Reimagining Productivity: The Neuroscience of Achieving Balance and Well-being

Emily Smit

Fabulous. Good morning, everybody. We are so excited you're all here. Welcome to everybody if this is your first time. We love meeting new faces and meeting new people. Who are we? We are a group of people passionate about being great leaders, intentionally building great cultures on our teams, and building community. This is really a space to learn, develop, and grow, to connect with each other, to have fun, to be inspired and activated to make a positive change in the world. What a fun way to kick off the morning. We meet online monthly and we cover all sorts of topics that help us become better leaders and build better cultures. Join us next month, where we will be talking about the power of feedback, igniting growth and excellence, and our very own, Leah and Steph will be presenting that. Super excited about that topic. Speaking of Lea, I'll turn it over to her to talk about the perk a little bit.

Leah Roe

What is happening? An immersive view. Did anyone else just see this? What's happening? They used to do this on Teams. I didn't know that they had it on Zoom, and I also didn't know that it did it for everyone. We're going to roll with this. Great. Let me know in the comments if this is a huge disaster or distraction. This is a really great segue. The Perk, we are sponsors of Culture Community. That, I think, tells you a lot about us here at the park. We're always trying new things, innovating, sometimes in the moment. So here we go with this. So what do we do here at the park? We are a premier leadership and culture development studio. Now, what does that actually mean? Has anyone here ever... Oh, okay, now I can see the immersive view. Oh, everyone's in seats. Okay. Has anyone here ever worked for a really amazing leader? Have you ever worked for a leader that's just great? You connect with them, raise your hand. You've worked for a great leader. That is what we do here at the Perk. We develop those. And the way that we do that is through different ways.

Leah Roe

We're most known for our custom leadership development programs. We also do team workshops as well as one-on-one coaching. Everything that we do is rooted in our clear leadership operating system. This is teaching leaders the five daily behaviors that they need to successfully lead. Those five behaviors are curiosity, listening, expectations, yes/and, and recognition. The one that I want to focus on today is recognition. Here are some stats. Basically, what all this is saying is that people are not being recognized enough at work. They're not being recognized for the amazing things that they're doing, and also just for how amazing they are, the energy that they bring, how they show up, the things that they're doing at work and in the world. What I want all of us to do today is I want us to help make these stats better. I want us all to commit to reaching out to somebody today on our teams. If you're a solopreneur, reach out to a client, reach out to a vendor, reach out to a partner, and just express your gratitude. Tell them what are they doing that you think is amazing and why is that important? Can you raise your hand if you will commit to doing this today?

Leah Roe

Yay. And if you need some help on how to recognize, I'm going to have Dan put in the chat a link. We have a recognition guide that has tips for how you can effectively recognize the people in your life. All right, I'll turn it back over to you, Emily.

Emily Smit

Great. All right, I just want to take a minute to introduce Nina, so we know who's going to be speaking with us today. So Nina is a Distinguished Work, Stress, and Burnout Expert, leveraging her background in organizational behavior and neuroscience. Through her science-backed strategies, she empowers individuals to unleash stress relief and achieve work recovery, reduce strain, relieve stress, and overcome burnout under Nina's expert guidance. Without further ado, I will turn things over to Nina and Leah.

Leah Roe

Amazing. Okay, Nina, are you excited?

Nina Nesdoly

I am very excited. I have set up a hotspot from my phone so we can trust the internet now.

Leah Roe

You're rocking and rolling. Okay, so before we jump into all of Nina's brilliance, I wanted to assess the room right now. So we're going to use the Annotate feature, stuffand I'm like, Can you jump in quick and just let everyone know how to use that since I am horrible at technology?

Emily Smit

Yeah, absolutely. So there's a couple of ways to get Annotate. In the lower left-hand corner of your screen, you should see a little green pencil. If you click on that, now you're in Annotate. So then at the top of your screen, you can select text. If you want to text something, you can select a stamp. I think that will work really well for this one. And you can choose the stamp and then click where you'd like to on the screen and we should be able to see everybody's stamps. So again, in the lower left-hand corner, that's the green little pencil, then go to the top and click stamp and select on the screen where you fall on a scale of one to ten. Yeah.

Leah Roe

So I don't feel burnt out at all is one, and I am totally burnt toast is 10. Oh, Nina. This is fascinating. So Nina isn't burnt out at all, and I am very close to burnt toast. So this is going to be a fabulous conversation. All right. People are skewing a little bit more towards the 10.

Nina Nesdoly

I may have a slight advantage, Leah, to be fair.

Leah Roe

Teach us your ways. This is amazing. That's what I'm.

Nina Nesdoly

Here for. That's what we're going to do.

Leah Roe

Awesome. Okay, fantastic. Okay, can we clear that, please? And I have one more annotate. So I want to know, I want you to reflect based on how you're feeling right now on a scale of 1-10, 1 being I'm not burnt out at all, 10 being I am burnt toast, what is one thing that is contributing to your burnout right now? So on this page, you're going to use that annotate again, but press text and type in, What is one thing that is contributing to your burnout right now? Managing family schedule, lack of time and money, work-life balance. Too many amazing things to work on and too young kids, learning a new job, to-do list, school and work-balance. Okay, there are two.

Nina Nesdoly

Names in the chat. Someone says emotional labor.

Leah Roe

Emotional labor? Amazing. Okay, thank you, everyone, for your input. I will stop sharing my screen. What happened? Everyone's in a classroom now. Okay, we're all in a classroom.

Nina Nesdoly

This is giving me like a Magic School bus vibes.

[00:07:46.940] - Leah Roe

Just so you know, we've never done anything like this in the culture community, so Nina, you should feel very honored. You're like anything.

Leah Roe

Okay.

Leah Roe

Nina, I want to start out with the opening question of just... Okay, we're talking about neuroscience, we're talking about work-life balance, we're talking about burnout. How can neuroscience help us with work-life balance and burnout?

Nina Nesdoly

What it really comes down to is that when we understand the brain and the body and the brain and the body's capacity for work, exertion, and how we deal with stress in combination with how we then recover from it and how we bounce back to it, we can look at how we can set up our work days and our work lives, and also our lives outside of work in ways that are more brain-friendly and more conducive to what our nervous system can support is capable of by respecting the limits of our brains, our nervous system, and our bodies, we're able to perform at our best while still prioritizing our wellbeing.

Leah Roe

I'm curious. Okay, we just scored on a scale of 1-10, and you are not burnt out at all. Again, how are you not burnt out? What are the things that you're doing that are keeping you from burning out? Because you're a business owner. You own your own business. You're in between apartments.

Nina Nesdoly

What is- I'm also doing a PhD.

Leah Roe

You're also doing a PhD? Okay. So you have plenty of things that could be burning you out. So what are you doing that is keeping you at that one?

Nina Nesdoly

I really practice what I preach. I'll start with the overarching approach and then get into some of the specifics of what it looks like. I put my wellbeing first in all things. It's how I approach things is by looking at my workday, my workload, my commitments, and saying, How am I going to put myself and my wellbeing first? Because I know that if I don't, I tank. I don't perform as well. I'm not as creative. I'm not as focused. I really learned during my undergrad, after going through a bit of a burnout experience myself, where I pushed myself way too hard to the point where I wound up with a very severe concussion. I had to take seven months off of work and school, drop a lot of courses. And when I was coming back from that, I really just realized that the way that I was pushing myself to always get everything done and trying to push myself harder was counterproductive, because I had totally taken myself out. To get back into my work, my schooling, the things that I was passionate about, I had to learn to put my wellbeing at the forefront so that I could then keep doing those things.

Nina Nesdoly

That's the overarching approaches. I really do operate from a place of, Okay, how am I going to put my wellbeing first? How am I going to lead with taking care of myself? From a practical standpoint, what that looks like is setting up my work day in ways that are really brain-friendly. With breaks throughout the day, not just take your lunch break, but every hour taking a break, being very conscious of how much I commit to saying no to things, which sometimes is really uncomfortable and can feel like an opportunity lost. But for high achieving people, you get to the point where you have so many opportunities and things you could be doing that it really is worthwhile to take a serious look at what you're going to be committed to. I also am really consistent with stress, relief and work recovery practices. All of that advice that you see on the internet that I know you get tired of sometimes, it's like go for a walk and do your exercise and breathe and all of these different self-care things, but they do work. And especially if they are consistent practices within your life and your work day, that adds up.

Nina Nesdoly

And so I am relieving stress throughout the day. I am actively looking at how I recover from work in the evening. So by the time I get back to work the next day, I'm excited about it. I'm like, okay, I'm ready to work. I'm ready to sit down, be productive for the hours that I've committed to. And when I'm off work, I am off work. I'm not thinking about it. I'm not worrying about it. I'm not using any of my personal time for ruminating or planning or thinking or anticipating. I have this really fantastic separation. So when I'm in it, I'm in it. I'm focused. I'm working in ways that are good for my brain. And when I'm not, I'm focused on myself, my wellbeing, and lately, sandboarding in the desert.

Leah Roe

Okay. How do you do that? Because you're business owner. How do you turn it off when you're not working? How did you get there?

Nina Nesdoly

Yeah, hold on. Let me just clear my throat. I screamed away my voice, sandboarding in the desert on Tuesday. I'm not doing fun there. I think that one of the things with thinking about work is that it's actually a bit of a habit. And if it's a habit, then you can change it. Your brain loves patterns and associations. And if you've gotten to a place where you are used to thinking about work when you're not there and that's something that you are regularly stressed about, you're going to keep doing it. And it creates this illusion that then we need to do it. We're like, Oh, I've got so much to think about, so I probably need to think about these things. They're super important. No, your thoughts are just that they're thoughts. They are ideas. They are plans, problems that you can choose to entertain in that moment or not. We think that if something pops into our head, we've got to run with it, it must be so important. And that if we rehearse for things that might be coming up that we're stressed about, that we're somehow going to be better equipped in the moment.

Nina Nesdoly

But that only works if it's intentional. If we're working with coaches, practitioners, teams like The Perk, like my organization, where we're doing training for how people are going to respond under stress... It only not only works if it's intentional. If you're just rehearsing conversations in your mind, as we all do, that's not actually helpful. You're just creating that tension in your body. And your brain, you can distinguish between what's real and imagined, and you do know the difference. It's one of those neuromyths, I call them, that floats around that you can't tell the difference. You do actually know what's real or imagined, but what is imagined still creates the same physiological experience as what is real. So if you're thinking about work, you're putting that wear on your nervous system. So the first thing is just to understand that it actually is a habit, and you don't have to do it. As for the how, so there's a few different ways you can approach this. One of the first ones that I love to start with is what I call sensory cues. Because your brain loves patterns and associations, it loves to predict things, to put things together, you can use that to your advantage.

Nina Nesdoly

You can look at what you see, what you taste, what you smell, what you hear, even what you feel like your clothes on your body and say, Okay, what do I associate with work? What do I associate with personal time? Strengthen those. And if there's ones that are lacking or you don't have an association, you can add one. If you don't have a smell that you associate with work, for example, or with off work, that's a place where you could add one. Maybe you're going to have peppermint. That's a really good scent for focus and productivity. You're going to have a peppermint diffuser for while you're working, and you're going to switch it over to lavender or something more soothing later. Those sounds that are coming from your computer, from your phone that we all like the Microsoft teams. It just summons us like, Oh, I must work. Turn it off. It's a cue. It is very much you're bringing us like, Oh, there's a cue. I will have a response. And if the response is think about work, now you're right back into it. So that's one place to start is with those sensory cues.

Nina Nesdoly

That's one of my favorite places to start because it's really simple. But within that, you have to be a little bit tough love and say, Okay, this scent is lit. I'm in my comfy clothes. My Microsoft team sound is off. When those work thoughts pop in, you're dismissing them. And if they're good ideas and you're like, Well, I can't really dismiss this, you write them down. You write them down, you come back to them when you're working, and you train yourself over time to not be always gravitating towards work. And eventually, you will stop with that habit of thinking about work when you're not working.

Leah Roe

This happens every time I talk to Nina. I'm just like, I feel like it's just a pure therapy session for me. So I appreciate you. Honestly, I'm sitting here. I'm like, Oh, my gosh. Yeah. It has become a habit. And also I'm thinking back to before I started my own business, my habit was after work, I would dream about the businesses that I would start. That was my after work thing. Absolutely. Now that I have that, my after work thing is thinking about the business I have. So it's just never off.

Nina Nesdoly

So it's like- When I first started learning about these recovery practices for myself, I was in my masters when I was learning about really work recovery and starting to figure out how I could pair that with neuroscience. I also would really struggle with thinking, with dreaming about work. The worst part was my dreams were absolutely useless. We would come up with a research model, or I would come up with some plan and draw the diagram for what we were going to be doing in the study, and I would be asleep. My brain in my brain, in my dream, would be like, Oh, I have an idea. And it would be the same thing. It would be the same model I wrote yesterday. So what I started doing was actually keeping a notebook beside my bed, and I would wake up in the middle of the night with these ideas that were not ideas at all. It was just work that I had already done. And in the dark, without turning on the lights, I would take my pen, and I would just sketch it out in my notebook. And I would tell myself, It's in the notebook.

Nina Nesdoly

You can look at it in the morning. Put it aside. Go back to sleep. And because I didn't entertain it, because I didn't roll with those thoughts, the dreams eventually stopped. It took a couple of months, but then the dreams stopped because I wasn't going down that path.

Leah Roe

Oh, interesting. I'm curious, how do you know when you're getting burnt out? Is it different for everyone? What are the signs of like, I'm approaching burnout realm?

Nina Nesdoly

There's two ways I like to look at this. The first is to share the actual dimensions of burnout as defined by the World Health Organization. But then I'm going to share some what I call burnout cheat codes, so ways to get ahead of burnout. Everyone's like, I want the cheat codes. I see the head nods. But it's important to know what the dimensions are as well, just because that covers a broader spectrum. But I've been working with really high achieving teams of people all over North America for a couple of years now. And so these cheat codes have come from my observations of the things that people start to say and do in association with these dimensions. So according to the World Health Organization, burnout is an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic job stress that has not been successfully managed. We see more and more the term burnout spilling over into our day to day as a way to describe generally being exhausted or worn down. But if we really go back to, okay, how do we define it? It's about work. And then there's three dimensions. And what a dimension basically means is these different spectrums, so three different spectrums.

Nina Nesdoly

You can experience one dimension, two dimensions, all three, and to varying degrees. The first is emotional exhaustion. When you start to feel really take it, you might become really irritable, easily frustrated. Oh, no.

Leah Roe

Oh, I'm like at the edge of my seat. I'm writing down so many notes. Same. You're ready, Perc team leader. I'm going to have you. I want to know on each dimension where you're at. Also, while we're waiting for Nina to come back, if anyone else has questions or things, feel free to unmute. You can ask questions. You can put them in the chat. We can say them out loud from the chat. Just anything that you want to personally know as well. It doesn't have to be just a pure me getting information for my own burnout session.

Leah Roe

Awesome. Okay, so the first emotional exhaustion. Oh, no. How much data? I don't know.

Leah Roe

What is coming up for people right now in terms of burnout? What's one thing that you're... I'm definitely taking away this whole idea of practicing not thinking about work. I didn't even realize that that's something I should be doing. It is a practice, right? It's not just going to happen. Just go for it.

Participant

Yeah. I was going to say her note about dreaming about work hits home because that's also in the high stress times when I had a big project or a big launch happening. I could not get my mind to stop thinking about it. And sometimes I would just stay up. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and stay up because, well, I might as well get stuff done if my brain is going to go there.

Nina Nesdoly

Hey, everyone. I'm so sorry. I got a data package and then lost data service. Okay. I know this is a lot less fun, but would people be okay with turning cameras off? Because then I think my internet will have less to process. Totally. Would be okay with that?

Leah Roe

Yeah, let's try turning off videos.

Leah Roe

All good. The first one is emotional exhaustion. Can you tell us more about that?

Nina Nesdoly

Yes. With emotional exhaustion, you're starting to feel really run down. You feel like you just can't take it anymore. If one more thing goes wrong, you're just going to lose it. You might become really irritable and easily frustrated because you don't have the energy to deal with anything that's coming your way. That's emotional exhaustion. It often gets conflated with burnout. You hear the term exhaustion and burnt out used interchangeably, but really, it's just one dimension. The second is cynicism. With cynicism, we start to become withdrawn from other people. We pull back. Having this sense of dread around interacting with other people at work. If you once really enjoyed going in and seeing your... Did we.

Leah Roe

Lose Nina again?

Participant

I think it sounds like it.

Leah Roe

Yeah. I think so. Yeah. Kyle asked in the chat, what was the definition of burnout? Did anyone write it down? I have that it had to do with chronic job stress? Because I always thought burnout was like life and work. So it sounds like the definition is really work-related. Yeah, it was something along the lines of the buildup of chronic stress hasn't.

Participant

Been addressed or something along those lines. Yeah, that hasn't been managed. Isn't being managed, I guess, is active.

Leah Roe

Product job stress that has not been successfully managed. We're waiting for Nina.

Leah Roe

Nina, are you back?

Nina Nesdoly

I'm so sorry. It's flipping between my data plan and my Wi-Fi now, so it just dropped me. I promise when I work from home in Canada, I usually have better Internet, and this does not happen. But that's okay. We have emotional exhaustion. But that's okay. It's giving you time to percolate, right? You're reflecting now. So you've got emotional exhaustion. You've got cynicism. You all heard the definition for what cynicism looks like?

Leah Roe

Withdrawn from others, pulling back.

Nina Nesdoly

Perfect. Okay. And then our final dimension is reduced professional efficacy. So efficacy is the extent to which you feel capable at work. You feel like you can do things, you can accomplish things. So to reduce professional efficacy, you lose your sense of accomplishment at work. You start to feel like you're not good enough, like your work isn't good enough, and you may start to feel like you're getting bad at your job. These are our three dimensions: the exhaustion, cynicism, reduced professional efficacy. But what I have found through working with high-achieving people is that we are very good at just running straight past these dimensions, completely ignoring them, maybe not really recognizing how they show up for us. The dimensions, which we're really good at pushing down, we're really good at putting aside, there's some cheat codes for getting ahead of burnout and some ways to identify that we might be headed there before we even get there. We're going to try some of these out, actually. We can use the chat. I'd like you all to finish this sentence, put your answer in the chat. I just need to make it until end of the year, the weekend, Friday.

Nina Nesdoly

Friday. Friday, man. You all are going to be so excited when I tell you that tomorrow is Friday. Cool, right? 6:00 PM, my next day off. This is a bit of a hint that either you are burnt out, or even if you're not there yet, you're operating at capacity. You're probably fairly overextended. You're operating at capacity because you are just living for the weekend for your next vacation. That's an indicator that you are likely operating at a pace that's not sustainable. And what happens with this, I call it the moving finish line, is it moves. You make it to Friday, and then you do it again the next week. You're in this constant state of, I just need to make it through. You are surviving your work week. You're not thriving in it. You're not. That's one of them. The second one, I'll get you to put it in the chat again, tell me how many urgent, super important, must-be-done-today things are on your to-do list right now. Ten plus one. Way to go, Katie. Three. Three. Excellent. 10, 8, 3, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 6, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 8, 6, 6, 6, 8, 6, 6, 8, 6, 6, 12, 12, 12, 12, 12, 12, 12, 12, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 14, 14, 14, 14, 14, 14, 14, 14, 14, 14Two to three?

Nina Nesdoly

Okay. We've got a good distribution here. So generally speaking, if you've got more than three urgent items on your to-do list every single day, you're probably overcommitted. Having that level of constant urgency and high stress and pressure is not sustainable over the long term. So your to-do list is a really great, practical indicator. One of the techniques that I teach when I'm doing workshops is I have a workshop on the brain-friendly workday, and a nice way to win your workday every day because our to-do lists are so endless, is to set up your most important task list with the top three things that you're going to get done that day. And it's great because it gives you a victory each day where you're like, I finished that list, and everything else on your to-do list is just more fluid, and maybe you're not going to get it all done today, and you'll keep working on it tomorrow. But if that most important task list is constantly going an email, that's okay. But if it's at 8:10, 12:00, and you're frantic every day, that is a really good indicator that there's probably too much on your plate.

Nina Nesdoly

It's not just you and the way you're managing things. It's that actually you have too much on that list. Third is what I call super human expectations. This one is my cryptonight. I and other high achieving people will set things up. We'll be like, Okay, I got it. I got a plan. I'm going to be doing this job, and my kids are going to be in these sports, and I'm going to commit to this family thing, and this volunteer thing, and I've got this at work, and I've got this other thing. If I just get it all into my schedule just right, I set it up absolutely perfectly and nothing goes wrong, I'm going to get it all done. That's the phrase right there, I can do all of this if nothing goes wrong. That is what I call a superhuman expectation, because it is an expectation that you will never tire, you will never need sleep, you will never need help. It's also like a superhuman expectation of others because you're like, Well, everybody I know better send me what they need to send me exactly on time, or else my schedule crumbles. It's not sustainable.

Nina Nesdoly

If you're operating in that place where you're like, Yeah, I could do it all if nothing goes wrong, you may already be burnt out. If you're not, you're on that. That's the direction that you're headed with the capacity that you're operating at.

Leah Roe

Okay, looking at all three of these, and I'm like, I have work to do in every area. What's coming up for other people? As you hear the moving finish line, constant urgency, superhuman expectations. What's coming up for other people?

Participant

I noticed that I also have work to do in these areas, and a lot of this has to do with knowing where my boundaries are.

Participant

I'll say that a couple of years ago, I was burnt out hard. All of this is very familiar to me, but I've worked really hard over the last couple of years. Well, I'm definitely not perfect at this by any means or still work to do. I'm really proud of myself for putting some of these things into place, and I'm in a much better place. It's definitely taking time, though.

Nina Nesdoly

It does. It does take time. I think the just most important thing to remember and what I really try to convey in my keynote workshops that I give, training I do with teams, and also just on my social media presence, Instagram, TikTok, is that it is to make some of the sacrifices that goes with it. I think one of the most challenging things that prevents people from making the shift from this constant burnout to a better work-life balance, work-life integration, whatever you prefer to call it, is wanting to manage it, manage the stress, manage the overwhelm, rather than actually changing the commitments. Because going from a place where you were constantly caught up in overextension, overwhelm, being burnt out, to a place where you have more wellbeing, stability, work-life balance, as Jess mentioned boundaries, there are going to be some choices and some times of saying, Okay, what's actually important to me?

Nina Nesdoly

Because I am just one person. I am not superhuman. I am human, and that's enough. So what can I do as a human? And what can I be committed to that is still going to allow me to protect my wellbeing?

Leah Roe

Bill asked a good question in the chat. How can you help someone else who you think is burnt out?

Nina Nesdoly

One of my favorite strategies for helping other people with burnout is what I call burnout multiple choice. This is when I am working with teams, we do this in the leadership. There's, of course, in organizations, we have things like the employee assistance programs and we have different services available, so you can absolutely refer people there. But another thing we can do is look at, okay, how can we help someone else who's burnt out on a personal, one-to-one level? But when we do that, we also have to ensure that we are protecting ourselves. When we want to help other people, it's very easy sometimes to go past our own boundaries and our own limits of what we can actually do, what we can take on. Burnout multiple choice is a way to support others while at the same time respecting your own limits. Basically, what that strategy is, is to sit down and you can do this today. I don't want to give you too much homework, but you can sit down and do this today. I'm up with three or four ways that you could help other people in your organization or in your personal life that would be beneficial and helpful to them for supporting them.

Nina Nesdoly

Maybe it's with their workload, maybe it's with social support and encouragement, but that would be within your capacity to offer without overextending yourself. You're going to write it down, and it becomes like this multiple choice thing. Here are the three things I can offer. We're giving really practical, concrete things. If someone knows what they need and they can ask for it, that's great. Which is often the case when people are experiencing burnout. You can say, okay, here are three to four things I can offer. Do any of these right now? Or would you like me to direct you to other support offered by our organization, the mental health line, whatever it may be? One of the great things about offering specific forms of support is you can also be proactive about it. If you manage a team, if you lead a team, or in a team that you know is having a tough time right now, you can send out an email. This afternoon, you can write one up and say, Hey, I just want to let everyone know, or a few people know, if you feel like you're burnt out, here are three ways that I would be happy and ready to support you.

Nina Nesdoly

I would really appreciate if you took me up on one of these things if you are burnt out. It lets us be more proactive as well, which is really fantastic at work, where unfortunately, there is still, in some cultures, a lot of stigma around it, or people are nervous, or they don't know how people are going to respond. The other thing is, and we'll get back to some neuroscience here, burnout changes the brain. In a study in people who were burnt out, there was a diminished connection between the amygdala, your brain's fear and threat detection center, and regulation and other functions like that. What happens as a consequence of that is it becomes really difficult to regulate your own emotions. In this study, people who were not burnt out could come calm down from being stressed out quite easily. But people who were burnt out had a really hard time calming themselves down after being stressed out. The researchers attributed it to this diminished connection in the brain. We see that it's hard to regulate ourselves in burnout, which by extension means that it's hard to think things through. It's hard to make decisions. For people who are burnt out, coming up with solutions can sometimes be difficult.

Nina Nesdoly

Now, if you get to come to a talk like this this morning and learn about it, you'll have some ideas, but sometimes people just don't know what they need, so you providing concrete offers of support can really give them something to hold on to, to say, Oh, yeah, you know what? Actually, that's what I need. When I had burnt out and got my concussion, I had a friend who offered to drive me to physiotherapy appointments. I had whiplash from the accident, and I mentioned that my head was really hurting, my neck was really hurting, but I couldn't drive. She said, I can drive you. Would you like me to drive you? And there's a dog park nearby, so I'll take my dog to play. I took her up on that because it was very specific. I knew it was actually within her capacity. She really could do it and was sincerely offering that. Where we're like, Let me know if you need anything. People absolutely almost never do that unless it's your best friend. We've heard that from so many people, and we're often very hesitant to take people up on that because we don't know what to expect.

Nina Nesdoly

We don't want to be a burden to them. We maybe don't know what to ask for. We do this like three to four specific things. We can say this to people. If they come to us, we can lay it out for them, or we can proactively say, Here are a few ways that I can support you if this is what you're going through. We've got some specificity. People can grab onto it. It's easier for them to say yes. And at the same time, you are staying within your own capacity to support other people.

Leah Roe

Nina, I'm curious. Those are great points for helping individuals. I love that. What about if at our companies there's a burnout? It's a burnout culture. Everyone is burnt out. What can we do then? What if we want to go to our companies and be like, Okay, I want to help with the burnout culture we have here. What are some things we can think about or do there?

Nina Nesdoly

I'm going to go straight in for the hard sell here. Start by contacting me because I will come in and I will help you with that. I do workshops and trainings for teams. I also do consulting services. One of the things that I love about one of the primary programs that I offer is called Beat Burnout. It's a four-… We do four of them. We spread them out over a few months so that people have a chance to put things into practice in between. I love doing it this way because it gives everybody the same information, everybody the same strategies, and everybody can get on board, and we can start to change that culture together as a team. When we have things like workshops, sometimes things will come out in conversation because we'll go through something like the Brain Friendly Work Day or how to build boundaries. Conversations will arise or all pop into one of the Zoom meeting rooms when I have the breakout groups and people will say, Hey, well, this is really nice that you're teaching us this strategy, but here's the reason it doesn't work in our organization. And then we can go back, either the team altogether or I can go to the leadership team and I can say, hey, we talked about the strategy today.

Nina Nesdoly

There's actually something fundamentally built into your organization, Red Tape, Bureaucracies, some rule or something that is a barrier to this. What can we do to address it? Often then we can also make change not only to what individual people are doing, but to what the team is doing. That's one approach. Have me come in and I will help with that. If that's not currently within the realm of possibility for your organization, then what I would suggest, and we do go through this, we go through this with tease through, is taking a look at the job factors of burnout. There are six job factors of burnout that have been identified in the research. Call a meeting, sit down, take a look at them, and do some brainstorming around each one and say, Okay, which one do we think is really the big problem? You can ask your people, you can survey, you can look for feedback on what that is, and what are some things that we could do to address these job factors, so we start to shift the culture and address the root causes of burnout within our work.

Leah Roe

You said there's six job factors of burnout?

Nina Nesdoly

Yeah. You want to hear them? Yes. Okay, let me see if I can do them from memory. It's like one of those lists where you always forget when, right? One of them, and you talked about this at the beginning actually, is reward. So reward can include things like recognition. It can also include pay. So if people feel underrewarded at work, that is a risk factor for burnout. The second one, we'll probably not surprise you, it's workload. If workload is too high, people will be at risk for burnout. Workload is interesting, though, because it can also actually be too low. So with these burnout factors, in the research, we refer to them as mismatches, because it's not always that they're too high, sometimes it's too low. If people don't have enough work or challenging enough work, they are also at risk for burnout in their work. So we have reward, workload. Third is control. If people feel like they don't have enough control at work, they're lacking a sense of autonomy. This is a big one that I see in organizations. We really, I think, need to move towards a place of just we're all adults.

Nina Nesdoly

We're adults. We can do our job. Micromanaging is very hard on people. It's a lot more damaging, I think, than a lot of people realize because we really do thrive on autonomy and control. But at the same time, if you have way too much control, it may be time to delegate some obligations. We've got reward, workload, control. Fourth is community. This is typically a lack one. If you lack a sense of community at work, it's a risk factor for burnout. There's some cool insights from the neuroscience around these two actually. In recent years, we've learned that oxytocin, which you may know is like the cuddle hormone, the love hormone, we get oxytocin from positive interactions with other people. And oxytocin helps to regulate our cortisol levels. So having a strong sense of community at work, having social support is actually biologically helpful for regulating cortisol and managing stress. The last two are fairness and values. As humans, more concerned about process than outcome. We like to know that processes were fair, that the decision making, what went into deciding who got a promotion or who got a certain project was a fair process. With values, ideally, we're working in organizations where our values align with the values of the company.

Nina Nesdoly

That can be both in terms of the job itself, the work that they're doing. If you work for a company and you feel that the business itself is unethical, that's not going to be a good fit. It can also be the values that are expressed within the team. If family is a really important value to you and you work in an organization where people really don't care about that, it's going to create a mismatch. You start to feel like you are overinvesting your resources in something that doesn't align with your values. That investment that you make without getting back what you need is why we start to then feel burnt out.

Leah Roe

I love this list of job factors because I feel like burnout can be this really complex thing. I feel like this really helped, for me at least, break it down into like, Oh, okay. Now we can see where do we actually need to do work. For me as an individual, for us as a team, or us as a culture, I love this breakdown of those six factors.

Nina Nesdoly

Yeah, and this is definitely at the team within that the burnout series that I do with teams. This is the thing we go through. We do burn out multiple choice and then we do this. We take a look at, okay, what are the really community, culture-level things, and we usually try to pick one or two that stand out, and then we brainstorm what are going to be the changes and really practically policy, in the handbook things that we can implement that are going to address these job factors.

Leah Roe

I love that. Nina, I wanted to bring up, I asked you when we were chatting about this event, I asked you what is your favorite thing to geek out about when it comes to burnout, when it comes to neuroscience? And you said the Default Mode network. Yes. I would love for you to tell everyone about the Default Mode network.

Nina Nesdoly

Okay. The Default Mode network, I think it's just super cool, is this network in your brain. It's many different brain regions that activate together when you're not focused on anything in particular. When you are focused on your work or when you are actively thinking something through, you're engaging different networks of the brain. But when you are allowing your mind to wander, you're not really focused, your mind turns inwards. The default mode network is active, and this network facilitates subconscious problem solving, creativity, and even building our identities. It is incredibly powerful how much your brain does when you feel like you're doing nothing. Your brain is always going. It's always doing things. When we put in really committed time, working, focusing, learning, experiencing, and then we go and we have that time to detach, let our minds wander, it is just as important, if not more important, to have that default mode network time to let your mind do things as it is to have the focused time where you're actively trying to produce, to work, to learn. This is why you get your best ideas in the shower or on vacation, something just pops into your head.

Nina Nesdoly

This is actually how I started my business. I had finished my Masters in Management. It was during the pandemic, July 2021. I had been doing some volunteer workshops for Women's Nonprofit on stress, burnout, job factors, different aspects of workplace dynamics. I was on vacation with my now ex-boyfriend, and I was looking out at these beautiful fjords in Sagonais, La Seychne, Quebec. I turned to him and I said, I have to start a business. Because my mind just wandered and put all the pieces out. I've got my master's degree studying these topics. I love workshop facilitation. It all fits. It all goes together. Those dots got connected, not because I was at my desk thinking really hard about my next move in life, but because I wasn't. My brain did it for me. Your brain can do a lot for you when you're not actively pushing towards something. It's in our default mode network that we reflect on the things that matter to us. We connect different ideas, and we can really think about and explore our futures and who we want to be and where we want to go next.

Leah Roe

I love that. I'm very into the default mode network since you taught me that. Okay, if we're all going to leave today and go help ourselves with our own burnout, help our people in our life with burnout? What are the three things that you want us to walk out of here knowing, understanding, or being able to do?

Nina Nesdoly

One that we already went through, which I think is a great place to start, is with the detaching from work, the sensory cues. Take a look at that. You can literally sit down, write it down. Write out your five senses, make a personal column, make a work column, and write down what are those enhancing those, minimizing the ones that are going to draw you back into work, and really training your brain so that you can detach from work. If there's one thing I've seen in my work with high achieving teams over the last couple of years, it's that everybody is doing double the work just by thinking really hard when they're not even working. There's so much energy lost and stress created when we're not at work. That really is our time to recover, to detach. For supporting other people, as you mentioned with the teams, you can make up that Burnet multiple choice, like think proactively, what could I do for other people that would still be within my capacity to offer? Take a look at the job factors. If you want to go in and talk about that with your team, here's the six things.

Nina Nesdoly

What one is really our pain point here? What can we do in our culture, in our practices, in our day to day that's going to address this? Gosh, it's hard to come up with three things because this is all so important. I'm just going with the ones we talked about because I don't want to open too many other avenues we could go down. We didn't even get to talk about boundaries today, but there's so many important things here.

Leah Roe

What's the cheat code with boundaries?

Nina Nesdoly

With boundaries? When I do workshops with team and go through a three-start process for setting boundaries. We can get really deep into that in the workshop setting. But the quick view of boundaries is to look at boundaries, and particularly saying no, as a way of saying yes and forming connection. We have this idea of boundaries that it's putting up a wall, it's putting up a fence. But boundaries are simply specifying where one thing starts and another begins. Where I start and begin, where that crosses into being Leah, to being work, to be Emily, boundaries are simply us defining ourselves and the people around us. And that allows us to have stronger connections with other people and to have stronger relationships in our work. When I give my keynote, I like to do a little exercise, and actually, we'll do it right now. I'd like you to think of something fairly low stakes. Don't quit your job thing right now. Go for a low stakes. What's something that you could say no to? Where there's a meeting you could decline, a time you could leave work at, something you could be maybe a little bit more honest about?

Nina Nesdoly

What's a low stakes? No, that you could say. You can use the chat for this. What's something you could say no to?

Leah Roe

Honestly, this is so hard.

Nina Nesdoly

For me. Yeah

Nina Nesdoly

Can scale all the way back to like, you could say, no, I didn't like that movie. If we're so used to not having boundaries and are in a people-pleasing phase, it really does get to the point where someone's like, Oh, my gosh, I loved the Barbie movie. And you're like, I don't want toActually, I did love Barbie since the body's painful, but like Oppenheimer. I thought that was a terrible movie. Oh, my gosh, I was so bored. When we don't have boundaries, we won't even sometimes be honest about things like that. We'll be like, Well, I really want to get along with these people. I really want people to like me, so better say that I like the movie. Sometimes it's as simple as just being like, You know what? I'm going to say no to pretending to like stuff that I don't actually like, or I'm going to say no to phone calls after 4:00 PM. I'm going to say no to answering my phone on the weekend. Something that is... It's still a no, but it's maybe not like, I'm going to say no to every single project, or I'm going to quit my job.

Nina Nesdoly

Those are the big no's. But being honest about what you like and don't like, maybe saying no to an office-housework task, maybe you really don't want to bring cookies. I see discussions in here about pizza parties and things that have backfired. Saying no to answering emails for just 30 minutes, so you can protect your time. What's a low stakes thing that you could say no to? Then rather than thinking of it as a no, following it up with, what will that allow me to say yes to? Because maybe that 30 minutes where you don't answer emails, you say, no, I can't answer emails, that's you saying yes to getting something really important done on your to-do list. Maybe you saying no to an office-work task, is you saying yes to time with your children? Maybe you saying no to a meeting where you don't actually add value. Is you saying yes to getting an important project done? And you saying, no, I actually didn't like that movie. Is you saying yes to forming real connections with other people who will now actually get to know you? Because you're being honest about what you like and what you don't like.

Nina Nesdoly

When we reframe the nos and the boundaries as ways to say yes and connect with others, and that's really what they are, it gets a little bit easier to start practicing that. So the next time you're thinking, I need a boundary here. I really need to say no, and you start to go down that you're like, Oh, but I don't want to say no because... Second, and just ask yourself, What am I saying yes to? If I'm setting a boundary and I'm saying no, what am I saying yes to? Because you are saying yes to something, and hopefully that thing is yourself.

Leah Roe

Nina, thank you so much. I could literally sit and talk to you all day. I don't know if anyone else feels like this, but Nina has just such a calming presence too. I just feel my burnout flying away when I'm in her presence. But I do want to open up the floor now for other questions. We have about 10 minutes left. Who has a question or a thought or something that's come up for you during Nina's talk today? Don't be shy.

Participant

I have a question. I was wondering about what are some good practices on figuring out when we are assessing our plan for the day and within the priority of what is that must thing to do, or maybe if it's something that's in our head that it's more anxiety-inducing than.

Nina Nesdoly

What it is. Yes. Oh, I love this question. Okay, so this is actually something I've been very excited about recently. Sorry, Allen, did you finish your question? I got really excited. I did.

Participant

No, you're fine. No, no, no. I'm geeking out is fine.

Nina Nesdoly

That's fine. Okay, cool. You're saying like, What are the things I must have to do, but what are the things that you actually need to get done versus the things that you're just stressing out about that don't really need to be there? When you identify that language, I must, I have to, I need to, those are absolutes. Absolutelys are often paired with what we call irrational beliefs in the literature. These are thinking patterns that aren't actually true. They're not grounded in the reality of, in this case, our work. They may be catastrophic, feeling like, I have to do it this way or else I'm getting fired. There's going to be an Apocalyptic. Or they're often all or nothing. It either gets done this way or just doesn't get done at all. They are these thinking patterns that are irrational. They have these huge consequences. It's like, Man, if I don't do it this exact way, everything's just... Bridges will burn, apocalypses will rise, humanity over. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves sometimes. When you hear that language in yourself, I have to, I must, I need to change the absolute to a preference.

Nina Nesdoly

You're going to take a phrase like, I have to do it. I would prefer if it were done this way. As soon as you do that, it is like you unlock new places in your mind because you go away from these rules that you've made that are really stringent. Now you can look at different possibilities. And if you come back to the same one and you're like, No, you know what? That actually does have to be done that way, that's okay. But often it doesn't. Often when we're using absolutes, I have to, I must, I need to, we have committed to an old idea. We have locked ourselves into one way of doing things. We've come up with something that we totally invented. And I do this. I stick things on my to-do list, and I'm like, I have to write this e-book thing. And I just move it around all week and stress out about it, even though absolutely nobody but me knows that it exists. There's a story that I tell in my keynote speech. It's called Rest to Success about NASA. So in the design of the International Space Station, it came up that they were going to have to really significantly decrease the weight of the space shuttle that was going to go up to the space station.

Nina Nesdoly

They started looking for all of these different ways to do this. One of the things that they came up with, this was the third edition of a space shuttle, was to not paint it. This shuttle is so heavy. By not painting it white, because all the space shuttles up to this point had been white, by not painting it white, they cut the weight by 600 pounds. You can imagine this team going through and being like, Okay, we have to do this. We have to do that. We've got to do this. We've got to do that. Then someone coming in and saying, Well, hold on a second. Maybe we don't have to paint it. Maybe we don't have to do it exactly the same way. When the space shuttle that was delivering materials to the space station went up, it was just its natural rust color. They left the paint off. This is a super high stake scenario. I love this story because this is NASA. They did have to make a certain weight restriction. They did have to get the international space station up, otherwise international embarrassment, war, world events. There were some absolutes. There were some things they had to do.

Nina Nesdoly

But even within that, they were actively exploring what they did not have to do, where they could change the rules, where they could do something different. Even within our highest stake scenarios, we have that opportunity to say, Okay, what do I have to do? And what are preferences that maybe I don't actually have to do?

Leah Roe

I love that. I love that story. It's something I wrote down when you were talking about, Oh, gosh, the constant urgency, cheat code of just re-evaluating the things that I said. I have 10 plus urgent things on my list, but re-looking at it, is it really urgent? Redefining urgency. So I think of that. I love that idea as a team looking at, okay, what must we do? What are the things we have to do? And what are the things that let's get curious with it? Is it something we actually have to do?

Nina Nesdoly

Yes, exactly. And that simple moment of catching yourself and saying, okay, I just said I have to. What if that's just a preference? It's honestly a little bit magical. You do that in your mind and you're like, Whoa, there's so many options.

Leah Roe

I love that. Okay, we have time for one more question or if anyone has a thought they want to share or something that they're going to take from today, I'd love to hear it.

Participant

I just want to say thank you, Nina. I took a lot away. I took so many notes. And I feel like learning to notice my own tendency to burnout will also help me with the people I work with as well.

Nina Nesdoly

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much, Jess.

Leah Roe

Okay, we have time for one more, I lied. I said just one more, but one more.

Nina Nesdoly

But Jess was so fast.

Leah Roe

Jess was so quick to the point and amazing.

Leah Roe

If someone asks a question, I'm just going to get nerdy and take a long time to answer it.

Participant

I just have a quick comment as well. This information was incredible.Different. I feel like we hear the same things over and over with suggestions on burnout, and I felt like what you shared was clear and felt much more actionable and different than I've heard before. Thank you. This was really incredible.

Nina Nesdoly

Thank you so much, Sarah. I appreciate that so much. That means a lot to me because that's one of the... That's a really core value, I guess, I would say, in my work is giving people things that are actionable and coming from the science. I am not the person who's going to come into your organization for a wellness talk and be like, We need to drink water, and sleep, and wear sunscreen. You do need to do those things, but you are adults. I feel that if you are not doing things like sleeping and drinking water, and getting any exercise, that's usually because there's other stuff that's making it really hard for you to take care of yourself. That's where I want to be, is back at the neurophysiological level for individuals and within the culture of teams to make changes that really work. Then things like the sleeping and the drinking water and the breathing is easy as it should be.

Leah Roe

Just real quick, I'm going to share my screen one more time. Can everyone see that? This is more information on Nina's Beat Burnout Workshop series that she talked about, and then also a link for her newsletter. We can put this in the chat. We'll also send it out in our email that we sent out after the event today, just so you can sign up for her newsletter and get more information on if you want to bring the Beat Burnout Workshop series to your organization. All right.

Nina Nesdoly

Wonderful. Thank you so much, everyone. This has been so much fun. Thank you for your patience with my South American Wi-Fi. As I said, I usually have good, strong Wi-Fi back in Canada. So if I get to have the pleasure of coming in and working with one of your teams, we will have nice, consistent streaming for that. But for today, thank you so much for your patience, your attention, your great questions. I really hope that you're able to take something that you learned today and put it into practice and just put your wellbeing more to the forefront going forward.

Leah Roe

Awesome. Thank you so much, Nina. Thank you, everyone. Have a great day.