The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - How to Stop Work From Taking Over Your Life

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

Work doesn’t end when the workday does. Even after we close our laptops, our minds keep replaying awkward meetings, looming deadlines, and unfinished to-do lists. Over time, that “always on” mentality can quietly hijack our relationships, our health, and our happiness. Dr. Laurie sits down with psychologist and bestselling author Guy Winch (Mind Over Grind: How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life) to explore the science of work stress — and why so many of us get stuck in fight-or-flight mode long after we’ve left the office.  Plus, Ben Walter, host of “The Unshakeables” and CEO of Chase for Business, shares what he’s learned from working with small business owners who don’t have the option to simply “clock out.” If you’ve ever felt like work is bleeding into everything, this episode offers science-based tools to help you take your life back. Resources mentioned in this episode: Mind Over Grind: How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life "Burnout: A Review of Theory and Measurement" "The Relationship Between Workplace Stressors and Mortality and Health Costs in the United States" "How Small Businesses Drive the American Economy" "Small Business Facts" “The Unshakeables” "Yerkes-Dodson Law Of Arousal And Performance" “The Use of Imagery to Manipulate Challenge and Threat Appraisal States in Athletes” “Rebuilding After a Blaze: Luna Gourmet Coffee & Tea”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. When it comes to feeling happier, the approach we take to work really matters. The average Americans spends about half of their waking hours on the job, which even if you're lucky enough to love what you do, can feel like a lot. But work doesn't always stop at the end of the work day. And I'm not just talking about all the unpaid sorts of work we have to do, the cooking and cleaning and caring for family members. I'm talking about the paid work that winds up creeping into the little free time we do have. The metaphor I use is a pinball machine. The work shoots out, and then it starts dinging to your relationships,

to your personal life, to your thoughts, to your leisure, to your ability to recover, to your self-care. And then when those become compromised, it makes things worse at work, which makes things worse outside of work, which makes things worse at work, digging back and forth. And that stress then stays in play for so much longer, which is why we're getting burnt out. This is psychologist, podcaster, and best-selling author Guy Wynch. Guy is an expert on managing all kinds of tough emotions. But his latest book, Mind Over Grind, How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life,

is all about strategies we can use to create a healthier work-life balance, something Guy admits he wasn't always great at. Literally a year into my professional career, I was totally burnt out. I recognized that in an incident where I was in the elevator with a neighbor, and it stalled between floors. And the neighbor went into a panic. And here I am a psychologist. I wasn't panicked.

I knew what to say to calm him down. But I just was incredibly rude and cruel even to him. He was just like hitting all the buttons. And I was like, oh, this is going to take forever to get upstairs now. And then he was going, this is my nightmare. This is my nightmare. And my response is I looked at him and I said, and this is my nightmare. And it was so, I mean, it was funny in my head, but it was terrible.

And when I saw his face, I felt such remorse. And I was like, why did I do that? And that's when I realized, oh, because I am drained. I'm so exhausted, I have like nothing left. And then I realize, wow, I'm a year in and I'm burnt out. And that was a moment of what I know people call depersonalization, where you're kind of annoyed at the intentions of the people around you. Talk about what this feeling of burning out at work did to your socialization,

your self-care, the other parts of your life. So when you're burnt out at work, but you have to keep going. I'm self-employed, so I have to keep going. really one of the survival mechanisms psychologically is you numb. You just put your head down and get from task to task to task. You're not enjoying what you do. There's no passion for what you do. You feel jaded about what you do.

It doesn't seem important. It doesn't seem meaningful or fun. And you're not doing a great job for sure. So you just become this robot, this drone truly. You just works and works and works and works and gets your head down and gets through and then wakes up the next morning and gets through again. And you can't numb selectively. We know that in psychology. You don't numb some of your feelings in some of the areas.

You numb all your feelings in all of the areas. And then that affects all your life outside of work, or lack thereof in my case. I was just working, and I wasn't tending to any of my other needs. If this sounds familiar or you feel like you may be in danger of this becoming familiar, then this episode is for you. Because today, Guy and I will explore evidence-based strategies for setting healthier boundaries at work.

And we won't be alone. We'll be joined by Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business. Bed works closely with small business owners, just the sorts of entrepreneurs who can't clock out when things get stressful. I have huge responsibilities at work. I only have so much time to be at home and with my family. How could I possibly let this creep in in a way that would compromise

the limited time that I get with them? So get ready for strategies you can use to break free from work stress. Right after the Happiness Lab returns from this quick break. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. These days, it feels like a lot of people are talking about the problem of work stress. And that's in part because work stress has gotten really bad. In one 2024 survey, more than 75% of employees reported that work stress was affecting their physical health.

Another study estimated that workplace stress causes over 100,000 deaths in the U.S. each year. And that's all on top of the fact that the world right now just feels really hard. We are in a particular time of uncertainty. We have geopolitical uncertainty. we have economic uncertainty, we have policy uncertainty, at records we haven't seen in the past. This is Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business. Chase for Business creates a suite of products for small business owners,

entrepreneurs who face special kinds of work stresses. So I thought Ben would have a unique perspective on fighting stress on the job. 44% of the economy is small business. It's two-thirds of every new job created in America. One of the most fun parts of my job is that I get to host our podcast, the unshakables, where we meet with those clients and we hear the stories of the really tough things that they've been through, which obviously cause immense amounts of stress and hear how they were able to overcome those obstacles and continue to build their businesses.

And the obstacles that small business owners face as they build their businesses are many. When you are a small business, you are the head of sales, you are the CIO, you are the custodian, you are everything in between. Even if you have a few employees, it really comes back to you and your identity is highly linked with the success of the business and often your personal fortunes as well. And so I think about the difference between sort of home life and work life and the stress that crosses, that line is way, way more blurry for a small business owner even

than it is for the most hardened, seasoned, high-powered professional in a corporate environment. There just simply is no way to separate them in the same way. Most small business owners, if you have debt, you are personally guaranteeing that debt with your personal assets. Every time that business makes a decision, your personal reputation is on the line. And then you compound on the environment we're in right now in this heady froth of uncertainty, and you can see where you end up.

And at this high level of stress, where you usually end up is not such a great place. The downstream effects are obviously terrible on relationships, on your ability to execute, on your self-satisfaction, on your happiness with life, on all of those things. The blurring of work and home stress is something small business owners experience intensely, but it's something that employees in all roles are feeling more and more. When work stress spills into home life, it can turn into a vicious cycle that can feel almost impossible to escape. But the science of stress shows something surprising. Having at least a little stress is actually good.

And when we have no stress, we actually don't always get that creative and we don't work the extra little bit to do it because there isn't the pressure to do it. The moment it stops being channeled into that and has channeled into your personal relationships or unhealthy eating, or mind-spinning anxiety, that's the point at which I think it starts to detract rather than enhance your ability to make the best use of it. And then it's just bringing up a really important point that we've known in the science since the 1950s. Like back in the 1950s, people are like, is stress good? Is it bad? It's both. It's what folks call an inverted U function. This is this famous thing called the Yerkes-Dodson curve, which at no stress, when you're kind of at the bottom of stress, you're not getting

anything done. You can barely get out of bed. You're not excited for work. But then as stress goes up, you hit some optimal middle point with the stress where you're like, I'm excited, there's some pressure, we're going to get through this. But then there's a tipping point where it's like, a bell curve, yeah. A bell curve, no, it's too much. Now I'm screaming at my kids and I'm not getting to the gym and it becomes a little bit too much. One of my favorite phrases I got for my daughter. When she was in the fourth grade, we moved to London for a couple years for work. And I remember looking at her and saying, honey, are you nervous to move to London? Are you excited? What's the deal. And she looked at me, she was 10 years old or whatever she was, she said, I think I'm

kind of nerve-sighted, Dad. I just love that phrase, and it's stuck with me ever since. When I'm nervous-sighted about something, I'm probably going to do pretty well. So how do we keep our stress low enough that it works for us rather than against us? How do we stay nerve-sighted rather than freaked out? Psychologist and author Guy Wynch has found that how we think about stress matters a lot. Stress is very psychological to begin with. It really depends. on how you perceive the quote-unquote threats, pressures around you and whether you feel able to manage them. And one of the things we do at work, which I think most people do, is they frame their jobs in ways that add stress to their lives. A simple way is things like,

oh, my job is really, really stressful, or I hate my work, or my boss hates me, or like, I can't stand every second in that office. When you frame it in that generalized way, what you're doing is that you are predisposing yourself to perceive every moment at work as punishing, as difficult. And that means that you are anticipating threats. And so you are in fight or flight, you are highly activated and charged. You will perceive even the small ambivalent slight says, here's another thing, you'll tend to miss those moments that aren't.

And there is no job that's stressful all of the time. There just isn't. Even if you have terrible meetings that day, you have a few that aren't so terrible. You have an hour that's boring. You have 15 minutes where you can bring your favorite lunch and actually sit in the park and maybe take a break. There's got to be someone in the office, one person that you actually can stomach and it's not too bad seeing them when you see them. You know, your boss can't be evil every second of the day because even Disney villains aren't. But when you frame it that way, you are literally priming yourself to experience

everything is way more stressful than it actually is. And it's such a simple correction you can make in your head because the idea is actually to correct to accuracy and nuance, not to fantasy, but just to be more accurate. This also gets to this idea that we can be in these different modes when it comes to how we think about stress. We can be in what you've just talked about, which is a real threat mode, right? Like everything is so terrible all the time. But there's a flip mode that we can take when we're dealing with stressful situations, which is sort of a challenge mode. What's the difference between these two modes and how do we react psychological? when we're in one versus the other. So the threat versus the challenge mindset theory.

It's the preventing theory in sports psychology. And the distinction is, are you going into a situation, seeing it as a challenge to which you plan to rise? Are you going in with the idea of I'm going to win? I'm going to smash this. Or are you going in because you're seeing it as a threat? And then what you're trying to do is not lose. Like, I hope this doesn't go badly.

I hope I don't embarrass myself. Now, you're trying to succeed in both mindsets. but in one you're going in feeling confident, feeling in control, feeling like you're prepared, and in the other one you're going in second-guessing, wondering, anticipating threats, and those mindsets have a major difference, not in just how we conduct ourselves and think in the situation, but in how our brain responds, in the hormones that course through our body in that moment. And so the threat mindset is a really problematic one. it predisposes you to do poorly, to not be able to draw on your abilities as well.

And we psych ourselves out at work without realizing that we are creating a self-defeating prophecy. So we really can't afford to tell ourselves, oh, no, I can't handle that. Because you won't be able to handle it if you say that. I imagine there must be some cases when we really should be in more of a threat mindset, right? If we're really actually in danger, are there ways to know whether it's just the framing or whether it's the real situation that we're facing that could be potentially problematic. Well, yes, because we tend to be pessimistic. You know, zoom out for a minute.

Is this really problematic? Are you really in over your head or are you just nervous that things might not go well? If you are really in over your head, that's about problem solving. That's about, okay, let me redefine what's the best I can do here and be realistic in terms of this is going to be problematic. Let me see if I can get more help. If I can get an extension, if I can beef up my research. resources because I am not equipped to deal with this in that moment. But if it's just psychological,

if it's worry, you know, a lot of people just like second-guessing themselves, they have a little bit of a fear of failure. So that's when you want to shift mindset. And so how do we shift the mindset? How do we move from a threat mode to more of a challenge mode? What are some strategies? One is the idea of preparation. You really want to be prepared. Like if you're worried about something, your unconscious mind might be like, hey, I know this is a perfect time to serve social media. Or, oh, why don't you do a to-do list for the groceries? You're going to be shopping for later. That will be way more fun than dealing with the anxiety of thinking about this thing that's coming up.

That's what you have to catch, because that's going to be a problem. You want to be super prepared because the more prepared you are, the more confident you'll be. I asked small business expert Ben Walter what that kind of preparation actually looks like in practice, especially when you're not sure where to start. I lean heavily on structured frameworks. and reformed consultant, hand in the air, so I admit it. I used to be a management consultant. Consultants are basically paid to deal with ambiguity.

That's kind of what you do. So I used to joke when I was a consultant that they should give me a new title, and I should no longer be senior consultant or whatever I was. I should be senior executive vice president of bucketing. And that sounds a little silly, but if you can just take some ambiguous problem and break it into pieces, part A, part B, part C, and start categorizing the world into those buckets. and I will confess, I'm a disorganized person.

I know that about myself. I know that my lack of organization causes me stress. So I have built structures into my life that force organization for me and for the business that I run, which give me a scaffolding on which to not get as stressed when the inevitable stuff comes up. So I'll give you an example of that. Every year, I have five deliverables for my business. I'm very clear about what it is. this is what we're going to achieve this year.

We have KPIs against all of those. It's all written down. I meet with my team once a month. We go through that checklist. I know where we're red, amber, and green. I know what's going well. I know where they're stuck that I need to get in there and help and unblock.

When I have that in place, I find that all of the grenades that get thrown in don't phase me because I don't have that wild, crazy disorganization going on on the core of the business. And so I've learned, like, this causes me stress. I'm not good at it. I'm going to build infrastructure and hire people who are good at it

and compensate for me in all kinds of ways so that I have that as a scaffolding on which to operate. It also seems like this is another great case of bucketing in ways that feel really healthy. A colleague of mine who was always doing all these things and I was like, how do you keep all those balls

in the air all the time? And she once said the key is to recognize that some balls are glass and some balls are plastic. And you can let the plastic ones fall, but you got to catch the glass one. that it seems like this clear structure, like these are the five deliverables. It's like those are glass. The plastic ones fall.

That's not great, but oh well, as long as we catch those glass ones will be all right. It's a good metaphor. Organization will set you free. And I say that as someone who inherently just isn't that organized, but it's true. Some sense of organizing structure literally brings your stress level down. Similarly with uncertainty, okay, let me put down a framework on paper. Here are the things I control. Here are the things I don't control.

I'm going to focus on the things that I can control. control, I'm going to tick off that list. That other stuff is out there, but I cannot control that. It gives you a way forward. It gives you a checklist. It gives you something that you can start to act on instead of freezing in the face of all of this uncertainty and ambiguity. We had someone on the podcast, for example, it was a coffee company called Luna Gourmet Coffee, and their entire roastery burnt to the ground. Like ashes on the ground, smoldering. They lost a ton of inventory. They lost all their ability to roast. And I was asking them, like, how do you not freeze in the, what do you do. And he said, well, we knew we wanted to rebuild that minute. And so we just got to work and

we made a list. What do we need to do in the interim? We have some backup inventory. How are we going to manufacture in the meantime? When do we call the insurance company? And they split up the list and just got at it. And I'm sure it wasn't quite that easy. But they just talked about, you know, immediately going into sort and action, sort and action, sort and action. I think for most people, there's a piece that comes with that because I can speak for myself. Staring at something and going, I don't know what to do next, is completely paralyzing. And you have to give yourself a way forward because when you're just frozen, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Right. That's when the rumination gets going. If I can't control this, I can't do anything. Then you're in an anxiety spiral. But there's another way to prevent the

anxiety spirals that contribute to so much work stress. We need to control our inner monologue. And we'll hear some practical strategies for doing that when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. We have an unconscious mind, an automatic mind, and it's not a self-organized thing, it's not a self-conscious thing, but it does listen. It does pick up on the messages we give to ourselves. Psychologist and work stress expert Guy Wynch argues that we need to be a lot more careful about the inadvertent messages we're allowing our poor minds to hear on repeat. And so many of us tend to have so negative self-talk, that we are replaying doubts.

Even as we're trying to prepare, like, oh, but things never go well for me, and the boss just never likes me no matter what I do. And then your unconscious mind is hearing that, and why should you then feel confident? It's going to generate anxiety. It's going to generate doubt. And you can't say to your unconscious mind,

feel confident because it's unconscious. That's not how it works. But you can whisper to it by changing yourself talk to, well, I'm really preparing more than I ever have before, or like, I am so glad I'm investing all this time doing what I can. I'm so glad I reached out to a few people to get help because now I feel much more confident. Now I'm really doing everything I can.

You can message the confidence, the preparation, the control. Those are the things you want to be messaging. And so you really want to watch that internal dialogue. You've also noted that when we try to change our internal dialogue, it has to be believable. We can't just be like, oh, it's perfect. Nothing's going to be stressful today. I'm not worried about that terrible quarterly report I have coming up. How do we hack the believability of that self-time?

talk better. You just have to be accurate. Don't have to tell yourself, I am the best salesperson in the entire department if your track record doesn't show that. You can say to yourself, here's where I stand in terms of sales, and I'm putting in all this work now because I think I can really improve and move up that list. That is accurate to the extent that you're actually putting in the time and the effort to improve. So you want to be accurate, but you want to be accurate slash optimistic. And Guy argues that another thing we need to be accurate about is how we choose to name the annoying tasks, we face at work. A lot of the times when we procrastinate or when something stresses us out, it's because we feel it's an unpleasant task. It can be unpleasant to us because it's anxiety

provoking, it's stressful, it's unpleasant, it's boring. However we define it. You know, it can be an expense account. That's too boring for me. It can be the difficult email to write this difficult person. That's stressful. And when we think about tasks that way, A, they stress us out, and B, we are really inclined to procrastinate and put them off because we don't want to sit with those unpleasant feelings. And when we do that, we're taking the 15 minute tasks, say, 50 minutes of unpleasantness, and we're smearing it over an entire week by putting it off and then thinking about it all the time and then getting more worried about it and more stressed about putting it off. Now, I really have to do it, but I don't want to do it. So you actually took something that's

limited in terms of the unpleasantness and you supersized it. Now, if you redefine the tasks that you tend to put off like that or do you tend to find unpleasant as nuisances, which they are. Nusances are things we tend to take care of right away. When it's a nuisance, there's a fly, there's a pebble in your shoe. No one is on a hike and says, I've got a pebble in my shoe. I'm going to take that out in five to six miles. We don't do that. You know, we're like, oh, I'm going to take that out right away. The tag that's bothering me on the collar, I'm going to rip that out right. Nucences, we take care of right away. So start defining these stressful, obnoxious, difficult, and pleasant tasks as nuisances to yourself,

oh, now I've got this nuisance spreadsheet. I have to write that nuisance email. You are going to be much more inclined to get rid of it and to do it now rather than later. I can't say how much this has already helped me. I had proofs for a paper, which is as academic, when you get a paper, you have to check everything and make sure all the numbers are right and everything's perfect. And it wound up in my inbox.

And literally when I was going to bed and I'm like, oh, God, I have those proofs. I have those proofs. I have to do these proofs. But then right after that, I read your book, and I was like, the proofs, nuisance, got to get that out of the way. Then I just sat down to do it. It probably did take me like two hours or something. You know, it was a decent chunk of time. It was a big nuisance.

But then it was gone, right? Then it was two hours and it was done rather than over a whole week and I'm telling my husband about it at dinner. And I was seeing that email every time I look in the inbox. Oh, I got to deal with the proofs. It's such an easier thing to get it out of the way and get it off your desk. And the relief we feel when we do is also a nice little bonbon at the end. One of the big insights of your book is that our stress. doesn't really end at work, in part because our unconscious mind keeps it alive. How does our

unconscious mind keep it alive? When you have a difficult day at work, you're feeling overwhelmed, you had an unpleasant exchange with someone, you felt slighted, insulted, harassed, whatever it is. We don't leave those things at the office. Those are the kinds of insults and worries that we take home with us. And the way they manifest is that they appear as intrusive thoughts that make us think about the incident, but in an unproductive way. They just make us think about that moment where the boss said, no, that's not a good idea at all, and wave their hand dismissively at us and how insulted we felt and how dismissed we felt and how embarrassing that was afterwards, and there are mind spirals. Now, we're not figuring anything out. We went through the unpleasantness

of that incident, and now we are playing it on repeat and putting ourselves through that same unpleasantness over and over and over again at home to no end. One thing to consider is this is unpaid over time. If you are thinking about work when you're home, you're at work. You're not getting nothing done. You're upsetting yourself. You're stressing yourself out. You're keeping yourself activated and in fight or flight. And it's not voluntary. You're trying to watch a show and it intrudes into your mind again and you're sitting at dinner with your partner and trying to have a conversation. And suddenly they're like, hey, did you hear what I said? You're like, No, because you're back at work replaying that same argument.

Another thing people do, I'm sorry, I always find interesting because I do it too, is they have the fantasy argument. I wish I would have said this. And again, there's maybe some satisfaction in having the mic drop moment in your head, but you had to relive the insult to have it. You're still getting all upset about it, and it's not going to happen. That conversation went, it's in the past now. So we have to catch when we're ruminating unproductively

because it's really damaging us. It'll impair our sleep. It'll stress us out. It'll impair our mood. Over time, it can become habitual, and then it predisposes us to cardiovascular disease, to depression. There's just no utility to it. And so we have to catch it,

and then we have to convert it into a much more adaptive form of self-reflection. And so how do we banish the rumination? Your book has some of these lovely strategies. You talked about kind of coming up with ways to develop strong intolerance for rumination. Sounds great, but what do you mean there? Once you're aware of how you're used to,

and harmful rumination is and how you're doing all this over time and actually harming yourself in the process, you should develop a real antipathy toward it. You should see it as your unconscious mind trying to infect you in some way, trying to bring in unpleasantness into your headspace. And so the metaphor I use in the book

and you can use any is like, you have to think of it like a skunk that just sat down with you on the sofa. You're like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want this in my head. And I train myself really well to do it. I still ruminate when I'm in stressful periods because that is a natural thing. I just catch it really, really quickly. By the second round of the hamster wheel, I'm like, wait a minute, now I'm

ruminating. I'm not having that. Somebody was really annoying and they disappointed me in some kind of way and I'm like, how could they do that? I don't understand. In the minute they catch like, no, no, no, no, no, you're not going to give that person more stage time in your head. This is not happening in my head right now. I'm not letting it. And one of the great things about that strategy is because rumination is building off all these unconscious processes, just the act of noticing it can be really powerful because then you're like, wait, I'm doing that thing again, skunks on the couch. I got to get rid of this.

Right. It frees up so much bandwidth, so much mental space. It allows you to be more thoughtful and deliberate and intentional and present in actually what I'd rather be doing after work. Now I can enjoy the movie. Now I can enjoy date night with my partner because I'm actually more present. Another thing we can do when we get back to our conscious mind for thinking about how to deal with rumination is that we can start dealing with potential stressful problems proactively.

We can look ahead to prevent the rumination from coming in. You've talked about the strategy of finding your stress minds. What does that mean and how can we use that strategy better? I always ask people when I'm giving talks. Who thinks their job is stressful like nine out of ten? And people are like, oh, it's ten out of ten. And there's always someone who shouts, 11. You know, there's always that.

And I'm like, okay, but that's not the case. Your job is not at an 11. Break it down into what the specific components are and rank those. Now, maybe some of them are tens. Maybe that meeting with the boss and the client that hates you is so unpleasant, that's a 10. But you have it once a month. Maybe this task or this meeting, which is always people feuding and fighting and not getting along, is an 8 or a 9, and you have it 3 hours a week.

But once you start going through that, you'll find that there are some 8th, There are some nines, maybe some tens, but there are a lot of threes and fours and fives and sixes because there are the lunches and there are the boring meetings. There's plenty. But once you know what the tasks are, you can start looking at the ones that stress you out most. And those are your stress minds. Those are the ones that kind of explode every week and, you know, and then you can start to strategize about how to deal with him.

I asked Ben Walter what he thought of guy's strategy for categorizing your daily stress minds. Ben said, we can go even further by offloading a lot of. our stress minds altogether. Find ways to not have to do the things that stress you out the most. It's okay. Let's be honest. We are less stressed when we do things we're good at. Now, we don't want to only do things we're great at. Otherwise, we're not nerve-sided. We're not challenged. We're not pressed in the same way that we talked about. But the things that we know we're bad at and that we just don't have a gift for, we might never be good at. Find a way to not have to do them. That's not always possible, but it's possible a lot more than we think.

Pay an outside vendor to do it. Take the whole process out of your business process, if you can. Find the things that cause you the most stress and find a way to either engineer them out of your business process or to offload them to partners, employees, or some other party. But Ben also has a strategy for the stress minds you can't realistically unload. It's a practice that we talk about a lot on the Happiness Lab, the act of radical acceptance.

Simply accept the fact that stressful situations, are a normative part of most jobs, especially if you're a small business owner, like the client's Ben's supports. Sometimes there's a time to be stressed and a time to not be stressed. You know, I say to people who want to start their own businesses, just know the first two years,

you're going to be stressed the whole time. Yes, you can help manage it, but the early phase of starting a business is highly, highly stressful, even for the most resilient people. But there will come a time at which you can take some of that stress off. You know, a lot of, if you're in retail, guess what, Q4 is going to suck.

It's just the way it is. My wife works in an online retail. She always tells me like, Ben, Black Friday's coming. I know. We're not going away for Thanksgiving. We just don't. So I think having in your mind that there are sometimes that it's okay to be more stressed, and as long as you protect other times that are less,

that can give you more fortitude to cope. It also just normalizes what you're going through. I think it forces you to give yourself a little grace and self-compassion because you're like, this is normal. Of course I'm feeling stressed. I'm in my first year of the business, or of course I'm feeling stressed. It's Q4. common human experience. And there's so many studies that show that just having that moment of like,

yeah, normal, common human experience, it reduces the stress because it stops you from beating yourself up about the stress when you're in that tough time. Right. It's like saying if you've had a loss in your life and you're sad, well, that's normal. You're feeling grief. That's normal. And then there's times when you're stressed and that's okay too. And I think we don't give ourselves permission. I'm feeling stressed and I shouldn't. Well, no, maybe this is a time you probably are going to feel stressed. So far, we've heard Guy and Ben's strategies for managing stress at work, but what about managing stress when you get out of work? When we get back from the break, we'll discuss what the evidence says about how to truly relax and recharge. We'll learn why so many

of us tend to decompress in the wrong ways and what we can do to unstress our leisure time. The Happiness Lab, we'll be right back. These days, we talk a lot about stress on the job, but psychologist Guy Wynch likes to point out that handling work stress, isn't just about what you do during your work hours. It's also about how you spend your time off the clock. What's interesting for me is that the nature of work has changed so dramatically since the Industrial Revolution and our approaches to recovery, if not.

In other words, in the Industrial Revolution, you spend 15 hours a day, you know, stirring fabrics in a vat of dye, and then you get home and you need to rest. But we sit usually eight, nine hours a day, and look at screens, and our way to recover from that is to get home and sit down and look at screens. And our brain is like, so wait, what's happening? How is this different, really?

It doesn't matter that the content is different. We're doing the same thing. And the research shows that to recover effectively from the workday, we need to de-stress. And so resting and relaxing has its place. If you want to veg out for a few hours, fine. That won't drain your batteries further. It won't recharge them, though. To recharge, to recharge, to.

revitalize is a really important ingredient of effective recovery. So it can't just be about the veg out. It can't just be about the screen binge or about the social media. You know, so many people are like, I spent three hours looking through reels. And I'm like, three hours through wheels, they're short. So how many different, your attention is like your brain is like, that was not calming to me at all. You know, I did not feel calm by that. So we have to add in the recharging stuff. And recharging stuff, unfortunately, doesn't happen on the couch. It actually means we have to get up and do something. The problem is, our mind, again, the automatic unconscious mind will say to you like, no, no, no, no, no, you're totally wiped out. You can't go to the gym now. That's crazy talk.

You can't get up and go meet your friend. You're drained. Our mind doesn't distinguish well between mental exhaustion and physical exhaustion. It confuses the two. We're not physically tired. We're mentally drained and we need to recharge mentally. And everyone knows this. If you're athletic and you force yourself to get off the couch and go for that run, if you're social and you force yourself to go and socialize, if you're creative and you force yourself to go and do the painting or the writing or whatever it is, whether it's 15 minutes, half an hour or an hour later, you will come back feeling way more energized than before you left. Because of that magical ROI of that second wind, you'll feel revitalized, except that when you're on the couch, your mind is telling you, no, no, you just,

you don't have it within you, but you do. It's one of those moments where you have to, like, be the adult, you know, in the brain and kind of take over and disengage from the autopilot and do the thing that's good for you, even though it feels like I can't. But even when you've intentionally chosen a more restorative activity, it can still be hard to switch off. I know that when I'm feeling really stressed at work, it can feel like I'm battling my brain just to turn work mode off so that I can actually enjoy my free time. So how do we do this better? Guy suggests a strategy he learned as a kid from watching Mr. Rogers.

If you were a fan of that show, you probably remember how Mr. Rogers would famously swap his suit jacket and dress shoes for the red cardigan and sneakers he wore at home every day when he entered the house. Guy says that daily rituals like these can be more beneficial than we expect. We have to really help train our brain to shift gears from the workday, which might be intense and conflictual and pressure, and stressful to whatever the home life is, whatever you're doing when you get home, whether it's a dinner with your family, helping your kids with homework,

whatever the thing is. It's a very different mindset. You want to help switch gears. And for the brain, it's really useful to have a ritual that's repetitive because our brain learns rituals. And so when you start something, it starts to anticipate where this is going

and then it'll cooperate better in actually shifting the mindset. And I say ritual because people say, I have a routine, but a ritual is something that we imbue with deeper meaning. So it's actually a little bit more effective. And it should employ as many of the senses as possible. Music is very evocative for us.

So have the playlist that you play by the end of the day. Actions are useful. I always close the door to my home office. I will walk out. I will close the door and I will say to myself, your evening begins. Like I will message myself, this is the end of the work day. And then I will listen to a certain kind of music. I will change clothes.

I tend to wear casual clothes, but I have the casual clothes I wear when I'm working. And I have the casual, and people say to me, I'm jeans and T-shirts. I'm like terrific. Have the T-shirts you wear for work and associate with work and have the T-shirts and jeans that your brain associates with not work, because it's very symbolic. Clothes are very embodied. It makes us feel a certain thing.

So if you associate some with your leisure time, you're much more inclined to then feel relaxed. You can use scent, certain candles. You can shift the lighting. You can create whatever the ritual is that works for you. you. But repeat it every day. You can do it during your commute or, you know, as you get home, you can ask for like, when I get home, I'll need 10 minutes to get my mind straight before I dive into the duties of the household or the parenting. You can ask for that and then use that because then you'll be much more present. You're also hacking the same thing that causes all the

problems, which is your unconscious mind, right? If your mind is unconsciously noticing the clothes you wear, that you're still in the room where you're working, now all of a sudden it's still in work mode. But when you use the ritual to hack like, oh, now new smell, new clothes, your unconscious mind for better or for worse is learning from it and changing how you're experiencing the world emotionally. It's so powerful. Absolutely. Another way we can hack the unconscious mind, though, is that we can tell it stuff that we want it to learn from. You've talked about the power of announcing your schedule in the evenings if you do have to work on some small things. How does that work? I advocate for two things. Number one, I said when I leave my office, I say, now the evening begins.

But I will also put in my calendar. A lot of people, the evenings are white in their calendar, unless they have something that they're doing. Okay, I have dinner here with these friends or this thing that I'm going to. But otherwise, it's white. And white is not telling your brain what to do. So I would put there rest and recharge. Recover from the work day.

Spend quality time with your family. Put something there. So it reminds you, actually there is a task right now. It's not a goal-oriented one. It's an experiential one. But there is one. But the other thing you can do is like work emails. Many, many, many people.

They have to respond to them. And what that does is that it can just corrupt your entire evening because you check your phone every five minutes and then you're not detached from work at all. You're fused with work. You're not able to engage and to be present in whatever it is you are doing. So that framing, the feeling of autonomy

that you're in charge of your evening is very important. And the way you do that is you frame whatever the task is as the main event. The main event being relax and recharge or quality time with my family or go for run, then have dinner, then whatever the thing is. That's the main event.

When you have to check work stuff, do it in one sitting, if possible. Frame that as that's the intermission from the main event of the show that is my evening. And then you're just taking a break from your evening for the intermission about work. And then after the intermission, the show resumes, you're resuming, whatever you're doing. That brain hack allows your unconscious mind to still feel like we're at home, as opposed to continually thinking about, oh, I have to deal with this thing at work. So these are all strategies we can use for the end of the workday. But you've also been a big advocate of squeezing leisure into micro breaks during the work day. How can we do this a little bit better? So I said earlier that one of the things we do when we feel overwhelmed at work, pressured, stressed, etc., is we just put our head down and go from task to task on complete autopilot.

we're actually not strategizing our day from a psychological health point of view. We are not actually giving thought and looking like, oh my goodness, I have three difficult meetings in a row. What's the best way for me to deal with that? Oh, you know what? There's 10 minutes here between this one and this one. That would be a good time for me to do some sit-ups or push-ups or go up and down some stairs just to get my blood flow going.

I do have 15 minutes here. Let me prepare food to bring and go sit in the park. have some nature around me, that will be really, really useful. After this meeting, let me see if I can push back the next thing by 10 minutes because then I want to be able to call

my mother, my best friend, whatever, and just see a friendly, loving face and just get some good vibes. In other words, be intentional and deliberate about what breaks, what oases you're putting in your desert of a day or your hell of a landscape

or whatever it is, building some breaks. There's small things you can do for a minute or two. If you're going to be on social, media, look at things that actually make you smile. For me, videos of Vishla puppies, whatever. Two or three minutes. Guaranteed, oh, God, that's just too cute. I'm in a different mindset already. This was so critical for me when I heard this one because I realized that what I do

when I have these micro breaks in a really busy, busy day is I'm often, again, using these sort of slightly bad unconscious strategies as I'm like, well, those are my moments to get through the other stuff. That's when I'll go through my email or that's when I'll check in on what's happening on the news or something like that. And it's exactly the wrong thing I need at that time. It's like the thing my brain goes to is exactly the wrong stuff that I really need in that moment. The news, it doesn't matter what side of the political landscape you're on. It's upsetting regardless. It's angering regardless. So like, be very thoughtful about when do I want to be activated one way or the other. When do I want to feel like engaged in that way? Do it when it's good for you.

Do it when you can come down for it, not just that that lingers. And certainly don't do it between stressful meetings because, again, that'll put you into fight or flight and then predispose you to go into the next meeting really charged up. And that means more sensitized, more reactive, all of it. But managing stress can sometimes require more than a restful micromomomoment. In his work with small business owners, Ben Walter has seen that day-long breaks can also be transformative. The most effective strategies I see are when you reserve at least one specific time every week where you don't work. There's a reason that, you know, whatever your religion, whether your day is Saturday or your day is Sunday, there's a reason that people figured this out like 5,000 years ago,

that maybe a day of rest is probably pretty healthy for you, both physically and emotionally. It gives you an anchor and it gives you something to look forward to every week and that you can build on as the business grows. So I think the only way to manage it is to have set times where, but for emergencies, you don't work. But Ben's favorite tip for managing stress isn't about what you do on your own. It's about who you surround yourself with when times get tough. When you carry the weight to the world on your shoulders and you don't have anyone to share that with, it's pretty rough. So one of the big pieces of advice that I give to all of my clients is to find a network. A lot of small businesses have formed a community that support each other. I gave the example of that coffee

company, one of their competitors helped them get through it. And so whether it's complementary businesses or competitive businesses doesn't matter. Find like-minded people who've had experiences like yours and you should form a support network with them and have people that you can, in a safe way, share your challenges with who can share some of their experiences and how they solve them. It's a really important outlet for people. I meet with small businesses all the time,

and the difference between the ones who feel like they are alone and the ones who've found their people and know they aren't is dramatic. You're giving a strategy that fits so nicely with the science of social emotional regulation, that one of the great ways we can regulate our emotions and deal with our stress is to talk to other people about it. but it doesn't work to talk to other people if they don't understand what you're going through.

And so finding this network of people who are going through the same thing is like the best form of social emotional regulation because they're giving you strategies that they know are going to work for you. I mean, there's nothing in the world quite as comforting is when someone says, I know exactly what that feels like. That's really hard. And they mean it. That's just calming. Oh, I'm not alone.

This isn't unique to me. Other people have had to experience this. Let me learn from them. Work stress may be climbing, but that doesn't mean you have to live in fight or flight mode. By managing your mindset, protecting your recovery time, and building the right support around you, you can learn to keep stress in that healthier, nerve-sighted range. If you're curious to learn more science-backed advice on managing work stress, check out Guy Wynch's new book, Mind Over Grind, How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life.

And if you'd like to hear more personal stories from small business owners about their make-or-break moments, Check out Ben Walters' podcast, The Unshakeables. If you have thoughts about today's episode and the science of work stress, we'd love to hear them. You can email us at Happiness Lab at Pushkin.fm. Or leave us a review to tell us what resonated. You can also sign up to learn more about the science of happiness and join my free newsletter on my website, Dr. Lari-Santos.com. That's D-R-L-A-U-R-A-E-S-A-N-T-O-S dot com. That's it for today, but be sure to return next week.

for our special coverage of this year's upcoming World Happiness Report, which will be dropping later this week. That's all next time. On the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human.