All Things Brain: The Art Of Recognizing Fatigue And 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 Markel and his inspiring guests explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change-proof.

You're gonna love today's On 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 remote work has on the human brain. And It's hardwired need for connection. You're gonna 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 3 minutes by going to rankmyresilience.com, rankmyresilience.com. You'll get a score in 4 specific zones of resilience, including something that we're gonna be talking about in this episode with Dr. Mednick. Enjoy. All right, Amy. So 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 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 wrote this book recently. I'm very science-minded. My book is all about science. That's how I spend most of my days thinking. But My love really is fiction and I love to write a novel. So I started out with fiction writing and then found myself a scientist.

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

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

That's maybe a decent lead-in. I would love for you to provide some of your— a little bit of backstory on how you got to where you are today, and maybe there's a pivot or two in there that you might reveal.

Yeah, I would love to. Born and raised on the East Coast, New Jersey. I went to undergrad at MIT, by a lot of engineers. Most of my friends became engineers, and I fell into this Small major at the school, brain and cognitive science, 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? I want to be in a helping profession. I love science, so it fit. So I went to med school up in the Bronx, and 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.

By the way, just for people out there maybe smiling at this right in this moment, journey to law school, and then not like you, I actually, I couldn't admit that maybe I went into it a bit randomly. Oh, I think I'll go to law school. Oh, I think I'll get—

Yeah, why not?

Yeah, why not? I spent 18 years doing that work before I finally pivoted out of that. Anyway, back to you.

So I was at med school, and the nice thing actually about med school, I don't know if they do this in law school, is you really get to try everything out before you commit to anything. I think that's a great thing, not just to figure out what you love, but also so that once you're a doctor, you know about all the So I really didn't know and I just went through the rotations thinking, I, I guess I'll fall back on neurology if I must. And no thought ever of being a psychiatrist. And I had my psychiatry rotation and whatever. And then halfway through, I just fell completely in love with it and decided that was what I was gonna do. 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. You really start to get to know your patients really well. You get to glimpse into their brains. 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 really get to know the inner workings of their minds and understanding in general. Super rewarding work because I found myself really helping people to fine-tune 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, still psychiatry, but after a while, like I looked for other things cuz I wanted to have more to offer my patients than just medications. And so I started doing procedure a few years ago. It's called transcranial magnetic stimulation, 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 March 2020. Like it was really taken off. So we all know how that went. Pivoted back out of the office and back home. Luckily psychiatry is, other than the TMS arm, is pretty well suited for the remote world. So I was lucky in that way. And all my work went online like everyone else. 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 this book about doing remote work. It was like pretty early. We didn't know how to do any of this, but we decided to write a book about it. Extremely interesting because we just wrote it as we went. We took a year, so it was like late 2020, late 2021, really explored these things, explored the problems we were having, our patients, our clients were having, and just putting our finger on 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 later into strategies. But I think the strategies resonate more because there's, there's science behind them. That was a lot of my pandemic life. And now I'm doing all those things, but back out in the real world also, which is lovely.

Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience, but that of our teams. So right now, we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment Is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. That's the story of a lot of us. To me, I have a personal interest in talking about the subject matter of your book, which is why you're— 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 really under a bigger umbrella, and that umbrella is more well-being, beingness, word maybe. But the idea that 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 to create better systems for 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 thing. Can't really even relate it. 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. All that kind of thing. It makes sense, but yet we still are looking at massive attrition levels. Yeah. 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 Zs. 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 who knows? 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 are the part of the book where you're helping people to figure stuff out? Because I think we're at the stage right now where we're not in the 9th inning of it. We're not in the 1st inning. We're somewhere else. And people are coming back into the office 2, 3 days a week. And 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 5 days a week in the office in favor of a job for reasons that included the fact that he could work from home 2 days of the 5. So we're in this situation where it's definitely hybridized. 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 to the extent that it's possible even. And it is to a greater or lesser degree based on the way the culture is set for those kinds of things. So pass this baton to you 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, right? I was online with all of them and they were doing their remote work and their remote parenting. So I got the opportunity to 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 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 ties to a lot of conscious experience. So there's the attention problems and then there were just the general, blah, I feel terrible. Why do I feel so terrible? I don't know why. Why should I? And since that was what me and my coauthor were seeing the most often, really wanted to nail down why those things, because that seems really prevalent. So the way we organized things was to identify some basic human needs. That we don't get a lot of attention because they're not obvious. And I can get into those needs, but the point is that it is all not obvious. We all think we're fine. Like, why not? I can just be on the computer all day. I can do Zoom meetings back to back. I have another meeting coming up. Like, why should I get up? I can, I'll just finish. I'll just do it. I

don't need a break. Right.

And then I'll just stand up and go do my home life instantly, 5 seconds later. Yeah. There's this idea of, 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 fatigued in a way I never have known in my life before. So I was very interested in connecting the dots there. Let's really hone in. What are the things that are really missing that are manifesting 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 to— it's really hard if you don't know why. 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.

You've given us a great roadmap for this conversation because I'd love to start with the why. And I think that makes a tremendous amount of sense. And then we can talk about strategy. And I'm curious because 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 on the strategy side. So it'd be fun to see where they overlap.

Yeah.

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

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

Beautiful. Love it. And they'll— everybody who already knows, 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 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 broke things down into a few different levels of needs. And when I say need, 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 that's when you're hangry. So this is where we get into some of these that are not always so obvious. So on a more basic level, there's a need for safety. There's a need to feel safe and comfortable in your environment. That's our brain's first priority. Anywhere we enter, anything we do, there's always an instinct Sometimes 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 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 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 quite go away. So our question was, 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 people. Yeah. You know, this, we're having conversation. It's great. We're connecting, connect with people all day. It's great. But what's missing? Are you? Do you shut your laptop at the end of the day and 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 on alert, your threat system is activated. 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 because your body's in survival mode. Whether or not you're having a full stress fight or flight response or just a little one, still, your resources are going there.

Because stress and strategy are a bit mutually exclusive.

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

Or your body's producing cortisol and you're in— Yeah.

You're like, whoa, you're looking for the next shoe drops. If it's a struggle to pay attention, if you 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 need moves up a level. So kind of—

Can I ask a question about something else you said?

Yeah, please.

Does our limbic system know— you asked such a brilliant question earlier— that when we're on the Brady Bunch screen, does our— 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 wanna know the answer.

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. No, I'm looking at your eyes. But if I do what I'm supposed to do and stare straight into my camera,

yep,

so that you get the experience of direct eye contact, I'm looking at a white light. We're not, we're neither making direct eye contact nor making 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 brainwaves synchronize when we're really working together in teams. It's been studied in teams. It's been studied a lot in high school students. Like, you know—

It's the Napoleon Hill thing, right? The 2 minds coming together create a 3rd mind. Like, it's not as far-fetched as maybe—

No, right? It sounds totally far-fetched, but these students, their brainwaves are in sync. They're— the more in sync they are, the more engaged they are with the teacher. Like, It's been shown and proven across the board. So we're together, our brains synchronize, these social bonding chemicals flow. Yeah, we have to assume that's not— that can't all be happening. We're still connecting, we're still talking, we're still joining minds and everything. Women too. But there's a lot of other things that we're missing, and 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 just talked to people. But does your body know that?

That's why when you said that, I thought, wow, that really caused me to pause for a second because it would be like eating something that made you full or feel full, but had no nutritional value. And you go, so what did I really get out of it? Did I eat? Or— right? Yeah.

It's funny. I remember my first real day venturing back into the office. It was still a little early in the pandemic. 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. And I had been talking to people, but like the serendipity, like we ran into each other, it was so exciting. And then I went down into the subway and it just got there just as I got there. And I like slipped in the doors and both of those dopamine, like those things are like these huge surges, right? 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. Oh, I don't have to commute. It's great. But like all those little teeny things, they add up when we're missing them.

I won't take us down this path. I'm just curious if you've heard of the weak tie research. Have you?

No.

Okay, cool. All right. So then for anybody else also, this is neat. It's early '70s, and I can't remember the name of the researcher, forgive me, but 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, within organizations, have occurred at that classic water cooler meeting, that random meeting in the hallway or in the break room. And so it was studied how important 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 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 thing about how mentorship works that's so vitally important, right? 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— we're locked in place and all the other things or in front of a computer screen more than anything else, we miss those interactions that you just described that are so important 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. Holy smokes. But we somehow came through that. Right? So those weak tie connections, That's the term for maybe a little bit of what you were experiencing, which is just so cool.

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

It's not new to us. And we're in this sort of maybe awkward adolescent phase of this thing. What do you think— what's either in the book or even after the book was published, What's your determination about— what's the— I'm asking you 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, I hear about a lot of people like your son. A lot of my patients were very happy working remotely, getting to be with their kids. And here are so many workplaces where it's so for show, it's so Clearly for Optics, there was a lot of value to the flexibility and to the being at home and to bring workers in just because they should be there because you bought new office space. There's so many issues there. There's so much lack of like respect and understanding. And that's not the kind of thing that engages workers. People 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 not problems that are solved by a 5-day work week either, and commuting every day and killing yourself over it and all of that. So we had this opportunity to explore how much of this can we do online? What of it is— what's missing when we do it online? And I think it is shortsighted to say, okay, now let's go back because we found some stuff that really worked and 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 it's a tough world out there. It's hard to get everything done. It's hard, especially as working parents and everything. Let's use it. 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 just at home and what weak ties and what things we're missing from the organization and then try to get those things. 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.

If 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 this great experiment. So let's keep the stuff that worked because there was some great stuff here.

So on the strategy side, I'd love 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 strategies. Sure.

Yeah. The ones that I'm most interested in are the ones about energy. So I'll just, I'll backtrack a little, talk about where the fatigue problems come from. I talked about the attention problem, the Zoom fatigue, our kind of explanation we give for that is there's this other need, which is to be understood and to understand people and to make sense of the world. And our brains have to evolve a lot to be able to make sense of this We live in 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 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, all these wonderful shortcuts the brain has evolved to make assumptions, to take bigger pictures, 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. And that's a perception that goes for relating with people. And for example, a big shortcut is prediction. The brain loves predictions. The brain is like a huge prediction generator. If it already saw something, it's really gonna wanna predict the same thing's gonna happen the next time. 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 us, all designed for a 3-dimensional world. And then you translate them to a 2-dimensional world and They really fall flat. Couple problems. All the things, all of 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 gonna do a lot of extra work. Mm-hmm. 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.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm making a whole false assumption. Like for example, you make a joke and you get an awkward pause, right? And it's because your boss's internet was delayed. It's just a little pause and you see a little glitch and then you're okay. But in that 2 seconds where you pause, oh my God, what did I say? Go back, read over. Did I 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, that's happening all day long. We don't realize that again, we're fine. We're doing our thing back, back. I believe that's where Zoom fatigue comes from. It's so much more work than we're used to doing. Yeah. Than meets the eye and that we usually go through in a regular day, but we're doing it anyway. And so a lot of the strategies—

We're great at adapting, right? There's somebody out there going, that's the great thing about the species, right? We are only here because we've become the greatest adapters.

Yeah, we're really great at adapting.

Not the greatest, but we're good at it.

We're great at adapting, and we adapt over a long period of time. And we've been Zooming 2 years regularly, and that's like really not a lot of time on the evolutionary scale, right? So we can't expect our brains to evolve to be fluent in what it's like to communicate and Zoom in this way. So if we realize that there are problems, there's misinformation, there's glitches here, that's where we can start to Improve the situation. We're gonna interact remotely and it's not gonna be perfect, but we can do it in a, yeah, in a healthy way.

Maybe the awareness and understanding is so fundamental to any kind of a change. If I don't know, I'm listening to you say this, I'm going, how often have I just taken it for granted that an hour is an hour? And if I was an hour doing something outside, an hour in front of the, 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 of recon.

No, they don't. What they do is they run out of steam, and that's what fatigue is. That's where 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 we have physical fatigue, we stop, right?

If

your legs don't work anymore, you'd stop running. You just can't do it. We don't really treat mental fatigue. Like you said, you did 20% more, so you're going to run out earlier than you would have, but we just have our coffee and we just push and push. And there's this really interesting study actually that out of the UK, like 10 years ago, where they had 2 groups of people and one group Did something very passive for an hour and a half. And the other group did something really emotionally challenging, cognitively draining, like really used 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 cognitively challenged group rode shorter, significantly shorter. 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. I'll rest later.

Part of what we see in certain cultures and certain upbringings, programming from family and others, and certainly what we see in the cultures of workplaces, is this sort of a grind mentality. I do a lot of speaking all over the US and all over the globe. Of course, in the last few years, mostly domestically. It's certain places in this country, to grind is probably one of the highest compliments you can pay to someone. You're great at that. You can grind away. So gritty, so tenacious. And again, I sort of apologize, 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. And she's got a 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, resilience is not about endurance. Resilience is about recovery. It's about the way we ritualize 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 actually do get more longevity and capacity and all that good stuff. Yeah.

And that's really one of 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 this great research which came from— they were researchers who were studying athlete performance, Jim Lauren, Tony Schwartz. 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's the best, and they really found— they were like looking at tennis players, and the biggest difference they found was not how they were playing, but what they were doing in between playing and how they were taking breaks. And it's so essential 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, I know, to not just finish and then I'll take a break. But the truth is, if you work 8 hours straight versus 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 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 calms the amygdala and it 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 and a natural scene. If you can't get to a tree, like put one on your desk. This is Human things. So yeah, definitely a lot of emphasis on breaks and just 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, we call it a toggle. It's a bit of like intermittent training, which I learned when I was a college swimmer, bulk training. It's similar to that in the sense that if you— even a 60-second break, I know as odd as it sounds, I mean, I've done some recent studies about how 5 or 10-minute breaks between Zooms, it cools the brain. I'm very much a visual learner. So it's like on the one side, it's like hothead, yellow, orange, red is what the brain lights up as. And then with breaks of 5 to 10 minutes, the brain is blue again. Yeah. It's cool. On some level, this is common sense. And yet on another level, as you say, this is all new territory. In many ways, this is 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 a workaholic attorney for 18. It's like to work an 80, 90-hour week and get a lot of done. That's like a lot of people get. 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 you lose a point or you lose a match because you're not at your best in that moment. Your recovery methods, the methods of being able to turn the switch off. And I love it. Tennis players, like, in between the points, the switch goes off. I remember that study. It was cool because their heart rate goes down. They might have just been running crazy on the court, get after a ball or whatever. But in between, it's like their heart rate dips, goes back to a resting rate in between. Yeah. And that's their little intermittent 30-second, 60-second recovery. So what do we do? Not athletes like that, but you can sit at your desk and rub your ears and close your eyes. You can breathe deeply for a few moments. You can stretch. You could take a walk. Our sweet spot, I don't know if you found this in your research too, is the sweet spot for us is 10 to 30 minutes. 60 seconds is great for a state change. It's momentary. It really helps. But that 10 to 30 minutes Intermittently throughout the day, it's just powerful.

I think that's what NASA found too. There was a NASA study on the ideal nap, that best peak astronaut cognitive performance. 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

I guess the point— I just don't wanna wake up grumpy. 10 to 30 minutes is good cuz you don't, you're not grumpy. You don't get—

Exactly.

Yeah.

It didn't go far enough that you're grumpy. If you're not doing it right, you see it in the points. You see it in the performance. If it's a lawyer, it's just his ulcer, like, 25 years later. It's the cortisol.

It's hypertension. It's—

Yeah. Nobody's seeing it on the scoreboard.

You know, it's the kid at home that gets the brunt of it, or the dog. It's like, these are the things that we're— that turns into poor behavior.

Yeah.

And in the world that we're living in, I don't try to get on too high a horse with this stuff. I just think when we're living in a world that's always being called divisive for a country. A lot of this is in the US, but it's elsewhere too. It is definitely elsewhere where people feel more divided and angry at each other. So is it that we're somehow different, or— and this is a question, not a statement. I would 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? Are we just flat out exhausted? And that's why we have such little patience. For other people. Amy?

Yeah, definitely. We're certainly depleted. We're definitely depleted. Are we different? These things go together because I think what's different these days is we just, we do more 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, it's certainly not delivering all this free time that we were supposed to get from all these modern Technologies, there just feels 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 we have less to give and then we have, we get depleted and then we have even less. And so then we bicker and fight with each other and get cranky and mean.

In putting it in those terms, I don't know if you feel the same way, it doesn't make it go away, but understanding it is helpful to me, 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 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 worried about posting on 3 social channels

in the

midst of every other thing. And there are different times. I get it. 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 exponential because 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 compounding.

Yeah, especially, and 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 away when you're depleted. And the more that we can fuel our bank accounts and have these different sources to turn to and to draw from, then you have the energy to understand the other point of view and understand the other side and give them some grace and all of those things. But we can't do that if we're depleted. We can't do that if we're all— if we all have this much left and we're using it up to get home and get to the Netflix.

Is empathy a higher functioning activity? Does it take more energy from our brains? I don't know if you know this, to be empathetic than to be angry, for example?

I believe so. There's 2 kinds of empathy. There's 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 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 actively think about how it might feel to be them. It is a skill that can be built, empathy, even if it doesn't come naturally. So—

Seeking to understand.

But you're not gonna do that if you don't have enough energy. If you're wiped out, you're just gonna give up. Yeah.

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

I think the thing that I've become most aware of and conscious of in all of these things is, is that But all of this stuff takes a big cognitive load. It's kind of what we're talking about here with 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 than I could ever imagine. I'm like getting to capacity. I never did before, but I'm like, I am. Yeah. I don't know. I can't go farther. So 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 surprising, but we try to make our brain do everything all on its own. And 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. Holding them in your brain, not holding them in your working memory, not having all the plates in the air. It's a strong, obvious technique. And I started doing it, doing everything at once. And we have a tendency to just, just do it, just answer the text real quick, 'cause then it'll be done and then you could do the other thing and like 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, it's out then it's out of the head, it's on a Post-it note, it's Mm-hmm. 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 wrote a very specific to-do list for the next day slept way better because 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 doing all that work.

Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. I'm just so happy to say those— that it's super helpful. It's so tangible. It's so relatively easy. I'm holding up my notebook, right? So it's good to just know that I'm doing it for a reason. That's funny about writing notes and having so many of these things. They never go back. I have this habit of taking a yellow highlighter and And then I'll highlight the things I do want to be able to go back, the most important stuff. But the chances of me going back are probably 80% no in the ordinary course. But yet the writing itself is— I feel like I'm free to go. Yeah.

The fact that you unloaded all of that information, it probably means that you kept taking in more because it was unloaded. 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. I know I am.

It's called Humanizing the Remote Experience Through Leadership and Coaching: Strategies for Better Virtual Connections.

Beautiful. Excellent. You know what? I'm going to read it and then I want to invite you to come back for part 2 so that I can actually— Oh, I'd love to.

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 adamarkel.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 5-star reviews are just epic. And when we do read a review, oftentimes what we'll do is read that review in another episode, like just 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 we've got resources. It's so easy for us to really be able to access them now. And there's a lot. So when you find one that really is good and works, 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.

As usual, I did promise that this would be a great episode. And I just wanna 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 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 And it's really quite astounding that we could actually be in need of things and yet at the same time be completely oblivious to those things. 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, 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 attracting to those things was really very powerful. We talked about some pretty tangible studies, including that UK study that looked at 2 different groups, one where chewing on some pretty difficult mental tasks, cognitively utilizing their brains in a particular way to solve some problems, and the group that was at rest. And then both groups being asked to simply get on treadmills, get on stationary bikes, and exert themselves physically. What that study showed was that the groups that had been chewing on things mentally versus those that had not fatigued much quicker. And I think that's relevant because so many of us don't recognize the impact of mental fatigue on our physical feelings as well, on how we feel, 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 like that sponge or that washcloth that's, that's wrung out, or do we feel more energized and ready for the next transition, like, back from the work life into the home life, into the intimacy 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. Quite talking about not only the why, but also the strategy. I was sharing something about our toggle methodology, the way we, like a light switch, recommend that people intermittently throughout the day 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 decreasing cognitive load because the cognitive load on all of us is greater and greater, 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 means that we have an increased cognitive load from all the meetings and everything that we're being drawn into online and through proliferation of more and more content and our roles both in our work lives as well as in our personal lives as citizens. All of that 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'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 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 today has been a saving grace for me because I do this frequently. I have books and books of writings of things, notes, etc., that I often don't go back to. Sometimes I do, but often not. But the writing it down is a process of letting go. Writing to-do lists and writing them at night, even before bed, or writing down the day's agenda. What is it that's coming ahead tomorrow? Because then your brain can let it go, and you would actually sleep 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. There's really too many things to cover in a summary of what this talk was about. Taking breaks in nature and actually not even needing to get in nature if you can't get out and actually look 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 5-minute break or a 10-minute break between our meetings. 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 it 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 has a compound effect. And no wonder we find people that are burned out because of that. 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 able to be more resilient mentally, emotionally, physically, and even spiritually so that things 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 are actually more able to deal with those things. You're better equipped. 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 physically, cannot do that. 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 3 minutes' time. Couldn't be easier. You go to rankmyresilience.com, and 3 minutes later, Answering sixteen questions, you will have your answers 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. leave one at adamarkel.com/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 5-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 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 at adammarkel.com/podcast. For more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change-proof teams, visit adammarkel.com/becomechangeproof.