Mind Over Grind, with Dr. Guy Winch

Internationally renowned psychologist and author Dr. Guy Winch shares how a life-changing event in an elevator set him on his path, reveals the biggest misconceptions about work-life balance, and explains how to distinguish between true physical and mental fatigue, burdens vs. nuisances, using “stress thermometers”, and when to take email intermissions.

About Dr. Winch:

Dr. Guy Winch is an internationally renowned psychologist and bestselling author who advocates for integrating the science of emotional health into our daily lives. His 3 TED Talks have garnered over 35 million views and his science-based self-help books have been translated into 30 languages: Emotional First Aid, How to Fix a Broken Heart, The Squeaky Wheel, and Mind Over Grind: How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life. He is also co-host of the Ambie-nominated Dear Therapists podcast.

Guy gives talks and workshops across the globe and his advisory work includes the US and UK governments, Unilever, Nutrien, Apellis, other multinationals, and startups in the mental health space such as Alma, Unmind, and Circles. He has been featured in the NY Times, WSJ, Forbes, Boston Globe, Time, Psychology Today, Scientific American, and other major outlets. He received his doctorate in clinical psychology from New York University, completed post-doctoral training at New York University Medical Center, and is a member of the American Psychological Association. He lives and practices in New York City.

Learn more at GuyWinch.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Host
Dr Guy Winch is an internationally renowned psychologist who advocates for integrating the science of emotional health into our daily lives. And he spent decades studying how modern work erodes mental health. His new book Mind Over Grind, How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life, is a valuable mental toolkit for executives, entrepreneurs, young professionals and more, and we’re going to crack open that toolkit today. Welcome to the show.

Guy Winch
Thank you very much for having me.

Host
I read that you did a few years on the New York stand up comedy scene during your postgraduate study. That’s a really tough comedy scene to try to break into.

Guy Winch
Well it was actually after 9/11, I was already a functioning psychologist, and I felt, oh, I need some lightness in my life, because I’m in New York, and that was a, you know, a difficult time. And then I thought, well, you can’t go lighter than stand up comedy. The Gambit was, I’ll do it for a little bit, you know, once or twice kind of thing, just to try it out. But I did get the bug, and I really, really enjoyed it, and it allowed me to do something I think we all need to do in our professional lives, and that’s, inhabit a different aspect of ourselves, give oxygen to different aspects of our personality. So when I was doing stand up, and I did it after hours, you know, after work hours, I never spoke about being a psychologist that was important for me. Like people didn’t know that I was a psychologist. They didn’t know I had a career in that way because I wanted to be someone else, not not someone other than me, but a part of me that’s not a psychologist. It doesn’t have to be thoughtful or responsible, or that could just be silly and goofy and rude and whatever the thing would be. And that was tremendously useful and recharging for me, because I really got to inhabit a part of my personality that didn’t get much air time during the work week, and it felt incredibly refreshing, and for that reason, also, it was it was very counter stress. It was very de stressing for me, it was a great way to work out problems.

Host
So fast forward to what seems to be a very formative event in your life, and one that’s not funny at all. On the first anniversary of your New York practice, you found yourself in a stalled elevator. What happened?

Guy Winch
It was a celebratory moment, because it’s the first anniversary of my practice. I had thought and dreamed about having this practice for many, many, many years, and there I was in the elevator, just just going home. It was a hot Friday night, and but it stalled with a neighbor who was a doctor in the ER, and this man who dealt with emergencies for a living, went into a panic and literally started banging on the door, like, this is my nightmare. This is my nightmare. And then he and then he pressed every button, and I, rather than having compassion. In that moment, I wasn’t panicked about the elevator, elevator store. I got so irritated. I just looked at him and said, and this is my nightmare. And it was so offensive, and he was so angry and humiliated. The minute I saw his face, I was like, Oh my goodness. Why did I do that? And when I got home, by the way, after going floor by floor by floor. When I got home, I was like, What? What happened there? Why did I do that? Why was I so uncompassionate when I’m in the biz? Because I have compassion, and I also I could have calmed him down. I knew what to say, and I realized, Oh, my goodness, I’m so drained, I have nothing left. And that’s when I started thinking, I am burnt out. And it was very confusing to me, because I associated burnout with something that happens after years and decades. You know, you’re old, you’re grizzly. I’ve been through it all, and it was my first year, and so it was confusing, but it started to but I definitely was burnt out. And for good reason, I had worked, you know, really, without breaks and seven days a week. And I had, I had immigrated. So I was an immigrant in the country. I had to do what a lot of immigrants have to do that’s worked very hard, but it really taught me that burnout is not what it seemed to me that it would be at the time. It was not the stereotype. It can happen at all kinds of levels. It can happen to all people, and when it does, it’s severe the way that it impacts you.

Host
There is a lot of flawed advice out there on work life balance, not only in how we divide our time, but our emotions as well, including even things like the amount of passion that we have or that we reserve for our job. What are some of the most common misconceptions that you hear around this idea of balance?

Guy Winch
Biggest misconception I think I hear is people think. That work life balance is about something you do in the world. I will add two hours of yoga to my schedule. There we go. Balanced. We are where work life imbalance happens is primarily in your head, and it’s our thinking, it’s our approach, it’s how we think about ourselves and how we think about ourselves vis a vis our work. That’s where the imbalance is that work becomes incredibly primary for us. Our unconscious mind is quite primitive, but it considers work to be the most important thing in our lives, and for good reason. Work is what gives us all the things we need for basic living. It’s what pays our bills. It’s what gives us shelter, security, status, self appreciation, appreciation by others. So our unconscious mind thinks, Well, that’s the most important thing for you. Anything else is disturbing it, and so it really focuses us on work. So the balance has to be first corrected in your head in all kinds of different ways. That’s one misconception that people have. And the other misconception that people have is that by just doing something, by doing that extra, you know, yoga or the meditation, or like, I’m gonna, you know, go to the gym twice, or, you know, whatever the thing is, now you’ve fixed something. Work invades our thoughts. When we’re outside of work, it takes over our thoughts in all kinds of intrusive, invasive ways. So you can be doing something, but if you’re still thinking about work, you might be at the gym, but you’re at work. You might be having dinner with a friend, but you’re at work if you keep thinking about that annoying email, etc, etc. So that’s the misconception that it’s an action in the world where it first has to be an action in the head.

Host
You know, the covid pandemic and work from home certainly changed how all of us feel about work and home. So on one hand, it forced work into all of our homes. On the other hand, we kind of had to practice how to cope with that. Do you think it changed our idea of work life balance for the better, for the worse?

Guy Winch
I would love to say that the pandemic and essentially, and especially, the shutdowns that kept us working from home for long durations actually allowed us to practice, quote, unquote, mastering the division and the psychological separation between work and home. I didn’t see a lot of people practicing that. I saw a lot of people struggling with that, but I didn’t see a very intentional effort to create that separation. It was a survival mode, you know, it was like, and there was an understanding, and that’s what also like created it, you know, like, it wasn’t just us that, you know, it broke a boundary for it was our managers. It was our workplaces. Because they felt like, well, you know, before it was like, Well, should I intrude on home, on their home life, by emailing them after hours or by contacting them on the weekend, but now it’s like, well, they’re home working, so there’s no intrusion. That’s where they work. It just psychologically erased a barrier for them and for employers and for employees, and it’s never really been fully resurrected, unfortunately. So I don’t think it was for the better. I think working from home has many, many benefits, but I think it actually then imposes on us a greater burden to be more mindful and intentional about how we create that separation psychologically, especially because those barriers have been reduced. One simple example, and I was giving a lot of talks over the pandemic, and I was trying to say to people like, if you are working from home, it is imperative that you find a small, little corner of home you work from and work only from there. Do not infect your home with a feeling of work. Try and keep it maintained to a very small space. And then when you go into that space, you’re working. When you step out of that space, it could be a corner of a table, because there’s a lot of sharing going on. You know, it could be your side of the bed, I don’t care. But when you are out in that space, you’re working. When you’re outside of it, you are not you have to train your mind to, you know, have that separation too. And very few people heard it or followed it, you know, where they were just like pacing around, and they were working from everywhere. And so it really did associate home with work, and it’s an association that’s difficult to break.

Host
You know, the distinguishing characteristics between mental exhaustion and physical exhaustion are often very subtle, very hard to spot. Help us distinguish a little between what some of those warning signs are of the mental exhaustion and physical exhaustion?

Guy Winch
Well, that’s the problem. There aren’t really any. In other words, our mind absolutely confuses the two. When you come home after draining eight hours in the office, say, your mind will tell you, I’m spent. I need to veg out on the couch now for five hours. I don’t have physical energy. You do. You didn’t do anything all day. You sat now you feel spent. You feel mentally drained, but you’re not physically drained, except your mind confuses the two. I wish there were more distinguishing signs that I could say to people, ah, notice this. All I can say is, notice that you won’t be able to tell the difference. Just do the math. How much physical exertion did you go through during the day? And if you didn’t, it’s not physical. I mean, if you’re a weight. A or if you’re in an office where you’re literally running back and forth between and you’re literally, oh, look at 20,000 steps. Fair enough. But otherwise it’s just a confusion. So you have to dismiss this idea of, I’m too tired to do blank and actually do blank, because that blank part like the thing that we force ourselves to do, or do we have the notion to do, but we’re like, I’m too tired to get to the gym. I’m too tired to go to that dinner. Like, No, I know I said I would organize this thing that I like organizing, but I I’m too tired to do that. I’m too tired to go and paint or to the writing or do the making or do the whatever the thing is that I like to do. You have to override that instinct, because you know from experience, and that’s what you have to remind yourself of, that when you force yourself, and it will be forcing to go and do it, when you finish doing it, you will be more energized than you were before you left. When you force yourself to go for the run or to go to the gym or to go and do the making that you wanted to do, whatever the crafts are, whatever the thing is, then it energizes you, and you come back with more skip in your step, not less. The ROI is significant. You expended energy, but got more back from it, because you are not physically tired, you are drained mentally and that you can only do from knowledge, because your insides are telling you, like, no, not just veg, veg. There’s something great on TV. Watch it work out as an example. And a lot of people might be like, basically working out. That’s the only thing, no anything you do like that. If you want to get up in the morning and paint for an hour, or if you want to, you know, go and organize this thing and you’re or make this quilt, or, like, you know, whatever people do that that makes them, you know, whatever their hobbies are, whatever their passions are. If you go and you do that, what you’re doing is you are actually recharging your batteries. You are actually reminding yourself that your identity is not just your professional identity, it’s your personal identity and many aspects of it. So you’re actually giving oxygen to parts of yourself that need it. You’re inflating your sense of self in a good way. Don’t mean inflating actually sounds bad. You’re like, you’re giving oxygen to it. You’re like, reminding yourself that, Oh, I like doing this. It’s recharging in the morning. It will give you more energy for the work, that you’ll feel good about yourself, because you’re not just your work. And so whenever you do it, it has those benefits. You don’t just have to do it after work. And for some people, it’s like, I am a morning like I’m a morning person and I’m a writer. I like writing. I cannot do that in the evening because I’m a little the A it the mental drain is problematic. But I can write in the morning. So I’ll get up early and write in the morning. I’ll work out in the evening, because that requires less mental energy and more physical so that, you know that’s my balance, because that’s my chronotype. I’m a morning person, if you’re an evening person. I know writers were like, I cannot write before midnight, and I’m like, Well, okay, good luck. But, but, you know, because that’s difficult, but, but, but it’s like, you have to match to whoever you are. But, no, it’s benefit whenever you do it. A lot of people say to me, this is true of many, many, many people. They say, but I don’t know what challenges me. I’ve been working now for so long. I don’t have any hobbies. I come home, or I’m a parent, so I’m doing care, taking duties, like I have no idea what recharges me. And I’m like, excellent your task, then is to discover that. And you start by mental exercise. The mental exercise is you come to work on Monday and someone says, how was your weekend? Or come on a Tuesday, how was your evening? And you say, Oh, it was great. It was fun. And they say, Great. What did you do? What did you do? What would you have done that would make you say, Oh, that was fun. That was great. Start going through the options of what there is in life to do, what you might do on a weekend, what you used to do before you were working, perhaps, or what you used to try as a kid. Or the people who invigorate you, or who bring out another aspect of you, like do that, figure out what would make you respond? What were your response would be to the question, what was the fun thing that you did that made you say, Oh, it was a fun evening. And it’s rarely going to be, oh, I just four hours of television was tremendous fun. That’s not going to be the answer. It’s going to be something active. It’s going to be something that you actually did. I caught up with a friend. I did the thing that, you know, that’s how you start to figure out, Oh, those are the things that would make me respond and say, Oh, that was a fun or that was a good evening, because I actually did something. And then you need to work those in to your life.

Host
Kind of on the same vein, you know, a lot of us think that we have certain habits or certain coping mechanisms for dealing with work related stress, but in fact, a lot of the time, those mechanisms only serve to keep us trapped in a cycle of stress. So what are some of these flawed mechanisms?

Guy Winch
The flawed mechanisms are when we are really on autopilot, when we are really just pressured at work or pressure, downside, then we’re just kind of going through task and task to task to task, so we’re not actually giving thought to what coping mechanisms we are using. And coping mechanisms are a way of managing situations. We have a default way. We can’t be thoughtful about it all the time. Our unconscious mind makes that decision for us most of the time, but the decision it will make most of the. Time. You know automatic coping mechanisms, they’re not sophisticated. It will be about emotional relief. That will be the thing that when you have two minutes, or you have five minutes between meetings, oh, I know I’m going to surf social media, it’s not going to do anything for you, but that’s the instinct. Or when you now have to do this task, I don’t want to do that. Don’t feel like doing that. Let me put that off. It’s a bad instinct, because it’ll give you emotional relief in the moment, but then it sits then it sits in the back of your mind, and then as the time goes by, it creates more and more pressure to complete that thing that you put off. And so you found a way to actually balloon the stress from a half hour task you could get rid of to five days worth of thinking about it and waste of bandwidth on deep coping with the stress of not doing it, which is also a bandwidth waste for us. And so you have to be more thoughtful. You can’t be more thoughtful all the time, but you have to be more thoughtful some of the times. And one of the things you want to catch is procrastination, because that usually is about it’s never very we think it’s thought through. No, I thought about it and I’ll put it off. No, you didn’t really think about it. Because if you thought about it, you’d realize that I just expanded the stress that thing is going to give me. Let me just get rid of it. My recommendation there is to think of those kinds of tasks that you want to procrastinate on, not as burdens, because that’s the thing you want to put off. But there’s nuisances. Nuisances are small things like, you know, pebbles in our shoe, or flies. We shoot them away immediately. If you have a pebble in your shoe, you’re not on a Monday, you’re not going to say, I’ll take it out on Friday. You’re going to do it right away, because it’s a nuisance. It’s annoying. Think of the tasks as nuisances. You want to get rid of them. You don’t want to postpone them. So that’s one kind of example, but the other one is actually just to be more thoughtful. If you have a day that’s back to back meetings and they’re draining and some of them are stressful, what can you build in during the day? What kind of breaks can you build in that will actually give you breaks that would actually recharge you, not just the social media thing or, Oh, I know, I’ll do some chores, like, you know, I’ll go and I’ll order the thing that’s not going to recharge you. Like, maybe you do need to take a five minute walk. Maybe you called a loved one. You know, grandparents are terrific. They’re up and around. And a five minute call during a video call to your grandparents brings joy to them. And it actually is kind of joyful. Or, you know, if you have a pet at home and you have a pet camera, go look at your pet doing the things pet do like that’s very recharging. Oh, look, they’re so cute. Do something that makes you go. You know, that is actually makes you smile, makes you you know, that’s the but you have to be thoughtful in order to do that. So you have to be you have to disengage the autopilot, and then, you know, take, you know, do use coping mechanisms that are actually useful and do something for you. And look folding laundry, just as an example, can be quite meditative for some people and quite not for others. It’s very individualized, but I know that people who enjoy it. It’s a very rewarding task, because you actually it’s the folding, and you actually end up with something that was messy, that was made neat, and in clear piles. You see there’s a immediate feedback of this, of this productive, useful time, and you’ve made order in your world in some kind of small way. So that’s quite rewarding. It’s quite meditative. For people, it’s things like that, you know that actually quite useful to do as a break, because it’s also using very different mental muscles than your other work does. One of the mistakes we make is that, you know, where most of us sit and we face a screen all day, and then we come back, and how we tend to recover after work is by looking at screens all evening, and our brain is like, I’m having a hard time telling the difference between what you did all day and what you’re doing now, you know what I mean. And also, people tell me like, oh, and I’m watching the news. Well, that’s not, you know, calming. And some people will literally say to me, like, I try and relax, but you know when I’m watching TV, so I just watch the things that I like. And what do you like? Oh, the things about serial killers. I’m like, All right, so, but if that’s relaxing to you, great. You know, not for me. I’m not going to watch a serial killer thing, but you have to figure out. What does it for you?

Host
This is The Action Catalyst podcast, so we always like to give our listeners some really actionable items that they can apply right away. So this is going to be kind of a lightning round, because you’ve got a lot of good tools that we want to make sure people know about. So let’s start, if you will, with stress thermometers.

Guy Winch
Okay, that sounds way more sophisticated than what it actually is. It’s basically, you know, you just take a line, draw a line from numbers, from one to 10, with 10 being absolutely the worst stress you can have, and one being no or low, very, very low stress. And then you want to actually track how stressed you are during your work day. And the thing is that we tend to think we know how stressed we are, but we’re not great historians in that way. So we need to monitor it. You want to monitor it three times a day, like before work, during work, or after a stressful moment at work, and then in the evening, once, once you’re home, to be accurate, because we habituate to stress. We get used to it. So you’ll be like, Oh, I don’t know, but it’s actually quite stressful. You’re just used to it. What you want to do is, you want to find the video, or a couple of them clips, of you in absolute relaxation mode, you’re on vacation, you’re smiling, you’re happy, like, and we want to watch that clip for 1020 seconds to remind yourself, like, oh yeah, that’s what I feel like. What? I’m totally not stressed, so that’s my one. And then rate your stress, you know, for that morning, that afternoon, for the for the evening, do it for a couple of weeks and track how stressed you are. People are sometimes surprised, because they think it hasn’t been too bad, but then they’re doing it. But do it after that stressful moment at work and suddenly realize, Oh, that was a seven, and that was an eight, and the lowest I got, even in the evening, it was a four, because I was kind of thinking about work, and most nights it was even at five. Like, actually, the stress is there quite significantly. So it just keeps it just as great accountability and lets you know how stressed you’re getting. Because we don’t have a great thermometer, we usually find out by getting burnt out, but we kind of fall off the cliff, and then we’re like, oh, now, but we want to see when it’s actually mounting and when people are getting these high numbers, 6789, very continually. That’s when you want to be like, Oh, this is this is happening a lot. I need to actually do something. And usually you could anticipate, sometimes not. But even what is the stressful moment of the day going to be? It’s this meeting. It’s this encounter. It’s this client. It’s this this set your phone to remind you, and alarm to kind of remind you to mark it off, because you’re gonna forget and you’ve got to be too busy. But then just but set it so that you know you really trying to get real numbers here. So do it at the at the high stress point of the day, when you can see it coming. And those are the numbers you actually want to look at.

Host
So you’ve also got the overworking self care assessment. What is the overworking self care assessment?

Guy Winch
Well, what I found was like, when people talk about overworking, they always talk about the number of hours that we work. So, you know, the average work week should be 40. I say should, because honestly, for most people, it’s not. You know, between 40 and 55 roughly, is where you’re working hard, and over 55 or over 60 is where you’re truly overworking. And certainly the people who put in 80,90, 100 plus hour weeks on a regular basis, that’s extreme overworking. And when people look at, okay, what’s the impact of that? Well, it’s very unhealthy. We know that over time, it has a lot of health risks, cardiovascular wise, and otherwise, however, it’s a very individualized thing, like someone can manage 70 hour weeks well, and somebody not, and you might manage a 90 hour week well for this month, but a different context in your life, there’s actually something else going on that you’re not going to manage that well. So it’s not just about the number of hours. What you really need to look at is, how much is your self care slipping, how much of your and by self care, I mean, are you? Are you? Are you brushing your teeth? Are you eating nutritious meals? Are you exercising? Are you paying your bills? Are you fixing the broken light bulb? Are you organizing your your workspace? Are you taking care of your life duties? One of the questions I ask people, and it’s remarkable the answers that I get, and by remarkable, I mean distressing, is, when’s the last time you had a checkup, you had blood work a woman? When’s the last time you saw an OBGYN? When is the last time you went to the dentist? And people put those things off, you know, a little bit, a little bit, and then suddenly they’re like, Well, it’s been three years, and I’m like, what you can’t do that, you know? And there are all these stories in the press about, you know, big founders of different organizations that have come down with really big illnesses and things that they’ve really endangered themselves because they haven’t been monitoring their self care. So this, this assessment that I have in the book, will help you monitor and it will also alert you to when it’s slipping, because that’s when you want to take action.

Host
Piles of emails is a very common stressor. You’ve got an exercise for that in the book called red light, green light.

Guy Winch
Well the problem is not so much the emails that you have during the day, but you get bombarded with them after work hours. I mean, some surveys say that that managers and people in certain jobs like your listeners might do eight hours a week of emails outside of work. That’s a whole other work day that they’re not getting paid for, necessarily. The bigger problem with that is not just that they’re working all these extra hours that are unpaid. The is that it’s completely disrupting their evenings and their weekends, because they’re constantly checking their phone. Is there an email to respond to that? Let me just check if I have to respond to that. I hear that all the time. Oh, let me I just have to see if I have to respond to that. And but they’re looking at it every five minutes, and some they have to respond to, some they do not. And so what that does, it completely disrupts your ability to detach from work. You’re actually thinking about work or evening, even if your task switching and thinking back to whatever is going on. But, you know, but you’re not detached from work. You’re still in fight or flight, your your physiological systems are not recovering or resetting or relaxing, because you’re still in work mode, and it’s not necessary, because for most workplaces and for most situations, you don’t have to be of constant alert. It’s not a high emergency situation. You don’t need to answer within the hour. You need to answer once an evening. You don’t need to answer within five minutes of getting an email, unless there’s something very unusual going on. So the system is like, give yourself a green light to have an evening and take one break. And I call it an intermission. Call it an intermission. You’re taking a break from your evening. So you’re redefining it in your head as the evening is the evening. What I’m doing is what I’m doing. The little 15 minutes I’m doing for work to check emails and respond to them. That’s the intermission. And so before the intermission, there’s an orange light. You let the people know, or yourself, okay, I’m going to take the intermission now. Red light. You go, you do the emails, and then green light to resume your evening. What that does is it tells your brain the evening is the evening. That’s what I’m doing. The work is an intermission. I’m doing that on the side, as opposed to, I’m still working all day and trying to sneak in little moments of the evening, of you know, of life in between. So you encapsulate it to one sitting, if possible. You do it at one point. And by the way, and if your manager says to you, like, why did it take you now to respond? You do not obliged to answer that question beyond saying, I was busy because whether you were in a theater and you did have your phone off, whether you’re getting a massage, whether you were swimming in a pool, or whether you’re having an intimate moment with your partner, it is none of your manager’s business. It is your life. You’re allowed to be busy for an hour or an hour and a half until like, I’m sorry I was busy. That’s when I got to it, and then you’re also training them that I will respond, but not gonna do it in your timetable. It’s my life after work. I’ll do it in mine, but I will respond. I’ll do it responsibly. And maybe, if a situation you can’t wait an hour, let me know. But otherwise, absolutely.

Host
There’s so many of these great tips in the book and so many more that we won’t have time to get to today. But where can they pick up a copy, or where can they connect with you to learn more about your other work as well?

Guy Winch
The book is available anywhere they get books. Go to your independent bookstore. That’s always a good idea. If they don’t have it, you can order it. It’s available online, anywhere books are sold. It’s available both in hardcover, ebook and audiobook. I read the audiobook. If my voice isn’t annoying to you, you’ll be able to hear it on the audiobook, and you could reach me at guy, winch.com that’s my website, and through there, you’ll have links to podcasts that I do, of social media and all the other things you might be interested in.

Host
Guy, thank you so much for making the time for us today. It’s been a pleasure.

Guy Winch
It’s been a pleasure for me too, thank you so much.