783: How to Take Back Your Evenings, with Guy Winch

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
You know that 9-to-5 work schedule that some of our parents had? Go to work in the morning, put in a full day, and then by dinner time, don’t think that much about work and certainly don’t do any work until the next day. Well, that’s not my reality either. And in this conversation, what you can do to take back your evenings. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 783.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:26]:
Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:34]:
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made, and this weekly show helps leaders thrive at key inflection points. I think about that word thrive. I think about how much we think about it in the context, at least I do in the work we’re doing here on the podcast, in the context of work, and helping us to thrive in the workplace. And I am often reminded of how work is not contained to the number of hours a day that we are, quote, unquote, at work. Oftentimes, work bleeds into our evenings.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:14]:
Today, a conversation on how we can take our evenings back a bit. How we can really frame work in the best way, and how we can actually thrive and have work not take over our life, but enhance it in so many wonderful ways. And I’m so pleased to welcome an exper,t that’s going to help guide us so beautifully in this conversation. Guy Winch is a psychologist and best-selling author who advocates for integrating the science of emotional health into our daily lives. His TED talks have attracted over 35 million views, and his books have been translated into more than 30 languages. He is co-host of the Ambie-nominated Dear Therapists podcast and author of the new book Mind Over Grind: How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life. Guy, such a pleasure to have you on.

Guy Winch [00:02:01]:
Thank you very much for having me.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:03]:
You write in the book, I’m quoting you: The human brain might be the most brilliant machine in the universe, but it requires adult supervision. There are moments in which we need to disengage the autopilot and make ourselves do the hard thing, supervise our own behavior. I was thinking about those lines and the word autopilot, and I was wondering if you could tell me a bit more about what you mean by that and where it gets in our way with our thinking and our brains.

Guy Winch [00:02:34]:
Well, when we have a day, and some of us have many days like this, where we get up, and they’re like, oh my God, I have such a difficult day at work, I just need to get through it! That’s how we think about it. Just, it’s one of those days, it’s, it’s back to back, I just need to get through it. To get through it, what that usually means is we put our head down, and we just go from task to task, to meeting to whatever the thing is. And, we just again, get through it.

Guy Winch [00:03:00]:
And that means mindlessly, and that means on autopilot. Doesn’t mean that our brain is switched off, but it means that we’re not being intentional about how we’re deploying our coping mechanisms, how we’re curating our breaks, what choice we’re making to recover from difficult meetings. Even in the minute or two that we have between them, we are not actually being thoughtful and deliberate, and intentional about how we’re managing ourselves psychologically in that very difficult day. We’re just getting through; that’s the autopilot. The problem with the autopilot is that when we’re in that state, and many of us are, it’s a very common thing, we are really allowing our unconscious mind to deploy our coping mechanisms for us, because we’re not being intentional.

Guy Winch [00:03:49]:
Now our unconscious mind is not a, you know, it’s not a self-aware thing, it just goes in automatic heuristics. And so it just will, when we have a break, it’ll just make us do the default, which for many people is social media or, you know, it won’t be thoughtful about “Wow, this was a very difficult meeting. I actually need to recharge a bit afterwards”, or “This was an extremely conflictual one because that client is so difficult. I really need to get some support after this one”. We’ll just, we won’t do those things.

Guy Winch [00:04:18]:
We’ll just kind of go to the next task and just pass the time. And that will not recharge us, it will deplete us mentally, and we need to be much less prone to the default of autopilot and curate our days, and curate our coping in a much more active way.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:36]:
There’s a chapter in your book with the subtitle ” How to Stop the Nightly Intrusion of Work Thoughts”. And you say this: One interesting thing about work stress is that we don’t experience most of it at work. Could you unpack that a bit?

Guy Winch [00:04:53]:
Yeah. Stress is a very psychological thing. It depends on how we frame it to ourselves, how we reflect on it. When again, we’re in that autopilot mode, when we have very difficult, challenging days, we’re focused on what we’re doing, we’re focused on the task at hand. We don’t have a lot of bandwidth left over to process, to think through what’s actually happening. That we tend to do after work hours or on the way to work, when we’re commuting to work from work, when we’re sitting at the dinner table with our partner or with our family. That’s when those challenging moments from the day, the distressing ones, the upsetting ones, the harassment, the incivility, the insubordination, the pressures, the different things, strains that happen, will start to pop into our mind, and we’ll start to think about them and chew them over in those moments. And that often happens in an involuntary way. The intrusive thoughts of rumination, which means to chew over those kinds of intrusive thoughts, will start replaying that moment where our colleague or coworker was very dismissive or rude in a meeting, in a public way.

Guy Winch [00:06:06]:
We’ll start thinking about those things in the evening, in the commute, and we’ll just replay them. We’ll kind of go through them. We’ll have these fantasy arguments in our head with like, I wish I would have said this or I wish I could say that, or I’m going to write them this email or call them and say this to them. All these things that we’re actually not going to do because they’re not wise and we know it, right? But we can lose hours going through those imaginary arguments in our head in the off hours when we’re supposed to be doing something else. That’s unhealthy. You are activating your stress response when you’re doing it, you are flooding your body with cortisol, you’re upsetting yourself. You’re taking the unfortunate moments of the day that are really upsetting and then reliving them over and over and over again.

Guy Winch [00:06:49]:
It’s going to interfere with your sleep, with eating healthy foods, it’s going to ruin your mood, it’s going to make you checked out in the moment. It’s going to ruin your evening. And it’s like doing all this unpaid overtime that not only you’re not getting anything done, but you’re actually doing damage to yourself mentally and physically. So there’s a huge distinction between those two things. When I give talks to companies, I always ask people, what time do you guys finish working? And they’ll always give me an hour. We leave the office at 7, I close my laptop at 8, and that’s not when you finish work. You finish work, by definition, when you stop thinking about work.

Guy Winch [00:07:27]:
If you’re home and you’re thinking about work, you’re mentally at work, you’re still working, your body, your mind, consider you working. It is the same effect; it doesn’t matter where you are geographically or what you think you’re doing. If that’s where, if that’s what you’re stewing about, you’re working. And so you have to understand, people have to understand that that’s when your work day ends, you are extending it when you’re ruminating unnecessarily in unhealthy ways.

Dave Stachowiak [00:07:53]:
And in a way, it’s almost worse than if you actually were working, right? Like I was thinking, by the way, the irony is not lost on me, that I sent you an email last night at 9 pm about how to do a better job of taking back her evenings from work, right?

Guy Winch [00:08:10]:
But that was the topic of the- Yes.

Dave Stachowiak [00:08:14]:
So it was kind of, it’s kind of funny, but at the same time, like, one of the reasons I had worked so, I was working late is because I had had some really wonderful conversation with my wife earlier in the evening. We sat on the couch, we talked for a couple hours, like the time that I was actually stopped work earlier. And it ended up being really meaningful time. So it was joyful, and the work was purposeful. It was like reaching out to you and talking about it. And I think sometimes, while a lot of us don’t like to work late in the evening, and sometimes we all make the choice to do that, in a way at least when you do that, like you’re getting something done that’s helpful in a way. But when I think about rumination, it’s still work, but nothing good really comes out of it. It’s not like you get something done.

Dave Stachowiak [00:08:56]:
It’s not like you’re even being productive. You are telling yourself this lie that I’m not working, I’m relaxing, I’ve got time off. But in reality, it’s, it isn’t like that at all, psychologically.

Guy Winch [00:09:08]:
It isn’t, and it’s much worse because when you’re actually at work, you are getting things done, you’re getting things off your plate, you’re reducing the load of responsibilities, duties, deliverables, whatever the thing is that you have to do. When you’re ruminating, nothing, you’re just actually doing damage. And you know you are ruminating because you’re churning up all those difficult feelings that the event that you’re ruminating about triggered. So you’re actually feeling it viscerally in your chest and your stomach, wherever you tend to feel stress or upset or distress or anger or resentment, wherever the thing is, you’re feeling it in your stomach. When you’re actually being productive by figuring something out, you’re actually using your executive functioning. You’re in your head, you’re not in your viscera.

Guy Winch [00:09:54]:
You’re not, you’re, and that will ease the distress. But it’s when you’re just churning that you will feel yourself getting worked up.

Dave Stachowiak [00:10:01]:
You invite us to work on developing an intolerance with our ruminations. The first step, there’s two steps in this, and I really want to ask you about the second one, too. The first step, though, is labeling it. How do you know it, and how do you recognize it when you’re doing it?

Guy Winch [00:10:21]:
So again, it’s about repetitive thoughts, about obsessive thoughts. So if you’re sitting and you’re watching a TV show, you’re having dinner, and suddenly you’re caught up thinking about something again, upsetting, distressing, aggravating, whatever that happened at work, and you didn’t mean to do that. You were doing something else, and suddenly you’re doing that… Hint number one. And you’re feeling upset now. The thing about emotional wounds that is different from physical wounds is if you recollect and tell somebody about the time you broke your leg skiing five years ago, your leg will not start hurting as a result of the telling. But if you start telling someone about something really, really upsetting that happened to you, unfair or something, even if it was 20 years ago, you’ll start to feel the resentment. You’ll start to feel upset again. Going over emotional wounds reactivates them.

Guy Winch [00:11:07]:
So all the feelings you had when the actual incident happened that you’re actually ruminating about are now stirred up all over again. It’s as if you’re experiencing it all over again. So you didn’t want to do that, and it’s in your head. You’re feeling all the feelings about it, and you’re going around and around in circles in that part. You’ve had that thought 10 times. All of those, that’s hint number three.

Guy Winch [00:11:29]:
So you’re being unproductive. You didn’t mean to be thinking about it, yet you are. And you’re all stirred up emotionally at the time. Now you know you’re ruminating, and you have to label it rumination. And you have to understand that word to mean harmful, pointless, unproductive, should not be in my head.

Dave Stachowiak [00:11:48]:
Boy, there’s two really big distinctions I heard in what you just said, and tell me if I heard you well. One of them was intention. Like, it’s one thing to sit down and have a conversation with yourself, with someone else, about something that happened at work, and to use that productively. But part of what I’m hearing is like, a lot of times, rumination is that I didn’t necessarily intend to like start thinking about this, and all of a sudden it’s there. All of a sudden it’s taken over my thinking, my, my mental health in this moment. And the other thing that I’m hearing is a distinction is the repetition of it. It’s like the replay keeps going, you keep doing the same thing, and that pattern keeps coming up.

Dave Stachowiak [00:12:25]:
Am I hearing you right on those two things as indicators?

Guy Winch [00:12:29]:
Yes. I mean, to ruminate literally means to chew over. So, the repetition is absolutely a feature of it. But it doesn’t need to mean you’re having exactly the same thought. You might, but you’re having this, you know, like you can be surfing around the same emotion.

Dave Stachowiak [00:12:42]:
So the second step in this, once we’ve labeled it and we notice it and we see it, is to foster what you call disgust, disdain, and annoyance with ruminations. Tell me about what you mean by that and how to go about that.

Guy Winch [00:12:58]:
Well, one of the things that I did when I fell into that rumination track, which I did early in my career, was once I understood how unhealthy it was, once I understood that this was an intrusive thought, this wasn’t a voluntary thought, it was an intrusive thought that was actually invading my mind, hijacking my thoughts, hijacking my time, I started to get really angry at it now. Yes, it’s my unconscious mind doing it. My unconscious mind again, is not a self-conscious entity. It’s not a thing. But it’s, it’s an artifact of something that’s happening to me that I’m very annoyed that my mind is doing. And by cultivating that annoyance, I was cultivating an intolerance for it. I didn’t want to indulge it.

Guy Winch [00:13:41]:
I wanted to experience it as something that was like, I don’t want this in my body, like some kind of infection that I’m trying to purge. And it’s very important, because otherwise it’s very compelling, this urge to ruminate. Like it’s, it feels like you’re doing something important even though you’re actually doing something harmful. It feels “Well, no, no, I really need to be thinking about this”. Yes, you do, but not in that way. And so I developed a real antipathy toward it. I trained myself to think of it as something dirty, something unfortunate, something unhealthy.

Guy Winch [00:14:11]:
You know, like the metaphor I use in one of my earlier books is “picking at an emotional scab, exposing the pus”. I would literally think about it in that way, if people are a little too, that’s a little too much for people, think about it as a skunk that’s sitting next to you on the couch that you, every time you look at it, you’ll be like, no, kick the thing out. Shouldn’t be there.

Dave Stachowiak [00:14:29]:
Yeah, it’s really interesting on how sometimes just distracting ourselves, like getting away from it. Even if you metaphorically kick out the skunk, you’re like, well, what if it comes back in two minutes? But oftentimes, if we actually do make a very conscious decision to say, “hey, this is annoying, this is not helpful, this is disgusting, I don’t want this”. And we do kick it out a lot of times, that minute or two or three-minute distraction can be the thing that, like, really sets us on a much better path, like the rest of the day, the rest of the evening.

Guy Winch [00:15:03]:
Yes. The distraction, by the way, has to be something that requires concentration. You can’t just will this away because it’s pretty strong, again, intrusive, obsessive thought. And so if you’re just trying to sit there and I’m just going to go back to watch TV and not think about it, that’s going to be difficult. You want to do some kind of task, you know, I mean, for me, one of the things that works, you know, is wordle, the New York Times Wordle. Because that takes two or three minutes usually.

Guy Winch [00:15:28]:
The problem is there’s only one of them a day, so that’s only good for one rumination. Right? But any kind of memory task will do it, try and remember the people that you sat next to during, you know, first to fifth grade, the order of songs in a playlist, you know, the last 10 books you read in sequence, the items you have in the top shelf in your fridge, something like that, even that for two or three minutes that requires concentration. And it’s a bit like an Etch A Sketch, like shaking it. It kind of resets the brain in a way, and then you can try and get back to what you were doing.

Guy Winch [00:15:58]:
But by the way, when you’re getting back to what you were doing, you want to remind yourself what that is- and it doesn’t have to be anything. It can be like, I’m just sitting here watching this show. But say to yourself, like, it’s important for me to watch this show because that’s how I want to relax right now, and I want to be able to do it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:16:13]:
You point out that the more stress and strain we feel at the end of the workday, the more likely we will be to choose ineffective recovery strategies at home, and our time away.

Guy Winch [00:16:27]:
That is what the research says, and quite dramatically that, you know, it says that the more difficult the workday is, the more important it is for us to recover from the strain, the mental strain of that day. And yet, the more likely we will then be to choose actually ineffective ways to recover. One of the reasons that happens is that we confuse mental and physical fatigue. We get home after a very challenging day at work and we feel, I am wiped out. There is nothing that I can do right now. I just need to sit on the couch and veg out because I’m totally wiped out. You are wiped out mentally.

Guy Winch [00:17:12]:
You are not wiped out physically, most of us sit all day. And even if we’re going walking to a meeting, we’re not exerting ourselves physically. You are not physically tired. You are mentally, perhaps emotionally tired. And resting is useful, but it’s only part of the equation because if you rest, it won’t drain your batteries further, but it won’t recharge them. To actually feel recharged, to actually feel reenergized, not just that evening, but for the next day, you need to do something that recharges you, that gives you a second wind. You need to do something that feels revitalizing for you because it has meaning for you, because it’s something that makes you feel like you, that you like. And that’s a personal thing.

Guy Winch [00:17:57]:
We each have our things that when we do them, they’re revitalizing. Except it’s very difficult to do it when you feel, quote, unquote, wiped out and like you’re completely drained, and you can’t do anything. That threshold is something you have to get over because again, the research shows that if you just over-index on resting, you are going to wake up feeling tired the next day, mentally still, because you didn’t recharge.

Dave Stachowiak [00:18:21]:
I was thinking about the research that you highlighted as I was reading the book, and I got to thinking about both of my grandfathers. One of them was a butcher, and the other one ran a gas station for almost 50 years in his hometown. And they both had jobs that their work was a ton of manual labor. They were on their feet all day. It was dirty work. It was difficult work. And when they came home at the end of the day, quite understandably, they wanted to sit on the couch, watch TV. I remember one of my grandfathers said this really great lazy boy chair.

Dave Stachowiak [00:19:03]:
Like we loved it when we were little, of like playing in, because he would love to sit there because his whole day was manual labor. And I think like, really interesting how for many of us, especially the people listening this podcast, like a lot of our work has become much more about the mental and emotional labor you just mentioned, but it’s not about the physical labor. And yet, when we think about rest and recovery, oftentimes we still think about sitting on the couch, watching TV, watching Netflix, scrolling on social media. We’re still like, we’re not doing something really different than what a lot of us do at work, which is stare at screens all day and engage in that emotional labor. It’s really, I had never thought about that distinction before I read that.

Guy Winch [00:19:49]:
Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting, right? Because our brain is quite confused at that point. It’s like, wait, isn’t that what we did during the day? We’re just looking at screens now. And look, this is the thing about grandfathers, the same was true of mine. But the problem is that our grandfathers grew up in an era in which working out physical fitness was not something you engaged in past the age of 20-something, unless you were an athlete.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:12]:
Right.

Guy Winch [00:20:12]:
There wasn’t a culture of running, of going to the gym, of working out, of amateur sports teams, that just didn’t exist at the time. So they also didn’t have a model, and they didn’t have a go to kind of sport, for example, that they would enjoy doing. Now, people today, you know, like, I’m an older person, I both run on a regular basis, and I work out of the gym on a regular basis. And for me, those are recharging things. They’re not the only things that are recharging. I do other things as well, but they are recharging things. It’s much more of a cultural thing, our grandfathers did very much on the side of being sedentary.

Guy Winch [00:20:48]:
And you know, they had usually, you know, health problems to match. So that was an issue for them. But, but it’s, it’s really about like, remind- And by the way, it doesn’t just have to be, you know, working out. If some people, like go, do the 20-minute thing in the garage, make the thing, the making. For some people, it’s a creative thing that they’re, they’re artists, they’re painters, they’re musicians. And people say to me, like, well, yeah, I played, you know, the, the piano or whatever, or the guitar.

Guy Winch [00:21:16]:
You know, I was in a high school band or in a college band. But I can’t be in a band anymore, I don’t have time to be in a band, you know, to practice, to perform. And I’m like, you don’t need to be in a band. You don’t need to, you know, to do the thing full-time. If you pick up the guitar and play for 15 minutes a few times a week, you’ll feel like a musician again. It will give oxygen to that part of yourself that you are not giving oxygen to, which was a meaningful and important part of yourself. Music is one of the best things for our brain.

Guy Winch [00:21:47]:
It really activates our brain in very comprehensive ways. But if we don’t do it, then we are truly, truly missing out. And so, it’s really important to find, again, it doesn’t need to be the full time thing. We don’t have the time for the full-time thing. But it’s about giving oxygen, having the experience again. And you don’t need to do it full-time to have that experience. You just need to practice it a little bit to do it somewhat.

Dave Stachowiak [00:22:15]:
You remind us also about the power of rituals in your work. What’s a ritual, and how does it help in the context of thinking about evening and making the transition away from work?

Guy Winch [00:22:28]:
So one of the tricky parts we have, in part why we tend to ruminate, in part why we’re so, you know, preoccupied with work when we get home, is that when you have a very challenging job, when you have a difficult day, you can’t just tell your brain, all right, switch off now, we’re good. Let’s relax. You know, like, you can’t command your brain to do that. Your brain has been in fight or flight. Yeah, it doesn’t come down from that that quickly. You need to train it to come down. You need to train it to transition.

Guy Winch [00:22:57]:
And one of the ways, the best way to do that is by having a ritual that you enact every day after work, before you get home. Now, I say ritual, people say, oh, I have a routine. I’m like, a routine is different from a ritual. Both of them have repetitive steps that are similar, but rituals tend to have deeper meaning. They tend to resonate more deeply, and that’s obviously more effective when we’re trying to get our brain to get something. So a ritual means that you want to involve as many of the senses as possible. Music is terribly evocative.

Guy Winch [00:23:26]:
So, you know, put on a song, a playlist that really helps you shift your mood. It helps, you know, relax you. That helps remind you, you know, the song that you used to listen to on vacation when you first met your partner. The things that make you feel in the way you want to feel for whatever the evening you know, is about. If you’re actually going to go out and have dinner with friends, put on songs that you used to play with them when you were together in college. Do you know what I mean? I get yourself into the mindset that you need to be in. Now, clothes are very evocative.

Guy Winch [00:24:00]:
So if you’re going out straight from work, whatever, there’s only so much you can do. But if you’re going home, change your clothes at the end of the day. There’s a reason we call power suits, power suits, and leisure wear, leisure wear. It’s because they evoke a certain mood, and clothes are very evocative. So, you know, have the clothes you wear to work and have the clothes you wear at home, and change clothes at the end of the day. Now, some people say to me, I wear the same thing at home that I do at work. I’m like, terrific.

Guy Winch [00:24:26]:
We’ll have a set of it for work that you associate with work. These jeans are work jeans, and these T-shirts are home T-shirts. You know, if that’s the case, it doesn’t matter. Just as long as you can tell the difference, your brain will be able to tell the difference. In the ritual act of changing clothes, you are signaling to your brain, “We are shifting the mood, we are shifting the energy. We are shifting the focus now of the, of what this time is about to be, what’s supposed to be going on in this time”.

Guy Winch [00:24:54]:
So you can do that, if you’re working from home, shift the lighting, open the blinds, close the blinds, do something to symbolize a change in mood and atmosphere. And if you can do those repetitive things every day, you will be training your brain. Our brain learns very quickly. It learns to anticipate what we’re doing, right? And so it’s like when it sees you starting on those steps, it’ll, it’ll help you start to relax, start to come down, start to refocus on your personal home life, which is, again, what those hours are supposed to be about.

Dave Stachowiak [00:25:24]:
And, boy, the big message I hear there is, involve the senses in whatever way feels right to you, whether it’s sound, sight, touch. Find the thing that’s really going to be purposeful, meaning for you, for to make that transition. And however you do it, everyone’s going to do it differently, but if you involve the senses, that that’s super powerful for our brains to help them make that transition.

Guy Winch [00:25:43]:
Yes, absolutely.

Dave Stachowiak [00:25:45]:
You talk in the book about something that I think is just so interesting and speaks to something I think so many of us struggle with. You speak about earlier in your career, where there was a time you had not had a vacation for a long time, and your brother convinces you to go on vacation, and you decide to go to Europe and do what so many people do when they take a big trip. Is, I’m going to go to Europe, and I’m going to spend an entire week seeing the sights. And what ended up happening was not at all what you planned, was it?

Guy Winch [00:26:21]:
Right, I had always had, for a very young age, I’d always liked writing. Except when you’re in, spend your young adulthood in college and then graduate school getting a BA, a master’s, and a PhD. You’re doing a lot of writing, but it’s academic writing, it’s not fun writing. But I’d always loved writing. And I went to Europe and I, and the first day I got there, I had this, you know, I was, I had this idea, oh, I know this is.

Guy Winch [00:26:50]:
I had an idea for a screenplay, and I thought, let me just sit in a cafe here, and I had a notebook with me, and, let me just jot down like, the outline of this idea I had- my undergraduate degree was a split major between psychology and film. So this was not a, this wasn’t that much of a departure to have an idea for a screenplay. And then basically the whole day had gone by, and I was right, and then I spent the entire week in different cafes writing.

Guy Winch [00:27:19]:
By the way, since then I’ve met, I have met many writers who specifically go to Europe to sit in cafes to write their, their novels, their books, their screenplays. There’s something about European cafes which is, somebody should research because, you know, apparently it’s a thing. It wasn’t just me, but that’s what I ended up doing. So I ended up actually working in a way throughout the entire holiday. And what was interesting was that I came back feeling ridiculously refreshed and recharged. I felt like I was revitalized in a really surprising but delightful and meaningful way. And what it turned out, well, you know, what I understood later, you know, after this was much earlier in my career. What I understood much later in life was that part of why was that I had again this was part of me that had been squelched, suppressed.

Guy Winch [00:28:15]:
I didn’t give room. You know, again, my undergraduate degree was in film, and I had done some creative writing then, obviously with screenplays and things, but not since. And that was a part of me that was a very meaningful part. It turns out that I enjoyed tremendously, that I needed, I would say, in my life, that I didn’t realize until I actually inadvertently gave it to myself. And it was a vacation from who I was. I was on vacation from being a psychologist. There was no psychology in that week.

Guy Winch [00:28:46]:
I was a writer, I inhabited a different, not Persona, but a different profession for that week. And it turned out that was incredibly meaningful because it was a profession that was meaningful to me. That was hugely meaningful and hugely recharging because, again, it was giving space to, you know, a part of me that did not get any attention. And that’s what vacations, in part, should be about. You know, breaks, not just vacations, but breaks. The evenings, the weekends should give us space to be those parts of ourselves that we can’t be during the workday because we’re in, you know, the display rules at work, there’s conduct at work.

Guy Winch [00:29:28]:
You can’t just be whoever you want to be, but you can after hours. And it might be really important too.

Dave Stachowiak [00:29:34]:
I think so much about what you just shared, and coming back to that word we talked about earlier, of intention, that so often when we think of time in our evening, our weekend, our vacation, we think about not doing anything, watching TV, going to, on a trip, and just seeing the sights or sitting on the beach. And by the way, there’s a time and a place for all those. And if that’s the intentional thing you decide to do, great, go for it. Right? It’s the both-and that sometimes we don’t think about too. That is also, what would I do with intention that actually awakens a part of me that I normally don’t get to do during the workday? That comes back to something I had a passion for, that brings in a side of me I normally don’t get to explore? And we often, I think sometimes on its face, we think about that as, oh, that’s more work.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:25]:
But when we actually do it and have the experience like you had all those years ago in Europe, of like, wow, like, how we, like, show up so much more revitalized and alive and connected to what we care about as humans. Right?

Guy Winch [00:30:37]:
Yeah. And I love the word you used, the awakening, because awakening implies it’s there, but it’s dormant. It’s there, but it’s suppressed. Awakening it, and it is so powerful psychologically, you will come back not just feeling recharged, but feeling like life is worthwhile.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:58]:
Thinking about the subtitle of your book, How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life. In putting together this book and in talking to all the people that you’ve talked to in your work and your practice, and looking at all the research, if you reflect on bringing this book together, what’s one thing that you’ve changed your mind on in the not-too-distant past?

Guy Winch [00:31:21]:
One of the things I changed my mind on, and this wasn’t so much like a shift, but a recognition of the importance of what I’m about to say, and that is vacations. I end the book with a chapter about the science of restorative vacations. I always knew vacations were important. I had never looked at the research. Did people research this? Do we know how to do this well? What the ingredients are, what we should and shouldn’t do? And reading the research really helped me coalesce a lot of ideas I had, and I implemented in my own life that I wasn’t talking about because I thought, well, that’s just me. That just works for me. And then, when you read the research, I was realizing, oh, no, no, that will actually work for everyone, based on this research. And so it didn’t change my mind, but it really crystallized these thoughts about how important vacations are, how much we can get out of even very short ones, if we curate them well, what mistakes to avoid.

Guy Winch [00:32:24]:
I would be the, one of those people, and I’m sure your listeners are going to know, get this one. I would be one of those people who would go on a week vacation. Roughly by day three or four, I’d calm down enough to start enjoying it. I’d be able to actually be present in everything. But until then, I was too wound up. I was still on fifth gear, fourth gear, I was still like in need to get things done, need to get in the work mode, you know, and half the vacation was wasted.

Guy Winch [00:32:45]:
And around, I don’t know, maybe it was around the pandemic, but I started to realize “I actually need to rest before I go on vacation a bit. I can’t get to the vacation with my tongue hanging out and panting from exertion. I need to get to the vacation in vacation-ready mindset, so I can start relaxing on day one”. And so I would stop doing that thing where you pack everything into that last few days, and I stopped doing that, and I started getting much more out of vacations. Turns out, there’s research to back that up. I always believed in taking more, more vacations that are shorter rather than that one long two-week thing that some people do. Turns out there’s research that backs it up.

Guy Winch [00:33:25]:
The benefits of vacation after day seven start to, you know, to be not there. You’re much better off taking, you know, more and shorter vacations than one, you know, long one. I also had experience with, sometimes I would do weekends away. And weekends away, I wouldn’t curate them at first. I would just, well, we’ll do this or that. But you can actually, you know, and you don’t have to pack activities in full time, but you have to put- pack in the elements that you need. Like, where is the restful part? Where’s the connective part, where’s the interesting part? Where’s the part that’s exciting? That, turns out, has relevance. I triple dip that I’ve been doing for a long time.

Guy Winch [00:34:04]:
The triple dipping of vacation. The triple dipping meaning, that I use the weeks leading up to, to get excited about it. Oh, I’m going to go to this place, and it’s going to be great. Now I’m not trying to oversell it because then there’s room for disappointment. So I’m not trying to, you know, I don’t over promise, but I will think about one thing that really looking forward to doing. The one person I’m really looking forward to seeing, the one activity that I’m really anticipating. That’s enough to get me excited, so I can start getting excited and groove on that before I go, like weeks before I go, then I actually have the time to be there, and to actually enjoy the things. And then when I get back, I always make sure to curate the media that I took the videos, that the pictures, and relive the vacation through them. So that you can triple dip, you can get triple the enjoyment out of dedication. Other people take videos or not, or you know, some people, you know, are just taking videos rather than enjoying, that’s not useful.

Guy Winch [00:34:58]:
But a lot of people don’t do anything with them when they get back. You can actually relive those things because otherwise, within a day or two, you’re like, what vacation? I’m back to work, it gets forgotten. But if you then spend the evenings of the week that you’re back organizing those materials, looking at them, reliving it, you’re extending that vacation vibe and the benefits you get from it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:18]:
Guy Winch is the author of Mind Over Grind: How to Break Free when Work Hijacks Your Life. Guy, thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us. I so appreciate it.

Guy Winch [00:35:28]:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:36]:
If this conversation was helpful to you, three other episodes I’d recommend. One of them is episode 431: Align your calendar to what matters. Nir Eyal was my guest on that episode, and we talked about some of the tactical things that come out of a conversation like this. How do you actually structure your day better in order to find the space to be able to have that bandwidth and margin for evenings? Like we talked about in episode 431, Nir walks through calendar management, time blocking, some of those core foundational things that, if you’re able to get just a little bit better at, as far as advanced planning, help you to decide on what’s important and to align your day around it. So many helpful tactics in that conversation. Also helpful, episode 438: What to do with your feelings. Lori Gottlieb was my guest on that episode. We talked about the reality of feelings and emotion that, or course, comes up so much in this, especially when we’re thinking about evenings and rumination, and so many of the things Guy and I discussed.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:37]:
Also thinking about her because Guy and her have hosted the Dear Therapist podcast together, and so they’ve been colleagues and supporting each other’s work. I think a great complement to this conversation as well. And then finally, I’d recommend episode 522: How high achievers begin to find balance. Michael Hyatt was my guest on that episode. Michael has been inspiring so many of us for years, I’ve read several of his books. He’s been gracious to come on the podcast a number of times over the years.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:03]:
I know many of you have followed his work as well. Michael, in that conversation though, talks about something a little different than he normally does, which is, how do you actually find balance outside of work? How do you engage in hobbies? How do you find that margin and bandwidth? It’s such an important thing to do. Again, I think a great compliment to this conversation. Michael talks through how he’s made that work for him and how he’s supported so many leaders in being able to find that balance. Episode 522 for that. All of those episodes you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website, and I’m inviting you today to set up your membership, your free membership at coachingforleaders.com, because it’s going to give you access to the entire catalog of episodes, searchable by topic. We are filing this episode under Work Life Integration. There are many, many, many episodes that we’ve aired over the years, including that one with Michael on this topic, to help you to do a better job of bringing work and life together, and the reality of doing both at the same time, which we are all doing regularly. It’s part of the free membership.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:02]:
In addition, you’ll get access to my Focus5 message every single week. Every week, I am tackling a single topic. I’m finding five resources, ideas, books, quotes, recommendations that will help you to continue moving forward. It’s part of your free membership, you can activate it by going over to coachingforleaders.com. Coaching for leaders is edited today, as always, by Andrew Kroeger. Next Monday, I’m glad to welcome Eric Ries to the show. We are going to be talking about how to protect the organization you love. A fabulous conversation with Eric, a new book he has out. Join me for that conversation with him. Have a great week, and see you on Monday.