Your Job Is Hijacking Your Life: How to Set Limits, Decrease Work Stress, and Reclaim Your Evenings | Guy Winch

28:41I mean, literally, you know, literally those things happen. And then you're like, I see. You know, so those people really, those people have to do the math about like, is this a place I want to keep working? Or is this a stepping stone that I will take, but I will really limit it to this amount of time if I can't move within this amount of time? And that's when I say to them, like, do the math in which quality of life is a factor. how much in comp is quality of life worth? How much in comp is health and happiness worth? If it's less comp, but better quality of life, it is something you should consider.

29:18Don't keep your eye just on total comp and be like, I need to get to a certain arbitrary level because I decided that. Look at what it's costing you. And I guess what I'm pointing at, and what I think you were pointing at earlier is not just look at what it's costing you. Why do you want the comp? Like what is truly driving you? We tend to compare to the people who have more than us, much more than we do to the people who have less than us. So when you're climbing a ladder, you're always looking at the rung above you and saying, I could have that next if I did such and such and such. Some people look several rungs above them.

29:57Some people stand on the ground, look at the top of the ladder and go, that's me. And off you go to try and get that. People don't ask necessarily A, the why, and B, what matters. In other words, let's say you have it. How does it change your life? Because for lots of people, it doesn't. Because then they're just looking up at the next rung and going, now I have to go for that. And they're not even using the ability they have to do certain things to do those things. They're just putting those aside, deferring and pushing ahead to be in a rat race, to win a race that no one actually asked them to enter.

30:35Some of my clients are extremely wealthy. I've literally spoken with people who say to me like, yeah, but I need to keep grinding it out because I'm not at that next level. And I'm like, what's the next level for you? These are very wealthy people. Like I can't really afford a private plane yet. You might not be able to afford a private plane, but you can afford a private room in the hospital where you will be if you continue at this pace, you know. Yes, yes, yes. I'm laughing, but I see myself in this insanity. And I would just want to be honest about that. We're all in there at different levels, right?

31:12I mean, whatever, it's not a private plane for most, but whatever that next level is, it's just still there. Speaking personally as a Buddhist, it just speaks to the insatiability that the Buddha very astutely diagnosed in us, that it's never enough. It's very difficult to feel sated. And I think what you're asking us to do is to ask at what cost and to start to think about the accumulation or quality of life in terms of just to widen the aperture. It's not just about the comp. It's about your overall quality of life. Yes. One question I ask people, and it might seem like a very simple one, but when we talk about work-life balance, they say, oh, you know, my work-life balance, I need to work on my work-life balance.

31:56I'm like, terrific. I understand work. What does life mean when you say the life part of the balance? What is that for you? And people really stumble on that. I mean, they'll always start by saying, well, well, I'm going to add a couple of hours of yoga. And I'm like, that's terrific. Life. What does that mean beyond the two hours of yoga? Now, what I think it means is that you get to do homework with your kids or read them a bedtime story or have a nice evening with your partner or be out with friends and be able to be present when you're doing it or enjoy binging the show that you want to binge and truly be able to be present and enjoy it.

32:37It's being present in the small moments of life. That's the life part of the work-life balance to me. And yes, it means experiences. It means holidays. It means vacations. It means other things. But primarily, it means that. And that's what people, you know, like, I haven't defined. And so they, you know, they're not aiming for that. The springtime thaw is finally here. Flowers are blooming. Days are getting longer. We're saying yes to more plans and finally getting outside, running, walking, just moving again. It's the perfect time to upgrade your everyday go-tos with Bombas. Bombas sports socks are super comfortable and designed with sports-specific tech for running, cycling, yoga, hiking, you name it.

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36:50He was saying that many of his clients get very scared when he tries to take away from them the fuel of self-criticism and insufficiency because they believe that they need that in order to get anything done. And his argument is that actually you can be fueled by something much healthier, which is love, properly understood. Love of yourself, love of the world, love of your family, love of the people you're allegedly serving in your job, love of your colleagues. And that actually will take you much further. And I didn't like when he said that, but I have to say over time, that really has, in my saner moments, become the thing that drives me now.

37:36I have an issue with self-criticism in that I don't see the point of it. It is a very damaging practice. And the part that's damaging is not the self-reflection. It's not the accountability. It's not the responsibility. It's not the due diligence. It's the criticism part. It's the bullying part. It's the name calling. It's calling ourselves idiot and I'm such a loser. And how could I do that? And shaming ourselves and, you know, belittling ourselves. That adds zero value to anything that you're doing, and it will absolutely do a number on your motivation, on your ability to draw forth on your abilities and your skills and your talents because you're actually kicking them and diminishing them.

38:19What you need to do is be accountable. Strive for success. If things do not go well, by all means, look at why, what you did wrong, what you could have done better, what you can learn from it. But you don't need to wag a finger in your face in order to learn that. You will learn much better. You would gain much more if you didn't. People don't do the post-mortem after failures because they tend to do it so self-critically, it's so unpleasant for them, they try and avoid it. But if you weren't doing it in a self-critical way, if you were just doing it in a very emotion-free, just observational, due diligence way, then you would do much more of it.

38:57You would be able to learn from your errors much more. You'd be able to correct them. You're able to do better. And in doing so, gain a sense of control, gain a sense of agency, gain a sense of efficacy. And those are going to serve you. The critical part of self-criticism is absolutely damaging and unnecessary. And there's a lot of data to support where you're saying I often think about it as moving from an inner drill sergeant to an inner coach. A coach doesn't fail to point out when you've made mistakes that but she or he just isn't a jerk about it. And that's that's the crucial part. And again, there's research to show that people who have this kind of supportive but still honest attitude internally are more likely not less likely to reach their goals.

39:43Okay, I do want to talk a little bit about some of the specific strategies that you recommend in your book. Again, Mind Over Grind. One of the things you talk about is a kind of mindset shift, moving from like a threat mindset to a challenge mindset. Can you talk about what you mean by this? The challenge versus threat mindset theory is one of the prevailing theories in sports psychology. it contends that if you approach a difficult task if you approach the game day the big presentation you know the the track meet with a mindset of i am prepared i am ready i'm going to crush this i'm going out to win you're really going out to crush it to do the best you can that puts you in one specific mindset if you approach the same task which you want to win which you want to do well at but you feel you're not fully prepared you don't fully have the skills to do it so you're hoping to win, but you're really just trying not to lose, which is a nuance because you want to win in both cases, but in one case you feel that you are up to the task and the other you're questioning that.

40:46That makes that task seem more like a threat than a challenge for which you are equipped. And that difference in mindset has a huge verification in terms of brain chemistry, in terms of transmitters, how your body responds, how your mind responds, how your brain works. and it contributes in the, when you see it as a challenge to which you're equipped, you will do much, much better than if you worried about losing. Where you can see this most at play, to me, and you know, like in sports is in tennis. You can see someone leading and they're not making errors. They're, you know, they're doing everything really well.

41:27And then they start to fall behind and suddenly they're double faulting. They're making errors. They're just because, and you can see what happened in the head. It switched from a challenge mindset to a threat mindset to the, uh-oh, I don't want to lose. And I don't want to lose. It's a terrible motivator. It's a very different motivator than I want to win. This is the exact right day for me to hear you say that because I'm contemplating work project and I think I've been mostly motivated by threat and just the tweak of, no, this is a big, interesting challenge. And by the way, it could help a lot of people if I get it right, is a much healthier and creative and generative space out of which to operate than the, if I get this wrong, everything's fucked mindset, which is where I was.

42:11So thank you. To help us do this, to make this switch, you recommend something called the mind whisperer exercise. What is that? A lot of the times when people face a challenge and they start to worry, they start to say to themselves, oh, I can't handle this. This is going to be too stressful. they start thinking about it in a negative way. When you're doing that, this is what psyching yourself out means. It means conveying to your unconscious mind that you are worried about your ability to do something. And then your unconscious mind hears it and will make you more anxious, because apparently this is very overwhelming.

42:49So psyching yourself out kind of means psyching your unconscious mind out. Now, our unconscious mind is not a self-organized, self-conscious thing. There's no gremlin in our head that's pulling levers. It's automatic processes. But those automatic processes are impacted by our thought process and by the messaging we give it. When we're saying to ourselves, this is going to be overwhelming, this is going to be too stressful, I can't handle it, I just can't handle that, I just can't handle it if it happens again. you know those kinds of statements are really going to be a disservice to us instead we want to the mind whisperers to whisper to our unconscious mind in a way that it'll believe you can't say to your unconscious mind no i've got this entirely covered if that's not how you feel because your unconscious mind knows how you feel it's part of your brain what you can say to it is this is going to be stressful but i can handle it this is going to be hard but i've got it covered or I'll get it covered.

43:44This is going to be a lot of work, but I'll really prepare well for it. In other words, you're saying things that acknowledge the difficulty because you can't lie to your unconscious mind, but add the nuance of confidence that you'll prepare accordingly, that you'll be able to handle it. And that can help pivot you from the threat mindset to a challenge one. And then you can then add to it. This is going to be really difficult, but here's what I do when I'm giving, let's say, a really important talk, like a TED talk, which you've done. You gave a TED talk in Vancouver. I've given one too. It's quite stressful.

44:23You might have not been stressed because I was there when you gave it and you did a magnificent job. I was quite stressed when I did it. But what I said to myself ahead of time was, this is really stressful, but I know myself, if I can prepare well enough and I will prepare well enough, I'm really going to be able to do well and I can even enjoy it. Like I'm giving myself the message of, yes, this is going to be difficult, but I know myself if I'll be prepared, I'll be able to do well and I might even enjoy it. That's the kind of messaging you want to be able to give. I just think it's so powerful.

44:54And again, it's the thing I needed to hear specifically today. This idea that you, and we talked about this earlier, the idea that you can be your own coach. And it's not going soft. It's coaching yourself to greater heights than you would ever reach if you rely upon the old internal cattle prod punitive model. I am all for success. I want to be successful. I want to reach heights. I want the people I work with to be able to reach the heights that they set for themselves. I just want them and I want myself to be smart about how you do it. I don't know if I'm going to get through my whole list of questions I want to ask you, but another thing you talk about in the book is how to stop intrusive thoughts after hours if you're home and you're thinking about work.

45:46What do you recommend? How we typically think about work after hours is one of two ways. either we're figuring something out i have that presentation maybe i need to start with this slide rather than that slide you're actually you're doing work in your head that that's fine there's not a problem with that but the tendency we have especially if the workday you know was irritating or we were insulted or we were put down or dismissed by a boss we're aggravated we're upset about something is we are going to tend to ruminate about it we're going to just like spin and chew it over and over and over and i don't know anyone who hasn't done the following thing.

46:20You had a really difficult day, someone really upset you at work, and you spent three hours at home fantasizing about how you are going to tell them off in ways you're never going to do. You're never going to say that to your boss, but you have mic drop moments, and I'm going to say this, and in my fantasy, I would do that. And here's what you're actually doing in those three hours. A, you are stressing yourself out totally, and you are taking a very upsetting three-minute exchange with your boss and reliving it over and over and over. And when we relive emotional experiences, we reactivate the emotional distress we had when we went through them.

47:00If somebody thinks about the time they broke their leg last year, it's not going to make their leg hurt. If they're going to think about the time that somebody really, really disappointed and upset them, they're going to feel disappointed and upset. So when you're ruminating and you're just spinning without finding solutions, without getting any problem solving, without any action items, you're just replaying the distress and upset. Even if it's for the moments of satisfaction, which in your head, you show them, but you're never going to show them. Then you just ruined your whole evening. You were checked out.

47:29You flooded your body with cortisol and stress hormones because you're completely worked up. You've extended your workday. It's unpaid overtime that you just volunteered to do, and you got absolutely nothing out of it. yes yes i'm laughing just because i've done it so many times so in those moments what's the move the move therefore is to do two things number one to convert the thing you're ruminating about into a problem to be sold so the boss said this insulting thing do i need to do something about that do i need to talk to the boss and address it with them or if not what do i need to change so that doesn't happen anymore let me think of what happened in that meeting right before they kind of like did that thing to me.

48:11Well, they asked who was in favor of their idea and I wasn't for it. So maybe they were lashing out at me. Maybe I need to learn something. Or maybe I do need to talk to the boss. If so, what do I need to say? What's the messaging? What's the product that I want to get at the end? I want to walk out of that conversation having achieved what? And once I define what that is, what's the best way for me to get there? Or, you know what? I have a really important evening. I want to enjoy it with my family. I'm going to schedule half an hour in the morning to go over this thing and think about it so I can problem solve exactly what's the conversation that I have with my boss and now I can put it aside.

48:44Once you problem solve it, once there's an action item, once you're trying to resolve something, you're tying up that loose knot in your brain and your brain can let it go. And if it can't let it go, what you can also do is you can reframe it so it's less upsetting. What drives rumination is the emotional insult, the upset that you have. So if you can reframe the thing to make it less upsetting, then you'll be less activated to ruminate. You can be like, you know what? I was thinking of looking for a new job in the first place. I'm glad this happened. That was my sign. Tomorrow morning, we're going to start doing it.

49:19This was a good thing that that happened. Or yeah, my coworker stabbed me in the back. You know what? That's very good to know that now I don't trust this person because I would have trusted them and that would have been very dangerous. So okay, they showed their true colors. Now that's useful to me. You find a way to think about it that's less activating, and then you turn it into a problem that can be solved. And if none of those things work, because there's nothing you can actually do to solve it, and it's still upsetting, but you want to stop ruminating about it, the research shows that two to three minutes of concentrating on a task that actually requires all your bandwidth is enough to let the urge to ruminate pass, because that urge is a little bit like a craving.

49:56You just kind of let it pass. So you can do things like my go-to is Wordle, which unfortunately is good for only one rumination a day so you need more than just that but but but something that requires a lot of concentration this is great we've talked a lot here about shitty days at work if you've had one uh or even if you just had a busy day at work how do we recover at the end of the day so we're not doing unpaid overtime they don't ruminate because that's preventing you that's keeping you at work that you can start to recover at the point that you feel psychologically detached from work. The point that you stop thinking about work is when your workday actually ends.

50:33So you want that to happen as soon as possible. What recovery actually means is that we need to do two things. We have to rest and we have to recharge. What we tend to do, though, is over-index on the resting. You come home, you feel wiped out. I'm wiped out. I can't do anything. I need to slouch on the couch for three hours and look at whatever screens or doing scroll or whatever the thing is, because I am tapped out, I can't do anything. Now, we mistake mental exhaustion for physical exhaustion. You probably sat all day, most people. So you're not physically exhausted. You just feel mentally exhausted and you're confusing the two.

51:12If you just rest after days like that, you will wake up still tired in the morning, because you didn't deplete your batteries further, but you didn't recharge them. Recharging them, again, this is where the life part of the equation of the work-life balance comes in, is doing something that revitalizes you. And that's a personal thing, whatever that thing is for you. But none of those things happen on the couch. If you're athletic, you need to work out. If you're a creator, you need to do something creative. If you're a maker, you need to make. An organizer needs to organize. An extrovert needs to go and socialize or do it on the phone or do something.

51:47if you're a musician 15 minutes of playing an instrument of choice or singing whatever the thing is is enough to kind of take you out of work mode and activate other parts of your personality of your identity that are meaningful to you that don't get to be expressed during the work day and so that's the recharging part now it's very difficult that threshold of getting yourself off the couch to do the thing is difficult but everyone knows that when you're able to do it you come back with a second wind you come back having expended energy on something and yet you feel more energized than before you left because the roi on that is huge so it's both resting and recharging you can't recharge every day because you got home late etc you had duties with kids what what have you work it in during the week find the 15 minutes here the half an hour there to do the things that recharge you mentally emotionally in terms of your personality and identity that give oxygen to those aspects of yourself that are starving for it, that are meaningful and important to you, that will help recovery way more than just doom scrolling on the screen.

52:53So again, it just comes back to your main, one of your main thesis, theses is that we need taking care of ourselves, ensuring our own happiness and joy. This is not a nice to have, it really is part of succeeding. Yes. And this is also why I wrote the book, because a lot of us, We can't change our boss. We can't change our workplace. We might feel stuck. This is the boss I have, the workplace I have, the job I have. But there's so much more we can do when it comes to how we manage ourselves. And the delta we can create, both in our stress levels and in our quality of life, are significant. There's just a lot we can do more in terms of just managing ourselves that would make a big, big difference.

53:33And that everyone is empowered to do. There's a section in your book about how to avoid foot-in-mouth disease. What's that about? There are two aspects to emotional intelligence. There's the emotional intelligence we have, and there's the emotional intelligence that we actually use, how we apply it. And there are a lot of people who have it, but when they're stressed out or they're not being mindful, they're not applying it, and therein is the foot-in-mouth disease. They will go and actually tell their boss what they think because it didn't take five minutes to calm down before that. meeting, or they get so stirred up, they go and look for social support from someone, but they're not communicating clearly enough what they need from that person, so the person doesn't understand, so they get angry at the coworker, and that ends up in a conflict in terms of the support that they wanted.

54:19So the foot and mouth disease is this idea of that, you have to manage your emotional energies during the day and make sure that you're not getting depleted, because those emotional intelligence whoopsies can end up costing you a lot because you can really make mistakes both politically interpersonally that that in terms of how you manage up and down and sideways that can end up costing you so in other words doing all the things we've been talking about today taking care of yourself so that you have the resources to function effectively can just prevent you from doing stupid shit you later regret well said yes I'm a very hard person to buy gifts for.

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57:45you have a concept as a pair of concepts stress minds and uh speed bumps what do you mean by that this comes from when i ask people how stressful is your job you know like you know what what percent of your job is highly stressful most people will say to me 90 80 it's all very stressful all the time. And it's a very problematic framing to have. Because first of all, it's not true. I mean, it's just truly the very few jobs in which that's true, that it's 80%, that it's 90%. You have the boring meetings, you have the nothing burgers, you have the rote tasks that are not stressful one way or the other.

58:30But when you frame your job as stressful all the time, what it does is it puts you into this fight or flight mode all the time. Because your mind is like, I guess it's stressful all the time. I need to be ready incoming any given moment. So you're actually much more likely to be in fight or flight, to be in a highly activated stress mode throughout the whole day, to think about your job like that afterwards when you get home. It's such a stressful day tomorrow because you have this one meeting that's difficult. It's not the whole day. So the Stress Minds is an exercise to help people find where the actual stressful parts of the job are and what percentage of their day or their week or their month those actually comprise.

59:09And usually people find it's 10%, it's 20%, difficult jobs, it's even 50%. But it's not 100%. And when you know where the stress minds are, where the highly intense and stressful moments are, those you can start to problem solve ahead of time. A, by using emotional intelligence to kind of raise your coping mechanisms before you go into the nasty meeting, or by working in breaks or doing something, getting support, calling a loved one after a difficult thing. So you can, you know, get a breather or taking a walk around the block. You can, you can navigate that. You can see what things might, you might be able to delegate.

59:43You can, you know where you want to minimize something, you know, like in other words, if it's a meeting you have to have, but you let them initiate the meeting at 60 minutes, but you initiate it, make it 45. They won't complain. You know, like you can do things to help you manage that once you know where the stress minds are. Speed bump refers to something else. Those are the kinds of typical mistakes we make in the job when we're on autopilot. Because when we have a stressful job, again, we're on autopilot all the time. We just put our head down, go from task to task, meeting to meeting, thing to thing, without actually raising our heads and being more thoughtful, mindful, intentional, and deliberate about how we should be managing ourselves in those moments.

1:00:23And some people have blind spots. Some people, it's a lateness. It's time management. I always use this example like, how is it you've had a time management problem all your life and you haven't figured it out. Like you come to work every day. It's the same route. How can you constantly be late? It's a puzzle of time. What goes wrong there that you can't figure it out? You know, and there's all, and they're blind spots. That's what goes wrong. So the speed bumps are about ways to find and mitigate the blind spots you have, whether it's, you know, with time management, whether it's with ignoring politics because you want to be above it.

1:00:54I don't want to be in that childish, you know, like schoolyard politics of the job, But if childish schoolyard politics are going on around you, you can't hold yourself above the fray. You're going to be swirled into it. And if you don't understand what's going on, you're going to be victimized by it. You know, so all these kind of blind spots we have, there's a list of them and what they do, the damage they can cause. And these are the speed bumps you need to initiate in order to prevent them from tripping you up. How do we not let the stress of work impact our personal relationships? So that was a really tricky one.

1:01:29You know, there's research that shows, for example, that when somebody is chronically stressed at work, their partner can start to develop symptoms of burnout. There's research that shows that if you're really stressed at work, your partner will start to lose their sex drive too. because, by the way, you come home tense and preoccupied and so irritable that you can roast a marshmallow on you, then that's not very appealing to your partner to want to have sex with you. And it creates emotional distance, and without the emotional closeness, intimacy suffers. So there are all these ways that we bring home work stresses, pressures, upsets, distress, and we think we don't.

1:02:10We try, most of us try to not let it spill over and affect our families and affect our loved ones, but we can't be successful because, you know, A, we're not that great at turning it off. You know, we can't switch off. We can't be in the modern day battlefield of a workplace and then come home and suddenly be chill. I mean, some people can, but it's rare. Like, you know, you actually have to be mindful. You have to do things to help you de-escalate. You have to be aware of how the tension is affecting your family. Like I experienced it myself and I've seen other people that they come home and they're so preoccupied still with work, they're still in the fog of war, that their six-year-old runs up to give mommy a hug and mommy tenses because she's just not ready for it yet.

1:02:52And the kids can tell and the partners can tell and they don't mean to tense up like that, but that's where they are. They're sitting there, they're checked out. So we have to be aware of how profoundly that barrier, again, has been eroded between work and home and how we can bring all those pressures, stresses, distresses home with us and how we actually have to be very mindful and really make efforts to shield our family and ourselves because we're not doing ourselves a favor either from doing that and be much more mindful, intentional and kind of take the steps that we need to, to try and create a barrier that is less there than it used to be in the past.

1:03:30One thing that has been helpful for me is really putting my phone away early and not going back to it. I think ideally that would be absolutely lovely. It's so hard for people because for a lot of people, their social life is on their phone too. So they're cutting off the friend who's texting them with a funny thing they wanted to tell or the parent who's trying to reach them or whatever the thing is. So it's great that you do that. I wish more people would do that. It is very, very difficult for people. But you can have dinner-free, phone-free dinners. You can have, like I always say to people, if your plan is to sit with your partner and watch a show on TV, treat it like you're actually at the movies and turn your phone off.

1:04:10You're allowed to do it. You're allowed to go to the movies. You're allowed to go to Broadway. You're allowed to go to a show. You're allowed to have your phone off. You're allowed to live. So, but do it in that way. We talked earlier about how one might deal with one's boss, an unreasonable boss who's angry that we didn't get back to them within 15 minutes on a Saturday. Are there other things to say about how to set boundaries at work so we can take care of ourselves? Yeah, well, it depends on who you're setting them with. If it's with a co-worker, that's one thing. If it's with a boss, it's another.

1:04:41You really need to look at the culture of your workplace and what is customary and what is tolerated. There are, as you said, workplaces, I'm sure some of your listeners are working in them, in which there is no tolerance to push back against the boss in any way. it will absolutely put you in the next round of cuts. Or it'll interfere with your chances of promotion, of advancement, of those things. So there are, first of all, individual bosses who are that sensitive to any kind of boundary setting, cultures in which that will not be tolerated. You can still do it, but you have to be smart about it.

1:05:19Again, counting keystrokes, that notwithstanding, I have a section in the book which is a homage to you and your podcast called, it's called 10 % Slackier. And that is that when people, truly it's just a homage. And it's when people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week, nobody will notice if they take 10 % off. Unless again, they're being monitored in that way. People won't notice. They don't know what they're doing on the weekend. They don't know that took them a little bit longer because they actually took the afternoon to go to the kids game. And so, you know, like, again, if you're working 35 hours a week, that's harder to do.

1:05:54But when you're overworking, when you're over-functioning, when you're putting in all that face time, pulling back a bit is something that is much less likely to be noticed. And if you pull back and you use it wisely, you will have the same work product and your productivity will remain the same because you're being wiser about how you're using your mental resources and your cognitive resources. You'll be hearing from my lawyers about the copyright infringement. But other than that, I love 10 % Slack here. You also talk in the book about something we can do when we have the Sunday scaries, when Sunday is being hijacked by our fears about going back to work on Monday morning.

1:06:30Right. And for many of us, and you don't even necessarily have to have a toxic work environment or a difficult job, weekends, when you use them wisely, you are rested, you're more relaxed, you have more autonomy to choose and do the things you want to do. and then Monday comes and you're back in expectation of having to function a certain way, to work a certain way. Everything gets much, much harder at that point. Now, here's the interesting part. Why that happens is because, again, our unconscious mind, not self-aware, but trying to be helpful, sees that the next thing in the queue is work and its job is to prepare you for challenges.

1:07:07And so, hey, hey, work's coming, like winter's coming and Game of Thrones, work's coming, work's coming, but it'll start that Sunday afternoon. And that tension and dread, oh, the work week, work week, will really interfere and it'll put you into a bad mood. It'll really interfere with your ability to relax, to enjoy the rest of your Sunday, etc. So, but that's your unconscious mind warning you that that's the next thing in the queue. So, one thing you can do is you can layer something before that in the queue. If the first thing you do on Monday morning something you enjoy and you get a path an hour earlier to do it because I'm going to keep working on that writing project I really enjoy I'm going to have a quick coffee or breakfast with a friend that I haven't seen I'm going to work out because I love doing that before work it always you're doing something oh I'm wore a new out I bought a new outfit I'm going to wear that outfit to work and kind of look forward to people complimenting me when I get to the office whatever the thing is but if you schedule something like that on the Monday morning and that's what you tell your brain you're looking forward to, can't wait for Monday morning, can't wait to show up to the outfit, can't wait to see my friend, can't wait to do that workout or whatever the thing would be to work on my project, then your brain is like, okay, but what comes after that?

1:08:17The next thing in the queue is that thing you're looking forward to. It'll have a little less reason to sound the alarm Monday afternoon, Sunday afternoon or Sunday evening, because you actually schedule something and you're making a big deal out of it in your head. And again, that's the unconscious mind whisperer thing of like, you can set up your unconscious mind to think things by doing something like that and measure, oh, I'm so excited about this. I'm so excited. And you tell people around you, I'm so excited to see my friend Monday morning, first thing. And that's what you're mind going.

1:08:47That's apparently the next thing. So we're good. As we wing toward the end of our time together, is there something you were hoping we would get to that we haven't? There's one other topic that no one asks me about because it's depressing and difficult, and we don't necessarily need to get to it because it's depressing and difficult. This shows all about the depressing and the difficult. Tell us. It's about the moral decline that we suffer in the workplace, the ethical decline. There's a process that happens to us when we're in unethical workplaces or workplaces that are very toxic. And there's certain behaviors that we see all around us, they become normalized.

1:09:23And we will find ourselves slowly drifting into doing things that we would never have done otherwise. This is how you end up with Volkswagen executives going to jail for the emissions scandal. This is how you end up with 5 ,000 employees. I think it was Wells Fargo getting fired because they falsified accounts. Now, they did it because the pressures on them to produce was so intense. You open this number of accounts, so you're going to get fired. They're like, well, the only way to do that is to kind of open false accounts. So there's often these pressures, but you end up often doing things that you would never do.

1:10:03Like you can have it out with a coworker and say the kinds of things to them that you would never say to a neighbor, you know, because that's the culture in that workplace of screaming and put down that this, and a lot of our ethics can really drift without us realizing how much and you know more common in certain industries more common in certain workplaces based on the culture but it's amazing about how morality can really get challenged and that we can fall into this because every and sometimes like oh well if we don't do this we're selling this product if we don't exaggerate the ability of the project or overstate these things or like then we're going to fall behind in sales we're not going to get the bonuses everyone else is doing it Why am I the schmuck that's not?

1:10:46You know, like we find ways to justify it, but it gets to extreme places. That's why people can end up in workplaces where they're like selling, you know, whatever rubbish to people who don't need it. And they're actually joyful about, ah, there's another sucker just bought things. They didn't start thinking people are suckers, but they got indoctrinated into it by this moral disinhibition that happens, disengagement that happens in which our moral compass really gets untethered. And over time, things become more and more normalized. Everyone around us is doing it. We begin to do it. We might even benefit from it.

1:11:21And that's a danger in all kinds of workplaces. In the small ways it happens is that that stress that comes at you from above, your manager putting stress on you, doesn't care if they're calling you at home, doesn't care if they're ruining your weekend. You start to not care if you're ruining your subordinates weekend as well. Whereas before you work there and that kind of culture, I would not want to do that to somebody who works for me. But if it's done to me and that's how it needs to be done and that's how it is and you start to justify and mobilize. So the consequences of not managing your work stress go beyond your happiness and your health.

1:11:56It can extend all the way to your ethical compass and you can get yourself into real trouble, small or large, if you're not watching up. And another way that happens, just to point out that I talk about a lot in the book because I don't think people talk about it enough, is we're always much more drawn to abuse. Abuse is very shiny. Neglect is as damaging a lot of the time. And a lot of managers are very neglectful. They're very neglectful because they're ignoring the politics that are going on in their team that are disadvantaging people, that are bullying people because they don't want to get into that or they don't want to have to deal with that.

1:12:32Managers are supposed to protect their reports and protect their emotional lives and enable them to do their jobs well. And a lot of managers fall down on that. They neglect that because they weren't nurtured. And this is not how it works here. I don't have to baby you. And it's not babying. It's being responsible as a manager to find out what's going, to get a better vibe happening, to make sure one person is not being bullied or harassed by another. But that often happens because of neglect. You have one person who's doing the abuse, but you have a lot of people who are neglecting it. And that's another moral failing.

1:13:05Guy Winch, your book is called Mind Over Grind, How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life. But that's just your latest book. You've also written Emotional First Aid, How to Fix a Broken Heart, and The Squeaky Wheel. You've delivered several phenomenally popular TED Talks. And you have a podcast called Dear Therapists. We will put links to all of those in the show notes. But in the meantime, thank you for coming on. It was awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10 % Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili.

1:13:40Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. One last thing I want to say before you go. If you enjoy this show, please do me slash us a solid. Follow the show and leave a rating and a review on whatever platform you watch or listen to us on. It only takes a minute. It's free and it really helps new people find us and spread the good news that the mind is trainable. Thank you.

1:14:16Sincerely, I mean it. Thank you.