Modern Wisdom - #569 - Chris Bailey - How To Stop Feeling So Burned Out

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

Chris Bailey is a productivity consultant, researcher and best selling author. Being productive is great. Everyone wants to get more done in less time and achieve their goals. But overshooting your tolerance for work can result in misery, fatigue, loss of creativity and days in bed. Finding a balance between the grind and being calm is vital. Expect to learn the scientific theory explaining why burnout exists, why calmness and productivity are intrinsically linked, how being dopamine-driven is a dangerous motivator, how to slow down without feeling idle and lazy, the science of savouring life, why people who watch the news get more PTSD than people who experienced a bombing attack and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Get 20% discount on the best Ketone Drink at https://ketone-iq.com/ (use code MW10) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Check out Chris' website - https://alifeofproductivity.com/  Buy How To Calm Your Mind - https://amzn.to/3I6NSK6  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Chris Bailey. He's a productivity consultant, researcher, and best-selling author. Being productive is great. Everyone wants to get more done in less time and achieve their goals, but overshooting your tolerance for work can result in misery, fatigue, loss of creativity, and days in bed. Finding a balance between the grind and being calm is vital. Expect to learn the scientific theory explaining why burnout exists, why calmness and productivity are intrinsically linked, how being dopamine driven is a dangerous motivator, how to slow down without feeling idle and lazy, the science of savoring life, why people who watch the news get more PTSD than people who experience

the bombing attack, and much more? Heads up that this Saturday there is no episode again, it is New Year's Eve, and I figured I would leave you to whatever debauchery you have planned for yourself, but this January has the largest episode release that I've ever done. Flu to Las Vegas, record with one of the biggest guests in the world, and I can't wait to release this. It is killing me to sit on such a good episode and not be able to say or announce who it is, but very soon I will be able to,

and yeah, it's beyond anything that we've done so far. So get ready for that one. But now, ladies and and gentlemen please welcome Chris Bailey. You have written two books, two bestselling books on productivity. And now you're writing a book about calmness and how to calm your mind. What gets you interested in working out how to calm your mind? Yeah, this book was honestly a lot tougher to write than the other two. You know, we were chatting before.

There are no productivity emergencies out there. Maybe there's a couple that I haven't heard of. But if you're a doctor, there are medical emergencies, but there aren't productivity emergencies. And it was really kind of an urgency, though, in my own life, that led me to write this this book called How to Call Me Your Mind. I was not in a good place a few years ago. I was anxious, I was burnt out, and this all culminated. A lot of this was happening beneath the depths of my awareness at the time. And this all crescendoed on stage

for me. I was on stage in front of about 100 people giving a talk on productivity, of course. And I noticed when I got up on the stage that beads of sweat started to form on the back of my neck. I felt as though I was struggling to get my words out. Like my tongue had to dance around a bunch of marbles inside my mouth. And I started just stammering and stumbling on my every word. And I realized up there, you know, right when I wanted to kind of flee the stage, I was having an anxiety attack in front of this audience. And I had taken on too much stress.

I had taken on just too many commitments in my work. And in my life, I had too much chronic stress and found myself kind of picking up the pieces after this episode where I realized I was burnt out, I was anxious. And I had been investing in self care quite a bit up to that point. And that's kind of what baffled me at the time and got me to look at the research out there and talk to experts to try to Honestly desperately try to solve this in my own life I hadn't really thought about a book at the time because you know when you're in kind of an emergency like that And this little last thing on your mind. You're just trying to oh, you're just trying to get through

But yeah, that's that's kind of how this journey began. Was there any shame associated with being the productivity guy who also kind of doesn't seem to be holding it together while supposedly talking about his mastermind topic? Yeah, definitely. I thought, I think a big part of that was we tend to buy into these narratives that other people tell us about ourselves. And that was a big part of my own story, is buying into this story that people had shared in intros and bios and blurbs leading up to that point.

Where honestly, and this sounds kind of ridiculous looking back on it, but I think a big part of me thought that I was unstoppablely productive, that there were really no limits to how much I could get done, as if the endorsements were true, you know, that I was kind of unstoppable or the superhuman, I don't know, I don't even want to regurgitate the different words that people use to describe my work. But of course, you know, we all have these normal human boundaries. And I think that was kind of an internal reckoning that I had to go through.

That there was this story that I had told myself about myself, that I had constructed my identity out of this superhumanly productive kind of narrative. And it just wasn't true because, of course, it's not true, it's the most obvious thing in the world. We all have normal limits. So yeah, I love the question. Yeah, there definitely was shame. Yeah, I think reflecting on Jordan Peterson

over the last couple of years is a good example of psychiatrists that was telling everybody to carry a burden and be honest and truthful and so on and so forth. People, his detractors online took a great amount of joy in pointing out the fact that he was the person that was addicted to benzodiazepines for a good while. He was the guy that was on antidepressants. He was the psychiatrist that couldn't get stuff to work. You think, yeah, it is the expectation adds another layer of guilt and shame and perspective that isn't helpful on top of already your own expectations

of yourself. Yeah, and we already construct our self identities on shaky ground. You know, we construct them on top of our success at work, for example, but when that success goes away, we feel like we're kind of losing a part of who we are. And you're so right, there is that expectation. I think it comes with expertise. And I see a lot of happiness experts out there who go through periods of depression. I see a lot of experts on meditation

who fall off the way. I see a lot of lazy productivity experts out there too. Myself included, which drives me to explore these subjects of productivity. And I think we kind of need that contrast in a way to realize how well the best strategies work, not only for us but for other people. What if you come to learn about burnout then?

It seems like this was a period of extreme burnout for you. What did you not know before that now seems completely obvious? Yeah, it's what burnout even is. I think you've had folks on the podcast who've chated about burnout. But in my mind, I thought it was just burnout. Burnout is exhaustion. If we're completely wiped, we're completely depleted,

we're burnt out. But realizing that exhaustion is just a third of the picture of burnout was one of the most surprising things that I myself discovered. And it explained a lot of how I was one of the most surprising things that I myself discovered. And it explained a lot of how I was feeling at the time. Exhaustion is a core component of burnout, but it's only a third of the burnout equation as defined by researchers like Christina Maslach in the World Health Organization.

We need to be exhausted, right, That feeling of being just totally depleted. But we also need to feel cynical. We need to feel as though there is this negative attitude, just that pervades everything that we do. That's a second attribute of burnout. And the third is unproductive, right? We need to feel as though what we're doing doesn't make a difference and like we have nothing left in the tank to make a difference with who we are. And it's the confluence of those three ingredients exhaustion, cynicism and inefficacy that produces full blown burnout phenomenon that's caused by one thing and one thing only and that's chronic stress.

Any source of stress we face repeatedly is something that can cause burnout. And the more sources of chronic stress, some of them are obvious, right? Financial concerns, just, you know, marital stress, all these different sources that we can see. But a lot of it's hidden, right? The threatening information that we choose to pay attention to on social media on the news simply because it's familiar can lead us to that point of burnout. But also the factors of our work that contribute to a full blown burnout phenomenon, there's

six of them, in fact. And so the more in alignment we are with these six factors, the more engaged we become, and the less burnt out we become. But these six areas of our work are also the peachy ridishes that the chronic stress of our work can incubate inside of. And so those are how much work we have on our plate, whether we're rewarded fairly. And that goes to money, that goes to social rewards, that goes to being recognized for the contributions that we make. Control is a third one. So whether or not we feel we have control over when, where and how we do our work,

community. So whether we feel connected with people around us, the less community we have, the more likely we are to burn out. Fair, we need to be treated fairly and values. So whether we feel is though we can manifest our values through our actions at work. And when we do that, we feel like there's meaning behind what we're doing because we can observe our behavior and connect those with who we truly are. But when we don't value the work that we do or we don't have that deeper connection, we're out of alignment and we're more likely to burn out. And so, you know, just in case people don't read the book, no pressure, obviously. But I want to kind of share those six factors. Charging how well you're doing in those six areas over time,

workload, control, reward, community fairness and values. And noticing that you're on the stepping stones to that full-blown burnout phenomenon, even if you're cynical and not exhausted, or even if you feel profoundly unproductive, but you have more than enough energy, these three attributes can serve as kind of stepping stones to a full-blown burnout phenomenon. That's interesting. What are some of the ways that people can better notice what's going on in self-regulate? These are emotions. They're going on inside of our head.

There is no external scoreboard that's going to tell us where we're at with our cynicism or energy or productivity. What are some of the ways people can self-regulate? One of my favorite ways, and I'd be lying if I said I did this every week or even every month. But since going through that burnout, I do this every probably three or four months or so or whenever I'm feeling exhausted or wiped or I have that kind of dread

on Sunday that I have to work. Again, the following morning, that's kind of my cue to pick up where I left off here. And I just have a spreadsheet. So I rate how well I'm doing in each of these six areas out of 10. And it's pretty informal. I haven't seen a ton of evidence behind this particular tactic, but it does feed into the wealth of evidence out there. Especially workload is one to pay a particular mind to because that's often one of the primary contributors to burnout. And it's in fact in clinical settings, it's the first thing that they get you to look at. And they say, okay, can you cut back on workload because that really cuts back on how much burnout you have.

But just charting how well you're doing in the six areas can really make a profound difference. And you can notice the trend line over time. So if you notice that sense, COVID for example, your line has been ticking upwards. And along that upward tick, you're starting to feel more tired and cynical and productive. That's probably why?

You mentioned all of the different contributing factors that come from work. There are two board cohorts of people, right? One are employed and have a boss and have a relatively limited amount of control over the work that they do. And another one would be someone that's self-employed and is their own boss. Is there anything that you've come to believe about the interesting distinction between the two, how they should regulate their burnout and their workload and the social respect that they get from the work that they do? Is there something unique about those two cohorts?

that they get from the work that they do? Is there something unique about those two cohorts? Yeah, the fascinating thing is it really does vary. And so, you know, for advice on call, anxiety, productivity, even, one thing I really believe is we have to take the advice that works for us and leave the rest. There is no advice that works universally well for, and even if there are these six universal factors, control is the fascinating one I find, especially with regard to how much autonomy we have in our work. We may not have control over what we work on, but in ideal circumstances,

regardless of whether we work for somebody else or ourselves. We often have control of when we work on something and how we execute it. God, I hope that's the case with us because so many of us do knowledge work for a living that takes advantage of our unique mind and perspective and skills and expertise and experience. And so we should fight for control however we can. And you know, one thing that I found fascinating and looking at the research as well is often burnout. It's our responsibility to deal with when we go through an episode of burnout, but it's usually not our fault. You know, it's kind of the fault of whoever creates

the conditions with where we work. And so if you're a manager, that's something I would highlight in addition to this. If you're a manager who has had employees that have burnt out, that should be your tripwire. That should be your alarm bell. That's something in the workplace that you're cultivating for people is fundamentally broken and toxic. And the key there, I think, is realizing that burnout is not being burnt out is not really a luxury. We need to be past the point of not burnt out. Burnout exists

on a spectrum. One side is burnt out where we're exhaustive, we're cynical, we're unproductive. And on the other side, we're fired up. We have this energy beneath what we do. We're engaged, we're, we're productive. We're making a contribution. Burnout is on one side and engagement is on the other side of this spectrum in terms of how much energy we have. And so it's worth fighting to have those conditions if you don't necessarily have that autonomy, where you can control how you work on things. And if you're a manager, man, check the environment you're creating if you find that people have these conditions because they're not just burnt out. Their minds aren't just suffering. Their productivity is as well in terms of engagement.

Why not just push yourself until you burn out, relapse, and then go again. Why is that not an acceptable solution? Well, because it's a recipe for misery. I think it comes down to what you value, too. There's nothing wrong with valuing accomplishment. Accomplishment does lead us to savor our lives less. There's another interesting field of research is the subject of savoring, which is just the process of enjoying experiences because just because we experience something positive does not mean that we'll enjoy it. You know I'm drinking this amazing delicious cup of of jasmine green. I think you know just like last episode I remember drinking a little green tea with you, man. And just because I, Simpa on this amazing green tea,

does not mean that I will enjoy the experience. Just because we experience something positive doesn't mean we'll internalize it and generate positive emotions from it. And the more we actually strive to accomplish, the less likely we are to savor and enjoy our lives and, and luxuriate in the positive experiences that comprise our day. And so if you value accomplishment, you know, there's nothing wrong with

having some hustle as long as you have a direction, but I think so much of the advice out there that, you know, we should hustle until we have this empty take assumes that accomplishment is the only thing that is worth valuing. And really values came up a lot in this journey that I embarked on. We need to manifest our values through our daily actions. And I glossed over this a couple of paragraphs ago and when we were chatting. But when we can observe ourselves manifesting our values through our actions, that's the process through which meaning is made, right?

If we value kindness and we can express that through volunteering, we're going to have a more meaningful experience than somebody who doesn't value kindness because we can observe ourselves going through that process. If we value service, if we value connection and we can observe ourselves manifesting those things, we're going to feel like we're making a bigger difference. Maybe even a bigger difference than we actually are a lot of the times, but it really does come down to values and realizing that there is a complexity of values that lies at the core of who we are, that we deserve to express in how we act.

Accomplishment being maybe one of them, but by God, hopefully not the only one. You would hope so. I mean, one of the interesting things I've learned this year is people for, in the modern world, a lot of people are very happy to give up the thing that they want in order to achieve the thing which is supposed to get it. So people will give up happiness in order to achieve success in the hopes that their success will afford them happiness. I think, hang in there, say, yeah, I'm sure you know about the story of the American businessman and the fisherman that's out on the water. And he says, you know, if you built this up as a business then you would be able to sell more and maybe you'd be able to employ a bunch of people and then

after a while you'd be able to earn a factory and you'd have all of these fish and he said, well, why? And he said, well, if you do all of that then you'd be able to spend all of your day fishing in a boat on your own. You're well, that's my life already. Now, I do wonder how much over-complication comes from people trying to go the long way round in order to achieve happiness. And I think the success is one of the easy traps that that gets into. And it's so true. Yeah, exactly. And so much of the modern world, it tells us what we need to do to be happy, like accomplish

more, generate more status. But the last place we should be looking for happiness is the modern world. I mean, look around. The modern world is not happy. People can't savor experiences like they used to. People rush past the most beautiful moments of their life. Time with family, time with these deep experiences, time that they could otherwise connect with what they value, to distract themselves, and to pursue greater accomplishment, things that pull us out of whatever it is that we're experiencing, and whomever it is that we're with. And it's this disconnect between what we usually value most deeply on this personal level and what the world around us values on this cultural level and every single one of

us has a disconnect in that regard. Not one of us unless we never reflect on what we value or who we are or what our mission is, what our purpose is. Unless we never reflect. If we never reflect, we'll have perfect alignment to our culture and then we'll become even more miserable. What did you learn about burnout from either a neuroscience or a evolutionary theory perspective? I mean, why would burnout be an adaptive response and

what's going on inside of the brain and body when we hit it? Yeah, so our body, it turns out, gets used to whatever stress we provide us with. And it gets so used to it sometimes that it gets fed up with having to go through the whole rigmarole of generating that stress response. You know, to that spike of cortisol levels, our pupils dilating our heart rate, elevating to mobilize, to face down a threat, which was usually physical. Those these days were just sitting in front of our email clients, stewing over one negative message. And so burnout on this biological level

is a refusal of our body to generate a stress response, in response to something that our ancient mind usually perceives as a threatening situation. And I use the example of measuring my own cortisol levels in the book. So I had this, it measuring my own cortisol levels in the book. So I had this, it was a saliva cortisol test, so it's not as reliable as a blood cortisol test. But I had my levels measured when I was going through this period of burnout just for sheer

curiosity's sake. And there's kind of the normal range of cortisol response to a threatening situation. Cortisol, of course, being a primary stress hormone. And our cortisol level is usually spiking the morning, which is good, right? Because that's what mobilizes us to do the day, to get out of bed, to take on whatever the day might offer us. And then they kind of trail off as our energy goes down throughout the day. And I noticed when my own levels came back that they had basically flatlined. There was no cortisol spike in the morning.

There was no kind of rise in the middle of the day and just kind of flatlined all day long. And so in other words, regardless of the stressful situation that we experience when we're burnt out, we can't generate the mental resources to overcome whatever stressful situation is presented to us. And that's where that feeling of exhaustion, cynicism, being unproductive comes from. Some stress is good. Right? Stress provides us with meaning. If you removed all the stressful episodes from your life, you'd also remove all the meaning from your life. You'd remove the weddings, the anniversaries,

you'd remove the weird Thanksgiving meals with family. You'd remove the most challenging moments of your life, too. But too much stress does deplete this capacity for a stress response over time. And that's what the research shows on the subject of burnout. Is burnout is the refusal of our body and our mind to mobilize to a stressful situation. It's when our stress response flatlines and it is the ultimate manifestation of chronic stress in our work and in our life that usually comes from those six areas. So it's kind of like your body just giving up and saying, yeah, I'm carrying too heavy

of a weight. I'm not going to respond to the stress anymore. My solution for this is to completely kill all motivation to make you feel doubtful about the future and to dial down your ability to be productive. Exactly, it's not working anyway, so why keep generating it? Let's say that there's someone listening now, we're coming toward the back end of the year.

Lots of people will have worked very, very hard, or maybe we're going into the new year, and you just think, God, all of these things that Chris is talking about, it feels like that to me. Like, just taking off all of the different elements and maladies that you've described. How should somebody that is currently dealing with burnout get out the other side of it? Yeah. Burnout is a fascinating phenomenon for that reason. And there's so much that influences how burnt out we are. But I think keeping kind of an eye on the ball that chronic stress is what causes that

phenomenon of burnout. Chronic stress is, you know, we've all heard the term, but really dissecting the sources of chronic stress we face in our life. So we have two kinds of stress that we face all day long, day in, day out, every single day. There's acute stress, which is the once-off moment. It's the traffic jam on the way to the airport. It's the once-off argument with your spouse that's a huge pain to get through, and it's

what forces you to grow. But the chronic stress is the no good, very bad kind of stress that we face repeatedly. Instead of the argument with our spouse, it's the reconcilable feelings we have when we see their dumb, stupid face. When we, you know, instead of the traffic jam, it's the traffic we encounter every day in rush hour on our way to the office. That's like an hour and a half on the other side of town. Really understanding the stress that exists in your life is the recipe for overcoming this

burnout phenomenon. So first of all, dissect those six areas where the chronic stress, because that's where you should spotlight. Those are the kind of peach redishes in our work that this stress tends to metastasize and grow and expand to to fit a level that we don't really have the capacity to cope with. But then we have all the stress that's hidden in our life all throughout our days. So anything threatening that you pay attention to over the course of the day is likely a source of hidden chronic stress in your life. You know, there was one study that was conducted around the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings and the team of researchers looked at two groups of people. The first group of people were those who watched six or more hours of news coverage about the bombings. And the second group of people were runners

in the actual marathon. And what the team of researchers found was those who watched six or more hours of news coverage about the bombings were more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder. And they experienced a higher level of chronic stress than those who were in the marathon and personally affected by it. And so that's shocking to me. You know, encountering studies and statistics are usually not that motivating. They usually don't drive us to action, but that one was kind of a holy shit moment. Is this really how my mind interprets the news?

So I compartmentalized the news checking to just one newspaper each and every day. I compartmentalized social media time to one block within the middle of the workday. So I could just get it done and get on with my life. Anything else that I, well, I eliminated one threatening, not not threatening, but one toxic relationship in my life over the course of this project to create success that kind of freed up a lot of mental and emotional bandwidth. And so really dissecting the chronics list it if you want. List every source of stress you face over the course of the day, divide it into chronic stress and acute stress,

and under chronic stress, do mind the stuff that's hidden because all this stuff can lead us away from calm and towards anxiety as well, not just this burnout. Okay, so somebody has realized, wow, I'm watching way too much of the news and the CCP's algorithm on TikTok is making me feel like I want to throw myself out a window. Seriously, yeah. All the rest of it. But there's still stuck in this particular embodied state.

Is there anything that you've found as you're in burnout? This is an ejectus button that you can push, which is going to help to actually really reinvigorate you if you are feeling cynical, unproductive, low in energy, demotivated. What were the quickest ways that you found to get yourself back from that? Yeah. So one simple way is to define productivity hours every single day. Burnout has traditionally been defined as a workplace phenomenon, and that's not to say that it still is. We have stress that comes in from every direction of our life right now, from our personal lives to our work lives, but defining boundaries around that pursuit of productivity

at work is one of the most powerful strategies that I personally like to deploy every single day. So at the start of the day, I'll choose when I start to care about productivity and I'll define when I'll stop caring about productivity. These days, it's around 10 to 6. And so I have the mornings for just starting things off slow and deliberately and carving out a bit of time for meditation and reading and just having this slow morning

that can lead to this calm, deliberate day. And then having this wind down ritual at the end of the work day, where I can choose to no longer care about accomplishment. And so, you know, that goes back to that accomplishment mindset as well, is when we're in this acquisition mentality, this acquisition mentality leads us away from this presence as calm in our life. And so the more we focus on acquiring, the less we actually enjoy ourselves.

And so this, these productivity hours can kind of serve that double purpose of limiting your workload, gaining more control over your day, having that reward at the end of the day. So even if these external circumstances aren't put around the boundaries of your work by somebody else, you can choose to do this yourself. If you're not paid to be on call, don't be on call. If you're not paid to be connected in the evenings, don't connect in the evenings. I think the irony of this is it's often by stepping back that we become more productive.

You know, it's by stepping back, we actually recharge. We can actually spend more time in the analog world and not just stare at screens all day long. The most calming, energizing parts of our life are found in the analog, not in the digital. We can actually step back from this big source of chronic stress in our life and turn to the hopefully more acute sources of chronic stress and meaningful or not chronic acute stress in our personal lives. And so defining boundaries around that practice is critical. That bleed out from a period of productivity into the laptop is still open, I'm still working

away. I've got something in the back of my mind that needs to be done. It's just it permeates everything, right? The entire fabric in your life is ambiently anxious because there is always the option to do work. You could always be doing work. You could really could always be scouting. The time.

Scouting for more clients or networking more effectively or spending time building up their LinkedIn profile or whatever it is, right? Researching the next piece of content that they're going to write. And yes, I read a while ago that the ancient Greek word for work was translated as not at play, which was interesting because the set point that we see now is that play is an aberration and work is the set. Previously, it was the other way around that play is the set point and work was the aberration work is the thing you had to get done. And I always like thinking about that in relation, it might be total

bollocks, but I always like thinking about it as a concept. When it comes to this sort of, you've mentioned anxiety a couple of times there, what's the difference in your mind or relationship between burnout, anxiety, calm, productivity, how do all of those things fit together? Oh, so much comes to my, man. That's a blank check of a question. It's a, I find the relationship between these things absolutely fascinating. And you know, this was, and maybe I'm weird in this way. Like I used to see the therapist I saw, I started seeing her when there's, I didn't perceive anything wrong in my life or in my mind. I was just curious to untangle what was happening up there in my head.

This kind of has a similar vibe to me where just sheer curiosity pulled me forward into this journey. First of all, between calm and anxiety. This was one of the more fascinating elements that I uncovered on this journey because I was never really compelled by calm. one of the more fascinating elements that I uncovered on this journey, because I was never really compelled by calm. The only time I've really ever felt the need to find calm in my life is when I've become anxious, when I've wanted just that anxiety to go away. And in my head, anxiety was speaking of spectrums. Anxiety was always the spectrum that went from zero anxiety all the way to this intolerable

level of anxiety. But the research shows that anxiety and calm are opposite ends of the same spectrum, where we relate to our thoughts either in a positive way or a negative way, and our mind is either agitated or it is still. And so those two variables determine where we are on the spectrum. But what this means is that we can go past the point of no anxiety and travel further down on this road to calm and continue to garner a lot of the benefits that a less

anxious mind has. And one of those to hit another keyword in the question is productivity. And this product, this relationship between anxiety, calm, and productivity is fascinating. Because if I ask you, you know, let's say you have to give a presentation to 1,000 people in 15 minutes. And all that is on your mind is this presentation, of course, because it's 15 minutes from now. You want to do a good job.

And if I ask you in that same moment, 15 minutes before this talk, hey, you mind reading this article that I wrote and giving me feedback or, hey, do you mind digesting and summarizing this journal article or do you mind doing any bit of knowledge work? By God, you would have a very challenging time doing it. This is the effect that anxiety has on our cognitive performance. When we work with an anxious mind, it's for this reason that our work takes longer. I break down how about eight hours of real actual work takes us about 10 hours because anxiety actually reduces our cognitive capacity. This goes back

to our last conversation on this idea of our working memory capacity, our attentional space. This mental scratch that we use to process whatever it is that we're doing in the moment. Anxiety shrinks our working memory capacity by about 20%. So might not sound like a lot, but when our work takes 20% longer, eight hours of work takes around 10 hours, especially when you add in the other factors that lead us to even a greater decline in productivity. We become more aware of the threats that are surrounded by us. We become more susceptible to distraction.

When we're in an anxious state, our mind is more stimulated. Again, a higher level of mental activity. The more stimulated our mind is, the more we Again, a higher level of mental activity. And the more stimulated our mind is, the more we wish to keep it at that state. And so we're more susceptible to dopaminergic distraction. Any distraction that releases a hit of dopamine in our mind, which is also considered when you look at the research to be an enemy of presence and calm. to be an enemy of presence in calm. Not completely, it's more complex than that. I found digging through these ideas,

but it's fascinating just how much of a cognitive limiter anxiety is, but you look at people who are calm under pressure that calmness that we can cultivate in our life. It is a wellspring that lives at the heart of what makes us productive and what makes life meaningful. It leads us to presence, it leads us to focus, it leads us to be steady and have this attention and this confidence that regardless of what happens around us, we are where we need to be. We're doing what we need to be doing and we can focus on it without our anxious mind tugging at our thoughts. And I actually think eight hours of work takes far far

longer than 10 hours and when you work with an mind, and if you notice that you have less time than before, you have less attention than before, the anxiety is it's kind of a hidden factor that influences our productivity. It's one we never think about, but it's one that influences us all day long. We might not have that same effect that we do before we're going on stage, but we have a similar effect that limits our cognitive performance only all day long when we're working with this anxious mind. Isn't there something funny about the fact that most people who are pushing very hard, who are type A, go getters, are creating an environment in which the mind is less productive

in service of being more productive? I'm going to push myself. I'm going to continue to go harder, but what you're actually doing is applying more break whilst you apply more accelerator at the same time. Exactly. Even on a neurological level, if you look at the networks of our brain that are activated when we're in this acquisition mentality versus when we're present with something. So presence, it sounds like a hippy-dippy term, but presence is just being able to focus on what you're doing. Presence is the process through which we actually become more productive.

And if you look at the networks of our brain that are activated when we're in an acquisition mentality versus focused on something in the here and now, they're anti-correlated with one another. So the acquisition mentality is primarily structured on top of the neurochemical dopamine, so much so that a lot of researchers refer to dopamine as the molecule of more, whether it's more accomplishment or more stimulation, whereas networks of presence are centered around serotonin oxytocin, which leads us to to feel proud and connected and happy with what we're doing. And it's fascinating how we, you know, I feel the extra drive that a lot of people have compensates for this fact that they have less energy in a lot of cases, simply because

they spend more time, you know, trying to manifest this value of accomplishment all day long. But because of that counter-vailing force, it's probably a wash in terms of just how much further you get. You might as well enjoy things while you're doing them. You might as well become more present in what you're doing. This, I think, goes back to my philosophy of productivity. Productivity advice exists to optimize the benefits and the contributions of our work.

We should feel as though our work is making more of a difference, and we do when we're more present. I wonder if an element of this is to do with laziness as well, that if you are working more for longer periods of time, you actually can afford to be less focused, you can apply less effort to it, and running twice the distance at half the speed, significantly easier than running half the distance at twice the speed. Yeah, and this goes back to that whole idea of productivity hours, and it seems like such a simplistic tactic, but I think one of the reasons it works so well is it has sort of a deadline effect.

And so if you have a full week's worth of work in front of you and it's Monday and somebody says to you, Hey, you want this all expenses paid trip to Australia, but it leaves on Wednesday, you'll probably find a way to accomplish all of that week's worth of work between Monday and Tuesday, maybe Wednesday, depending on how this analogy is structured. And you'll probably find a way because of this deadline effect to accomplish it all. And it's just the deadline effect. When we have less time for something, that time limiter forces us to expend more energy over that shorter distance of time so we can get the thing accomplished.

And we should always have a bit of time pressure behind what we're doing. No time pressure is an episode for laziness. It's a sign that our work is expanding to fit how much time we have available for its completion, which is often called Parkinson's Law. Our work will expand. It's this thing we have to compress. So if you don't feel as though you always have a bit of time pressure, not too much, too much creates yet another source of chronic stress,

when our workload eclipses our capacity to get it done in a major way. That's a contributor to burnout. It's a contribute to anxiety as well. But we should always, there is this Goldilocks zone of time pressure. And if you don't have it most of the time, you're probably working too many hours. Let's say that there's someone listening who is a type A go getter. They like the idea of accomplishments. They like the idea of achieving and being in acquisition mode. And they don't like the idea of leaving a lot

on the table, but they also don't like the idea of being burned out and this ambient anxiety and the stress and neurosis and all that. What have you come to believe about the balance between not leaving a lot on the table, about maximizing what you can achieve, about actually going out there and getting it and getting after it, while having this more holistic view of the self and of work? Is it possible for these two things to exist side by side? Yeah, and so much of this journey for me was finding that balance. I want to make a big contribution through the work that I do, and I also don't want to be miserable.

And I also don't want to be anxious, and I want to enjoy the things that I create. A big discovery over this journey for me was realizing that this connection between dopamine, which leads to mental stimulation and anxiety and accomplishment. How I've come to see things, and this is a way that I like to find balance in my own days, is every single thing we tend to over the course of the day, exists at a different height of stimulation. And so a different height of mental stimulation, depending on how much dopamine something releases. And so the size of the dopamine hit we get, it fluctuates based on genetics, it fluctuates based on how much something directly affects our life, but you can kind of divide by the same amount for things online,

because most things online don't directly affect our life that we see. What really differs in the things we encounter online is the relative novelty of the information. Novelty, if something is surprising, it releases a far greater dopamine hit than something that isn't. And so, you know, online we can kind of sort things by novelty, but every single thing we tend to, over the course of the day, releases a varying level of dopamine. And so it exists at a different height of stimulation, a different altitude.

So hard drug use would be at the very top, which leads to a huge dopamine surge and then a plummet afterward. Beneath that, it might be social media. It might be the super stimuli we tend to online. These highly exaggerated versions of things that were, by default, our mind is wired to crave and enjoy. So pornography is a great example of this too. This highly artificial thing that our brain is wired to crave.

These exist in the analog world too. So take out anything on most things on Uber Eats. This is my escape of choice. That stuff is, it's a super stimuli. It's highly dopamine energy, so that exists at a higher height of stimulation. But then you start working downwards in these heights of stimulation. In the middle band are these activities that you were just describing. This middle band is where we usually make our contribution.

It's things that are less, they release less dopamine than other things in our life, but here lies writing, here lies playing an instrument, here lies having coffee with a friend and resisting the urge to rise to a new height of mental stimulation by checking your phone, staying in that band. Beneath that are the most calming activities that we can tend to throughout the day.

You know, towards the bottom are, you know, lying on the couch and letting your mind wander, might be at the very bottom, watching a campfire, just watching the flames dance and kind of letting the conversation that's happening fade in and out at the same time Nature, right hiking through nature might be towards the bottom, but Different bands on this chart of mental stimulation. We can actually Draw a chart of our own and I highly recommend doing so charting the activities that you tend to part of our own. And I highly recommend doing so, charting the activities that you tend to throughout the day to get a feel of what your average stimulation height is and get a feel for the ways that the different activities you tend to throughout the day make you feel. Generally speaking, we want to lower our mental stimulation height because that is what

leads us to make a bigger contribution. That is what leads us to make a bigger contribution. That is what leads us to also find that balance of productivity but also calm and also enjoyment and also accomplishment and also optimizing the contributions of our work but also how our work makes us feel. That is the ideal band and it's the most productive, it happens to be the most productive band as well, instead of rising to these heights of stimulation

that are difficult to come down from. We find this enjoyment and this presence and this deep connection with whatever it is that we're doing. That's the place we want to be. Thinking it, maybe not necessarily in terms of laziness, even though it's kind of a lazy way to spend time to be at a high altitude, it's kind of leaning on distraction and technology to do our thinking for us and presenting the most dopamine-energy morsels of content to

us. It takes a bit of work to be further down in that imaginary chart, but that's where the benefits are. What if someone feels guilty when they're relaxing? Oh, who doesn't? I think such a big part of that relaxation guilt comes from the fact that we are terrible at measuring

our productivity. And so we feel guilty when we're not making progress towards something. You know, because we value progress so much and maybe more so because the world around us values progress to such an extreme level, we feel a disconnect with our behavior and those cultural values. But I would make the argument that there is immense productivity to be found in relaxation. So one simple example, we talked about scatter focus last time, that mental mind wandering mode of our mind. But if you're a leader or if you're a creator or if you're in a position where your thoughts can lead to you making a difference or you generating an idea can lead to you making a difference, there is pride to be found in this relaxation and letting our mind come down to a new lower level of mental

stimulation. So going on a walk is a simple example of this. If you're a CEO of a Fortune 500 company and you have a meeting and you blow it off to take a walk in the park around your campus, that walk might lead you to an insight that turns your company from a $100 billion company into a $1 trillion company. One walk, right? That's the power, that's the value of an idea. You look at, you know, say Bob Eiger or somebody walking around his Steve Jobs, walking around

at Tim Cook, probably actually did this, turned Apple into a trillion dollar company. If you look at Tim Cook taking a walk, a stroll around the Apple campus, he's like, oh man, he's slacking off. He's not even listening to anything on his phone. He's not listening to a podcast. He's not using that time to get ahead. And this goes back to how we often are terrible at measuring our productivity. We often look to busyness as a proxy measure for how productive we are. Even though busyness is really no different from an active form of laziness when it doesn't lead us to accomplish anything of importance, like when we're at that high altitude of stimulation. But when we look to how much we actually accomplish, when we look to the results that we generate for how we spend our time, it can be profound. So

the ironic thing about investing in calm and overcoming anxiety is a big part of me feels less productive now than than I used to. But when I look at my accomplishments list at the end of the week, which I keep every week and to kind of maintain the, you know, measurements of the contributions I make each each and every week, I contribute far more right now with a calm mind and with a mind that wanders and generates ideas, then I did in, you know, a whole month of directionless hustle a lot of the time. And this goes to that acquisition mentality, that idea of this mindset of more goals without endpoints are useless. Right? We so often have this striving that we just settle into by default

that doesn't lead us to contribute anything, but when we measure our actual contributions that's when we realize just how productive we are Sorry, I feel like I went off for like 10 minutes there. Like I'm working on talking about this not at all I feel it feels a little bit to me like what people are optimizing for is a sense of hustle. Like they're actually chasing the hustle itself as opposed to the outcomes that the hustle are supposed to achieve. This is what would appear to be one of the fundamental differences that you have discovered. I'm not supposed to be pursuing the degree of difficulty or pain or sacrifice or effort that I go through. I'm bothered about the outcomes on the other side of it. That's what I'm optimizing for.

Exactly. And we so often look to the measures that you just mentioned. We look at how exhausted we are at the end of the day and think, oh, I'm so exhausted, I must be productive. We wear it as a badge of honor as well, right? Exactly, yeah, we have this pride that comes from busyness. I know a lot of busy people

who don't accomplish a single damn thing every day. I know a lot of lazy people who make more of a contribution than either of us do, right? It comes back to deliberateness, I think, at the end of the day. The most productive people, they don't work more frantically and faster, and with this direction, you know, a goal without an endpoint is just a fantasy. They work with a calm

deliberateness on what is truly important and what they lack in speed they make up for in intentionality. And ultimately, I think that's what it comes down to. At the end of the day, our level of deliberateness and intentionality is the factor in speaking of optimization. That's the factor we need to optimize for. We need to optimize for intention because the more we do so,

the more we accomplish what we set out to do. That should be the ultimate measure of productivity. Did you do what you set out to do? Whether you were taking in a beach, putting your feet up, drinking a couple of pinnacle otas, or whether you were clearing out the thousand emails that were building up in your inbox, and bringing somebody new onto your team and finishing a book that you've had on the go for quite some time.

It comes back to our intentions. That's where productivity begins and ends in my opinion. When it comes down to the strategies that you did in order to be able to find how to become more calm in life, were there anything that is common held calm wisdom, but that you tried and found that it was rubbish didn't work for you and or there was no evidence in the literature to suggest that it's even beneficial. Oh, that's a fascinating question. I would say a lot of the self-care strategies out there, the whole idea of self-care was one area that it surprised me just how much there was to wade through in that area. And there are definite benefits to yoga.

And I've been meditating for half an hour a day for well over a decade at this point. But yet, somehow, I still burned out and still fell into this pit of anxiety. And it just goes to show that a lot of the self-care strategies out there, meditation most definitely works better than others. Most of lot of the self-care strategies out there, meditation most definitely works better than others. Most of the so many self-care strategies are just a band-aid solution.

If you fundamentally hate your job, meditation is not going to help you. It might help you cope, but it won't fix that underlying issue. If you're in an abusive relationship, for an example, or you have one of those in your life with somebody who's close or distant to you, you need to pull these problems out by the root in order for them to stop providing you with chronic stress that might lead you to a point of burnout or anxiety.

And I think that, more than anything else, when I look at what allowed me to actually welcome more calm into my life and move from that point of high anxiety down to that state of high calmness, it wasn't these like simple tactics. It was really deconstructing my days. And I think that's what we have to do. We don't have to deconstruct our lives. You don't have to go as deep as your values, though that most definitely helps to have kind of a reflection in that direction because our mind, we tend to optimize any currency we come into contact with, whether that be money, status, follower count, whatever. And that definitely includes a lot of the currencies we come into contact with in our modern

culture that by default we want more of without really thinking of why. And so having that value's connection is immensely helpful. But we need to go deeper. How much dopamine do you get throughout the day? How much of your behavior is structured on top of dopamine? Whether that be in the pursuit of acquiring more or in the pursuit of finding more mental stimulation so you can continue to fly at such a height, that was an uncomfortable truth that I had to face in my own life, is so much of my day was structured around dopamine.

And because of that, I never felt satisfied or present. And what was you doing? What were you doing? What were the things you were doing that was chasing dopamine? Yeah, it was just tending to distraction throughout the day. But I was pretty good at resisting distraction when I was on the clock and working.

But when I was off the clock, the easiest way to entertain my mind, I would just turn on YouTube and receive all these dopamine hits. You know, it was alcohol use, so it was takeout use. It was tending to a lot of super stimuli in the form of social media and checking on things that fed my ego a lot of the time. Just checking how many books were selling on a given week. And I say week, but I would check it multiple times a day. How are the books ranked today, just to get that validation boost. And we need to go beyond the quick fixes to ask these questions and uproot a lot of this this chronic stress in our life. And so I think one shift that occurred

with how I think about anxiety is the surface level advice that doesn't go deep enough. I don't know if that makes sense, but I think we need to go deep in order to find goal. I like the analogy of you not being able to meditate your way out of a bad job. Yeah. There is a fundamental issue and some of the symptoms of that problem can be dealt with. You're going to give yourself more mindfulness.

Maybe it'll help you be at peace with your dick of a boss or whoever it is dealing with. Yeah. But you're still in a shit job. You know, you're still in a job that you don't enjoy. Okay, so I think a lot of people are probably in a position very similar to the one that you just described, which is very dopamine, energetically driven, permanently chasing distraction, probably when they're on the clock as well as off the clock. What have you done? Dopamine is one hell of a drug. What have you done to be able

to down-regulate how much you're chasing for it? Why are you not looking at the books sold or the news articles or the Instagram likes? Why are you no longer looking at that? What were the strategies that allowed you to down regulate that? Well, stimulation fasting. You know, I found, it is something I resisted doing for the longest time. It often called a dopamine fast. And I had heard dopamine fast, you know, mention again and again and I never really applied it to my own life.

But okay, I'm on this, this experiment for calm. Let me try this. And so for a month, I cut out social media, I cut out email on my phone, cut out all the, all the stuff that exists in a high height of stimulation. And I found that the first week or so, it was quite restless. It does take our mind time to adjust downward into a new lower level of mental stimulation, but the benefits of doing so are absolutely profound. And I noticed this in the most simple ways. So for an example, I would often tend to just a quick social media check or a quick

scroll around on my phone between things. So if a meeting ended at 255 and the next meeting was at 3 instead of thinking about the meeting, I would scroll for 5 minutes. These distractions kind of filling the gaps of our day like water. What if my friends calls that a holding pattern activity? So I like that. When you're currently just waiting, you're circling the airport, some things about to happen.

And one of his, this is three years ago on a life hacks episode. And he said, everyone's got a holding pattern activity. And what you want to do is try and make the activity that you use in your holding pattern something that you would want you to do. So and make the activity that you use in your holding pattern something that you would want you to do. So what he did was he bought a Kindle and he put that on his desk and he kept his phone outside of his desk. So if he was in between calls, if he was going to do something he would pick up his Kindle or he would maybe he had some other stuff that he was playing about with on his desk. My point being that there's two levels to this, I suppose. One would be substitute what you're doing

for something which is better, but another layer deeper than that would be substitute the chasing of wanting a something for realizing that you don't need to chase anything and just allow yourself to be. Yeah, yeah, and with the constraints of the experiment, I noticed that happening automatically. So when I couldn't tend to something, I noticed that I was just managing the receipts on

my desk, which had been sitting there for months. This stuff happens automatically in an evening without going on YouTube because I wasn't allowed, I deleted the app off the Apple TV. I would just scroll around photos and reminisce about old memories. And I think you hit the nail right on the head. We need to substitute activities in for these old activities.

So there isn't some hole in our life that just we have to awkwardly try to fill with things in the moment. So ones that allow us to feel connected with others and this sense of pride. I took up piano lessons in the moment. So one's that allow us to feel connected with others and this sense of pride. I took up piano lessons at the time. My piano is just on the left here. You can see in the video.

Nice. And so now I have something to do when the call ends a bit early. You know, at this lower level of mental stimulation. And you know, we, dopamine fast for about a month, it's a pain, but it works incredibly, incredibly well. What's the effect? The effect is we no longer crave novelty, nearly as much. Novelty doesn't drive what we do.

And because of that, our mind settles down finally. You know, we finally settle down into a new, Because of that, our mind settles down finally. You know, we finally settle down into a new lower level of mental stimulation where the calm things are. We allow intentions to inform in our mind, to inform our actions. And so instead of just kind of, you know, frantically moving between objects of attention, choosing whatever option in the moment happens to be the most novel, because we crave dopamine

in the moment more than almost anything else, we have that pause before we act. And we allow an intention to form in our mind that, okay, maybe I should just organize these receipts, or maybe, oh, I have 10 minutes, not five, because they're going to be late. Maybe I should just practice this piece on the piano. And we take control of our behavior significantly more when we're at that lower level. Another example activity that I found remarkably well, I mentioned how the networks for presence and for acquisition are anti-correlated with one another, is that science of savoring that I mentioned. So having a saver list, which is just a list of everything you love to enjoy. Here's the fascinating thing. One of my favorite questions to everybody should try this.

To ask somebody who is really driven in this acquisition mentality, one of my favorite things to ask them is, what do you savor the most in your life? And this dumps pretty much all of the most driven people that I've asked this to. And the research shows that this idea of savoring, wherein we convert positive experiences into positive emotions, men find it more challenging to do than women. And wealthier people find it more challenging to do than people who are not wealthy because of that acquisition mentality. But having this list of things that we saver

is a beautiful way of practicing presence each and every day. It can be as simple as a cup of tea. It can be time with your partner. It can be a good book. It can be a fireplace that happy happen to have in the house. It can be an instrument you love to put something you love, an album that you love to listen to.

Whatever it is you love to savor, make a list and deliberately practice this skill of savering. Indeed, it is a skill. But what you're really practicing is not only optimizing the enjoyment you get out of everyday experiences, but you're actually practicing and practicing this skill of switching over this acquisition network to this here and now network. And the more nimble, nimble you can switch between these two modes, the easier you will find it to be focused

and present on whatever it is that you intend to be doing. And so this mental nimbleness that comes from the skill of savoring, indeed it is a skill. We can even savor the past and the future. We can savor the past by practicing, it's called reminiscence, we've all heard the word, but we just relive a positive experience that happened in our past in our mind and visualize it just for a few minutes. of experience that happened in our past in our mind. And visualize it just for a few minutes. We can also savor the future. And this counts as savering because we do it in the present.

We savor the future. It's called anticipation. And we can do this by counting down the days to an event. We can do this by just talking about something, some experience that's coming up. But the research shows that counting down, even just counting down the days to an event, creates effective memory traces in our mind,

kind of a path through a forest that we walk over again, which leads us to enjoy the experience even more when it actually does happen, which lets us extract more meaning and enjoyment out of our time. So dopamine fasting, saving, just a couple strategies to different effects, lowering the stimulation level and being able to switch between the acquisition mentality

and the present here and now mentality. Are there some components of savering, individual skills that contribute to being effective at the overall job of savoring. Yeah. Well, there are subcombo components to savoring. So, luxurrating is one of these. So, think of a cat. I just got a cat's around my mind. We just got a kitten a few weeks ago. Her name is Eleanor. Think of a cat soaking in the sun, luxuriating in the sun. That's one way we can save our experience.

Gratitude counts as savoring as well. So the practice of Thanksgiving, recalling three things that were great for each and every day. This is a ritual my wife and I have developed every night when we're going to sleep before we kind of fall asleep. We recall three things that we're grateful for. And people ask, do you run out of things? And it's like, hell no, no.

We could probably list 10 each and every day. Marvelling is yet another thing. So when we feel a sense of awe by something, whether that's kind of even just looking at the window and marvelling at the snow, it could be, and that actually by the way, when we see through our whole eyes, including our peripheral vision, that has a bonus calming effect when we feel a sense of awe with something that's visual. But just, you know, whether it's luxuriating, thanksgiving, marveling, anticipation, reminiscence, or just mindfully enjoying something in the moment. These all count, thankfully. All right, Christoph, I appreciate you very much. Thank you for coming on.

Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with all the stuff that you do? Yes, sir, thank you for having me on again. The book is called How to Call Me Your Mind, Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times. I think it's the best thing I've ever written and I hope you find the same. It's wherever books are sold,

I am at chrisbal Bailey.com and my podcast that I do with my wife is called Time of Attention, bonus plug there. But yeah, the book, the main thing. Thank you so much, man. All right, Chris. Thank you. you