Why Understanding NeuroScience is Key to Stress and Burnout w/ Nina Nesdoly

In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with researcher and work stress and burnout prevention consultant Nina Nesdoly on how understanding neuroscience is the key to addressing stress and burnout.

Nina shares her insights and experience with...

• Understanding stress and burnout
• Impact of stress on cognitive abilities
• Overwhelming stress and cognitive function
• Neuroplasticity and burnout
• Work-Life balance and recovery
• Masking and emotional exhaustion
• Importance of training and development
• Healthy stress vs. hindrance stress
• Dopamine misconceptions

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Transcript

Russel Lolacher: And on the show today, we have Nina Nesdoly, and here is why she is awesome. She is a professional speaker, researcher, and founder of Workplace Clarity, a work stress and burnout prevention consultancy. Her background in organizational behavior and neuroscience helps a lot, so she's currently doing a PhD studying work related stress. That's the path. Her insights have been featured in BuzzFeed, MarketWatch, The Financial Times, and her TEDx Talk, How to Relieve Stress When You're Overwhelmed. That was selected as an Editor's Pick by TED. Fancy. In a former life, she worked as a workshop facilitator for Apple.

And now she's here. Hi, Nina.

Nina Nesdoly: Hi, Russel. Great to be here.

Russel Lolacher: I'm excited to get sciencey and nerdy with you about neuroscience today, especially as it relates to stress and that thing we like to pretend exists called work life balance. But first, let's kick off with the question I ask all of my guests, which is, what is your, Nina, your best or worst employee experience?

Nina Nesdoly: One of the first experiences that springs to mind for me is experience where I really learned about setting boundaries and that you can set boundaries and the world is not going to end. So I had this supervisor when I was finishing off my undergrad, I was a research assistant, and I had been tasked with doing the ethics submission for this research project. Complete newbie to research, this was taking me absolutely forever. These days, this is something that will take me an afternoon, but this was like several weeks to a month of me trying to complete this form and get the research that I needed done to fill out this ethics submission. And I had this fantastic supervisor. So I got to the point where I just, I could not meet the deadlines that I had been given.

I, the timeline was not realistic. I couldn't keep up. And I got very in my head about it and I was like, okay, I'm going to tell her that I, I can't do this. And if that's not okay with her, I'm going to have to quit. Like I'm not going to, I can't handle this. It's too much. So I wrote out, fortunately, a polite email that did not have that, that energy, but just politely said, Hey, this timeline is too much for me.

I'm overwhelmed. I'm not able to get everything done. And I was just shaking in my boots. I remember sweating and typing this email, pressing send, and just lodging myself back in my chair, exhausted from the effort of trying to say what I needed. And my, the supervisor emailed back. She asked me to come in for a meeting. And I'm still just like shaking, trembling, terrified. I sit down at the table. She pulls up her iPad and she says, okay, so you're overwhelmed. Let's see what we can do about this. And just calmly, happily starts rearranging the project timeline saying what she can help me with because you know she understands I'm new to this work, and it's taking me longer than it would for someone who's more advanced. And I just sat there flabbergasted, I was like wow if you ask for things that you need sometimes you get them? People are nice about this? This is, this is great. And it's actually been fairly consistently my experience. Yes, there are going to be some managers and supervisors who are not going to help you, but nine times out of 10, people are actually pretty willing to make adjustments and are pretty receptive if you say that you need help.

Russel Lolacher: Having that conversation in your head, what and writing your own narrative before you push send, I think is far more common than people want to admit because it doesn't fit the professional narrative. You just do the job. You just, you head down, boss tells you to do a thing, you do a thing. How did that inform you moving forward in your career?

Nina Nesdoly: Oh, It meant that I was a lot more confident asking for things going forward and saying when I was overwhelmed, when I was overextended. And also rather than, deciding beforehand, what people were going to say really started approaching work from a place of, you don't know, and people can't help you and they can't support you if they don't know that you need help and support. Some supervisors might have the superpower to read your mind and figure out when you're overextended, but most don't, and that's not a realistic expectation. And so going forward from that, I very much became comfortable at least asking and at least saying, Hey, this isn't going to work for me. This doesn't make sense and it really shows up in my work in my PhD now with my supervisor.

She's very much that kind of person where if I say something's not working, it's not a big deal. We're just going to rearrange it. It also informs decisions about who I work with. I'm not very keen to work with people who are not like that, who are not willing to be flexible and listen when I say that I need support or that I'm overwhelmed or overextended.

Russel Lolacher: I know there's a few people listening going, I wish I had, I was able to have those boundaries or I wish I was able to make those decisions. I get it. Cause a lot of people are in organizations where they, as much as they can stand up for themselves and the boundaries, choosing not to listen to a certain person or not, is not always unfortunately, as optional as some people get. But being aware, I think, has some power. At least being informed for those next decisions in your career, I think is super, super important. Okay, well, this is easy to translate and transition into our topic today. You are all about the stress and the burnout, not you and feeling it, but how to fix it.

So, it's certainly been a reoccurring topic on this show as well. I love starting out with definitions. I'm not a fan of throwing out words, even the simplest of words, like words like leadership, when nobody freaking defines them ever, especially when it comes to maybe that organization. Nina, what are you saying when you mean you're addressing stress and burnout?

What does that actually mean in your world?

Nina Nesdoly: So, I'll give you definitions for both, for stress and then for burnout. Stress is typically more acute than burnout. Stress is your psychological and physiological response to a stressor in your external or internal environment. Sometimes it's the stories we make up in our heads before we've even bothered to ask our supervisor about something, like we just talked about. So stress is going to be the physiological and the psychological reaction. It is the thoughts that kick in, the response in your nervous system that kicks in to help you attend to some kind of challenge or some kind of threat in your environment. That's stress. Burnout is an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic job stress that has not been successfully managed. So you cannot have burnout without experiencing chronic stress and lots of stress over time, but you can experience stress that doesn't necessarily mean that you're burnt out and doesn't necessarily turn into burnout long term. With stress, you often have the knowledge that it's going to end. You can see that it's a specific event, it's a specific stressor, and there's a sensation that if you just wrap your head around things, or you get the control that you need, or the resources that you need, then you're going to be able to deal with the situation. Whereas with burnout, it's a bit more enduring. It's like you're waking up every morning, you're going to work every day, you're finishing work every day, feeling this constant sense of stuck in a loop and hopelessness and not really sure when you're going to come out the other side.

Russel Lolacher: Where is there the line where ourselves as we're defining it for ourselves what stress and burnout is, because everybody probably has a very personal definition of what it means or they have that inner narrative that we talked about earlier going, I'm fine. It's just the job. This is just the nature of the job.

I'm stressed, but it's healthy stress. Like they, they tell themselves that story. When is the line... 'no, no, this is, this is stress. This is something you have to work on. No, no, this is burnout.' This is like, how do we recognize it in ourselves that it is not healthy and it needs to be addressed?

Nina Nesdoly: So with stress, I would say it's not so much a matter of deciding that it's not healthy as it is that stress management and doing things to relieve stress belongs in our day to day no matter how we're doing. Because even good stress, even if you love your job, and you're encountering challenges at work that you're excited about, that's still resulting in psychological and physiological responses in the body. In my TEDx talk, I use the example of exercise if you hate running. It's pretty easy for me to convince you that you should take a day off and you should recover sometimes. But even if you love running, running puts wear and tear on the body. It's physically hard on the knees. It wears you down. You need breaks. Same thing goes for stress.

So whether you're at a place where you are experiencing a lot of really taxing stress during the day, or you're really loving the work that you do, we still need time throughout our day to day to relieve stress, take time for ourselves, to recover, to make sure that we're getting the sleep that we need, that we're letting some tension out of our bodies. When we have stress at a volume where we can't do that, or it starts to feel like the things we're doing to relieve stress don't work, like it's you get five minutes here and there, but it's just constantly piling up and it's every five minutes that you get to yourself. Simply stops you from exploding. It doesn't actually make you feel better. Stress is probably too high. And that means longterm, it's going to turn into burnout. Burnout has three dimensions that show up, emotional exhaustion. It's when you feel really depleted. It's... you get rest, you get a good night's sleep, but it just doesn't seem to do it. You just never feel recovered.

Cynicism and depersonalization. So you start to withdraw from others. You start to become really pessimistic. I hear employees say things like, well, yeah, I know my manager says that they're trying to help me with this. And like they, they said I could talk to them, but I just think they have an ulterior motive here. Cynicism, pessimistic, distrustfulness kicking in and finally reduced professional efficacy.

Efficacy refers to the extent to which you believe in your ability to do something in this case, your work. So when people are very burnt out and they have reduced professional efficacy, they start to lose their sense of accomplishment at work. They start to feel like they're not good enough. And ironically, what this does is it puts people into this cycle of feeling like they need to push themselves harder. To make up for their shortcomings and what they perceive as failings as them not doing enough when what they really need is to take a step back. So in terms of spotting that within ourselves, it looks like these feelings of chronic exhaustion, like it's just not getting better. It looks like if we notice that we're really disconnecting from others and pushing other people away, we don't believe people when they're trying to help or support us. And if we find ourselves feeling like we're constantly failing or saying things like, I feel like I'm getting worse at my job. I feel like I'm getting bad at what I do. We don't usually go backwards. We don't usually get worse at our jobs, so that should be a signal to people that something is wrong.

Russel Lolacher: Let's get a little sciencey, Nina. I am not sciencey, but I love that you are because that makes me an opportunity, it gives me an opportunity to learn. So one of the questions I have is around the impacts of stress on us, because we tend to, as much as we're talking about boundaries and avoiding stress and recognize it from a mental health perspective, I don't think a lot of leaders understand the impact of going through a stressful environment long term, how that can impact you from a neuroscience standpoint.

So I guess one of the first questions I have is when you're in a job that stress related, how can it impact your decision making and your cognitive abilities in the workplace?

Nina Nesdoly: Stress, when you are experiencing stress to an extent that is overwhelming, and we talk about how sometimes stress can be a little bit motivating, a bit of stress can be exciting, and if we're feeling like a positive challenge in our work, this can be good for us. But this narrative has really swung too far in the last decade from what I've seen. We had Kelly McGonigal's wonderful TEDtalk on Make Stress Your Friend back in, I think it was 2012. And from there, this kind of seems to have really swung the pendulum the other way to people are like, see, stress is good for you. Okay, a little bit sometimes, but not the way that we've been doing it in organizations for the last decade. When you have a bit of a challenge there's something that you maybe don't know how to do and you have to learn, you have a timeline that pushes you a little bit, that's great. But when you become overwhelmed by stress, when your workload is untenable, it's too high, you're not being given enough resources, you're being asked to do the jobs of two, three, four people with no end in sight, that's an excessive amount of stress and that's going to hinder people's progress at work and their experience. Overwhelm and focus in the brain cannot co-exist. These are different circuits. So if someone is overwhelmed, feeling like they don't have enough control, they don't have enough resources, the stressors they're attending to are completely outside of what they're able to cope with and they are overwhelmed, the brain physically cannot also be its most focused, most efficient, most productive at that point. So the areas of your brain that are engaged then are shifting and your body is prioritizing survival, just getting through the day and trying to get out of that circumstance as quickly as possible rather than letting you actually focus and have higher order thinking, decision making. Decision making is something that our brain throws out pretty quickly when we're under stress because your brain has all kinds of schemas and default thinking patterns and things that it can just go. Oh, I've seen something similar before I know how to handle this and it can run back to things that are familiar. So if you are overwhelmed, if you are constantly under excessive stress, that's what your body is going to be doing. People start to take shortcuts. They make poor decisions. They don't make decisions at all.

They just go with what seems easy and what comes natural because they don't have the resources and their brain is not in a state where they can actively think things through and make good decisions.

Russel Lolacher: When I was preparing for this chat with you, I was reading about neuroscience and how it can impact. I actually read that your brain can physically change, like the structure and the function over time can actually change based on stress. What does that even mean?

Nina Nesdoly: So your brain is very malleable. The connections between different brain regions, Neurons themselves, like each individual neuron. And an example of what that would look like is, in burnout, when people have been chronically burnt out, there was a study done in, I believe it was 2014, and it's one of the only neuroscience studies on professional burnout.

These fields don't actually cross that often, like management and neuroscience. Often people like myself bringing things together, but to actually have a study from a neuroscience journal that looked at professional burnout, the way we define it in management and went into workplaces is not actually that common. So they did this study and they found that for people who were experiencing occupational burnout, they were less able to calm themselves down. So they would expose people to something that would startle them. And people who were not burnt out were able to very quickly recover from this. People who were burnt out, it took them longer to calm themselves down after they were startled, after they had a stress response. And in the brain, what the researchers saw was diminished connections between the amygdala, so your threat detection center of the brain, and regions of the brain involved in attention and mood regulation. So the ability of these brain regions to talk to each other, basically, was diminished in people who were experiencing burnout, making it more difficult for them to regulate their own emotions.

Russel Lolacher: Neuroplasticity was also something that came up. Is that something we need to consider when we're going through stress and so forth? Again, maybe I should, maybe we should define neuroplasticity first. And it is that, that changing of the function. Is it something that happens involuntarily? Is it something you can actually have some influence on?

Nina Nesdoly: It's both. So your brain is very plastic when people are young. So we think about neuroplasticity often more for children and teenagers, because that's when your brain is forming. That's when there's more change taking place. But even as adults, our brains will change and adapt basically to what we do often and what we experience frequently. So we can have some control over that. We can say, I want to, I want neuroplasticity that's going to be in my favor, and we do that through healthy habits, exercise, exposure to challenges, but not excessive stress. This is going to be good for the brain. It promotes neuroplasticity in ways that are good for us. But your brain will also change in ways that are not so good. It will be worn down. You will lose access to resources in your mind, to memories, to the ability to make good decisions if you are constantly exposed to excessive stress. And you will also change over time in ways that simply adapt to who you are and what your day to day lifestyle is. For better or for worse, your brain is always trying to get to a place where it can keep you safe. And it can predict what's going to happen to you, and it can be prepared for what you are encountering often and for what is familiar. So if you're leading a lifestyle that is not really what you want, your brain is always shifting in ways that are going to adapt more and more to that lifestyle. It doesn't happen super easily. We're not talking about Oh, I had a week where I really went off the rails and didn't take care of myself. And now my brain is all messed up. We're talking about months, even years to change the structure of your brain. But it does happen. Your brain structure, your brain function does change over time.

Russel Lolacher: When we talk about topics like this, diversity always comes into my brain because we're talking about humans and humans are pretty universal, but there is that difference in upbringing, difference in habits, difference in gender, difference in so many different things when it comes under the diversity banner. Is that impactful what we're talking about today when it comes to about neuroscience and things we might need to consider when it comes to stress and burnout?

Nina Nesdoly: So I really like the analogy we use in neurosciences often. Genetics loads the gun, environment pulls the trigger. Not the prettiest analogy, but it explains it well. Yeah, it explains it pretty well. So we all have genetic differences and things about us that are ingrained, but we also have a lot of room to change our experiences and how we go through the world and what's actually going to happen for us. You can be a person, for example, who isn't really built to be a swimmer. That's not gonna stop you from ever getting in the water, but it probably means you're not gonna become Michael Phelps. He didn't become the swimmer as decorated as he is just because he trained. There was also predisposition there in terms of biology. And the same thing comes into play with health and well being. People have different thresholds for how they tolerate stress. People have different levels of anxiety that they experience. Some people are biologically more prone to feeling anxious than others. The really only way that I'm aware of to move the needle on that is therapy. And you can do it. You can get in and do the work. But at the same time, there's always going to be some biological differences there. I'm someone who has never experienced very much anxiety in my life. I know that it's partly my work, but it's also partly biological. That's partly just the genetics that I was dealt. And I know other people who are very prone to feeling highly anxious. And for some of them, they've been able to work on that. And it's something that is not as big of a deal anymore for others, it'll always be something that's more difficult for them. But if you take someone who's not very anxious and put them in a toxic work environment or a toxic relationship that trains them to be constantly on edge and afraid for their life and their well being, they're going to feel anxious.

So some things are in our genes, some things are in our environment, and how we interact with the world and what we experience changes how our genes are expressed.

Russel Lolacher: A lot of your work and a lot of what you talk about online is specifically around work life balance as it links to stress and burnout. So as much as we like to have that separation of church and state between work and life, everything influences everything else. What can we be doing in our lives that could be better impacting our work to keep that stress down to make us more malleable and defensive to that burnout?

Nina Nesdoly: So a lot of it comes down to rest and to getting opportunities to disconnect. One of the big problems that we face today is people are exposed to work a lot more than they are actually at work through being connected to the phones, to the emails, working on the weekends. And so people are often spending more than their 40 hours a week at work or focused on work, meaning that they're constantly exposed to that job related stress, not having appropriate opportunities to recover. You can do things, absolutely, to boost your resilience to stress, like exercise, eating well, ice baths are getting popular. All of these things help, but they're kind of band aid solutions if we're not actually stopping the exposure to the stress in the first place. So I think the most important place to start with cultivating work life balance is to focus on the division and in training ourselves and our thoughts to not always be preoccupied with work. The cool thing about thinking about work, ruminating about work, worrying about work, is that's a habit. That's something that your brain has learned that you should be doing or that you like to do. You might be like, well, no, I don't like it. But your brain thinks that you do because you're doing it often enough that it's seen this as a pattern. If something is a habit, then it means that you can change it. Because, like we talked about, your brain has some plasticity to it. But it's going to take time and attention. One of the first orders of improving work life balance is simply to start acknowledging when you're thinking about work or you're engaging with work and it's supposed to be your personal time and to stop doing that. To acknowledge those work thoughts, record them somewhere if you need them, or just dismiss them.

It's a little bit like meditation in a more active way in your day to day. The idea behind meditation is not to never have a thought. It's to acknowledge the thoughts and release them and return to the present moment. And the same goes for thinking about work when you're not there. Acknowledging that you have those thoughts, if they're actually good ideas, which they almost never are. Write them down, save them for later, and then get on with your day and train yourself over time to be more engaged in your relationships, in your time spent resting, in your activities outside of work, to stop the exposure. And then all of those other things that we talk about, like exercise, and of course getting enough sleep, and the ice baths, and all of these things that promote biological resilience are actually going to have a chance to help you cope with stressors well, and become more adaptable in the face of stressors because now your body's coming from a place where you're actually rested and recovered. And so if you're also doing all of these things that are really good for you and good for your nervous system, they're more able to help and support you.

Russel Lolacher: I see this a lot from a self leadership standpoint, being aware, things that you need to address. But I also firmly believe that we're not an island here. We're working in organizations that need to understand that our employees, as much as leaders that we are going through this because we're humans too, but those that are in our charge are also going through these impacts of stress and burnout and trying to figure out what work life balance looks like for them.

So as a leader, what do you recommend to those in what to look for, for their staff that might be going through these neuroscienceological challenges? I just made up a new word. Yes.

Nina Nesdoly: Absolutely I recommend a fairly proactive approach more so than trying to look for things, because it's very hard to spot stress and burnout in other people, especially because our work culture has really taught us not to let those signs show up. It's called masking when you show up to work and you hide how you're actually feeling and we hear that in a lot of context now, especially with like neurodiversity and people masking in different situations. But this term has been around in the research for a long time as well. And when people are coming in and they're showing up and pretending that they're happy and they're having a good day, it contributes to more emotional exhaustion more burnout. But everyone does it and it's very common where we're coming in and we're communicating a certain way.

We're appearing a certain way. We have our professionalism. I just had a REEL go viral on Tik Tok that was making fun of the corporate lingo that we use -circle back low hanging fruit build off of what whoever said. So we all know these things. We all do it and we all participate, which means that it's very difficult for leaders to figure out what employees are going through. The biggest sign that you have is a change in engagement. If people are becoming disengaged, they're no longer connected to others at work or to their work. They're no longer interested in work that they once were. But even that can be difficult to spot. So my recommendation for leaders is twofold. One, model things for your employees. If you were a leader who was saying, Oh, don't, don't worry about emails on the weekend, but you're sending emails on the weekend. The data, the research clearly shows that people feel extremely pressured by that. People are going to feel like they have to attend to it. And they're trying to follow the leader in terms of, what they think good performance at work is, what looking engaged looks like.

So if you want your employees to have good work life balance and be able to cope with stress, well, show them that you are doing that too. Model it, show yourself disconnecting on the weekends, express it when you've gone through something that you found was stressful, let them know, 'Hey, I was having a really hard week. I made sure that I spent some time with my family.' Show people what you're doing to cope with stress. So that's the first one is to model it. The second thing is to proactively offer really specific forms of support. We mean really well when we say let me know if you need anything, let me know if you're struggling with burnout, like I'm here for you. People are almost never going to take you up on that. Because they don't know what to expect. And it kind of goes back to the story that I told at the beginning, it was really hard for me to speak up to my supervisor and say that I was overwhelmed because I didn't know what to expect. Now I've learned over time that it's better to do that and give people a chance, but that's, it's hard.

It's not the easiest thing to do. And in organizational settings where you're worried about, your performance reviews and your paycheck and layoffs and all of these different things. You don't want to be the only person who speaks up and is Hey, I'm actually super burnt out and I can't handle these 16 projects that you gave me. So rather than putting employees in a position where we're always asking them to be the ones to speak up. Or even putting leaders in a position where we're trying to guess who is struggling and who needs help. Leaders should go in and on a regular basis, update the team and say, Hey, if you are struggling, if you are overextended, if you're very stressed, as a reminder, here's our employee assistance programs that you can access. I can have a one to one meeting with you anytime you want to evaluate the workload or if you want to grab lunch off site so that we can just have some time to chat and catch up. And offer really specific things that people can grab on to. The great thing about this approach is that it means that as a leader, you're only offering things that you can actually offer. You're offering things that respect your boundaries and your energy. And as an employee, you can see specific things where you can say, Oh yeah, actually that would be helpful. I could use that right now. And it's being explicitly offered. So there's no reason to expect that accepting that offer of help would have any kind of negative repercussions.

Russel Lolacher: I'm looking at this and trying to figure out or understand things that can get in the way of this because there's a lot of leadership responsibility when it comes to understand their staff, what they're going through, giving him opportunities. But things like cognitive dissonance comes up for me, which is saying those things because we're told we have to say them, but not actually meaning them.

When it comes to our staff in that relationship Oh, I have an open door policy and I'm like, you've only seen two people ever walk into your office over the last five years. That's not an open door policy. That is frightening. So how are cultures getting it wrong? How are leaders getting it wrong when it comes to recognizing the impacts of stress and burnout?

Nina Nesdoly: Well, I'll start by saying that most cultures are actually pretty good in that respect. It's not as bad as we tend to think it is. The media comes out with the really scary stories and it makes things look a little bit worse than they are. It's not that stress and burnout is not a problem. It is, but in my experience, most leaders, most managers are actually putting in some pretty good effort to deal with these things. Most people would like to help their teams and would like to be good leaders. And this is consistent with the data too. When we look at leadership styles, abuse of supervision is when leaders are toxic, they're taking advantage of their power positions.

They're not actually helping. That's not most people. Like it's not as common, even when we look at the data of how leaders are behaving as we may believe when we hear these stories out in the world. So most leaders would actually really like to help and they're trying. So the dissonance often occurs more so from them being constrained by the organization, the same way that their staff are. And so then it becomes a matter of the leader really just needing to do their best to kind of act as an umbrella. Like a really good leader is going to hold up an umbrella over their team and be looking for ways to protect them from orders and things that are coming from on high, that would make it difficult for them to get their work done, barriers that would make it challenging for them to get access to resources. So that's what I see as the role of a leader is really to be that umbrella and to say, okay, whatever else is going on in this 8, 000 person company, this is my team, and this is how I'm going to do whatever I can to protect them. That said, we do see some dissonance, and it often comes most from people who are higher up in the organizations, where they maybe are not as aware of the trickle down effects and what is kicking in at places lower in the organizations with employees that they don't necessarily engage with as much. So we do see some lip service. And to my mind, if you're in an organization where it's just lip service and you're not actually able to get any of the help and support that you need ever, spruce up your resume because there are a lot of companies out there that are working really hard to try and create healthy work environments.

Russel Lolacher: I would agree with you on the leadership side of thing. I don't think anybody's doing any bad leadership wise maliciously or in any state. I think the problem is the lack of leadership skills in the leadership realm because of there's the... and I feel more bad than anything else Because people are put in positions of authority to to take over. Because they were good at a job once. And they were so good at that job, they got promoted to a level where like well, they've never actually managed staff before but they're so good at that thing. So they're in a position of now leadership with no formal training. No formal understanding of what leadership even looks like so they're kind of set up to fail. So, I I I completely agree with you that they're not doing anything maliciously.

I think they're more not set up with the tools they need to properly support their teams because they're dealing with their own work stress and going to the next meeting and have five seconds to engage with their staff. So I think there's a lot of environmental challenges, as you mentioned with your gun analogy earlier, that have such an impact on this.

So where's the organization? Where's HR? You sort of mentioned executive, but what's the organization's responsibility?

Nina Nesdoly: I think organizations not training their people is a huge problem. And I think it comes out in a lot of different ways. I also feel very strongly that a lot of the issues being countered. This is a different topic, but with diversity, equity and inclusion would be solved if we had proper onboarding processes, because it's one thing to come in and say, Oh, we're trying to hire people from all these diverse backgrounds. Well, some backgrounds and some people are given different opportunities than others. So if we're not going to even the playing field, once people get in and actually put them through rigorous onboarding processes than we're just setting up some demographics of people to fail. I had a... my first PhD program, I transferred programs. One of many things that was not a good fit there and one of the many things that went wrong, was there was no orientation There was not even an orientation day when we got in there. We were paired up with mentors and I was paired up with a mentor who, lovely woman, but she had been in India because it was COVID. So she'd never even been to campus. And this is supposed to be my mentor who I'm coming in with. It didn't work. I was trying to ask questions and get help. She literally couldn't answer them. And I remember just being stumped as to why there was no orientation and they're like, well, we want you to connect with your mentor. I'm like, yeah, but she's trying, but if this isn't working, and so we see this through all levels of organizations where a place where organizations will often try to save money is training and development. But then they go through this cycle of oh, we cut all of our training and development. And now we really need training and development because we need people who know how to do the job and we need people who have the management skills.

So as to what we can do about that as individual contributors. Not much. But when you have people who are in a position in HR, in training and development roles, I think it's incredibly important to put these things in place. Absolutely. There should be management training available. I see a lot of people reach out for it outside of their teams.

So if that's you and you're in an organization that's not providing that, look up someone like, her name is Ashley. She runs Manager Method on TikTok. She does training for managers, read the leadership books, get into the courses, do it for yourself. It's going to be something that will always serve you in your career. And then when you have the opportunity and you're in a position to say, Hey, we should actually be using some of this money for training and development. You can make the experience better for everybody else that comes after you.

Russel Lolacher: The irony of this though, Nina, is that if you're dealing with a lot of stress and a lot of burnout, your brain ain't ready to learn things. Your brain is resistant to professional development. So you have to get in a position of addressing these things before we can even get in a position of moving forward and understanding.

So it's ironic that to learn how to address stress and burnout, you have to be have already addressed a bit of the stress and burnout or the learning isn't going to take. Have you experience that?

Nina Nesdoly: No, because everything matters.

Russel Lolacher: Yeah.

Nina Nesdoly: Yeah, everything that you do matters. So it won't be the leaps and bounds maybe that people have hoped for, but every action that you take matters. And if all you get out of, coming to a workshop with someone like me or any kind of other professional development training is one thing that makes your day a little bit easier and your stress level a little bit lower, and then eventually you can add in another thing, you're going to get there over time. And the more we have people who are committed to their well being and to prioritizing rest, the more we shift cultures over time. It doesn't feel like it sometimes when we look around, but if we go all the way back to the 1960s, occupational health and safety used to be an employee problem. We used to be like, oh, well, it's on you, wear your hard hat, don't let the ladder fall on you, employee problem. We have studies on this. We have pamphlets on this that exists where we 110 percent blamed employees. And we're like, well, just don't get poisoned at work. And now, yes, it's decades later, but we could never imagine doing that now coming in with that attitude now to say, Oh, it's it's, it's your problem. If you get poisoned at work, like tough luck. Occupational health and safety is very much seen as the responsibility of the employer.

And we have organizations dedicated to this and to maintaining this, and we're starting to see the same kind of shift happen with stress, burnout and well being, particularly around the concept of psychological safety. Places like Australia are now saying, okay, it's not enough for a work environment to simply not poison their employees and not drop heavy equipment on them. We also need to have psychologically safe work environments. And we still have people who are stressed and burnt out in these environments, but little by little, we're making changes and we are seeing shifts come through. So it is a little bit of a tough spot to be in when you're stressed and burnt out and you're being asked to do things for yourself if you're in an organization that is not supporting you, but it does matter, and it does make a little bit of a difference, and over time these little differences add up.

Russel Lolacher: It sounds, and for myself as well, it's a matter of redefining what success looks like. Don't look at things as, well, that course... it's just more of taking bite size to build up to a bigger, that's, I'm talking for myself. Apparently I need to learn. I have a question too though, because, and you brought this up at the beginning, that this is a myth that we're kind to, to, to bust here, which is around the idea of healthy stress because there will be a lot of organizations that just say, well, it's just part of the job.

This is, this is what we do to do what we need to do. Is there such thing as healthy stress and what's, what's enough,

Nina Nesdoly: There is, and it's very little, and not most of the stressors that we talk about in our, in our lives. Healthy stress is things like, you wake up in the morning and you are super dehydrated. That is stress on the body. You don't have the resources that you need. And so your body goes, I don't like this. Get out of bed and get some water. That's what healthy stress is. It's what keeps you going, what gets you up, gets you feeding yourself, gets you going through your day. And in a work context, in the research, we differentiate between challenge stressors and hindrance stressors. So challenge stressors are things that give you opportunities to learn and grow, to better yourself, to further your career. Hindrance stressors are things that get in your way. Red tape, office politics, not having the resources that you need to do your job. This stress is not helping you, it's just making it hard to do things. Psychologically, there's a difference. When you are challenged at work, when you're learning, when you're growing, psychologically, that's a really positive experience.

And it helps us to feel engaged and feel more satisfied with our work. Physiologically, there's no difference. If you're having positive stressors at work versus hindrance stressors at work, it's still wear and tear on the body. So that's where it's like there, there's healthy stress, but not. There are these psychological benefits to doing things that challenge us and help us to grow and stretch and try new things. But both types of stressors have been shown through the research to contribute to burnout. So even when we are experiencing healthy challenges at work, we still need opportunities to recover and to prioritize our well being. And I think that's where the big gap has happened in the last decade is we've said, Oh, there's these challenges that make us feel really good and give us this sense of accomplishment. And so we can just have more of them, all the time. No, the body does not agree with that. The body says, no, no, I enjoyed the mental stimulus of doing this project, but I still need to chill. I still need to detach. I still need my time for myself. In a work context, we should just treat everything like it's a stressor that could be damaging to us, even if we're enjoying it.

Russel Lolacher: But our body does like to reward us every once in a while. I'm going to get into the idea of dopamine when it comes to things like recognition, empowerment, feeling valued. How does that make its way into interacting with stress and workload?

Nina Nesdoly: Ah, I love that you brought this up because dopamine is so massively misunderstood. The idea that dopamine is a reward, first of all, is outdated. In the research now, we understand that we get dopamine to propel us towards or away from things that will be very rewarding or very threatening. So we don't actually get very much dopamine from the things that we see as rewards. Dopamine is what gets us there in the first place. So you can kind of think of it the same way that slot machines are set up and the reason that you stay and keep playing. When you're pulling that lever, that is dopamine, but it's propelling you to do something because you might get a reward. When you actually win on the slot machine, there is now less dopamine involved. Because you got the reward. Dopamine is to propel you towards or away from things. And this is the other piece that not a lot of people are aware of with dopamine, it's not just for good things It's also to get you to run away from things that are harmful to you. Dopamine has both this approach and avoidant part to it. And so I'm It's newer research, but there has been some research coming out looking at dopamine in terms of our coping mechanisms, because it has that approach avoidance.

It's not super well understood at this point, but when something is stressful and has the potential to be harmful to you, there will be dopamine released in the brain to tell you to get away from that thing. And, we've got this phenomenon with dopamine where it propels us to do things and then when we actually get to the reward that we want, this is why people often have the sensation of oh, I was so excited for this vacation and now I'm here and eh, it's fine. Anticipation is, is where dopamine really kicks in. It propels us to or towards things and away from things. And it propels us towards things that it thinks will be rewarding. It propels us away from things that it thinks will be threats to our well being.

Russel Lolacher: So I'm going to turn it to you specifically and just try to get an understanding. What do you do Nina to sort of defend yourself from stress and burnout? What's, what's something that you're adding or removing from your life that sort of like, you know what, I can be a more sane person today?

Nina Nesdoly: In a practical sense, it comes up in a lot of different ways with how I schedule my day to have regular breaks, how I operate with my to do list. But the overarching thing that I am doing that really shapes my approach is I am just constantly asking myself how I can put my well being first. And it sounds counterintuitive because we have this thought that we need to get the work done first and then take care of ourselves.

But to our conversation earlier about the brain and how stress and burnout changes the brain, if you're not in a good headspace and if you're not taking care of your brain, everything is just so much harder. Like it's harder to focus. It's harder to get work done. It's harder to pay attention. So my constant orientation through my day to day is how am I resting? How am I taking care of myself? And I'm working when I'm at a point where I feel good, not taking breaks when I'm at a point that I feel exhausted. So in practice, that looks like being very intentional about detaching from work, not taking calls and emails afterwards. I schedule breaks throughout the day, so I'm having regular breaks, not working for big four or five hour stints.

I'm only working for 45 minutes to an hour at a time before taking a break. I am constantly reevaluating my to do list, and if I'm looking at it and going, Oh my god. I can get all of this done if absolutely nothing goes wrong. That's not realistic. Things are going to go wrong. I'm going back to people and declining projects, saying no to things, rearranging things. Now it's been a long time that this has been the, my work and my focus, so it gets a lot easier over time. I very rarely get to the point where I've set myself up to be overextended, but it does still happen. And so it's a matter of being honest with myself when I'm starting to see those early signs of burnout and sometimes letting things go. It's funny, I think, for someone like me, people see on paper, the, the TEDx Talk and the business and the PhD, and it all looks really impressive, but what people don't see is the massive number of things that I say no to, and that I don't do, that I'm not able to pursue the research projects that I'm not part of, the much more prestigious PhD program that I dropped out of in favor of one that was better in alignment with my goals. So we see the things that people are doing. But we don't see what people aren't doing, and I'm actually not doing a lot, and that's how I'm able to protect myself.

Russel Lolacher: Thank you for that. I want to get a little personal because I know this is... the idea of stress and burnout and what it means to people and how they address it is such a personal thing. Even though the impacts can be so universal. Plus i'm still trying to wrap my brain around dopamine right now, Like I just that is something that i'm gonna have to do a little bit more research myself going it's not what you think it is and it's not something that just should be so flippantly thrown around as a reward system So thank you for clarifying that.

So let's wrap it up with the question I asked which is what's one simple action people can do right now to improve their relationships at work?

Nina Nesdoly: This is gonna be a very different topic than any of the stress burnout stuff, but, get really comfortable with small talk. We knock small talk, we say oh, it's small conversations, small minds. No, it's the, it's the gateway. It's how you get to know people. I read an amazing book back when I was working for Apple, How to Talk to Anyone- 92 Tips and Tricks. Leil Lowndes, I believe, is the author, and it just helped me get really good at chatting with people. The more people you chat with, the more little conversations you have about stuff that feels inconsequential, when your toaster broke or what shade of lipstick someone is wearing. The more you have social capital with people, and that's always going to serve you. Whether it's within that time at the organization, it's when something comes up that is stressful and now you need their help or support or 10 years down the line when you're in different places and you still remember having good relationships with each other. So that would be my tip. Stop, stop the blasphemy against small talk and just enjoy talking to people.

Russel Lolacher: That is Nina Nesdoly. She is a professional speaker, researcher and founder of Workplace Clarity, helping all of us prevent work stress and burnout. Thank you so much for being here, Nina.

Nina Nesdoly: Thanks, Russel.