part0016

Prioritizing self-care is a fundamental aspect of reducing your workplace stress. If you don’t take care of yourself, you’re going down. That’s the unfortunate reality. You need to look after your physical, emotional, and mental health. If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for the people who care about you and depend on you: your kids, your friends, your family, and your coworkers.

I have seen stress turn to burnout and burnout turn to serious mental or physical health conditions too many times. I don’t want that to happen to another person. Please take care of yourself. If you don’t, something will give and that something will be you. And when you give, everything else around you will fall apart. I don’t care how passionate you are about your work or how dedicated you are to your family; you are not doing anyone any favors by not looking after yourself.

When you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of anyone or anything else. In fact, other people will have to start taking care of you.

Save the people who care about you from the heartbreak and burden of seeing you suffer. Lead by example and save them from following in your footsteps. The more of us who start setting good life-work boundaries and taking care of ourselves, the more common it will become.

It’s not easy to take care of ourselves with all the demands on us. For those of us who have children, the demands of parenting have grown exponentially. The expectation to volunteer at school and sport events and help our children with complicated science fair experiments and homework, in addition to managing their extracurricular lives, setting up their play dates, and scheduling their after-school activities while making sure they are not too scheduled, is overwhelming. Not to mention making their lunches. Don’t even get me started on that. Those lunches are the bane of my existence.

For those of us with aging parents, there are appointments to take them to, plans to make for an uncertain future, and financial stressors and obligations. In some situations, we have to step in and manage our parents’ care and their lives when they are no longer capable. Our families can be filled with stressors that we have no control over.

And our workplaces are putting more demands on us than ever. Many of us live in fear of downsizing, and we’re all overwhelmed by e-mail and the expectation to be available at all hours. Everyone I know has been told they need to do more with less. Between life and work stressors, it’s no wonder that so many people are struggling to manage everything on their plates .

Then there’s our phones—the gateway to working twenty-four hours a day. The pressure never ends.

Most people’s lives remind me of when I was a kid and I used to play Asteroids on Atari. It was a very simple game in which your only goal was to shoot down as many asteroids as you could before they landed on you. As the game progressed, the asteroids came faster and faster.

We are being bombarded by asteroids that are coming at us much faster than we can shoot them down. Most of us ignore the toll the effort is taking and just keep powering through, shooting as many asteroids as we can and hoping we won’t get clobbered. This is not sustainable. We need to slow down, realize the impacts of all this stress on us, and make different choices in our lives.

I learned the importance of self-care during those long years of my mother’s illness. Alzheimer’s is a devastating and demanding disease. The landscape and needs are constantly shifting, and I was always running to catch up to the next crisis. If I hadn’t taken care of myself, I wouldn’t have been able to care for my mother.

Now that I’m insanely busy with work and parenting, it’s easy to forget how important it is to take care of myself. I used to go for weeks without exercise or making time to see friends. Then I’d notice how cranky I was getting and plan a night out with friends.

Lately I’ve been much better at scheduling self-care into my life because of all the research that shows that self-care not only makes us happier and healthier, it also makes us more productive.

Some of the ways I’ve scheduled self-care into my life include planning walking dates with friends, dinners out with my husband, and scheduling a weekly yoga class. When we schedule it into our lives, self-care happens.

When I take care of myself, I’m happier. Everyone benefits. I show up to my relationships as a far better version of myself than when I’m overwhelmed and stressed out.

When we take care of ourselves, we are Working Well . We can be the absolute best employee and give our all at work because we have recharged and looked after ourselves. We can be loving and present parents, spouses, children, and friends because we have filled ourselves up, so we have enough energy, love, and attention to give others.

When we aren’t taking care of ourselves, our batteries get drained—we behave just the way our phones and computers do when they’re drained. There are glitches, things go more slowly, tasks that should feel easy feel impossible. Just like our phones and computers, we need to switch off, disconnect and take a break.

There is excellent research that makes a compelling case for taking care of ourselves and focusing on our own happiness. Shawn Achor, Harvard researcher and author of The Happiness Advantage , found that happier people experience:

Further, he observes that “data abounds showing that happy workers have higher levels of productivity, produce higher sales, perform better in leadership positions, and receive higher performance ratings and higher pay.” 1

If you need a reason to prioritize your happiness, this is it. When we are happy, we naturally have better relationships, our health improves, our stress decreases, and our productivity increases .

Often, the way we go about finding happiness is completely backwards. Most of us see happiness as the result of achieving a specific goal. We think, Once I get a new job, finish this project, find the perfect partner, get in better shape, then I’ll be happier .

I’ve certainly fallen into this trap, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. We get caught up in believing that if we can just achieve a goal, figure out a problem, or deal with a stressor, we will be happier. But it turns out, that’s backwards. If we choose to be happy first, we’re more likely to succeed. If we can find a sense of happiness within us that isn’t dependent on external circumstances, everything flows more smoothly.

Achor’s research found that:

happiness fuels success, not the other way around. Your brain works significantly better at positive than at negative, neutral, or stressed. Every single business and educational outcome improves when we start at positive rather than waiting for a future success. Sales improve 37% cross-industry, productivity by 31%; you’re 40% more likely to receive a promotion, and nearly ten times more engaged at work; you live longer, get better grades, your symptoms are less acute, and much more. 2

What? The research says we should find ways to be happy, but we shouldn’t try too hard at it? Pretty much. Happiness is like that quintessential butterfly. You’ve just got to sit there and let it land on you.

I read The Happiness Advantage in November of last year and was amazed to learn about all the positive impacts happiness could have on my life. When I met with my goals group in January, I chose the goal of being happier. No one was very pleased with me setting this goal. It was too vague; it would be hard to measure; it was not at all what a proper goal should look like. I persevered and stuck with my nebulous goal of happiness. The year 2018 is over, and the results are in.

I have a much closer relationship with my husband—we prioritized spending more time together, and that has been awesome. I’m really enjoying my time with my kids—I feel more relaxed with them, and we’re having more fun together (until I ask them to clean up their rooms). I wrote two books this year. I had at least two new clients through referral every month. I earned fifteen percent more this year than the previous one. I took a total of ten weeks off, worked four-day weeks, and I have accomplished far more than I did in previous years when I was working all the time. When you look at those results, it seems pretty clear that focusing on your happiness will be the best productivity tool you ever use.

I didn’t know about the research that says if you turn happiness into a goal, you put too much pressure on yourself and your time, which means you don’t feel as happy. I treated this project like every other project in my life and put way too much pressure on myself. I had moments of being happier, but they didn’t happen when I was planning out my weekly happiness activities (date with husband, visit with friend, yoga at least twice a week, take kids somewhere fun, and so on).

My happiest moments were when I just relaxed and let go—when I took a true vacation and didn’t try to accomplish a damn thing and was really present in the moment, when I laughed with friends, lay down at the end of a hard yoga class, had a client tell me that I was a miracle worker, watched my kids dress up and be goofy. When I just relaxed and took in what was happening in the moment, I was genuinely happier than when I tried hard to be happier.

I’m about to give you a whole bunch of fantastic research-proven strategies to get happier, but please learn from my mistakes. Don’t make happiness your goal, instead let it be your way of life.

What’s so amazing is that the choice to be happy is all within your control. As Shawn Achor found in his research, “only 10 percent of our long-term happiness is predicted by the external world; 90 percent of our long-term happiness is how our brain processes the external world.” 3

This is why Negative Nancy and Bitter Bob are never happy, not because of their external circumstances but because of their internal worlds. If you’re a Negative Nancy or a Bitter Bob, you’ve got the ability to make a significant change in how you view the world, simply by focusing your attention in different ways. All the research-based strategies in the upcoming section will help you with shifting your mindset.

What are the little things that make you happy in the day-to-day? Often, they are the same things that we do to take care of ourselves.

The little things that make me happy almost all revolve around people: having a cuddle with my kids in the morning, sharing a quiet glass of wine after dinner with my husband, working with clients that I love, seeing good friends.

When we can take little actions every day that build up our happiness, we’re going to be more relaxed and more productive. We’ll have better relationships and more success in every aspect of our lives.

Hopefully, some of the following strategies will help you remember ways you can let that beautiful butterfly land on your shoulder rather than chasing it.

We intuitively know that spending time with good friends makes us feel happier. After a night of sharing stories and laughter with my friends, my tank is full. Numerous studies have also found this to be the case, including Harvard’s longest running study on longevity and well-being that found that friendship was the biggest contributor to living a long and happy life :

“The surprising finding is that our relationships and how happy we are in our relationships has a powerful influence on our health,” said Robert Waldinger, director of the study, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives, the study revealed. Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes. 4

How’s that for a reason to book a night out with your friends? Or to build stronger working relationships with your colleagues? Having good relationships at work and at home makes us happier, and that yields amazing results. When our coworkers become our friends, our work lives are not only more pleasant, we are also more productive.

Friends make us happier and healthier. I often feel much better after a walk or even a phone call with a friend. I feel listened to, understood, and I’m often able to laugh about some of the elements of life that have been stressing me out.

The challenge of living such busy, demanding lives is that we aren’t making enough time for our friendships. We do far too much socializing through social media and far too little socializing in our living rooms. I once had a client who explained that she was so busy that all she could do to maintain her social life was to spend half an hour every night on Facebook. This horrified me because recent research has found that “the more we use social media, the less happy we seem to be.” 5

So many of us feel too busy to make time for our friends, and we don’t prioritize maintaining our friendships. Can you relate to this?

Get off social media and go out with a friend. Please. It’ll make you happier. It’ll make them happier, and it’ll make everyone who deals with both of you happier .

My client and I had a long conversation about what she was denying herself and her friends through focusing her social time on Facebook rather than real-life interactions. She committed to going out with friends one night a month and replacing her social media time with phone calls to friends. After a few months, she felt a marked decrease in her stress levels. She was still insanely busy with too much on her plate, but by putting friendship back on her plate, she was less stressed and happier. This allowed her to manage all of her stressors better.

We will talk more about building positive work relationships in Chapter Nine because having friends at work is a key element of increasing our productivity and decreasing our stress. Many of my close friends are people that I met at work.

Arianna Huffington explains in her book Thrive : “We have all the data now that shows how [sleep deprivation] affects every aspect of our health. This includes everything from a suppressed immune system (it might be why you’re always getting a cold), hypertension (less snooze means a harder time processing stress), and obesity (the sleepy crave bad carbs and sugars).” 6 Sleep is crucial to our well-being on so many levels. Yet it’s the first thing we give up when we are stressed out.

I know how challenging it can be to get enough sleep. Seven years of parenthood-related sleep deprivation has made me all too aware of the negative impacts of missing out on a full night’s rest. An unfortunate reality for many of us is that it’s hard to get any more sleep. Some of us are so stressed that it’s hard to fall asleep or stay asleep, others work shifts that make it impossible to get consistent sleep, and still others feel that sacrificing sleep is the only way to get everything done. I’m hoping the research will convince you that if there’s any way you can do it, it’s worthwhile to find ways to get just a few more minutes every night.

Travis Bradberry, who researches emotional intelligence, states that “your self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when you don’t get enough—or the right kind—of sleep. Sleep deprivation raises stress hormone levels on its own, even without a stressor present.” 7

Most of us can relate to this. When I don’t get enough sleep, I’m looking at the world through dark and desperate glasses. I am far more emotional; I cry at commercials and snap at my husband and kids much more easily than when I’m well rested. How about you?

Most of us have similar responses to sleep deprivation: we’re more irritable and emotional, we can’t think as clearly, and we don’t function at our best. It’s way more challenging to make good choices when you’re sleep deprived. A cookie feels like a much better pick-me-up than a walk. Checking e-mail every few minutes feels more manageable than concentrating on work.

In the first year after my son was born, I scraped our car four times. I can’t begin to tell you the number of basic tasks that I screwed up at work during my first year as a sleep-deprived working parent. I was grateful for an understanding manager who’d been through a similar experience .

While working on this book, I had a few nights of being up with my daughter when she was sick. When I tried to write the next day, all that came out was drivel and mush. I was wise enough to focus on less mentally taxing work for those few days until I was better rested. We know we don’t operate at our best without sleep, yet so many of us give up sleep in the interest of getting more work done. Giving up sleep is not working. We are just damaging our health and decreasing our productivity.

There are entire books and websites devoted to how to get better sleep, and I’m sure you know most of the tips. Just in case you need a reminder, some common strategies include:

I’ve found that the more I can calm my mind down, either through meditation or getting some perspective on my stressors, the better I sleep. Please think about small actions you can take to get just a little bit more sleep. Doing so will have an incredibly positive impact on every aspect of your life.

If sleep is difficult to come by, I empathize but you’ve got to find a way to get more sleep. Sleeping less than seven hours a night compromises our immune system, makes us more vulnerable to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer. 8

Sleeping more will change your entire outlook on life, improve your health and your ability to handle stress and to get more good-quality work done.

This is definitely a case of do what I say, not what I do. Although I will say that after reading all the research on exercise while writing this book, I’ve been getting more disciplined. I’m now partaking in some form of gentle exercise (yoga, swimming, or walking) at least twice a week; sometimes, I get to three or four times a week. Research has found that exercise is really good for us. Shocker, I know. Yes—it’s hard to believe but studies have found that “besides lifting your mood, regular exercise offers other health benefits, such as lowering blood pressure, protecting against heart disease and cancer, and boosting self-esteem.” 9

Obviously, none of this is news to any of us. Some of us, myself included, might have even been in a good rhythm of regular exercise in the past, and we remember how good we felt. But we’re busy. Stupidly busy. And exercise doesn’t feel fun. It feels like a lot of work.

I’m trying to find ways to make exercise less painful and to build it more naturally into my life. So, I walk. Everywhere I can. I walk when I’m coaching. I walk with my kids. I walk around the block after dinner. Because I enjoy walking. And going for a walk doesn’t really feel like exercising.

Here’s some good news for people like me who don’t really enjoy feeling like their lungs might explode: “Plenty of research has also shown that moderate exercise tends to be as good or better for longevity than vigorous activities such as running, which can take a toll on the body over time.” 10 Bring on the moderate exercise! That I can get on board with.

What are some ways you can create time and motivation to exercise? Here are a few ideas:

Here’s another reason to exercise: research has found that “typically, people who exercise start eating better and become more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed.” 11

Okay, I’ve inundated you with enough research that tells you what you already know: exercise is good for you. It will reduce your stress and increase your productivity. So, go for it—find a way to make exercise work for you and start sweating (or just walking more to start with).

After all that talk of exercise, let’s move on to a nice sedentary way to take care of yourself. No sweat required. We just have to breathe. When we are feeling stressed or anxious, we tend to take short, shallow breaths. This means we aren’t getting enough oxygen through our blood stream. When we can spend a couple of minutes noticing our breath and take a few conscious deep breaths, we feel far more relaxed and focused.

When my kids were young, they learned the breathing method of “smell the flowers, blow on the soup” to help them calm down when they were upset. They never used it, but I’d sit there pretending to smell flowers and blow soup while they just ignored me and kept screaming. It worked for me—I was far more calm when dealing with their tantrums.

A very simple breathing technique to help us be grounded and focused is used by both special forces military units and yoga teachers. It’s called box breathing or tactical breathing. Using this technique, you inhale for four seconds, hold your breath for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, and hold your breath for four seconds.

My yoga teacher leads us through it by repeating: “Inhale , one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . hold , one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . exhale , one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . hold , one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .” for a few minutes. She encourages us to hold the breath lightly during the holds. Box breathing has magical instant stress-reducing qualities—I’ve been using it while stuck in traffic, dealing with difficult children, before big presentations, and in moments when I’m highly stressed, and it immediately calms me down .

You might want to try it before you’re going into a high-pressure meeting or presentation, in the middle of a difficult conversation, or just make time throughout the day to spend a minute or two doing box breathing. Notice how much calmer and more focused you feel after paying attention to your breathing and taking some deep breaths. We take breathing for granted but if we can lengthen and deepen our breaths, we’ll see a significant reduction in our stress instantly. Give box breathing a try—if it works for the special forces in life-threatening
situations, surely it will help us mere mortals.

Box breathing is hard to describe, but there’s a demonstration of box breathing and a few other breathing techniques in the free Working Well companion video on my website .

I coach a lot of people who are extremely stressed out by all that work demands of them, not to mention their family responsibilities. We focus our coaching sessions on setting clear boundaries, so they can enjoy both work and life. So many of us, myself included, need to learn to prioritize, to say no, and to set reasonable expectations and clear boundaries. We need to leave work at work at the end of the day. But how do we do that?

A participant in one of my workplace stress talks shared a strategy that she has used to help her set boundaries between work and home. Every day when she leaves the office, she stands by her office door and she says consciously, “I am now leaving this place; when I close this door, I am leaving all of my work behind me and going home to my life there, where I will give my full attention. My work will be waiting for me tomorrow, and I will pick it up when I open the door in the morning. But when I close this door, I am leaving work behind.”

I love this intentional way she has created boundaries—far too often we are frantically running from work to home with thoughts and worries from our workday trailing along behind us.

Research has shown time and again that the extra hours you are putting in aren’t making you more productive. They’re making you less productive. According to a study published by John Pencavel of Stanford University, “Research . . . found that employee output falls sharply after a fifty-hour workweek, and falls off a cliff after fifty-five hours—so much so that someone who puts in seventy hours produces nothing more with those extra fifteen hours.” 12

Many people think that if they just work longer hours, they can get a handle on their stress and increase their productivity. The irony is that working more doesn’t help. It actually makes us more stressed and less productive.

We have limited capacity and when we push beyond it, the results aren’t great. Our productivity decreases because we aren’t taking the time to recharge.

So, what do we do? The work needs to get done. Our first instinct is to work longer, but what if we just started working smarter? “According to US researcher Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, most modern employees are productive for about four hours a day: the rest is padding and huge amounts of worry.” 13

Four hours a day! That’s our capacity for productivity, yet we easily put in ten- and twelve-hour days, thinking that will help us keep up with our unreasonable workloads. We are using the wrong tool to try to solve our problems. It’s like bringing a chainsaw to a job that requires a screwdriver. The research indicates that in order to be more productive and less stressed, working more is the exact opposite of what we should be doing. Working smarter means taking breaks to recharge, working with our brains (which you’ll learn more about in Chapter Ten ), and using tools and systems to be more productive (which you’ll learn in Chapter Eleven ).

How can you change your mindset and your schedule so you make the best use of those four hours, being as highly productive as possible and using the remainder of the time to recharge? Perhaps you could do a walking meeting with a colleague, spend some time thinking about and planning out your work—rather than going from one thing to the next with no plan in mind—or maybe even take a lunch break.

I know it’s hard to set boundaries and work less, but I promise you that working more isn’t solving your problem, it’s making it worse .

Have you seen those signs on the highway that say: Leave Your Phone Alone? Most of us could use one of those signs in our offices and in our homes. How would it feel to turn your phone off for a few hours (gasp)? And I’m not just talking about when you’re at home, but also when you’re at work. When we have our phones on and nearby at work, we’re less productive and less capable. A 2017 University of Texas study “found that the mere presence of our smartphones, face down on the desk in front of us, undercuts our ability to perform basic cognitive tasks.” 14

Our phones are making us stupid. And we’re getting addicted—they’re controlling us, rather than the other way around.

According to a recent study published in the New York Post , “Americans check their phone on average once every twelve minutes—burying their heads in their phones eighty times a day.” 15

There is a pretty nefarious reason we’re picking up our phones so often. We are getting addicted to the chemical hit of dopamine (said to be as addictive as cocaine) that comes from having positive experiences on social media. And that’s not random, it’s by design.

As David Brooks says in this New York Times article, “The critique of the tech industry is that it is causing this addiction on purpose, to make money. Tech companies understand what causes dopamine surges in the brain, and they lace their products with “hijacking techniques” that lure us in and create “compulsion loops.” 16 Social media sites are using “algorithms to leverage our dopamine-driven reward circuitry. Smartphones and social media apps stack the cards—and our brains—against us.” 17

I don’t know about you, but based on this information, I’m spending a whole lot less time on social media sites. Because they are messing with my brain. To make money.

Instead of seeking that dopamine hit through likes, make some time to connect face-to-face and get an even better dopamine hit. When we’re online, our connections tend to be more superficial and surface level. When we connect in person, we’re having more deep and meaningful connections.

Let’s aim for true connection and intimacy, for reflection and pause, and a deeper level of thinking than social media require of us. I can’t think of a better way to do that than putting down our phones and connecting in person.

I’m sure you’re thinking, Well, other people might do that, but not me . That’s what I thought too. Until I installed an app called Moment on my phone, which tracks how often I pick up my phone and how long I spend on it. Turns out I was below average, but still coming in at forty to fifty pickups a day.

I can’t think of anything else I do forty to fifty times a day. I decided I should do a push-up before every time I picked up my phone. It didn’t work. It was just a little too awkward in public places. But I did force myself to open up the notes page and write for ten minutes before I let myself check e-mail. Now I’m down to about twenty to thirty pickups a day. Still alarming, but at least I’m heading in the right direction.

Having a constant connection to work without getting a true break isn’t helping us be more productive or be fully present in our work or personal lives. We’re missing out on connections with the people we care about when our faces are buried in our phones.

It’s hard to disconnect, I know. Especially when you see an e-mail or a text pop up that pulls you right back into the world of work. But resist the pull of the phone. Turn it off, or, at least, put it away for a few hours every night. Try to do this at work as well.

Focusing on your coworkers, either in a meeting or during a lunch break instead of looking at your phone makes them feel valued. I’m sure we’ve all felt the frustration of attempting to engage with a coworker (or family member or friend) who is checking their phone in the midst of our conversation. It’s not a great feeling, so please leave your phone alone as often as you can.

When we disconnect from work, it not only gives us perspective, it helps us recharge. A break from what we are doing energizes us, and when we come back, our productivity skyrockets.

How many of you take a nice long lunch break? And how about your morning coffee break? Don’t forget the afternoon one. Most of you are probably like I used to be and don’t actually know the meaning of the word break . Well, it’s time to get reacquainted.

Research by Tony Schwartz suggests that for optimal productivity, we should take breaks every ninety minutes. 18 What we do on our breaks will make the difference as to whether we return to work recharged or drained. Research has found that “a good break provides psychological detachment and positive emotions.” 1 9

Think about what you do most often on your breaks. Most people I know check their social media or personal e-mail, guzzle caffeine, or vent to coworkers. These activities are not giving us a true break! For a break to recharge us, we need to disconnect from screens, do something that makes us happy, and move our bodies. At the risk of sounding like your mother, take a proper break: put your phone down, get outside, talk to a friend, have a drink of water, eat something, do some stretches, or take a moment to think about what you feel grateful for.

Too often we skip lunch—some of us even skip breakfast. We are working all day on an empty tank. How efficient do you think you are when you have no fuel? How pleasant are you to be around when you are hungry? How does this impact your health?

I promise you that stopping to take a lunch break and getting some healthy food is going to make you way more productive in the afternoon.

We’ll talk more about breaks in Chapter Eleven because taking a break isn’t just good for your mood and your health, it will also skyrocket your productivity.

Work gives us many things, but not everything. When you find yourself slipping into focusing too much on work, take a step back and remember that no one at your funeral will speak of what a good employee you were. They will speak of what a good parent you were, what a good friend you were, and what a good spouse you were, what a loving family member you were—because you made the time for your cherished relationships.

Steal back your time from work. Go home early. Put the phone away. Get some sleep. Ask the people you love to spend time with you—time when you disconnect from everything but them. Give them your full attention.

Put the time and the effort into having quality relationships. It’s the most important thing you can do. Set good boundaries so you can get good work done, and, at the end of the day, you’ll have time and energy to live a life that you enjoy.

Focus on creating happiness at work and at home and remember that happiness really is an inside job. When you’re happy, you’ll be less stressed out, you’ll get more done, and you’ll have more energy for your life.

Choose one or two strategies to help you take better care of yourself and begin to practice them. Like everything, the challenge is to take action. After you choose a strategy, start using it right away.

The research is very clear. Happiness works. Self-care matters. Make yourself a priority. When you take care of yourself, it will make all the difference to your entire life.