All Things Brain: The Art Of Recognizing Fatigue & Developing Mental Resilience With Dr. Amy Mednick

Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day we face change, stress and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Barkel and his inspiring guest explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change. Proof. You're gonna love today's episode of the Change Proof podcast. I have Dr. Amy Mednick, who has a passion for all things brain. I love that. Which started in her undergraduate studies of neuroscience at mit. She went on to pursue psychiatry at Beth Israel as a field that she could make the most positive change in an area of highest need. The coronavirus pandemic moved all of her patient work online and led her to study and write about the effects of remote work has on the human brain and its hardwired need for connection. You're going to love this conversation. And if you've not yet taken your own resilience assessment to establish your mental resilience, you can do that for free in just three minutes by going to rank my resilience.com rankmyresilience.com you will get a score in four specific zones of resilience, including something that we're going to be talking about in this episode of with Dr. Mednick. Enjoy. All right, Amy, so you've, you've, you know, it's fun to listen to your own bio read to you. I bet. I know. I always enjoy hearing mine, actually. It makes me cringe, to be honest.

Same.

So here's a question for you. What's one thing, one thing that's not part of your standard bio that you would love for people to know about you? Sure.

Yes. So I guess so. I, I wrote, I wrote this book recently. I'm very science minded. My, you know, my book is all about science and, and that's how I spend most of my days thinking. But my love really is fiction and I, and I, I'd love to write a novel. So I kind of started out with fiction writing and then found myself a scientist.

Wow, that's, that is interesting. I'm, I'm a fan of fiction writing and always sort of think my, my skills as a nonfiction writer just don't measure up. I mean, if I'm being really, you know, very transparent about it, that the creative writing, you know, that my writing is somehow less creative, but it's, it's.

Creative and then, but it's just like a different brain space, you know, and especially if you spend so much time in that nonfiction space, it's like it's. It's hard. It's hard to shift. It's hard to move to that other space or feel like you can. But it's, you know, it's definitely a different part of your brain.

It. It is. You know, it's maybe a decent lead in to the. I would love for. For you to. To maybe provide some of your. A little bit of backstory on. On how you got to where you are today. And maybe there's a pivot or two in there that you might reveal, perhaps.

Yeah, I would love to. So born and raised on the East Coast, Jersey. And I went to. I went to undergrad at mit, so, you know, surrounded by a lot of engineers. Most of my friends became engineers. And I kind of fell into this. Into this major, small major at the school, brain and cognitive science, kind of by accident, and I just loved it. And I really just fell in love with everything related to the brain and had a really awesome time studying it in school. I decided to go to med school because. Why not? You know, I mean, I wanted a. I want to be in a helping profession. I love science. So, you know, it fit so into med school up in the Bronx, and I. I really didn't. I didn't know exactly what I was going to do. I figured I love the brain, so I guess I'll be a neurologist.

Like it was, by the way. I just. Just for people out there that are. Are maybe smiling at this right in this moment. I did the. My journey to law school. And then not like you, I actually, I couldn't admit that maybe I. I went into it a bit randomly, you know, like, oh, I think I'll go to law school. Oh, I think I'll get. No.

Why not?

Yeah, why not? I spent 18 years. I spent 18 years doing that work before I finally pivoted. So, anyway, back to you.

So. So as a med school. And the nice thing actually about med school, I don't know if they do this in law school, is you really kind of get to try everything out before you commit to anything. I think that's a great. A great thing. Not just to kind of figure out what you love, but also so that once you're a doctor, you know about all the other stuff. So I really didn't know. And I just kind of went through the rotations thinking, I guess I'll fall back on neurology if I must, and. And no, no thought ever of being a psychiatrist. And I had my psychiatry rotation and whatever, and then halfway through, I Just, I just fell completely in love with it and just decided that was what I was going to do. And so I, so that's what I did. I did my psychiatry residency and finally finished school. So that was exciting. And I went into, I started my own psychiatry practice and I did a lot of psychopharmacology, prescribing medications. Really came to love that a lot. It really, it's, it's kind of when it's done right, it's kind of an art. You know, you really start to like, you get to know your patients really well. You kind of get to glimpse into their brains. You're, you're making little adjustments. You're seeing what happens when we change this and what happens when we change that. And the more you understand people and how they respond to these things, the more you kind of really get to know the inner workings of their minds and kind of understanding in general. Super rewarding work because you really, you know, I found myself really kind of helping people to find, fine tune their, their own experience of the world. Try to make it a little bit better, try to build their resilience, things like that. So I was doing that for a long time. I guess you could call it a pivot. I, it's still psychiatry, but after a while I kind of wanted to, I looked for other things because I wanted to have more to offer my patients and just medications. So I started doing a procedure a few years ago. It's called transcranial magnetic stimulation. It's brain stimulation to increase, to treat depression, help rewiring, help stimulate growth, things like that. So I started doing TMS and it's a very office based procedure. I got it really up and running about, you know, March 2020. Like it was really, really taken off. So we all know how that went. Pivoted back out of the office and back home. Luckily, psychiatry is, is other than the TMS arm is, is pretty well suited for the remote world. So I was lucky in that way. And all my work went online like everyone else. And I, I continued seeing my patients online, running the rest of my life online like everyone else. And then a little ways into the pandemic, I was approached by a colleague who was, had this idea for, for this book about, about doing remote work. It was like pretty early, so we didn't, we didn't know how to do any of this, but we decided to write a book about it. This is kind of in, extremely interesting because we just kind of like wrote it as we went. You know, we took a year. So it was like late 2020. Late 2021. You know, really explored these things, explored the problems we were having, our patients, our clients were having, and, you know, just putting our finger on. On like the why. A lot of the book is about the why. Why is it? Why are we struggling, what's missing, what's hard. And then kind of goes later into. Into strategies. But I think the strategies resonate more because there's, there's science behind them. So that was a lot of my pandemic life, and now I'm kind of doing all those things, but back out in the real world also, which is lovely.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's the story of a lot of us. Different. Different, but same. Same, you know, or same thing.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's. I wanna, you know, to me, I have a personal interest in talking about the subject matter of your book, which is why you're, you know, we, we're so happy to have you as a guest on the show. A lot of my work as a keynote speaker, a resilience keynote speaker is. Is really under a bigger umbrella, and that umbrella is more well being. Well being. Well being. Beingness word, maybe. But the idea that we, we can take better care of one another and we spend, as we know, massive amounts of our life, our adult lives, in work, at work, and with other people in that same pursuit, so to the care of those around us and for ourselves is a really worthwhile pursuit. It's what I do now and as opposed to what I was doing as a lawyer. Different, different thing. Can't really even. I mean, they're related, but. But this is, this is, I think, a time when really getting very granular, even about what that looks like, as opposed to just the big broad strokes of it. Yeah, I get it. We should take better care of ourselves, we should take better care of others. You know, all that kind. It makes sense, but yet we still are looking at massive attrition levels. People leave the workplace more frequently and more quickly. And it was blamed on millennials for a really long time. And now what we see is it's not just millennials or Gen Z's. It's like people are not having their needs met where they are, and they have options. And maybe that's part of where we are in the cycle of the economy. That's made that possible too. And, you know, who knows?

But yeah, it's.

It's still. The change has. Is upon us and, and that's what's obvious. So I would like to explore a bit of what this remote work world was like for you as you were writing the book, what insights you gained, what tangible things. You know, the part of the book where you're helping people to. To figure stuff out. Because I think we're at the stage right now where we're not in the ninth inning of it. You know, we're not in the first inning. We're somewhere else. And people are coming back into the office two, three days a week. I know our youngest, one of our youngest children just got a job in the finance space, and he turned down a job to be at a publicly traded company to work five days a week in the office in favor of a job for reasons that included the fact that he could work from home two days of the five. So we're in this situation where it's definitely hybridized and people are still. Organizations are still struggling. And part of when we come in to talk to them, it's about the struggles they have with both attracting their talent, new talent, keeping the talent they've got, engaging them and keeping them healthy and happy, you know, to the extent that that's possible even. Right. So. And it is to. To a greater or less degree, based on the. The way the culture is set for those kinds of things. So, yeah, I'm going to pass this baton to you to, to start anywhere you want in terms of what you learned while you were experiencing this transition and what the book actually talks about.

Yeah, I think what I experienced and some of the common themes, talking to friends and then just seeing so many of my patients experience. I was online with all of them and they were doing their remote work and their remote parenting. So I kind of got the opportunity to sort of peer into a lot of living rooms and home offices and see all these people's experiences through this. So I think some of the common themes were just a deep sense of exhaustion and fatigue that was different than anything people had really experienced before. A difficulty with attention and focus, which is, you know, attention is a really interesting area for me. That's what I like to talk about, attention a lot. I treat it. And I think it's really ties. Ties to a lot of our conscious experience. So there's the attention problems and then there were just the general, like, I feel terrible. Why do I feel so terrible?

I don't know.

Why? What, why should I. And since since that was what me and my co author were seeing the most often, we kind of really wanted to nail down why, why those things, because that seemed to be really, really prevalent. So. So the way we organize things was to. To identify some. Some basic human needs.

The.

That we don't. That don't get a lot of attention because they're not obvious. And I can get into those needs. But the. The point is, you know, is that. That it is all not obvious. We kind of all think we're fine. Like, why not? You know, I can just be on the computer all day. I can do zoom meetings back to back. Like, I have another meeting coming up. Like, why should I get up? I can. I'll just finish. I'll just do it. I'll just, you know, and then I'll.

I don't need a break, right?

No, and then I'll just stand up and, like, go, do. Go do my home life instantly, you know, five seconds later. And so, yeah, there's kind of this idea of, like, I think it's fine. I think I can. And it can't be related to the fact that I feel weird and cranky and can't pay attention and am fatigued in a way I never have known in my life before. So we're, you know, I was very interested in connecting the dots there. Like, let's really hone in what is the thing. What are the things that are really missing that are manifesting and in these kind of. In these kind of feelings. And then once we really found those and found the why, it makes the strategy so much easier to apply because I tell my patients to apply strategies all the time. I tell myself, too, it's really hard if you don't know why. You know, you could tell people to meditate a billion times, but when you explain why, what they're missing and why it's so important, it really changes everything. So that was a lot of my focus.

So I think that's a great. You've. You've given us great roadmap for this, for this conversation, because I'd love to start with the why and. And I think that makes a tremendous amount of sense. And then we can talk about strategy, which I think. And I'm curious because I haven't. I don't know. I haven't read the book, so I don't know the strategies ahead of time, and I know what we teach and on the strategy side, so it'd be kind of fun to see where they overlap.

Yeah.

If. You know, and I expect they will. So first, let's. I just want folks to hear the name of the book.

Yes. It's called Humanizing the Remote Experience through Leadership and Coaching.

Beautiful. Love it. And they'll for everybody who already knows, you know, we have show notes where links to the book links to finding out more about Amy and her work. You'll be able to get all access to that, too. So don't, don't, don't, you know, don't sweat it. You don't have to stop, pause, go look at it now. It'll all be there. Make it really super easy for you all.

Okay, great. So we. So we kind of broke things down into a few different levels of needs. And when I say need, I mean basic things that you're hardwired to require that your body kind of pushes you towards, like, hunger. You're hardwired to need food, and when you don't have enough of it, you feel hungry and then you go eat. But if you're a toddler, you might not really know that. Like, that's when you're. You're hangry. So this is kind of where we get into some of these that are not always so obvious. So on a. On a more basic level, there's the need. There's the need for safety. There's a need to feel safe and comfortable in your environment. That's kind of our brain's first priority. Anywhere we enter, anything we do, there's always an instant. You know, sometimes it's. It's unnoticeable, it's instantaneous. But there's always an assessment of, am I safe here? And as human beings, being safe tends to require the presence of other people. That's how we were wired, because infant, you know, as. As infants, if we didn't have other people around, we would not survive. Unlike some other animals, we need other people around to survive. We have distress when they leave us alone, and. And a lot of that never really goes away. That's. We're wired for that. We're wired to feel most comfortable when other people around. And it doesn't. It doesn't quite go away. So. So our question was, well, okay, we have this need for safety and comfort around other people. Are we getting that met when we're on these Brady Bunch screens all day? Maybe some. Yeah, you know, this. We're having conversation. It's great. We're connecting. Connect with people all day. It's great. But how. But what's missing are you. Are you, you know, do you shut your laptop at the end of the day? And if you're alone in your room or apartment, does your body really know? Does your brain. Does your limbic system really know that you were around people all day? If you're going a week like that and you haven't actually been physically with a person. What does that feel like? And if it doesn't feel quite right, what we see is you're not safe. So you're hypervigilant, you're, you're on alert, your threat system is activated. You're, you're, you're like on the lookout for danger. When that's the case, when you're in that mode, you're not in higher thinking, concentrating, focusing, listening to the meeting, doing a list of complex tasks. Cuz your body's in survival mode. Whether you're not, whether or not you're having a full stress, you know, fight or flight response or just a little one. Still your resources are going there because.

Stress and strategy are, are a bit mutually exclusive. They.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If something is, is, might be wrong, then you're not listening to the budget report.

No, your, your body's producing cortisol and you're in.

Yeah, yeah. And you're like, whoa. You know, you're, you're looking for the next shoe to drop. So, so you know, if, if it's a struggle to pay attention, if you kind of find yourself losing focus throughout the day, this could be why you could be not meeting your need to feel safe and comfortable. And maybe you need to address that. The second knee kind of moves up a level. So this is kind of.

Can I ask a question about something else you said?

Yeah, please.

You know, if our, does our limbic system know you asked such a brilliant question earlier I, that when we're on the Brady Bunch screen at the end of a day of doing that, which we all know what that's like, and one after another and after another. Does our limbic system know that we were with other people? You didn't answer that question. So I want to know the answer.

I mean, I don't, I don't know for sure the answer. And I think the experience is definitely different for different people. But there are things that happen in your body when you're around people, when you're making direct eye contact with people, which we are not making. You know, I'm looking at your eyes, but if I do what I'm supposed to do and stare straight into my camera so that you get the, you get the experience of direct eye contact. I'm looking at a white light, you know, so we're not, we're not, we're neither making direct eye contact nor making, you know, shared, shared joint attention on one thing together. So we're missing that. We're missing the oxytocin that comes from that. Endorphins and dopamine. All these things come from these little interactions. These things we do during the day. Our brains synchronize. Actually our brain waves synchronize when we're really working together in, in teams. It's been studied in teams. It's been studied a lot in, in high school students. Like.

It'S the Napoleon Hill thing, right? The two minds coming together, create a third mind, the mastermind. I mean, you know, like, it's not as far fetched as maybe.

No, I mean it's. Right, it sounds totally far fetched, but it's the. These students, their brainwaves are in sync. They're the more in sync they are, the more they engaged they are with the teacher. Like it's been shown and proven across the board. So we're together, our brain synchronize. We, you know, these. So these social bonding chemicals flow. So yeah, I mean, a little of. We have to assume that's not, that can't all be happening. You know, I mean, we're, we're still connecting, we're still talking, we're still joining minds and everything, but there's a lot of other things that we're missing and it's, it's physical things. And that's again why we say, oh, it's fine. I've been talking to people all day. I'm sure it's fine. I've. I just, I just talked to people. But does your, but does your body know that?

Right, exactly. That's why when you said that, I thought, wow, that really caused me to pause for a second because, you know, it would be like eating, eating something that made you full or feel full but had no nutritional value.

And you go, so nice.

What did I really get out? Did I eat or.

Yeah. And it's, it's funny, I remember my first, like real day kind of venturing back into the office. It was still a little early in the pandemic, but, you know, I went and I remember I like walked down the street and I ran into a neighbor and we like walked to the subway together and she went to her office and I was like, wow, that like, felt really nice. Like, and I had been talking to people, but like the serendipity, like we ran into each other. It was so exciting. It was so. And then I went down into the subway and it, it just got there just as I got there and I like slipped in the. Do yours and both of Those dopamine, dopamine. Like, those things are like these huge surges, right? This meeting her on the corner, like the endorphin, these huge, tiny little wins that I had, getting to my office. Not nothing that we really think about, or, oh, I don't have to commute. It's great. But like, all those little teeny things, they. They add up when we're missing them.

I won't take us down, down this path. I'm just curious if you've heard of the weak tie research. Have you? Okay, cool, cool. All right. So then for anybody else also, this is. This is neat, early 70s, and I can't remember the name of the researcher. Forgive me, but the. This. You can look it up. Weak tie connections. But the concept basically was that a lot of the greatest innovations that have occurred within the working space, you know, within organizations, have occurred at that, you know, that classic water cooler meeting, that random meeting in the hallway or in the break room. And so it was studied how important that those were to the innovative process and why, of course, people may hate me for saying this, but why. Being in the office to some degree is vitally important to the. To the evolution of whatever that organization's purpose is, because we need to be in proximity to other people and not just people on your own team, which there's a whole, you know, thing about how mentorship works. It's so vitally important. Right. You know, getting to know people, connecting. But just those random meetings are so essential. And I did some writing during the pandemic about weak ties in connection with what you're saying that the idea that when we were not, you know, we were locked in place and all the other things or in front of a computer screen, more, More than anything else, we miss those interactions that you just described that are so important to. To how resilient we feel in the face of existential threats, which are everywhere. Right. Our world is a complicated place. It's no different today than it was in 1930 when there was a Great depression and a dust bowl happening at the very same time. You go, holy smokes. But we somehow came through that. Right? So those weak tie connections, that's the term for. For maybe a little bit of what you were experiencing, which.

Yeah. So cool.

Yeah.

And that I agree that that water cooler stuff is. Is so vital. The meetings that you have that are not scheduled, the. The side comments, the. The little. It's. It's all these just these little tiny things that need to happen spontaneously and then they don't. And you don't, you can't schedule all of them.

So, so, so we are, are not, it's not new to us and we're in this sort of maybe awkward adolescent phase of this thing. Maybe. What, what do you think what's either in the book or even after the book was published have, what's your determination about, you know, what's the, I'm asking a kind of a future of work question, right?

Yeah.

How much are we going to keep of what we were forced to learn to do versus what we were doing before?

Yeah. You know, I hear, I hear about a lot of people like your son. I, you know, a lot of my patients, we're very happy working remotely, getting to be with our kids. And I, I hear so many workplaces where it's so, it's, it's so for show. It's so clearly for optics. You know, it's, these people really had, there was a lot of value to the flexibility into the being at home and to, to bring workers in just because they should be there. Because you, you bought new office space. I mean there's so many, there's so many issues there. There's so much, you know, lack of, of like respect and understanding and, and that's not the kind of thing that engages workers. So I mean people need to be, need to be happy and feel understood and not feel overworked to be happy at work. And that's essential. There's all these problems I'm listing, but these are problems, these are not problems that are solved by a five day work week either and commuting every day and killing yourself over it and all of that. So we kind of, I mean we had this opportunity to explore how much of this can we do online, what if it is, what's missing when we do it online. And I think it is short sighted to say, okay, now let's go back because we found some stuff that really worked and we, you know, we gave people more of an opportunity to attend to their self care and to be where they need to be for their families. And you know, it's a, a, it's a tough world out there. It's hard to get everything done. It's hard especially as working parents and everything. So, you know, let's use it. I, I think it's, I think it's silly to just go back to what we were doing before when we figured out a lot of ways to make this work. Let's identify the things that don't work when we're, when we're just at home and what we ties in what things we're missing from the organization and then try to get those things. You know, what's the combination what I think what works for people and what's going to keep people well because otherwise they're not going to do good work.

Yeah, they're not. Well that wouldn't be a sustainable recipe. Nobody would think that that would somehow create sustainable. Yeah anything performance.

So we had, yeah so we had this great experiment. So let's, let's keep the stuff that worked because there was some great stuff here.

On the strategy side. I'd love to, to know in the book a little bit. Don't give us all of it because we want people to go get the book of course but just maybe a taste of some of what strategy.

Yeah, well the ones, the ones that I'm most interested in are the ones about energy. So I'll just, I'll backtrack a little to, to talk about where the fatigue problems come from. I talked about the attention problem. The, the fatigue, the zoom fatigue are kind of the explanation we give for that is there's this other need which is to be understood and to understand people and to kind of make sense of the world. And our brains have had to evolve a lot to be able to make sense of this incredibly complex world and language and people and relationships. And there's so much to analyze in every waking moment that if you had to like do it all fresh you would last like 10 minutes and then you'd have to go back to sleep because you're. All of your brain energy would be spent as a result. We have these wonder, all these wonderful shortcuts. Brain has evolved to, to kind of make assumptions to like take bigger pictures, to, to make things more energy efficient because you can't decipher everything that you're perceiving in every single moment. That goes for like perception, that goes for relating with people. And so, and so like for example a big, a big shortcut is, is prediction. The brain is a, the brain loves predictions. The brain is like a huge prediction generator. If it already saw something it's really going to want to predict the same thing's going to happen the next time. And that's, and that's often really helpful and that does save a lot of energy. So we have all these great shortcuts and they were not built for zoom. I mean they were all designed for a three dimensional world and then you translate them to a two dimensional world and they really fall flat. Couple, couple problems you know, all the things, all of the, the cues and the signals and the body language and all the things that we use to predict what people mean and to understand people, either they're missing or they're distorted. Missing is a problem. It makes things harder. I can't see your whole body. I can't really feel your body language. We talked about the whole eye contact problem. So I'm going to do a lot of extra work because I'm missing stuff. I don't have enough information, so I'm gonna fill in the blanks. Distorted is even worse because I'm getting the cues, but I'm wrong. And I'm. I'm like, I'm making a whole false assumption. Like, for example, you know, you make a joke and you get an awkward pause, right? And it's because you're. Because you're boss's Internet was delayed. It's just a little pause and, you know, and then he. You see a little glitch, and then you're, oh, okay. But in that two seconds where you're paused, oh, my God. What did I say? Go back, read over. Did I, you know, like, think back over what I said? How am I going to fix this? What am I going to do? And he's back and everything's fine. So you think, okay, that was fine. That was just a little glitch. I'm fine. But, oh, my God, the work that you just did, the work that your brain just did, and there's.

You don't even realize necessarily that your brain did.

No, no. And you're. That's happening like, all day long. And, and you're. We don't, we don't realize that. Again, we're fine. We're doing our thing back to back to back. I, I believe that's where zoom fatigue comes from. It's. It's so much more work than, Than we're used to doing. Yeah. Then that meets the eye and that, that we usually go through in a, In a regular day. So. But we're doing it anyway. And so a lot of the strategies.

We'Re great at adapting, right? I mean, there's somebody out there going, but, you know, that's the great thing about the species, right? We've. We are only here because we've become the greatest adapters or.

Yeah, we're really great at adapting, but.

We'Re good at it.

We're great at adapting, and we adapt over a long of time. And we've been zooming for like, two years regularly. And that's like really not a lot of time on the evolutionary scale. Right. So we can expect our, our brains to evolve, to be fluent in. In what it's like to communicate and zoom in this way. So if we realize that, we realize that there are. There are problems, there's misinformation, there's glitches here, that's where we can start. Start to improve the situation. We're not going to. We're going to interact remotely, and it's not going to be perfect, but we can do it in a. Yeah. In a healthy way.

Yeah. And to be, to be. Maybe the awareness is just the under. Awareness and understanding is so fundamental to any, Any kind of a change that could take place. Because if you don't. If I don't know, I mean, I'm. I'm listening to you say this. I'm going, how often have I just sort of taken it for granted that an hour is an hour? If I was an hour doing something outside, an hour in front of the, you know, in the office on zoom or whatever. But it's. My brain's not necessarily saying to me, hey, by the way, just by the. So, you know, the hour that just passed, I worked 20% harder during that hour than during a similar hour in a different environment. Like, our brains don't send us that level. No recon.

No, they don't. Yeah, they don't. What they do is they run. They run out of steam. And that's what fatigue is. That's where there's, you know, fatigue is. There's nothing left. The gas tank is empty. And it's interesting, mental fatigue. We also don't really understand that as well as we should. When our, when we have physical fatigue, we stop. Right. If your legs don't work anymore, you'd stop running. You just can't do it. And we don't really treat mental fatigue when, you know, like you said, you did 20% more. So you're gonna be. You're gonna run out earlier than you would have. But we just have our coffee and we just push and push and push. And this is really interesting study, actually, that out of the UK, like 10 years ago, where they had two groups of people and one group just did something very passive for an hour and a half, and the other group did something really emotionally challenging, cognitively draining, like really use their brains really hard for an hour and a half, and then they put both groups on stationary bikes and they said, ride until you can't ride anymore. And the, the cognitively challenged group rode shorter, significantly shorter. They got, they got to exhaustion faster because it's all drawing from the same gas tank. We just don't acknowledge it and we just, just push, just keep going.

Yeah.

Especially later.

Part of what we, we see in certain cultures and certain upbringings, programming from family and others and, and certainly what we see in the cultures of workplaces is a sort of a grind mentality. I do a lot of speaking all over the, all over the US and all over the globe even, and. But of course, in the last few years, mostly and domestically, it's like certain places in this country to grind is, is a. It's probably the high. One of the highest compliments you can pay to someone. You know, you're great at. You're great at that. You can grind away. I mean, you're like, you know, so, so gritty, so tenacious. And again, I, I sort of apologize. Not that, not that Angela Duckworth needs me to apologize. I'm sure I'm impacting nothing when it comes to her popularity or book sales or anything, you know, and it's got great TED talk too. But I just feel like the grit thing is not our philosophy. And when we come in and try to turn a little bit of that paradigm on its side, meaning resilience is not about endurance. Resilience is about recovery. It's about the way we ritualize our, our recovery, how we refill the tank. Can you refill the tank throughout the day so that you don't deplete to the degree that you have been and therefore you get. Actually do get more longevity and capacity? Yeah, yeah, that's not.

Yeah. And. No, no, no, no, no, no. And, and that's really one of the main, the main strategies that we talk about is exactly what you're saying is stopping. And like you said, it's so un American. It's so hard to do. But so there's, there's this great research which came from. They were. Researchers are studying athlete performance. Jim Lauren, Tony Schwartz. And so what they found in athletes, and it carried over to all of us, is that you basically need 15 to 20 minutes of rest for every 90 minutes of work. And as they were studying athletes, they were looking at who, who's the best. And they really found they were like looking at tennis players. And the, the biggest difference they found was not how they were playing, but what they were doing in between. In between playing and how they were taking breaks. And so that's, that's, it's so essential to, to recognize when you have basically been working for it's easy. There's a number 90 to 120 minutes. If you've been working that hard, you need to stop. And it's so hard. And it's so hard, I know, to not just, just, just finish, you know, finish and then, and then I'll take a break. But the truth is if you work eight hours straight versus, you know, 90 minute increments with breaks, you're going to do better work. You're going to, you're just going to be healthier and work better. And it's. Yeah, it's very counterintuitive. It's hard to stop. Breaks are essential. Breaks in nature are actually even better than regular breaks. Several studies have shown that and shown that it kind of calms the amygdala and calms the fight or flight system. It decreases the cortisol to be in nature. But you can even look at it. So the same was true if you were looking at nature in a natural scene. If you can't get to a tree like on your desk. This is, you know, it's human thing. So, so yeah, but definitely a lot of emphasis on, on breaks and kind of just how you're, how you're managing your energy. Like you said, how you're refilling your fuel tank.

Yeah, it's so interesting too because those refills that we, we call it a toggle, it's a bit of like intermittent, you know, intermittent training which I learned when I was, yeah. College swimmer, interval training. And it's similar to that in the sense that if you, if you even a 60 second break. I know, as odd as it sounds, right. I mean I've read some recent studies about how five or ten minute breaks between zooms. It cools the brain. I'm very much a visual learner. So it's like on the one side, you know, it's like hot, hot, hot head and yellow, orange, red is what the brain lights up as. And then with breaks of five to 10 minutes, the brain is blue again. You know, it's cool. So you just go, on some level, this is common sense. And yet on another level, as you say, this is all new territory in many ways, this new territory. And also we're living in different times because the grit grind thing was a thing and I'm sure a lot of people succeeded. I was, I was a workaholic attorney for 18 years. I know what it's like to work an 80, 90 hour week and get a lot of shit done. I mean that's like a lot of people get that there's an ROI that you get out of being that kind of person. And yet what we see is that you cannot sustain that and that also the performance is what falls off. So if you were in fact an athlete looking to be at your best, which is so much more under the microscope because you lose a point where you lose a match because you're not at your best. So you know, in that moment, your recovery methods, the methods of, of being able to turn the switch off. And I love it because I, you know, tennis players, like in between the points, switch goes off. It's like they're, they, they, they. I remember that study was cool because their, their heart rate goes down.

Yeah.

You know, they go, they might have just been running crazy on the court to get a, you know, to get a, get after a ball or whatever, but in between, it's like their heart rate dips, goes back to a resting heart rate in between. And that's, that's their little intermittent 32nd, 62nd recovery. So what do we do? You know, we're not athletes like that, but you can sit and you can, you can sit at your desk and rub your ears, close your eyes. You can breathe deeply for a few moments. Right. You can stretch, you could take a walk. You know. Our sweet spot, I don't know if you found this in your, in your research too, is the sweet spot for us is 10 to 20, 10 to 30 minutes. You know, 60 seconds is great for a state change. It's momentary, it really helps. But that 10 to 30 minutes, if you, you know, intermittently throughout the day. Yeah, it's just powerful.

I, I think that's what NASA found too.

Right.

With the, There was a NASA study on like the, the ideal nap that best, you know, peak astronaut cognitive performance. I, I think, I can't remember the exact number. I think it was what you just said, between 20 and 30 minutes peak nap. And you know, I just don't want.

To wake up grumpy.

Right.

10 to 30 minutes is good because you don't, you're not grumpy. Right.

You know, exactly. You didn't go far enough that you're grumpy.

Right.

It's a, it's a great point about athletes where like, you see if you're not doing it right, you see it in the points, you see it in the performance. If it's a lawyer, you know, it's just his ulcer, like 25 years later, you know, it's the cortisol hypertension.

It's.

Yeah.

Nobody kid at home that gets. That gets the brunt of it, you know, or the dog, you know, like, it's like these are the things that, where we're. That turns into poor behavior.

Yeah.

And in the world that we're living in, I mean, I don't, I don't try to get on too high a horse with this stuff. I just think, you know, when we're living in a world that's always being called divisive or a country, because a lot of this is in the US but it's elsewhere too, you know, it is definitely elsewhere and where people feel more divided and angry at each other. I mean, it's like, so is it that we're somehow different or. And this is a question, not a statement. I'd love to get your thoughts on this. Is it that we're different somehow? That the pandemic or any of these things have somehow altered us, or are we just depleted? Like, are we just flat, flat out exhausted and that's why we have such little patience for other people? Amy?

Yeah, I mean, we're definitely. We're certainly depleted. We're definitely depleted. They. Are we different. I mean, these things kind of go together because I think what's different these days is we just. We do more and more and more and more, like, where there's just more expected from us, there's more to do where we have all these modern conveniences, and yet somehow it means that, like, I don't know, we just. It's certainly not delivering all this free time that we were supposed to get from all these modern technologies. There's. There's just, there's so there just feels, you know, like there's more to do for most people than is possible to do in a day. And there's so many demands and we're depleted, so there's more being asked of us and more being taken from us, energy wise. And so, yeah, we have less to give and then we have. We get depleted and then we have even less. And so then we bicker, fight with each other, and get cranky and mean.

I mean, in putting it in those terms, I don't know if you feel the same way. It. It doesn't make it go away, but understanding it is, is helpful to me because then I'm not. I'm not, let's say, coming from a place of judgment as much as I am coming from a place of compassion, perhaps, or empathy, because we're all going through it. I mean, regardless of whatever your. Your political color or whatever other thing we Divide into these days it's like that's our common denominator. We're all feeling that way. Eleanor Roosevelt wasn't, you know, worried about posting on three social channels.

Yeah.

In the midst of every other thing. Thing. It's. And they're different times. I get it. They're not. You can't really compare. But when you put it that way that more being asked of us and more being taken and then that becomes sort of exponential because you know like a bank account.

Yeah.

If your resilience is depleted, if you're in deficit, if the next day you're also going to be in deficit. It's. You can imagine at some point you run out and the same true of having more deposits to that resilience bank account and you're in surplus that it's exponential in the other direction as well. You're getting compound interest on that on those deposits if you stay in surplus.

Yeah. Yeah. Especially. And you know empathy and perspective taking like those take energy. You have to have something left to be able to do that. So those are going to go, those are going to go away when you're, when you're depleted. And the more that we can, we can fuel our bank accounts and, and have these different sources to turn to and to draw from then you have an energy to understand the other point of view and understand the other side and give them some grace and, and all of those things. But we can't. Yeah we can't do that if we're all. If we all have like this much left and we're using it up to get home and get to the Netflix and go.

Is empathy higher functioning activities to take more energy from our brains? I don't know if you know this to be empathetic and to be angry, for example.

I, I believe so. I mean there's kind of two kinds of empathy. There's the, the one that comes pretty naturally when you feel what someone feels. And then there's a cognitive empathy which is a little bit more active where you don't understand it's you know, harder when you're not. Don't have as much in common with the person or common background. You can still cognitively you can still kind of actively think about how it might feel to be them. So you know it is a skill that can be built empathy even if it doesn't come naturally.

So understand.

But you're not going to do that if you, if you don't have, if you don't have enough energy. If you're wife going to give up. Yeah.

Yeah, I am. I literally could talk to you for days. And we. We won't. We can't. But. So I would love to know if there's a final question to you is just, is there one thing that is kind of your go to, like the thing that you do if, if given, you know, like you're depleted and it's, it's like you're, you're. You've either done this to avoid the depletion or you recognize that that's what's happening for you. You go to that one thing. What is that thing?

I think the. The thing that I've become most. Most like aware of and conscious of and, and all of these things is, is, is that all of this stuff takes a big cognitive load. It's kind of what we're talking about here with not. Not having anything left. We have this cognitive load we're carrying all day. We add to it, we ask more of it. The zoom fatigue takes more. The zoom meetings, it all takes more from it. So I think that's definitely something I've become extremely conscious of, living through the pandemic and just juggling more and more and more than I could ever imagine. You know, I'm like getting to capacity. I never did before, but I'm like, I, I can't. I don't know, I can't go farther. So I. There are a lot of strategies in the book about decreasing cognitive load, and I think those are probably some of the ones I took to heart the most. And they're simple. It's. It's surprising, but we, we try to make our brain do everything all on its own. And it's like as simple as using a piece of paper. Like writing. Just putting things down on paper is powerful and strong, even if you can't check them off the list. Not holding them in your brain, not holding them in your working memory, not like, you know, having all the plates in the air. It's. It's a really. It's really strong. It's a strong, obvious technique. And I started doing it. You know, I'm. I'm doing everything at once. And we have a tendency to just, well, just do it. You know, just answer the text real quick because then it'll be done. And then you could do the other thing and like, just do all of the things. And I stopped doing that. And when a thing pops into my head, I write it down. I'll put it on a post it note, and it's out. It's out. Then it's out of the head. It's on a post it note. It's organizable. Your brain doesn't have to ruminate on it anymore. Your brain is actually. Lets things go better. Can you can actually decrease rumination by writing things down and sleep better? Actually another good study where people who. Who wrote a very specific to do list for the next day slept way better because again, like you can unload it from your brain. It seems silly, but it's. Your brain handles things differently when they are in physical space in front of you instead of just only held internally and you know, doing all that work.

Wow. You know what? I'm just so happy to hear you. You say those. That's super helpful. It's so tangible, so relatively easy. I'm holding up my, you know, my notebook. Right. So it's good. It's good to just know that I'm. That I'm doing it for a reason. I may not. That's funny about writing notes and having so many of these things. I may never go back. I mean I have this habit of taking a yellow, you know, like yellow highlighter and then I'll highlight the things I do want to be able to go back.

Yeah.

Right. The most important stuff. Right. But the chances of me going back are probably 80% no in. In the ordinary course. But yet the writing itself is so like you said, I feel.

Yeah. The fact that you. Yep. You. You unloaded all of that information. It probably means that you kept taking in more because you know, it was unloaded. It's. It's safe. It's safe over here. I can take in some more. There's room for more. Yeah. It's very powerful.

Love it. Again, Amy, say the name of the book and it'll be in the show notes. I'm sure lots and lots of people are going to go out and buy it right now.

It's. I know I am called. Okay. It's called humanizing the Remote experience through leadership and coaching Strategies for Better Virtual Connections.

Beautiful. Excellent. And I'm so. You know what? I'm going to read it and then I want to invite you to come back for a part two so that.

I love to actually. That'd be fun.

A hot bench.

Awesome. I like that.

Yeah. Way cool. Folks, if this episode really resonated with you, we'd love to know. We'd love to hear it in the comments. So AdamMarkel.com podcast you can do it right there. Of course, if you're inclined to leave a review on whatever platform that you consume this podcast. That would be so lovely. The five star reviews are just epic. And, and when we do read a review, oftentimes what we'll do is read that review in another episode. Like to just sort of edify you for doing that. And it's just wonderful to us. It feels good. Feels great actually. And lastly, if there's somebody that you know that would really benefit from any part of this discussion or all of this discussion, feel free to share this episode with whoever that might be. I think that's the one great thing about it, is that we've got resources. It's so easy for us to, to really be able to access them now. And, and there's a lot. So when you find one that really is good and works, it's, it's cool to share it with your, with the people that you care about and with that. Amy, again, just thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you.

Well, as usual, I did promise that this would be a great episode and I just want to summarize a couple of my own personal takeaways here. It was really profound to talk with Dr. Mednick today about how it is that we've gotten as exhausted as so many of us have felt. We really, really dove into the why and how it is that, that our brains are hardwired for certain needs. Some of these needs we are aware of and some of these needs we are unconscious of. And it's, it's really quite astounding that, that we, we could actually be in need of things and, and yet at the same time be completely oblivious to those things. And, and then again, it's no wonder that we feel the way we do, that we have heightened levels of anxiety and tension and dis ease in many areas of our lives because in fact we are not meeting some basic needs that we're simply unaware of. So I thought the conversation we're attract to those things was really very powerful. We talked about some pretty tangible studies, including that UK study that looked at two different groups, one where they were chewing on some pretty difficult mental tasks, cognitively utilizing their brains in a particular way to solve some problems, and another group that was at rest, and then both groups being asked to simply get on treadmills, get on stationary bikes and exert themselves physically. And what that study showed was that the groups that had been chewing on things mentally versus those that had not fatigued much, much quicker. And I think that's relevant because so many of us don't recognize the, the impact of mental fatigue on Our physical feelings as well, on how we feel on our, on our, our energy levels, on our ability to be patient with other people, our ability to just do simple tasks and how we feel at the end of the day, whether we feel kind of like that sponge or that washcloths that's, you know, that's wrung out. Or do we feel more energized and ready for the next transition, like back from, from. From the work life into the home life into the intimacy with, with our loved ones and other things that we might even have interest in, but often we're just too exhausted and have no energy for. That's quite, quite telling. Talking about not only the why, but also the strategy, I, I was sharing something about our toggle methodology. The way we like a light switch recommend that people intermittently throughout the day are, are in their energy zone and then in a rest and recovery zone, even if that rest and recovery zone is only a few moments, even if it's a few minutes. The sweet spot being more like 10 to 30 minutes, of course. Or not of course. But that's what our research reveals and we talk a bit about that as well. But I loved how Amy shared with us this concept of, of decreasing cognitive load because the cognitive load on all of us is, is greater and greater that, that more is being asked. She said more is being asked of us and more is being taken from us in the course of an average day. And by that she, she means that we're. We have an increased cognitive load from all the meetings and everything that we're being drawn into online and through proliferation of, of more and more content and, and our roles both in, in our work lives as well as in our personal lives as, as, as citizens. All of that is, is taking a, is increasing the cognitive load. And there are things, simple things that we can be doing to decrease that load, such as writing things down. And we were both sharing that. That's a habit of ours to take notes and to write things down. Because when you write something down, even if you don't go back and re. Read it later or refer to it at some other point, by writing it down, it's allowing your brain to let it go, to release it as a means of then having space for other things to come in. So writing things down is a very powerful tool that I realized in speaking with Amy. That has been a saving grace for me because I do this frequently. I have books and books of writings of things, notes, et cetera, that I often don't go back to sometimes I do, but, but often not. But the writing it down is, is a process of letting go, writing to do lists and writing them at night even before bed or, or writing down the day's agenda. You know, what is it that's, that's coming ahead tomorrow? Because then your brain can let it go and you would actually sleep more, more soundly and have more effective rest at night when your brain is not otherwise chewing on all the things that it is holding on to. So there's, there's really too many things to cover in, in a summary of what this, of what this talk was about. Taking breaks in nature and, and, and actually not even needing to get in nature if you can't get out and actually look and, and see a tree or touch a tree, but just to look at a tree, even a picture of a tree, when we're taking a five minute break or a ten minute break between our meetings, that, that immediately calms us down, cools our brains, brings us back into a state of more homeostasis or equilibrium, which then gives us the capacity to go further. I analogized it to a bank account that resilience is like a bank account where the goal is to make more deposits than withdrawals for obvious reasons, but to say that a little bit differently, that when we are making more withdrawals than deposits, we are in deficit. And then day after day, when that's the case, it's, it has a compound effect. And no wonder we find people that are burned out because of that. Whereas when we're making more deposits than withdrawals, we're in surplus. And that surplus becomes also day after day that you're in surplus, you gain a compounding effect in that area as well, so that you're able to have the energy to outperform problems more easily. You're, you're able to be more resilient mentally, emotionally, physically and even spiritually. So that things that, that would otherwise take you out, things that would stress you out, things that are difficult that come all of a sudden, greater uncertainties, greater adversities that might be present. You're, you are actually more able to, to deal with those things. You're better equipped. You are, you're able, you have the capacity, I should say, to resolve those, to creatively find solutions to those things in a way that people who are depleted cannot, cannot physically cannot do that. So love the conversation once again would say to you, if you don't know where you are currently, how you are doing resilience wise, mentally, emotionally, physically, even spiritually, you can simply find your own score, a baseline score, and also get resources, all for free, and all in three minutes time. I mean, it couldn't be easier. You go to rankmyresilience.com rankmyresilience.com and three minutes later answering 16 questions, you will have your answers in in the realms of resilience, the zones, the four zones of resilience, as well as the kinds of small little changes that you could make. These hacks that Dr. Mednick and I started speaking about today, a whole host of those things are available to you as a resource and our gift for taking the time to actually get your own score. So with that, I will say please share this episode with anybody that you think could benefit from it. As always, we appreciate your comments and you can leave one at AdamMarkel.com/forward/comment and we read them. I answer them personally and if it's something that you're willing to do, leaving a review is helpful. Not just for us to see those five star reviews, but for other people that evaluate podcasts based on what other people like you think of the conversation itself. So hopefully you've loved it and that it is something that that you've gotten value from. I will say ciao for now. Have a blessed and a beautiful day and we'll see you next time. Thanks for listening everyone. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change proof. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over@adammarkelle.com podcast for more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change proof teams, visit AdamMarkel.com BecomeChangeproof.