Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Today we're talking about how to stop overworking, how to slow down and take a break and get space in our life.
Have you ever felt like you're just going to do one more thing and then it becomes another thing, another thing, another thing, another thing, and it's just back to back to back to back to back, and then you end up feeling burned out, stressed out, and you can't stop. You know, you should stop. You know, you need to take a break, but it just doesn't happen. And one thing leads to the next and just goes on and on.
Well, this is an episode for all the workaholics out there on how to.
How to calm it down a little bit and what can be done practically to deal with it. I'm a recovering workaholic. I have to be honest.
And so this has been difficult for me to do.
Once I stop working and I take a break and go on a trip or something, then I can totally relax. But once I get into.
Can go one thing to the next, and then if I'm using AI or I'm working on projects, it can just go on and on and on obsessively, because once the machine gets turned on, it can just. It's like almost like a train that it has a momentum.
And so that's what we are diving into today. Shireen, can you resonate with this? You've got any workaholic tendencies by any means?
[00:01:32] Speaker B: Okay, I don't even know where to go with this. Michael, can I be honest here?
[00:01:37] Speaker A: Of course you can.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
I've struggled very much to stabilize my identity in a spiritual swaman we call self respect.
Like, I'm a pure, peaceful soul.
And I feel very reluctant to say something that is against it.
I don't want to say I'm a workaholic because that's not true. I'm originally a pure, peaceful soul. I don't want to use that language.
People have said even recently, you know, recently I had a birthday and they had to force me to go somewhere because I wasn't leaving.
But I don't. I still want to maintain I'm a pure, peaceful soul.
I don't want to think in those terms.
Whatever change in behavior has to happen happens for me.
Not saying this is true for everyone.
For me, it has to happen through that lens.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: That's right. Now what we're. Just to be clear, we're not encouraging anyone to label themselves a workaholic and say, I am a workaholic or I am anything, except I am an internal being.
But what we are saying is that do we identify with certain behaviors of endless amounts of work and wanting to do work and get things finished? And if we don't feel productive, then we feel we have to do more and more and more and days are not going to be good unless as certain things have happened.
This is the issue we're talking about, you know, and the problem with excessive amounts of work without taking breaks is that it can be very bad for our health. For a start, it's bad for our mind. We can end up with burnout. We can end up with strange health problems that don't really make any sense.
We. And also, oftentimes my own experience, I'll speak for myself, is that I. I have had the attitude that the solution to any challenges that I have is actually doing more work in one way or the other. Like, if I got this issue, if I work harder at it, then that's the means to solve it.
By putting in the work, it will solve the problem. This is kind of like the background belief.
I've had the realization recently that the work itself, the way I've been doing it in certain situations, is the cause of the problem, not the solution to it.
And that's actually been a bit of a shock to the system. It's a bit like having an illness and taking medication to fix the illness, only to find out that the medication caused the illness.
That's a very weird situation to be in. So many, many of us in the world are so used to doing stuff and making things happen and getting things done that the idea that somehow doing the thing that we like to do that we think is solving a problem turns out to be a problem.
It's almost like flipping everything in a weird way around. And it's a bit of a strange situation. So what we're talking about today is if we are constantly, push, push, push, push, push, push, push. How can we get out of that? You know, the benefit from my personal experience of doing this is that when I stop and I take a break, then I get clarity and I can see what's important compared to what's not important, which isn't obvious to me at all in the middle of the work, right? And the problem is the more we work, there comes to this point of diminishing returns.
So at a certain point we are productive and it was wonderful.
But once we start getting tired, the brain gets clouded, the mind gets clouded, and the kind of awareness isn't quite as good as it was earlier in the day.
Oftentimes it can take three or four or five times longer to get something done. And even worse than that, we can be destroying all the good work that we did prior to that with the later work.
So not only is it not effective, it. It's wrecking.
[00:06:21] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: Especially if you're writing books and doing stuff like that.
Many, many times it's like, it's good. And then I'm tired, and then I keep working at it, and then afterwards I'm like, I just totally butchered my own work and I didn't like it.
I'll give an example from the book Essentialism, which is a great book. The guy who wrote the book, Greg McKinnon, I think his name is, or McEwen, he gave an example where he was invited to give a talk at a conference on his ideas, and he already had a presentation ready, and they wanted the presentation he already had, and they knew what it was, and he talked about it, right? So everything was clear. So he got there, he went to this place, and he got in a hotel, and he started thinking, well, I don't think it's good enough, so I'm going to make it better.
So at night, he decided to upgrade it. And as he was upgrading, he thought, you know what? I'm going to try something even better. Totally different thing. So he started a totally new presentation.
And he worked all night on this new presentation, and he was tired. He woke up. By the time he woke up, he hadn't had enough sleep. So he woke up, went to this initial meeting with them, and he was kind of groggy and spaced out. And then he had to do this presentation to this large group of people. It was completely untested.
And it turned out as he started doing it, that he had no idea what he was talking about, that it wasn't landing, it didn't work, people didn't like it, and he. He lost the contract to do more presentations, which is why he came in there in the first place. So he. So he. He'd done a load of work to do something that people didn't like, and he lose. Lost the opportunity to get what he wanted, which is the whole point of him being there. Whereas if he just done the thing that he wanted to do, he would have got a nice rest, showed up, done the thing he already knew and would have got more work.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: And so the question we have to ask ourselves, Michael, here.
The question we have to ask ourselves is why?
What was the reason behind him thinking the first one was not good? In your own life, right? You Write a lot, you create a lot. What is the reason?
What is the underlying feeling that you have? That the first time itself, that's not good. That's something we need to look at.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: I think it's what's perfectionism, isn't it? There's this mythical idea of this perfect thing and it's like this.
[00:09:08] Speaker B: But whatever you had could be perfect. No. How do we know it's not? Why do you feel it's not perfect? What is the feeling? Why is it?
[00:09:15] Speaker A: Well, that's why. I mean, it's a mythical. Perfectionism is like a mythical cloud that is unformed. It's like this pink cloud that's got a sort of somewhat formed and not really.
And my personal experience working on lots of stuff is that I have this sense that there's this perfect version somewhere, but I don't actually know what it is.
And I'm working to find out if I can get to it on some level.
But because it keeps moving and it's a fluffy pink cloud of some kind, it never arrives. So it can be iterated indefinitely, forever and ever and ever and ever and ever.
Because there's never going to come to a point where I've reached this thing that I want, the Holy Grail, because it doesn't actually exist.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: I feel these are very deep psychological issues that are going on and we need to look at the real underpinnings of it. Right. It's not just, oh, stop working too much, the really deep underlying issues that are going on.
[00:10:27] Speaker A: Yeah, this is.
I mean, what I've come to realize personally is that what is actually necessary and what is not necessary, that that's the bigger, like if you zoom out, that's. That's really what is important.
So for example, if I'm sending an email, for example, or doing a talk or something, like, what is going to do the job? Who is it for and how is it going to help somebody? And what's going to do the trick? What's going to be of service to the people?
What is the minimum viable, valuable thing that can be delivered in the time available that's going to do the greatest service? That's why I need to know, you know, but, but if I lose track of that, I can get into some other way of thinking which is what's the perfect, perfect, ultimate thing, which, which expands the scope indefinitely to some totally different thing entirely.
[00:11:37] Speaker B: Absolutely, yeah.
[00:11:39] Speaker A: You know.
[00:11:40] Speaker B: Right, right.
And one thing I was also thinking, when I do, I work more and most of my work is deadlines, I create for myself, there's like no one putting a gun to my head and saying, oh, you'll lose your job if you don't do this, right? I create these deadlines for myself, and then I get all bent out of shape. I'm not meeting the deadline, and then I work a lot to meet the deadline.
Is the question I keep asking myself is why?
Why did you take this up and begin with? Right, let's take.
I'm writing a series on the Ramayana, and I say in my substack, okay, there will be a new chapter every Thursday and every Sunday.
Write two chapters a week. And when I first started, it seemed a reasonable deadline because I wrote a lot of it and then I started publishing, right? But now most of the initial chapters are gone and I have to reset and write. And the deadline feels very all consuming.
And then I realized, why did I take it up to begin with? And I really had to go into the very deep psychological reality reasons for me doing what I'm doing.
Why am I doing this? Why am I. What is this pattern that I'm doing this to myself?
[00:13:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
So what did you learn from thinking about that?
[00:13:25] Speaker B: It's still a work in progress.
The pattern I feel is there's certain flow states, right? I mean, what I've come to discover is that there are two different things.
One is overwork and one is a flow state.
So if I'm overworked, then I am. Let's say I'm stressed, I'm anxious, I'm feeling guilty, I'm not producing the chapters and all of that is going on. I'm in the flow state. Means I'm energized. I'm doing the same amount of work. Let's say I'm writing eight hours a day, right?
Eight hours a day here in the flow state feels like I feel energized. I really feel in the flow. I feel things are joyful and lovely and things are moving. And I'm able to write about these things, and I'm able to get new insights into the characters. This, that, right? All of this is happening the same. Eight hours here feels very different.
Feels like I'm feeling guilty.
I'm not meeting the deadline, I'm totally stressed and this and that.
So I've differentiated between the two.
So for me, it's not just I'm overworking.
It's not just I'm working a certain amount of hours.
Where I am while I'm working those hours, that feels very important to me. That's the only thing I've been able to really clearly state for myself so far, so I don't really have an answer for you.
[00:15:11] Speaker A: It's a very, very deep thing. Yeah, I mean, I love the flow state. I try and live my life around having a continuous flow state as best I can because I really value that and a lot.
But there's a big difference between the flow state and the stress state. They're totally different things. And one is highly creative and fun and energizing and inspiring and seems to lead to good outcomes as well.
And the other one is sort of disturbing, stressed out, forceful, irritated, unpleasant. I mean, what I've personally found is that the flow state after a certain amount of time can turn into the stress state if there's no breaks.
You know, the flow state, I could probably maintain flow state for up to four hours, but I can't. But beyond that, it's gonna. If I don't take a break and refresh, it's going to turn into the other one. And then it becomes obsessive, nasty state, which I don't like at all. And it doesn't produce good work and I don't enjoy it. This isn't easy to do because this breaks the flow state, right, Is to have a timer. I have multiple different apps that I use. The main one I've got, I think it's called. It's just called timer. It's on my computer and I set it for 25 minutes or 50 minutes, whatever. And when it goes off, it's really hard to be perfectly honest, sometimes to stop because I'm like, I'm in the zone.
But if I stop and I play some music or I lie down, or I go outside and go in the sun, have some water, eat something, it's in that space there is a bigger awareness. I can do meditation. I can remember I'm a spiritual being. I can remember why I'm doing these things.
And then it actually is refreshing. And then I come back into the flow state afterwards. But if I don't do that at a certain point, it goes from inspired to obsessive or just stressed.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: Stressed?
Yeah, just stressed. Totally stressed. You know, one thing I feel to understand the personality of the self also, we are all very different personalities.
You know, some people, right. I know a lot of people who are just easy.
Life is easy, right?
Do a little bit today and then the good and all of that. I'm not like that.
I'm super organized and I'm super, you know, achieving. And like, I was always like that growing up. I was always like that. Right. It's not like something I manufactured now. And I'm doing this.
And I feel I need to honor that part of myself, too.
Right. I don't want to put myself down for being who I am.
If that is who I am, then that's who I am. Right. I'm not going to see, like, someone, like so many people I know, they're just very easy, calm, go to their job, do this, that.
Not much. You know, they don't want to do anything outside of whatever they're doing. And I'm really happy for them.
I'm very, very happy for them.
But that's not me.
And I need to honor that. Right. And so while honoring who we are, like, let's take you.
You are a creative person.
You can't just switch that off.
That would be such punishment.
You are a creative person.
Right. You want to create. That's who you are. You.
[00:19:03] Speaker A: And it needs to come through.
[00:19:06] Speaker B: It needs to come through. And I feel when we are looking at these things, honestly, we have to look at that also look at our personality and honor that part of who we are.
[00:19:20] Speaker A: Absolutely. It's very true. We're not trying to say, let's not do anything anymore, because this potentially can be a problem for us.
Because then we wouldn't be happy, like, if we said, that's it, no more work. We're just going to sit around and not do anything all day long. That wouldn't work either.
I'm just. All I'm going to do today is make some food and go for a walk and nothing else at all. That.
I mean, it might be helpful at certain points to do, not very much, but if there's an inspiration and there is a certain gift, they should be respected and appreciated. I think the issue is when it. When it becomes an identity and it gets out of hand and it starts leading to this stress zone.
Because the stress zone isn't really using our gifts properly and it doesn't produce quality work, and it's personally disturbing. So that's the issue.
[00:20:13] Speaker B: I think, also, Michael, I don't think the example of making food and going for a walk is the right example for us for you and for me. I don't think it's the right example.
The right example, I feel, would be creating for four hours versus creating for 16 hours.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:38] Speaker B: And so.
And also in the four hours, am I taking breaks? Right. So that's the example. What do you feel like that. That's. For me, maybe I can't talk for you, that's for me.
I could write. The other day I wrote for 13 hours. Right, right.
And when I told Moini Didi this, she said, what are you not doing any service? What are you doing writing 13 hours a day?
So that's it. But I was in the flow state. But maybe in the 11th hour, 12th, 13th hour, I was really tired, but I was like, no, no, no, I need to get this done, I need to get this done. Right.
So an extreme case would be I'm writing 13 hours or I'm writing six hours.
It's not just I'm cooking food and going for a walk. I mean, even if someone puts a gun to my head, I can't do that with my life.
I need to do something.
It can't be the extremes. The extreme can't be, oh, I'm cooking food and going for a walk today.
[00:21:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:48] Speaker B: You know what I mean?
[00:21:49] Speaker A: Yeah, it's, it's.
What I'm personally trying to do is to.
There's a few things.
First thing is to understand what is essential and what is extra.
Because I'm more attracted to the extra things and I don't really want to do the essential things if I'm honest. Right. I like, I like creative things that are somewhat for their own sake.
Like, I like.
[00:22:27] Speaker B: Wow. A true artist is wonderful.
I know it is a little wonderful.
[00:22:33] Speaker A: Like the Greek.
[00:22:34] Speaker B: It doesn't put food on the table, but it is wonderful.
[00:22:37] Speaker A: The Greeks have this term noble leisure. The whole. They say the point of work is to do noble leisure, and that's the point of life.
And their view of noble leisure is meaningful pursuits where you're discovering something about yourself, philosophy, learning, thinking about stuff, you know, like debates and creating things of value that aren't your work.
But they're like.
So I would prefer not to do any work and just only do noble leisure. And that's mostly why I actually do. I spend most of my time in noble leisure, which is a form of like creative work. It turns out some of the noble leisure I create is actually the best stuff that I could be doing, is most useful for the world, actually.
But they're separate things.
And so what I'm personally trying to do is to figure out what these things are. So I know the difference and then sit with my journal in the morning and do basically a two way prayer, which is, that's what it's called technically, but it's just asking God for guidance. So what do you want me to do today? So I'm not just doing whatever I Feel like I'm thinking, how can I be of the greatest service to the world?
What is the highest use of my time?
And what normally comes through in my journal, to be perfectly honest, is have more meditation.
So I'm sitting there thinking, what do you want me to do today?
All right.
And it's like, have four hours meditation, like, what are you doing? You know, and, and then do these three things and stop.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: Blessings on your head. May you have four hours.
[00:24:31] Speaker A: So I'm like, okay, it's not as
[00:24:33] Speaker B: easy as, you know, but it's up to me. But yes, if I listen to what
[00:24:38] Speaker A: God wants me to do, he wants me to work less and have more meditation and do other things. But the part of me that likes to create things has its own idea. So I've come to the point where I've got now got these. I have what I feel is being divinely inspired to the best of my ability.
Then I've come had to come up with a second page because journal has two pages right on the left hand side. Now I've written what not to do because it turns out that all the things that I'm doing that are not those things are the biggest problem that I actually have.
So for example, if on my list it says do atmo meditation work on this project and this project and take breaks and go for a walk and call someone up or whatever it is, right? And that's it. It's a nice simple day, nice clear plan. I mean, these are high level things.
But if I'm doing all these other things like working on this other project and working on this fun thing and doing this, then I'm not going to do at the end of the day. And this is what I've noticed at the end of the day, I look at the list and I go, what did I actually do today compared to what I said I was going to do? And it turns out I ended up doing all these random other things.
So I've now had to write a not to do list.
And one of my favorite quotes is from Wyatt Woodsmore, which I've always remembered this because I think I need to hear this again and again.
It's what you're doing when you're not doing what you need to be doing that's the problem.
And he interviewed all these top CEOs and top people in the world and pretty much all of them said the main thing is the main thing is the main thing. Like I only do the main thing and everything else is totally cancelled and they only Ever do the main thing again and again and again.
So that's those things on the right hand side. But the other stuff is all very attractive to do.
In my case, it might be various projects, but in many people's lives it might be randomly watching social media videos and nonsense and checking out this and having whatever, whatever.
So, so, so doing the highest level things and taking breaks and I feel really good when I, when I take breaks and I have a much, much better life, right? Do better work and I'm more of service and I feel happier and, and for me, AI has become a serious problem because I don't know, the time is gone with AI. So it's one of those things where it's not really a, a flow state.
It's. It's pseudo flow state which I consider more of a hypnotic state because it's technologically powerful thing that goes around and there's multiple versions of it.
So how do you manage these things? What's your thoughts on this?
[00:27:33] Speaker B: I like what you're saying about taking a break. You know what we call traffic control, where you just stop, right? Not only you just stop, but also to put a full stop to your thoughts, right? Put a full stop.
One of the things when I heard that the first time I heard, or maybe 10 years later whenever I heard, when I actually heard it, oh, you need to put a full stop in a second. And I was like, how is that possible? Full stop in a second.
And then I went and did some research and it is possible because the brain has amazing capacity to shift attention in a fraction of a second, right?
So there's a lot of research on cognitive psychology on this that you can shift your attention in a fraction of a second and your attention is not fixed. It's not something that is just fixed. And the problem is not even that you are obsessing about something that you're not able to shift your attention. The problem is you keep coming back to something over and over again, right? You keep coming back to it. So let's say you're doing obsessive work. It's not like you can't put a full stop. You can because it's not like, you know, the Brahma Kumari's the Supreme Soul Baba is saying that put a full stop in a second is something not possible for you to do. It is possible for you to do.
But we keep going back to something previous, right? We keep going back to that obsessive samskara. We have. We keep going back and I feel to break that and Just put a full stop.
Put a full stop.
And the other thing I feel is when people hear a full stop, because this is what happened to me. When people hear a full stop, they think that it's a full stop into nothing. But it's just shifting your attention to something spiritual.
Right. I am a peaceful soul. I'm a pure soul. That's all that full stop needs to be.
[00:29:52] Speaker A: Yeah. So just put a full stop. Put a period. You know, it's like the end of the sentence. So I've been doing this, this, and this and this. Now I put a. It's like saying, that's it.
The end of the chapter type of thing, you know, for now.
And if we don't do that, then it can go on and on. And I know many, many people who, once they get going, it just goes on and then they collapse at the end of the day, basically.
So this is an opportunity to have a forced break. In some of these meditation centers, they have a sound system that goes on every hour, and they plays a little meditation song of some kind.
And everyone stops and takes a moment. Silence, or a minute silence or even a few minutes in the middle of. I've been. Yeah.
[00:30:48] Speaker B: To surrender to it. Right.
Like, if you put a timer every hour to surrender to that stop, like, surrender yourself to the stop. Like, don't think, snooze, and then keep working. Like, you have to really surrender to it.
[00:31:03] Speaker A: It's been a very interesting experience being in these places where, like, there's all sorts of activities happening. People eating or cleaning or doing something or having a class or something.
And right in the middle, so it's all happening. Everyone's kind of in the flow, doing stuff. And then all of a sudden, the sound goes off and everyone just almost immediately, within a few seconds, just stops completely.
And it's like, can I pack everything up and go beyond right now, or is my mind still in the thing I was just doing?
It's easier to do it in a situation like that where everyone stops, because if you carry on, it's pretty obvious, right? Because everyone else has stopped.
If you're having a conversation with somebody and everyone's quiet except for you, it's like, come on.
But when we're on our own and there's no one around, then no one's there. There's no peer pressure. Just make us stop. So we have to do it ourselves.
And so it's a little bit more difficult. But it's the same practice internally, though.
[00:32:17] Speaker B: It's the same thing, is to surrender to really surrender to it, you have to mentally be ready, willing to surrender to that break.
[00:32:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:32:33] Speaker B: Like you just have to mentally accept, okay, I'm going to surrender to this because this is for my benefit.
It's not here to annoy me and to irritate me and do this or that. It's here for my benefit. I'm really surrendering to it.
[00:32:48] Speaker A: It's a wonderful thing to say.
Whatever I've been doing, whatever's happened, I'm pausing there, I'm stopping that right now and I'm expanding out into an eternal view of things.
So in the scheme of things, it's like if we go beyond the world and we go beyond time and you imagine looking at your life far, far away, thousands of years in the past, it's a bit like that. It's coming into a bigger awareness.
So me, me, me, I need to finish this thing. It's so important to. No, it doesn't matter at all. Because there's this much more important thing.
There's a much bigger scale that is worth being aware of.
I'm aware I'm a spiritual being, remember God, Become aware of the larger reality and then come back into it with that awareness. So that something that seemed like a big deal or really important now is a bit more light.
Oh, it doesn't really matter that much.
Yeah, this is a hugely important practice. So what we're suggesting, and this is what we try and do as much as possible we can, is you can either set a timer on your phone, there's various apps that do things like this. You can have a timer on your computer, you can set up a sound system in your house if you want to really go for it. It has plays sounds at certain times.
[00:34:17] Speaker B: And also there are apps, Brahma Kumari's traffic control apps on both Apple and Android.
And you can, it's a 15 second timer on the hour it goes off.
[00:34:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I've actually created an app myself that's once it's working properly, will do exactly the same thing but has other stuff on it, it's even better. So, but it's like it has to work, obviously you have to notice it.
So when it goes off, then we stop. Even if we're in the middle of the flow state. The difficulty is that anyone who's in that likes the flow state and likes their work a lot.
It can feel like, oh, but I'm in the zone, I'm in the flow, I don't want to stop, I'll lose the flow.
And so we have to say, it doesn't matter if I'm in the flow state, I'm stopping anyway
[00:35:10] Speaker B: and stop eventually ultimately. Right. That will be more beneficial. That's what you have to accept.
If you don't accept it's for my benefit, then it's very hard to convince ourselves to do it.
[00:35:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
What I find helpful because I have plenty of experience doing it and not doing it is that I can get back into the flow state and my work is better afterwards. So it genuinely is better to do the break, like without question, 100%.
So there's a little resistance. I don't want to stop right now.
And we say, okay, fine, and then put a full stuff anyway and zoom out 5 minutes, 2 minutes, 1 minute, 30 seconds.
And then get back into it.
I mean, it's actually been recommended to stop every hour for five minutes or even 10 minutes, which I have not been able to do for 10 minutes. I've managed maybe five minutes.
Fairly often in the hour. But if you really want to go for it, that's the more advanced version. But let's start with one minute. Start with one minute.
One minute an hour or one minute every other hour, Whatever it is. Right. You can decide what the break's going to be.
So there we have it. Should we do our managed to stop, get some space and still get things done with ease and grace. So hopefully this has been helpful. Try it out if you do it. My personal experience is this is that I have much better day. I feel much happier and my work is better. So it's win, win, win across every level.
And I'm sure you'll find that you can set a timer. You can set a timer, you can computer on your phone, you can get these different apps. There's so many ways of doing it.
So let's close with a blessing. Shireen, what is our blessing today?
[00:37:27] Speaker B: This is God's blessing for you. Accuracy.
No matter the situation, you've honed your ability to understand which path to take, when to start and when to finish.
Your intuition is so finely tuned that it can sense hidden dangers.
You are never scared to make a fresh start.
[00:38:04] Speaker A: That's beautiful. Each little break is is a fresh start, isn't really is start getting fresh, go beyond and come back.
So hopefully this has been helpful. Thank you for your wonderful presence. Thank you, Shireen. And have a beautiful week, everybody. And we will connect with you in the next episode.
Lots of.
