Ep. #81 The Neuroscience of Misery at Work - Part 1

Speaker 1: 0:00

You are listening to Making Sense of Work with Jean Balfour. Hi everyone, and welcome to Making Sense of Work In an episode we've so delightfully called the Neuroscience of the Misery of Work. This is part one of a two-part series, and the topic came about out of ongoing conversations I've been having with people about their struggles at work. A number of people have been talking to me about feeling stuck or feeling overworked and generally struggling to see what choices and options they had. I knew there was some help that we could find in neuroscience, and so I hunted it down and I'm going to share it with you. In this episode, I'm going to talk you through some of my understanding of the neuroscience and what is happening to us, and in part two, I'll explore how we can work with neuroscience to help us to make sense of these things when they're difficult at work and to help us to see the choice we have and to move forward.

Speaker 1: 1:13

We all of us have periods of being happy at work and of being unhappy at work. It's normal, it's part of our human nature that there are times when things are not going right, and, of course, work is the same. When work is not working for us, when we're struggling with it, and I guess I believe that we have a choice about how we experience it, and I also believe that neuroscience can help us think about what's happening. It may be obvious now, if you're a regular listener, that whilst I love my work and I run my own company and do work that's largely in my lane I have periods of unhappiness and feeling stuck at work too. So I'm speaking both to you and to myself in this. It's probably important that I start with a caveat. I am clearly not a neuroscientist. I'm a facilitator and a coach and a teacher who's curious about neuroscience, and I've been reading about it for a while, and so what I'm going to share with you today are the things that I've picked up along the way. One of the things I've learned about neuroscience is that we're not there. It's such an emerging science and that means that anything that we talk about today could change in our understanding of it tomorrow. And I'm obviously going to share the way I've understood it, the way I make sense of it, which, if you're a scientist listening to, you may think oh, jean hasn't got that right and maybe I haven't got it quite right, but this is my interpretation. I will be sharing my understanding of not just how we can understand the neuroscience, but then, in part two, in the next episode of the podcast, how we can apply it. How can we take that understanding to bring about change, to ease our misery in our working lives? How can we motivate ourselves? How do we think in a creative and a new way? And, essentially, how do we become unstuck?

Speaker 1: 3:21

Let's start by thinking a bit about what is causing our misery at work. I asked a group of people this recently and the first answer, of course, that came out was workload, because this is such an issue for many of us. But other things emerged as well, like a lack of recognition or a lack of passion for our current work. The organization culture is affecting us. Maybe that's ineffective leadership. Maybe there's a lack of empathy or understanding of what's going on for us, both at work and at home. There's something about a lack of freedom for some people and others feeling underutilized, feeling that their skills are not being valued, and there's a big story about job instability for many people, which is really not helping.

Speaker 1: 4:09

I was curious about how much of a problem unhappiness at work really was. Was it something that I was just hearing, or was it in the general population? And I started looking around and I wanted to see what global workplace studies were saying about misery and stuckness. And I came across two studies pretty quickly. So these are just giving a snapshot, I guess, but they're both saying pretty similar things. The first is a Gallup study that came out in 2023. And the other is a very recent PwC study that came out in 2024, just in March 2024.

Speaker 1: 4:47

And from these studies we can see a few things. The first is that young people, so people who we might call Gen Y or Gen Z, are generally looking to move jobs and in some parts of the world, like in Singapore, where I'm based, 50% of young people are unhappy at work and want to move. For older people, that number drops, but it still doesn't drop much. It goes down to the lowest, 30% and sometimes 40%. So this means that anywhere between a third and a half of workers are wanting to leave their jobs. Third and a half of workers are wanting to leave their jobs and the reasons they're saying that is partly pay, but the two other big reasons are well-being and, of course, that links to workload and stress and opportunities to grow and develop, the opportunities to stretch ourselves, to feel fulfilled.

Speaker 1: 5:42

There are other things emerging from their studies. One I think that's really critical is, of course, our cost of living crisis, because this is adding to the trouble. Many people are feeling a bit financially trapped in their jobs and they don't enjoy the job, but they feel they can't leave because of finances. And there's also many people saying they're actually doing additional work on top of their current job in order to financially survive. And then one of the other things that leapt out at me from one of the reports was the levels of reported stress at work, and this has gone up constantly by between 1% and 2% over the past 15 years between 1 and 2% over the past 15 years and 40% of the people surveyed said they had experienced the emotions of stress the day before they completed the survey. So they were just asking you know, when did you last feel this? And 40% said yesterday. So we've got people in a really stressed and, for many people, quite unhappy place, and I do think this is what we're hearing generally.

Speaker 1: 6:49

Now, of course, this isn't everyone and of course, for all of us it's not all the time, but there is a sense that we're feeling a bit stuck and I want to talk about what might be happening from a neuroscience perspective on that and, as I said, what can we do about it? Now, of course, as I said also, I'm talking to myself as much as I'm talking to you, and I think I'm a good case study because actually I do have a lot of control over my working life. So for me, this is about how do I work with my mindset and how do I make the changes I can, and I think that's partly true for all of us, because I've been curious over the last few years about what was happening to me. I essentially love my job, but I do have these difficult periods.

Speaker 1: 7:39

I noticed that when it's difficult that I end up in this kind of vicious cycle and it goes round and circle and it becomes iterative, so it starts that I feel a bit unhappy or overworked, for whatever reason. Then I start ruminating and chewing over it and then I go to bed thinking about it and I wake up thinking about it and then I just start to feel really bad and I fall into what we call negativity bias, and I'm going to talk about that a bit in this podcast. Essentially, that's seeing the dark side, if you like, and only the dark side, and then that of course leads to symptoms of stress or pressure, and then I feel stuck and I maybe feel a bit paralyzed and angsty, and then I don't take action except one action, and that's that I complain and I moan and I complain, and I moan and I complain, and then I'm in a negative energy spiral and that leaves me feeling like a victim and powerless. So I imagine that you might see yourself in a bit of this. We're in this kind of negative cycle and we just keep going around it and we need to find a way to break out of it. And it's really critical that we do that, because otherwise we're stuck there and we have this feeling of stuckness. We want to have a different experience. We want to break free. We want to find a way to solve the practical problems that are happening. There are practical problems when I'm in my complaining cycle. Usually I have too much to do, but that's a practical problem that I need to solve, but somehow I need to get my mind into a place where I can solve the problem. So let's look at what is happening to us from a brain-based perspective what is going on here and see if we can make some sense of how to work with that.

Speaker 1: 9:29

I'm going to share with you six different things that I think we can learn from the brain. I hope I'll explain them in a way that's reasonably simple to understand. The first is that our brains have evolved with one main job, and that is to keep us safe and alive. You're probably already aware of this. You know this that your brain has evolved to keep us safe. And being kept alive was very important when our brains were evolving, because we were often living outside or living in caves and we had a lot of potential for physical danger. And so the brain evolved to keep us physically safe and free from pain.

Speaker 1: 10:11

And to do that, it evolved to be on the alert all the time, to look out for danger, and the challenge for us today is that it hasn't stopped being on the alert, even though we know some people are at risk of physical harm and physical danger at the moment, but most of us aren't. But that doesn't stop our brain from looking out, being on the alert and worrying, and worrying and worrying, and ruminating, and ruminating and ruminating, because it's been designed to do that, so it's constantly looking out for danger and part of what's happening here is that our brain is being triggered, and it gets triggered through something called the left amygdala and I'm going to talk about the right amygdala later and because evolution has trained it to do this, it actually scans for threats and it does that two-thirds of the time. So part of our brain is looking for danger two-thirds of the time because it wants to keep us safe. So we want to say thank you, brain. But actually what that turns into is that we're more fearful than we should be. We see more risks than there are, we overestimate risk and we worry too much, and this is what takes us into what we might talk about as a negativity bias.

Speaker 1: 11:31

You will also probably know that it also takes us into what we call fight, flight, freeze, or we've added in fawn to this because when we're in this alert, fearful space, our body wants to keep us safe. It either wants to fight, so to really struggle, or it wants us to freeze, to remain very still so paralyzed, not take action, almost so that we become invisible and are not seen. Or we want to flight, we want to run away and I guess in a work contest, that's leave my job. We see a lot of people wanting to leave their jobs, to run away and then fawn. Fawn is perhaps not the right word for this, but it's related to people pleasing. So this is us doing things to keep others happy and, of course, when we do that, it's usually not so good for us, because we're often keeping others happy at the expense of us.

Speaker 1: 12:27

So we've got this first one safety first and the problem is that at work, our brain, therefore, is on the alert for potential danger and then it triggers us into fight, flight, freeze or fawn, and then all of our actions are coming out of fear. So that's the first one. The second thing is that when our brains were evolving, we needed to learn how to keep ourselves safe. We needed to learn from experience. So if I eat that plant and I don't die, I learn that I can eat that plant again that's very nutritious plant and I don't die, I learn that I can eat that plant again that's very nutritious and I replay it and I think that's a good plant. Or if I managed to stop myself being killed by a saber-toothed tiger, then what was it that I did? How did I keep myself safe? So the brain evolved to replay things so that it could learn.

Speaker 1: 13:18

Now the problem with this one is that our brains are continuing to do this Now. In many cases, that's fantastic because we're learning, but actually it is constantly problem solving on all sorts of risk and fear based things, and that can become rumination and that can become a negativity cycle and then we end up learning about negative things and not leaning into the positive things. And there's a gorgeous quote about this from Dr Rick Hunson, who says the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones. What we basically see is that our brains are very good at looking for the negative experience and learning from them, and not so good at looking for the negative experience and learning from them and not so good at looking for the positive experiences. If you think about this in a work-based context, think about a conversation with your manager and your review, and you get 10 things that you've done really well and one could try harder. And then you go to bed thinking about the could try harder, not all the good things. You go over and over it in your head. Or you say something in a meeting that you regret, and then you turn it over and over in your mind. You just keep going around it. So again, we've got this problem solving, but it's not creative, it's fear-based.

Speaker 1: 14:37

The third is what we might call social anxiety. When our brains were evolving, we needed to be kept safe. And to be kept safe, we were better in the group Because if we were isolated, if we were out on our own, we were very exposed to the elements, to other dangers, and so the group became very important, and being rejected from the group became a physical risk. It was physically dangerous. So our brains have evolved to be on the lookout for us not to be ejected from the group. We want to fit in. Now. This is a nightmare in modern society. We have social media. That means we've got the potential to be ejected from the group at any time, and also we work in these big workplaces where we hear so many people talk about things being toxic and things being hard at work at the moment.

Speaker 1: 15:26

But I think that this is because we're really affected by negative conversation. It really gets to us, it has a physical impact on us. In fact, there's some neuroscientists at UCLA in the States, matt Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberger, who have been studying this and they have found that when we're excluded from a group. Our body can't differentiate from physical pain and the emotional pain, so the body actually feels that pain as though it's physical. And they found that if you are feeling emotional angst about something at work and you take a painkiller, it can actually take the edge off it. So when we're at work and we're struggling with terrible work cultures which many of us are we're actually experiencing that in our bodies. We're feeling it physiologically.

Speaker 1: 16:22

The fourth thing here is about something called mirror neurons, and I've read about mirror neurons and I find them really hard to explain, so I'm going to give you my lay person's way of explaining them. Essentially, our brains mirror each other, the people around us. We pick up on each other's emotions and that means that our emotions are contagious. So if we're in a group of people who are unhappy, we might catch it. And this is particularly critical if you think about the vicious cycle that I talked about earlier and there's a bit of complaining going on, one or two people are unhappy and we engage in that. We can get caught up in quite a negative space when maybe we're not feeling like that Somebody is unhappy with the boss, but actually we get on with the boss okay. We might then start to feel unhappy in that situation. So it's really important that we understand that, because we might want to protect ourselves from other people's unhappiness, because we're feeding it. We're all bringing it up and making something bigger maybe than it is. Okay, two more areas that can impact us.

Speaker 1: 17:28

As I move into the fifth one, let me ask you a question when do you do your best creative thinking? What comes to mind when you think about that? When I ask people this, the usual answers I get are on a walk in nature or in the shower always comes up, and sometimes when I'm in a casual conversation. These are the times when solutions to problems often come to us. So why might this be?

Speaker 1: 17:59

In the early stages of brain research, the neuroscientists assumed that when the brain wasn't focused on a task, it was resting. When they were able to do more sophisticated scans, they saw that this was far from the truth. When the brain stopped focusing on a task, it didn't rest at all. It started making connections between things. It quietly ran through the system, through the brain, the neural pathways, to see how things fitted together, and so they called this the default mode network. It's where the brain goes on default after it's gone out of the task.

Speaker 1: 18:35

If you think about the difference between looking at your computer and focusing on a piece of work that's what they've called the task positive network Then you look out the window and look at the clouds and you're not thinking about anything in particular. That's what they've called the default mode network, and this is a network that's kicked in when we're in the shower, when we're walking outside or when we're simply staring out the window Anywhere. We're not looking at our phones for focus, where we let our mind wander. This is a great space for us to create. We're not focused, we're relaxed, and when the default mode network is activated, we dream. It kind of helps us go into the past and the present and the future, and then we see solutions to things that we haven't been able to see. Of course, if we're unhappy at work, we can be tempted to just focus on our computer. We lean into the task, but it's in taking time away from the task that we can begin to see hope, we can begin to see options and we can begin to see ways forward.

Speaker 1: 19:38

The starting point is not to sit down and focus, it's to go out for that walk in nature to let your brain wander. For me, I'm a big audiobook and podcast listener, but I've learned not to do that. I now go for a walk for about half an hour without listening to anything. Or if you're a swimmer, swimming's perfect, because of course, you can't listen to anything in the pool. So lots of default mode network activity there, of default mode network activity there. The key here is that we want to solve the problem. So one of the things we want to do is to allow our brain to rest and daydream, because then it might solve the problem that if we stay task focused, we may struggle with it.

Speaker 1: 20:21

The final part I want to briefly talk about here is that the idea and the belief that we can change and we can change our brain and we can grow new neural pathways. Many of you will know this. When I was growing up, I was told that my brain, once it had reached 25, was all downhill from there. But we know that's not true. We know now that we can literally grow our brain. You can change your brain physically and in the context of being miserable at work, I think we can, if we're feeling stuck, sometimes end up in a bit of a fixed mindset about it a fixed state of I can't change it and we can feel like, oh, this is hard, it's pointless, I don't want to hear anything, I don't want to learn anything. I don't want to learn anything, I'm not able to do it, I'm really stuck and we can end up, as I've said, in a fixed mindset. So, in order for us to find solutions, I think it's important first that we A remember that there's possibility. Remember that our brains can grow and lean into a growth mindset, lean into the possibility that we can do it.

Speaker 1: 21:32

There's much more about learning how to have a growth mindset in episode 54. And you can listen in there if you'd like to learn more about that. So we have these six things happening. So we have these six things happening in our brains. We've got this safety first alert. We've got the replay things to learn. So we replay things. We need to stay in the group. We're emotionally connected, we're creative when we're resting and we can grow our brains.

Speaker 1: 22:01

The choice now is to consider how can we work with these to help us to move forward. The choice now is to consider how can we work with these to help us to move forward, to help us to feel more powerful and to help us to feel the choice we have, so that we can be less miserable in our working lives, in our organizations. I believe this is a mindset job. Before we can take the practical actions like looking for a new job or finding more rewarding work, we need to get out of that vicious cycle. We need to move our mind and our system and our body out of stress responses into creative problem solving, and it's really hard to problem solve when we're feeling trapped. It's when we move into knowing that we have options that we can start to generate thoughts that will take us forward, and I'm going to approach this more in the next episode of the podcast from the angle of how can we move into the mindset to bring about change. The starting point for this is that when we are stuck, we need to find a way to feel less stuck in our minds, and that is my focus. How do we find the right state of mind to bring about the change?

Speaker 1: 23:09

I talked earlier about the amygdala the left amygdala and this is something in our brains that's got a little constant eek. Somebody described it to me recently as it's like a mouse that's constantly squeaking in our brains. However, there is some good news. There's a growing understanding that we have two amygdalae and that we have one on the left and one on the right, and the right holds a different function. The right one is curious, it's creative, it's about empathy and it's about community. It's all about possibility. And this is amazing because if we can engage it, we can find a way to help ourselves to move out of fear and into creativity and curiosity.

Speaker 1: 23:55

Now, of course, I'm massively oversimplifying this and this is growing research and I'm not a neuroscience. However, I have found that if I use this framing, I'm instantly moving towards finding a different, creative solution to my situation. So for me, it suggests that the starting point is to start to engage our right amygdala, to drive ourselves, to look for ways that we can move from the left, which is full of fear and angst, into the right, so that we can get ourselves into this creative, curious space, so that we can solve the problem. Our job is to move from flight, fight, freeze or fawn the paralysis that we're in into creative, problem solving a mindset where we can see choice and options. And in part two, I will share how we can do this, how we can engage our creative, curious selves to do just that. In the meantime, we have a few guides on our websites for various aspects of this work and we will put links to these in the show notes.

Speaker 1: 24:57

And before listening to part two, I encourage you to become aware of how you are being impacted from a neuroscience perspective. Consider your stress responses. Consider are you overthinking, are you worried about the group at work? How are you picking up on other people's moods and is this impacting you? Beginning to notice this will help you when you come to consider how to make a mindset and practical change. Take yourself for a walk, let your mind wander and see what's possible. I'll see you in part two. Thanks for joining this episode of Making Sense of Work. If you enjoyed it, please go and subscribe, rate and review. If you have a topic you'd like me to explore in the podcast, please follow the show notes and send me a message.