Mind Over Grind: Practical Tips to Manage Work Stress and Enhance Your Well-Being with Guy Winch

If you can think of the tasks that you tend to procrastinate on as nuisances and frame them that way in your head, think of them in that way. Use that word when you speak about them or even think about them in your own head. You are much more likely to tackle them soon and avoid exacerbating the stress that comes from them. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Here's a simple question with a surprisingly uncomfortable answer. When does your workday actually end? My guest today is Guy Winch, and his latest book is Mind Over Grind, How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life. Guy makes the case that work doesn't end when you stop answering emails. It ends when you stop thinking about work. And for a lot of us, that moment never really comes. We talk about the difference between mental fatigue and physical fatigue, why scrolling feels like rest, but it often isn't, and how to turn rumination into something more useful or to shut it down entirely when it's just chewing up your life. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is The One You Feed. We are conducting a survey to find out what you want. Look, you know this, I know this. There's ads on this podcast. It's how the podcast stays alive and feeds those of us who devote ourselves to it. But I'd love to improve that ad experience for you. And in order to do that, though, I need to know a little bit more about you. The survey is quick, it's easy, and it is really important to us right now. It takes two minutes to do and really would be a huge help. Go to oneufeed.net slash survey. Again, that's oneufeed.net slash survey. Thank you so much. Hi, Guy. Welcome back to the show. Hello, and thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to talk with you again. We're going to be discussing your new book, which is called Mind Over Grind, How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life. And it's an outstanding book, and I'm really excited to talk about it. But we'll start like we always do on this show with a parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? and the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. So I'm going to slight cheat on this one because I do want to make the point, but here's the thing. I see it in this context as the good wolf representing our personal life, our family life, the things that we value most, what we do it all for. And the quote-unquote bad wolf, because it's not necessarily bad, but the quote-unquote bad wolf being our work life, our professional identity, the time that we spend in the workplace, working in our careers, etc. And in this case, the wolves are battling for our attention. And in this case, and why I wrote the book, is that we are feeding the work wolf way more than we're feeding a personal life family wolf. The wolf that's about our life outside of work. and we're not aware of the extent of that imbalance and we're not aware of how much the work wolf is stealing the food of the home life wolf. So I'm bastardizing the parable completely, but to make that point, that there's this tension between these two aspects of our lives, these two aspects of our identities, and we're trying to keep them in balance in some way and we're not succeeding or certainly we're not succeeding as much as we think we are. Yeah, I think that's a great way to, as you say, bastardize the parable, because it makes a lot of sense. And your book was really clear on the ways in which our work lives are taking from the rest of our lives. And I think all of us feel this tension. It's why I love the story of the two wolves. We all get it on one level. We all feel this tension. We want multiple things at once. We want a good career. We want to be successful. We want money. We want good relationships. We want hobbies. We want health. We want multiple things at the same time, and it takes a lot of conscious effort to really balance those things. And that's the thing about the parable that's really, I think, interesting. Because just going back to the actual parable now, it's not just the one you feed, because that kind of implies that you only feed in a conscious, deliberate, intentional way. We do a lot of feeding to these wolves, whatever constellation, however you want to break down what the wolves are. We do a lot of feeding that's unconscious, that we're not aware of. And sometimes it'll contradict what our conscious goals and efforts are. So we actually have to pay attention to that on two levels, not just what are we feeding in our actions and our conscious thought, but what are we inadvertently feeding? Yeah. And I think that's a key theme in the book, right? Is this idea that our work lives are stressful and stress drives us into a bit of an autopilot mode with things where, to your point, we're not clear about what we're feeding, both consciously and unconsciously. We are reacting. And when we are under a lot of stress work-wise, that ends up taking more of the energy and attention than we might think it is because we're not actually capable of thinking about it very well. Right. This is why we have a problem with stress and burnout today because i mean what's interesting is over the past five years let's say since the shutdowns six probably now then awareness of oh work stress is bad burnout you know is problematic work-life balance that's very important 10 years ago you said work-life balance in a workplace that look at you like what are you talking about today it's discussed right and so there's so much more awareness the fact that this is important that the balance between these two wolves are important. And yet, stress and burnout are peaking in the workplace now. Even as our awareness went up and we're so much more educated about how important it is to maintain a certain balance. So how is it that we've become more aware, everyone's making efforts to try and do it, and yet it's getting worse. And it's getting worse because it's no longer contained to the workplace. The pressures that we feel, these stresses, we bring them home with us. You know, in certain ways, sometimes they stow away with us in ways that we're not aware of. But then they invade our life outside of work and make things worse there, which then predisposes us for things to be worse the next day at work, which then predisposes that stress to spill over back into our personal lives and back and forth and back and forth. That's the thing. Stress and those pressures are staying in play far longer than they need to be because we're paying attention to them at work sometimes, or workplaces are, but we're not paying enough attention about what's happening outside of work. And you think that is different than it used to be, or it's worse than it used to be? Why? Well, I think there's more pressure in the workplace today. I think the pandemic erased the boundary between work and home. For us, for our employers, you know, like, you're much more likely to get an email, you know, at home now than you were before the pandemic. Much more likely to be you know getting messages messages and whatever and be expected to be there and to be responsive even if it's a weekend because that boundary was was was violated already like that we were doing that for months and months on end so people well you're home you can do it you know before like there was a sanctity about it oh let's not invade you know let's not disrupt somebody at home but now it's like of course we will and a lot of people say to me like the problem is not that I have that many emails to respond to in the evening. I have one. I have to respond to one. I have to read a hundred till I know which one that is. And so it is an invasion, you know, in that way. And so there has been that change. The workplace has become a little bit harsher. There are expectations now of, you know, a grind of the hustle culture over work is romanticized, purely romanticized. Like, you know, everyone has these, and by everyone, I mean CEOs. You know, So, you know, like I slept on the floor of the factory and, you know, I put in those 40. And if you're a founder, it's 40 nowadays, seven days a week for the first year. And it's not like, oh, my goodness, that sounds dangerous, which it is. It's like, isn't that wonderful? That's the bravery that brave workers need to put in to help the company succeed. It's dangerous. We're not talking about that. So there's even a romanticization of the grind, of the overwork. And so then it seems like, oh, this is what one should do. So there's many, many ways in which we've completely taken our eye off. What's actually happening? What are the consequences? How it's impacting us and what it's doing? Yeah, I've been out of the official work world for about six years now. And I think my whole career before then had been in tech and startups. And so I think that was always part of that culture, at least for me. So I recall it being that way. I can't speak to how it's changed since the pandemic because I haven't been in that culture. It hasn't gotten better, I can tell you That I believe. So let's talk about stress. The simple version of stress is stress is bad. The more complicated version of stress is some stress is good, some stress is bad, different types of it. There's an even more nuanced version than that. Talk to me about, you know, your title of the chapter is how good stress goes bad. Stress is not necessarily bad for us. It's a part of life. And in terms of when it comes to our performance, if there's too little stress, we don't actually do that well because we're not that invested. We're not paying that much attention. So, you know, as stress goes up, it becomes more useful. It keeps us on point more. We're making more effort. It's that when it exceeds a certain level, then we begin to mismanage it, you know, in a larger sense. small bursts of stress are good for our stress response you know like because you know like when we evolved there was this you know big you know like there was a hunt there was everyone's excited and we're hunting the mammoths and whatever we were doing and then you know we do that for a bit and then it's over and then there's a celebration in other words stress used to be a spike that then comes down and that's not necessarily bad for us because yes we're in high activation, but then there's a calming that goes on. That's not what happens today. Today, our battles don't end because we're in high activation. We can be in high activation all day at work and then come home and ruminate about work and think about it and deal with the emails. And we're in battle all the time. That's when stress goes bad, when it becomes chronic, when we don't give our systems a break from it. When we're under stress, it's not just that we're, cortisol is flooding our systems, we're shutting down our digestion because there's certain things we need to be doing differently. We're flooding, you know, like blood is rushing to our extremities so we can indeed fight, you know, or flight. We're putting our body under stress as well. There's our physiological systems, our psychological systems. They're all very skewed toward a very specific situation, which is not the normative situation we should be living in. But if we don't have a break from that, and in today's workplace, many times we don't, then the wear and tear is significant our bodies won't evolve to stay in that state all the time neither were our minds at some point you just start to numb out because you can't take it anymore that's what burnout is burnout is this feeling of like such deep exhaustion that a good night's sleep's not going to do anything because you have just been going at it and grinding for so long your mind and your body are starting to adapt and in bad ways and so stress is not bad in and of itself. If we are mindful and clear that we need to have breaks from it at the end of the day, we need to use the weekend to recover from a difficult work week. We need to manage ourselves with much more intentionality when we're under that level of duress than we do. We just kind of go about it. We just put our heads down and do it. We don't think like, oh, how do I manage myself? But that's why stress is bad because it's so chronic and it's unrelenting for so many people. There's another idea that you introduce, which is that part of the degree of stress, the degree that it's harmful to us, is our belief about stress itself, whether it puts us into like a challenge state or a threat state. Before we go into what those are, I want to ask a question about that general idea that stress is what we, in essence, make of it. Is there a certain level of stress that just is beyond our ability to cope with? And is that what we're facing, that the stress we're facing is so relenting that we end up relating to it all from a negative perspective? We're actually quite adaptable when it comes to stress. In other words, when you start any new situation, it's stressful. First days of school were always stressful. First day in a new job is always stressful. It's stressful because beyond the actual job, you know, you don't know where this is. You don't know where that is. You don't know what's expected. You don't know, like there's so many other variables, so many things to consider all at once. It's overwhelming. But a month into that job, you're getting the hang of it. It's less stressful. So we adapt to stress quite well. I've worked with lots of people. I don't know if you had the experience. If you had a period where you weren't working and there just weren't a lot of demands on you, and then you go into a regular nine to five, oh, that's going to be really stressful. You're not used to it. But within a few weeks, you'll adapt to it, and it'll be fine. But we have our limits. Think of it like a balloon. We can keep inflating it slowly, and it'll inflate slowly. If you're going to inflate it all at once, it'll burst because it doesn't have a chance to adjust. But even that balloon is going to have its limits. If the stress keeps going up, at some point you'll reach your limit. and you'll find out because the balloon will pop. And then what that means in terms of stress is that you won manage it anymore in an adaptive way You will feel overwhelmed You will shut down You feel extremely emotional Small little things will make you cry or yell or act out. Your coping mechanisms will fail to manage and keep you ticking in the situation. And you'll see, we call it a breakdown. In other words, whether it's tears, whether it's anger, whether it's shutdown, whether it's paralysis, that's what happened in the moment of overwhelm. It's too much now. You can't manage it anymore. The machinery is shutting down. It's misfiring. Now, that's the state you don't want to get to. But that's what happens when we exceed our capacities. You may have heard me mention my new book a few times, and I can assure you, you will certainly hear it a few more. But now we are offering some pre-order bonuses. One of them is the Still Point Method, which I believe is the only systematic way to interrupt negative thought patterns often enough for them to change. There's a lot out there about what you should think and not think, but there's very little that gives you a small and portable system to actually do it. You get the guide to the method and three free months of a new app designed to help you implement it. There are other bonuses too. You can learn more and claim them at oneyoufeed.net book. So talk to me about this idea of challenge state versus threat state. look, it's a very interesting thing. It's based on the prevailing theory of sports psychology. And that theory is that stress is very psychological. And it depends entirely how we frame it to ourselves. And if you are going into a challenging situation at work, you have a big presentation to do, or you have a big interview, there's an account you have to land, you know, like, oh, this really, really, really matters. Your mindset will determine whether you go in there with your abilities really sharpened, with your neurotransmitters in your brain and the hormones in your body really, you know, cued towards peak performance or the opposite. And it is a nuance that makes a difference. And that nuance is this. In a challenge state, you see it as a challenge you can rise to. So you're going to go in there to kill it, to smash it. Oh, yeah. You're excited because I have the skills for this. I know this. I can do this. I'm going to win. in sports, or I'm going to land the account, or, you know, kill the presentation, whatever the thing is. The other nuance is where you're not that sure. Like, you want to do well, but something's making you doubt, and so then you just don't want to lose. I don't want to lose the game. I don't want to lose that game. I don't want to embarrass myself. I don't want it to go poorly, or I hope it doesn't go poorly. It's very different, and I'm excited to make it go well. Now, in both of them, you want it to go well, not losing and winning are the same thing in theory, but that nuance is critical. Because if you're going in to not lose, if you're going in to not do poorly, if you're trying not to embarrass yourself, oh God, I hope my boss doesn't hate it, then you're actually predisposing yourself to second guess yourself, to be less confident, to not, and again, the whole brain chemistry changes, your whole body response changes. And again, and we know from sports that that nuance is critical. And we don't necessarily have that much conscious, we have some conscious control over it, but there are things you need to do to prime yourself for success as opposed to psych yourself out. And I see all the time people in the workplace psyching themselves out. They get, you know, there's something important they have to do and they say to themselves, oh God, I can't handle it. Oh, I can't deal with that. You know, and it's like, well, you just are setting yourself up to do poorly when you say I can't deal with that. Yeah. now or i can't handle it this is just not going to go well now you might feel that and you might worry that that's the case but you need to change the messaging to yourself so that you're not going to psych yourself out and again all you need to say is like that's going to be challenging i'm glad i have two weeks to prepare because then i'll be able to be prepared or that sounds like a lot right now but i know that once i break it down and get my arms around it i'll be able to manage it In other words, you can't deny that that feels like a lot in the moment because that's what it feels like. You can't deny that. But you can frame it in a way that sets you up to not psych yourself. Because when you psych yourself up, you're more likely to start procrastinating, to avoiding, because who wants to actually engage in the thing that's going to be a disaster? But if you say, that's a lot, I'm really going to have to work hard here. Then actually you're priming yourself to, then let's work hard. Or, I know myself. It always seems like a big thing at the beginning, but once I start looking at it and really breaking it down, it always becomes more manageable. Those are the things you need to be saying to yourself in those moments, and they make really big differences. That is probably one of the biggest things that I somewhere along the way figured out, probably talking to you all those years ago. Who knows? Talking to lots of smart people. But that recognition that I just remind myself like you've handled plenty of difficult things before. You can do it again. And I love what you talk about in the book. You're like, we can't lie to ourselves, right? For me, just to be like, I'm great. I'm going to kill it. That doesn't work for me because there's some part of me that that's not what it's feeling. So some realism, like you said, this is going to be difficult. This is challenging. I don't quite currently feel up to it. Our statements of honesty followed by, for me, and you've handled it before. And one of the things about getting to be your and I's age is we've got a lot of experiences in the past. I've got countless ones that I thought I'm not going to be able to do that. And then I do it and I can look back and go, OK, you know, I find this all the time. I get stressed out about common things. The one I make a joke about often is like any time it's getting ready to get ready for a trip, we always have a lot to do before we leave. Right. And I start to get like, oh, God, I've got so much to do. And I just remind myself, you've done this a thousand times. You always get enough done to go on the trip. It's always worked out. And just that enough allows me to kind of relax and be like, okay, you got this. This is my fourth book. And you think, oh, you have four books. But it's four books over 15 years, right? So it's not as if I'm doing that every day. And I don't know if people know this, but when you sell a book that's nonfiction, you don't actually write the book and then send it to publishers and they go, we love it, let's do it. you write a 25 page outline of what the book will be and that's what they buy that's it it is an outline that's it yeah and then when they buy it they say okay great now turn the outline into a book and it's very overwhelming because it's an outline that you could flesh that out in all kinds of different ways there can be a hundred books in that outline which one are you writing is that the one they thought they're buying etc so i reminded myself because you You sell it and that's, oh, yay, sold another book. And then you go, oh, yay, got to write another book. And, you know, and then the yay turns into like, aye. And it's very overwhelming because you haven't started, you haven't really figured out, well, actually how I'm presenting this material. What's the structure of it? What's the voice of it? How do I want to do it? And there are a couple of days and everyone I speak to, you know, and this was your experience because you also did this. Those first few days when you sell the book, before you actually start writing the book, it is like, what did i get myself into oh my goodness you know and it just feels so overwhelming but what i was able to do this time because it's my fourth and maybe first time writers don't have that just to remind myself like it always feels this way because you haven't started you haven't broken down the thing you haven't like for me the way i do it is like i might spend three months in one chapter figuring out the structure figuring out the voice figuring out how i want to once i know that, then the rest comes much more easily. But in those three months, I can be like, oh my God, it's not working. This is already two months on one chapter. I have so many other chapters to write. How am I ever going to get this done in time? But I have the voice now that's saying like, but you know, you always figure it out. It's just a puzzle that you got to put the pieces together. So take a deep breath, go back to the puzzle. It's so much more reassuring. But again, you have to have that reassurance because otherwise there's so much in life that just seems, and certainly in the workplace seems terribly overwhelming at once. Yeah, that was certainly my experience. And never having done it, I probably had even more doubt. But what I could fall back on is that I realized that nearly anything I've done that has been a significant undertaking, there are periods of it that I'm certain that I don't know how to do it. I'm certain that the ideas I've got are lousy. I'm certain my ability to articulate those ideas have left me this time. And so I had a little bit of experience to go like, okay, just stick in there. And for me, one of the things that I believe a lot in, and it's the reason I talk about small steps and all that, is I believe that sometimes what we can take comfort in and we can believe in ourselves in is the fact that we're showing up. And for me, if I know that I'm showing up, I have confidence that I will figure it out. It's when I don't show up, stress goes up. In your book, you talk about procrastination as this way that we make the stress worse on ourselves. Because when we are avoiding, that's when, at least for me, stress really goes up. As long as I'm facing it to the best of my ability, I can talk to myself and be like, you're showing up, you'll figure it out. But when I'm not showing up, that's when stress starts to have a runaway effect. Right. That's what avoidance does. It really increases the stress for two reasons. One of them practical, one of them psychological. The practical one is that you took a task. Now, a book is not a good example because that's such a big task. But let's just look at small tasks that you have to do at work. The really unpleasant email you have to write to that client that is always so difficult or the difficult conversation you have to have with someone about something that's going to be so uncomfortable, you put it off because it's going to be uncomfortable and stressful. So you don't want to do it. So you put it off. And then the next day, you're thinking about it again. And you're like, I'm really going to do that. I'll do it later. And the next day, you're thinking about it again. And the next day and the next day. So you've taken a task that was a 15-minute email, 20-minute conversation. And instead of getting it done in 20 minutes, you have smeared it over three weeks. You know, supersized the amount of time you spend stressing about it. You have literally turned the small thing into a huge thing. That's the practical way you make it worse. It's the psychological way. With every avoidance, the message you're giving yourself is, that is so terrible to do. That is such an obnoxious thing to do that I literally can't stand it, so I'm putting it off. So now you're making it seem even scarier. Now it's going to be even worse. Now doing that thing seems even more just unpleasant than it was two weeks ago when you started kicking the can down the road. In both of those ways, you are making the stress much worse. You know, it's one of those ways that we mismanage stress and self-sarotage and make things worse for ourselves. And we think of procrastination as we're giving ourselves a break. We're not giving ourselves a break. We're punishing ourselves. We're making it much harder to do. We're spreading it out. We're supersizing it. We're making it more unpleasant in our own perceptions. we're not giving ourselves a break. We're avoiding. And so one of the solutions I talk about in the book, which I think is a useful one for people, is just reframe the task. Instead of as obnoxious, annoying, unpleasant, scary, intimidating, overwhelming, whatever the thing is. And this is a small task. This does not apply to a book. So anyone writing a book, this is not what I'm talking about. Talking about the stuff in the office, reframe that as a nuisance. This task is a nuisance because nuisances are unpleasant, but we take care of them immediately. If you have a pebble in your shoe and you're hiking, you don't think to yourself, that's really annoying. I want to take it out in five to six miles. No, you'll pause and you'll take it out right there. You'll swat at the fly when it comes at you in the moment. You'll remove the annoying tag that's bothering your neck as it happens. Nuisances, we take care of immediately because they're nuisances and you want to bat them away. And if you can think of the tasks that you tend to procrastinate on as nuisances and frame them that way in your head, think of them in that way. Use that word when you speak about them or even think about them in your own head. You are much more likely to tackle them soon and avoid exacerbating the stress that comes from them. Yeah, I love that reframing of nuisance because, again, there's an intellectual honesty in it. I'm not being like, this task is great. You're like, this is a nuisance. I don't want to do it. Okay, that's honest. And now let me deal with it. And one of the rules I try and have for myself with things like that is I ask myself, am I ever going to want to do this thing? Yeah. And if the answer is no, then I try. I don't always succeed, but I try and do it as soon as is possible. Because to your point, every minute that I don't do it, I'm just adding to the total suffering that comes with this task because I'm dreading it, that dread. And I just – I will carry that dread around. And so there's just this whole idea of I'll feel like it another time. I'll feel more like it another time. There's just some of this stuff like no, you won't. There's never a good time to do it. You'll never – I'll never want to do it. And so, like I said, I try to the best of my ability to just do that thing as soon as I can. I want to stay with procrastination and avoidance because I agree with you that this is one of the ways that we do make stress a lot worse for ourselves. You talk about procrastination is not about avoiding an obnoxious task. It's about avoiding the unsettling emotions those tasks evoke. and it usually happens with our unconscious at the helm. This is what happens when we're on autopilot. When we have pressure at work and we just have a lot to do and we just kind of, you know, we put our head down, get things done, the unpleasant task is over there, like, oh, we'll do that one later. Almost an absence of thought. I mean, we often think that we're thinking when we're procrastinating, but we're not. We're kind of, we're not actually pausing, is that a rise decision for me? You know, it'll just make it worse. Should I really, I'm like, we're not doing that whole calculation. We just like no and we put it off Now what happens is this We have coping mechanisms at our disposal but we have automatic ones and when we just we have our mind down we default to automatic coping mechanisms the automatic coping mechanisms we have are primitive they are there primarily to give us a little bit of relief a little bit of emotional relief so when we're not thinking when we have a 10-minute break between really really difficult meetings we will reach for our phone and surf on social media. And that won't recharge us. It won't make us feel any better necessarily. It might actually irritate us or make us feel bad because we're seeing all our friends live up their great life. And here we are stuck between these meetings, you know, et cetera. But we're not thinking. We're just doing it automatically. We'll automatically, you know, put off the difficult task. Because again, our unconscious mind is like, let's give it a little bit of relief. You know, and when we are using our coping mechanisms in an intentional way, then we can be more sophisticated about it because our prefrontal cortex is sophisticated. That's not what our automatic coping mechanisms avail themselves of. We can. It cannot. And so when we do that, we can actually start looking at consequences. We can actually be a little clever and go, you know what, let me reframe that task as a nuisance, and then it'll seem less unpleasant, I'll be less likely to put it off. Or let me think about why I'm so tense before this meeting. Maybe I should find five minutes to do some breathing exercises so I don't go in like a live wire, because if I do, I'll experience everything as more unpleasant, and I might be more reactive than I should be. So let me actually use my wisdom here to, I need five minutes to calm down because I'm so charged up. Or that other thing that my boss just said was so upsetting. Let me find five minutes, go somewhere and actually call the loved one so I can get some validation and support and kind of calm down before I just kind of drag that into the next meeting. We can start being more clever and sophisticated and responsible and manage ourselves in healthier, more productive ways when we are on it, when we're thinking consciously. Now, we can't do that all day. Our attentional abilities are limited. We can't both get our work done and think of what our coping mechanism should be and how we need to manage it. That's too much. We can do it in moments, but we need to do it in moments. And too many people don't do it in any moments during the workday. They're literally on autopilot from start to finish. And that's when things are likely to go wrong. That's when we're likely to make similar mistakes, where we're likely to start conflict, even though we're trying not to, when we're likely to react poorly, when we shouldn't, because we're on autopilot and we're not aware of how we're feeling, what we need, and what small little tweaks we can do to regulate better, to be wiser. Why I wrote this book is because I don't want it to sound like, oh, to have the mind over grind, to manage yourself better in the workplace, to catch the things you need to catch and tweak them is very laborious. It is often brain hacks, small tweaks, five minutes here, three minutes there, that make critical differences. It's something we can all do. This is not like, you know, you're not changing the whole thing. You're just introducing pauses, reflection, slightly different habits, slightly different ways of thinking. And those make the critical difference. It is accessible. We can all do way better than we're doing in terms of how we're managing ourselves and how we're experiencing life, both in work and at home. So if someone is listening to this and is hearing themselves in what you're saying, which is, yeah, I am just one thing to the next throughout the day. I drag out sort of one semi-lousy coping mechanism after another, even if I do take any coping mechanism. How do I start to interrupt this? Like what's one thing they could do tomorrow to start to bring a little bit more of this consciousness out of autopilot into their day tomorrow? So, okay, this is about the work day. Now, a lot of the book actually talks about what you should be doing at home in addition. But in the work day, one of the things that you need to think more about is look at your schedule and where are the breaks, right? We're talking about where are the breaks from the stress? Where are the breaks there? I talk about this in the book when I say to people, like, how difficult is your job? How stressful is your job? My job is terribly stressful. I hate my boss. I work for the most horrible company. You might feel that way. It is completely not useless. And it's damaging to think that way. Because if you hate your job, you are going into every day and every minute of every day activated with antipathy, expecting the worst. And you might not like a lot of your job a lot of the time, but it isn't all horrible. No one's job is stressful morning to night. So look at your schedule and identify where are small breaks I can take then? And what's the most effective thing I can do? do I have 10 minutes to walk around the block just to get some air and change my mindset? Maybe I take, oh, this is a very difficult day, but you know what I can do? I have 15 minutes there between this really not great meeting and that not great meeting. What I'm going to do, I'm going to prepare my favorite lunch, and I'm going to take it on, and I'm going to like spend 20 minutes even, and I can look forward to like that meeting's not great, and that one's not great, but at least I can have my favorite lunch, and that will be great. I love you. a very similar thing a few minutes ago. I have three conversations today, which is a lot. Although for you, you're probably having like six a day because you're in the middle of book lunch. So you're like, I wish I only had three today, Eric. But nonetheless, I had about 10 minutes and I was feeling very tired. And I was like, I just wish I had a cup of coffee here, which of course, when I'm tired like that, what I want to do is just pick up my phone and do nothing. And I made myself walk up and down this. There's one flight of stairs in this little place I am. I was like, all right, I'm going to go up and down these stairs 10 times, which for me, I know is a good break. Like it, it resets me. And it is, it's that consciousness to really think about what will refresh us. That's a constant one. I think maybe everybody struggles with, but I certainly do, which is when I get a break, what I feel is tired. And so what I want to do is something that takes no energy, which is exactly opposite of what is almost always the best choice for me, which generally would be to go outside. It is very cold here right now. And I was like, I just don't feel like going outside. So the stairs it was. But look, what you did is you kind of, you woke up your body again, most of us settle day. Yes, I do. So we want to do something that's the opposite of what we did because otherwise we're doing the same thing. And this is kind of what happens when we get home and we have a draining day and we we miss one thing that our our brain doesn't distinguish well between mental fatigue and physical fatigue so we sat all day and then we get home and we feel wiped out yeah i just need to like just veg out over here i need to just zone out and just you know binge whatever show because i am wiped out i am drained you are wiped out mentally, not physically. You're not physically tired. You might think you are, but think about it. You're sat for eight to nine hours. You are not physically tired. And so actually doing something that requires you to get out of the couch, get up from the couch and go and do the thing. It can be exercise. It can be something creative. It can be something, if you're a maker, it can be making something. If you're an extrovert, it can be socializing. If you're an organizer, it can be organizing. The thing that doesn't happen on the couch, but the thing that you know about yourself, that when you do it, you come back with more energy than before you left. In other words, the ROI is magical there. You actually expend energy to do the thing, and you come back feeling even more energized. And that is because at the end of a mentally draining day, resting won't drain our battery further, but it will not recharge it. To recharge our battery, we actually have to do something rejuvenating, fulfilling that's meaningful to us. And when we just sit on a couch and look at our phone or look at the TV or look at the tablet or look at the PC, our brain is like, you sat and watched screens all day and now you're sitting and watching screens. I'm not really feeling much of a difference. In other words, you're not recharging. You're just doing the same in a different guise. So yes, getting up and going up the stairs 10 times. It's a silly thing. It's a small thing. But that is a much wiser thing. That will give you more energy for the rest of the day. It'll make the day seem less like a slog. It's the wise thing to do. Yeah. I find that that situation you're describing as I was reading your book, I find that one of the real challenges is this end of the day feeling really tired and then being inclined to essentially do what I've done all day, which is to sit and look at a screen. Now, I'm looking at something different on the screen and it might be nice because I'm sitting there with my partner and she's rubbing my back or I'm rubbing her feet. I mean, there's good parts about it. And yet, this attempt to continue to propel myself out into life when I'm tired, I feel like this is the challenge that I keep having to push on and wrestle with at my age, or maybe it's just the age we are all in. But here's the thing. Let's set the bar in a reasonable place. Yeah. You don't need, at any age, to get in the car, drive 20 minutes to the gym, do an hour-long workout, drive 20 minutes back home if you're really wiped out that day. It would be good to do once in a while, a couple of times a week. but 15 minutes can do it because what you're trying to do is to give oxygen to aspects of your identity aspects of your personality that do not get expression during the workday so if you're a creative and you're not using much of it working on your novel for 15 minutes will get some of those juices flowing doing the little bit of painting doing a little bit of gardening you know if you're an extrovert and you've been in you know just in meetings and meetings and meetings which are not a social thing. You haven't interacted socially. You've interacted in all kinds of ways, but not socially. Then actually doing a video catch-up with a friend for 20 minutes can get you going again. So be reasonable in what you're doing, but do it. Because the other thing is I say to people, a lot of times when I'm giving talks, I'll ask the audience, I'll say, what time does your workday end? And the hands go up, and this one says 6 o'clock for me. I leave the office at 5, I shut the laptop at 6, you know, I stop with emails at 7. and I'm like, that's not when your workday ends. Your workday doesn't end when you leave the office. It doesn't end when you finish your emails. It ends when you stop thinking about work and start thinking about whatever you're doing in your personal life. So if you're ruminating about work, you're still working. If you're worried about this thing that's happening at work, you're still at work. And so, you know, you need that distinction because to not be at work, you actually have to be somewhere else and that means at home And then you need to be engaged in whatever it is you're doing. And you can't be engaged in two things at the same time. If you're thinking about work, you're actually, you know, as much as your partner's rubbing your back, you're checked out. You're not getting the actual benefit of it because you're not focused on what that feels like, the connective part of it and how nice of her to do that. You're not focused on that. You're just replaying the thing that needed to happen today that didn't happen and da-da-da-da-da. So, you know, that's the idea of like, you know, we need to be, you know, more aware of what's happening. If you're thinking about work, you're still at work. And if you're home, then what are you doing? And is that the best thing for you to be doing? And by all means, take a night where you're vegging. But it can't be every night. Right. I think that's the trick is just to, for me anyway, that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to have some variance. I'm trying to say like, okay, can I get 30 minutes of playing guitar in before I start to veg out? Can I spend two nights a week where I actually do get out of the house and go somewhere and do something? you know, to keep the balance. Let's talk about this idea though, that you just talked about, which is that our workday ends when we stop thinking about work. I want to explore it from a couple of different options. The first is simply, you've got a chapter in the book where you talk about how a client of yours called it the blitz, right? The nightly intrusion of work thoughts. And the very simple delineation is that if you're thinking about work, you're still working. But there's a subtlety in there also, I think, which is often what is the nature of the thoughts that I'm having? You talk about rumination as being sort of the replaying of thoughts. Talk to me about what rumination is to start and then we can kind of broaden out from there. What rumination is, is that you are processing, supposedly processing, the upsetting, distressing, angering, unfair, whatever events of the day, the distressing things that you haven't had a chance to process. Or maybe you have, but you're replaying them. You're thinking about the moment your co-worker said something really rude to you about how your boss kind of chewed you out in the meeting, the client that yelled at you and you really need that client so you had to tolerate it and how annoying that was. and you're not thinking about it in a productive way. You're actually just replaying the upsetting event. So for example, and people literally do this, you might spend a good hour imagining that client yell at you and then fantasizing about, I wish I could have said this and I could have said that and if I would have been able to respond, I would have said this to that. You just had a fantasy conversation for an hour, which you're never going to have because the moment passed and you're not going to do it anyway because you need the client. But in doing so, there might have been a few moments of satisfaction of the aha, the mic drop moment where you figured out I'm going to put them in their place. But what you actually did is you just reactivated the whole distress of the event. You just lived the upsetting thing over and over and over again. So it was upsetting when it happened. And now you're diving in voluntarily slightly, because it's not voluntary necessarily, but you are indulging it over and over, like you're reliving the worst moments over and over and over and over again. And it's very, very unproductive. It very damaging You flooding your system with stress when you doing it The research says that the more you ruminate about these kinds of things after work the poorer your sleep will be The more likely you are to eat unhealthy foods for comfort, the worse your mood will be, the more checked out you'll be in whatever else you were doing. And over time, the more predisposed you will be to cardiovascular disease. And people can ruminate about these distressing, upsetting pressures from work for hours in the evening. They can spend the entire evening. I mean, how many of us have had to rewind the thing because I have no idea what's happening right now? And then you start, oh my goodness, it's been half an hour that I haven't been paying attention to this. Or you're reading something and suddenly like, wait, who's this? I have no idea what's happening. Because you were completely checked out. And your family can tell, your kids can tell, your partner can tell because they're talking to you and you have the look, teenagers do this glazed thing like, I might be looking at you, but I am somewhere else. It's very, very damaging. and you can think of it as unpaid overtime because you're at work. You're having all the stresses of the work because you're reliving them, but you're not getting anything done and no one's paying you. So what are you doing? Do you know what I mean? And rumination, it's habitual. We can do it for a long, long time. Some people can do it for 10 hours a week. That's an extra day and plus at work in a damaging way, not accomplishing anything. But it feels compelling. It feels like, oh, I'm thinking through things. That seems important. And these are intrusive thoughts. That's why that person, the client in that story called it the blitz because it's like it's external. You might not want to. You might be desperate to switch off. But it just occurs to you and then you start thinking about it. It occurs to you again and you start thinking about it. That's what's really tough. So you really need, when you're ruminating about work like that, you really need a game plan about how to stop. That requires you to pause whatever's going on and be like, I need to address this. because they're mechanisms, they're tools, I give them in the book, for how to stop that from happening. But it requires mindfulness, you actually have to do certain things, and you have to be on it. Because otherwise, you know, like, again, it can happen, and then at three o'clock in the morning, it can happen again. And then, you know, like, literally, when something's really upsetting, you know, at work in that way, it can go on for weeks. Like, people who didn't get the promotion that they wanted, somebody else got favored over them, it can stew about it for weeks. So let's introduce a little bit more nuance into that because I don't think the answer you're saying is just stuff whatever it is you're thinking or feeling away all the time, avoid. So when do we know the difference between processing usefully and ruminating? or said slightly differently. Like for myself, there are times that I have thoughts about work that I'm like, I've thought this 55 times already and I'm covering no new ground. For me, that's rumination. There are other times I'm thinking about something work-related. I may not be at work, but it feels like something good is happening. It feels like I'm uncovering new territory. It feels like I'm unlocking something. It feels emotionally positive to me. So I know it's not just thinking about work. I think it's in how we are doing it. How do we tell the difference? And if we do recognize that we are ruminating, it seems like maybe on some level there's something that we have to process that we haven't yet. So what do we do? What are some of these steps? There might be something we have to process. There might not be. There might not be something we can do about it. In other words, that's the tricky part. Now look, you know you're ruminating because it's not just that you're replaying the upsetting event. You are feeling it viscerally. In other words, if the event was really angering, outraging, and unfair, you will feel the resentment. You will feel the stress of it. You will feel the frustration of it viscerally. That's how you know you're ruminating because you're activated like you feel it in your body. When you were talking about that thing you were doing, you were thinking about work, and you were treading new ground, you were in your head, you weren't in your body. You were problem solving or thinking creatively. That is good. Now, again, whether you want to do that after hours, it's fine. Agreed. Different question. And problem solving eases stress. When something's troubling you and you're trying to figure out, well, what can I do about it or what direction should I go with this or what would be a good way to kind of think of it or reframe it, then you're actually trying to figure something out. You're problem solving. You're thinking about actions that you can take. you're thinking more creatively, that has been shown to reduce stress because whatever it is that's troubling you, you're actually unraveling the knot, right? With rumination, you're just banging on the same knot over and over again. You're just like picking at a scab, at an emotional scab and reactivating the wound. So that's not productive. And indeed, one of the ways you manage rumination is you turn the upsetting thing into a problem-solving question into a question that needs to be resolved. So if it's about the client that yelled at you and you kind of have to tolerate it, the question then becomes, how do we need to manage this client going forward? Do I need to talk to them and set limits with them? Would that be productive to do now? Should I wait actually and wait for the next time they want to start raising their voice and do it then? And if I want to do it then, what's the most respectful way that I can do it that won't cost me the client? What's the threshold for action that I should anticipate. Let me think of the language that I can use. Maybe I should shoot them an email and make some kind of reference to it. Like you're trying to figure it out. When you're doing that, again, you're in your head, you're not in your body because you're actually thinking. And once you figure it out, then okay, I don't need to keep obsessing about what the client did because now I know what I'm going to do about it, if anything. And maybe the result is, okay, there's not much I can do with that client because they're super sensitive, they're super reactive. so what i can then figure out is the next time i have a meeting with them what kind of support can i line up afterwards because i'm going to need to vent you know like who can i line up to be ready to talk to that i can go at a meeting with that person again i need to tell you they were in great form you know like what kind of bingo card can i make with all the insults that they throw to see at least let me amuse myself if they're gonna like you know bingo that was very good you did all the nasty things. You know, like find ways to deal with it. That eases stress. You've got a couple other approaches. So one is you convert these ruminative thoughts into productive problem solving. Another approach you say is sort of weaken the emotions by reframing them. What are a couple reframes that are easy to use in this case? So what fuels the rumination is not the angry client, angry, the unpleasant client, hostile client, but the emotions that that evoked in us. So it's the upset, it's the embarrassment, it's the outrage, it's the resentment. So if you can reduce those, if you can reduce the emotional intensity that you have about those things, then the urge to ruminate lessens. So how do we reduce emotions? How do we regulate our emotions? Well, there are many ways we do it. We can suppress them, that's not the most effective way to go, or we can reframe them in a way that makes the incident less toxic to us. For example, with the hostile client that I just mentioned, I can reframe that as, oh, you know what? This one was the last straw. They actually crossed the line in what they did. And luckily, it was a Zoom call that we were recording. So now I actually have evidence to go to my boss, who can then go to their boss. Or now I have some kind of evidence that allows me to actually do something about this. Or like, this time it was so bad that I do have grounds. And I'll do it delicately, but I can actually act because they literally, now they stepped in it. They went too far. Or now they just alerted me that I've been putting up with too much all along. So great, now I need to figure something out because I was just like thinking this comes with the territory. But you know what? Being abused and bullied at work is not something that I should accept as coming with the territory. So that incident was useful because it got me to see things differently. The minute you start thinking and reframing the thing like that, then you're less upset about it because now there's utility to it. There was an opportunity in it. It did something that allows you to address the situation which you might have needed to address all along. Those are examples of reframing that makes the emotional load of the incident lessen, which makes the urge to ruminate lessen, which allows you to then problem solve and reduce it even further. The last one is that you say develop an absolute intolerance for ruminations by labeling them as rumination and fostering disgust towards them. This is something I trained myself to do years ago because I've been writing and thinking about ruminating for a while now. And because it's so unhealthy, because it's so toxic, and because it's so clear to me, and I hope it becomes clear to you after reading this book, that, wow, this is elective damage I'm doing to myself, like really elective damage that I don't need to do. I am introducing, not introducing, but I am tolerating something so psychologically and then physiologically toxic to my life unnecessarily. I am not okay with that. And it's fine that my mind, you know, our mind operates in such a way that it's going to bombard us with these ruminations, I'm going to campaign against it. I'm not tolerating it. So now in stressful periods in my own life, I'll ruminate. And by ruminate, I mean I will get the thought, the intrusive thought will occur. I'll start to go down the rabbit hole with a few steps. I will catch it really quickly, and I'll be like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not doing that. I am not indulging that. I'm not letting that person into my brain or into my evening. if it's usually about a person. I'm not letting that person into my evening. I can't stand that person. I don't want them at home with me. I'm not giving them stage time in my brain. I'm not indulging that thought. So I catch it quickly and I react quickly with disgust, I expel it. And that's the place you want to get to. Once you are clear about what's rumination and what isn't, once you're clear about like, ugh, I don't want these people in my head, then you can develop the antipathy and it'll really help you have a more quicker reaction and a sharper reaction to not indulge. Yeah, I think one of the other things that I tell myself that really helps me with it also is that every time I do it, I make it more likely I'll do it again. That's true though. I recognize the repetitive nature of it. I also treat it as like, get out of there quick. I mean, being a recovering addict, there was a time in my life where the thoughts that I had around using were so clearly destructive that I had no tolerance for them, right? When I noticed one was there, it was like, we got to get out of here somehow. There are ways of getting out of here that might be more constructive than other ways, but any of them is better than being right here. And I feel similar about these rumination patterns in the same way that like, okay, I love some of the things you have in here like puzzles, counting backwards by sevens, memory tasks, you know, little things that we can do to give our brains something to do. My favorite is the alphabet gratitude game where I try and think of something I'm grateful for that starts with A and then something that starts with B. Or I'll pick a song I like that starts with A and try and hear it. But if that's not working, I'm like, any distraction right now – I mean, again, within reason – is better than sticking around with this particular thought pattern. So I agree. I have a very low tolerance for it. It doesn't mean I don't do it. I try and recognize that like, this isn't going anywhere. You know, when I talk about the ways work invades your life, this is how work invades your thoughts. And if you think about this is work invading my thoughts, this is the most obnoxious people that I don't like, because it's usually those are the ones you're ruminating about, invading my thoughts, invading my home, invading my evening. I'm sitting here next to my partner and they're in my head. if you see it that way and you get you know appropriately turned off annoyed disgusted then you develop an intolerance for this unpleasant thing now again i use the signal if you're ruminating about it ask yourself first the question is there something i need to figure out there yeah you know like sometimes it's just no my boss does this thing and there's nothing i can do about it and it's just very annoying each time there's no more for me to figure out and then you want to use distraction. But ask yourself, is there something you need to figure out? Let me figure it out. But if not, mm-mm-mm. Yeah. Yeah. My question is just always, is this useful, right? Is this actually in any way useful to where I want to be? Right. Great question. Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn't quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why I created the six saboteurs of self-control. It's a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you're ready to take back control and start making lasting changes, download your copy now at oneyoufeed.net slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen starting today. Oneyoufeed.net slash ebook. Well, amazingly, Guy, I just looked at the clock and we are at our time to wrap up. There is so much in this book that we didn't even begin to get to. We didn't talk about rest and recuperation in any meaningful way. We didn't talk about knowing how much work is overwork. We didn't talk about how our jobs impact our relationships. We didn't talk about how to know if it's time to leave a job, which is an outstanding chapter. That's something so many of us spend, let's talk about ruminating, spending a lot of time thinking, should I leave this job? You've got some great tactics in there for how to do that. So we'll have links in the show notes to where people can get the book and find more about you. But there's so much in this book we didn't cover. It's an outstanding book. And I always appreciate any chance you and I get to talk. So thank you so much, Guy. Thank you so much for having me. And I really appreciate the conversation. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that's you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.