Speaking and Communicating Podcast

29:23
In other words, you're gonna have to cycle through things to see what makes those energy deposits within you and what really works for you as opposed to what may work for somebody else. So you don't wanna just have somebody get up there and say, you must pet five puppies a month to never be burned out because that may work for somebody, but it may not for somebody else. Or like me, you must.
29:49
sit there for 15 minutes every day and notice the air passing your nostrils as you meditate. And I'm like, I never noticed that. I can't figure that one out. So we say that it's really important to try different methods, see what sticks, but we always begin with the same thing. And the first step is always what we call self-compassion or building your own personal emotional intelligence. And that is...
30:17
we're so used to in all our jobs and all our lives, it's not just on the job, it's at home with the kids or the spouse or the dog or whatever. You're always focusing your energies and your attention on everybody else to the point that if you start thinking about yourself, sometimes you even feel guilty and you're just like, oh, I shouldn't be caring for myself, I should be caring for everybody else. But the first step really is to periodically
30:44
Think about yourself, spend a little time. Where am I? Am I good? Am I feeling good? Am I feeling run down? Am I feeling happy, sad? What makes me happy, sad? What brings me joy? What brings me pleasure? What is dragging me down? What are the things in the day that I dread? What are the things that I look forward to? How am I on the overall scale? We believe you have to grant yourself permission to do that without guilt.
31:13
to get a handle on where you are and what you need. And then the next step is to grant yourself permission to do it, to do the things that you recognize. Even more important, yeah. And you don't have to become a raging narcissist where that's all you do, but you have to periodically take into account what you need and where you are and what you could be doing for yourself. So we have literally,
31:42
50, 60, 70 different types of strategies that you could try and just see. But one of the big hitters that, I'll give you two quick big hitters, and I'll shut up. Let's go ahead. One is the idea of harvesting uplifts. And I know in medicine for sure, but I guarantee it occurs everywhere else, that we spend much of our day looking for what could go wrong, anticipating what could go wrong, because we wanna head it off at the pass.
32:11
or we assume something's gonna go wrong. You're just waiting for the boot to drop. But we've trained it, talk about what we were talking about at the beginning, where we kind of train our brains in different ways. Well, we've all trained our brains to look for bad things. And again, it's very true in medicine because you're always on the search for something terrible. But what that means is we've stopped noticing good things. And what we talk about is forcing ourselves
32:40
every day for a few weeks, two to three weeks, to write down maybe four, five, six good things that happened during the day. It could just be somebody smiled at us. It could be somebody thanked us for something. It could be that you heard a song that you hadn't heard since high school and it put a smile on your face. But write them down, these uplifts that you hit today.
33:07
bring them home that evening, hopefully just before you go to sleep even, read through them and say, you know, kind of cool things happened today. This happened, this happened, this happened. And there's good psychological evidence that you do this for a couple of weeks or so and your brain will start seeking it out itself. You no longer have to remind yourself. Your brain will just start noticing highlights during the day, which is gonna make you feel better. So.
33:36
That's a big one. Another big one is something that we all do, particularly as we get into our 30s and 40s, is we start cutting off our relationships with a lot of people who we care about, people that have been important in our lives, who we enjoy, who bring us joy, who bring us fascination and interest. You can plot it on a graph for almost everybody and you just see the amount and...
34:05
the number of people you stay connected with and the amount that you connect with them, you can watch those deteriorate. And this correlates very strongly with your propensity to burn out. It actually also correlates with dementia eventually as you get older. The more you isolate yourself, the more likely you will end up with dementia later on. And so it's really important to...
34:33
think about the people that you care about and to make an effort periodically to stay connected. It doesn't have to be spend 10 hours a week with them. You know, I have some of my best friends from med school I'll see every six years and that's just not right. We should do better than that. And it would be healthy for us if we did. Keeping your brain active with connection, relationships, learning new things, being curious.
35:02
will then reduce dementia possibilities? Yeah, it's obviously not gonna make you completely immune, but it is, you know, those who stay very active intellectually, but also behaviorally, meaning, you know, with relationships. If you look at it across big populations, less risk of dementia. So, it works both on the burnout level, but, you know, eventually.
35:28
on keeping your brain as fresh and healthy as it can be. Right. Dr. Simmons, is there something I didn't ask you that you were hoping to share with our listeners today? Oh my gosh, no, you've emptied my brain of everything I ever know. I gotta go study some new stuff. Oh my God. No, it's, yeah, you're hitting on some of the stuff I deeply care about and wanna get the message out. And again, I think in that burnout sphere,
35:58
that idea of don't think that you can read a poem, it's all done, or look at, you know, go to one lecture. I think it's really important to figure out how you're going to remind yourself to take care of yourself. You know, again, in books like ours, we give, you know, we give all these suggestions. You can go online and to a million burnout sites, and they'll give very similar suggestions and whatever it takes. I'm old school, so...
36:24
I don't use my phone for these sort of things, but you know, if you, if you put a post-it note up on your mirror, that just says, you know, smile when you talk on the telephone, it's amazing what that can do to kind of approach it that way. Realize it's something that you got to hit with frequency and keep looking for the things that work best for you. Right. Words of wisdom from Dr. Gary Simmons, the neurosurgeon and professor at Virginia Tech.
36:54
This has been very educational. Thank you so much for being on our show today. Oh, it's truly my delight. This is excellent. Thank you so much. My absolute pleasure. And before you go, where can we find you on the web? I do have my own website. It's basically myname.com. So it's Gary, G-A-R-Y-R, spelled like Simon's. So it's S-I-M-O-N-D-S. So garyrsimons.com.
37:23
and it's easy to find. Oh, it's Simons. I've been saying Simons. I'm sorry about that. No, it is Simons. It is Simons. But when people ask me, you know, how do I spell it? I say, spell it like Simons. Okay. Otherwise I want to spell S-I-M-M-O-N-S or something like that. But it's Simons. Yeah, it's double M. That's right. So I will put that on the show notes. Thank you so much, Dr. Gary. Oh my goodness. It is my delight. Excellent stuff. My pleasure as well.
37:52
Thank you for joining the Speaking and Communicating podcast once again. The Speaking and Communicating podcast is part of the Be Podcast Network, where there are many other podcasts that support you in being a better leader and becoming the change you want to see. To learn more about the Be Podcast Network, go to BePo Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify, and stay tuned.
38:21
for more episodes to come.