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Guy Winch: First Aid for Your Work Life
00:55:45
How to survive having a job—whether you love it or hate it right now.
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- [00:08]
A
Welcome to Simplify. I'm Caitlin Schiller.
- [00:10]
B
I'm Ben Schuman, Solar.
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A
Hello. Nice to see you, Ben.
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B
You also.
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A
Yeah, we're getting another winter here in Berlin, but it's okay because I feel spring in my heart.
- [00:18]
B
That's right. The energy of spring arrives before the season itself.
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A
That's true. Your dad said that, right? He's so right.
- [00:24]
B
Yep, yep.
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A
Energy's here. So today's guest is somebody whose work I really, really like. His name is Guy Winch. He's kind of a celebrity psychotherapist who has a very cool podcast with Lori Gottlieb called Dear Therapists. But he's also written a ton of books. One of them we talked about a few years ago on Simplify called How to Fix a Broken Heart. He kind of deals in emotional first aid and this book is no exception. It is called Mind Over Grind. When I saw he had this new book out, I wrote him immediately and I was like, guy, this is relevant to our interests. And this is a book about how to deal with your job, even if you kind of hate it, which I think everyone listening can relate to. If not right now, in this moment, then at some point in your life you have worked a job where you got up every day and you were like, no.
- [01:10]
B
Yeah. Or at least a project. I mean, let's be honest.
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A
Or a project. Yeah, there's something there. And he acknowledges that this book is not about changing the system. Because that would be nice. We all agree that would be nice. But sometimes you have to just work within the system for a certain amount of time or because you don't have another option right now. But sometimes you need to just make the best of what you've got. And this book helps you do that by sort of managing your own mindset. It gives tons of really great hands on tools. I will say I super enjoyed reading this book. It didn't feel like work at all. I just had fun with it. It was great. I loved it. He follows five different patients of his. It's not one of those books that gives like 17,000 case studies and you get kind of fatigued from it. It's just five people who go through some growth and then he offers science backed explanations of this stuff. It's also organized by day of the week, Monday through Sunday.
- [02:01]
C
Okay.
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A
And like you might be feeling at those different points, it's really. It's a creative self help book. And you can tell that Guy loves to write, which we talk about in the episode.
- [02:11]
B
Yeah, you do love a Sort of tell all psycho psychology yet behind the curtains?
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A
I do.
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B
So what should people listen up for? Should we just play the tape? You wanna preview something?
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A
I will say listen up for this mindset trick that is a hack that I actually used and have continued to use to great effect for dealing with your own emotional response when a whole bunch of stuff comes down the pipeline and you're not sure how you're going to get it all done.
- [02:39]
B
Yeah.
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A
So especially if you're somebody who's a freelancer, a solopreneur, these, like this information is invaluable. So, yeah, give this episode to your entrepreneur friends. Help them not burn out because it's so easy to do. And yeah, I hope you enjoy it.
- [02:54]
B
All right, let's play the tape with you and Guy Winch.
- [02:59]
A
Hi, Guy. Thank you so much for joining me today.
- [03:02]
C
Hello. Thank you for having me.
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A
Ah, I am so excited to talk with you about your new book today. I could do a long rambling introduction of you, but I actually really love it when people introduce themselves the way that they like to be introduced. I just like to hear what the angle is or how they most like to identify. So, Gaia Winch, how do you like to be introduced?
- [03:22]
C
I'm a psychologist and an author, I guess to keep it simple.
- [03:26]
A
Okay, good. Very nice and simple. You also, then I'm gonna big you up a little bit, but you also host an excellent podcast with Lori Gottlieb called Dear Therapists, which I really enjoy. And you have been on Simplify before. We talked about how to fix a broken heart. And this time you've returned with Mind over grind, which is basically how to survive your job, even when it sucks. And when survival means leaving, that's also a possibility. And this book was very, very you to me. Because to me the hallmark of a Guy Winch book is that it's practical and it's science based and moves people beyond just seeing a problem to doing something about it, which I think is very cool.
- [04:03]
C
Oh, that's very kind of you to say. And yes, I mean, I'm a very practical person myself. So I, you know, I always want, you know, when people say, you need to get from here to there. And I'm like, great, what are the steps? Break it down for me, you know, so I. That's how I tend to write because I like to make it applicable, easy.
- [04:21]
A
Okay, so I have a question that I want to start out with. Do you think that there is a percentage of time that we should just realistically expect to like Our jobs.
- [04:32]
C
You mean a percentage of time of the day or in life?
- [04:36]
A
All right, well, then I'll. I'll reveal my agenda. I. When I have interns or when I had interns in the past, when I worked at a. At a business, I said, you know what? I think that it's good if you like your job 70% of the time. That's amazing because there's at least 30.
- [04:49]
C
Yes. I think most people listening when they hear you say, like it 70% of the time will think, like, in what utopia are you living that you like your job 70% of the time? Because I think most people, and what I hear all the time is I hate my job 100% of the time. A lot of people feel. And a. That's a problematic feeling to have. It's also a problematic framing to have, which we can get into. But for me, there's a lot about the job. I love my job, and I would. Maybe I'm close to 70% of the time, but even for somebody who loves their job, no, they're going to be the tedious moments, they're going to be the annoying moments, they're going to be the frustrating moments. So I think that it's not a, you know, that expectation is like, that's the upper limit, I think, of what even the best jobs can offer. Because every job is going to have its aspects to it that you just have to actually get through to support the other part that you like. This is something I really get into in the books, and I need people to understand the basic assumption here. The basic assumption is that a lot of our experience of stress and of how much we enjoy our job and, you know, what we get from it is very psychological. It depends on how we frame things to ourselves. So when you're saying to yourself, like, when those people say to me, like, oh, I hate my job, or I hate my boss, I hate going to work. I just have to get through. These days, what they're actually doing is they're framing things to themselves in a way that now their nervous system has to be on alert for the bad things happening all the time when they're there. Because if you hate your job, at any moment, something hateful, something difficult, something upsetting can happen. So you're on alert all the time. And it will also predispose you to notice the upsetting things and to be much more sensitive to them than you would if you were more measured and said like, I hate certain aspects, but I'm fine with other aspects. And even there's some things that I like. So when doing that, you're actually setting yourself up to experience your job and as more difficult to, and as more hateful and to experience it as more stressful and you're making the grind worse.
- [07:04]
A
Yeah, and, and you mentioned people when they say they hate their job, the first thing they say is, I find it so stressful. That's what comes out of so many people's mouth. And I guess it makes sense that much of the first part of this book is about stress and how to grapple with it. And I think it says that, that 43% of workers reported high stress. And I think it's funny and tragic that we suffer so much from work when nine times out of 10, the jobs that most of us do are not actually saving lives. The stakes aren't that high with a broad read, but it's not just about what we're actually doing at our jobs. It's also what work does for our sense of safety and self. And you had a really interesting. I think it's just one little paragraph, but it really clicked for me when you mentioned how work really touches every layer of the Maslovian pyramid. This hierarchy of needs. It permeates every part. Can you speak a little bit about that?
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C
Well, because work is an existential thing. Not in terms of life or death directly. I mean, maybe if you're a firefighter or, you know, law enforcement, but in the sense of that's what pays for every, practically every need you have, from basic needs in the master hierarchy of safety, shelter, food, to higher up needs like, you know, clothing, status, you know, and all, all the way up to, you know, connectedness to, to self actualization, to appreciation, to community, to belonging. All of those things are derived from our work. So the threat there is really significant that the stakes of us being successful at work, feeling secure at work, feeling good at work are very, very high. And that's why also people feel so trapped in it sometimes because, well, I need a job. So, you know, if my industry is just terrible at the moment and I don' for moving somewhere else, I just have to stay where I'm suffering and where I hate it and just, you know, slog through and have a hateful, you know, day every day. And, and that again, that framing is problematic. But secondly, it's a reality that is extremely stressful for people because the stakes of not having that job is losing your ability to pay rent, to feed your kids, to like, the stakes are very high.
- [09:21]
A
Absolutely. That does make a lot of sense. And I think a lot about how when I was first, I don't know if it was when I was first starting to work, quote unquote, because I'm 49, I've been in the workforce for an awful long time. But I remember maybe 15, 12 years ago, the whole framing of how a job should be in your life. It was this. Do what you love. And even I had a little acronym, D W Y L. You saw it everywhere on the Internet. I don't know if you remember that. But what do you think about that? Do you think that we should, do you think that we should do what we love? Do you think that's a, that's a, an important aspect of work these days?
- [09:58]
C
Well, the actual, the full phrase was actually worse. And I'll say I'm saying that it was do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life and let's all collectively vomit right now. That's just not true. Again, you can do what you love, but there is no thing that you love that they're not going to be very difficult moments. And again, I'm not just saying because of the outside. I'm self employed and I talk about myself a lot in this book because I've made all the mistakes I've suffered from. I start the book with getting burnt out after one year, you know, like starting off my career with that major mistake, like, you can do what you love. I think sometimes of artists that I've worked with over the years, first of all, you know, and they do what they love. But there's a reason they call it tortured artists, you know, because like that act of creation can be torturous. It's the same with writers that I've spoken to. And you can own a business that you really, really love the business, but it is stressful and you have to deal with the suppliers and you have to, you know, find somebody to open the store when you're not well. And again, there is no doing what you love is a great foundation. And if you're going to spend 40 years working, 50 years working, whatever it is, it would be great if you could do it in a subject matter or in a content or an area or with people that you really like, basically fundamentally appreciate, find meaningful or satisfying, that would be great. Because that idea of job satisfaction, finding meaning in your work, this is something especially that Gen Z has prioritized in a very healthy way. I think they are much more inclined to say, I want work. That makes me, you know, that has meaning to me that makes me feel. And it's not just the work that has to have meaning for them. Like, I need to know that the company is doing things that I find meaningful. They're advocating for the causes that I believe in. That's another source of meaning. Doesn't have to be my actual day to day tasks. But you know, the overall thing, that's very important. And for a lot of people, if you can get there, that's good. But I also want to point out that you don't have to start there to get there. You can find meaning in what you do, even if you start out not finding meaning in what you do, if you know how to look for it, if you know how to again, frame it in a way that emphasizes those aspects that are meaningful.
- [12:25]
A
Talk to me about that. How would you go about helping someone reframe their work so that they can find some satisfaction and meaning in it?
- [12:33]
C
So for example, there's one person I'm thinking about. They worked for, they did back office kind of work. I mean, they were, they were quite senior and quite a large company. But they didn't do the stuff that was actually meaningful. They did administrative, you know, like, like finance kind of stuff for this company. So was their work meaningful? They were doing the finances, you know, they were, they were managing, you know, a lot of people in a certain way. No, but they knew that the company, among the many things the company did, there were a couple of things that were quite meaningful. You know, like I'll just give you an example. You know, just to be, not to be controversial about it, but you know, I've worked with a lot of pharmaceutical companies and you can think what you want about pharmaceutical companies. There's a lot in which, you know, the overpriced medications, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But sometimes it's only those big pharmaceutical companies that will spend the R and D in looking for treatments for rare illnesses. And you know, the only way to get that money back is to overcharge for them, you know, in a certain way. But then when somebody, when I'm, and again, I'm not advocating pro or con, but when I work with somebody in that company and they say, and then when I, you know, when we get emails from patients who, you know, whose lives were saved by this medication. Yes. On the other side, we get emails from patients who, you know, who can't afford it anymore because they lost their insurance and et cetera. And so there's many sides to thing. But you can look for what's meaningful somewhere. You can look for some of the good that you do. And the other thing is that when you invest a lot of effort, when you invest a lot of time in doing something, we tend to care about it more. And that's true of anything. It's a psychological principle. The more effort you invest in a thing, and that thing can be a person, a relationship, a job, a career. The more you invest in it, the more you care about it. So that caring happens naturally. Also given or if you invest in it appropriately, you'll start to care more about it.
- [14:43]
A
Mm, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.
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C
Guy.
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A
I want to, I want to switch to. Or I don't know about switch, but you give a lot of case studies of patients you've actually spoken to and worked with. And one of them named Priya I found really interesting. And she, she was brought in by her parents after she'd quit 11 different jobs in pretty rapid succession. And this kind of behavior can be interpreted as apathy or non commitment. But when you, when you dug around a little bit, you found that that wasn't actually the whole story of what was happening. It was something else, a coping mechanism that kept on firing off without her being fully aware of it. Can you talk a little bit about what was really happening with Priya behind the scenes here? With stress? I think it's really useful.
- [15:30]
C
The issue for Priya, and it's an issue for many people, is that she. And it was an issue for me and I spoke about that too. You know, that burnout in year one is that she was not enough aware of when she was getting too stressed out at her job. She was aware that she was getting stressed out. But we, you know, there's a point at which we can't take it anymore, that we are not managing the stress at all. Like we can be very stressed and manage it, then we can mismanage it, then we can kind of hang on. And then at some point we, you know, we, you know, we exceed our capacity. And at that point, one of two things will happen. We'll either act out, which is Priya's want. And her act out was, okay, I can't take it, I'm quitting. Or we'll just shut down. And then we'll just kind of either be totally numb or we'll just kind of go through the motions but be completely checked out. That was my form of burnout. You know, I kept going, but I was completely checked out and numb. And why that's important is because our Ability to manage, manage stress is based on a bell curve. And you know, when there's too little of it, we don't do that well in terms of our performance because the stakes aren't very high. There's nothing to really keep us focused, keep us energized. And as things get more stressful, we start to pay more attention, we're more focused. And then there's this Goldilocks zone of stress management where the stress is just enough to keep us fully attended and bring all our capacities to the fore. And that's when we do our best work. Beyond that, when stress goes up and up and accumulates beyond that is when we start to mismanage stress, when we start to self sabotage and when we start to unconsciously make the stress worse. It's not just that we don't handle the stress. There is, we make the stress worse. We add stress to our load unconsciously, inadvertently, in ways that we don't realize. And that's what Priya would do. She would start. And I've seen this with many, many people. You can see them start to like, start to fall behind and hide the fact that they're falling behind. And at some point it will catch up. And I've worked with many people, sometime high up, you know, with significant jobs where they, where they just start mismanaging it so badly that at some point they know they're just gonna have to quit because if they don't, they're about to get fired because it'll catch up with them. And she just quit, you know, 11 times. And each time it's because she didn't catch that the stress was hitting this critical mark and that she needed to do something to lower it. When, when we look at the bell curve, you don't have to end the stress, you just have to unwind enough of it to bring it back up the curve toward the Goldilocks zone or toward the management zone. So, so sometimes even a small correction can give you enough oxygen to keep going rather than really sabotaging and making it unmanageable.
- [18:19]
A
That feels, that feels hopeful because I think when people who, who need, I mean, we all need that critical point of stress in order to do great work, but I think some of us need it more. I have a lot of friends who have, who are very high performers who have adhd and they need a certain amount of it to do, to do anything, to get really excited about it. And to execut. It can sound like a tall order when we just say, okay, you need to calm your stress down. And a lot of times all you hear is, take a deep breath. And it's like, yeah, that's one step we can do. But it doesn't really help all that much. How do you. How do you tell people first to notice when they might be reaching that critical point so they don't get fired up all the way to a point where it's no longer useful? Stress.
- [19:03]
C
So. So part of what I try to do in the book is I try to give a lot of different options. Why I cover those five people is each of them represents a different kind of person in a different kind of situation. Because there are different ways that manifests. For Priya, it manifested by her starting to have feelings of being checked out, starting to fantasize about leaving the job before she actually got to pulling the trigger and leaving. For other people, it can be that they start to feel really checked out, numb. For some people, it can really be that they start to fall behind in certain things and not just at work. Part of the whole premise of the book is that all of this manifests outside of work and does damage in your personal life as much as in your work life. And so there's actually an exercise there that I have people that people can complete that will help them catch what I call the canaries in the gold mine. Those first signs that things are starting to slip in a bad way because you can see them often outside of work even more quickly than you can at work. But certainly if you're waking up every morning with that feeling of dread of, oh, God, I have to get through the day, you know when you're saying to yourself, I just hate my job, I can't wait to get out of here, when those are the kinds of thoughts that you're having, then that's when you really want to pay attention. And I agree with you about the hopeful part. And this is a message that. That always surprises people. But it makes perfect sense once I explain it, is that it's not. You don't have to undo that much. It's like think of it as a cup that's full and that's spilling over with every drop. You don't have to lower the levels that much to be able to contain a few new drops. Sometimes just taking one thing off your plate in a real task way or again. And this is the point of the book, doing something psychologically so that your experience of the same amount of demands and pressures from work is less stressful because you're framing it in a Less stressful way because you are recovering more effectively after work. There are many ways that you could increase your tolerance for those stresses and pressures without changing those stresses and pressures directly. One way of doing it is cognitive reappraisal. But you can do it in many, many different ways. I mean, bas, that's kind of what the whole book is about. How to the mind over grind is how to lower the grind psychologically. And I say in the book, this is not about how to fight the system. This is about how to manage your mind in a way that will give you much better capacities. So reframing cognitive reappraisal is a cognitive task where you sit and you try and think about the stressful situation in ways that make it seem less stress. Again, as I said, is very psychological. It's based on our perceptions of how difficult a certain task is or how demanding our tasks are in aggregate. So if you, you know, for example, you feel overwhelmed because now you know things were hard enough and now you just got saddled with another big thing and you know, like, how am I going to manage that? I just, I have too much on my plate already. Then actually, you know, for example, sitting down and reminding yourself and about, well, okay, but here are all the stuff I have to do. This one I can pretty much do with my eyes closed. This one I've done a thousand times. This one I know how to do very easily. These are not going to be difficult tasks. These are just going to be like, just get, you know, check the box on those. Because I can do them well and I can do them easily. Really, it's these two or three things that are either new or demanding, complicated, uncertain. So let me focus my concerns on how to make those more certain, easier to deliver, how to problem solve of the difficult parts, how to make clearer some of the unknowns so that they are not these vague things that I don't know how I'm going to get my arms around, but get a sense of how I can get my arms around. And then even doing those will seem less stressful. Because the other part that I talk about is that when you are very fatigued from stress, when you are not managing it well, what that means is that you have to devote a significant amount of your mental bandwidth just to managing your emotions behind the scenes so that you don't suddenly start feel panicked and overwhelmed. And we have a finite amount of mental bandwidth. So that means that throughout the day you'll start to be less efficient, less effective, less productive, less creative. You won't Be as good. And you're in essence wasting your time because you are managing, you are spending so many resources managing the pressures, the stresses, the aggravations, the irrit patients that, you know, you, you are just not as efficient or as productive. And it takes you longer to get a work product that's not as good. If you were managing those things better, your work product would improve you. The speed in which you could produce it would improve and you would be able to get your arms around things easier.
- [24:10]
A
Yeah. And it's, it's actually amazing how little this actually takes you. You sort of took us through it there. But I used this myself earlier this week. I just started a big new freelance client. I'm going into an office for the first time in a while, twice a week. And then I had a rush job come in randomly from off to the side from a client I hadn't heard from in a while. And I said yes. And then I thought, how am I ever gonna do this? And I thought about your book that I had been reading, and I was like, okay, Caitlin, sit down. Think about what this actually means. And I realized the best thing I could possibly do was just tell myself, you know what, this is gonna be really annoying. But you can absolutely do this. This is a question of discomfort and short term annoyance. And it's not an I can'. It's a yeah, this might not be the best day ever, but I can
- [24:55]
C
get through it, you know, and here's why that's really effective. I'm so glad you did that. Me too.
- [25:02]
A
Thank you.
- [25:02]
C
No, but here's what happens psychologically behind the scenes when you do that. When you say to yourself, and this is, you know, and I, and I do talk about this in the book that you say to yourself, like, this is going to be stressful, this is going to be annoying. This is going to require a couple of weeks of, like, not a lot of free time. And maybe I need to give up weekends. Like, be. You have to be realistic about these things. But when you say to yourself, this is going to be difficult, but I can do it, as opposed to, this is so difficult, how am I going to do it? You know, again, they're very different, you know, statements. One is a question, the statement of like, I can't manage, and the other is a reassurance of I can. The minute you say to yourself, this is going to be difficult, but I can do it, you're actually, you know, you're mobilizing your defense mechanisms. You are preparing yourself, you're like, you know, gearing up for. Okay, like, you know, like. And when you're going into a confrontation and you know it, you kind of raise your defense mechanisms. You'll kind of get ready to have a conflict with, with someone. I'm not a physical one. Like an argument even, you know, certainly if it is a physical one, it's the same thing. And then you are much less sensitive in those moments because you're geared up, you're defended already, you're ready for the incoming kind of thing. So the minute you're prepped for this is going to be a difficult period and you're prepared for that. You experience it much less, as less difficult and as much less stressful because you're prepared for it. When you are messaging yourself, I don't know how I'm going to manage this. You are unprepared. You're not actually activating your coping mechanisms. You're more likely to activate your unconscious coping mechanisms which will all be about avoidance and distraction from the moment as opposed to engaging in the moment. Moment.
- [26:47]
A
Yes. And that I, I really enjoyed reading that part. Exactly.
- [26:51]
C
Yes. And by the way, I have to say this is why I like writing psychology self help books. Because it gets, it gives me the opportunity to explain some basic psychology to people because I, and I always find that people like, when they understand what's going on in their heads, they go like, oh, that's useful because this is what's happening in my head.
- [27:09]
A
Yeah. And it makes it not so scary. Just like telling yourself, I've got this, it's going to be annoying, but I can do it it right. Okay guy. For me, the most significant, most resonant, maybe part of the book, and perhaps because I've gone through a pretty significant burnout myself, is the attention that you give to the epidemic of overwork and recovering from work and recovering from burnout, really. Which is where I want to spend the rest of our time. First, there's overwork. And in my friend group I've got a lot of entrepreneurs, people who have a special skill to offer and are basically just a business of one. And over the last year or two, I've witnessed a few of them really crash out because they just can't stop saying yes. First, what's going on here? And second, how can I help my, my overworking friends before they get to that point is are there things that we can do, little interventions that we can have with the people we love to, to help them, not overwork so much.
- [28:07]
C
So let's start with, with, excuse me, let's, let's start with what's actually happening. Overworking. It's is very common today. It's become expected in certain industries. It's norm, it's normalized in certain industries and it's romanticized in many industries. You know, you keep hearing founders talk about, you know, I spent a year sleeping on the floor of the factory, excuse me, and you know, specifically the founder in question that said that I doubt that they actually slept on the floor and I doubt that they did it without having their cooks, their assistants, their massage therapists and their drivers and their publicists around them, making that difficult year on the floor of the factory a little less difficult in ways that most people cannot. Overworking is dangerous. You know, the 40 hour workweek is what's standard. If you're working hard, it's around 50, around 55 to 60 hours a week is where we start to define it as excessive overworking. And the World Health Organization estimate that, that 750,000 people a year die from overworking. In China. We keep getting headlines out of China about this 30 year old and 40 year old executives who died from overworking. In Japan, it has a name, Karoshi deaths. Those are deaths from overworking. Overworking is very, very dangerous. And people think they're like, well what? I'm just sitting all day. But it's not the overworking as much. It's the fact that you're in a stress mode all the time. Because when we are working, our body's activated. We are in kind of an activated fight or flight mode. We were not built, we did not evolve to be in that mode. 12, 14 hours a day, day after day after day after day. We're nomadic hunter gatherers. The hunt lasted a certain amount of time, even in the past few thousand years, since the hunter gathering, let's say like 6 to 10,000 years, whatever it is, since agriculture came in 10, 12,000 years ago. Then even then, even tribal warf was limited. Even when there was a hundred years war, it wasn't all war all the time, you know, so people are not, our bodies are not used to working in that way. And there will be wear and tear, but mostly there is massive neglect that comes with overwork. And the other thing about overwork is it's very addictive because if you're ambitious, if you're driven, if you're trying to be successful, you can get a lot done if you work 15 hours a day, clearly more than you can if you work 9. Now, I don't think you can get like 50% more done if you work, you know, you know, if you work 10 hours a day versus 15, you're not making, you're not getting 50% more done because the quality of your work, the ability to produce is going to drop dramatically. But still it feels like you're getting a lot done. And so then once you do that for a bit and everyone starts by saying, I'll just do it for a week or two to, you know, I just need to do it until, you know, I get the promotion or until earnings come in or until we get that round of funding, whatever the thing is, you know, until I land that client. But then you're used to it, then doing this feels like slacking off feels like, oh, I'm, I'm wasting time here. I could be achieving more more quickly. Excuse me. So, so it's, it's actually quite addictive. And, and therein lies the problem with overworking. You get into the, the trap of it and it's very difficult to break free because then you'll really feel like, now I'm not doing as much as I can, it's going to take me years longer. You exaggerate that in your head when in fact, no, you're going to burn out and then you're going to really stop functioning or get really ill and then everything's going to come to a shuddering halt or you're going to get so burnt out that nothing you do is going to matter and it's not going to feel like you're actually, then anything you're doing. The successes are actually enjoyable or worthwhile. You won't be able to celebrate them because you're so burnt out now quickly in terms of what you can do when that's your friend. I mean, I know this is very self serving but my most obvious answer is like, maybe you give them this book because this book will help them realize it, but the other thing you can do. And I have an identical twin who's also a psychologist and he's a great barometer for me. He will say to me even today, because, you know, look, it's a slippery slope. I, I avoid burnout now, but I flirt with it. I get close, you know, and he will say to me, you've been sounding really tense lately. Yeah, you, you don't sound joyful about what you're doing. Have you noticed you sound irritable a lot of the time. You're focused a lot on everything that you have to do. All I'm hearing from you is work, work, work, what's happening in other parts of your life. He will, he will, he will read that to me. Now it's easier with me because he only has to say one thing and I know what it is and I know where it's landing and I look at myself and I go, oh, oops, I need to make a correction. I mean, all the consequence of that is very obvious. But with other people, you might need to say, I'm concerned about you. I'm not hearing from you much, you're not really responding much. And I'm not just talking about our friendship. I'm worried about that this is what's happening in your life right now and that you're losing touch with what the life part of work life balance actually means. Yeah, it does take bravery and it can, you know, in some people it can, I don't know, threaten the friendship. But some people don't take kindly to it. But if you care about them, you want to try it once again. I wouldn't hound them unless you're really close, but maybe hearing it might do something.
- [33:46]
A
Yeah, yeah. And Guy, you've mentioned a few times now that you share your experience with overwork and burnout here and I'd love for you to speak about that a little bit and what you did to get yourself out of burnout. Because I think that we talk about burnout a lot in the culture these days. But what a lot of people don't explain is that if you don't actively recover and if you're not really being mindful about that, it can take two to five years to fully recover from. So what was your experience like and how did you find your way out?
- [34:19]
C
So the recovery is both a long term gambit and a daily gambit. It because again, I just want to frame it in terms of our stress response. When you are highly activated and you are in fight or flight and you're spending all these hours at work or at home working, regardless, and then you're sitting and stewing and brooding and ruminating about work after you finish work and basically all you're thinking about is work, work, work, work, then your nervous system is in activation all the time. That's when stress becomes chronic and that's what leads to burnout. And so recovery, when you have a demanding situation, when the job is stressful, it is necessary physiologically and psychologically to use some of the after hours to recover, which means there have to be after hours. You can't just go from morning till night to Bed. First of all, good luck falling asleep. But even if you do because you're so tired, you know, where is life happening? And recovery involves two things, some kind of rest and relaxation to again bring that stress response down, to give your systems a break. Our body responds very differently in stress. It operates very differently in a state of stress when our sympathetic nervous system is activated than it does when our parasympathetic nervous system kicks in to calm. So we need to have that calm time. So A, you need some rest and relaxation, but B, you need to recharge. You need to do the things that actually revitalize you, that make you feel like you again. And those are not work things. Those are the personal things that are meaningful to you, that express aspects of your personality and of your identity that are not related to work or the ones that are not expressed at work. And so for me at the time when I went through burnout, I took a vacation, I got hit by a car. There was a whole thing that happened, it was terrific. And then I took another vacation because the one after I was hit by the car turned out not to be that fun. And I rediscovered really my passion for writing and not writing about psychology, writing about other things, creative writing. And I spent the whole vacation writing. And people say, well, that sounds like a work vacation. I'm like, no, it was a vacation from me. I inhabited a different identity in that vacation. I wasn't a psychologist, I didn't have a practice, I wasn't teaching, I wasn't working in hospitals. I was a creative writer in the cafes of Europe, which is what it was for a week. And that felt like such a recharging experience. And it also taught me that I, this can't just be something I do on holiday. I need to integrate an aspect of it into my daily life. At first that was 15 minutes a day. But you can't get that much writing done in 15 minutes a day. It didn't matter. I had to touch that for 15 minutes a day. I got up earlier, I sacrificed some sleep for it, and then I started cutting some things out, work wise. Because I realized that when I did those 15 minutes, it made me happy, it made me feel free, liberated in a way. Again, I'm self employed. Who am I liberating myself from? Well, from the obligations and the tasks that I impose on myself. You know, it made me feel like life is a more well rounded thing. It's not just about this devotion to work. I always say to people, when people often look at social media and See their friends living, quote, unquote, their best lives. And when you see somebody living their best life online, never are they at work. They're never living their best life at work. They're never there, like smiling because they just closed the deal. It's that they closed the deal and then they went and did something that was living their best life because they closed the deal. And we have to keep sight of that life part. You know, the work, life, balance. Life is in your head more than it's in, you know, it's not about the hour of yoga you add a week. It's about how you define what life is about for you and how much you prioritize that in your day to day. That's how you recover from burnout. Yes, it takes time and you have to lower the stresses, but it's like you have to make room for life.
- [38:43]
A
Yeah, yeah. This I feel ties really well into. When you talk about vacation in the book and how to really get the best out of your vacation, you mentioned that we need to slip into alternative identities that we don't get to inhabit every day to really reach, reap all the reward of a vacation, which I found fascinating and also so obvious. My, my personal way out of burnout was I started doing the artist's way and I discovered that I actually love to paint. I'd never painted in my life.
- [39:13]
C
Amazing.
- [39:15]
A
And I paint for an entire summer. I painted like, I don't know, 25, 30 paintings. Ended up having a little show. But if I had never done that and tapped into this other identity that exercised a completely different idea of who I was outside of work, I don't know if how I would have gotten better. Yeah, sorry, that's, that's really the end of that story. But I was going to say a thing that I've been meaning to do is take like a little three or four day painting vacation from my own work. And just saying, no, you're not going to do any freelance work at all. You're just going to be able to paint every day just for a little while.
- [39:50]
C
And by the way, I don't know if you need to take a vacation just to do that. In other words, if you set up some corner where you live, where you know, you, you have the easel, you have whatever the medium is there, the canvas, whatever the thing the paint's set up, then it's harder to ignore. And I always say that to painters, to writers, to makers, like if you have to start taking all the stuff out in order to do it that's a lot of friction. But for many people, it's like, if you're a writer, have the word document open up to that page. Because even opening the laptop and opening the document create less friction. Have it around you to remind you you don't have the paintbrushes in a closed container that's transparent, but that you can see. Because again, seeing that reminds you of who you are, of that aspect of yourself. If you're a maker, if you're out in your garage doing stuff, tinkering on old cars, have some kind of wrench or something in the house that can remind you. I'm not saying leave a trail of wrenches to the garage, let's go. But do things that keep it present in your life. Because it's true that 10 to 15 minutes a day, and that might be a lot for some people. What about my kids and I have to put them to bed. But 15 minutes a day, not every day, three times a week, find that 15 minutes because you don't have to do it full time. I mean, doing it for a summer is amazing. Doing it for three days as a kind of personal retreat is great. But really, even like, I spoke to a musician once and said, like, I don't have time to be in a, you know, to, to be in any kind of concert situation. I said, but you can play the violin for 15 minutes. You can practice 15 minutes. He said, that won't keep me sharp. I'm like, it's not about keeping you sharp. It's about making you feel like a musician. And if you play, you will feel like a musician. And so it doesn't take a lot to give oxygen to those aspects of ourselves and we, and we. And it's an easy. It's an easy route because, you know, if your life, if you feel like I am living, you can't get burnt out. To get burnt out, you have to diminish the living part.
- [42:07]
A
That makes so much sense. The last thing that I want to ask you about, because I know that we're running up to the end of time, here is just a distinction of three things. I think it's three words that you mentioned earlier. There's rest, relaxation, and recharging. What is the difference between these things?
- [42:25]
C
We tend to over index on rest because when we get home after a very demanding day or when we end work after a demanding day, we are again, our unconscious mind. I blame our unconscious mind for a lot, but our unconscious mind doesn't distinguish well between physical fatigue and mental fatigue. So you might have been sitting all day for 10 hours and you get back and you just slouch on your couch. I am wiped out. All I can do right now is veg out for a few hours and, like, binge the show or doom scroll or. Or do whatever, because I have no energy. Well, you don't have mental energy, but you do have physical energy because you sat all day. So that's actually not true. Now, it's gonna be very difficult to convince yourself to get up from the couch, but to do something. Recharging. If you're athletic, that means working out. If you're a painter, it means painting. A writer, it means writing. An organizer, it means organizing. If you're an extrovert, it means either going out and go chat with a neighbor on the porch for 30 minutes, like doing something that is recharging for you. Whatever that personal thing is, it does not happen on the couch. And so there's a threshold. You have to convince yourself that, no, you're not. You're wiped out mentally, not physically. You do have the energy, and everyone will notice when you force yourself to do it. Even if it's like getting up and working out for an hour, when you come back, having previously felt wiped out, you will come back feeling energized, like you have a second wind and feeling much more energy than you did before you left and expended all this energy, energy on that recharging activity. The ROI is incredible. And you know it when you do it. You know, it's just very difficult to convince yourself, no, get up, get up. You should do it. You can't maybe do that every day, but you should do it maybe several times a week. Because the research is that if you just rest, you will wake up the next day feeling tired because you didn't deplete your batteries, but you didn't recharge them.
- [44:17]
A
Yes. Okay. Okay. That makes so much sense. All right, guy, I'm going to let you go now because even though I would love to talk with you for another half an hour, I know you have a heart out, so I'm going to respect your time. And I just want to say thank you. Thank you for this book. Thank you for the talk. Yeah, Just thank you so much for taking the time today.
- [44:34]
C
It's been my pleasure. Thank you very much.
- [44:42]
B
Welcome to the bookend, where we end with books.
- [44:44]
A
Books that had such, like, carnival barker energy. I love it. No, don't keep it. It's fun.
- [44:50]
B
Yeah, that's fine. Let's go. It's fun.
- [44:51]
A
It was great. Yeah.
- [44:52]
B
We don't redo the welcome to the bookends. We just ride with them.
- [44:55]
A
Yes. Yeah, it sets. It sets the tone.
- [44:58]
B
So, okay. Burnout.
- [45:00]
A
Yes.
- [45:00]
B
Stress changing. Reframing. Cognitive tricks. Resetting, Recharging. Doing your thing.
- [45:09]
A
Yeah.
- [45:10]
B
These are just like the first words from my notes from each line. But I could go on. But what do you want to talk about?
- [45:14]
A
You just want to do vocab jazz. Come on, let's scout it out. Ben, what do I want to talk about? I think that this sentence really stuck with me. He said the problem with such long working hours is not that you're working, it's that you're in stress mode all the time. And I thought that it was really interesting.
- [45:32]
B
Shout out996.
- [45:34]
A
Yes,996. I just hop in about this. I hope that no one listening to this is working in that working culture, but they probably are. And realistically, you were a champion. You were a hero. Good luck.
- [45:44]
B
For anyone who doesn't know, it means 9am to 9pm Six days a week.
- [45:48]
A
Wasn't AI supposed to give us more time?
- [45:51]
B
We made it to this. We made it back there. All these things just come back. I'm so glad. I can't wait to work at a factory for 18 hours.
- [45:57]
A
What a horror show. This guy Winch book is really timely, but I love that he distinguishes between rest and restoration because they're so different and if you're not doing both, you can't really feel good. And I mean, I talked about my experience with that a bit in the episode and Ben, I don't know, what do you do to rest? Do you rest?
- [46:18]
B
Well, you know how he said, you don't just rest, you have to recharge by doing your thing? Yeah, and I do rest. I rest by doing my thing. And he said, you know, if you like moving, then you got to move. If you like writing, you got to write. If you like, if you're extroverted, got to hang out with people. You got to hang out with people. I mean, I do all that stuff and sometimes you just got to go be alone for a while. But I. But that it's. It is really true because just I remember when I left a full time job after many years and then I just kind of tried to reduce how much I was doing every day. It wasn't the same as when I started doing like creative collaborations with people. Then I started to feel energy again or like energy. That old buzz or something, you know, because it's not Just the rest. I mean, the rest is important too, but I definitely felt it physically, like I'm not the person that needs to sit on the couch all day. It's not how I recharge. In fact, I find it really uncomfortable. So that was something I also wrote down. I mean, what about you? How do you recharge?
- [47:17]
A
How do I recharge? Well, I have historically, really, really liked going to yoga. It's not something I'm doing right now because I've got a little back injury. I'm working through. Shout out to being in your 40s.
- [47:30]
B
And weightlifting.
- [47:31]
A
And weightlifting, yeah. Then again, I've been dealing with this since I was like 20, so whatever. But that. I also, I do need couches time, like once a. Once or twice a week, if I'm realistic. I need, like, I really just need to be quiet and be by myself there. But yoga helps me a lot. Movement really helps me a lot. I go for a lot of walks. I get a lot of quality thinking done there. I've been. I've been raw, dogging my walks lately.
- [47:53]
C
Wow.
- [47:54]
A
You know, just staring into space, listening to nothing. Very difficult for me to do, but I feel really good.
- [47:59]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [48:01]
A
So, yeah, the AirPod.
- [48:02]
B
We were all fine before the AirPods.
- [48:04]
A
Yeah.
- [48:04]
B
I mean, there's a lot about. Yeah, everybody recharges differently. And also, I really like when he said, you know, you do something not necessarily to get better at it or to, like, be the world champion at it. You don't have to practice violin to go perform violin, but because it'll make you feel like a musician again. And this idea that burnout requires diminishing of life. Right. Like, requires. There's a difference between being tired and being wrecked and being, you know, and like, proper burnout. All these things are. Should be avoidable or whatever. Sometimes we have to go through tough times. That's okay. But there is that kind of
- [48:38]
C
almost
- [48:39]
B
like degradation or like erosion of self that happens in burnout when you just sort of start to have that dead. That dead look.
- [48:46]
A
Yeah. And I liked what he said about you need to essentially, like, pull on an alternative identity that feels like you in order to recharge. It makes me think about all these, like, yoga retreats or you're seeing, like, camps for adults. You know, like, things like this exist because we really need to get into different head spaces that don't involve our work.
- [49:08]
B
Yeah, yeah. And playing that role and being like, I am somebody that can enjoy a chill night with my friends, or like, I am somebody that goes For a walk in the morning or something. That's fine. You know what I mean? And it's different than being like, yeah, I'm somebody. Somebody that.
- [49:24]
C
That.
- [49:25]
B
That suffers under the weight of other people's decisions for my life.
- [49:28]
A
Yeah.
- [49:29]
B
I definitely started thinking differently about, like, how do I address it myself? What do I have control over?
- [49:37]
C
Right.
- [49:37]
B
What can I actually manage? My headspace is sometimes difficult, but I can definitely work on reframing things and how I talk to myself. Yeah, right. And reframing it.
- [49:46]
A
Exactly.
- [49:47]
B
This is a thing, but I can still do it.
- [49:51]
A
Like that thing that I. That's exactly what I loved in the book. That. Just saying to myself, you know what? This is going to be annoying for like 48 hours. And then you're gonna be fine. You've done these things before. Sit down, make a list, go. It took the pressure off. It made it so much more manageable and I was fine. Was it a pleasant week? No. But did I suffer? Honestly, not that much. I just did it and it was fine.
- [50:13]
C
Yeah.
- [50:14]
B
Yep. Should we do books?
- [50:16]
A
Yeah, we should do books. Let's do books.
- [50:17]
B
You wanna go first or should I go first?
- [50:18]
A
I'll go first. Thank you very much. I am bringing to the table an OG of self help.
- [50:25]
B
Okay.
- [50:26]
A
Can you guess who it is?
- [50:30]
B
Cal Newport.
- [50:32]
A
No. Older, more antique. It's Dale Carnegie.
- [50:38]
B
Oh, I was thinking about that.
- [50:39]
A
You were? Okay, well, it's not the classic how to win friends and influence people. Instead, it's how to enjoy your life and your job.
- [50:47]
B
Oh, I didn't know that exactly.
- [50:49]
A
I did not know it existed either. And when I ran across it, I was like, what, this guy has another book? And it's so relevant to what I've been thinking about lately. And a lot of it, like, I don't know about Dale Carnegie. Sometimes I think he's like the original grifter.
- [51:02]
C
Yeah.
- [51:03]
A
But there is a thing about his grift that I do respect. And it's everything usually comes down to pay attention to people. Notice what they need, notice what they like, notice what their rhythms are. And yes, this can be manipulative, but it's also a really great invitation to clock in and notice the people around you. So that's not that grifty.
- [51:24]
B
No.
- [51:25]
A
But I read this book and I was very interested in the fact that so much of it lined up with what Winch has to say. And he pays particular attention to how, if you're exhausted after a day of work, it's not physical. Generally it's emotional labor and being Emotionally on the clock makes us so tired.
- [51:45]
B
Yeah.
- [51:46]
A
And there's a lot of discussion on there, but it's good. You could. You could check that out if you liked this book again, it's called how to Enjoy youy Life and you'd Job by Dale Carnegie. What do you have, Ben?
- [51:56]
B
Good choice. I like when you dig deep.
- [51:59]
A
Digging deep.
- [52:00]
B
Dig into the hundred year old.
- [52:01]
A
Well. Yeah.
- [52:02]
B
Okay, so I have a much newer book from 2019 called Burnout the Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emilia Nagaski.
- [52:10]
A
Yeah.
- [52:11]
B
So you know this book very long and a couple years ago, Amelia put out. Amelia Nagaski put out, like a workbook also. And there's an audiobook that she narrates. So it's like you can get it in all the different ways. And the whole point is that for her, the stress, like stress doesn't just appear and go away. You have to sort of complete the cycle of stress in order to get rid of it. So, you know, you get stress, but then everyone has this way of moving through it. And so you don't just like, like stop.
- [52:38]
C
Okay.
- [52:39]
B
And then the stress goes away and you hit pause and then you're better the next day.
- [52:42]
A
Stay stuck in your body.
- [52:43]
B
Exactly. So it reminded me of Guy Winch's thing of how you have to recharge. You don't just rest, you also have to recharge. So for Nagoski, there's different ways to go through the cycle. Right. Like you can. She said you can laugh or you can go outside or you can like make out with somebody or like a hug or like contact or run. Running.
- [53:00]
A
Yeah, sing.
- [53:00]
B
Exactly. Like all these different ways that are necessary to kind of just get the stress out. And remind me, like, it's not enough to just kind of stop the. The trigger or the. Or the thing that causes the stress or the burnout or the exhaustion, but also to remember whether you're doing Winch's way or Nagoski's way. Like, everyone has to remember to recharge to get it back. Whatever you need to do. If you're somebody that walks in the forest, go walk in the forest. If you're someone who loves animals, go hang out in the petting zoo and touch a goat. Do what you gotta do.
- [53:30]
A
Touch a goat. Cool. Yeah, I love that book. Really, really good.
- [53:34]
B
Yeah, awesome.
- [53:35]
A
Also, she's a choir director and she talks in the book about how singing is uniquely capable of helping. Helping the stress cycle run through. Just because of. Not only are you making noise, it's sort of Ritualistic, which is a thing we often lack in modern times. And also joining voices with a bunch of other people gives us a really special feeling. I can't remember what it's called. It might be collective effervescence, but yeah, really great book.
- [53:59]
C
Good pick.
- [54:00]
B
Awesome.
- [54:00]
A
Cool. That's it then.
- [54:02]
B
That's it. Great episode.
- [54:03]
A
Yes. And hey, we are thinking if you have something to say to us, we would love it if you sent us a voice note. You can just record it right on your phone. There's the voice memo app. If you are an iPhone user or anything else you like and you can send it to infolomedia.com that's info. L L O M E D I A C O M. Yeah, let us know how you deal with being exhausted from work. What do you do to restore yourself? Anything else you want to tell us? Just like respond to an episode. We would really love to hear from you. On that note, I want to ask you to do one more thing, which they always tell you in marketing you should never do, but that's fine. Here we are. This is our show. Give us a review. We have not since we've relaunched. I don't think there are any new reviews and I would just love to see some. It would help us get back in the charts. It'll help other people discover us. So please, yeah, give us a review. Send us a voice note. We'd love to hear from you.
- [55:00]
B
Yeah, you can do it on Spotify now too.
- [55:02]
A
Yeah. Comments, right?
- [55:03]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [55:05]
A
Cool. Cool.
- [55:06]
B
Awesome. All right, we're looking forward to hearing from everybody.
- [55:08]
A
Simplify was produced by me, Caitlin Schiller, and you, Ben Schumann Stoller, in Berlin, Germany for Colo Media. In the back of Chapters Bookshop.
- [55:16]
B
Rock on.
- [55:17]
A
Okay, check it out.
- [55:17]
B
See you soon.
- [55:18]
A
Bye.
- [55:18]
B
Bye,
- [55:25]
A
Sam.