Breaking Free From Unhappiness Habits to Reclaim Happiness

Now friends, every time that the brain pushes information back and reloads it, there is a cost we pay to it. That cost is a drain in our energy. Our brains are two and a half pound organs that consume almost 25% of the energy and so the cost we pay when we multitask is very high.

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Hi dear friends, in the continuing series on how we have made unhappiness a habit, I want to actually turn to three habits I want to bring to your attention, which are habits around work that we've created that are really at the heart of this epidemic of stress, anxiety, burnout and languishing that we are seeing. Those three habits are first, our habit of multitasking that we have picked up over the years, accentuated only more by technology. Second is our habit of feeling like we constantly need to stay plugged in, connected at home, on vacations, into work. And then the third one is, you know, this desire and continuously feeling like we need to be doing things, which translates at work, around back to back meetings. You know, there's so many people who spend 80, 90% of their days in back to back meeting meetings with no breaks in the middle and that's just become their normal way of being. They're like, yeah, that's how it's meant to be. How else are we going to get things done? So I want to talk about those three habits, I want to take each one of them and I want to highlight the costs, what is driving some of this and some alternative ways in which we can build better habits that help us be happier, be more resilient, be more adaptable, and truly get more done by being more versus just doing more. Let's start with the first one, Multitasking myth. Now, when we ask most people why people multitask, one people say, well, because I'm good at it. If you look at the research, 95% of people are not multitaskers. They're actually just really good at context switching and they're serial unitaskers. Just like a processor can stop what it's doing, reload a new piece of information, process that put that down. Now do the Next one and the next one. We have one process in our brain. The brain works the same way every time. We context switch, we task switch, we are unloading content from our immediate memory to something else. We're reloading information and context of what we're going to work or not work on. And then we start on it and we do it continuously. Now friends, every time that the brain pushes information back and reloads it, there is a cost we pay to it. That cost is a drain in our energy. Our brains are two and a half pound organs that consume almost 25% of the energy. And so the cost we pay when we multitask is very high. Now the research that was done at American Psychological association highlighted that the productivity loss that we can experience can be up to 40%. So when you think you're being efficient, my dear friends, because we have convinced ourselves that we're really good at multitasking, recognize that that's potentially how much less you are actually getting done. The second one is we can look at research done around stress accumulation in serial multitaskers versus those who focus on one. And again, we see high levels of accumulation of stress. We see it in terms of increased heart rates, higher blood pressures. So all of those are really, really, you know, factors that affect our long term well being, they affect our short term moods, and that's not a good thing. I want to offer you an alternative. The alternative is something called the flow state. Now flow was a concept that was coined by Mihali Csiksetmihaly and highlighted those states, those moments when we are completely absorbed in a particular activity where we lose track of time, we lose track of ourselves. We're so engaged, we're so involved fully in it. When we are in that flow state, we are truly operating at our peak performance. This state boosts productivity, but it also boosts fulfillment, happiness and significantly increases our chances of success. So instead of serially continuously multitasking, I want you to build a different habit. I want you to build a habit of working more in flow. So how do you do that? I think there's a couple several steps that we can take based on the work Mihaly did. We can look at the work done by Cal Newport in deep work and how do you go create conditions? Here are three or four that have worked for me and I would highly encourage you to consider this for you because all teams that integrate this experience significant gains. So number one is about truly creating a pre flow routine. You see, our environments are so filled with interruptions, our Phones are going off, you know, pings, if you will happen all the time. We get emails, we might get actually people interrupting us. There might be a loud noise somewhere. So it's really, really important that we create a pre flow routine, routine or ritual, which means, number one, we turn devices off, we might put a do not disturb, you might even exit your mail and slack applications if you have those. You make sure that the task you're going to work on, all the material you need to do that is already pre printed in front of you so you don't have to interrupt yourself. Second, create a block of time, you know, somewhere between 60 to 90 minutes where you're going to focus on this task. Now we're going to create small little breaks in the middle there, but at least have 60, 60 to 90 minutes. And friends, if every day you're able to find 60 to 90 minutes to focus on that one thing, that one thing that really, really matters will move the needle for you. Day by day, week by week, month by week, you will notice the gains that you get from it. So second is schedule blocks. If you don't block it, it's not going to happen. The third one is use a method called the Pomodoro method. And the way the Pomodoro method works is you work in focused 25 minute intervals, then you take a short five minute break, then you work in another 25 minute interval, you take a five minute break and you might do three or four cycles of this and then after that you might take a deeper break. But when we do this, when we work in sprints, we are truly present, we can be at our best, our brain is focused, we've eliminated all the losses that come from context switching. And finally we can start to truly create and train our brain through mindfulness long term. So that in those moments that we are working over time, we are building the muscle to be present and really engaged. I want you to try this particular way of working 60 to 90 minutes every day and notice how much more you're getting done. Notice what's happening to your level of stress, notice what's happening to your level of creativity. And you know, let us know, let us know on LinkedIn. You can email me. I would love to hear your story on how as you break the unhappiness habit of multitasking and instead build the habit of focused flow work, I want to know what benefits you're seeing from it. I would love to hear your stories. So please share those with us. So that, dear friends, is the first unhappiness, habit I want to talk about, which is this multitasking. Now let's switch gears and talk about the second habit. This is especially true in the U.S. you know, we are one of the most overworked group of people. We work long hours. If we compare ourselves, for example, to Germans, we almost work about 300 to 500 hours longer. In Europe, there are breaks over summer that most countries take in one shape or form. In the us, many of the people don't even take the two weeks of vacation that they are allocated. But it's not just about vacations, friends. This notion of overworking and the need to be continuously on has become a massive epidemic. Even when we are not working, we're thinking about work. We feel the need to plug in on vacations. We need to plug in during dinners, after dinners. We just somehow have this constantly nervous system running on anxiety, feeling like if we are not there, something's not going to happen. So we just feel like we have to continuously be on. You know, I was quite blown away by a story one of my clients shared with me where even the five minutes that in the morning he goes to have a shower, he's having massive, you know, he has almost massive panic attacks. He almost considers sometimes taking his phone and to the shower because he feels something's gonna get missed, something's gonna get left out. But that's how, you know, we have normalized a way which wasn't that in the past. We didn't have the ability to be connected 20, 25 years ago before the Internet and all the cell phones and the text technology came about. When we left work, we left work. When we were at work, we were at work. When we went on vacation, there was nothing to stay in touch, in contact with. But today, because it is possible, we now make it almost mandatory and make it, you know, we kind of create our own suffering and pay a huge cost for that. I'm going to share with you some data around this overwork and what we are seeing from the world. So in 2021, the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization released this shocking study where they found that Almost close to 750,000 people died from stroke and heart disease related to overwork. Working 55 plus hours a week, it was associated with a 35% higher risk of stroke, 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease versus working 35, 40 hours. Now we hear stories all the time, all the time of people who die because of overwork. Japan. There was a recent story from India Anna Sebastian Perel, who was a young 26 year old who died from overwork and excessive hours. So we are paying a huge cost in our health and even I would say in many cases through our life from this overwork, extremely long hours. Now, some of it is organizational, dear friends, that we don't control. But trust me, there is more of this that you control than otherwise. Because even when those organizational pressures are not on, I often see the need to be constantly on. Look, I was one of those. I myself have a hard time not thinking about work and not constantly checking my emails. Quite different than my wife who's actually really, really good at it.

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Now to change a happy habit that we have normalized, we have to first understand why is it that we have built this habit. Why is it that despite knowing so much, despite recognizing I wish I hadn't worked so hard as one of the key regrets of the dying, we still keep doing that. And I think there are two big reasons for it. And I really like the reasons posed by Clay Christensen in his book How Will youl Measure your Life? The first one was tied again and they're both tied to how our brains have evolved and how we make sense of day to day decisions. So the first one is this notion of misallocated resources. We are people pleasers. Why are we people pleasers? Because we like to belong. We don't like being seen as difficult. And so we say yes to a lot of things and we dedicate our time and energy to those who shout the loudest. Where does it come from? 20,000 years ago, if we didn't belong, we died because alone. It was hard to survive in the wilderness. And in some shape or form that thinking continues today deep in our unconscious. So we respond and we give, you know, say yes to more things than we would otherwise because we don't want to say no. The second is ourselves. You know, we have a much more short term bias than a long term bias. We will go for things now versus going for things in the future. And when it comes to work, when we put in that extra hour, stay an extra hour longer, you know, our families on health are long term, they don't cry. In the short term they are more understanding. They give us the wider birth and the return we get from this in the near term from work, that extra hour we worked that attaboy, you know, the oh my God, you're on the fast track and you recognize and you will probably get promoted. You know, we value that way more than the long term costs we pay in our health and in our relationships. So that's just how power brains. It's important to recognize that that's what we are going to do. So we don't villainize ourselves, we don't villainize the companies. We recognize this is how the system is, this is how we are. So we can start to make a shift. I would invite you, as you make a shift, think about three or four ways in which you can really integrate your work in life. I'm a big fan of work life integration versus work life balance. Isn't it interesting, friends, that when it comes to life and work, we often create this hard boundary even though we are working longer and longer. But when it comes to life, we don't make any boundaries between time for self, time for family, time for parents, time for friends, time for service. All of that melds in. We do things that make sense in the here and now and we seamlessly are flexible and allocate. And I want you to take that same mindset towards work. But in order to do that, you have to start with first making your work be a source of meaning. Integrate meaning into your work so that it becomes a source of fulfillment rather than just a way of survival. If you do that, you fundamentally transform work into life. It becomes life giving versus life draining. It is just another aspect of life. I think the second important part of this, if you want to truly live an integrated fashion of work and life, it is important to use technology efficiently. So in those moments when you are actually unplugging from work, when you are on vacation or you know, time with family. So like at our dinner, we very hard, we try very hard to make sure that there are no devices when we have dinner together every evening. Now, I'm sometimes the first culprit to break that rule. And you know, I am rightly chastised by my son and my wife or if one of them do it, you know, I will do that for them. But we try as hard to keep that technology away so we can truly be present with each other. We can check in on how our days went and be really present. Same story with vacations. You know, when we take vacations, we try as much as we can to keep work out of it. We'll proactively have conversations with our Colleagues who I'm working with to make sure that there is anything urgent that comes, there's somebody who can take care of it, or we make sure we tell our clients. These are all things you can do. You know, sometimes we have this. We don't like asking for help. And my encouragement to you will be when you take time off, ask for help. Create backups for those who can handle the requests so you don't have to constantly be on. And then set some hard boundaries around those moments when you are unplugging from work, where you are spending time with your family or yourself or in the community. The third important part is again to train our brain instead of constantly be thinking about work, you might not be working, but you're thinking about work, is to again practice mindfulness. You know, this is something that shows up again consistently. Our brains are wandering brains, but that's because we allow them to be and we allow them and train to be even more of dopamine. You know, we're becoming more of dopamine addicts. We're training our brain constantly to be out there so we will never eliminate mind wandering. Not that we should, but I think we should train our brain to be more present so that we can savor those moments of life versus constantly go and think about work. Because when things don't go well, my friend at work, you know, that fear, that anxiety will make our brain go there because our brains have that negativity bias, right? And so it's important long term if we want to. We gotta train our brain to be in the here and now. Because when we are in the here and now, we can focus on what we are doing. So those are three ways, three or four ways in which we can start to really break that habit of constantly feeling on and overworking and integrate work in life beautifully where, you know, we're not afraid to unplug. We are really enjoying that moment when we are unplugging. We are really making work be a source of meaning for us. If we do all of these things, we can start to shift and break this overwork constantly on habit. Let's talk about the third unhappiness habit for our episode today. And that is the habit of constantly being in back to back meetings and eliminating any time to being. It's a habit of constantly be in motion and doing 80, 90% of the people I talk to and executives that coach talk about the torment of back to back meetings. They say they start their day and they end the day. They might get 10, 1520 minutes in the day, but otherwise they're always on friends. Even our phones need charging through the days. Why do we believe our brains are any different? Our bodies need charging throughout the day. Breaks, standing up, walking, eating water. Why do we feel our brains don't need that? In fact, the research that was done at Microsoft was actually quite instructive around the high cost we pay from back to back meetings. This constant meeting after meeting culture that we've created that we live into. The first is our stress accumulates over time. You know, they did this study where they put FMRI monitors on people's heads so they could, man, they could really study what was happening inside the brain. And you could literally see the brain accumulating stress and getting hotter and redder and redder without breaks over three to four hours. The second issue is you start to actually see negative levels in frontal alpha asymmetry, which means our ability to focus is actually going down, our engagement is going down. So if we are in back to back, we're not even paying attention. And then the third is, you know, the stress levels, you know, they spike, but they don't go down. We are less productive, we are accumulating stress, we're less focused, we are higher. Hence chance of making errors. So it's a really big deal, right? These are all things that we don't want. As I said, it's a habit that results in stress and burnout and lower productivity. Right. We're not actually getting any gains from it and I think it's time we actually break it. So how do you go about eliminating this madness, this back to back meeting cultures? We've created, our ways of working. Here's some tips for you to consider that would help you start to break the habit. Number one is really do an audit of your existing meetings. And I would recommend you take a 6D approach. So what are the 6D's? The 6D's are decline, delegate, decrease, defer, delete, and do smarter. So decline meetings, you don't need to delegate them to others that can do this for you. Decrease the frequency of the meetings so that if you meet every week, maybe you can meet every other week. Defer some meetings to another time if it's not urgent and delete the meetings. And the last one is do smarter. Which means, you know, make sure meetings have clear agenda so we can get more done in less time. Make sure there's a pre read. So that's the 6D approach. You can learn more about this, reach out to us, we'll Create a separate post on it. But it's really, really optimizing our existing set of meetings. It's really important. If we don't do it, it'll never gonna change. And friends, maybe in the near term it's hard, but try and optimize them three months out. Second, have a conversation with your team, with your function, with your organization and see if you can create certain no meeting blocks. Maybe it's no meeting Fridays or no meetings Mondays, or there are two halves in the middle of the week that you can create and align that this is the time we're not going to do meetings. Third, use technology to your advantage. Create rules that allow meetings to not go back to back. So schedule buffer time in between your days and your meetings. Maybe there are 10 or 5 minute breaks that are fundamentally created and integrated. So for example, you know, in my schedule I make sure that beyond 90 minutes I at least have a 10 minute break. The second thing I do is I make sure that my meetings are 25 minutes or 50 minutes, they're never 30 minutes or 60 minutes. And the reason that helps is because I at least get a five minute break between 25 minute meetings and 10 minutes between the 60 minute meetings which now have become 50. Right? So we can start to do this. So 60s is one, scheduling buffer time is another. Implementing no meeting blocks in collaboration with your teams. I think these can make a really, really big difference where we start to normalize and create space to get things done versus being stuck in meetings. Now you can pair this, dear friends, with the prior unhappiness habit of constantly multitasking. Because guess what, if you're in all day meetings, what are you going to do in the meetings? You're going to do other things, right? Because the work still needs to get done. So instead of that, you can create those moments every day. They're 60 to 90 minutes at your best. When you are at your best, that you're doing that flow work, that work on the most important thing. If you start to make these changes to your ways of working, if you start to break these three unhappiness habits, my dear friends, this unhappiness habit of multitasking, the unhappiness habit of constantly being on, and this unhappiness habit of over scheduling or being constantly in meetings and saying yes to this tyranny of meetings that we have created. If you break these three habits, you will see significant increase in your and your team's flourishing, your happiness. You will see reduction in your level of stress and anxiety. You'll see increase in engagement and most importantly, we cannot just work and make an impact for us as our immediate teams. But that leading by example is going to start to reset this for whole organizations and for others who are looking at us because we can be big role models for this change. And I really hope that you are able to do that for them and for yourself. Let us know how you're successful implementing these habits, new habits or new ways of breaking old habits and building new ones. If there are tips that work for you, we want to know. If you are struggling with challenges, I want to know. Please post it on our LinkedIn page on happiness Squad or on my personal Ashish Kothari and we'll do our best to answer the questions for you to address and share tips on how you can truly make flourishing your competitive edge. You start to delete things that are not working we know are at the source of stress and we build new habits. Thank you for listening and have a great day.

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