Episode #68 How to Thrive in a Digitally Demanding World with Dr Kristy Goodwin

This transcript is computer generated and may contain errors and not be an exact representation of the audio

Dr. Hayley Quinn 00:04

Hi, this is Welcome to Self ®. And I’m your host, Dr. Hayley D Quinn, fellow human,  AuDHDer, business owner, and the Anti-Burnout Business Coach. I’m here for service based business owners and entrepreneurs like you to help you increase your own self care and self compassion. Change the relationship you have with yourself in your business, and help you elevate your business to a new level. So you can live the full and meaningful life you desire. We are all on a continual learning journey. So let’s learn together. Welcome to self is a place where you can come and learn about the practices that will assist you as a business owner, and get tips on how to engage in your business in a way that is sustainable for you. 

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Because remember, if you thrive your business will too. 

Now let’s get to the episode 

Hi and welcome to another episode and another wonderful guest. I feel so fortunate to be able to share the wisdom of such great guests with you, and I know this is an episode you’re going to really want to pay attention to, so grab your cuppa or put on your walking shoes and join me as I introduce today’s guest, Dr Kristy Goodwin is an award winning digital wellbeing and productivity expert. She powers up performance by decoding the neurobiology of peak performance in the digitally intense world we now work and live in. 

Dr Kristy shares practical, brain based solutions to help high achievers optimize their performance so they don’t have to pay the success tax where their success comes at the cost of their physical health, mental well being and or relationships. So you can see why I wanted to get her onto the podcast, she uses cutting edge science and neurotechnology to power up performers so people can live high res lives at work and beyond. 

Dr Kristy’s peak performance protocols play a critical role in the modern workplace to enhance efficiency, drive productivity and facilitate innovation without having to sacrifice well being. Kristy is a certified speaker professional in 2023 she was the recipient of the Australian Professional Speakers Association breakthrough speaker of the Year award. And she is the author of the award winning book, Dear Digital We Need To Talk. It is my absolute pleasure to welcome Dr Kristy to the podcast. Hi Kristy. Thank you so much for joining me

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  03:29

pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. And what a great example of technology enabling us to do things that would otherwise be challenging or perhaps even inconceivable.

Dr. Hayley Quinn  03:38

Yeah, so it just certainly has its benefits, doesn’t it, but we really need to think about how we’re using it so that we don’t have the negative consequences that we’ll talk a bit more about. Could you tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to writing the digital we need to talk book.

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  03:55

So I initially started my career as an educator, and then did a PhD that looked at the impact of technology on what I colloquially refer to as screenages, ie, kids and teenagers. And my research and speaking was often around that space of the impact of digitalized childhoods and adolescents on our children and their developing brains and bodies, but it was often parents who would come up at the end of the parent seminar or health professional saying, Look, I know that that session was all about kids and teens, but I’m recognizing that my digital habits and behaviors are having a profound impact on my productivity, on my wellbeing, on my focus, and so my work started to expand into working with how all of us, you know, how humans can either be powered up or powered down by our digital habits and behaviors. 

And it was actually the impetus for writing the book, was that I had a really serious health issue at the height of the pandemic, like many people contracted covid and. I was a fit, vaccinated woman in her 40s. I thought that it would be a relatively minor health incident. I had plans of binge watching Netflix and my husband delivering me chicken soup in bed, neither of which took place. Instead, what happened was that I became so sick with covid, I had repeated uncontrollable seizures, and one Wednesday morning, our dog found me on the floor adjacent to our bed, convulsing. I was rushed to a code red emergency board and hooked up to a ventilator, unable to breathe. And for years, my body had been whispering to me, slow down, work in a more sustainable pace. 

But instead, I adopted the quadrille advice that was made popular in the 1980s and I just soldiered on and and years of chronic stress, even though my body had been whispering to me, the years of chronic stress caught up with me, and I was so sick with covid that I was literally in that code red emergency ward. And so I had been living and working in a way that was completely incompatible with what I call our human operating system, the way brains and bodies are designed. And, you know, I was working as I think many people are, if we’re really honest, in a frantic, frenetic and frazzled way. And these work habits and ways of living were completely incompatible with this hos, the human operating system. Even though I spoke about this, even though I researched this, I was no better. I wasn’t walking the talk. 

Dr. Hayley Quinn  06:32

And it’s so many of us have these stories, don’t we of not listening to the whispers until it is too late, and also that we know it and we’ve learned it and we teach it and we don’t listen to it…

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  06:42

Because I thought I could outperform my biological I thought I could outsmart it, I could hustle my way to success. And so I paid the ultimate six, I almost paid the ultimate success tax. I lay in hospital bed and through the paper petition curtained, separating myself and the lady next to me, I heard the woman next to me, literally take the final breaths of her life. And I was forced to confront my own possible mortality, and I had to confront the very ugly truth, the reality that I didn’t want to look at and that I was not living in ways that were compatible with my hos, my human operating system. And so I made a pledge to myself that if I was able to leave that hospital that I would no longer pay the success tax. I was willing to compromise my physical health, my mental well being, my relationships, all in the pursuit of success and back to my roots in terms of what do we know from neuroscience? 

What do we know from psychology about what I call sustainable peak performance. How can we work and live in harmony with our human operating system? And so I tried to course correct very entrenched behaviors, and I made radical shifts over time. I often, in the book, I talk about this concept of microhabits, and it’s based on the principle that big doors swing on small hinges. It was not about doing a radical 360 rotation of my life. It was just about making small, incremental changes. And those small, incremental changes amassed into completely transforming my life. And I went from being this powered down, burnt out version, the reason I was so sick with covid, the only medical explanation that the doctors came up with was that I was burnt out. You’re burnt out. Yeah, totally burnt out.

 The years of chronic stress caught up with me, and so I left that hospital saying that, if I can, you know, leave this, I’m on a mission to power up my performance, but to do so in a way that’s sustainable. And I knew that the only way to do that was to work with that human operating system. So that implored me to write the book and do the work that I now doing. So I don’t want anyone else being stuck in a hospital ward or facing a really serious health or life issue and regretting the decisions that they’ve made along the way.

Hayley Quinn  08:58

Yeah, gosh, we’re so aligned in our thinking there, I had a very severe burnout, led to chronic illness. And again, you have to reinvent how you’re living your life, don’t you? And like you say, It can’t be just a big, massive shift, because that in itself is not sustainable. It has to be, what am I adding in? What am I putting down? What are the small steps I can take? Because I think once you’ve been there, I mean, there’s so many of us that have a similar story in not listening to ourselves and then ending up in these really negative consequences. But once you’ve been there, it’s like, I am not going back there. 

There is nothing worth it in this world to put me back in that place. I speak to people and say, you know, burnout nearly took everything from me, my health, my income, my relationships, and that’s why I’m so passionate about the work I do as well. Now in the book you talk about, and I love this that it’s not just about doing a digital detox. We all know we’re on digital stuff too much like if anybody isn’t, then congratulate. Conversations. But I think we all know that most of us have some areas where we could put it down or do it differently, but I love that you talk about this isn’t about digital detox, because that doesn’t change habits, does it? That just puts things on pause and then we go back to how we did things. So can you speak a little bit more to that

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  10:20

so often with any type of detox, a digital detox, a juice detox, what we find, inevitably, is that it creates a binge and a purge. So I go off on offline for three days, but I come back on Tuesday morning to a bulging inbox, 281 teams chats, and I’m frantically trying to triage those. The research on digital detoxes also tells us that they are effective long term. 

They don’t create the long term behavioral change. So I believe we need to start to learn, how can we take back control? How can we use technology so it’s not about digital amputation, because that doesn’t work in 2024 and beyond, where technology plays an absolutely integral role in our lives, professionally and personally. But it’s about saying, How can we intentionally, how can we use technology so we’re not a slave to the screen? How can we use technology in ways that are congruent with how we are designed as humans? 

And so what we know is that the detoxing doesn’t work. In fact, a study looked at a group of people who did a digital detox, and they had another group who just cut down their social media use by an hour a day, and they did some pre and post intervention measures, and what they overwhelmingly found was that three months after the study had concluded, the group that had done the detox had inadvertently reverted back to their pre intervention habits. They basically crept back in. 

However, the group that simply reduced the amount of time they were spending on social media didn’t cut it out completely, had consistently stuck to a much more reduced amount of time they were spending online. So I think it speaks volumes about the fact that the detox doesn’t work. It’s about harmonizing our digital habits so that means us not enslave us. Yeah,

Hayley Quinn  12:12

I think it’s kind of shifting away from that all or nothing thinking, isn’t it? It’s like we’ve got to find ways. And you speak to this, I think this is where I feel very aligned with the sort of work that you’re doing. 

You speak about the human operating system, and I speak with people about we really need to get to know ourselves well as the human being that we are. And obviously we have similarities as humans, but we also have the unique ways that we want to or have to operate in the world, and we need to pay attention to that so that we can have something that works for us and that works long term. 

Otherwise, we just keep going. It’s like with everything, like you’ve said, it’s not just digital it’s all aspects of life. Just jump from quick fix to quick fix to quick fix, which actually doesn’t fix anything, does it?

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  12:55

No, and doesn’t create the long term behavioral change. I mean, the harsh reality is, whether you love technology or you loathe it, or perhaps you sit somewhere in between, or perhaps you oscillate from hour to hour, depending on the messages that are flashing on your screen. The reality is, technology is here to stay. It’s that phase. It is going to continue to play a really integral role in our lives. 

How can we learn to live with it? How can we learn to leverage it so it supports us rather than stifles us? And that’s where I think having that neurobiological understanding really helps. You. Know, as humans, I often say we’re really not that complicated. We have certainly over complicated our lives. But what do we need as humans? What are my psychological and physical needs. How do I best operate as a human? And that’s all our biological blueprint, your IQ, your EQ, your physical prowess. 

There are some biological constraints we have. And you know, we’re not designed to be multitasking. Yet, many of us spend hours a day. We’re not designed to be spending hour upon hour with our eyes on a very small surface area, like they are on our desktops and laptops. We’re designed for our vision to be dilated, our eyes to be dilated, so some digital habits that are really incompatible with how we are designed, and it’s about just shifting those experience the you know, we’re living in a world, I think, where people are always on, rarely focused and never recovered.

Dr. Hayley Quinn 14:30

We were talking before we hit record. Hey, about this is this isn’t going away like this is just the start of it. Like you said, you wrote the book prior to IA, AI, sorry, starting to become more prevalent. So this stuff is going to be in our lives more and more and more, and we need to develop healthy and helpful habits so that we can live with technology in a way that isn’t harmful to. US. So you talk a lot about some of these habits.

 Can you Well, I guess talking about, what are some of the risks if we don’t actually stop and take stock and say, This is what’s happening? I know we’ve kind of touched on the burnout, but what are some of the other risks that you see if we don’t do that? And then perhaps, let’s talk about what are some of the benefits if we do change this relationship with digital

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  15:25

Sure, so we know that our digital habits and behaviors are having a profound impact on our stress. Global rates, as you alluded to of burnout and stress, are at, you know, very elevated levels. And I think this speaks to the fact I call it the silent stress epidemic. I believe that our screen habits are one of the chief they’re certainly not the only contributing factor. There are significant global events, economic challenges facing many people throughout the world, but I think we’re often oblivious to some of the very pervasive, but very pervasive, but subtle ways that technology can make us feel stressed. 

So for example, I mentioned, you know, the dilated gaze and we’re spending hours on a very fixed surface area. We also know that when we look at a screen, we do not sigh anywhere near as much. Now as humans, one of the beautiful biological mechanisms that we have built into our biology is that when we’re awake, we naturally should sigh roughly every five minutes. It’s a natural mechanism to regulate our oxygen and carbon dioxide levels. Two inhalations through our nose and we exhale through our mouth. 

However, when we have that fixed, narrow gaze on our screens, we don’t sigh anywhere near it’s incredible, right? There’s a condition that has been studied called Email acne, where we hold our breath. When we go into our inbox, we dump some cortisol, our heart rate spikes, our pupils dilate. We have a physiological response. So technology is certainly making us stress. You know, back to back, virtual meetings, we’ve got brain scans actually showing us what we all intuitively know and experience teams or Zoom meetings or WebEx meetings are stressful and exhausting. It’s definitely impacting our stress and burnout ways. It’s also impacting our sleep. We know that our tech habits are having a huge impact on interpersonal relationships, impact on our vision. You know, we’ve seen rates of myopia, which is nearsightedness, increase rapidly over the last few years amongst children, teens and adults alike. 

And one of the popular misconceptions is that it’s too much close work now that potentially be a causal effect. But what we also know is that it’s what our excessive time on screens is displacing time and sunlight, natural sunlight, we know, and we’re not quite sure what the mechanism is. Is it that when we’re out in the sunlight, we tend to look at things in the distance, so we develop that depth of vision, or is it that the sunlight helps to elongate our optic nerve. We’re not really quite sure yet what the real mechanism is, but yeah, our tech habits are having a profound impact on so many parts, on our musculoskeletal health. 

Physiotherapists and a whole range of allied health professionals treating increasing, you know, musculoskeletal related issues we know often mental health issues can be exacerbated, not necessarily caused. Speculation in the research about whether social media and screen use causes poor mental health. We know there’s a strong correlation, but yet, there are certain things that I think you know. I often say there’s not many parts of our life that have not been touched by digital transformation. And so the impact is across the board in so many parts of our lives. Yeah,

Dr. Hayley Quinn 18:48

absolutely, absolutely. And you cover some really lovely habits in the book about how we can kind of counteract some of that. And just with when you were talking, it’s like, Yeah, can we kind of get outside, or at least look outside, or even just look up from your desk across an office room if you’re in an office, so that we we aren’t just staring at the same place, and we can sit for so long. We’re not designed to just sit for hours and end are we? 

And how can we actually take care of our physical bodies if we need to be for long periods of time, or can we shorten our meetings with people? You know, there’s lots of things that we can look at. And I highly recommend your book. It’s an easy read as well. I’ve become somebody who, if I’m reading a book, I do like it to be an easy read now, and yours is a really easy book to read, so that’s great. Well done. You.

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  19:41

Thank you. And the reason I wrote it the way that it is, in just small, little digestible habits, is because we know our attention spans are shrinking. I often say the super skill of our of the 21st century, the skill that trumps our IQ and our EQ.

I’m not saying they’re not important, but. The Super skill of the 21st century that every human, irrespective of their age, gender, geographic location, is their FQ, their focus quotient, our capacity to focus and sustain our focus in a world that’s being deliberately engineered to be distracting and destructive will be a universal skill, and it’s a skill under threat. You know, we see it time and time again. People pull up at traffic lights and are checking devices. People order their coffee and they pull out their devices a lift. And so that obviously has a huge impact on our capacity to focus and direct that, that FQ skill. Yeah,

Dr. Hayley Quinn 20:38

absolutely. So you talk about digital boundaries? Talk to me about that.

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  20:44

Yes. So look, technology’s crept into every crevice of our lives, and we have to put up some borders and boundaries so that we, and I do work with teams. One of the things I help teams to create are what I call their digital guardrails. Now across the globe, countries are in various stages and various iterations of implementing legislation around the right to disconnect. This has to be complemented. Regardless of whether your country has this legislation in place or not, we have to create digital guard guard rails. These are your digital norms and behaviors and protocols. I often colloquially call these your tech spectations. You know, how responsive do you expect your team to be to internal emails? Do you have an after hours communication escalation plan so that if there is a time sensitive, critical issue, how will that be disseminated at a personal level, we need to create those borders and boundaries, because we are not designed to be always on. We just, you know, it’s working against our neurobiology. 

I can explain to people that the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that does all that heavy lifting in our thinking, our prefrontal cortex, only has a four to six hour battery life per day, consistently pumping out. I know there are situations that demand extra hours sometimes, but if you’re consistently working 12 and 14 hour days, you are working against the way you are designed. So boundaries, personally, we need the team level, these digital guardrails, and we need organizations some parameters too, but, but determining, you know, where, where do I want to use devices? I often recommend creating a landing zone in your house. Where do phones go during meal times, or if you don’t want to be taking them into the bedroom, actually taking the time. You know, when do you want to switch off? What are your parameters around responding to emails after hours or on holidays? You know, we know search tells us. Many people are avoiding I’ve done a lot of work in the last couple of years with companies saying, we need you to remind people they need to take their annual leave because liability on their books. But people are shying away from their leave because they don’t want to come back to a bulging inbox or to the barrage of messages so

Dr. Hayley Quinn 23:03

and we don’t reward this, do we in society? We don’t reward people taking breaks and resting. A lot of the people listening to the podcaster are business owners and maybe small business and I think you know that this working long hours and posting on social media that you’re on the beach with your laptop, like that. It’s glamorized. 

And what we need to be glamorizing is, you know, just laying down and doing nothing and recognizing that actually allowing ourselves to rest and restore is so, so important, but it’s just not rewarded. I mean, I think there’s, there’s a number of us kind of working in this kind of space of trying to shift the narrative, but it’s hard, isn’t it, because people are seeing that colleagues do better, or somebody’s business seems more successful because they’re working harder. I mean, I was excited to see the legislation come through about the changes in Australia, about not being able to contact staff after hours.

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  24:08

Yeah, look, I firmly believe there are certainly well being benefits of working the way we’re designed. We are biologically designed, effort and recovery effort, just like you wouldn’t get on a treadmill at the gym and run at level speed 22 for the entire time, you might do a quick and then you would recover quick cover. We are designed to work that way, and so there are definitely well being perspectives. But I also encourage people, and I know this is often a challenge for high performance entrepreneurs, small business owners, because we have become conditioned to thinking that more is more, the more, the more results I will get. And that’s often, I think an industrialized model of productivity absolutely I think what we need to remember is that rest is absolutely integral to sustainable peak performance. Yeah. I often ask people, where were you? What were you doing when you came up with your last brilliant idea? Where were you when you solved a really complex problem? And I have never, in the 1000s of people I’ve asked this to never, ever had one person say to me, it was in an Excel spreadsheet

Dr. Hayley Quinn 25:19

in the middle of a meeting when I was feeling really stressed.

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  25:23

It is universally, most of the time in the shower, in the shower, when I was on holidays and there was no and so the neuroscience behind this is when we let our minds we used to call it daydreaming, yeah, when we let our minds meander. It’s called the default mode network. This is when ideas germinate. So if you want to perform, as I’m imagining, your listeners do, if you want to perform, not only at a sustainable level, but if you want creative, productive, innovative ideas to germinate, you have white space. You’ve got, you know, you can call it ballroom. And I worked with a CEO a couple of years ago in a coaching capacity, and he understood the scientific merits of this default mode network, but he said, Kristy, my EA will think I am very unprofessional if I block out times in my calendar called daydreaming. He said, just won’t cut it. It will look, you know, and could have a very negative effect on the team. So he said, I’m going to block out this time because I can see what you’re saying and why it might be important. But instead, what I’m going to call it is activation of Default Mode Network Time. He said, It sounds very fancy, and it was semantics Exactly.

Dr. Hayley Quinn 26:34

It’s the same thing, but it sounds better for the context he was in.

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  26:37

What resulted is that by blocking out that time, and it had to move around in his calendar. It wasn’t sort of a hard fix time, but what he came back to me and reported was that protecting that time ended up with him creating an idea that generated millions of dollars in revenue he knows, had he not fiercely protected that time, if he just kept pushing on and not having that percolation time, that mind wandering time, that idea never would have come to light. So I think if we can shift it, you know, it’s not just something that’s a nice to have, that it’s a wellbeing and a performance imperative,

Dr. Hayley Quinn 27:14

absolutely, it’s so essential, isn’t it? I have a color code in my phone diary, and I use yellow for self care, because when I look at it, it just feels more joyous. And I make sure that there’s some yellow in my diary every day, and I will look to the next week, and if there’s not yellow, then I make a point of putting yellow in there. And I talk with people I work with around this, because we have to be intentional with it, don’t we? 

We can’t just assume it’s going to happen, because for many people, and particularly, I would say for women, without generalizing too much, but we can tend to be very other focused people pleasing. I work with a lot of helping professionals, and that can be a lot of the time about focusing on other people. So we need to be intentional. Otherwise, the day’s gone by and you haven’t done it, the week’s gone by and you haven’t done it. So like you were working with that corporate person about putting it in the diary, I think it’s important for all of us, no matter what the context of our life is, that we are very deliberate and intentional about this.

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  28:19

And I love that you color coded, because it’s a very quick, tangible indicator as to whether we’ve got enough of that yellow map. What

Dr. Hayley Quinn 28:27

decreases my cognitive load when I’m looking at my diary, it’s like, is there yellow or is there not yellow? Absolutely. And

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  28:35

also, we live and die by our calendars these days, so if we don’t in there, we fill that space up with another meeting, or we allow other people, you know, our colleagues or clients, to fill that space up. And I wanted to circle back to what you said, we have a very, very pronounced gender wellbeing gap. Study after study is telling us that, Concerningly, more females than males are experiencing stress and burnout. 

And there is certainly a biological component. There is certainly a hormonal component to that, but we also know there are some other extraneous variables that mean women are much more prone to this. So it’s something you know, regardless of whether you are male or female, we need to be cognizant of this and look at how do we remedy this? How do we address this? Because I am having so many conversations across the globe with with high performing women who are experiencing this, but many times suffering in silence, thinking that this fundamentally flawed or wrong with them. For years, we got told to lean in, and then we were told to lean out. The reality is we just all wanted to lay down.

Dr. Hayley Quinn 29:45

It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it, because so many people are suffering in silence. Yep, and and also, I think some of the stuff that happens, and I can find quite frustrating, is this minimization of burnout, where people like. Many things, people just say, I’m a bit tired. I’m feeling burnt out, and maybe they actually just haven’t had a very good night’s sleep, and otherwise they’re feeling okay, and we need to stop doing that, because burnout is such a significant and damaging thing. And as with everything, when we minimize it, people don’t think, well, actually, I do need to reach out and get some help for this. 

I do need to make some major changes so that they don’t end up really sick, end up in hospital like yourself. You know, too many of us have got these stories of life kind of collapsing and having to rebuild. And for me, it’s really, I really want to work in this kind of burnout prevention space, rather than burnout recovery, because burnout recovery is expensive and takes a really long time. So adding these aspects, this is why I wanted to get you on the podcast, because this digital context is so invasive in our life, we need to pay attention to it, because it’s such an important part of how we live. And like you say, it’s going to get worse, not better.

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  31:09

No, I agree. And basically invisible came to mind when you were saying, you know, that sort of crept in, and we’ve never really evaluated, is this serving me? Is this enslaving me? Is this helping or is this harming me? And I think we’re at a really interesting juncture in time where we are, you know, it saddens me. I agree, burnout has become almost a throwaway term or just a part of vernacular. The other worrying trend that I’m seeing with some of the corporate teams I’m working with is that people have almost normalized stress, exhaustion and burnout. It’s just, you know, it’s a part of working in the modern, 21st century, and that’s not the case like that is why we are designed that’s not going to get sustainable peak performance. That’s not going to get, you know, Deloitte have released, and recently, recently released a paper about human performance and human capital. And if we are going to live in a world where, you know, a significant proportion of the population are knowledge workers, how do we optimize the humans? And I think this is why we really have to shift that conversation, and we have to stop normalizing burnout. We need clear parameters on what it is, and so acknowledging it’s not a baseline for human existence.

Dr. Hayley Quinn 32:22

No, not at all. Because if we take care of humans, and whether this is in organizations or for many of the listeners, if this is about your own business, like taking care of you is taking care of business, it’s like you say, you’ll be more creative. 

You can be more productive in the time that you’re meant to actually be having these bursts of working. If you were to think about two or three kind of tips for somebody, if they’re sort of thinking, oh yeah, this is resonating a lot, and I use my phone too much, and I’m on back to back meetings. I’m doing all the things. What would be two or three things that you’d say, Look, why don’t you kind of consider starting here

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  32:59

absolutely? So I say there’s three pillars of powered up performance if you want to thrive in the digitally demanding world, the three pillars that will set you up for success and sustainable success. One, I believe we have to build a fortress around our focus. So a really simple microhabit When you want to get your deep, focused work done, put your phone somewhere where you can’t see it. Research from the University of Austin, Texas tells us that even if our phone is on silent and face down, if it’s in our line of sight, it drops our cognitive performance by an estimated seven to 10% huge. Hey, huge. Looking at having your phone nearby makes you seven to 10% dumber. I can’t be any more direct, literally, the brain drain, because we’re offloading some of our cognitive resources.

 You know, we know when we are distracted. It does not matter if it’s the ping of a notification, whether it’s chatting Kathy coming up to our desk in the office, whether it’s a ruminating thought, regardless of how we are distracted. Research tells us that it takes the average adult 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back into their deep focus state. It’s called the resumption lag. So being able to minimize distractions and to focus when we need to is absolutely critical. So that’s the first pillar. So really trying to optimize our focus. The second pillar is that we have to build our stress tolerance. 

We are living in a world that will inevitably be stressful. But the good news is, as humans, we are biologically designed for stress. We are designed, however, for really short bursts acute stress, and we are designed to complete or close out the stress cycle. And so one of the things that I often talk about is that we have to build our capacity to hold stress, and this is why there are so many scientific merits behind things like cold showers and ice baths. 

It is priming our body to deal with physical stress so that we are better equipped to deal with psychological stress. And. Um, other micro habits, things like vigorous physical activity, um, building our stress resilience. So when we do have back to back virtual meetings, because that’s just the way our calendar looks that day, what can I do to regulate my stress cycle? Is it sighing? You know, research tells us two to three cycles drops our stress response. 

Is it in your team’s meeting, literally closing your eyes. We know that when we’re on virtual meetings, part of our brain, it’s called the occipital globe, and it processes what we’re seeing in another region, region called the fusiform gyrus. They’re very active on teams and zoom meetings our brain fatigues, so simply closing your eyes for 30 seconds and just sit very still. Make it look like your internet has dropped out momentarily,

Dr. Hayley Quinn 35:49

Pretend you’ve frozen. I think that’s such a good point, though, and I talk to people about this, about having eyes closed time, because we don’t realize how much stimuli we take in merely just being in a room doing nothing. Our eyes are taking in so much stimuli, right,

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  36:07

huge amount. And we’ve actually, I mean, roughly quantified. So we know the human brain is processing 11 million bits of sensory data per second. Our brains are literally super computers. What we are estimating is that 10 million of those come through our eyes. So having a browser with 28 tabs open, having your phone nearby with a red notification saying you’ve got 88 unread messages, that is all really taxing. Having a really big base, all of those things are exhausting, so building our focus is really important, putting your phone out of sight, figuring out what is your prime time. 

This is what we call your chronotype, and biologically, we are most focused and alert during certain times of the day. We’re either early birds, we’re either sort of middle birds, or we’re late night owls, and your job is to build a fortress around your focus during your most productive hours, where you can turning off notifications, putting your phone out of sight, blocking that time out for deep work. So that’s the second pillar. 

The third pillar for sustainable success is that we have to reframe recovery. We have to make sure that we see recovery and rest as a right and a responsibility. It’s not a reward, it’s not frivolous, it’s not excessive, it’s not something we save up and do on our annual leave. It’s something and the research study has only come out in the last week or so, corroborating that the best type of break to tackle burnout, we’d all love it to be annual leave, and to say we need to have a limited annual leave, but the research actually tells us it’s micro breaks in my flow breaks those that is actually saying a minimum of 10 minutes, 10 minutes interspersed throughout your day, several times we know is enough to help optimal performance and well being.

Dr. Hayley Quinn 38:01

And this is the thing, isn’t it? I mean, people have so many complex beliefs around resting and slowing down, and it’s so important to work through those, because ultimately, it’s not huge. I mean, if you allowed yourself to stop and do a bit of down regulating breathing, or to just even, even if you can’t get outside, to just go and just walk around somewhere away from your desk. And if you’re doing these things throughout the day, you’re taking care of yourself on a daily basis, rather than, I’ll take care of myself when everything else is finished, and I’ve got some time for a holiday. And then you talk to people who say, I’ve got so much holiday accrued. It’s like, why it’s holiday, go take it, enjoy it.

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  38:52

The other thing I hear very common pattern with a lot of the clients I work with is they get to their annual leave and they’re so exhausted and depleted. Last few days are spent with a migraine sick, and that’s not how we’re designed to function and live as humans. And I agree this is something that and they actually call it the recovery paradox. And it is this concept that the people who need the most recovery tend to be the people who take the least amount.

Dr. Hayley Quinn 39:21

When I work with people around the self care, it’s like, when you need it the most, you do it the least, but you’ve got to do it, and you’ve got to do it consistently. And it doesn’t have to be huge, right? Because I think people, when they are already tired or they ought they are busy and have a lot on their plate, it’s like, oh, not not another thing. And it’s like closing your eyes and taking 10 breaths is going to take no time at all and is going to help nourish your nervous system.

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  39:49

Yep, and that that’s with the high performers I work with. I agree it’s a huge leap in their thinking, especially if it’s embedded habit and trait that they’ve carried throughout their lifetime. And that’s why I’m a huge advocate for using wearable devices. I’m working with a number of clients, and we are using wearable devices so that they can track the impact on their own biometric data. So for example, the clients I work with, we’re measuring their stress in real time. There’s a tool using and you’ve got a stress monitor. Now, no one who’s stressed needs an app telling them that they’re stressed.

Dr. Hayley Quinn 40:26

Good data to see it right in front of you. Can’t say it

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  40:29

and start to see it in terms of time. Oh, wow. I had no idea that that meeting with my colleague was so stressful. Oh, wow. Stress really peaks around three to 5pm What do I tend to be doing then. But more importantly, we can look at what protocols, what are the little micro habits we can put in place that bring us back to a stress baseline, and what is the impact? We know that a huge impact in terms of people’s sleep, and we’ve got certain data that globally, people are not getting enough or good quality of sleep. 

And what we know is that unresolved daytime stress has a huge impact on the quality and quantity of sleep at night. So we can start to look for correlations in their behaviors and track what are the impact of some of these little micro habits on our biometric data, because our body does not lie, and our body keeps score absolutely to see, and this is one of the problems with any sort of habit change, is that habit change is often invisible and incremental, and so we often don’t see the cumulative benefits of what’s resulting from the little micro habits we’re implementing. 

But with biometric data and wearable devices, you can see, wow. You know, my performance skyrockets when I get that seven hours of sleep. What did I do as a precursor to help me get that seven hours you know, I stopped eating a couple of hours before I went to bed. I had a wind down routine. I took breaks throughout the day. And so we can start to bake in and confirm this is the data scientist in me coming out, we can start to corroborate what does the data actually tell us. We can make data informed decisions. Absolutely, I

Dr. Hayley Quinn 42:07

have a wearable. This is not sponsored, but I wear an aura ring, and I found that really helpful in terms of my sleep and sometimes changing what I do with that. But also, what’s been lovely for me is often when I’ve had a time where I’m working and I check my data later. A lot of the work I do has me in the relaxed and engaged phase. They have like restored, relaxed, engaged and stressed, and that just brings a smile to my face now, because I’ve created my business in a way that I’m doing stuff that I really love and feel passionate and engaged about, excited about, and I spend a lot of time resting in between appointments. 

Even this morning, I knew I had a busier day than normal. So for me, I think about it in terms of front loading self care, and what are the things that I’m going to do so that I’m taking care of myself on the busier days, more so than days I’m not so busy, but it’s lovely to see the data, and then if it changes for me, I can be like, Okay, let’s reflect on what was different about that day, and what what have I let go of, or what do I need to add a bit more in so the digital stuff can be really helpful. Absolutely. Some amazing you and I chatting on this and doing the podcast. I mean, we couldn’t do this if we didn’t have the digital technology.

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  43:29

Totally agree, yeah, and we and we need to leverage it like I think it, and I hope this hasn’t come across in any way as an anti tech. It’s not about, you know, abdicating habits. It’s not about digital abstinence. It’s about can I harmonize? How can I find congruence between these digital habits and behaviors so that they help me not harm me? How can I use them in a way that so that I can leverage the benefits they offer without having to endure the pitfalls that they can also present if I’m not using them the right way or excessively, and

Dr. Hayley Quinn 44:04

your book again, doesn’t come through as anti tech at all. I think it’s a really easy to digest, easy read full of information that can just be really helpful in getting people started on this path of, how do I want my relationship with my digital world to be different, so that I can use it to benefit me, not to have me stressed out all the time. 

I’m sure there will be bits of it in there that are confronting for people, because, like anything, we see stuff and go do that a bit much, but, but it’s wonderful. Um, I’m curious as to what, what you learned, perhaps, about yourself during writing that book. Yeah,

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  44:51

so, um, I’ll be honest, I had a an insane deadline that I agreed to with the publisher. It wasn’t the publisher enforcing it on me. Um. And I could see towards the end of the writing process that I was reverting back to some unhealthy, unhelpful behaviors, and I could feel burnout approaching. And you know, given that I’d made that pledge that I was never going to go back to that, that way of living and working, I had to have some confronting, comfortable conversations with myself, and I managed to course correct. 

Now, years ago, Kristy would have kept pushing on. She would have ignored those whispers, and I could hear the whispers in my body. And so I learned a lot, you know, not just about the ideas presented in the book, about how do I tune in, how do I work in a sustainable way? And I’m really proud to say I managed to submit the book by the agreed date with the publisher for the submission, but I did so in a way that didn’t compromise my health and well being, and that is something I’m incredibly proud of. It speaks volumes. 

You know, if I could do that by applying these, you know, very simple brain based protocols. They work. As someone who’s a neuroscientist, I love to be able to say that this is baked in science, or batched by science, perhaps baked by as well. And you know, if we work the way we are designed, because we’re not complicated as humans, if with our human operating system, we will thrive. The reason that so many of us are powered down, burnt out living, I often call it as a low res version of ourselves, because we are living incompatible with how we are designed to as

Dr. Hayley Quinn 46:35

humans. Yeah, absolutely. And I think sometimes when we start to veer off course after we’ve been through something like that, and we can course correct. I think it can be really great that we veered off course, because it shows us actually, when I do tune in and listen and I recognize that I have learned new skills and I have new way of doing things, and it’s worked, and I’m not on this path to burnout now. I think it can be really, valuable, hey, and also

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  47:01

having loving friends and family who gently, and this is why I love the idea of guardrails. They just sort of bump you back in for veering off the wrong path. And I need to remember, you know, just this week, I reached out to a friend I knew she was not doing particularly well, and her response actually, I think it actually saddened me. 

She said, Thank you for taking the time to care enough to reach out. And so I think we need to remember, you know, even if it is just, and I will say it was literally just a text message, we’ve seen a phone call, and we’re meeting for a walk in the coming weeks, but taking the time when you see someone else who you are concerned may not be, you know, going perhaps they are going down that path of burnout, or perhaps aren’t doing right. Don’t be afraid to reach out. I think we’ve become accustomed to a world where we are in this frantic, frenetic and frazzled way that we’ve forgotten the value and the importance of simple human connection, like striking striking up the conversation while you wait for your coffee with someone, just a smile at someone. I just Yeah. I’m worried, in a world where where we are more connected than ever, that we are slowly becoming more disconnected, and that is a terrible fear.

Hayley Quinn  48:14

So instead of getting your phone out in the queue, maybe speak to another human being that’s in the queue, and then if you’re not with other people. Use this, this wonderful technology, like you say, to reach out and connect with somebody that you might otherwise not be able to connect with, because there are such beautiful, as we keep saying, there’s such beautiful aspects to this. 

I’ve got friends all over the world that I can connect with and talk to as if we’re just sitting in the same room. I mean, that’s marvelous, but we need to do it in a way that is aligned with who we are as human beings. Hey, and what’s going to work for us individually? My next question I asked to all my guests, I’m always curious about the answer on this one, if you could meet your 80 year old self today, what do you think she would say to you? Oh,

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  49:05

she say, Oh, I often live by this, this mantra, um, prioritize the potent and live in close proximity to your values. That, to me, is the ultimate success. And I’ve had enough life experience where I haven’t done those things, and I think we need to remember those things that, to me, is true success, really living in close proximity to your values. So I think we need to take the time to know what those values are and fiercely protect them, and not let the digital world Duke you into thinking what your values might be, or divert you from what are your deep values yourself?

Dr. Hayley Quinn 49:47

Yeah, oh, that’s beautiful. I’m sure she would be very thankful that you have adopted that in your life and live accordingly. Yeah, it’s been an absolute. Pleasure. Thank you. People will get a lot from this episode. I highly recommend they go and buy your book. We’ll put some links in the show notes so that they can know where to find that and where to find out more information about yourself. But thank you again for coming on. It’s

Dr. Kristy Goodwin  50:16

been really great. It’s a pleasure, and thank you for having me. Hayley,

Dr. Hayley Quinn 50:22

Thank you for sharing this time with me today. I hope our time together has been helpful and supportive. If there has been something in this episode that you have found helpful, I invite you to share it with another person who you think might benefit. If you’ve benefited in any way from the podcast. 

 

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I wish you all well in your relationship with yourself and your business. may go well and go gently. And remember, if you thrive, your business will too

 

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