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10% Happier with Dan Harris
Your Job Is Hijacking Your Life: How to Set Limits, Decrease Work Stress, and Reclaim Your Evenings | Guy Winch
01:06:55
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign hey, welcome to the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Today we're talking about work stress, which, if you believe the surveys, is worse than ever. My guest today has some very practical strategies for how not to bring your work home with you, how to set boundaries with your boss even if you have a bad boss, how to recover from a terrible day at the office, how to coach yourself through major challenges, how to deal with the Sunday scaries, and much more. My guest is Guy Winch, who is a psychologist and author. His new book is called Mind Over Grind. He's written many books including Emotional First Aid and the Squeaky Wheel. But again, his new book is called Mind Over Grind and I think you're going to like this interview. I liked it a lot. Guy Winch after this quick break, a few things before we hear from our sponsors. I get two questions all the time. One question is how do I maintain an abiding meditation habit? I keep falling off the wagon. That's what I hear from people all the time. The second question I get all the time is I'm interested in Buddhism, but I don't know where to start. I have answers to both of those questions. The answers are slightly self serving because I'm going to send you to my app 10% with Dan Harris. But check this out. Starting this Sunday, July 12th at 4pm Eastern, we're running a summer Sunday live series with the great meditation teacher Sharon Salsberg who's going to do an eight part series every Sunday for eight weeks where she takes one piece of the Buddha's Eightfold Path. If you're looking to get into Buddhism, a great place to start is one of the foundational Buddhist lists and that is the Eightfold Path. You can think of it as the Buddha's Cookbook for a Happy Life. And Sharon is going to walk us through each part of the Eightfold Path and she's going to do so live and in community. So every Sunday at 4pm Eastern you can meditate with a bunch of other people. And the science shows that habit formation is often much more successful in the carpool lane. So you'll meditate as a group with the rest of us, myself included, and we will then listen to Sharon teach us a little bit and then we'll all get the opportunity to ask Sharon questions. So it really is an enormous opportunity to deepen your practice and to learn more about the Dharma. Again, it starts this Sunday, July 12th at 4pm Eastern. Go to danharris.com and sign up for the 10% with Dan Harris app right now to start your free trial. And we will be right back after this. This episode is sponsored by Better Help. We talk about mental health more openly these days, but asking for help can still feel hard. And Better Help's latest research confirms this. BetterHelp's 2026 State of Stigma report surveyed 2,000Americans and revealed that 85% of Americans believe getting support is wise, yet 74% say society discourages people from doing so. I find these numbers personally quite disturbing. Nobody should feel stigmatized for getting help. You don't feel funny about getting your heart checked, so getting your brain and mind checked should be completely fine. I see a therapist, have seen a therapist since I was a little boy. It is an enormously helpful thing to do. And it's also not for nothing, not self indulgent, because taking care of yourself helps you be better resourced and better prepared to take care of other people. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 6 million people globally. Don't let stigma stand in the way of support. Start therapy with BetterHelp. Sign up and get 10% off@betterhelp.com happier. That's betterhelp.com happier. Guy Winch, welcome to the show.
- [04:01]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [04:02]
A
All right, so let's get right into it. I'm curious. Can we say with a degree of certainty that work stress is greater or worse now than it's ever been?
- [04:16]
B
If you're going to base it on surveys that measure work stress these days compared to what it was 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago, yes, we can say so with absolute certainty. The work stress and burnout have been peaking over the past five years, and they're at all time highs and higher than they've been pre pandemic and certainly before that. So, yes, absolutely, we can say that with certainty.
- [04:41]
A
What's driving that?
- [04:42]
B
I think the workplace culture right now is a very difficult culture. But I think primarily what happened is that the pandemic did something very fundamental to our psychological barrier in our head, the separation we had between work and home. We were all in lockdowns for a certain amount of time, some for weeks, months, some for longer. And home became our workplace and not just in our own minds, but in the minds of our employers. And so we really erased a boundary that was quite fundamental. Before the pandemic, people would be a little bit more hesitant to trouble an employee at home or to expect them to check their emails or certainly get on a video Call. But after the pandemic that was so normalized, both in our heads and in the minds of our employers, that that boundary got erased. And the stress that results is because work stress is no longer contained to the workplace. We are bringing it home. It's following us home. They are giving it to us at home. And that's why it's so high, because any program you have to reduce work stress in the workplace is going to fail if it's not being addressed in all the other places where it happens.
- [05:55]
A
I have a million other questions. I just want to say one clarifying point, and I want to be clear that this is not me correcting you in any way. I know you agree with everything I'm about to say. But of course, during the pandemic, there were a lot of people, including people who listen to this show, who had to go to work and thinking specifically of medical professionals, delivery drivers and other frontline workers. And for them, there was a different kind of stress that the pandemic produced. And Guy, and I see you, if that's.
- [06:24]
B
You say that's absolutely correct. But even those people had kids at home who were studying on Zoom and who had partners whose workplace was in the home. So there was a. And they knew it from all their friends as well. Just psychologically, you know, that barrier got erased, even if it wasn't specific to you, even if you were an essential employee.
- [06:43]
A
Do you think, and I'm not sure if this is showing up in the surveys yet, do you think that the encroachment of. Or even if it's not really encroaching on your work yet, you're just hearing about it all the time. The arrival, the impending arrival, however you want to describe it, of artificial intelligence is amping up people's work stress.
- [07:02]
B
It's amping up stress in general. The thing with artificial intelligence is that it's creating massive uncertainty in the workspace, in the workplace, in all kinds of industries. And so people don't know what's coming. They don't know when it's coming. Yes, it might impact my industry. It might be doing that already. When will it be doing it? And because of the negativity bias we have as people, we evolved to be much more prone to spot threats and danger than we did to spot good things that had less of an evolutionary survival imperative. Then when we have uncertainty, we fill in those blanks with doom and gloom, with the negative. And so that's causing a rise in stress, in anxiety and dread as well.
- [07:44]
A
Yeah, I mean, I Have to say, I like, I feel that acutely myself. It feels to me like we're in some extended version of the agony that I remember feeling in the days before the COVID lockdowns. Like, I knew the shit was about to hit the fan. I just didn't know how bad it was going to be and how long it was going to last. And yeah, I have this extended excruciating pain of feeling like we're in the before times and I have no idea what is coming next or when it's going to hit with full force.
- [08:16]
B
Look, what's so interesting is what you're describing is dread. And as humans, we do very, very poorly with dread. There are many experiments that show that when people are given the option to, let's say, receive a mild electrical shock in an hour or a much heavier one right now, they will opt for the heavier shock right now because that hour of dread is so intolerable for them. We would rather have the bad thing happen than actually sit in dread and wait. So dread's a very difficult feeling. And that's what happened pre pandemic. That is what's happening now in a lot of sectors.
- [08:50]
A
I think we've established quite robustly that people are stressed at work. What are the health ramifications of all of this stress?
- [08:59]
B
Stress is a. First of all, it can lead to burnout. And that has not just health ramifications, but professional ramifications, because your function, you know, drops significantly. But health wise, acute and chronic stress really impairs our health. It impairs our functioning of our immune system. It can predispose us to all kinds of diseases, to cardiovascular disease, all kinds of things like that. The risk rises. Depression, cardiovascular disease, things like that. Our risk rises, especially when the stress is serious and chronic, which a lot of people do report it to be. The risk of burnout is that we reach this tipping point beyond which we literally kind of become a little bit numb, emotionally removed from what we are doing. Everything that used to interest us or even excite us about our work no longer does we become cynical. We don't even know what we're doing it for. We're literally just putting down our head and pushing through, just grinding it out, just getting through the day in a kind of numb, depressed, kind of exhausted way. And burnout is a more severe thing. It takes longer to recover from burnout than just from regular exhaustion. Burnout is a psychological and mental exhaustion that runs quite, quite deep and that can be serious. And people don't realize that they're getting into the red zone with how they're working or with the stress that they're dealing with. And often they don't realize they're about to become burnt out until they.
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A
How can I tell when I've crossed the line from being stressed about work to being truly burnt out?
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B
That happened to me earlier in my career. It's how I start my new book with that story, if I may just indulge you with it. It'll take, you know, it's a quick story, but. I was a psychologist. I opened a private practice. It was my first year. I had just finished my first year. I was living the dream. This is what I had wanted and planned for and studied for all the years. And I get home on a Friday night and I get into the elevator. It was a warm summ night with a neighbor who was a doctor in an er. And the elevator rises and then shudders and comes to a halt. And my neighbor, who deals with emergencies for a living, started banging all the buttons, pressing all the buttons, banging the door and saying, this is my nightmare. This is my nightmare. He was in a total panic. And what came out of my mouth was that I looked at him and said, and this is my nightmare. And yeah, it was funny in my head, but horrific. And he looked at me and I. I'll never forget the way he looked at me. It was daggers. It was like, what the hell? You know? And I felt immediately so bad, like I wasn't panicked. I knew how to calm him down. I knew that this is what I trained to do, essentially help somebody in this situation. And that's what came out of my mouth. And when I got home, I literally was like, what is going on with me? And I realized I was totally burnt out, that I had nothing left. I was just going through the motions. But by the end of the week, it wasn't just compassion fatigue, it was burnout. I didn't like what I was doing. I didn't enjoy what I was doing. I didn't know why I was doing it. I didn't know if I was doing a good job. I just felt tired, as if I had been doing it for 40 years and I'd been doing it for one.
- [12:12]
A
Yeah.
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B
And that's what alerted me that I was burnt out.
- [12:15]
A
So if I am trying to figure out if I'm burnt out, one way to. To know is if I'm being unnecessarily unkind to people.
- [12:24]
B
Were you interested in certain aspects of your job previously? Are you interested in them now? Did you used to get excited when certain things happen? Are you getting excited now? Did you think you were doing something useful, meaningful, important? Do you feel that way now? Do you generally feel like bone tired all the time? Do you wake up in the morning to I have to get through another day? Is the mindset, do you feel kind of numb about the things that are happening? Those are the questions you can ask in any industry that you're in.
- [12:57]
A
I do want to say that I have so much empathy for both of the people in that elevator. I'm. I have serious claustrophobia. So that is my nightmare too. And I can imagine just what a toilet vortex you went into in the moment where you, you know, expressed frustration and then felt so horrible about yourself, given that your job is allegedly to help people and you didn't do that in this moment. And I, yeah, I can just really feel.
- [13:25]
B
I literally started looking for new apartments. I was like, I cannot see this person again.
- [13:31]
A
It's a really helpful story. It's a harsh story, but I'm glad you told it. It's really helpful to help us diagnose whether we've crossed the line over into burnout. But let me just go back to stress for a second because I could imagine some people listening to this, hard charging people, and I would put myself in this category that they might be thinking, well, don't I need some good stress? Like if I don't have stress in my life, doesn't that say I'm not trying hard enough?
- [13:56]
B
Yes, actually, here's the thing about stress. It gets a bad rap. It gets a bad rap because actually acute stress is useful for us. It's the chronic stress that's problematic. But beyond the acute and the chronic bell curve of stress and performance is such that when the stress is too low, we don't perform very well because the stakes are too low. We don't have skin in the game, it doesn't matter as much. So we don't give it our full attention. As the stress starts to rise and so does our focus, so does our effort, so does our attention. And then you reach some point in which there's this Goldilocks zone of the stress is just enough that you're doing your best work, but past the Goldilocks zone, where the stress rises, continues to rise. And now you're past the Goldilocks zone. That's when we start to feel overwhelmed and that's when we start to mismanage the stress. We start to self sabotage because of it in unconscious ways. And our Performance starts to decline precipitously. So yes, we need some stress, we need a measure of it, we need skin in the game, we need a certain level of tension, excitement, stakes, what have you. But beyond a certain point and when that goes on for too long it becomes damaging.
- [15:07]
A
I'm going to come back to the Goldilocks Zone for a second, but you pique my interest when you say we start to self sabotage. What can that look like in the
- [15:15]
B
workplace when you have a lot of stress? Let's say you have an extremely stressful day planned for you and self sabotage means that you are not actually using the emotional intelligence. You have to look at your day and figure out how do I manage this? This is going to be a very difficult two hour meeting. I should take a break after that because then I have a very important meeting with my boss. I don't want to go into that meeting charged and annoyed because I just had two hours with a very antagonistic team. So let me just think about that more clearly. Let me take five minutes to walk around the block and refresh myself because I'm already starting to get worn out. We start to make mistakes more and we don't catch them because we're just trying to power through rather than be wise about how we're managing ourselves and how we're managing ourselves during the day. So it's our emotional intelligence that gets compromised in all kinds of ways, our judgment gets compromised in all kinds of ways. And those things can actually make us completely trip up and set up all kinds of self defeating cycles that then get worse and worse.
- [16:16]
A
I think you have everybody's full attention on the, the problem, the scope of the problem, the ramifications of the problem. So let me get back to the Goldilocks Zone because that I think starts to steer us into the land of potential solutions. What can we do to stay in the Goldilocks Zone of, of enough stress to keep us focused on our toes, engaged, but not so much stress that we're self sabotaging or burning out.
- [16:44]
B
Well, we have to do two things. Both of them are extremely familiar to you. We have to be mindful about how we're doing. We have to self reflect. In other words, we have to be able to take our own temperature and pay attention to how we're doing, to how we're feeling, to how we're functioning. And so we can tell when we're starting to veer off course or when we're starting to decline in terms of our performance. And that requires paying attention to ourselves noting that this task that I did easily last week is pissing me off and annoying me. And I've already made five mistakes. That's something about your stress level is causing that in that moment. So we have to be able to do those things. And then the good news about the Goldilocks zone is the minute we start to exceed doesn't necessarily require a huge correction. It can just be that I really need to take this weekend off because I'm starting to get past my accumulative kind of stress levels. Let me take the weekend off, let me actually sleep in a little bit tomorrow. Let me pass on this thing that I would love to do, but it's just gonna add a little bit too much to monitor yourself and to be able to kind of, you know, where you have the ability to control how much you take on, which not everyone does, but most people do have the ability to control how they recover. Rest, recharge after work and the weekends in the breaks they have during the day. So you have to start monitoring those and paying more attention those. It's this balance. The stress is balanced out by recovery, by resting, by recharging, by revitalizing. If you can't control one, you need to pay more attention to the other.
- [18:22]
A
This is always an interesting juncture for me because on the one hand I find it personally very liberating as a typical hard charging, super ambitious Westerner to hear that you can use some basic self awareness to titrate to take responsibility and rest when you need it. And that in fact rest is part of high performance. It's not a reward you get at the end. It's actually, it's, it's a key part of the process. I love all of that. And I can imagine for some people it's hard to swallow the personal responsibility piece of this, the personal agency piece of this because you know, some listeners and viewers may feel like I'm in, I'm in a toxic workspace. I've got a boss who's completely unreasonable. They expect me to be on call seven days a week, 24 hours a day. They're liable to give me an assignment late Friday that is due first thing Monday. So even if I know I need to rest, I can't rest in this environment. So what do you say to those folks, Guy?
- [19:24]
B
First of all, I say that it's absolutely essential that you rest. You will do a better job if you don't keep just grinding it out. You'll do a better job if you don't just continue to punish yourself. And you can set more limits than you realize. If your boss is giving you an assignment that they want you to do on Friday evening. And I know people who check their phone every five minutes, maybe my boss is trying to get in touch with me. Now, if there's a live issue going on, a project with a deadline, something urgent, that's unusual, that's one thing. But this is normative. Evenings, afternoons, every two minutes, checking emails from work. If you're thinking about work when you're at home, you're at work. If you're thinking about work every five minutes on the weekend, you're working, you're not getting a rest. And they say to me, well, my boss will say to me, why did it take you an hour to answer? And I truly feel befuddled by that question of, like, what if you were swimming? You didn't take your phone with you? What if you were getting a massage? What if you were having sex with your partner? In other words, you are allowed to have a life. And if your boss says, why did it take you an hour? The response is, because I was busy, I wasn't free. And if they say, what were you doing? That's an intrusive, inappropriate question. And you can just give them a wink and say, we can talk about that later if you insist, to imply that it was something very personal that they shouldn't be asking you about. And so there is more space we can take than we allow ourselves to take. To take. We fall into the trap that to be good soldiers, we have to be ready at any given moment. But soldiers are never on watch 247 without a break. They're only on the watchtower for certain shifts because nobody could maintain that level of attention and preparedness and alertness. So we really have to reclaim some of this myth that in my work, I do not have a minute. In my work, I do not get a second. People say, I don't have two minutes during the day. I'm like, do not go to the toilet. There's somebody measuring how long you take in there. That's absolutely false. And there's a lot we can do in those two minutes if we put our mind to it. So we first have to disavow ourselves of this fictional idea of 247 grind. It's absolutely. It's not true. It shouldn't be true. And if you're doing that, then you're falling into a trap set by the culture that's going to actually really cost you.
- [21:57]
A
I largely agree with you. Guy, I'm going to push back just gently, just. Just to channel a skeptical listener, but just. Just to say, I. I do largely agree with you. I think there's. There are these interstitial moments during the day that we really can take advantage of. I think some of this story we tell ourselves that we need to be always on is, in fact, falsifiable. Having said that, I can imagine people listening and saying, well, I work at a place where actually they're hacked into my. My employer is, you know, counting my keystrokes and seeing what I'm doing on my laptop all day long. And so they are essentially monitoring everything I do all day, A and B. I can imagine people listening and say, saying, well, Guy told me how to talk back to my boss about the fact that I'm in the pool on the weekend or whatever. But, yeah, I. I could get fired for that if I did what Guy was recommending.
- [22:53]
B
Right. Actually, I'm not saying talk back to your boss, because talk back to your boss is none of your. I'm not saying say none of your business. Say, like, I'm so sorry. I was busy. I was indisposed.
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A
Right.
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B
You know, you just, you know, like, let the. Let the boss think whatever they want. I'm saying do it politely. Apologize for the terrible thing that you did by not being able to respond for an hour. If you play the game, if you must, by all means. I'm not saying, like, push back and say, that's a stupid request. But. But the other thing is, yes, if they're looking at your keystrokes, et cetera, but if the expectation in that job is that your keyboard should be functional 16 hours a day, then you really need to start thinking about what's the price that you are willing to pay for that job and for that level of scrutiny and for that level of exhaustion and burnout that will happen. What are you doing it all for? People lose the forest here because they're like, well, I'm doing it so I can provide a good life to your family. To my family. And I'm like, family doesn't know you because you're never around. So I'm not sure what good life you're providing your kids if they don't get any time with you. If this is for some kind of fictional point in the future where you retire or whatever, let's hope you get there. The World Health Organization says that around 750,000 employees die a year of overworking. Overworking will literally shorten your life, and it will make you ill. And so not everyone. It's a crapshoot. You can take those chances if you want, but ask yourself, this is a decision you're making about how worthwhile this is for me. And the other thing people do is they say, but I just need to do it for a couple of years. I'm a founder of a company. It's a startup. Every startup has to work that way for two or three years, et cetera. And they say, oh, people sleep on the floor of their factory. And I'm like, you know, founders talk about that. And like, the founders who talk about sleeping on the floor of their factory have chefs and assistants and drivers and masseurs. You do not. It's not a good equivalency.
- [24:55]
A
You asked a really profound question there about why are you doing this? And I'm just thinking, like, about myself in this regard. Why? You know, I spent so much of my career just pushing, pushing, pushing as a. As a brief illustration of the environment in which I came up as a network news correspondent and anchor in 2004. So this is dating me and myself here, but I was covering the Democratic primaries in the. In the US presidential elections in 2004, and on the night that Howard Dean, who was the up and coming Democratic,
- [25:34]
B
yeehawed when he yeehawed.
- [25:36]
A
Yeah, yeah, he screamed. Howard Dean was on his way to getting the Democratic nomination that John Kerry ultimately got, but he had this moment where he screamed on camera and he came off as unhinged and weird. Anyway, my bosses made me stand outside in a freezing rain that night to do a live shot, and I got sick, like deathly ill and had to go to the hospital and. And I had to stay in Iowa, where this happened for a week, because I was that sick. When I got back, one of my bosses said to me, that was not a good look for you. So that, that. That was the environment in which I was raised. This kind of militaristic boomer culture. I'm. I'm not a boomer, but those were my bosses. Part of it is I was pushing myself because that was the environment in which I came up. But there was something underneath that, too, something innate in me, the kid who grew up in the 70s and 80s watching the lifestyles of the rich and famous on TV. And who felt that my parents, you know, who were both, you know, academic physicians. I felt like they didn't make as much money as the other kids in my class. And I felt I really would succumb to the comparing mind there. Yeah. So I'm riffing here and probably saying too much, but it's a deep question you're asking us to consider, like what is at the root of our ambition.
- [27:03]
B
Yes. And I want to separate two different cases. I want to separate out the people who have bosses like you did, who insist that you stand out in the cold and the rain in Iowa in the winter and then get sick and then criticize you for getting sick for the thing they told you to do that made you sick. Or the bosses that are counting keystrokes and wanting to know why you weren't on your laptop at 9 o' clock at night, such a reasonable hour and who cares that your kid had a birthday? I want to separate out those people from the people who do it in a self imposed way, which is many, many people have more degrees of freedom than that, but they self impose it because this is what it takes to win. These are the memes you see on social media, like what it takes to win. You have to hustle, you have to grind it out, you have to work 24 7. You have to do these things, all these truisms that are false because in fact your productivity declines, your creativity declines, your error rate increases. The more fatigued you are, the less good you are. And so actually taking breaks will improve your productivity, will improve the end product, will actually get you something better. And so there's some, you know, those who have the, in cultures that are toxic or have bosses who are difficult, who have expectations that are like, no, you must be on 24 7. It's a always on work culture here, you know, or the kinds of places, you know, that people tell me about where like they come and they say you, you have unlimited vacation days and then you try to take your first vacation and they say, oh, you can take as much vacation as you want. You just have to attend all your meetings while you're away. I mean literally, you know, literally that's that those things happen. And then you're like, I see, you know, so those people really, those people have to do the math about like, is this a place I want to keep working? Or is this a stepping stone that I will take, but I will really limit it to this amount of time if I can't move within this amount of time. And that's when I say to them, like, do the math in which quality of life is a factor. How much in comp is quality of life worth? How much in comp is health and happiness worth? If it's less comp but better quality of Life, it is something you should consider. Don't keep your eye just on total comp and be like, I need to get to a certain arbitrary level because I decided that, look at what it's costing you.
- [29:26]
A
And I guess what I'm pointing at and what I think you were pointing at earlier is not just look at what it's costing you. Why do you want the comp? Like, what is truly driving you?
- [29:37]
B
We tend to compare to the people who have more than us, much more than we do to the people who have less than us. So when you're climbing a ladder, you're always looking at the wrong. Above you and saying, I could have that next if I did such and such and such. Some people look several rungs above them. Some people stand on the ground, look at the top of the ladder and go, that's me. And off you go. To try and get that, people don't ask necessarily, A, the why and B, what matters. In other words, let's say you have it. How does it change your life? Because for lots of people, it doesn't. Because then they're just looking up at the next rung and going, now I have to go for that. And they're not even using the ability they have to do certain things, to do those things. They're just putting those aside, deferring and pushing ahead to be in a rat race to win a race that no one actually asked them to enter. Some of my clients are extremely wealthy. I've literally spoken with people who say to me, like, yeah, but I need to keep grinding it out because I'm not at that next level. And I'm like, what's the next level for you? These are very wealthy people. Like, I can't really afford a private plane yet. You might not be able to afford a private plane, but you can afford a private room in the hospital, where you will be if you continue at this pace.
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A
You know, yes, yes, yes. I'm laughing, but I see myself in. In this insanity.
- [31:10]
B
And I would be there at different levels, right? I mean, whatever. It's not a private plane for most, but whatever. The. That next level is just still there.
- [31:17]
A
Speaking personally as. As a Buddhist, it just speaks to the insatiability that the Buddha very astutely diagnosed in us that it's. It's never enough.
- [31:27]
B
It's very difficult to feel sated.
- [31:30]
A
And I think what you're asking us to do is, is to ask at what cost? And to start to think about the accumulation or quality of life in terms of just to widen the aperture. It's not just about the comp, it's about your overall quality of life.
- [31:48]
B
Yes. One question I ask people, and it might seem like a very simple one, but when we talk about work life balance, they say, oh, you know, my work life balance, I need to work on my work life balance. I'm like, terrific, I understand work. What does life mean when you say the life part of the balance? What is that for you? And people really stumble on that. I mean, they'll always start by saying, well, I'm going to add a couple of hours of yoga. And I'm like, that's terrific life. What does that mean beyond the two hours of yoga? Now, what I think it means is that you get to do homework with your kids or read them a bedtime story, or have a nice evening with your partner, or be out with friends and be able to be present when you're doing it or enjoy binging the show that you want to binge and truly be able to be present and enjoy it. It's being present in the small moments of life. That's the life part of the work life balance to me. And yes, it means experiences, it means holidays, it means vacations, it means other things, but primarily it means that. And that's what people, you know, like, I haven't defined. And so they, you know, they're not aiming for that.
- [33:01]
A
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- [38:05]
B
I have an issue with self criticism in that I don't see the point of it. It is a very damaging practice. And the part that's damaging is not the self reflection, it's not the accountability, it's not the responsibility, it's not the due diligence, it's the criticism part, it's the bullying part, it's the name calling. It's calling ourselves idiot, and I'm such a loser, and how could I do that? And shaming ourselves and belittling ourselves, that adds zero value to anything that you're doing. And it will absolutely do a number on your motivation, on your ability to draw forth, on your abilities and your skills and your talents, because you're actually kicking them and diminishing them. What you need to do is be accountable, strive for success. If things do not go well, by all means, look at why. What you did wrong, what you could have done better, what you can learn from it, but you don't need to wag a finger in your face in order to learn that. You would learn much better, you would gain much more if you Didn't. People don't do the post mortem after failures because they tend to do it so self critically, it's so unpleasant for them, they try and avoid it. But if you weren't doing it in a self critical way, if you were just doing it in a very emotion free, just observational, due diligence way, then you would do much more of it. You would be able to learn from your errors much more, you'd be able to correct them, you're able to do better. And in doing so, in doing so, gain a sense of control, gain a sense of agency, gain a sense of efficacy, and those are going to serve you. The critical part of self criticism is absolutely damaging and unnecessary and there's a
- [39:45]
A
lot of data to support what you're saying. I often think about it as moving from an inner drill sergeant to an inner coach. A coach doesn't fail to point out when you've made mistakes, but she or he just isn't a jerk about it. And that's, that's the crucial part. And again, there's research to show that people who have this kind of supportive but still honest attitude internally are more likely, not less likely to reach their goals. Okay, I do want to talk a little bit about some of the specific strategies that you recommend in your book. Again, mind over grind. One of the things you talk about is a kind of mindset shift, moving from like a threat mindset to a challenge mindset. Can you talk about what you mean by this?
- [40:31]
B
The challenge vs threat mindset theory is one of the prevailing theories in sports psychology. It contends that if you approach a difficult task, if you approach the game day, the big presentation, the track meet with a mindset of I am prepared, I am ready, I'm going to crush this, I'm going out to win. You're really going out to crush it, to do the best you can. That puts you in one specific mindset. If you approach the same task, which you want to win, which you want to do well at, but you feel you're not fully prepared, you don't fully have the skills to do it, so you're hoping to win, but you're really just trying not to lose, which is a nuance because you want to win in both cases, but in one case you feel that you are up to the task and the other you're questioning that that makes that task seem more like a threat than a challenge for which you are equipped. And that difference in mindset has a huge ramification in terms of brain chemistry, in terms of transmitters, how your body responds, how your mind responds, how your brain works, and it contributes in the. When you see it as a challenge to which you're equipped, you will do much, much better than if you worried about losing. Where you can see this most at play to me, and like in sports is in tennis, you can see someone leading and they're not making errors, they're doing everything really well. And then they start to fall behind and suddenly they're double faulting, they're making errors, they're just because. And you can see what happened in the head. It switched from a challenge mindset to a threat mindset, to the oh, I don't want to lose and I don't want to lose. It's a terrible motivator. It's a very different motivator than I want to win.
- [42:14]
A
This is the exact right day for me to hear you say that because I'm contemplating work project and I think I've been mostly motivated by threat and just the tweak of no, this is a big interesting challenge and by the way, it could help a lot of people if I get it right, is a much healthier and creative and generative space out of which to operate than the if I get this wrong, everything's fucked mindset, which is where I was. So thank you to help us do this, to make this switch, you recommend something called the Mind Whisperer exercise. What is that?
- [42:49]
B
A lot of the times when people face a challenge and they start to worry, they start to say to themselves, oh, I can't handle this. This is going to be too stressful, they start thinking about it in a negative way. When you're doing that, this is what psyching yourself out means. It means conveying to your unconscious mind that you are worried about your ability to do something. And then your unconscious mind hears it and will make you more anxious because apparently this is very overwhelming. So psyching yourself out kind of means psyching your unconscious mind out. Now, our unconscious mind is not a self organized, self conscious thing. There's no gremlin in our head that's pulling levers. It's automatic processes. But those automatic processes do are impacted by our thought process and by the messaging we give it when we're saying to ourselves, this is gonna be overwhelming, this is gonna be too stressful. I can't handle it. I just can't handle that. I just can't handle it if it happens again. Those kinds of statements are really gonna be a disservice to us. Instead, we wanna the mind whisperers to whisper to our unconscious mind in a way that it'll believe. You can't say to your unconscious mind, no, I've got this entirely covered. If that's not how you feel. Cause your unconscious mind knows how you feel. It's part of your brain. What you can say to it is, this is going to be stressful, but I can handle it. This is going to be hard, but I've got it covered or I'll get it covered. This is going to be a lot of work, but I'll really prepare well for it. In other words, you're saying things that acknowledge the difficulty because you can't lie to your unconscious mind, but add the nuance of confidence that you'll prepare accordingly, that you'll be able to handle it and that can help pivot you from the threat mindset to a challenge one, and then you can then add to it. This is going to be really difficult. But here's what I do when I'm giving, let's say, a really important talk, like a TED Talk, which you've done. You gave a TED Talk in Vancouver. I've given one too. It's quite stressful that you might have not been stressed because I was there when you gave it and you did a magnificent job. I was quite stressed when I did it. But what I said to myself ahead of time was, this is really stressful. But I know myself, if I can prepare well enough, and I will prepare well enough, I'm really going to be able to do well and I can even enjoy it. Like I'm giving myself the message of, yes, this is going to be difficult, but I know myself, if I'll be prepared, I'll be able to do well and I might even enjoy it. That's the kind of messaging you want to be able to give.
- [45:22]
A
I just think it's so powerful. And again, it's the thing I needed to hear specifically today. This idea that you and we talked about this earlier, the idea that you can be your own coach and it's not going soft, it's coaching yourself to greater heights than you would ever reach if you rely upon the old internal cattle prod punitive model.
- [45:48]
B
I am all for success. I want to be successful. I want to reach heights. I want the people I work with to be able to reach the heights that they set for themselves. I just want them and I want myself to be smart about how you do it.
- [46:02]
A
I don't know if I'm going to get through all my whole list of Questions I want to ask you. But another thing you talk about in the book is how to stop intrusive thoughts after hours. If you're home and you're thinking about work, what do you recommend?
- [46:16]
B
How we typically think about work after hours is one of two ways. Either we're figuring something out. I have that presentation. Maybe I need to start with this slide rather than that slide. You're doing work in your head, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But the tendency we have, especially if the workday was irritating or we were insulted or we were put down or dismissed by a boss, we're aggravated, we're upset about something, is we are going to tend to ruminate about it. We're going to just spin and chew it over and over and over. Don't know anyone who hasn't done the following thing. You had a really difficult day, someone really upset you at work and you spend three hours at home fantasizing about how you are going to tell them off in ways you're never going to do. You're never going to say that to your boss. But you have mic drop moments. And I'm going to say this, and in my fantasy I would do that and then I would. And here's what you're actually doing in those three hours. A you are stressing yourself out totally and you are taking a very upsetting three minute exchange with your boss and reliving it over and over and over. And when we relive emotional experiences, we reactivate the emotional distress we had when we went through them. If somebody thinks about the time they broke their leg last year, it's not going to make their leg hurt. If they're going to think about the time that somebody really, really disappointed and upset them, they're going to feel disappointed and upset. So when you're ruminating and you're just spinning without finding solutions, without getting any problem solving, without any action items, you're just replaying the distress and upset even it's for the moments of satisfaction which in your head you show them, but you're never going to show them. Then you just ruined your whole evening. You were checked out. You flooded your body with cortisol and stress hormones because you're completely worked up. You've extended your workday. It's unpaid overtime that you just volunteered to do and you got absolutely nothing out of it.
- [48:11]
A
Yes, yes, I'm laughing just because I've done it so many times. So in those moments, what's the move?
- [48:18]
B
The move, therefore, is to do Two things. Number one, to convert the thing you're ruminating about into a problem to be sold. So the boss said this insulting thing, do I need to do something about that? Do I need to talk to the boss and address it with them? Or if not, what do I need to change so that doesn't happen anymore? Let me think of what happened in that meeting right before they kind of like did that thing to me. Well, they asked who was in favor of their idea and I wasn't for it. So maybe they were lashing out at me. Maybe I need to learn something. Or maybe I do need to talk to the boss. If so, what do I need to say? What's the messaging? What's the product that I want to get at the end? I want to walk out of that conversation having achieved what. And once I define what that is, what's the best way for me to get there or, you know what, have a really important evening. I want to enjoy it with my family. I'm going to schedule half an hour in the morning to go over this thing and think about it so I can problem solve. Exactly what's the conversation that I have with my boss? And now I can put it aside. Once you problem solve it, once there's an action item, once you're trying to resolve something, you're tying up that loose knot in your brain, and your brain can let it go. And if it can't let it go, what you can also do is you can reframe it so it's less upsetting. What drives rumination is the emotional insult, the upset that you have. So if you can reframe the thing to make it less upsetting, then you'll be less activated to ruminate. You can be like, you know what? I was thinking of looking for a new job in the first place. I'm glad this happened. That was my sign. Tomorrow morning we're going to start doing it. This was a good thing that that happened. Or, yeah, my coworker stabbed me in the back. You know what, that's very good to know that now I don't trust this person because I would have trusted them and that would have been very dangerous. So, okay, they showed their true colors. Now that's useful to me. You find a way to think about it that's less activating and then you turn it into a problem that can be solved. And if none of those things work because there's nothing you can actually do to solve it, and it's still upsetting, but you want to stop ruminating about it. The research shows that two to three minutes of concentrating on a task that actually requires all your bandwidth is enough to let the urge to ruminate past. Because that urge is a little bit like a craving. You just kind of let it pause. So you can do things like my go to is wordle, which unfortunately is good for only one rumination a day. So you need more than just that. But, but. But something that requires a lot of concentration.
- [50:37]
A
This is great. We've talked a lot here about shitty days at work. If you've had one, or even if you just had a busy day at work. How do we recover at the end of the day? So we're not doing unpaid overtime.
- [50:50]
B
A don't ruminate because that's preventing you, that's keeping you at work. B that you can start to recover. At the point that you feel psychologically detached from work. At the point that you stop thinking about work is when your workday actually ends. So you want that to happen as soon as possible. What recovery actually means is that we need to do two things. We have to rest and we have to recharge. What we tend to do though is over index on the resting. You come home, you feel wiped out. I'm wiped out. I can't do anything. I need to slouch on the couch for three hours and look at whatever screens or doom scroll or whatever the thing is because I am tapped out, I can't do anything now. We mistake mental exhaustion for physical exhaustion. You probably sat all day most people, so you're not physically exhausted, you just feel mentally exhausted and you're confusing the two. If you just rest after days like that, you will wake up still tired in the morning because you didn't deplete your batteries further, but you didn't recharge them, recharging them again. This is where the life part of the equation of the work life balance comes in. Is doing something that revitalizes you and that's a personal thing, whatever that thing is for you. But none of those things happen on the couch. If you're athletic, you need to work out. If you're a creator, you need to do something creative. If you're a maker, you need to make an organizer, needs to organize. An extrovert needs to go and socialize or do it on the phone or do something. If you're a musician, 15 minutes of playing an instrument of choice or singing, whatever the thing is, is enough to kind of take you out of work mode and activate other parts of your personality of your identity. That are meaningful to you, that don't get to be expressed during the workday. And so that's the recharging part. Now it's very difficult. That threshold of getting yourself off the couch to do the thing is difficult. But everyone knows that when you're able to do it, you come back with the second wind. You come back having expended energy on something and yet you feel more energized than before you left because the ROI on that is huge. So it's both resting and recharging. You can't recharge every day because you got home late, et cetera. You had duties with kids, what have you work it in during the week, find the 15 minutes here, the half an hour there to do the things that recharge you mentally, emotionally, in terms of your personality and identity, that give oxygen to those aspects of yourself that are starving for it, that are meaningful and important to you, that will help recovery way more than just doom scrolling on the screen.
- [53:22]
A
So again, it just comes back to your main. One of your main thesis theses is, is that we need taking care of ourselves, ensuring our own happiness and joy. This is not a nice to have. It really is part of. Of succeeding.
- [53:35]
B
Yes. And this is also why, why I wrote the book. Because a lot of us, we can't change our boss, we can't change our workplace. You know, we might feel stuck. This is the boss I have, the workplace I have, the job I have. But there's so much more we can do when it comes to how we manage ourselves. And the delta we can create, both in our stress levels and in our quality of life are significant. There's just a lot we can do more in terms of just managing ourselves. That would make a big, big difference and that everyone is empowered to do.
- [54:04]
A
There's a section in your book about how to avoid foot in mouth disease.
- [54:09]
B
What's that about the two aspects to emotional intelligence. There's the emotional intelligence we have and there's the emotional intelligence that we actually use, how we apply it. And there are a lot of people who have it, but when they're stressed out or they're not being mindful, they're not applying it. And therein is the foot in mouth disease. They will go and actually tell their boss what they think because it didn't take five minutes to calm down before that meeting, or they get so stirred up, they go and look for social support from someone, but they're not communicating clearly enough what they need from that person so the person doesn't understand. So they get angry at the coworker and that ends up in a conflict in terms of the support that they wanted. So the foot and mouth disease is this idea of that you have to manage your emotional energies during the day and make sure that you're not getting depleted because those emotional intelligence whoopsies can end up costing you a lot. Because you can really make mistakes, both politically, interpersonally, in terms of how you manage up and down and sideways that can end up costing you.
- [55:14]
A
So in other words, doing all the things we've been talking about today, taking care of yourself so that you have the resources to function effectively can just prevent you from doing stupid shit you later regret.
- [55:26]
B
Well said. Yes,
- [55:29]
A
summer's here. Time for a vacation for many of us. But vacations can be a little stressful because of course, they often cost money. One way to reduce financial anxiety is, I have found, is to have all of your financial information in one place so you can look at it and get a sense of how things are going in one clean, clear interface. Which brings me to one of our sponsors today, Monarch. They have a product that does exactly that. My family and I have used it. Monarch is the personal finance app that tracks everything accounts, investments, savings goals and spending. Get your first year of Monarch Core for half off just $50 with promo code Happier. Most apps only tell you what you've already spent. Monarch helps set goals, map out big purchases, and see if you're actually on track before it's too late to adjust. You can ask Monarch's AI assistant anything about your finances, like how much did I spend on travel last summer? Or can I afford this vacation without touching my savings spot? Things you wouldn't think to look for with AI Insights. Has your spending gone up or is it just inflation? Super helpful. Use code happier@monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with the code Happier Insurance is not one size fits all. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name your Price Tool for years now. With the Name your price tool, you tell them what you want to pay and they'll show you options that fit your budget. So whether you're picking out your first policy or just looking for something that works better for you and your family, they make it easier to see your options. Visit progressive.com find a rate that works for you with the name your price tool Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates Price and Coverage match Limited by state law. You have A concept, as a pair of concepts. Stress minds and speed bumps. What do you mean by that?
- [57:36]
B
This comes from when I ask people, how stressful is your job? You know, like, you know what, what percent of your job is highly stressful? Most people will say to me, 90%, 80%. It's all very stressful all the time. And it's a very problematic framing to have because first of all, it's not true. I mean, it's just truly there are very few jobs in which that's true, that it's 80%, that it's 90%. Do you have the boring meetings, you have the nothing burgers, you have the rote tasks that are not stressful one way or the other. But when you frame your job as stressful all the time, what it does is it puts you into this fight or flight mode all the time because your mind is like, I guess it's stressful all the time. I need to be ready incoming any given moment. So you're actually much more likely to be in fight or flight to be in a highly activated stress mode throughout the whole day to think about your job like that. Afterwards, when you get home, it's such a stressful day tomorrow because you have this one meeting that's difficult. It's not the whole day. So the stress minds is an exercise to help people find where the actual stressful parts of the job are and what percentage of their day or their week or their month those actually comprise. And usually people find it's 10%, it's 20%. In difficult jobs, it's even 50%, but it's not 100%. And when you know where the stress minds are, where the highly intense and stressful moments are, those you can start to problem solve ahead of time. A by using emotional intelligence to kind of raise your coping mechanisms before you go into the nasty meeting, or by working in breaks or doing something, you know, getting support, calling a loved one after a difficult thing so you can get a breather, taking a walk around the block, you can navigate that. You can see what things you might be able to delegate. You know, where you want to minimize something, you know, like, in other words, if it's a meeting you have to have, but you let them initiate the meeting. It's 60 minutes, but you initiate it, make it 45, they won't complain. You know, like, you can do things to help you manage that. Once you know where the stress minds are, Speed bump refers to something else. Those are the kinds of typical mistakes we make in the job when we are on autopilot, because when we have a stressful job, again, we're on autopilot all the time. We just put our head down, go from task to task, meeting to meeting, thing to thing, without actually raising our heads and being more thoughtful, mindful, intentional, and deliberate about how we should be managing ourselves in those moments. And some people have blind spots. Some people, it's a lateness. It's time management. I always use this example, like, how is it you've had a time management problem all your life and you haven't figured it out? Like, you come to work every day, it's the same route. How can you constantly be late? It's a puzzle of time. What goes wrong there that you can't figure it out? And they're blind spots. That's what goes wrong. So the speed bumps are about ways to find and mitigate the blind spots you have, whether it's with time management, whether it's with ignoring politics because you want to be above it. I don't want to be in that childish schoolyard politics of the job. But if childish schoolyard politics are going on around you, you can't hold yourself above the fray. You're going to be swirled into it, and if you don't understand what's going on, you're going to be victimized by it. So all these kind of blind spots we have, there's a list of them and what they do, the damage they can cause. And these are the speed bumps you need to initiate in order to prevent them from tripping you up.
- [60:55]
A
How do we not let the stress of work impact our personal relationships?
- [61:03]
B
So that was a really tricky one. You know, there's research that shows, for example, that when somebody's chronically stressed at work, their partner can start to develop symptoms of burnout. There's research that shows that if you're really stressed at work, your partner will start to lose their sex drive, too, because, by the way, you come home tense and preoccupied and so irritable that you can roast a marshmallow on you, then that's not very appealing to your partner to want to have sex with you. And it creates emotional distance. And without the emotional closeness, intimacy suffers. So there are all these ways that we bring home work stresses, pressures, upsets, distress. And we think we don't. We try, most of us try to not let it spill over and affect our families and affect our loved ones, but we can't be successful because, you know, a. We're not that great at turning it off. You know, we can't switch off. We can't be in the modern day battlefield of a workplace and then come home and suddenly be chill. I mean, some people can, but it's rare. Like, you know, you actually have to be mindful. You have to actually do things to help you de escalate. You have to be aware of how the tension is affecting your family. Like I experienced it myself and I've seen other people that they come home and they're so preoccupied still with work, they're still in the fog of war that their six year old runs up to give, give mommy a hug and mommy tenses because she's just not ready for it yet. And the kids can tell and the partners can tell and they don't mean to tense up like that, but that's where they are. They're sitting there, they're checked out. So we have to be aware of how profoundly that barrier again has been eroded between work and home and how we can bring all those pressures, stresses, distresses home with us and how we actually have to be very mindful and really make efforts to shield our family and ourselves because we're not doing ourselves a favor either from doing that and be much more mindful, intentional, and kind of take the steps that we need to, to try and create a barrier that is less there than it used to be. In the past.
- [63:07]
A
One thing that has been helpful for me is really putting my phone away early and not going back to it.
- [63:13]
B
I think ideally that would be absolutely lovely. It's so hard for people because for a lot of people, their socialite is on their phone too. So they're cutting off the friend who's texting them with a funny thing they wanted to tell or the parent who's trying to reach them or whatever the thing is. So it's great that you do that. I wish more people would do that. It is very, very difficult for people. But you can have dinner, free phone, free dinners. You can have, like I always say to people, if your plan is to sit with your partner and watch a show on tv, treat it like you're actually at the movies and turn your phone off. You're allowed to do it, you're allowed to go to the movies, you're allowed to go to Broadway, you're allowed to go to a show, you're allowed to have your phone off, you're allowed to live. So. But do it in that way.
- [63:55]
A
We talked earlier about how one might deal with one's boss, an unreasonable boss who's angry that we didn't get back to them within 15 minutes on a Saturday. Are there other things to say about how to set boundaries at work so we can take care of ourselves?
- [64:12]
B
Yeah, well, it depends on who you're setting them with. If it's with a coworker, that's one thing. If it's with a boss, it's another. You really need to look at the culture of your workplace and what is customary and what is tolerated. There are, as you said, workplaces, and I'm sure some of your listeners are working in them, in which there is no tolerance to push back against the boss in any way. It will absolutely put you on the next round of cuts or it'll interfere with your chances of a promotion of advancement of those things. So there are, first of all, individual bosses who are that sensitive to any kind of, you know, boundary setting cultures in which that will not be tolerated. You can still do it, but you have to be smart about it. Again, counting keystrokes. That notwithstanding, I have a section in the book which is a homage to you and your podcast. It's called 10% slackier. And that is that when people truly just a homage. And it's when people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week, nobody will notice if they take 10% off. Unless again, they're being monitored in that way. People won't notice. They don't know what they're doing on the weekend. They don't know that took them a little bit longer because they actually took the afternoon to go to the kids game. And so again, if you're working 35 hours a week, that's harder to do. But when you're overworking, when you're over functioning, when you're putting in all that face time, pulling back a bit is something that is much less likely to be noticed. And if you pull back and you use it wisely, you will have the same work product and your productivity will remain the same because you're being wiser about how you're using your mental resources and your cognitive resources.
- [65:51]
A
You'll be hearing from my lawyers about the copyright infringement, but other than that, I love 10% slack here. You also talk in the book about something we can do when we have the Sunday scaries, when Sunday is being hijacked by our fears about going back to work on Monday morning.
- [66:07]
B
Right? And for many of us, you don't even necessarily have to have a toxic work environment or a difficult job weekends. When you use them wisely, you are rested, you're more relaxed, you have more autonomy to choose and do the things you want to do. And then Monday comes and you're back in an expectation of having to function a certain way, to work a certain way. Everything gets much, much harder at that point. Now, here's the interesting part. Why that happens is because again, our unconscious mind, not self aware, but trying to be helpful, sees that the next thing in the queue is work. And its job is to prepare you for challenges. And so it'll be, hey, hey, work's coming. Like winter's coming and Game of Thrones. Work's coming, work's coming. But it'll start that Sunday afternoon and that tension and dread, oh, the work week. Work week will really interfere and it'll put you into a bad mood. It'll really interfere with your ability to relax, to enjoy the rest of your Sunday, et cetera. So, but that's your unconscious mind warning you that that's the next thing in the queue. So one thing you can do is you can layer something before that in the queue. If the first thing you do on Monday morning is something you enjoy and you get up half an hour earlier to do it. Because I'm going to keep working on that writing project I really enjoy. I'm going to have a quick coffee or breakfast with a friend I haven't seen. I'm going to work out because I love doing that before work. It always, you're doing something, oh, I'm wore a new outfit, I bought a new outfit. I'm gonna wear that outfit to work and kind of look forward to people complimenting me when I get to the office, whatever the thing is. But if you schedule something like that on the Monday morning, and that's what you tell your brain you're looking forward to, can't wait for Monday morning. Can't wait to show up the outfit, can't wait to see my friend, can't wait to, you know, to do that workout or whatever the thing would be to work on my project. Then your brain is like, okay, but what comes after that? The next thing in the queue is that thing you're looking forward to. It'll have a little less reason to sound the alarm Sunday afternoon or Sunday evening because you actually schedule something and you're making a big deal out of it in your head. And again, that's the unconscious mind whisperer thing of like, you can set up your unconscious mind to think things by doing something like that and measure. Oh, I'm so excited about this. I'm so excited. And you tell people around you, I'm so excited to see my Friend Monday morning, first thing. And that's what you're. That's apparently the next thing.
- [68:25]
A
So we're good as we wing toward the end of our time together. Is there something you were hoping we would get to that we haven't?
- [68:32]
B
There's one other topic that no one asks me about because it's depressing and difficult. And we don't necessarily need to get to it because it's depressing and difficult.
- [68:41]
A
This show's all about the depressing and the difficult. Tell us.
- [68:44]
B
It's about the moral decline that we suffer in the workplace, the ethical decline. There's a process that happens to us when we're in unethical workplaces or workplaces that are very toxic. And there's certain behaviors that we see all around us. They become normalized and we will find ourselves slowly drifting into doing things that we would never have done otherwise. This is how you end up with Volkswagen executives going to jail for the emissions scandal. This is how you end up with 5,000 employees. I think it was Wells Fargo going, getting fired because they opened, they falsified accounts. Now they did it because the pressures on them to produce was so intense. Like, you open this number of accounts or you're going to get fired. They're like, well, the only way to do that is to kind of open false accounts. So there's often these pressures, but you end up often doing things that you would never do. Like you can have it out with a coworker and say the kinds of things to them that you would never say to a neighbor. Because that's the culture in that workplace of screaming and put downs and this. And a lot of our ethics can really drift without us realizing how much. And, you know, more common in certain industries, more common in certain workplaces based on the culture. But it's amazing about how morality can really get challenged and that we can fall into this because every. And sometimes like, oh, well, if we don't do this, we're selling this product. If we don't exaggerate the ability of the product or overstate these things or like, then we're going to fall behind in sales. We're not going to get the bonuses. Everyone else is doing it. Why am I the schmuck? That's not, you know, like, we find ways to justify it, but it gets to extreme places. That's why people can end up in workplaces where they're, like, selling, you know, whatever rubbish to people who don't need it and they're actually joyful about, ah, there's another sucker just bought things. They didn't start thinking people are suckers, but they got indoctrinated into it by this moral disinhibition that happens, disengagement that happens in which our moral compass really gets untethered. And over time things become more and more and more normalized. Everyone around us is doing it, we begin to do it, we might even benefit from it. And that's a danger in all kinds of workplaces, in the small ways it happens is that that stress that comes at you from above. Your manager putting stress on you, doesn't care if they're calling you at home, doesn't care if they're ruining your weekend. You start to not care if you're ruining your subordinates weekend as well. Whereas before you worked there or that kind of culture, like I would not want to do that to somebody who works for me. But like if it's done to me and that's how it needs to be done and that's how it is and you start to justify and normalize.
- [71:26]
A
So the consequences of not managing your work stress are go beyond your happiness and your health. They can, it can extend all the way to your, your ethical compass. And you can get yourself into real trouble, small or large, if you're not watching that.
- [71:43]
B
And another way that happens, just to point out that I talk about a lot in the book because I don't think people talk about it enough, is, you know, we're always much more drawn to abuse. Abuse is very shiny. Neglect is as damaging a lot of the time. And a lot of managers are very neglectful. They're very neglectful because they're ignoring the politics that are going on in their team, that are disadvantaging people, that are bullying people because they don't want to get into that or they don't have to deal with that. Managers are supposed to protect their airports and protect their emotional lives and enable them to do their jobs well. And a lot of managers fall down on that. They neglect that because they want nurtured. And this is not how to work here. You know how it works here. I don't have to like baby you. And it's not babying, it's taking. It's being responsible as a manager to find out what's going to get a better vibe happening, to make sure one person is not being bullied or harassed by another. But that often happens because of neglect. You have one person who's doing the abuse, but you have a lot of people who are neglecting it. And that's another moral failing.
- [72:42]
A
Guy Winch, your book is called Mind over how to Break free when work hijacks your life. But that's just your latest book. You've also written Emotional First Aid, how to Fix a Broken Heart, and the Squeaky Wheel. You've delivered several phenomenally popular TED Talks and you have a podcast called Dear Therapists. We will put links to all of those in the show notes. But in the meantime, thank you for coming on. It was awesome to talk to you.
- [73:08]
B
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
- [73:11]
A
Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show 10% happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. One last thing I want to say before you go. If you enjoy this show, please do me sl us a solid. Follow the show and leave a rating and a review on whatever platform you watch or listen to us on. It only takes a minute. It's free and it really helps new people find us and spread the good news that the mind is trainable. Thank you. Sincerely, I mean, it's. Thank you.
- [74:01]
B
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial.
- [74:19]
A
Give it a try.
- [74:20]
B
And@mintmobile.com switch upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 month plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes.
- [74:29]
A
Me slow when network is busy.
- [74:30]
B
See terms.