The Real Reason You Can't Stop Thinking About Work After Hours | Guy Winch

Key Takeaway

Tonight, stop giving work unpaid overtime in your head. When you catch yourself replaying an upsetting interaction, write down one concrete next step: address it, change a behavior, or schedule 30 minutes tomorrow to think it through. If there is no solvable action, spend 2-3 minutes on a task that fully absorbs your attention. This closes the mental loop, reduces rumination, and helps you become present for the life waiting after work.

Episode Overview

Psychologist Guy Winch explains why work stress and burnout have intensified, especially as the boundary between home and work has eroded. He offers practical ways to spot burnout, reframe high-stakes work as a challenge rather than a threat, interrupt after-hours rumination, build real recovery, and reassess the personal cost of an always-on career.

Full Transcript

Transcript of The Real Reason You Can't Stop Thinking About Work After Hours | Guy Winch from 10% Happier. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

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. Uh 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. Uh my guest is Guy Winch, who is a psychologist and author.

His new book is called Mind Over Grind. He's uh written many books including Emotional First Aid and The Squeaky Wheel. But again, his uh new book is called Mind Over Grind. And uh I think you're going to like this interview. I liked it a lot. Guy Wench 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 Um, 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.

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Get more with northwestregistered agent at northwestregisteredagent.com/happierfree. Guy Winch, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. 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 uh now than it's ever been? been? been? 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. uh work stress and burnout have been peaking over the past 5 years and they're at all-time highs and you know and higher than they've been pre- pandemic and certainly before that.

So yes absolutely we can say that with certainty. certainty. certainty. What's driving that? 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. it happens. it happens. I have a million other questions. I just want to say one clarifying point and 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 uh had to go to work and thinking specifically of medical professionals, delivery drivers, and other frontline workers.

Um, and for them uh there was a different kind of stress that the pandemic produced and and Guy and I see you, if that's you, may I just 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, psychologically, psychologically, you know, that barrier got erased even if it wasn't specific to you, even if you were an essential employee.

Do you think, and I'm not sure if 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. It's amping up stress in general. The thing with artificial intelligence is it's it's creating massive uncertainty in the workspace in 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 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, in dread as well.

Yeah. I mean, I 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 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 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.

Look, what's so interesting is what 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. I think we've established quite robustly that people are stressed at work. What what are the health ramifications of all of this stress? 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. Health-wise, acute and chronic stress really impairs our health. It impairs our 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 is serious and chronic, which a lot of people do report it uh to be. The risk of burnout is that we we reach this tipping point beyond which we literally kind of become a little bit numb, emotionally removed from what we're 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 uh 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 do. they do. they do. How can I tell when I've crossed the line from being stressed about work to being truly burnt out?

That happened to me earlier in my career. It's how I I start my my new book with that story. Um if I may just indulge you with it, it'll take, you know, it's a 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 summer night with a neighbor who was a doctor in an ER. And the elevator rises and then shutters and comes to a halt. And my neighbor who deals with emergencies uh 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." Yeah, he was in a total panic. And what came out of my mouth was I looked at him and said, and this is my nightmare. And yeah, it was funny in my head, but horrific.

And so, 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?" [clears throat] 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. for one. for one. Yeah. And that's what alerted me that I was burnt out.

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. 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 is the mindset? Do you feel kind of numb about the things that are happening? Those are the questions you can ask in in any industry that you're in. I do want to say that I I have so much empathy for both of the people in that elevator. I'm a 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 I literally started looking for new apartments. I was like, I cannot see this person again. It's a really helpful story. It's a harsh story, but I'm I'm glad you told it. It's really helpful to 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 can imagine some people listening to this hard charging people and I I would put myself in this category that they might be thinking, well, don't I need some good stress?

Like um if I if I don't have stress in my life, doesn't that say I'm not trying hard enough? Yes. Actually, uh 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, 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 goldilock zone where the stress rises, continues to rise and now you're past the goldilock 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. I'm going to come back to the Goldilock zone for a second, but I you you piqu my interest. When you say we start to self-sabotage, what can that look like in the 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 2-hour meeting. I should take a break after that cuz 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 2 hours with a very antagonistic team. So, let me just think about that more clearly.

Let me take 5 minutes to walk around the block and refresh myself because I'm already got 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 imaging managing ourselves during the day. So it 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 are can actually make us completely trip up and set up all kinds of self-defeating cycles that then get worse and worse.

I think you have everybody's full attention on the the problem uh the scope of the problem, the ramifications of the problem. So, let me get back to the Goldilocks zone because uh that I think starts to steer us into um 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? burning out? burning out? 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. self-reflect. 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 in that moment. So we have to be able to do those things. And then the good news about the Goldilock zone is the minute we start to exceed it, it doesn't necessarily require a huge correction. It can just be they're like, "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 going to add a little bit too much." to monitor yourself and to be able to kind of, you know, when 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, in the weekends, in the breaks they have during the day.

So, you have to start monitoring those and paying more attention to 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. other. other. This is always an interesting juncture for me because on the one hand, I find it personally very liberating as a a typical hard charging super ambitious westerner uh to hear that, you know, you can use some basic self-awareness to titrate to to take responsibility and rest when you need it and that in fact rest is part of high performance.

It's not a a 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 and viewers may feel like I'm in I'm in a toxic workspace. I've got a boss who's completely unreasonable. They they expect me to be on call 7 days a week, uh, 24 hours a day.

They're they're liable to give me an assignment late Friday that is due first thing Monday. So I even if I know I need to rest, I can't rest in this environment. So what do you say to those folks? Guy, folks? Guy, folks? Guy, first of all, I say 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, you know, want you to do on on on Friday evening, right? and that you know if you're 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 2 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 5 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 I 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. busy. 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 we 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 there is more space we can take than we allow ourselves 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 watchtowwer for certain shifts because nobody could you know maintain that level of like attention and preparedness and alertness for you know whatever so 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 uh there's somebody measuring how long you take in there that's absolutely false you know and there's a lot we can do in those two if we put our mind to it.

So, we first have to like disavow ourselves of this, you know, this fictional idea of 24/7 grind. You know, 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. I largely agree with you, guy. Uh I'm going to push back uh 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. Um 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." Um, but yeah, I I could get fired for that if I did what guy was recommending, recommending, recommending, 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." Right? you know, you just, you know, like less 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 uh for an hour. If play the game if you must, by all means, I'm not saying like push back and say that's a stupid request.

Um but but the other thing is yes, if they're looking at your keystrokes, etc. 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 so I can like, you know, provide a good life to you, your family, to my family." And I'm like, family doesn't know you cuz 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. You know, the World Health uh organization says that around 750,000 around 750,000 around 750,000 employees die a year of overwork. You know, overworking will literally shorten your life and it will make you ill and and 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 what 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. We all, you know, it's it's a startup. We just every startup has to work that way for two or three years, etc. You know, like, and they say, oh, you know, people sleep on the floor of their factory. And I'm like, you know, founders talk about that. Like the founders who talk about sleeping on the floor of their factory have chefs and assistants and drivers and massurs.

You do not. It's not a good equivalency. You asked a a really profound question there about why are you doing this? And I'm 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 um I was covering the Democratic primaries in in the in the US presidential elections in 2004.

And on the night that Howard Dean, who was the upand cominging Democratic Yeih when he yhad 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 uh I got sick, like deathly ill, and had to go to the hospital. And uh and I had to stay in Iowa, where this happened, uh 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 um those were my bosses. Part of it is uh 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 808s watching the lifestyles of the rich and famous on TV and who felt that my parents um you know who were both you know academic physicians.

Uh I felt like they didn't make as much money as the other kids in my class and I felt I I really would succumb to the comparing mind there. Um 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? ambition? ambition? Yes. And I want to separate two different uh cases. I want to separate separate out the people who have bosses like you did who insist that you stand out in the cold and the rain in Iowa uh in 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 9:00 at night such a reasonable hour and who cares that your kid had a birthday. I 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 and 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 like you know like you have to hustle, you have to grind it out, you have to work 24/7, you you know you have to do these things.

All these um you know 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. Um, and so the there's some, you know, those who have the are 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, all the kinds of places, you know, that people tell me about where like they come and they say you you have um uh uh 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 um 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 and 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 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 cuz I decided that. Look at what it's costing you. costing you. costing you. 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? 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 rung 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." You know, and and you know, off you go to try and get that.

People 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 my 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, you know. you know.

you know. Yes. Yes. Yes. I'm laughing, but I see myself in in this insanity. And I would all there at different levels, right? I mean, whatever it's not a private plane for most, but whatever the ne that next level is just still there. 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. It's very difficult to feel sated. 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. 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, that they'll always start by saying, "Well, well, I I I and I 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 they, you know, they're not aiming for that. 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 BetterHelp's latest research confirms this. BetterHelp's 2026 state of stigma report surveyed 2,000 Americans 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 at betterhelp.com/happier. betterhelp.com/happier. betterhelp.com/happier. That's betterhp.com/happhappier. I do want to signal that there are all these practical tools in your book which again is called Mind Over Grind that I want to get to. But just since we're on this subject of like what's motivating us, I'll say something and I may have said this on the show before.

So loyal listeners and viewers, I apologize if I if I'm being repetitive here, but I remember having a conversation many years ago with my executive coach who I've had the good fortune of being able to work with for a long time, a guy named Jerry Colona. He was saying that many of his clients get very scared when he tries to take away from them the fuel of self-criticism and insufficiency because they believe that they need that in order to get anything done. And his argument is that actually you can be fueled by something much healthier which is love properly understood.

love of yourself, love of the world, love of your family, love of the people you're allegedly serving in your job, love of your colleagues. And that actually will take you much further. And I didn't like when he said that, but I have to say over time that really has in my ser moments become the thing that drives me now. now. now. 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 selfreflection.

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 call ourselves calling ourselves idiot and I'm such a loser and how could I do that and shaming ourselves and you know 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 to draw forth on your abilities and your skills and your talents because you're actually, you know, kicking them and 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 emotionfree, 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 say in doing so gain a sense of control, gain a sense of agency, gain a sense of of of efficacy and and those are going to serve you. The the the critical part of self-criticism is absolutely damaging and and unnecessary.

And there's a lot of data to support what you're saying. I often think about it as um moving from an inner drill sergeant to an inner coach. A coach doesn't fail to point out when you've made mistakes that but she or he just isn't a jerk about it. And that's that's the crucial part. And 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 uh some of the specific strategies that you re 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 a challenge mindset. Can you talk about what what you mean by this? The challenge versus threat mindset theory is 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, you know, the 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 cases 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 to which you are 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 there's 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 you know like in sports is in tennis. You can see someone leading and they're not making errors. They're, you know, 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 their head. It switched from a challenge mindset to a threat mindset to the uhoh, I don't want to lose. And I don't want to lose is a terrible motivator. It's a very different motivator than I want to win. This is the exact right day for me to hear you say that because I'm 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 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? A lot of the times when people face a challenge and they start to worry, they start to say to themselves, uh, 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 uh are impacted by our thought process and by the messaging we give it when we're saying to ourel this is going to be overwhelming. This is going to be too stressful. Um I can't handle it. I just can't handle that. I just can't handle it if it happens again.

You know those kinds of statements are really going to be a disservice to us. Instead we want to the mind whisperer is 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. Because 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 I'll really prepare well for it." In other words, you're saying things that acknowledge the the the difficulty because you can't lie to your unconscious mind, but add the nuance of, you know, confidence that you'll prepare accordingly, that you'll be able to handle it. And that can help, you know, pivot you from the threat mindset, you know, to a challenge one. And then you can then add to it. you know this is going to be really difficult but I know here's what I do when I'm giving let's say a really important talk like a you know a TED talk which you've done um like you've gave a TED talk in Vancouver I given one too it's quite stressful that's you might have not been stressed cuz I I was there when you gave it and you did a magnificent job I was quite 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. I just think it's so powerful and again it's the the thing I needed to hear specifically today. This idea that you and we 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 old internal old internal cattle prod punitive model.

I am all for success. I 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. I don't know if I'm going to get through all all my whole list of questions I want to ask you, but another thing you talk about in the book um is how to stop intrusive thoughts after hours.

If you're home and you're thinking about work, uh what do you recommend? 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 you're actually you're doing work in your head. That that's fine. There's not problem with that. But the tendency we have, especially if the workday, you know, 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 like spin and chew it over and over and over. And I 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 3 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 I'm going to say this and I in my fantasy I would do that and then I would and and you 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 threeinut 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 cuz 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. Yes. [gasps] Yes. I'm laughing just because I've done it so many times. So in those moments, what's the move? The move, therefore, is to do two things. Number one, to convert the thing you're ruminating about into a problem to be solved. 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 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'll 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 the the upset that you have. So if you can refrain the thing to make it less upsetting, upsetting, 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 cuz 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 2 to 3 minutes of concentrating on a task that actually requires all your bandwidth is enough to let the urge to ruminate pass. Because that urge is a little bit like a craving. You just kind of let it pass. 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. This is great. We've talked a lot here about shitty days at work. If you've had one, uh or even if you've just had a busy day at work, what how do we recover at the end of the day so we're not doing unpaid overtime? unpaid overtime? unpaid overtime? A don't ruminate because that's preventing you, that's keeping you at work. 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 overindex 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 3 hours and you know look at whatever screens or doing scroll or whatever the thing is because I am tapped out.

I can't do anything. Now we mistake mental exhaustion but 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 and 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 a 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, etc. You had duties with kids, what 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. So again, it just comes back to your main one of your main thesis thesis 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. Yes. And and this is also why why I wrote the book because um a lot of us we can't change our boss. We can't change our workplace. We 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. There's a section in your book about how to avoid footin mouth disease. What's that about? that about? that about? There are 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 there therein is the foot in mouth disease. They will go and actually tell their boss what they think because it didn't take 5 minutes to calm down before that meeting or they will 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, you know, the foot and mouth disease is this idea of that, you know, like when you are you have to manage your emotional uh uh 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 interpersonally interpersonally that that in terms of how you manage up and down and sideways um that can end up costing you.

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 you later regret. Well said. Yes. You have a concept as a pair of concepts stress minds and uh speed bumps. What do you mean by that? 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. Uh 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%. You have the boring meetings you have the nothing burgers you have the wrote tasks that are you know like 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 orflight 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 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 you know get a breather or taking a walk around the block you can you can navigate that you can see what things might you might be able to delegate you can 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 know manage that once you know where the stress minds are.

Speed bump refers to something else. Those are the kinds of typical mistakes uh we make in the job when we're 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, you know, and there's all 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, you know, with with time management, whether it's with ignoring politics because you want to be above it.

I I don't want to be in that childish, you know, like 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. Then if you don't understand what's going on, you're going to be victimized by it, you know. So all all these kind of blind spots we have, there's a list of them and what they do, the damage they can cause, and and these are the speed bumps you need to initiate in order to prevent them from tripping you up.

up. up. How do we not let the stress of work impact our personal relationships? 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 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.

So um and it creates emotional distance and without the emotional closeness intimacy suffers. So there 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 a in a 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 actually to do things to help you deescalate. You have to be aware of how the tension is affecting your family. Like, I've experienced it myself and I've seen other people that they come home and they're so preoccupied still with with work. is still in the fog of war that their six-year-old runs up to 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, they're like, so we have to be aware of how profoundly that barrier again has 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 cuz 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 that is less there than it used to be in the past.

One thing that has been helpful for me is really putting my phone away early and not going back to it. I think ideally that would be absolutely lovely. It's so hard for people because for a lot of people their social life is on their phone too. So they're cutting off the friend who's texting them with a you know a funny thing they wanted to tell or the parent who's trying to reach them or whatever the thing is. So like 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 uh phone free dinners. You can't 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. We talked earlier about how one might deal with one's boss, uh, an unreasonable boss who's angry that we didn't get back to them, uh, 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? Yeah. Well, it depends of who you're setting them with. If it's with a co-orker, that's that's one thing. If it's with a boss, it's another. it. 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 in the next round of of cuts, either there or it'll interfere with your chances of a promotion, of advancement of those things. So, so there are first of all individual bosses who are who are that sensitive to any kind of uh uh 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, not that notwithstanding, I have a section in the book which is a homage to you and your podcast called, it's called 10% slackier. And that is that when people uh 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 their 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, you know, like 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 facetime, 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.

You'll be hearing from my lawyers about the copyright infringement, but other than that, I love 10% slack here. You also talk uh 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, Monday morning, Monday morning, right? Right? And for many of us, and 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 of having to function a certain way, to work a certain way. Everything gets much much harder at that point. Now, here's the 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 it its job is to prepare you for challenges. And so be, hey, hey, work's coming, like winter's coming, 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 is will really interfere and it'll it'll put you into a bad mood. It'll really interfere with your ability to relax, to enjoy the rest of your Sunday, etc. So, but your 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, 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 that I haven't seen. I'm going to work out cuz I love doing that before work. It always you're doing something. Oh, I'm wore a new out. I bought a new outfit. I'm going to wear that outfit to work and kind of look forward to people complimenting me when I get to the office or 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 for the outfit, can't wait to see my friend, can't wait to, you know, to 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 Monday 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 me, 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 going that's that's apparently the next thing. 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? There's one other topic that no one asks me about cuz it's depressing and difficult and uh we don't necessarily need to get to it because it's depressing and difficult. This show is all about the depressing and the difficult.

Tell us. 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 with with Volkswagen executives going to jail for the emissions scandal. This is how you you you end up with 5,000 employees, I think it was Wells Fargo, going, you know, like 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 you you can like have it out with a coworker and say the kinds of things to them that you would never say to a neighbor, you know, 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 cuz 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 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 that happens in which our moral compass really gets untethered and over time we we you know things become more and more and more normalized everyone we around us is doing it we begin to do it we might even benefit from it and 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 then 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. So the consequences of not managing your work stress are go beyond your happiness and your health. Uh 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 up.

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 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 um in their team that are disadvantaging people that are bullying people because they don't they don't want to get into that or they don't want to have to deal with that.

Managers are supposed to protect their reports 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 weren't 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. Guy Winch, your book is called Mind Over Grind. 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 uh 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. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. 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 Cashmir 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 mess 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 uh the good news that the mind is trainable. Thank you sincerely. I mean it. Thank you.