1141: How to Stop Burnout Before It Starts with Guy Winch

Pete Mockaitis
Guy, welcome!

Guy Winch
Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat about Mind Over Grind. Could you kick us off with your dramatic story about being stuck in an elevator?

Guy Winch
Yes. So this is actually a story of how I learned, or figured out, rather, that I had burnout because I was a year in to my career, one year. So it’s not exactly what you tend to think of when you think about burnout. But it occurred to me when I was, that was a Friday night, I was coming back from work. I was in the elevator with a neighbor and the elevator stalled and shuddered and just stopped between floors.

And the neighbor actually happened to be a physician in an ER, used to emergencies, one would think, started hitting all the buttons, pounding on the door, and going, “This is my nightmare! This is my nightmare!” And I was so depleted, what came out of my mouth is I just looked at him, and I said, “And this is my nightmare.” And it was such a cruel, unempathetic thing to say.

I am a psychologist, I do know the right thing to say, “Here’s a person in distress. This is literally what I trained for,” and that’s what came out of my mouth. And so when you act out of character in a very substantial way, at least for me, you ask yourself, “What’s going on? Why would I do something like that?” And then when I got home, I realized, “Wow, I am just so drained. I feel like I’ve been doing this for 50 years. I just had nothing left.”

And I realized, “Wow, I’m a year in. That is a major problem.” And the thing is, you don’t learn about burnout in graduate school. At least I didn’t. You know, the PhD never mentioned. So it’s not as if it was something I was alerted to. It just wasn’t something that occurred to me. But that’s what was going on. I was totally burnt out.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a nice alert right there. So when we act out of character in kind of a snippy, snappy, unkind, impatient sort of a way, that could be a clue, “Oh, I’m not a jerk. Well, maybe. Maybe I am.”

Guy Winch
No, you qualified with the out of character part when you said that.

Pete Mockaitis
Out of character, right. So that could well be an indicator, a little sign, “Hmm, there may be burnout afoot here.”

Guy Winch
Burnout, you might be depressed, but there’s something going on, is the thing. Something is going on. If it’s that uncharacteristic for you, you have to ask yourself, “What’s happening?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us, that’s one sort of dramatic illustration, like, “Oh, something’s going on here.” Could you give us a couple other signs that, “Oh, maybe I need to pay attention here”?

Guy Winch
Well, with burnout, I mean, the primary symptom is exhaustion. And it’s the kind of bone-tired, this kind of deep feeling of exhaustion that, you know, it’s not a good night’s sleep will remedy that. Neither will a good weekend remedy that. It feels like every day is a slog.

You feel very jaded about what you’re doing. You don’t know if you’re doing a good job. You don’t necessarily care all that much anymore. And you feel so overloaded that every new thing that comes down the pike, every new, like, for me, it was like, I was, to the point where any new request someone, you know, I hadn’t seen for a while, “Oh, do you have time for a session?” I would get so angry or resentful.

Like, “No, I don’t. Just leave me alone. I’m doing enough.” It was that kind of feeling of like, I am taxed beyond what I have and I can’t. But you have to keep going. So you keep going, there’s this kind of numbness that develops.

And it impacts you inside the workplace and without. It’s not as if you can’t be burnt out, totally burnt out at work and be absolutely jovial at home. That doesn’t happen. So it’s impacting you in every area of your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, we’re going to dig into a lot of potential interventions, strategies, things you can do. But maybe, first, could you share with us any particularly surprising discoveries that you’ve made in the world of burnout that maybe a lot of folks haven’t heard?

Guy Winch
Well, one thing that’s interesting to me, and this is part of what I got when I decided to actually really start to look into this more seriously. I mean, obviously from year one in my career, I was alerted. But the pandemic was an interesting time because the pandemic, especially the shutdowns that happened at the beginning, there was a moment for emotional health in the workplace.

Like, all the companies were like, “Oh, my goodness, we’re so worried about now everyone’s virtual.” I was giving like, I don’t know, like 15, 20 talks a week to companies about how to maintain emotional health at work in teams when you’re all virtual. All the companies were flooding, their resource pages were here, resources and help, and everyone was aware.

And the discussion of work-life balance came into the picture. People were going on job interviews and asking, “What’s the work-life balance in this company?” Nobody would have dared ask that before. It’s like, “Why? Are you planning to slack off? That’s not necessarily making us want to hire you.” But, suddenly, that became legit. So awareness went up.

Companies were putting a lot of resources into it. And individual workers, both with quiet quitting and their own prioritizing, were trying to do something about work-life balance. And yet, as that was happening, as that moment was happening, work stress and burnout were peaking and have remained at all-time highs in the workplace. And that’s a paradox.

How is it everyone is so aware, everyone on both ends, both the employees and the employers, are trying to do something about it, and it keeps going up? That’s the thing. And so what got me interested is that. And what I found and why I wrote my book, Mind Over Grind, is that the answer is that it works a little bit like a pinball machine.

The work stress shoots out, but then it starts dinging around in your life within and outside of work. And so it makes it harder to, you know, you get home, you’re more likely to have a conflict with your partner, which is going to make you more stressed the next day, which is going to make you come home and ruminate about the bad things that happen, which is going to impair your sleep, which is going to make you more susceptible and more irritable, so more bad things will happen.

It just keeps digging around back and forth. And the ball of stress, as it were, remains in play for much, much longer, and that’s why the burnout is happening and the stress is so high, because it’s escaped the workplace. It’s now operating outside the workplace in our lives in all kinds of ways, some of which we’re aware of, many of which we’re not. And that’s why things keep getting bad, because unless we turn off all those dingers, not just at work, then it will remain problematic.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a spooky, scary picture there in terms of the cascade, the doom loop that one thing begets another and another and another, like an avalanche, snowball going downhill. So then what do you recommend? If we find ourselves in the early or the later stages of this kind of situation, what are the top things that we should be doing?

Guy Winch
So, first of all, I don’t think it’s a big if. In other words, the workplace right now is really difficult. It’s very demanding for many people. You don’t have to be burnt out to be susceptible to some of these things that are going on. And I’ll give you just one example.

If you have a very difficult day at work, something went wrong, you had a conflict with a co-worker, your boss treated you really poorly, you were one of the many people who were subject to either harassment, or bias, or bullying, or truly even incivility, which is incredibly common in the workplace, just rudeness, you are likely to come home and stew about that.

Ruminate is the word we use professionally. To ruminate means to chew over. You’re likely to come home and chew over about those things because they’re going to bother you, and you’re like, “Why would they say that to me? And why would they do that? And I wish I wouldn’t.”

And then you’re starting to, you’ll spend the evening like imagining having this fantasy conversation with your boss that you actually never have because he’ll fire you, but you’re like, “I wish I could say this to her. And I wish I could say that to him,” and all these mic drop moments that you imagine. It is going to be extremely difficult after those kinds of days to switch off and be present in whatever your family life, personal life is that evening.

Work will hijack your thoughts, and that is extremely, extremely common. And when it does, we are not aware that we’re being hijacked. We think, “Well, we’re processing. Isn’t that a good thing? Wouldn’t a psychologist say processing is good?”

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds wholesome. PhD approved.

Guy Winch
“Sounds wholesome. I’m thinking things through.” You’re not thinking things through. You’re churning. You’re spinning. You’re in an emotional hamster wheel. Thinking things through, by definition, means that there’s a start point and an end point. That end point is a takeaway, a conclusion, an insight, an action item.

But what you’re doing is, again, when you’re doing fantasy conversations about how you’ll tell someone off that you’ll never have, there’s nothing. You’re not doing anything there. But what you are doing, mind you, when you’re ruminating, is, number one, you’re flooding your system with cortisol. You’re stressing yourself out. You are picking the scabs off whatever emotional wounds that left.

So all the irritation, the annoyance, the upset, the insult that you experienced during the workday, by replaying it, you are re-experiencing all those things. You are adding hours of unpaid overtime into your evening. You are checked out from whatever it is and whoever is around you. So you’re actually doing a significant amount and you’re impairing your sleep. You’re more likely to eat unhealthy foods.

There’s just this list of things that are bad when you’re ruminating, and most people are not aware when they’re doing it, but it’s actually quite damaging.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so very clear. Rumination, bad. So how do we knock it off? Sometimes that’s easier said than done.

Guy Winch
First all, it actually is a little bit easier said than done, but it has to start with the awareness that what you’re doing isn’t useful. And the way you know that is, because when you’re trying to figure something out, that’s a mental process. You’re in your head. You’re strategizing. You’re thinking. You’re analyzing.

When you’re ruminating, you’re in your chest. It’s visceral because you’re upset again, you’re charged again, you’re angry again. And so you know it because, A, you’ve had that thought for the tenth time. You’re not actually getting anywhere.

You’re just replaying how upsetting something was, or your fantasy arguments, or like just imagining, or remembering all the other times they said the insulting thing to you, just literally replaying the greatest hits. That’s when you’re ruminating.

So, first of all, step one, catch it. Label it as rumination. Label it as unuseful and damaging thought. There’s two kinds of self-reflection. There’s more, but just for the sake of argument. There’s healthy and unhealthy. Productive, unproductive. This is unhealthy and unproductive.

The solution, therefore, is to convert the ruminating into healthy and productive self-reflection. Healthy and productive self-reflection has a point. It has a goal. So, in this case, whatever it is that’s troubling you, ask yourself, “What is the problem I need to solve here? Is it, do I need to speak to that co-worker who was so dismissive of me, etc.? Should I go to Human Resources to talk about the bias or the harassment or the bullying?”

“Do I need to get support from somebody else, etc? Do I need to address this rudeness? How do I avoid that coworker who constantly upsets me when I see them?” You’re asking questions that you actually need to figure out and answer. Now, what you’re thinking is actually productive because you’re trying to actually figure something out and know how to handle it and have takeaways from that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really useful distinction there. We’re thinking it through, so we’re landing somewhere. It’s a plan, a decision, a next to action. I think some of the trickiest parts for me with rumination, because I love figuring stuff out, strategizing, and problem solving, getting to the bottom of stuff. But I think what I have the hardest time is when it seems like there’s not really a solution to the external circumstances.

Guy Winch
Give me a “for instance.”

Pete Mockaitis
So, I guess, but perhaps the for instance would be you have had conversations with a manager or colleague about the matter at hand multiple times. And they have demonstrated a fundamental unwillingness to adjust their behavior in a manner that you would like.

So, in a way, you’re kind of stuck. And I guess, in a way, we always have a choice, “Well, you could leave. You could find a new workplace.” And I guess that’s true, but sometimes, at least in the short term…

Guy Winch 
That’s a nuclear option, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis 
Yeah, in the short term, we find ourselves somewhat stuck like, “Well, you know what, at the moment, I need this job, I need this income. Boss is not responding to my previous requests to adjust their behavior in a way that would accommodate me. He’s done this again and again, and it makes me angry again and again. So it’s not as though I’m going to arrive at a solution or a magical script. All right.”

Guy Winch
No, but here’s what you can arrive at. Yes, but here’s what you can arrive at. There are numerous things you can do. Number one, you can look around and say, “Who does this boss not do it to? Why do they not do it to them? Is there something I can learn from that?”

Number two, “If they’re doing it to everyone, it’s something about the boss. Is there a way I can understand why the boss does this that would make it easier for me to tolerate? Because I have a little bit of understanding, insight into what’s going on with them. Are they simply obtuse, so they’re not aware that they’re being insulting or annoying?”

“Is it that that’s what they get from their manager and, therefore, they’re just passing that down the line? Is it that they have a really difficult home situation, and so they just take out their frustrations and anger on their subordinates at work?”

You can try and reframe the situation so that it’s less activating for you. If you’re stuck there, “How do I make this feel less annoying? It’s going to occur. How do I avoid some of it? And how do I think of it in a different way?”

For example, some people – I’m just giving this as an example – literally do not have the emotional intelligence to recognize and realize when they’re doing something that’s rude and offensive. They literally don’t get it. You can try and point it out, it doesn’t stick. It’s not something that crosses their radar in that way. It’s just they don’t have the apparatus to.

And so it’s not necessarily on purpose. They don’t realize they’re being that difficult. And if you think about it that way, for example, then it’s like a blind person who just like stepped on your foot because they didn’t see it. Like, it’s hurtful, it’s annoying, but there’s only so angry you can get.

So, in other words, I’m just giving examples of you, if you can’t change it, then change how you feel about it so that you don’t have to live in that anger and resentment as much as you have been. Do you know what mean? So there’s always something that you can do to try and better your situation.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us some cool examples of reframes that have been really transformational for folks and within their situations?

Guy Winch
Look, it can be as simple as, “I’ve tried so many ways to manage the situation and I’m not managing. Therefore, this is the sign that I actually do need to look at the nuclear option because I’ve done everything before.” But, again, that’s a nuclear option of leaving.

But another one is to understand, you know, people sometimes when they get the backstory of who the person is, why they’re behaving the way they are, develop some empathy for them. They understand that, “Oh, they have a sick kid at home. They’re stressed out beyond belief.”

“They got passed up for this promotion and they’re really, really hurting. And, no, they’re certainly not managing it well, but they’re not, you know, skipping through the tulips while they’re making all of us eat crap.” You know, that’s not the case. Empathy, perspective taking so that you get some kind of empathy and insight for the person and why they’re doing it often helps mitigate the feelings of frustration and anger.

But often it is something that’s more workable because, you know, again, if you see the person doing it to everyone, then it’s about them, but sometimes it’s just, it’s not to everyone, “So what’s different? What am I doing to step on someone’s toes to make them, to make me a target for them?” I’m not talking about bullying, but just about a boss who’s not treating you nicely or respectfully.

Is it bias? And if it’s bias, you can’t do anything about it. You can think of collecting other incidences of it, finding people who will join with you, and consider going to HR. But, again, that can be dangerous and iffy depending on the company.

But just look first at your behavior. Because a lot of people will say to me sometimes, “You know, I realize that every time I come up with an idea, my boss shoots it down. But the only place I come up with these ideas are in these meetings. And he doesn’t like it when people come up with great ideas in the meetings because they’re supposed to be about his ideas, not our ideas.”

“I need to go to him on the side. And then when I go to him on the side, he’s actually, one-on-one, he’s much nicer than in the public forum.” You know what mean? Like, you have to try and figure out the method behind the madness, and that can really transform your perception and your strategy and your handling of the situation.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you share a specific story of a person who had a transformational reframe?

Guy Winch
In my book, I follow five characters, you know, clients of mine throughout. And this is a reframe in the other direction, mind you, but the first person I talk about is a guy called Tony. He’s a trader and he’s in this political fight… he’s the number one trader on the desk with the number two trader on the desk.

And he keeps thinking that the number two trader on the desk is just jealous of him and tries to sabotage him or tries to kind of turn people against him. And so he kind of doesn’t take it seriously enough. When he understands what the number two person on the desk is trying to do is actually oust him entirely, literally sabotage his entire career, that’s transformational for him.

He suddenly looks at everything with very different eyes, with very different levels of alarm, which are appropriate. And sometimes we don’t fully understand the reasons other people at work are doing what they’re doing. And we really need to, because that will reveal a chess game that we might not be aware of.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really powerful. And I’m thinking about movies like “Fight Club” or “The Sixth Sense” where there’s a big reveal that sort of recasts your understanding of everything. It’s like, “Oh, now I have to watch this movie again.” And so that is big in terms of uncovering those things really does bring new things to light.

And what’s so interesting is when, I think a lot of times, when someone’s behavior just doesn’t make any sense to us, it seems there’s often another element that when you understand that, it is that unlock. Like, “Oh, so that’s why you do what you do.” “Oh, you’re trying to oust me.” “Oh, you have a super stressful home life situation.” “Oh, you’ve always learned that had to be tough in certain situations.” “Oh, you think this meeting is about you looking like a brilliant, innovative, creative genius. Okay.”

So it’s like when we’re flummoxed by others’ behavior, there may very well be just a missing piece of the puzzle that can put everything into the right perspective.

Guy Winch
Right. Another example is, “Oh, your self-esteem is so fragile, you are so incapable of owning a mistake that you will, literally, look to blame the most ridiculous people rather than take any ownership or responsibility because you’re constitutionally too threatened by that notion,” let’s say.

Pete Mockaitis
You might not say that out loud to your boss, unprompted.

Guy Winch
No, but it would be useful to understand because then any kind of effort to try and make them see or make them get is like it’s going to be useless and a waste of energy because they cannot, they will not take ownership of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, this is useful. Thank you. Well, in your book, you’ve got a fun structure in terms of chapter one, Monday morning, chapter two, Monday afternoon, kind of like moving through a work week. Can you share with us what are some of the most transformational practices, not just in the moment when, oh, rumination is striking, but, in general, to have our mind over grind?

Guy Winch
So when we have a difficult and demanding job, when we’re very, very busy, our tendency is, for most people, is, you know, anyone who’s gotten up in the morning are like, “I just need to get through this day,” or, “I just need to get through this week. There’s just so much going on. I just need to get through it.”

That kind of thought, or that kind of strategy, is problematic because what it’s going to do, what that means is it means you’re putting your head down and you’re going from task to task to task. You’re just getting through. What it means you’re not doing is you’re not actually looking at the week more strategically and more intentionally planning out, “How do I manage my energies through this week?”

“How do I utilize my time out of work to recover from this very, very difficult and demanding week? How do I break up the day? If I have 10 minutes here and five minutes there..” you know, some people literally running all the time “…where can I schedule those 10 minutes? What can I do within them that will refresh me a little bit rather than just keep grinding through and just praying for the end of the day to arrive?”

“How can I be more intentional in the breaks that I choose, where I choose to take them, what I choose to do in them, because the default is going to be serve social media or distract myself in some way, as opposed to doing something that will actually revitalize me even in five minutes?”

In the book, I have this whole section about mini breaks, like two minutes here, five minutes here, what you can do that will actually be useful, as opposed to what most people do that is not. So how we curate the rest period, the break period, the recovery options, is super important and it’s the last thing we think of doing when we need it most because we just put our head down and let’s just get through it.

But we need to be more strategic and more deliberate in how we do that. And that makes a huge difference because when we just get through, by the second part of the day, our creativity, our decision-making, our attention to detail, most of our executive functioning is depleted, is on the decline because we don’t, you know, we’re not computers, we don’t keep going at the same level until we crash.

There’s a downward slope that happens quite quickly. So unless you’re really planning for breaks that will refresh you and will revitalize you and kind of restore your functioning to a higher level, you’re not going to do as good work as you might if you are more thoughtful about doing that.

And the second part is what happens after hours. The more stressed and pressured you are at work, the more essential it is to use those times to recover. And the research shows the less likely we are to do that in any way that’s effective.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a huge nice bright light for us there. If you’re having the thought, “Ooh, just got to get through this day,” it’s like, you know, “Time out, you know, that is probably exactly the wrong thought to be having,” versus, “Where do I get my energy replenished? And I’m going to have to look harder for those opportunities given that there is a whole lot competing for my hours in this day.”

So share with us what are some of the most rejuvenating mini breaks that really go a long way for people?

Guy Winch
So, for example, if you’re sitting all day, and then stand up, go up and down some stairs, do some push-ups if you’re inclined to do that, do something physical for a few minutes, number one. Number two, you have 10 minutes. If you can take a walk around the block, if there’s any nature to be parked in, nature is very restorative. Just sitting among trees, even if it’s for 10 minutes, can really kind of refresh.

If you have a very difficult, you know, say, some people say to me like, “Oh, I have three hours of the most obnoxious client meetings. They always are so hostile and so tense and I have to smile through it because they’re critical clients. I always feel so like, you know, yucky afterwards.”

I’m like, “Great. That’s after those meetings is when you need to make a plan with a coworker to go so you can vent, so you can get support, call your grandmother with a smiling face. If you’re working from home, that’s when you bring the puppy over to get some cuddles. Like, do something to help you recover from the tension of those meetings.”

Meditation can be done in five minutes. If you have a very, very difficult day, like, “Wednesday’s going to be hump day. I just need to get through Wednesday,” what’s your favorite thing you can make yourself for lunch and take it to work on Wednesday?

So even though that’s the hardest day, you can look forward to, “But you know what, I’m going to have this thing at lunch and take 15 minutes and I really enjoy this thing that I’m bringing, and so I’m going to look forward to having that over that day and give myself the treat at lunch that day.”

Be thoughtful about what you can do so it’s not torture all the time, because that’s how the stress happens. We go into fight or flight, the workplace is a modern-day battlefield. Even though it’s not a battlefield, it’s a conference room, but it’s same thing. It’s a cubicle, it doesn’t matter. It’s like we’re on alert all the time. Our bodies are activated in fight or flight. You need to have breaks from that.

And if you come home and you’re ruminating about stuff, you’re still in fight or flight. Or if you come home and you’re so tense that, you know, everyone’s avoiding you, you’re still in fight or flight. So we have to be aware that that’s how burnout happens.

Our systems did not evolve. Our mental and physical body systems, you know, functioning, did not evolve to be activated like that for many, many hours, for most of the day, day after day after day after day. That’s never our evolution. Even in times of war, there was R&R. Nobody stayed at the front forever. And now we are at the front forever.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I really resonate with what you said about lunch. I have actually had days where, “Oh, my gosh, this day is so brutal. But you know what? I’ve got those delicious chicken pineapple meatballs from Costco. And, really, it’s like a bright light.”

Guy Winch
It is though, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Okay. Well, so you mentioned social media is the default. Guy, is your good doctor’s opinion that that is not an efficacious means of rejuvenation?

Guy Winch
No, it’s the researchers’ opinion that it’s not an efficacious means of rejuvenation. There are studies done about it. And, look, when you’re working, if you’re going to, if your social media, there’s two kinds, really, right? It’s your social, actual social media, what your friends are doing.

Tell me how many friends you have that post pictures of them looking absolutely harassed during the workday, looking miserable in a cubicle, crying in the toilets after they got chewed out by their boss. No one posts that. What you will see, they’re drinking Mai Tais on the beach or the time they went out with their coworkers and they’re all semi-drunk and having a great time.

Whatever the thing is, it’s going to make you feel like, “Oh, wow, everybody’s living except me.” It’s not going to make you feel good. That’s one type. And the other type is news and all kinds of things like that. And those algorithms, all of them, are slanted toward getting your attention and activating you and making you upset and outraged and angry, is what will get your attention.

And so they will feed you content that you’re going to be like, “I cannot believe that happened. I can’t believe this.” It will, literally, be activating in all the wrong ways. Relaxing, it will not be. No one’s feed shows like a Philharmonic playing casual classical music with aromatherapy wafting through your phone. We don’t get that. So that’s not going to be useful.

My phone, I don’t, you know, like I post on social media. I have somebody who does it for me, but what I use my phone for, I have trained my algorithm so that if I am going to do that, it is going to show me stuff that is going to make me smile.

And I can show you my phone, you can go to the search, the only thing it will show you is stand-up clips and puppies. That’s it. That’s all you’re getting. In other words, I’ve trained it, I’m not interested in anything else. If I’m coming to you, it’s for like a few seconds of relief. So that’s what it knows to show me. You can train your algorithm.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was just going to ask, because I find that sometimes when I turn to social media or news, what I’m really after is a quick hit of, like, a palate cleanser. Like, I want something that’s interesting, that’s stimulating, that makes me go, “Hmm.”

Guy Winch
Can you see that you’re going to get that on the news?

Pete Mockaitis 
And is novel and different. Well, I guess usually I don’t but sometimes I do. I think that’s the thing. It’s like the gambler, like pull on the the slot machine one more time. It’s like, “Oh, maybe this time, you know, I’ll hit something makes me go, ‘Huh, that’s really interesting.’”

But I’m gathering, from my own experience and from all the research that, yeah, this isn’t really a great place to to get what I’m after. So one approach is, you’ve just trained it, “Give me puppies and comedy and nothing else.” Are there perhaps superior substitutions? We’ve talked about nature and having a walk and some exercise. That’s cool. Any nice intellectual substitutions for social media?

Guy Winch
Yes, but what you want to do on break from work is you actually want to use the intellectual muscles that are not the same ones that you’ve just used. So, if you’re in a job that’s just very rote or analytical, you might want something that stimulates your feelings of creativity, right?

If you’re in a creative job that’s just very, very artistic, you might want something that gives you puzzles, or something that just uses different, you know, it’s like you want to use a different area of the brain. If those muscles are tired, let’s use other muscles and give them a little bit of a workout.

If you’re working from home, you know what’s great to do for five or 10 minutes if you can? If you play a musical instrument, play it for five or 10 minutes. If you’re a singer, sing for five or 10 minutes. If you’re a dancer, dance for five or 10 minutes.

Like, I know that’s not a lot of time, but it’s enough time to kind of, really, it does two things. Number one, it’s so different from what you’re doing probably for work. And secondly, it’s giving some oxygen to other parts of your personality and your identity that you don’t really get to express that much. So that’s quite refreshing to do.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Well, Guy, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Guy Winch
Yes, one other thing. I talked about the recovery after work, too. Our brain doesn’t distinguish that well between physical exhaustion and mental exhaustion. So a lot of people get home after eight, nine hours, let’s say even in the office where they sat all day and they feel, “I am wiped out. All I can do now is veg four to five hours of TV or shows or screens in some kind of ways, but I couldn’t move because I’m wiped out.”

You’re not wiped out physically. You’re drained mentally. And, in fact, doing something physical or doing something, and so they rest for four or five hours, right? They over-index on resting. Resting is half the equation. Resting doesn’t deplete your batteries further, but it doesn’t recharge them.

To recharge your batteries after work, you actually need to do something that you can’t do on a couch. Again, if you’re creative, you need to do the creative endeavor. If you’re a social person, you actually need to meet people and interact.

If you’re athletic, you have to work out in some kind of way. If you’re artistic, you’ve got to practice your art, you’ve got to practice your music, you’ve got to practice your writing, you’ve got to tinker in the garage, you’ve got to organize if you’re an organizer.

You have to do the thing that recharges you. Not every night is that possible. And people say to me, like, “Well…” I have an example of somebody in the book who used to do improv. And they’re like, “Well, I can’t do it. I can’t join a troupe, I can’t perform. I don’t have that kind of time.”

I’m like, “You don’t need a lot of time to do it for 10 or 15 minutes a day with your kids. Ask them what character they want you to be and be that character to fool around.” Like, you play the violin, 15 minutes of, and, again, it’s not a lot, it’s not enough, but picking it up and doing something is enough to kind of make you feel recharged again, remind you that it’s not all about work.

You know, the life part of the work-life balance is the you part as well. It’s not just add an hour of yoga. It’s about live. Be present in the life that you do have. Be present in doing homework with the kids and putting them to bed and having a date night with your partner. Hanging out with your friends. Be present in that.

But people are like, “No, I’m too drained.” So you have to remind yourself that you’re not physically tired. You’re mentally tired. Your body is deceiving you. Your mind is deceiving you into thinking that you’re physically tired.

And everyone has done that and forced themselves up from the couch and forced themselves to then do the recharging thing has come back with a second wind in which they actually expended energy but now they feel more energized.

Everybody knows the ROI is significant but you have to remind yourself of that because if you don’t, if you just veg all evening, you’ll wake up tired the next day, you won’t feel recharged or refreshed. So that’s the biggest mistake. And the more stressed you are at work, the more likely you are to fall into that trap. So you really have to override it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well. now could you share your favourite quote, something you find inspiring?

Guy Winch
So I forget who said it, maybe it was Carl Sagan who said, “The human brain might be the most brilliant machine in the universe.” And so that’s the quote.

“So the human brain might be the most brilliant machine in the entire universe…” Here’s my addition, “…but it requires adult supervision.” In other words, we have to be mindful. We have to be intentional. We can’t just let our mind be on autopilot because it’s smart and it’s brilliant, but not when it comes to emotional and psychological sophistication. It defaults to easy solutions.

It’ll distract us by just, “Go to social media. Just zombie out on the couch.” It’ll tell us all those things, and we have to be able to be the adult and to make the managerial decision about, “That’s not what I need. Here’s what I need. I have to get my ass off the couch and do this. I have to get the chicken pineapple thing from…” I forgot now what it was.

Pete Mockaitis
Hell, yeah, chicken pineapple meatballs.

Guy Winch
But, yes, chicken pineapple meatballs from Costco. “I need to get up and heat that up because that’s what’s going to put a smile on my face, even though I don’t feel like it.” You know, we have to do the adult thing and we have to manage our mind and not just let it be because it doesn’t make the best decisions for us when it’s on autopilot.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And can you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Guy Winch
One of the studies that really caught my attention when working on this book is that when one person in a relationship is really stressed out at work for a long period, their partner will start to develop symptoms of burnout because it transfers that substantially to the other people in the house.

And people, most people think like, “No, no, no, I keep it under wraps. I don’t stress everybody out.” Even when you don’t intend to, we do. So there’s one. I’ll just throw in one other one of the same example. When one person in their job is really stressed out, their partner is likely to lose their sex drive, because, you know, again, those things cross over and they impact our loved ones way more than we realize.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite book?

Guy Winch
Here’s one on topic. And I don’t know if this person has been on your podcast, Mita Mallick. Has she been on your podcast? She wrote a book that just came out a few months ago. It’s called The Devil Emails at Midnight. And it’s about difficult bosses and how to handle them, and that she had fallen into the trap of being a difficult boss herself, but it’s a great book about the workplace that’s also quite funny.

One that’s not on this topic at all, but just one that I read recently that I absolutely loved, it’s called Eve. It’s a New York Times bestseller, how female evolution drove 200 million years, how the female body drove 200 million years of evolution. It looks through at evolution, starting literally 200 million years ago, through the lens of women and the female body. And it’s remarkable.

As much as you think as you know about the female body, as much as women think they know about their own body, you will learn so much from this book. And it’s written in such a way that almost every page you want to pause and call someone and say, “Look what I just found out,” you know? It’s great.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Guy Winch
One of the tools that I use daily is gratitude exercises. I really believe in them. And the gratitude exercises is that you really write a paragraph about something that you’re grateful for every day. If something bad happens, you deal with it, you process it, but you also try and find some good in it.

It’s a great balancing act. We’ve evolved to be predisposed to notice the bad, the danger, the difficult stuff that’s coming on the horizon. We need to counterbalance that by intentionally looking for the good and the positive because that comes much less naturally to all of us.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a key nugget you share that seems to really connect and resonate with folks, you hear them quoted back to you often?

Guy Winch
It’s from earlier in my work, but that nugget is that we need to treat psychological and emotional wounds the same way that we do physical wounds. When we are upset, when we are injured emotionally or psychologically, there’s a wound there a lot of the time that we actually have to be informed about and do something to treat.

Much as we would put a bandaid, or a bandage on something, or an ice pack on a sprain, there are ways we need to recover from experiences like rejection and failure. And little exercises that we can do, that will be those bandages and ice packs and pain relievers. And we need to get sophisticated enough to be able to recognize when we’re injured and apply these small little tools and techniques to feel better more quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Guy Winch
GuyWinch.com is my website, that’s G-U-Y-W-I-N-C-H.com, where they can get links to all my social media, my books, and my newsletter on Substack. It’s only every two weeks, so it’s not too burdensome, but GuyWinch.com is the place to go for all of that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Guy Winch
Yes, I would like you to be much more thoughtful about how you are managing yourself during the work day. Make informed decisions. Be deliberate. Don’t be on autopilot. Autopilot will fly the plane into a cliff without you realizing it. So just be much more mindful.

Lift up your head and ask yourself, “What do I need this day? What do I need this week? How do I make this intentionally? What do I need to get from Costco that will put a smile on my face?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Guy, thank you.

Guy Winch
Thank you.