I'm pivoting to vegging out. And I was really good at the discipline of, of doing that. And also in terms of responding to emails, say, I would get them, I would try and live with the book and only respond in the morning. Or if I just wanted to give a quick response to get it off my, I would schedule it so it only arrived in the morning. But I did a good job at evenings. I did not do a great job with weekends.

• 44:19Chris Duffy?

  Okay.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  This came on top of a full-time job.

• 44:22Chris Duffy?

  Yeah.

• 44:22Speaker 03

  So it has to happen sometime. And so I did cede a lot of weekends to writing. My blessing is that I enjoy writing.

• 44:33Chris Duffy?

  Uh huh.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  So it wasn't a punishment. I would actually look forward to waking up on a Saturday or a Sunday and going into my office and writing for quite a few hours. I would actually enjoy that. But I could have taken more, I probably needed to take a few more days off on weekends than I ended up doing.

• 44:53Chris Duffy?

  Yeah.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  But there is a danger of being dedicated to your work, of being excited about your work, of being passionate about it, of feeling like you're doing a meaningful thing. And the danger is that you can excuse and justify losing that line, you know, making the line more vague between when the job has to end and life has to begin. And so it's people who are passionate, who are self-employed like me, who are more at risk often of losing the boundary and finding out the hard way when they start getting burnt out, when they start not enjoying something they should be enjoying, that they've overdone it.

• 45:31Chris Duffy?

  But I think many people have the experience of doing something that they really care about, that they love, that maybe started as a passion or a hobby and now has become either a side gig or their main gig. I think a lot of people have this feeling of like, I can't blow it. I have to put everything into this because this is an opportunity and this is the thing I love and I want this to be successful. And I think a really powerful message in this conversation and also in the book is what you said about the eraser, right? Like that you can put a lot of passion and energy into your work, but you cannot allow it to be everything. You have to also put passion and energy into yourself, the non-work, non-job self.

• 46:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just, it's very important because the diminishing returns here. Like the more you work yourself into exhaustion, the less effective you are, the less productive you are. Like you're not, you might be spending more time, but you're not, you're working harder, not smarter. I talk about overworking a lot in the book and I, don't say overworking is terrible. Don't do it. It's dangerous in certain ways, but I'm a realist. Like I overwork sometimes and sometimes you have seasonal things and you have to overwork. And people, you know, with kids or who are caretaking, they get, you know, rarely get a minute for themselves. But you don't have to have a lot of time to squeeze in 15 minutes of something that is revitalizing for you, that personally.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Gives you some oxygen. If you have the wherewithal, like, I need 15 minutes. You can find the 15 minutes.

• 47:07Chris Duffy?

  Guy, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for sharing your insights and wisdom with us. It's been a real pleasure talking to you.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a great conversation.

• 47:17Chris Duffy?

  That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to Guy Winch. His new book is called Mind Over Grind, and you can order it now. Speaking of books, my book, Humor Me: How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Happy is out now, too. You can find out more about my book, my live show dates, and all of my projects at ChrisDuffyComedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is a job, it's a workplace, it's a podcast, but it's also a group of individuals, workers, you might say. On the TED side, the humans behind the curtain are Daniela Balarezzo, Banban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Laney Lott, Tansaka Sungman Nivong, and Tonya Lee and Joseph DeBryne. This episode was fact-checked by Matthias Salas, whose work keeps the rest of us honest

• 47:59Chris Duffy?

  and accurate. And on the PRX side, they are cranking out episodes and making sure that they are fully-realized people outside of work as well: Morgan Flannery, Norgil, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you for listening. I won't say that subscribing to this podcast is your job, but it certainly makes my job possible. Please leave us a positive review. Share this episode with a coworker, a friend, or a person you just met once at a local business. Whatever you do, tell people about it. Spread the word. It helps us so, so, so much. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, thanks again for listening and take care.

• 48:39Chris Duffy?

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• 49:26Chris Duffy?

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• 50:13Speaker 00

  With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com/bank. Capital One, N.A., Member FDIC.

• 50:43Speaker 00

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