Fixing Stress and Burnout with Victoria Mensch, Part 1

In today’s episode, Dan is joined by Victoria Mensch, a pioneer in organizational psychology who specializes in turning burnout into genuine well-being.

We will talk about one of the most persistent myths in business: the idea that success guarantees happiness. You will find new perspectives on the general lack of fulfillment and how to overcome that.

This is a conversation you won't want to miss, especially if you're ready to rethink what success truly means.

Show Highlights:

How often are successful people happy? [03:25]
Learn how flourishing is multidimensional [07:05]
Is happiness a state or an action? [09:14]
Why is burnout considered a threat to productivity? [10:16]
Learn to understand how you react to stress [13:07]
How our survival mechanism is useful? [14:02]
These stress management techniques can help [16:33]
Learn how the mind and body work together [23:34]

For more updates and my weekly newsletter, hop over to https://betterquestions.co/.

To learn more about Victoria Mensch, check out the below websites:
https://svexecutive.academy
https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoria-mensch/

Transcript:

0:10 All right, hello and welcome to this episode of the Dan Barrett podcast. And this is the titular Dan Barrett. How are you? I hope you are having a wonderful week. I will be honest. This week I have been quite sick. I don't know if you can hear that in my voice. I am struggling through some truly body wrecking coughs and some fever and some shakes and all the rest of it, but I was super excited to come in today. Actually came in to do this interview with my guest, Victoria mensch. Now Victoria, who you can find on LinkedIn by looking up Victoria mensch, which is spelled M, E, N, S, C, H, just go find her on there. Connect with her. Is she is a truly fascinating individual. She's got extensive background in psychology, in business, in Organizational Psychology, and today she works with a company called Silicon Valley executive Academy, where she is helping companies both their leaders and their organizations as a whole, deal with burnout, and not just deal with burnout in the sense of coping with stress, but getting past burnout into a place where you can actually start to aim at long term health and wellness and happiness. And I think a lot of people in Victoria's space, they don't use the word happiness. It maybe it feels I don't know. Maybe it feels ambiguous, it feels soft. But Victoria is a very deep thinker, and she's done a lot of work to understand exactly what that means and also how we can start to access happiness through interacting with our nervous system and the environments around us, the people that we work with. She's got so much interesting information to share. I cannot wait for you to hear this interview with Victoria Mensch from the Silicon Valley executive Academy. All right, what's up, everybody? This is Daniel Barrett, and I am here with Victoria mensch. Victoria, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

2:27 Thank you very much, Dan. I'm really happy to be here. Well, I was excited. We were just talking before we started recording, and I was talking about how this is one of those interviews where it's, it's like, when I reach out to people, sometimes I'm like, Oh my You know, my audience will be really interested in this. And sometimes I'm like, I selfishly want to talk to someone, and you're like, straddling both camps. I think it's going to be really interesting. So for people who don't know you or don't know your work, how would you describe what you do? Very interesting, tough question sometimes, right? It is, you know, I should know that, right? So I should actually have it at the top of my phone. I usually say that I'm an expert in success and happiness, so I basically help successful people feel happy. Successful people feel happy. Okay, so I have an immediate follow up question to that, which maybe you know, maybe you don't, but how often are successful people happy? Do you know what I'm saying? Well, not often enough, enough that necessitates someone to help them. So, I mean, let's, let's dig into that like, well, let me ask maybe that question a slightly different way, which is, I think a lot of people assume that becoming successful will make them happy. Have you found that to actually be the case? This is the greatest

3:52 myth, and I think that's that's why we are in a situation where we are this is the greatest myth that success brings happiness. There's so much research out there. It's proven. It's on the in the brain research, in the psychology research, that's actually not the case. So when, but we live like this, right? So we build our lifestyles like this. We we make our decisions like this. So once I hit that next milestone, once I get admitted to that college, once I get that promotion, once I buy that house, then I'll be happy. So you continuously postponing that sense of enjoyment and fulfillment until the next achievement. But even psychologically, it doesn't work that way. So this is not how we're built. It's not how our emotional system is built. That achievement, the success that milestone does bring kind of a very fleeting moment of happiness, only to bring you back to wanting more the next moment. So yes, so that's the greatest need, that success brings happiness. But if you look at the research that has been. Done. It's, you know, the correlation is almost reversed. You know, happy people are more successful than successful people are happy. That's one side of it, and the second side of it. What brings you the fulfillment and happiness is really a journey of getting there to that success, not necessarily that last kind of check mark, and that the sort

5:20 of reverse correlation thing they mentioned is really interesting. I want to make sure to come back to it. But, I mean, I wanted to, you know, I had mentioned, kind of, before we started recording. I was just at this seminar. It was like 1500 business owners there, and there's people with, like, you know, it's kind of place where, like, I'm there and just, you know, you're supposed to wear a suit, and I don't even know how to wear a tie. And you know, I had to have someone tie my tie for me. Is this, like, is that my typical room? And then there's people who are like, Oh, I just sold my company for a billion dollars. And, you know, so, like, very high level people, right? And I heard multiple people tell a story that was very the arc of the story that they told was I just achieved some huge milestone, goal or whatever, and then immediately after, I became depressed, right? And so do you one, do you see that a lot? And two, why do you think that that is,

6:17 I see this a lot. I see this a lot. And it's ironic, right? So we're building our careers, especially, I mean, it takes time to build a career to get to those achievements. So you're kind of driven by that, and then you get there, and you look around this, is it? What else is out there? So the interesting part, what I get to to understand and to explain to people again, first of all, that feeling of happiness, that we are our fulfillment. You know, it's even bigger than that. So I like to talk about fulfillment and well being right? So that flourishing, let's say the sense of flourishing, that sense of flourishing, first of all, it comes from different parts. It's not just, you know, your job, it's not just finances, it's it. This is really kind of a multi dimensional, multi dimensional, what's the work for it? I don't know. State. So it has all these different parts that come to that that play together in harmony to bring in that sense of fulfillment. And the second part will be touched on is that, that that feel, that feeling of happiness, is actually not, not in the, not a finished state, right? So it's very fleeting. So I think the the biggest tribulation for me was that the happiness is a practice. So it's not something that you get automatically with success. It's not something that you get automatically once you close that page or open a different page, and what have you, it is actually a practice that's something that you you put out there, and you make those decisions almost every day to be happy. Wow.

7:53 Okay, so that's really cool. I never really heard that or thought about that, that way, that like you're saying, like, we think happiness is a state you're in, but in actuality, it's a practice that you are constantly embodying. Okay, I want to come back to that. Let me ask you. So today you, you, you run a company called Silicon Valley executive Academy. Is that correct? Okay, yeah. So you're working with business owners, you're working with entrepreneurs, you're working with people in tech. You're working with all kinds of people. Of course, you have a PhD, your backgrounds in psychology. You do Organizational Psychology, like you are a pretty rational, like you have the academic background, right? Like you're not someone who's like, I just have good vibes, man, and like, whatever, right? So I am curious, like, for your clientele, I'm curious how open they are even to the idea of happiness, right? Like it's I understand depression, I understand suffering, right? But I think a lot of people, particularly in business and in tech or whatever these they tend to kind of be like, Yeah, well, that stuff's like, the soft stuff, that's the fluffy stuff, and they kind of tend to ignore it, often to their own detriment, right? So have you found that when you talk about, so, for example, happiness as a practice, or you talk about, hey, it's not a state, it's a thing that you're doing. Are people open to that idea? Do? Does it take a lot of time to like, get them to come around to it. How do people react to that?

9:22 A lot of conversation openers in my field, really start with the burnout, I think, and it's a very positive development. I think that we have an understanding of what burnout is now, so we actually can recognize that state in ourselves and then people around us. So I think that's probably the greatest advancement of mindfulness and, you know, mental health kind of industry in the last decade or so. So that's a recognizable kind of state, and you can recognize it in yourself, and you understand that it actually makes me less productive. It makes efficient. And regardless of the happiness factor in that, right? So you just want to get out of pain of the burnout. And even on the corporate level, on the company level, in the team, burnout is actually also recognized that a big threat to a productiveness of the organization, to the health of a culture, culturally health of the organization, and it's even been measured in terms of monetary damage that burnout brings to the company. When you get an unmotivated workforce, tired workforce, people who are going in and out of the company. So the retention is the big issue. That's where companies lose money as well. So a lot of conversations that I am having with our clients really start bears, like I feel that I'm in burnout, or I feel that my team is not as effective as it can be, that, you know, the people are burned out. And that's always heard the conversation. And inevitably, we'll start talking about, okay, well, you don't want to be in the burnout. Where do you want to be? So that will actually bring the conversation of, you know, the sense of flourishing and fulfillment and happiness?

11:12 Yeah, I think maybe it's easier for people. You can tell when you're losing something, right? I've lost a step. I feel more stressed out, like I feel worse than I used to. Maybe that's easier than being like, well, there might be something on the other side of that that's better than I've ever experienced, but I don't know what that is. Yeah, it's just kind of hard to imagine. Let's, let's stick with burnout for a minute. I mean, how do you how could someone tell if they are burned out? Right? Because obviously, we have moments of stress that are totally normal, right? Sometimes things get chaotic, but burnout seems different than that. So how can someone tell if they're being burned out or if they are burned out? Yeah,

11:51 so the definition of burnout is a chronic stress reaction. So there are some elements that are common between people, and there are elements that are individual, because we experience stress individually. So the common thread in the burnout is usually a sense of exhaustion. I'm exhausted. I'm tired, and no amount of rest, you know, can can bring me back to my energized state. So if you are in that, like if you feel tired almost quickly. You feel exhausted in and out right? You want to take that break. You want to take that risk. But no matter how much rest you take, you still feel tired. That's a pretty good sign that you might be in a burnout. And then there are individual, kind of very personalized symptoms that you might experience, especially on the behavioral level. So it really depends on how you how your system, your nervous system, reacts to stress. But it could be changes in appetite, for example. So some people would lose appetite. Some people would, you know, start create things, and, yeah, or it could be, you know, it could be changes in sleep patterns. So some people would sleep a lot, and some people would lose sleep. So it's, it makes sense to kind of know yourself a little bit better and understand how you react to stress, and if you experience that day in and day out, if it's just once, you know, once a month you feel overwhelmed and tired and not wanting to eat, that's one thing. If this is a consistent pattern, and then it's, you know, they it's a good chance that, you know, you are in that burnout state.

13:26 So what's what's happening on the nervous system level? Is it like, Hey, we're getting cortisol, and we're getting stressed hormones all the time, and so we're just, we're pumping that all into our body, and then we get used to it and where it's just hanging out all the time, like, what's happening on the physical level there? Yes. So we have two nervous systems, right? Two, parasympathetic and parasympathetic. Or, you know, we can call them fight or flight response or rest and digest response, but your fight or flight response is your survival mechanism. It's very useful. So I don't want people to think like, oh, I don't want to be in that mode. It's very useful. That's how we survive. This is because we react to life threatening situations. We have this our whole body mobilizes around just one purpose to react to a threat from an external environment, and in that moment, you know, all other systems shut down, your adrenaline shuts up where your cortisol shuts up every other system. You don't need to digest anything. You don't need to rest. You don't need your endocrine system, nothing. You just need to your very specific response, and that response usually needs to to finish with some kind of an action. So you make a decision and you act on it. You either go into a fight or flee the scene, right? So that's how the survival system works. And it's a very old system. It's a pre verbal system. What it means is that you cannot talk to it. It just gets activated, right? It does not understand words, so you cannot tell yourself, oh, just relax. Right? No, the system is activated and it goes its own. Way. So what happens now that we have so many different stimulus from the external environment? None of them, most of them, are not really life threatening, but our, you know, our survival brain keeps assigning this meaning, the survival meaning, the threat meaning, to that, and keeps, you know, activating that survival response.

That response gets accumulated, actually, doesn't really end with an action, right? So, because sometimes, like we are really worried about systems, you know, outside of our control completely, like wildfires in in Australia, right? So if you're not in Australia, it probably doesn't, you know, doesn't really matter to you, but your brain still reacts that way. So so that stress cycle never gets completed, and it keeps accumulating and accumulating and becomes chronic. So that's how you get that burnout, right? So you're really overactive, survival, survival, nervous system that never gets complete that stress reaction. So your body is always in that modelized mode. So everything is really going into over chart, and you're burning really your system over time. So that's how it works, and it's important to understand, I think, especially for people with kind of a more logical brain that again, as I said, it's a preferable system. So you can't just talk to it, but it has the language. Though, once we learn that language, we can actually communicate with that system. So understand the language of breath. It understands of language of images, and understands the language of action. So these are your stress management techniques. That's how you can send the signal to survival. You know, survival neuro system that fight or flight response, that the the threat has passed, you can relax, you can turn off and you can turn on the rest and digest system, all

16:46 right. So I definitely want to come back to that, the breath and the images and the action, but I want to take a minute so you said that to kind of go back to your Australian wildfires example, which really kind of piqued my interest. You essentially said you get alerted that there are wildfires in Australia, right? And however, you're not actually there. And so there's never an end, like you get alerted about it, and then there's never an end to it. And so there's some kind of cycle of finishing that does, it never completes, right? And so is the primary, maybe not the primary issue, but is our kind of inform, the way we take in information, which is often these kind of open loops. It's ambiguous. It's, I got an email from a friend. He says, We need to talk. It's like, well, what does that mean, you know, and it's, is that environment sort of driving this sort of increased level of stress for everyone, where maybe if I was just living on a farm in the middle of North Dakota and I never saw anybody be very different. Is like our information diet a primary driver of this kind of long term

17:54 I don't think I have an answer. I can tell you that just recently, I read a study about that, you know, kind of mechanism and what we assigned at the threat level for us. And a very interesting study at the end, the conclusion was that in the lack of this threat from the outside environment, we are starting to assign that stress, you know, threat, meaning to non threatening stimulus. So, so it's almost like, and not giving it as a final answer, but giving us one can put a put the thought. So one of the thing is that that survival system needs to have a work to do, right? So we don't have, like, real life threatening situations. It will find the threat in the environment, and it will get activated unless we actually learn to manage and control and kind of talk to in its own language. So like, once a quarter, I have to go bungee jumping, and that will clean it out. And well, that helps. So for a lot of people, that helps, you know, not for me, but for somebody else. I've been trying to do, like, indoor rock climbing and my cycle with my sons, and they're like, all the way the top, and I'll get, like, halfway, and I'm like, I'm fine here. I could go back down now, yeah,

19:15 is there easier ways to manage this? And you can manage it in the moment. You don't need to wait until the end of the quarter and go, you know, jump with the parachute. But there are easier ways, right? So there Stress management techniques. I call them a first aid. It's kind of like a band aid, you know, for burnout and you know, it's like breath work. Is one of those, you know, visualization techniques when you're actually imagining yourself in this serene and calm environment, in the kind of safe space, and that calms down the system. When I say, you know the action or activity, it doesn't mean that you have to, you know, run a marathon, right? It has it can be very simple. You clench and you relax your muscles. So that sends a signal to that system as well, a signal that understands that the danger has passed, right? So I can relax now. I can let. Other things take control. So yes,

20:03 so let's, let's touch on the the breathing, the images and the action. So there's certain ways we can kind of speak to this pre verbal system, and that definitely resonates with a lot of like last year, particularly, I went really down the rabbit hole on psychoanalysis, into hypnosis, into, like, everything, where I was, like, there's an unconscious because I think, like, prior to that, I probably would have said, I don't, I don't believe in an unconscious mind. But, like, I think a lot of that sort of early theorization lines up with these ideas of, you know, the self is composed of these very different cognitive mechanisms, some of which seem to integrate language and some don't, right? So, like you said, you I don't, I can't talk myself out of blinking, and I can't decide to hold my breath forever. I just won't, you know, you can't, right? There's only so much control you have over those sort of evolutionarily, sort of proceed, you know, predecessor systems, so breathing and images and actions. So let's start with breathing. Obviously, there's a lot of breathing techniques that people kind of say or do there. There's a lot of historical breathing techniques and things like yoga and all that stuff. So like for you, when you think, when you think about breathing now, and the way that it interfaces with, you know, maybe like the parasympathetic nervous system. What's that kind of modern day state of the art, understanding of how that stuff works and how we can use it,

21:33 right? So there's some elaborate breath work techniques out there for a lot of different purposes, a lot of different reasons. The ones that I'm talking about is really simple. So and even simple ones are just a variety of those, right? I don't know if you've heard about wind pump, you know, techniques. And the one that I really like, yeah, yes, yeah. I thought, I thought you said, mine have. And I was like, oh, yeah, his name. Sorry, so that's a popular one. The one I'm talking about is very simple. The one I like to to talk about is called boxed breathing, and it's very it's very simple, and it's very effective. And like, you pick a number, right? But you do it as a box. Let's hold box breathing so you inhale on the count of let's five, right? So inhale on the count of five, you hold your breath in the count of five. You exhale on the count of five, and you hold your breath again five. And that you do it about, you know, four to five times. And that calms down the system that basically oxygenates your nervous system says, then you have passed, you know, you can relax. Now it helps to switch from one system to another. That's basically the mechanism of that. There is some other techniques when you inhale on three and exhale on seven. So whatever it is, you can look it up the box one you know works well for me. They're very elaborate breathwork techniques. You can come and kind of book a breath work session for an hour or so. That will really take you to a different level of, you know, subconscious and unconscious. And you know, you'll see, you'll see all kinds of insights and regulations. That's not what I'm talking about, you know, from the burnout and kind of stress management point of view, but that's very effective way to regulate your emotions, regulate your state, regulate your stress levels.

23:23 It's really interesting, because I think as far as I understand, the way that there's kind of an interaction between, you know, the the division between mind and body is very artificial, so it kind of doesn't even make sense. But it's like we, if we stick with that for a moment, this kind of interaction between mind and body. It's like the sort of brain is interpreting evidence from the body, and the body is interpreting evidence from the brain, right? So if our breathing speeds up when we are stressed, because, hey, I'm stressed, I'm feeling adrenaline, and so your body starts taking an air in order to make sure that you can run, or whatever it is. It also makes sense that if we artificially, like, deliberately, consciously, lower our breath, then our nervous system says, Well, okay, now the breathing is slowing down, so now I can sort of take my foot off the gas. I mean, think that's really interesting. Kind of makes a lot of sense.

24:16 Hey guys, hope you enjoyed part one of this episode. It's just too good to limit to one show. Join us next week to hear the rest you.