March 16, 2026 • 43 mins
Work doesn’t end when the workday does. Even after we close our laptops, our minds keep replaying awkward meetings, looming deadlines, and unfinished to-do lists. Over time, that “always on” mentality can quietly hijack our relationships, our health, and our happiness.
Dr. Laurie sits down with psychologist and bestselling author Guy Winch (Mind Over Grind: How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life) to explore the science of work stress — and why so many of us get stuck in fight-or-flight mode long after we’ve left the office.
Plus, Ben Walter, host of “The Unshakeables” and CEO of Chase for Business, shares what he’s learned from working with small business owners who don’t have the option to simply “clock out.”
If you’ve ever felt like work is bleeding into everything, this episode offers science-based tools to help you take your life back.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Mind Over Grind: How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life
"Burnout: A Review of Theory and Measurement"
"The Relationship Between Workplace Stressors and Mortality and Health Costs in the United States"
"How Small Businesses Drive the American Economy"
"Yerkes-Dodson Law Of Arousal And Performance"
“The Use of Imagery to Manipulate Challenge and Threat Appraisal States in Athletes”
“Rebuilding After a Blaze: Luna Gourmet Coffee & Tea”
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. When it comes to feeling happier, the approach we
take to work really matters. The average American spends about
half of their waking hours on the job, which, even
if you're lucky enough to love what you do, can
feel like a lot. But work doesn't always stop at
(00:37):
the end of the work day. And I'm not just
talking about all the unpaid sorts of work we have
to do, the cooking and cleaning and caring for family members.
I'm talking about the paid work that winds up creeping
into the little free time we do have.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
The metaphor I use the pinball machine. The work shoots out,
and then it starts dinging to your relationships, to your
personal life, to your thoughts, to your leisure, to your
ability to recover, to your self care, and then when
those become compromise, it makes things worse at work, which
makes things worse outside of work, which makes things worse
at work, dinging back and forth, and that stress then
(01:12):
stays in play.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
For so much longer, which is why we're getting burnt out.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
This is psychologist, podcaster, and best selling author Guy Wench.
Guy is an expert on managing all kinds of tough emotions.
But his latest book, Mind Overgrind, how to break free
when work hijacks your life. It's all about strategies we
can use to create a healthier work life balance, something
Guy admits he wasn't always great at.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Literally a year into my professional career, I was totally
burnt out. I recognized that in an incident where I
was in the elevator with a neighbor and it stalled
between floors and the neighbor went into a panic. And here,
I am a psychologist. I wasn't panicked. I knew have
to say it to calm him down, but I just
was incredibly rude and cruel even to him. He was
(01:59):
just like hitting all the buttons and I was like, oh,
this is going to take forever to get upstairs now.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
And then he was like, this is my nightmare. This
is my nightmare.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
And my response is I looked at him and I said,
and this is my nightmare. And it was so I mean,
it was funny in my head, but it was terrible.
And when I saw his face, I felt such remorse
and I was like, why did I do that? And
that's when I realized, Oh, because I am drained. I'm
so exhausted, I have like nothing left. And then I realized, Wow,
I'm a year in and I'm burnt out.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
And that was a moment of what I know people
call depersonalization, where you're kind of annoyed at the intentions
of the people around you. Talk about what this feeling
of burning out at work did to your socialization and
your self care the other parts of your life.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
So when you're burnt out at work, but you have
to keep going. I'm self employed, so I have to
keep going. Really, one of the survival mechanisms psychologically is
you numb. You just put your head down and get
from task to task to task. You're not enjoying what
you do. There's no passion for what you do. You
feel jaded about what you do. It doesn't seem important,
it doesn't seem meaningful or fun, and you're not doing
(03:00):
a great job for sure. So you just become this robot,
this drone. Truly, you just works and works and works
and works and gets your head down and gets through
and then wakes up the next morning and gets through again.
And you can't numb. Selectively, we know that in psychology,
you don't numb. Some of your feelings in some of
the areas. You know all of your feelings in all
of the areas, and then that affects all your life
(03:20):
outside of work, or lack thereof. In my case, I
was just working and I wasn't tending to any of
my other needs.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
If this sounds familiar, or you feel like you may
be in danger of this becoming familiar, then this episode
is for you, because today Guy and I will explore
evidence based strategies for setting healthier boundaries at work, and
we won't be alone. We'll be joined by Ben Walter,
CEO of Chase for Business. Ben works closely with small
business owners, just the sorts of entrepreneurs who can't clock
(03:50):
out when things get stressful.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
I have huge responsibilities at work. I only have so
much time to be at home and with my family.
How could I possibly let this creep in a way
that would compromise the limited time that I get with them.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
So get ready for strategies you can use to break
free from work stress. Right after the Happiness Lab returns
from this quick break. These days, it feels like a
(04:20):
lot of people are talking about the problem of work stress,
and that's in part because work stress has gotten really bad.
In one twenty twenty four survey, more than seventy five
percent of employees reported that work stress was affecting their
physical health. Another study estimated that workplace stress causes over
one hundred thousand deaths in the US each year. And
that's all on top of the fact that the world
(04:42):
right now just feels really hard.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
We are in a particular time of uncertainty. We have
geopolitical uncertainty, we have economic uncertainty, we have policy uncertainty
at records we haven't seen in the past.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
This is Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business. Chase
for Business creates a suite of products for small business
owners entrepreneurs who face special kinds of work stresses, so
I thought Ben would have a unique perspective on fighting
stress on the job.
Speaker 4 (05:09):
Forty four percent of the economy is small business. It's
two thirds of every new job created in America. One
of the most fun parts of my job is that
I get to host our podcast, The Unshakables, where we
meet with those clients and we hear the stories of
the really tough things that they've been through, which obviously
cause immense amounts of stress, and hear how they were
able to overcome those obstacles and continue to build their businesses.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
And the obstacles that small business owners face as they
build their businesses are many.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
When you are a small business, you are the head
of sales, you are the COO, you are the custodian,
you are everything in between. Even if you have a
few employees. It really comes back to you and your
identities highly linked with the success of the business and
often your personal fortunes as well. And so I think
about the difference between home life and work life, and
the stress that crosses that line is way way more
(05:59):
blurry for a small business owner even than it is
for the most hardened, seasoned, high powered professional in a
corporate environment. There just simply is no way to say
operate them in the same way most small business owners.
If you have debt, you are personally guaranteeing that debt
with your personal assets. Every time that business makes a decision,
your personal reputation is on the line. And then you
(06:21):
compound on the environment we're in right now, in this
heady froth of uncertainty, and you can see where you
end up, and.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
At this high level of stress, where you usually end
up is not such a great place.
Speaker 4 (06:31):
The downstream effects are obviously terrible on relationships, on your
ability to execute, on your self satisfaction, on your happiness
with life, on all of those things.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
The blurring of work and home stress is something small
business owners experience intensely, but it's something that employees and
all roles are feeling more and more. When work stress
builds into home life, it can turn into a vicious
cycle that can feel almost impossible to escape. But the
science of stress shows something surprising. Having at least a
little stress is actually good.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
And when we have no stress, we actually don't always
get that creative and we don't work the extra a
little bit to do it because there isn't the pressure
to do it. The moment it stops being channeled into
that and has channeled into your personal relationships or unhealthy
eating or mind spinning anxiety, that's the point at which
I think it starts to detract rather than enhance your
ability to make the best use of it.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
And then it just bringing up a really important point
that we've known in the science since the nineteen fifties.
Like back in the nineteen fifties, people are like.
Speaker 4 (07:27):
Is stress good?
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Is it's bad? It's both. It's what folks call it
an inverted you function. This is this famous thing called
the Yerki's Dodson curve, which is at no stress, when
you're kind of at the bottom of stress, you're not
getting anything done, you can barely get out of bed,
you're not excited for work. But then as stress goes up,
you hit some optimal middle point with the stress where
you're like, I'm excited, there's some pressure, we're going to
get through this. But then there's a tipping point where
(07:49):
it's like, oh, curve, hell care Now it's too much.
Now I'm screaming at my kids, I'm not getting to
the gym, and it becomes a little bit too much.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
One of my favorite phrases I got from my daughter
when she was in the fourth grade. We moved to
London for a couple of years for work, and I
remember looking at her and saying, honey, are you nervous
to move to London or are you excited? What's the deal?
And she looked at me, she was ten years old
or whatever she was, she said, I think I'm kind
of nerve sided dad. I just love that phrase, and
that's stuck with me ever since. When I'm nerve cided
(08:18):
about something, I'm probably going to do pretty well.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
So how do we keep our stress low enough that
it works for us rather than against us? How do
we stay nerve sighted rather than freaked out. Psychologist and
author Guy Wench has found that how we think about
stress matters a lot.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Stress is very psychological to begin with. It really depends
on how you perceive the quote unquote threats pressures around you,
and whether you feel able to manage them. And one
of the things we do at work, which I think
most people do, is they frame their jobs in ways
that add stress to their lives. A simple way is
(08:57):
things like, oh, my job is really really stressful, or
I hate my work, or my boss hates me, or
like I can't stand every second in that office. When
you frame it in that generalized way, what you're doing
is is that you are predisposing yourself to perceive every
moment at work as punishing, as difficult. And that means
(09:20):
that you are anticipating threats and so you are in
fight or flight. You are highly activated and charged. You
will perceive even the small ambivalent slights as ah. Here's
another thing. You'll tend to miss those moments that aren't.
And there is no job that's stressful all of the time.
There just isn't. Even if you have terrible meetings that day,
(09:42):
you have a few that aren't so terrible.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
You have an.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Hour that's boring, you have fifteen minutes where you can
bring your favorite lunch and actually sit in the park
and maybe take a break. There's got to be someone
in the office, one person that you actually can stomach,
and it's not too bad seeing them.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
When you see them, you know your.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Boss can't be evil every second of the day, because
even Disney villains aren't. But when you frame it that way,
you are literally priming yourself to experience everything as way
more stressful than it actually is. And it's such a
simple correction you can make in your head, because the
idea is actually to correct to accuracy and nuance, not
to fantasy, but just to be more accurate.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
This also gets to this idea that we can be
in these different modes when it comes to how we
think about stress. We can be in what you've just
talked about, which is a real threat mode, right, like
everything is so terrible all the time, But there's a
flip mode that we can take when we're dealing with
stressful situations, which is sort of a challenge mode. What's
the difference between these two modes and how do we
react psychologically when we're in one versus the other?
Speaker 2 (10:40):
So the threat versus the challenge mindset theory, it's it's
the preventing theory in sports psychology, and the distinction is,
are you going into a situation seeing it as a
challenge to which you plan to rise? Are you going
in with the idea of I'm going to win, I'm
going to smash this, or are you going in because
you're seeing it as a threat, and then what you're
trying to do is not lose, Like I hope.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
This doesn't go badly. I hope I don't embarrass myself.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Now, you're trying to succeed in both mindsets, but in
one you're going in feeling confent and feeling in control,
feeling like you're prepared, and in the other one you're
going in second guessing, wondering, anticipating threats. And those mindsets
have a major difference not in just how we conduct
ourselves and think in the situation, but in how our
(11:27):
brain responds in the hormones that cause through our body
in that moment. And so the threat mindset is a
really problematic one. It predisposes you to do poorly, to
not be able to draw on your abilities as well,
and we psych ourselves out at work without realizing that
we are creating a self defeating prophecy. So we really
(11:48):
can't afford to tell ourselves, oh no, I can't handle that,
because you won't be able to handle it if you
say that.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
I imagine there must be some cases when we really should
be in more of a threat mindset, right for really
actually in danger. Are there ways to know whether it's
just the framing or whether it's the real situation that
we're facing that could be potentially problematic?
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Well, yes, because we tend to be pessimistic, you know,
zoom out for a minute. Is this really problematic? Are
you really in over your head or are you just
nervous that things might not go well? If you are
really in over your head, that's about problem solving. That's
about okay, let me redefine what's the best I can
do here and be realistic in terms of this is
(12:27):
going to be problematic. Let me see if I can
get more help, If I can get an extension if
I can beef up my resources because I am not
equipped to deal with this in that moment. But if
it's just psychological, if it's worry, you know a lot
of people just like second guessing themselves that they have
a little bit of a fear of failure.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
So that's when you want to shift mindset.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
And so how do we shift the mindset? How do
we move from a threat mode to more of a
challenge mode. What are some strategies.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
One is the idea of preparation.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
You really want to be prepared, Like if you're worried
about something, your unconscious mind might be like, hey, I
know this is a perfect time to serve social media,
or oh why don't you do it? To do list
for the groceries you're going to be shopping for later.
That will be way more fun than dealing with the
anxiety of thinking about this thing that's coming up. That's
what you have to catch because that's going to be
a problem. You want to be super prepared because the
(13:14):
more prepared you are, the more confident you'll be.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
I asked small business expert Ben Walter what that kind
of preparation actually looks like in practice, especially when you're
not sure where to start.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
I lean heavily on structured frameworks, an reformed consultant hand
in the air. So I admit it. I used to
be a management consultant. Consultants are basically paid to deal
with ambiguity. That's kind of what you do. So I
used to joke when I was a consultant that they
should give me a new title and I should no
longer be senior consultant or whatever I was. I should
be senior executive vice president of bucketing. And that sounds
(13:46):
a little silly. But if you can just take some
ambiguous problem and break it into pieces part A, part B,
part C, and start categorizing the world into those buckets,
and I will confess I'm a disorganized person. I know
that about myself. I know that my lack of organization
causes me stress. So I have built structures into my
(14:08):
life that force organization for me and for the business
that I run, which give me a scaffolding on which
to not get as stressed when the inevitable stuff comes up.
So I'll give you an example of that. Every year,
I have five deliverables for my business. I'm very clear
about what it is this is what we're going to
achieve this year. We have KPIs against all of those.
(14:30):
It's all written down. I meet with my team once
a month, we go through that checklist. I know we're red, amber,
and green. I know what's going well. I know where
they're stuck that I need to get in there and
help and unblocked. When I have that in place, I
find that all of the grenades that get thrown in
don't phaze me because I don't have that wild, crazy
disorganization going on on the core of the business. And
(14:52):
so I've learned, like this causes me stress. I'm not
good at it. I'm going to build infrastructure and hire
people who are good at it and compensate for me
in all kinds of ways so that I have that
as a scaffolding on which to operate.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
It also seems like this is another great case of
bucketing in ways that feel really healthy. A colleague of
mine who was always doing all these things, and I
was like, how do you keep all those balls in
the air all the time? And she once said, the
key is to recognize that some balls are glass and
some balls are plastic, and you can let the plastic
ones fall but you got to catch the glass one
that it seems like this clear structure, like these are
(15:26):
the five deliberables. It's like those are glass. The plastic
ones fall. That's not great, but oh well, as long
as we catch those glass ones will be all right.
Speaker 4 (15:33):
It's a good metaphor. Organization will set you free. And
I say that as someone who inherently just isn't that organized,
but it's true. Some sense of organizing structure literally brings
your stress level down. Similarly with uncertainty. Okay, let me
put down a framework on paper. Here are the things
I control. Here are the things I don't control. I'm
going to focus on the things that I can control.
(15:55):
I'm going to tick off that list. That other stuff
is out there, but I cannot control that. It gives
you a way forward, It gives you a checklist. It
gives you something that you can start to act on
instead of freezing in the face of all of this
uncertainty and ambiguity. We had someone on the podcast. For example,
it was affee company called Luna Gourmet Coffee and their
entire rostery burnt to the ground like ashes on the ground, smoldering.
(16:15):
They lost a ton of inventory. They lost all their
ability to roast, and I was asking them, how do
you not freeze in the foot?
Speaker 3 (16:22):
What do you do?
Speaker 4 (16:22):
And he said, well, we knew we wanted to rebuild
that minute, and so we just got to work and
we made a list. What do we need to do
in the interim, we have some backup of inventory. How
are we going to manufacture in the meantime? When do
we call the insurance company? And they split up the
list and just got at it. And I'm sure it
wasn't quite that easy, but they just talked about, you know,
immediately going into sort and action, sortain, action, sort and action.
(16:42):
I think for most people there's a piece that comes
with that, because I can speak for myself. Staring at
something and going I don't know what to do next
is completely paralyzing, and you have to give yourself a
way forward because when you're just frozen, it's a self
fulfilling prophecy, right, that's when the rumination gets going. If
I can't control this, I can't do anything, then you're
(17:03):
in an anxiety spiral.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
But there's another way to prevent the anxiety spirals that
contribute so much work stress. We need to control our
inner monologue, and we'll hear some practical strategies for doing
that when the happiness lab returns in a moment.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
We have an unconscious mind, an automatic mind, and it's
not a self organized thing. It's not a self conscious thing,
but it does listen, it does pick up on the
messages we get to ourselves.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Psychologists and work stress expert Guy Wench argues that we
need to be a lot more careful about the inevert
in messages we're allowing our poor minds to hear on repeat.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
And so many of us tend to have so negative
self talk that we are replaying doubts.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
So even as we're trying to.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Prepare, like, oh, but things never go well for me,
and the boss just never likes me no matter what
I do, And then your unconscious mind is hearing that,
and why should you then feel confident. It's going to
generate anxiety, it's going to generate doubt. And you can't
say to your unconscious mind feel confident, because it's unconscious.
That's not how it works. But you can whisper to
it by changing yourself talk to wow, I'm really preparing
(18:18):
more than I ever have before, or like I am
so glad I'm investing all this time doing what I can.
I'm so glad I reached out to a few people
to get help because now I feel much more confident.
Now I'm really doing everything I can. You can message
the confidence, the preparation, the control, those are the things
you want to be messaging. And so you really want
to watch that internal dialogue.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
You've also noted that when we try to change our
internal dialogue, it has to be believable. We can't just
be like, oh, it's perfect, nothing's going to be stressful today.
I'm not worried about that terrible re quarterly report I
have coming up. How do we hack the believability of
that self talk better?
Speaker 3 (18:53):
You just have to be accurate.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Don't just tell yourself I am the best salesperson in
the entire department. If your track record doesn't show that,
you can say to yourself, here's where I stand in
terms of sales, and I'm putting in all this work
now because I think I can really improve and move
up that list.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
That is accurate to the.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Extent that you're actually putting in the time and the
effort to improve. So you want to be accurate, but
you want to be accurate slash optimistic.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
And Guy argues that another thing we need to be
accurate about is how we choose to name the annoying
tasks we face at work.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
A lot of the times when we procrastinate or when
something stresses us out, it's because we feel it's an
unpleasant task. It can be unpleasant to us because it's
anxiety provoking, it's stressful, it's unpleasant, it's boring, however we
define it. You know, it can be an expense account
who has too boring for me? It can be the
difficult email to write this difficult person. Ah, that's stressful.
(19:43):
And when we think about tasks that way, A, this
stress us out, and B we're really inclined to procrastinate
and put them off because we don't sit with those
unpleasant feelings. And when we do that, we're taking the
fifteen minute tasks, say fifteen minutes of unpleasantness, and we're
smearing it over an entire week by putting it off
and then thinking about it all the time, and then
getting more worried about it and more stressed about putting
(20:06):
it off. Now I really have to do it, but
I don't want to do it. Actually took something that's
limited in terms of the unpleasantness, and you supersized it. Now,
if you redefine the tasks that you tend to put
off like that, or you tend to find unpleasant as nuisances,
which they are. Nuisances are things we tend to take
care of right away. When it's a nuisance. There's a fly,
there's a pebble in your shoe. No one is on
(20:27):
a high and says I have got a pebble in
my shoe. I'm going to take that out in five
to six miles. We don't do that, you know, like, oh,
we take that out right away. The tag that's bothering
me on the collar, I'm going to rip that out right.
Nuisances we take care of right away. So start defining
these stressful, obnoxious, difficult and pleasant tasks as nuisances to yourself.
Oh now I've got this nuisance spreadsheet. I have to
(20:50):
write that nuisance email. You are'm going to be much
more inclined to get rid of it and to do
it now rather than later.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Can't say how much this has already helped me. I
had proofs for a paper, which is as academic when
you get a paper. You have to check everything and
make sure all the numbers are right and everything's perfect.
And it wound up in my inbox and literally when
I was going to better and I'm like, oh god,
I have those proofs. I have those proofs. I have
to do these proofs. But then right after that I
read your book and I was like, the proofs nuisance.
Got to get that out of the way. Then I
(21:17):
just sat down to do it. You know, it probably
did take me like two hours or something. You know,
it was a decent hunk of times.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
It's a big nuisance.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
But then it was gone right then it was two
hours and it was done rather than over a whole week.
And I'm telling my husband about it at dinner, and
I'm seeing that email every time I look in the inbox.
All I got to deal with the proofs. It's such
an easier thing to get out of the way and
get it off your desk.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
And the relief we feel when we do is also
a nice little bumbun at the end.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
One of the big insights of your book is that
our stress doesn't really end at work, in part because
our unconscious mind keeps it alive. How does our unconscious mind,
keep it alive.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
When you have a difficult day at work, you're feeling overwhelmed,
you had an unpleasant exchange with someone, you felt slighted, insulted, harassed,
or whatever it is. We don't leave those things at
the office. Those are the kinds of insults and worries
that we take home with us. And the way they
manifest is that they appear as intrusive thoughts that make
us think about the incident, but in an unproductive way.
(22:12):
They just make us think about that moment where the
boss said no, that's not a good idea at all,
and wave their hand dismissively at us, and how insulted
we felt, and how dismissed we felt, and how embarrassing
that was afterwards, And that are mind spirals. Now we're
not figuring anything out. We went through the unpleasantness of
that incident, and now we are playing it on repeat
(22:34):
and putting ourselves through that same unpleasantness over and over
and over again at home to no end. One thing
to consider is this is unpaid all the time. If
you're thinking about work when you're home, you're at work,
you're getting nothing done, you're upsetting yourself, you're stressing yourself out.
You're keeping yourself activated and in fight or flight, and
(22:56):
it's not voluntary. You're trying to watch a show and
intrudes into your mind again, and you're sitting at dinner
with your partner and trying to have a conversation and
suddenly they're like, hey, did you hear what I said?
And you're like no, because you're back at work replaying
that same argument. Another thing people do, I'm sorry, always
find interesting is because I do it too, is they
have the fantasy argument I wish I would have said this,
And again, there's may be some satisfaction in having the
(23:18):
microdrop moment in your head, but you have to relive
the insult to have it. You're still getting all upset
about it, and it's not gonna happen. That conversation went.
It's in the past now. So we have to catch
when we're ruminating unproductively because it's really damaging us. It'll
impair our sleep, it'll stress us out, it'll impair our mood.
(23:39):
Over time, it can become habitual, and then it predisposes
us to cardiovascular disease, to depression. There's just no utility
to it, and so we have to catch it, and
then we have to convert it into a much more
adaptive form of self reflection.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
And so how do we banish the rumination? Your book
has some of these lovely strategies. You talked about kind
of coming up with ways to develop strong intolerance for rumination.
Sounds great, but what do you mean there.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Once you're aware of how useless and harmful rumination is
and how you're doing all this the time and actually
harming yourself in the process, you should develop a real
antipathy toward it. You should see it as your unconscious
mind trying to infect you in some way, trying to
bring in unpleasantness into your headspace. And so the metaphor
(24:25):
I use in the book, and you can use any
is like you have to think of it like a
skunk that just sat down with you on the sofa.
You're like, oh no, no, no, no, no, don't want to sit
in my head. And I trained myself really well to
do it. I still ruminate when I'm in stressful periods
because that is a natural thing.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
I just catch it really really quickly.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
By the second round of the hamster wheel, I'm like,
wait a minute, now, I'm ruminating I'm not having that.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
You know, somebody was.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Really annoying and they disappointed me in some kind of way,
and I'm like, how could they do that? I don't understand.
In the minute they catch like, no, no, no, no, no,
You're not gonna give that person more stage time in
your head. This is not happening in my head right now.
I'm not letting it.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
And one of the great things about that strategy is
because rumination is building off all these unconscious processes, just
the act of noticing it can be really powerful because
then you're like, wait, I'm doing that thing again. Skunk's
on the couch. I gotta get rid of this.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
Right.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
It frees up so much bandwidth, so much mental space.
It allows you to be more thoughtful and deliberate and
intentional and present in actually what I'd rather be doing
after work.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
Now I can enjoy the movie.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Now I can enjoy date night with my partner because
I'm actually more present.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Another thing we can do when we get back to
our conscious mind for thinking about how to deal with
the rumination is that we can start dealing with potential
stressful problems proactively. Right we can look ahead to prevent
the rumination from coming in. You've talked about the strategy
of finding your stress minds. What does that mean and
how can we use that strategy better?
Speaker 2 (25:50):
I always ask people when I'm getting talks, who thinks
their job is stressful?
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Like nine out of ten?
Speaker 2 (25:54):
And people are like, oh, it's ten out of ten,
and there's always someone to shouts eleven. You know, there's
always that, And I'm like, okay, but that's not ok
Your job is not at an eleven. Break it down
into what these specific components are and rank those. Now,
maybe some of them are tents. Maybe that meeting with
the boss and the client that hates you is so unpleasant,
that's a tent, but you have it once a month.
(26:16):
Maybe this task or this meeting which is always people
feuding and fighting and not giving along, is an eight
or a nine, and you have it three hours a week.
But once you start going through that, you'll find that
there are some eights, there are some nines, maybe some tents,
but there are a lot of threes and fours and
fives and sixes. Because there are the lunches and there
are the boring meetings. There's plenty. But once you know
(26:37):
what the tasks are, you can start looking at the
ones that stress you out most, and those are your
stress minds, those are the ones that kind of explode
every week, ugh, you know, and then you can start
to strategize about how to deal with them.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
I asked Ben Walter what he thought of Guy's strategy
for categorizing your daily stress minds. Ben said, we can
go even further by offloading our stress minds all together.
Speaker 4 (27:00):
Find ways to not have to do the things that
stress you out the most. It's okay, let's be honest.
We are less stressed when we do things good at. Now,
we don't want to only do things we're great at.
Otherwise we're not nerve sided, we're not challenged, we're not
pressed in the same way that we talked about. But
the things that we know we're bad at and that
we just don't have a gift for we might never
(27:21):
be good at, find a way to not have to
do them. That's not always possible, but it's possible a
lot more than we think. Pay an outside vendor to
do it. Take the whole process out of your business process.
If you can find the things that cause you the
most stressed and find a way to either engineer them
out of your business process, or to offload them to partners, employees,
(27:41):
or some other party.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
But that also has a strategy for the stress minds,
you can't realistically unload. It's a practice that we talk
about a lot on the Happiness Lab, the act of
radical acceptance. Simply accept the fact that stressful situations are
a normative part of most jobs, especially if you're a
small business owner. Like the clients Bend supports.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
Sometimes there's a time to be stressed and a time
to not be stressed. You I say to people who
want to start their own businesses, just the first two years,
you're going to be stressed the whole time. Yes, you
can help manage it, but the early phase of starting
a business is highly, highly stressful, even for the most
resilient people. But there will come a time at which
you can take some of that stress off. You know,
(28:23):
a lot of if you're in retail, guess what Q
four is going to suck. It's just the way it is.
My wife works in an online retail. She always tells me,
like Ben Blackfride is coming. I know we're not going
away for Thanksgiving. We just don't. So I think having
in your mind that there are sometimes that it's okay
to be more stressed, and as long as you protect
other times that are less that can give you more
fortitude to cope.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
It also just normalizes what you're going through. I think
it forces you to give yourself a little grace and
self compassion because you're like, this is normal. Of course
I'm feeling stressed. I'm in my first year of the business,
or of course I'm feeling stressed. It's Q four ah,
common human experience. And there's so many studies that show
that just having that moment of like, yeah, normal, common
human experience, it reduces the stress because it stops you
(29:04):
from beating yourself up about the stress when you're in
that tough time. Right.
Speaker 4 (29:07):
It's like saying, if you've had a loss in your
life life and you're sad, well, that's normal. You're feeling grief,
that's normal. And then there's times when you are stressed
and that's okay too. And I think we don't give
ourselves permission. I'm feeling stressed and I shouldn't. Well, no,
maybe this is the time you probably are going to
feel stressed.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
So far, we've heard Guy and Ben strategies for managing
stress at work, But what about managing stress when you
get out of work. When we get back from the break,
we'll discuss what the evidence says about how to truly
relax and recharge. We'll learn why so many of us
tend to decompress in the wrong ways, and what we
can do to unstress our leisure time. The Happiness Lab
will be right back. These days, we talk a lot
(29:56):
about stress on the job, but psychologist Guy Wench likes
to point out that handling work stress isn't just about
what you do during your work hours. It's also about
how you spend your time off the clock.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
What's interesting for me is that the nature of work
it has changed so dramatically since the Industrial Revolution, and
our approach is to recovery if not. In other words,
in the Industrial Revolution, you spend fifteen hours a day,
you know, stirring fabrics in a vat of die and
then you get home and you need to rest. But
we sit usually eight nine hours a day and look
(30:29):
at screens, and our way to recover from that is
to get home and sit down and look at screens.
And our brain is like, so, wait, what's happening? How
is this different?
Speaker 3 (30:40):
Really?
Speaker 2 (30:40):
It doesn't matter that the content is different. We're doing
the same thing. And the research shows that to recover
effectively from the workday, we need to de stress, and
so resting and relaxing has its place. If you want
to vege out for a few hours, fine, that won't
drain your batteries further, it won't recharge them though. To
recharge to revitalize is a really important ingredient of effective recovery.
(31:04):
So it can't just be about the vegout. It can't
just be about the screen bin sure about the social media.
You know, so many people are like, oh, I spent
three hours looking through reels, and I'm like three hours
through reels, they're short, so how many different? Your attention
is like your brain is like that was not coming
to me at all. You know, I did not feel
calm by that. So we have to add in the
(31:27):
recharging stuff. And the recharging stuff unfortunately doesn't happen on
the couch. It actually means we have to get up
and do something. The problem is our mind. Again, the
automatic unconscious mind will say to you like no, no, no, no,
you're totally wiped out. You can't go to the gym. Now,
that's crazy talk. You can't get up and go meet
your friend. You're drained, and our mind doesn't distinguish well
(31:51):
between mental exhaustion and physical exhaustion. It confuses the two.
We're not physically tired, we're mentally drained, and we need
to recharge mentally. And everyone knows this. If you're athletic
and you force yourself to get off the couch and
go for that run, if you're social and you force
yourself to go and socialize, if you're creative and you
force yourself to go and do the painting or the
(32:12):
writing or whatever it is, whether it's fifteen minutes, half
an hour, or an hour later, you will come back
feeling way more energized than before you left because of
that magical ROI, of that second wind. You'll feel revitalized,
except that when you're on the couch, your mind is
seting you no, no, you just you don't have it
within you, but you do. It's one of those moments
where you have to like be the adult you know
(32:34):
in the brain and kind of take over and disengage
from the audo pilot and do the thing that's good
for you, even though it feels like I can't.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
But even when you've intentionally chosen a more restorative activity,
it can still be hard to switch off. I know
that when I'm feeling really stressed at work, it can
feel like I'm battling my brain just to turn work
mode off so that I can actually enjoy my free time.
So how do we do this better? Guys suggests a
strategy he learned as a kid from watching Mister Rogers.
(33:01):
If you're a fan of that show, you probably remember
how mister Rogers would famously swap his suit jacket and
dress shoes for the red cardiga and in sneakers he
wore at home every day when he entered the house.
Guy says that daily rituals like these can be more
beneficial than we expect.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
We have to really help train our brain to shift
gears from the workday, which might be intense and confectual
and pressured and stressful.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
To whatever the home life is.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Whatever you're doing when you get home, whether it's a
dinner with your family, helping your kids with homework, whatever
the thing is, it's a very different mindset. You want
to help switch gears, and for the brain, it's really
useful to have a ritual that's repetitive because our brain
learns rituals, and so when you start something, it starts
to anticipate where this is going, and then it'll cooperate
(33:50):
better in actually shifting the mindset. And I say ritual
because people say I have a routine, But a ritual
is something that we imbue with deeper meanings. So it's
actually a little bit more effective. And it should employ
as many of the senses as possible. And music is
very evocative for us to have the playlist that you
play by the end of the day. Actions are useful.
Always close the door to my home office. I will
(34:11):
walk out, I will close the door, and I will
say to myself, your evening begins, like I will message myself,
this is the end of the work day. And then
I will listen to a certain kind of music. I
will change clothes. So I tend to wear casual clothes.
But I have the casual clothes I wear when I'm working.
And I have the casual and people say to me,
i'm jeans and T shirts. I'm like terrific. Have the
(34:32):
T shirts you wear for work and associate with work,
and have the T shirts and jeans that your brain
associates with not work because it's very symbolic it. Clothes
are very embodied. It makes us feel a certain thing.
So if you associate some with your leisure time, you're
much more inclined to then feel relaxed. You can use scent,
certain candles, you can shift the lighting, you can create
(34:52):
whatever the ritual is that works for you, but repeat
it every day. You can do it during your commute,
or you know, as you get home. You can ask
for like when I get home, I need ten minutes
to get my mind straight before I dive into the
duties of the household or the parenting. You can ask
for that and then use that, because then you'll be
much more present.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
You're also hacking the same thing that causes all the problems,
which is your unconscious mind. Right, if your mind is
unconsciously noticing the clothes you wear, that you're still in
the room where you're working now all of a sudden,
it is still in work mode. But when you use
the ritual to hack, like oh now new smell new clothes,
your unconscious mind, for better or for worse, is learning
from it and changing how you're experiencing the world emotionally.
(35:30):
It's so powerful, absolutely Another way we can hack the
unconscious mind, though, is that we can tell it stuff
that we want it to learn from. You've talked about
the power of announcing your schedule in the evenings if
you do have to work on some small things. How
does that work?
Speaker 3 (35:43):
I advocate the two things.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Number One, I said, when I leave my office, I say,
now the evening begins. But I will also put in
my calendar. A lot of people the evenings are white
in their calendar unless they have something that they're doing. Okay,
I've dinner here with these friends or this thing that
I'm going to, but otherwise it's white.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
And why does not telling your brain what to do?
Speaker 2 (36:02):
So I would put there rest and recharge, recover from
the workday, spend quality time with your family. Put something
there so it reminds you, actually, there is a task
right now. It's not a goal oriented one. It's an
experiential one, but there is one. But the other thing
you can do is like look work emails, many many,
many people.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
They have to respond to.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
And what that does is then it can just corrupt
your entire evening because you check your phone every five minute,
and then you're not detached from work at all. You're
confused with work, you're not able to engage and to
be present in whatever it is you are doing. So
that framing the feeling of autonomy that you're in charge
of your evening is very important. And the way you
do that is you frame whatever the task is as
the main event, the main event being relax and recharge
(36:44):
or quality time with my family or go for run,
then have dinner. Then whatever the thing is, that's the
main event. And then when you have to check work stuff,
do it in one sitting if possible. Frame that as
that's the intermission from the main event of the show,
that is my evening, and then you're just taking a
break from your evening for the intermission about work, and
(37:06):
then after the intermission the show resumes your resume whatever
you're doing. That brain hack allows your unconscious mind to
still feel like we're at home as opposed to continually
thinking about, oh, I have to deal with this thing
at work.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
So these are all strategies we can use for the
end of the workday. But you've also been a big
advocate of squeezing leisure into micro breaks during the work day.
How can we do this a little bit better?
Speaker 2 (37:30):
So I said earlier that one of the things we
do when we feel overwhelmed at work, pressured, stressed, et cetera,
is we just put our head down and go from
task to task on complete autopilot. We're actually not strategizing
our day from a psychological health point of view. We
are not actually giving thought and looking like, oh, my goodness,
I have three difficult meetings in a row.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
What's the best way for me to deal with that? Oh?
Speaker 2 (37:54):
You know what, there's ten minutes here between this one
and this one. That would be a good time for
me to do some sit ups or push ups, or
go up and down some stairs just to get my
blood flow going.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
I do have fifteen minutes here.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
Let me prepare food to bring and go sit in
the park, have some nature around me that will be really,
really useful. After this meeting, let me see if I
can push back the next thing by ten minutes, because
then I want to be able to call my mother,
my best friend, whatever, and just see a friendly, loving
face and just get some good vibes. In other words,
be intentional and deliberate about what breaks what oases you're
(38:32):
putting in your desert of a day or your hell
of a landscape or whatever it is. Building some breaks.
There's small things you can do for a minute or two.
If you're going to be on social media, look at
things that actually make you smile. For me, videos of
Vishla puppies whatever, two or three minutes guarantee, Oh god,
that's just too cute. I mean, a different mindset already.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
This was so critical for me when I heard this
one because I realized that what I do when I
have these micro breaks in a really busy, busy day
is I'm often again using these sort of slightly bad,
unconscious strategies as I'm like, well, those are my moments
to get through the other stuff. That's when I'll go
through my email, or that's when I'll in on what's
happening on the news or something like that, and it's
exactly the wrong thing I need at that time. It's
(39:14):
like the thing my brain goes to is exactly the
wrong stuff that I really need in that moment.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
The news doesn't matter what side of the political landscape
you're on. It's upsetting regardless, it's angering regardless. So like,
be very thoughtful about when do I want to be
activated one way or the other, When do I want
to feel like engaged in that way. Do it when
it's good for you, Do it when you can come
down for it, not just that then that lingers. And
certainly don't do it between stressful meetings because again that'll
(39:41):
put you into fight or flight and then predisposity to
go into the next meeting really charged up, and that
means more sensitized, more reactive, all of it.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
But managing stress can sometimes require more than a RESTful
micro moment. In his work with small business owners, then
Walter has seen that day long breaks can also be transformative.
Speaker 4 (40:00):
The most effective strategies that I see are when you
reserve at least one specific time every week where you
don't work. There's a reason that you know, whatever your religion,
whether your day is Saturday or your day is Sunday,
there's a reason that people figured this out like five
thousand years ago, that maybe a day of rest is
probably pretty healthy for you, both physically and emotionally. It
gives you an anchor, and it gives you something to
(40:21):
look forward to every week and that you can build
on as the business grows. So I think the only
way to manage it is to have set times where
but for emergencies you don't work.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
But Ben's favorite tip for managing stress isn't about what
you do on your own. It's about who you surround
yourself with when times get tough.
Speaker 4 (40:39):
When you carry the weight to the world on your
shoulders and you don't have anyone to share that with,
it's pretty rough. So one of the big pieces of
advice that I give to all of my clients is
to find a network. A lot of small businesses have
formed a community that support each other. I gave the
example that coffee company one of their competitors help them
get through it. And so whether it's complementary businesses or
(41:00):
competitive businesses doesn't matter. Find like minded people who've had
experiences like yours, and you should form a support network
with them and have people that you can in a
safe way share your challenges with who can share some
of their experiences and how they solve them. It's a
really important outlet for people. I meet with small businesses
all the time, and the difference between the ones who
feel like they are alone and the ones who found
(41:21):
their people and know they aren't is dramatic.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
You're giving a strategy that fits so nicely with the
science of social emotional regulation. That one of the great
ways we can regulate our emotions and deal with our
stress is to talk to other people about it. But
it doesn't work to talk to other people if they
don't understand what you're going through. And so finding this
network of people who are going through the same thing
is like the best form of social emotional regulation because
they're giving you strategies that they know are going to
(41:46):
work for you.
Speaker 4 (41:47):
I mean, there's nothing in the world quite as comforting
is when someone says, I know exactly what that feels like.
That's really hard, and they mean it. That's just calming.
Oh I'm not alone. This isn't unique to me. Other
people have had to experience this. Let me learn from them.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Work stress may be climbing, but that doesn't mean you
have to live in fight or flight mode. By managing
your mindset, protecting your recovery time, and building the right
support around you, you can learn to keep stress in
that healthier nerve sighted range. If you're curious to learn
more science backed advice on managing work stress, check out
Guy Wench's new book Mind Overgrind. How to break Free
(42:28):
when work hijacks your life and if you'd like to
hear more personal stories from small business owners about their
make or break moments, check out Ben Walter's podcast, The Unshakables.
If you have thoughts about today's episode and the science
of work stress, we'd love to hear them. You can
email us at Happiness Lab at pushkin dot fm, or
leave us a review to tell us what resonated. You
(42:50):
can also sign up to learn more about the science
of happiness and join my free newsletter on my website,
Doctor Laurie Santos dot com. That's d R l A
U RI E s A n t os dot com.
That's it for today, but be sure to return next
week for our special coverage of this year's upcoming World
Happiness Report, which will be dropping later this week. That's
(43:12):
all next time on the Happiness Lab with me, Doctor
Laurie Santos
Pushkin. When it comes to feeling happier, the approach we
take to work really matters. The average American spends about
half of their waking hours on the job, which, even
if you're lucky enough to love what you do, can
feel like a lot. But work doesn't always stop at
(00:37):
the end of the work day. And I'm not just
talking about all the unpaid sorts of work we have
to do, the cooking and cleaning and caring for family members.
I'm talking about the paid work that winds up creeping
into the little free time we do have.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
The metaphor I use the pinball machine. The work shoots out,
and then it starts dinging to your relationships, to your
personal life, to your thoughts, to your leisure, to your
ability to recover, to your self care, and then when
those become compromise, it makes things worse at work, which
makes things worse outside of work, which makes things worse
at work, dinging back and forth, and that stress then
(01:12):
stays in play.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
For so much longer, which is why we're getting burnt out.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
This is psychologist, podcaster, and best selling author Guy Wench.
Guy is an expert on managing all kinds of tough emotions.
But his latest book, Mind Overgrind, how to break free
when work hijacks your life. It's all about strategies we
can use to create a healthier work life balance, something
Guy admits he wasn't always great at.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Literally a year into my professional career, I was totally
burnt out. I recognized that in an incident where I
was in the elevator with a neighbor and it stalled
between floors and the neighbor went into a panic. And here,
I am a psychologist. I wasn't panicked. I knew have
to say it to calm him down, but I just
was incredibly rude and cruel even to him. He was
(01:59):
just like hitting all the buttons and I was like, oh,
this is going to take forever to get upstairs now.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
And then he was like, this is my nightmare. This
is my nightmare.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
And my response is I looked at him and I said,
and this is my nightmare. And it was so I mean,
it was funny in my head, but it was terrible.
And when I saw his face, I felt such remorse
and I was like, why did I do that? And
that's when I realized, Oh, because I am drained. I'm
so exhausted, I have like nothing left. And then I realized, Wow,
I'm a year in and I'm burnt out.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
And that was a moment of what I know people
call depersonalization, where you're kind of annoyed at the intentions
of the people around you. Talk about what this feeling
of burning out at work did to your socialization and
your self care the other parts of your life.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
So when you're burnt out at work, but you have
to keep going. I'm self employed, so I have to
keep going. Really, one of the survival mechanisms psychologically is
you numb. You just put your head down and get
from task to task to task. You're not enjoying what
you do. There's no passion for what you do. You
feel jaded about what you do. It doesn't seem important,
it doesn't seem meaningful or fun, and you're not doing
(03:00):
a great job for sure. So you just become this robot,
this drone. Truly, you just works and works and works
and works and gets your head down and gets through
and then wakes up the next morning and gets through again.
And you can't numb. Selectively, we know that in psychology,
you don't numb. Some of your feelings in some of
the areas. You know all of your feelings in all
of the areas, and then that affects all your life
(03:20):
outside of work, or lack thereof. In my case, I
was just working and I wasn't tending to any of
my other needs.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
If this sounds familiar, or you feel like you may
be in danger of this becoming familiar, then this episode
is for you, because today Guy and I will explore
evidence based strategies for setting healthier boundaries at work, and
we won't be alone. We'll be joined by Ben Walter,
CEO of Chase for Business. Ben works closely with small
business owners, just the sorts of entrepreneurs who can't clock
(03:50):
out when things get stressful.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
I have huge responsibilities at work. I only have so
much time to be at home and with my family.
How could I possibly let this creep in a way
that would compromise the limited time that I get with them.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
So get ready for strategies you can use to break
free from work stress. Right after the Happiness Lab returns
from this quick break. These days, it feels like a
(04:20):
lot of people are talking about the problem of work stress,
and that's in part because work stress has gotten really bad.
In one twenty twenty four survey, more than seventy five
percent of employees reported that work stress was affecting their
physical health. Another study estimated that workplace stress causes over
one hundred thousand deaths in the US each year. And
that's all on top of the fact that the world
(04:42):
right now just feels really hard.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
We are in a particular time of uncertainty. We have
geopolitical uncertainty, we have economic uncertainty, we have policy uncertainty
at records we haven't seen in the past.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
This is Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business. Chase
for Business creates a suite of products for small business
owners entrepreneurs who face special kinds of work stresses, so
I thought Ben would have a unique perspective on fighting
stress on the job.
Speaker 4 (05:09):
Forty four percent of the economy is small business. It's
two thirds of every new job created in America. One
of the most fun parts of my job is that
I get to host our podcast, The Unshakables, where we
meet with those clients and we hear the stories of
the really tough things that they've been through, which obviously
cause immense amounts of stress, and hear how they were
able to overcome those obstacles and continue to build their businesses.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
And the obstacles that small business owners face as they
build their businesses are many.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
When you are a small business, you are the head
of sales, you are the COO, you are the custodian,
you are everything in between. Even if you have a
few employees. It really comes back to you and your
identities highly linked with the success of the business and
often your personal fortunes as well. And so I think
about the difference between home life and work life, and
the stress that crosses that line is way way more
(05:59):
blurry for a small business owner even than it is
for the most hardened, seasoned, high powered professional in a
corporate environment. There just simply is no way to say
operate them in the same way most small business owners.
If you have debt, you are personally guaranteeing that debt
with your personal assets. Every time that business makes a decision,
your personal reputation is on the line. And then you
(06:21):
compound on the environment we're in right now, in this
heady froth of uncertainty, and you can see where you
end up, and.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
At this high level of stress, where you usually end
up is not such a great place.
Speaker 4 (06:31):
The downstream effects are obviously terrible on relationships, on your
ability to execute, on your self satisfaction, on your happiness
with life, on all of those things.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
The blurring of work and home stress is something small
business owners experience intensely, but it's something that employees and
all roles are feeling more and more. When work stress
builds into home life, it can turn into a vicious
cycle that can feel almost impossible to escape. But the
science of stress shows something surprising. Having at least a
little stress is actually good.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
And when we have no stress, we actually don't always
get that creative and we don't work the extra a
little bit to do it because there isn't the pressure
to do it. The moment it stops being channeled into
that and has channeled into your personal relationships or unhealthy
eating or mind spinning anxiety, that's the point at which
I think it starts to detract rather than enhance your
ability to make the best use of it.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
And then it just bringing up a really important point
that we've known in the science since the nineteen fifties.
Like back in the nineteen fifties, people are like.
Speaker 4 (07:27):
Is stress good?
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Is it's bad? It's both. It's what folks call it
an inverted you function. This is this famous thing called
the Yerki's Dodson curve, which is at no stress, when
you're kind of at the bottom of stress, you're not
getting anything done, you can barely get out of bed,
you're not excited for work. But then as stress goes up,
you hit some optimal middle point with the stress where
you're like, I'm excited, there's some pressure, we're going to
get through this. But then there's a tipping point where
(07:49):
it's like, oh, curve, hell care Now it's too much.
Now I'm screaming at my kids, I'm not getting to
the gym, and it becomes a little bit too much.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
One of my favorite phrases I got from my daughter
when she was in the fourth grade. We moved to
London for a couple of years for work, and I
remember looking at her and saying, honey, are you nervous
to move to London or are you excited? What's the deal?
And she looked at me, she was ten years old
or whatever she was, she said, I think I'm kind
of nerve sided dad. I just love that phrase, and
that's stuck with me ever since. When I'm nerve cided
(08:18):
about something, I'm probably going to do pretty well.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
So how do we keep our stress low enough that
it works for us rather than against us? How do
we stay nerve sighted rather than freaked out. Psychologist and
author Guy Wench has found that how we think about
stress matters a lot.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Stress is very psychological to begin with. It really depends
on how you perceive the quote unquote threats pressures around you,
and whether you feel able to manage them. And one
of the things we do at work, which I think
most people do, is they frame their jobs in ways
that add stress to their lives. A simple way is
(08:57):
things like, oh, my job is really really stressful, or
I hate my work, or my boss hates me, or
like I can't stand every second in that office. When
you frame it in that generalized way, what you're doing
is is that you are predisposing yourself to perceive every
moment at work as punishing, as difficult. And that means
(09:20):
that you are anticipating threats and so you are in
fight or flight. You are highly activated and charged. You
will perceive even the small ambivalent slights as ah. Here's
another thing. You'll tend to miss those moments that aren't.
And there is no job that's stressful all of the time.
There just isn't. Even if you have terrible meetings that day,
(09:42):
you have a few that aren't so terrible.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
You have an.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Hour that's boring, you have fifteen minutes where you can
bring your favorite lunch and actually sit in the park
and maybe take a break. There's got to be someone
in the office, one person that you actually can stomach,
and it's not too bad seeing them.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
When you see them, you know your.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Boss can't be evil every second of the day, because
even Disney villains aren't. But when you frame it that way,
you are literally priming yourself to experience everything as way
more stressful than it actually is. And it's such a
simple correction you can make in your head, because the
idea is actually to correct to accuracy and nuance, not
to fantasy, but just to be more accurate.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
This also gets to this idea that we can be
in these different modes when it comes to how we
think about stress. We can be in what you've just
talked about, which is a real threat mode, right, like
everything is so terrible all the time, But there's a
flip mode that we can take when we're dealing with
stressful situations, which is sort of a challenge mode. What's
the difference between these two modes and how do we
react psychologically when we're in one versus the other?
Speaker 2 (10:40):
So the threat versus the challenge mindset theory, it's it's
the preventing theory in sports psychology, and the distinction is,
are you going into a situation seeing it as a
challenge to which you plan to rise? Are you going
in with the idea of I'm going to win, I'm
going to smash this, or are you going in because
you're seeing it as a threat, and then what you're
trying to do is not lose, Like I hope.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
This doesn't go badly. I hope I don't embarrass myself.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Now, you're trying to succeed in both mindsets, but in
one you're going in feeling confent and feeling in control,
feeling like you're prepared, and in the other one you're
going in second guessing, wondering, anticipating threats. And those mindsets
have a major difference not in just how we conduct
ourselves and think in the situation, but in how our
(11:27):
brain responds in the hormones that cause through our body
in that moment. And so the threat mindset is a
really problematic one. It predisposes you to do poorly, to
not be able to draw on your abilities as well,
and we psych ourselves out at work without realizing that
we are creating a self defeating prophecy. So we really
(11:48):
can't afford to tell ourselves, oh no, I can't handle that,
because you won't be able to handle it if you
say that.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
I imagine there must be some cases when we really should
be in more of a threat mindset, right for really
actually in danger. Are there ways to know whether it's
just the framing or whether it's the real situation that
we're facing that could be potentially problematic?
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Well, yes, because we tend to be pessimistic, you know,
zoom out for a minute. Is this really problematic? Are
you really in over your head or are you just
nervous that things might not go well? If you are
really in over your head, that's about problem solving. That's
about okay, let me redefine what's the best I can
do here and be realistic in terms of this is
(12:27):
going to be problematic. Let me see if I can
get more help, If I can get an extension if
I can beef up my resources because I am not
equipped to deal with this in that moment. But if
it's just psychological, if it's worry, you know a lot
of people just like second guessing themselves that they have
a little bit of a fear of failure.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
So that's when you want to shift mindset.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
And so how do we shift the mindset? How do
we move from a threat mode to more of a
challenge mode. What are some strategies.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
One is the idea of preparation.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
You really want to be prepared, Like if you're worried
about something, your unconscious mind might be like, hey, I
know this is a perfect time to serve social media,
or oh why don't you do it? To do list
for the groceries you're going to be shopping for later.
That will be way more fun than dealing with the
anxiety of thinking about this thing that's coming up. That's
what you have to catch because that's going to be
a problem. You want to be super prepared because the
(13:14):
more prepared you are, the more confident you'll be.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
I asked small business expert Ben Walter what that kind
of preparation actually looks like in practice, especially when you're
not sure where to start.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
I lean heavily on structured frameworks, an reformed consultant hand
in the air. So I admit it. I used to
be a management consultant. Consultants are basically paid to deal
with ambiguity. That's kind of what you do. So I
used to joke when I was a consultant that they
should give me a new title and I should no
longer be senior consultant or whatever I was. I should
be senior executive vice president of bucketing. And that sounds
(13:46):
a little silly. But if you can just take some
ambiguous problem and break it into pieces part A, part B,
part C, and start categorizing the world into those buckets,
and I will confess I'm a disorganized person. I know
that about myself. I know that my lack of organization
causes me stress. So I have built structures into my
(14:08):
life that force organization for me and for the business
that I run, which give me a scaffolding on which
to not get as stressed when the inevitable stuff comes up.
So I'll give you an example of that. Every year,
I have five deliverables for my business. I'm very clear
about what it is this is what we're going to
achieve this year. We have KPIs against all of those.
(14:30):
It's all written down. I meet with my team once
a month, we go through that checklist. I know we're red, amber,
and green. I know what's going well. I know where
they're stuck that I need to get in there and
help and unblocked. When I have that in place, I
find that all of the grenades that get thrown in
don't phaze me because I don't have that wild, crazy
disorganization going on on the core of the business. And
(14:52):
so I've learned, like this causes me stress. I'm not
good at it. I'm going to build infrastructure and hire
people who are good at it and compensate for me
in all kinds of ways so that I have that
as a scaffolding on which to operate.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
It also seems like this is another great case of
bucketing in ways that feel really healthy. A colleague of
mine who was always doing all these things, and I
was like, how do you keep all those balls in
the air all the time? And she once said, the
key is to recognize that some balls are glass and
some balls are plastic, and you can let the plastic
ones fall but you got to catch the glass one
that it seems like this clear structure, like these are
(15:26):
the five deliberables. It's like those are glass. The plastic
ones fall. That's not great, but oh well, as long
as we catch those glass ones will be all right.
Speaker 4 (15:33):
It's a good metaphor. Organization will set you free. And
I say that as someone who inherently just isn't that organized,
but it's true. Some sense of organizing structure literally brings
your stress level down. Similarly with uncertainty. Okay, let me
put down a framework on paper. Here are the things
I control. Here are the things I don't control. I'm
going to focus on the things that I can control.
(15:55):
I'm going to tick off that list. That other stuff
is out there, but I cannot control that. It gives
you a way forward, It gives you a checklist. It
gives you something that you can start to act on
instead of freezing in the face of all of this
uncertainty and ambiguity. We had someone on the podcast. For example,
it was affee company called Luna Gourmet Coffee and their
entire rostery burnt to the ground like ashes on the ground, smoldering.
(16:15):
They lost a ton of inventory. They lost all their
ability to roast, and I was asking them, how do
you not freeze in the foot?
Speaker 3 (16:22):
What do you do?
Speaker 4 (16:22):
And he said, well, we knew we wanted to rebuild
that minute, and so we just got to work and
we made a list. What do we need to do
in the interim, we have some backup of inventory. How
are we going to manufacture in the meantime? When do
we call the insurance company? And they split up the
list and just got at it. And I'm sure it
wasn't quite that easy, but they just talked about, you know,
immediately going into sort and action, sortain, action, sort and action.
(16:42):
I think for most people there's a piece that comes
with that, because I can speak for myself. Staring at
something and going I don't know what to do next
is completely paralyzing, and you have to give yourself a
way forward because when you're just frozen, it's a self
fulfilling prophecy, right, that's when the rumination gets going. If
I can't control this, I can't do anything, then you're
(17:03):
in an anxiety spiral.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
But there's another way to prevent the anxiety spirals that
contribute so much work stress. We need to control our
inner monologue, and we'll hear some practical strategies for doing
that when the happiness lab returns in a moment.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
We have an unconscious mind, an automatic mind, and it's
not a self organized thing. It's not a self conscious thing,
but it does listen, it does pick up on the
messages we get to ourselves.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Psychologists and work stress expert Guy Wench argues that we
need to be a lot more careful about the inevert
in messages we're allowing our poor minds to hear on repeat.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
And so many of us tend to have so negative
self talk that we are replaying doubts.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
So even as we're trying to.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Prepare, like, oh, but things never go well for me,
and the boss just never likes me no matter what
I do, And then your unconscious mind is hearing that,
and why should you then feel confident. It's going to
generate anxiety, it's going to generate doubt. And you can't
say to your unconscious mind feel confident, because it's unconscious.
That's not how it works. But you can whisper to
it by changing yourself talk to wow, I'm really preparing
(18:18):
more than I ever have before, or like I am
so glad I'm investing all this time doing what I can.
I'm so glad I reached out to a few people
to get help because now I feel much more confident.
Now I'm really doing everything I can. You can message
the confidence, the preparation, the control, those are the things
you want to be messaging. And so you really want
to watch that internal dialogue.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
You've also noted that when we try to change our
internal dialogue, it has to be believable. We can't just
be like, oh, it's perfect, nothing's going to be stressful today.
I'm not worried about that terrible re quarterly report I
have coming up. How do we hack the believability of
that self talk better?
Speaker 3 (18:53):
You just have to be accurate.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Don't just tell yourself I am the best salesperson in
the entire department. If your track record doesn't show that,
you can say to yourself, here's where I stand in
terms of sales, and I'm putting in all this work
now because I think I can really improve and move
up that list.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
That is accurate to the.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Extent that you're actually putting in the time and the
effort to improve. So you want to be accurate, but
you want to be accurate slash optimistic.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
And Guy argues that another thing we need to be
accurate about is how we choose to name the annoying
tasks we face at work.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
A lot of the times when we procrastinate or when
something stresses us out, it's because we feel it's an
unpleasant task. It can be unpleasant to us because it's
anxiety provoking, it's stressful, it's unpleasant, it's boring, however we
define it. You know, it can be an expense account
who has too boring for me? It can be the
difficult email to write this difficult person. Ah, that's stressful.
(19:43):
And when we think about tasks that way, A, this
stress us out, and B we're really inclined to procrastinate
and put them off because we don't sit with those
unpleasant feelings. And when we do that, we're taking the
fifteen minute tasks, say fifteen minutes of unpleasantness, and we're
smearing it over an entire week by putting it off
and then thinking about it all the time, and then
getting more worried about it and more stressed about putting
(20:06):
it off. Now I really have to do it, but
I don't want to do it. Actually took something that's
limited in terms of the unpleasantness, and you supersized it. Now,
if you redefine the tasks that you tend to put
off like that, or you tend to find unpleasant as nuisances,
which they are. Nuisances are things we tend to take
care of right away. When it's a nuisance. There's a fly,
there's a pebble in your shoe. No one is on
(20:27):
a high and says I have got a pebble in
my shoe. I'm going to take that out in five
to six miles. We don't do that, you know, like, oh,
we take that out right away. The tag that's bothering
me on the collar, I'm going to rip that out right.
Nuisances we take care of right away. So start defining
these stressful, obnoxious, difficult and pleasant tasks as nuisances to yourself.
Oh now I've got this nuisance spreadsheet. I have to
(20:50):
write that nuisance email. You are'm going to be much
more inclined to get rid of it and to do
it now rather than later.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Can't say how much this has already helped me. I
had proofs for a paper, which is as academic when
you get a paper. You have to check everything and
make sure all the numbers are right and everything's perfect.
And it wound up in my inbox and literally when
I was going to better and I'm like, oh god,
I have those proofs. I have those proofs. I have
to do these proofs. But then right after that I
read your book and I was like, the proofs nuisance.
Got to get that out of the way. Then I
(21:17):
just sat down to do it. You know, it probably
did take me like two hours or something. You know,
it was a decent hunk of times.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
It's a big nuisance.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
But then it was gone right then it was two
hours and it was done rather than over a whole week.
And I'm telling my husband about it at dinner, and
I'm seeing that email every time I look in the inbox.
All I got to deal with the proofs. It's such
an easier thing to get out of the way and
get it off your desk.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
And the relief we feel when we do is also
a nice little bumbun at the end.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
One of the big insights of your book is that
our stress doesn't really end at work, in part because
our unconscious mind keeps it alive. How does our unconscious mind,
keep it alive.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
When you have a difficult day at work, you're feeling overwhelmed,
you had an unpleasant exchange with someone, you felt slighted, insulted, harassed,
or whatever it is. We don't leave those things at
the office. Those are the kinds of insults and worries
that we take home with us. And the way they
manifest is that they appear as intrusive thoughts that make
us think about the incident, but in an unproductive way.
(22:12):
They just make us think about that moment where the
boss said no, that's not a good idea at all,
and wave their hand dismissively at us, and how insulted
we felt, and how dismissed we felt, and how embarrassing
that was afterwards, And that are mind spirals. Now we're
not figuring anything out. We went through the unpleasantness of
that incident, and now we are playing it on repeat
(22:34):
and putting ourselves through that same unpleasantness over and over
and over again at home to no end. One thing
to consider is this is unpaid all the time. If
you're thinking about work when you're home, you're at work,
you're getting nothing done, you're upsetting yourself, you're stressing yourself out.
You're keeping yourself activated and in fight or flight, and
(22:56):
it's not voluntary. You're trying to watch a show and
intrudes into your mind again, and you're sitting at dinner
with your partner and trying to have a conversation and
suddenly they're like, hey, did you hear what I said?
And you're like no, because you're back at work replaying
that same argument. Another thing people do, I'm sorry, always
find interesting is because I do it too, is they
have the fantasy argument I wish I would have said this,
And again, there's may be some satisfaction in having the
(23:18):
microdrop moment in your head, but you have to relive
the insult to have it. You're still getting all upset
about it, and it's not gonna happen. That conversation went.
It's in the past now. So we have to catch
when we're ruminating unproductively because it's really damaging us. It'll
impair our sleep, it'll stress us out, it'll impair our mood.
(23:39):
Over time, it can become habitual, and then it predisposes
us to cardiovascular disease, to depression. There's just no utility
to it, and so we have to catch it, and
then we have to convert it into a much more
adaptive form of self reflection.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
And so how do we banish the rumination? Your book
has some of these lovely strategies. You talked about kind
of coming up with ways to develop strong intolerance for rumination.
Sounds great, but what do you mean there.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Once you're aware of how useless and harmful rumination is
and how you're doing all this the time and actually
harming yourself in the process, you should develop a real
antipathy toward it. You should see it as your unconscious
mind trying to infect you in some way, trying to
bring in unpleasantness into your headspace. And so the metaphor
(24:25):
I use in the book, and you can use any
is like you have to think of it like a
skunk that just sat down with you on the sofa.
You're like, oh no, no, no, no, no, don't want to sit
in my head. And I trained myself really well to
do it. I still ruminate when I'm in stressful periods
because that is a natural thing.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
I just catch it really really quickly.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
By the second round of the hamster wheel, I'm like,
wait a minute, now, I'm ruminating I'm not having that.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
You know, somebody was.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Really annoying and they disappointed me in some kind of way,
and I'm like, how could they do that? I don't understand.
In the minute they catch like, no, no, no, no, no,
You're not gonna give that person more stage time in
your head. This is not happening in my head right now.
I'm not letting it.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
And one of the great things about that strategy is
because rumination is building off all these unconscious processes, just
the act of noticing it can be really powerful because
then you're like, wait, I'm doing that thing again. Skunk's
on the couch. I gotta get rid of this.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
Right.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
It frees up so much bandwidth, so much mental space.
It allows you to be more thoughtful and deliberate and
intentional and present in actually what I'd rather be doing
after work.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
Now I can enjoy the movie.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Now I can enjoy date night with my partner because
I'm actually more present.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Another thing we can do when we get back to
our conscious mind for thinking about how to deal with
the rumination is that we can start dealing with potential
stressful problems proactively. Right we can look ahead to prevent
the rumination from coming in. You've talked about the strategy
of finding your stress minds. What does that mean and
how can we use that strategy better?
Speaker 2 (25:50):
I always ask people when I'm getting talks, who thinks
their job is stressful?
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Like nine out of ten?
Speaker 2 (25:54):
And people are like, oh, it's ten out of ten,
and there's always someone to shouts eleven. You know, there's
always that, And I'm like, okay, but that's not ok
Your job is not at an eleven. Break it down
into what these specific components are and rank those. Now,
maybe some of them are tents. Maybe that meeting with
the boss and the client that hates you is so unpleasant,
that's a tent, but you have it once a month.
(26:16):
Maybe this task or this meeting which is always people
feuding and fighting and not giving along, is an eight
or a nine, and you have it three hours a week.
But once you start going through that, you'll find that
there are some eights, there are some nines, maybe some tents,
but there are a lot of threes and fours and
fives and sixes. Because there are the lunches and there
are the boring meetings. There's plenty. But once you know
(26:37):
what the tasks are, you can start looking at the
ones that stress you out most, and those are your
stress minds, those are the ones that kind of explode
every week, ugh, you know, and then you can start
to strategize about how to deal with them.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
I asked Ben Walter what he thought of Guy's strategy
for categorizing your daily stress minds. Ben said, we can
go even further by offloading our stress minds all together.
Speaker 4 (27:00):
Find ways to not have to do the things that
stress you out the most. It's okay, let's be honest.
We are less stressed when we do things good at. Now,
we don't want to only do things we're great at.
Otherwise we're not nerve sided, we're not challenged, we're not
pressed in the same way that we talked about. But
the things that we know we're bad at and that
we just don't have a gift for we might never
(27:21):
be good at, find a way to not have to
do them. That's not always possible, but it's possible a
lot more than we think. Pay an outside vendor to
do it. Take the whole process out of your business process.
If you can find the things that cause you the
most stressed and find a way to either engineer them
out of your business process, or to offload them to partners, employees,
(27:41):
or some other party.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
But that also has a strategy for the stress minds,
you can't realistically unload. It's a practice that we talk
about a lot on the Happiness Lab, the act of
radical acceptance. Simply accept the fact that stressful situations are
a normative part of most jobs, especially if you're a
small business owner. Like the clients Bend supports.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
Sometimes there's a time to be stressed and a time
to not be stressed. You I say to people who
want to start their own businesses, just the first two years,
you're going to be stressed the whole time. Yes, you
can help manage it, but the early phase of starting
a business is highly, highly stressful, even for the most
resilient people. But there will come a time at which
you can take some of that stress off. You know,
(28:23):
a lot of if you're in retail, guess what Q
four is going to suck. It's just the way it is.
My wife works in an online retail. She always tells me,
like Ben Blackfride is coming. I know we're not going
away for Thanksgiving. We just don't. So I think having
in your mind that there are sometimes that it's okay
to be more stressed, and as long as you protect
other times that are less that can give you more
fortitude to cope.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
It also just normalizes what you're going through. I think
it forces you to give yourself a little grace and
self compassion because you're like, this is normal. Of course
I'm feeling stressed. I'm in my first year of the business,
or of course I'm feeling stressed. It's Q four ah,
common human experience. And there's so many studies that show
that just having that moment of like, yeah, normal, common
human experience, it reduces the stress because it stops you
(29:04):
from beating yourself up about the stress when you're in
that tough time. Right.
Speaker 4 (29:07):
It's like saying, if you've had a loss in your
life life and you're sad, well, that's normal. You're feeling grief,
that's normal. And then there's times when you are stressed
and that's okay too. And I think we don't give
ourselves permission. I'm feeling stressed and I shouldn't. Well, no,
maybe this is the time you probably are going to
feel stressed.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
So far, we've heard Guy and Ben strategies for managing
stress at work, But what about managing stress when you
get out of work. When we get back from the break,
we'll discuss what the evidence says about how to truly
relax and recharge. We'll learn why so many of us
tend to decompress in the wrong ways, and what we
can do to unstress our leisure time. The Happiness Lab
will be right back. These days, we talk a lot
(29:56):
about stress on the job, but psychologist Guy Wench likes
to point out that handling work stress isn't just about
what you do during your work hours. It's also about
how you spend your time off the clock.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
What's interesting for me is that the nature of work
it has changed so dramatically since the Industrial Revolution, and
our approach is to recovery if not. In other words,
in the Industrial Revolution, you spend fifteen hours a day,
you know, stirring fabrics in a vat of die and
then you get home and you need to rest. But
we sit usually eight nine hours a day and look
(30:29):
at screens, and our way to recover from that is
to get home and sit down and look at screens.
And our brain is like, so, wait, what's happening? How
is this different?
Speaker 3 (30:40):
Really?
Speaker 2 (30:40):
It doesn't matter that the content is different. We're doing
the same thing. And the research shows that to recover
effectively from the workday, we need to de stress, and
so resting and relaxing has its place. If you want
to vege out for a few hours, fine, that won't
drain your batteries further, it won't recharge them though. To
recharge to revitalize is a really important ingredient of effective recovery.
(31:04):
So it can't just be about the vegout. It can't
just be about the screen bin sure about the social media.
You know, so many people are like, oh, I spent
three hours looking through reels, and I'm like three hours
through reels, they're short, so how many different? Your attention
is like your brain is like that was not coming
to me at all. You know, I did not feel
calm by that. So we have to add in the
(31:27):
recharging stuff. And the recharging stuff unfortunately doesn't happen on
the couch. It actually means we have to get up
and do something. The problem is our mind. Again, the
automatic unconscious mind will say to you like no, no, no, no,
you're totally wiped out. You can't go to the gym. Now,
that's crazy talk. You can't get up and go meet
your friend. You're drained, and our mind doesn't distinguish well
(31:51):
between mental exhaustion and physical exhaustion. It confuses the two.
We're not physically tired, we're mentally drained, and we need
to recharge mentally. And everyone knows this. If you're athletic
and you force yourself to get off the couch and
go for that run, if you're social and you force
yourself to go and socialize, if you're creative and you
force yourself to go and do the painting or the
(32:12):
writing or whatever it is, whether it's fifteen minutes, half
an hour, or an hour later, you will come back
feeling way more energized than before you left because of
that magical ROI, of that second wind. You'll feel revitalized,
except that when you're on the couch, your mind is
seting you no, no, you just you don't have it
within you, but you do. It's one of those moments
where you have to like be the adult you know
(32:34):
in the brain and kind of take over and disengage
from the audo pilot and do the thing that's good
for you, even though it feels like I can't.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
But even when you've intentionally chosen a more restorative activity,
it can still be hard to switch off. I know
that when I'm feeling really stressed at work, it can
feel like I'm battling my brain just to turn work
mode off so that I can actually enjoy my free time.
So how do we do this better? Guys suggests a
strategy he learned as a kid from watching Mister Rogers.
(33:01):
If you're a fan of that show, you probably remember
how mister Rogers would famously swap his suit jacket and
dress shoes for the red cardiga and in sneakers he
wore at home every day when he entered the house.
Guy says that daily rituals like these can be more
beneficial than we expect.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
We have to really help train our brain to shift
gears from the workday, which might be intense and confectual
and pressured and stressful.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
To whatever the home life is.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Whatever you're doing when you get home, whether it's a
dinner with your family, helping your kids with homework, whatever
the thing is, it's a very different mindset. You want
to help switch gears, and for the brain, it's really
useful to have a ritual that's repetitive because our brain
learns rituals, and so when you start something, it starts
to anticipate where this is going, and then it'll cooperate
(33:50):
better in actually shifting the mindset. And I say ritual
because people say I have a routine, But a ritual
is something that we imbue with deeper meanings. So it's
actually a little bit more effective. And it should employ
as many of the senses as possible. And music is
very evocative for us to have the playlist that you
play by the end of the day. Actions are useful.
Always close the door to my home office. I will
(34:11):
walk out, I will close the door, and I will
say to myself, your evening begins, like I will message myself,
this is the end of the work day. And then
I will listen to a certain kind of music. I
will change clothes. So I tend to wear casual clothes.
But I have the casual clothes I wear when I'm working.
And I have the casual and people say to me,
i'm jeans and T shirts. I'm like terrific. Have the
(34:32):
T shirts you wear for work and associate with work,
and have the T shirts and jeans that your brain
associates with not work because it's very symbolic it. Clothes
are very embodied. It makes us feel a certain thing.
So if you associate some with your leisure time, you're
much more inclined to then feel relaxed. You can use scent,
certain candles, you can shift the lighting, you can create
(34:52):
whatever the ritual is that works for you, but repeat
it every day. You can do it during your commute,
or you know, as you get home. You can ask
for like when I get home, I need ten minutes
to get my mind straight before I dive into the
duties of the household or the parenting. You can ask
for that and then use that, because then you'll be
much more present.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
You're also hacking the same thing that causes all the problems,
which is your unconscious mind. Right, if your mind is
unconsciously noticing the clothes you wear, that you're still in
the room where you're working now all of a sudden,
it is still in work mode. But when you use
the ritual to hack, like oh now new smell new clothes,
your unconscious mind, for better or for worse, is learning
from it and changing how you're experiencing the world emotionally.
(35:30):
It's so powerful, absolutely Another way we can hack the
unconscious mind, though, is that we can tell it stuff
that we want it to learn from. You've talked about
the power of announcing your schedule in the evenings if
you do have to work on some small things. How
does that work?
Speaker 3 (35:43):
I advocate the two things.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Number One, I said, when I leave my office, I say,
now the evening begins. But I will also put in
my calendar. A lot of people the evenings are white
in their calendar unless they have something that they're doing. Okay,
I've dinner here with these friends or this thing that
I'm going to, but otherwise it's white.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
And why does not telling your brain what to do?
Speaker 2 (36:02):
So I would put there rest and recharge, recover from
the workday, spend quality time with your family. Put something
there so it reminds you, actually, there is a task
right now. It's not a goal oriented one. It's an
experiential one, but there is one. But the other thing
you can do is like look work emails, many many,
many people.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
They have to respond to.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
And what that does is then it can just corrupt
your entire evening because you check your phone every five minute,
and then you're not detached from work at all. You're
confused with work, you're not able to engage and to
be present in whatever it is you are doing. So
that framing the feeling of autonomy that you're in charge
of your evening is very important. And the way you
do that is you frame whatever the task is as
the main event, the main event being relax and recharge
(36:44):
or quality time with my family or go for run,
then have dinner. Then whatever the thing is, that's the
main event. And then when you have to check work stuff,
do it in one sitting if possible. Frame that as
that's the intermission from the main event of the show,
that is my evening, and then you're just taking a
break from your evening for the intermission about work, and
(37:06):
then after the intermission the show resumes your resume whatever
you're doing. That brain hack allows your unconscious mind to
still feel like we're at home as opposed to continually
thinking about, oh, I have to deal with this thing
at work.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
So these are all strategies we can use for the
end of the workday. But you've also been a big
advocate of squeezing leisure into micro breaks during the work day.
How can we do this a little bit better?
Speaker 2 (37:30):
So I said earlier that one of the things we
do when we feel overwhelmed at work, pressured, stressed, et cetera,
is we just put our head down and go from
task to task on complete autopilot. We're actually not strategizing
our day from a psychological health point of view. We
are not actually giving thought and looking like, oh, my goodness,
I have three difficult meetings in a row.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
What's the best way for me to deal with that? Oh?
Speaker 2 (37:54):
You know what, there's ten minutes here between this one
and this one. That would be a good time for
me to do some sit ups or push ups, or
go up and down some stairs just to get my
blood flow going.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
I do have fifteen minutes here.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
Let me prepare food to bring and go sit in
the park, have some nature around me that will be really,
really useful. After this meeting, let me see if I
can push back the next thing by ten minutes, because
then I want to be able to call my mother,
my best friend, whatever, and just see a friendly, loving
face and just get some good vibes. In other words,
be intentional and deliberate about what breaks what oases you're
(38:32):
putting in your desert of a day or your hell
of a landscape or whatever it is. Building some breaks.
There's small things you can do for a minute or two.
If you're going to be on social media, look at
things that actually make you smile. For me, videos of
Vishla puppies whatever, two or three minutes guarantee, Oh god,
that's just too cute. I mean, a different mindset already.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
This was so critical for me when I heard this
one because I realized that what I do when I
have these micro breaks in a really busy, busy day
is I'm often again using these sort of slightly bad,
unconscious strategies as I'm like, well, those are my moments
to get through the other stuff. That's when I'll go
through my email, or that's when I'll in on what's
happening on the news or something like that, and it's
exactly the wrong thing I need at that time. It's
(39:14):
like the thing my brain goes to is exactly the
wrong stuff that I really need in that moment.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
The news doesn't matter what side of the political landscape
you're on. It's upsetting regardless, it's angering regardless. So like,
be very thoughtful about when do I want to be
activated one way or the other, When do I want
to feel like engaged in that way. Do it when
it's good for you, Do it when you can come
down for it, not just that then that lingers. And
certainly don't do it between stressful meetings because again that'll
(39:41):
put you into fight or flight and then predisposity to
go into the next meeting really charged up, and that
means more sensitized, more reactive, all of it.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
But managing stress can sometimes require more than a RESTful
micro moment. In his work with small business owners, then
Walter has seen that day long breaks can also be transformative.
Speaker 4 (40:00):
The most effective strategies that I see are when you
reserve at least one specific time every week where you
don't work. There's a reason that you know, whatever your religion,
whether your day is Saturday or your day is Sunday,
there's a reason that people figured this out like five
thousand years ago, that maybe a day of rest is
probably pretty healthy for you, both physically and emotionally. It
gives you an anchor, and it gives you something to
(40:21):
look forward to every week and that you can build
on as the business grows. So I think the only
way to manage it is to have set times where
but for emergencies you don't work.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
But Ben's favorite tip for managing stress isn't about what
you do on your own. It's about who you surround
yourself with when times get tough.
Speaker 4 (40:39):
When you carry the weight to the world on your
shoulders and you don't have anyone to share that with,
it's pretty rough. So one of the big pieces of
advice that I give to all of my clients is
to find a network. A lot of small businesses have
formed a community that support each other. I gave the
example that coffee company one of their competitors help them
get through it. And so whether it's complementary businesses or
(41:00):
competitive businesses doesn't matter. Find like minded people who've had
experiences like yours, and you should form a support network
with them and have people that you can in a
safe way share your challenges with who can share some
of their experiences and how they solve them. It's a
really important outlet for people. I meet with small businesses
all the time, and the difference between the ones who
feel like they are alone and the ones who found
(41:21):
their people and know they aren't is dramatic.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
You're giving a strategy that fits so nicely with the
science of social emotional regulation. That one of the great
ways we can regulate our emotions and deal with our
stress is to talk to other people about it. But
it doesn't work to talk to other people if they
don't understand what you're going through. And so finding this
network of people who are going through the same thing
is like the best form of social emotional regulation because
they're giving you strategies that they know are going to
(41:46):
work for you.
Speaker 4 (41:47):
I mean, there's nothing in the world quite as comforting
is when someone says, I know exactly what that feels like.
That's really hard, and they mean it. That's just calming.
Oh I'm not alone. This isn't unique to me. Other
people have had to experience this. Let me learn from them.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Work stress may be climbing, but that doesn't mean you
have to live in fight or flight mode. By managing
your mindset, protecting your recovery time, and building the right
support around you, you can learn to keep stress in
that healthier nerve sighted range. If you're curious to learn
more science backed advice on managing work stress, check out
Guy Wench's new book Mind Overgrind. How to break Free
(42:28):
when work hijacks your life and if you'd like to
hear more personal stories from small business owners about their
make or break moments, check out Ben Walter's podcast, The Unshakables.
If you have thoughts about today's episode and the science
of work stress, we'd love to hear them. You can
email us at Happiness Lab at pushkin dot fm, or
leave us a review to tell us what resonated. You
(42:50):
can also sign up to learn more about the science
of happiness and join my free newsletter on my website,
Doctor Laurie Santos dot com. That's d R l A
U RI E s A n t os dot com.
That's it for today, but be sure to return next
week for our special coverage of this year's upcoming World
Happiness Report, which will be dropping later this week. That's
(43:12):
all next time on the Happiness Lab with me, Doctor
Laurie Santos
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