Why Work Feels So Hard — And What to Do About It
This episode features Dan Harris being interviewed by Dr. Laurie Santos, a Yale professor, about stress, sleep, and sanity at work. They explore strategies for employees to be happier and for employers to be better, focusing on mindfulness, motivation, and psychological safety.
Deep Dive Analysis
16 Topic Outline
Introduction to Work Stress, Sleep, and Sanity
Radical Acceptance of Difficult Feelings at Work
Mindfulness Meditation for Managing Stress
Sitting with Emotions and Cognitive Diffusion Techniques
The Impermanence of Emotions and Their Power
Knowing Your Motivation and Life's Purpose
The Interwoven Nature of Self-Interest and Altruism
Combating Jealousy and Social Comparison with Mudita
Misconceptions in Social Comparison and External Success
Addressing Structural Inequities and the Role of Self-Compassion
Protecting Sleep During Stressful Career Periods
Practical Strategies for Improving Sleep Hygiene
The Manager's Role in Fostering Psychological Safety
Improving Workplace Communication with Reflective Listening
Creating Belonging and Social Connection at Work
The Impact of Managerial Gratitude and Recognition
8 Key Concepts
Radical Acceptance
This is the counterintuitive idea that the only way to deal with difficult feelings like stress is to feel them directly, rather than pushing them away. By allowing oneself to experience these feelings, one can prevent them from overwhelming or 'owning' them.
Mindfulness Meditation
A practice involving sitting comfortably, focusing attention on a neutral sensory object (like breath), and repeatedly returning attention when distracted. Its purpose is not to clear the mind but to become familiar with its wildness, thereby reducing the chaos's power over you.
Cognitive Diffusion
Techniques designed to help individuals separate themselves from their thoughts, viewing them as passing phenomena rather than absolute facts. Examples include singing one's thoughts to a pop song or visualizing them as scrolling text, creating distance and reducing their control.
Mudita (Sympathetic Joy)
A Buddhist meditation practice focused on counteracting jealousy by genuinely wishing for the happiness and success of others to increase. It involves envisioning someone experiencing success and sending them phrases of well-wishing, fostering joy in their good fortune.
Fierce Self-Compassion
A concept that emphasizes treating oneself with kindness and understanding first, which then provides the necessary strength and bandwidth to fight against external inequities and challenges. It's presented as a mission-critical practice, not self-indulgent, for sustained effort and advocacy.
Psychological Safety
The comfort level within a team or organization that allows even the most junior person to speak up, ask questions, or admit mistakes without fear of negative repercussions. It has been identified in studies, such as one at Google, as a key common denominator among high-performing teams.
Reflective Listening
A communication technique where one listens carefully to another person, then briefly repeats back the essence of their message in their own words. This practice helps the speaker feel seen and heard, and acts as a circuit breaker for one's own reflexive, reactive responses, preventing misunderstandings.
Belonging at Work
A sense of meaning and social connection experienced in the workplace, which includes feeling that one's work matters and having close relationships, such as a 'best friend at work.' Research indicates it is the biggest predictor of happiness at work and positively correlates with improved performance and company stock performance.
11 Questions Answered
Radical acceptance is the counterintuitive idea that the only way to deal with difficult feelings like stress is to feel them directly, rather than pushing them away, which ultimately lessens their power over you.
Meditation provides a dedicated time to observe thoughts and emotions without taking them seriously, allowing one to recognize them as passing phenomena rather than facts, thus reducing their power.
By clearly defining and regularly reminding oneself of a core purpose or 'North Star' (e.g., 'for the benefit of all beings'), one can stay grounded and less affected by minor setbacks or competitive feelings at work.
Doing good for others, or having an 'other-oriented purpose,' creates a 'feel good, do good effect' and a 'growing pie' of happiness, which ironically boosts one's own well-being and can serve as an antidote to loneliness and other negative feelings.
Practicing Mudita (sympathetic joy) by wishing well for others' success, and recognizing that others' achievements are rarely at one's own expense, can help reframe competitive feelings.
People tend to overestimate the good things happening to others and underestimate the bad things, leading to inaccurate social comparisons and a false belief that others' lives are inherently better or easier.
Self-care is 'mission critical' because being a 'mess' makes it hard to care for colleagues, manage work, and balance home life; fierce self-compassion provides the necessary bandwidth and strength to fight for structural changes.
Beyond basic sleep hygiene, techniques include tuning into the pain of not sleeping as a motivator, practicing walking meditation to dissipate physical restlessness, and reframing catastrophizing thoughts about sleeplessness by reminding oneself that 'you will be fine.'
Psychological safety is the comfort level for team members, especially junior ones, to speak up without fear. It was identified in a Google study as the common denominator among the best-performing teams.
Managers can dedicate the first 10 minutes of virtual meetings to informal chit-chat, openly express gratitude with specific reasons, and acknowledge employees' personal milestones like birthdays with personalized messages, making them feel seen and valued.
Yes, research shows that a strong sense of belonging, including having a 'best friend at work,' is the biggest predictor of happiness at work and positively correlates with improved employee performance and even company stock performance.
32 Actionable Insights
1. Radically Accept Hard Feelings
Instead of pushing away or self-medicating difficult feelings like stress, practice radical acceptance by feeling them fully. This counterintuitive approach allows you to move through the discomfort rather than letting it own you.
2. Define Your North Star Purpose
Clarify your core motivations and what matters most to you, establishing a ‘North Star’ purpose to guide you through life’s ups and downs. This helps you stay grounded and less affected by minor setbacks or external comparisons.
3. Cultivate Other-Oriented Purpose
Shift your focus from self-serving goals to an other-oriented purpose, as doing things for the benefit of others significantly boosts your well-being. This approach makes it easier to navigate personal challenges and feel good about your contributions.
4. Build Psychological Safety
As a manager, actively foster an environment where even the most junior team members feel comfortable speaking up without fear. This involves warmly calling on junior people, making everyone feel included, and rewarding those who express difficult truths or point out your mistakes.
5. Prioritize Self-Care as Critical
View self-care and self-compassion not as self-indulgent, but as mission-critical for your ability to manage work, balance home life, and support colleagues. Schedule and prioritize activities that recharge your battery, as it’s hard to be effective when you’re overwhelmed.
6. Practice Fierce Self-Compassion
When facing structural inequities or negative emotions, treat yourself with kindness first, like a friend. This self-compassion can provide the ‘fierceness’ and bandwidth needed to effectively fight problems and advocate for change.
7. Master Reflective Listening
When someone speaks, listen carefully without planning your response, then briefly repeat the essence of their message in your own words. This technique makes the other person feel seen and heard, and acts as a circuit breaker for your own reactive responses, preventing misunderstandings.
8. Begin Mindfulness Meditation
To start mindfulness meditation, sit comfortably, close your eyes, and bring your attention to a neutral sensation like your breath or body. When your mind inevitably wanders, gently return your focus to your chosen object, treating each return as a success to become familiar with your mind’s patterns.
9. Investigate Difficult Emotions
When overtaken by strong emotions during meditation, instead of returning to your breath, examine the emotion by noticing its constituent parts, such as physical sensations or accompanying thoughts. This process disambiguates the emotion, reducing its power over you.
10. Reappraise Social Comparisons
Recognize that social comparisons are often flawed because you’re comparing your ‘insides’ to others’ ‘outsides,’ missing their internal struggles or the full context of their successes. Understand that what appears great externally might not be so great if you experienced it yourself.
11. Evaluate Work Behind Gifts
When feeling jealous of others’ achievements, adopt the Stoic practice of considering the effort and sacrifices required to attain those ‘gifts.’ Ask yourself if you are willing to put in that same work, which can help you realize if the perceived reward is truly worth it for you.
12. Remember Your Core Purpose
Develop consistent ways to remind yourself of your core motivations and purpose, such as a daily mantra or a visual cue like a tattoo. This helps you stay focused on what truly matters and not get stuck in trivial setbacks or competitive feelings.
13. Do One Nice Thing
When things feel overwhelming or bad at work, actively seek opportunities to do one nice thing for a colleague to make their life a little easier. This simple act can have profound positive effects on your own well-being and serve as an effective remedy for negative feelings.
14. Service Cures Loneliness
Combat feelings of loneliness, especially at work, by reaching out and trying to alleviate loneliness in others. Taking action to help others connect will, in turn, make you feel less lonely and foster a sense of connection.
15. Practice Mudita (Appreciative Joy)
Engage in Mudita meditation by envisioning someone experiencing success and sending them phrases like ‘may your happiness increase.’ This practice, the opposite of schadenfreude, helps counteract jealousy and cultivates genuine joy for others’ well-being.
16. Embrace Wise Selfishness
Understand that while humans are inherently selfish, ‘wise selfishness’ involves being altruistic because helping others ultimately leads to your greatest happiness. Harness this natural feature of human design to feel good by being useful to others.
17. Managers: Take Full Responsibility
As a manager, cultivate the reflex to take full responsibility for problems within your team, recognizing that issues often originate from leadership. This mindset helps you proactively address root causes and improve team dynamics.
18. Managers: Ask ‘How Complicit?’
Regularly ask yourself, ‘How am I complicit in the conditions I say I don’t want?’ This inconvenient but helpful question, especially for those in power, provides a lens into your influence and potential contributions to workplace issues you wish to change.
19. Foster Workplace Belonging
Prioritize creating a sense of belonging at work, as it is the biggest factor in employee happiness and performance. This involves ensuring people feel their work matters and fostering opportunities for genuine social connection, including developing friendships among colleagues.
20. Implement Basic Sleep Hygiene
Improve your sleep by maintaining basic sleep hygiene: keep your room cold, avoid blue light from devices before bed, get direct sunlight early in the day, and incorporate exercise to tire yourself out.
21. Recognize Sleep Deprivation Pain
Motivate yourself to adhere to sleep hygiene practices by consciously tuning into the severe pain and negative impact of not getting enough sleep. Acknowledging how awful sleeplessness feels can be a powerful driver for change.
22. Use Walking Meditation for Restlessness
If anxiety or anger manifest as physical restlessness, especially before bed, practice walking meditation by slowly walking back and forth while focusing on body sensations. This helps calm the mind and body, preventing you from teaching your brain that bed is a place for struggle.
23. Reframe Sleeplessness as Okay
When struggling to sleep, avoid catastrophizing about the next day and instead tell yourself, ‘It will be fine; you’ve dealt with sleeplessness before and survived.’ Giving yourself permission for it to suck and for you not to sleep can paradoxically create the relaxation needed for sleep to unfurl.
24. Get Out of Bed
If you find yourself tossing and turning in bed, get up and do something else, such as walking meditation, watching TV, reading a book, or even getting some work done. This prevents your brain from associating the bed with struggle and allows for potential relaxation to return later.
25. Reframe Thoughts as Not Facts
In meditation, when thoughts arise, recognize them as just thoughts with accompanying physical sensations, not objective facts. You can imagine them coming from an external source to diminish their power and control over you.
26. Practice Cognitive Diffusion
Employ techniques like singing your ruminative thoughts to an annoying pop song or visualizing them scrolling away like Star Wars text. These methods help create distance from your thoughts, allowing you to see them as separate from yourself.
27. Use ‘There Is Anger’
Instead of saying ‘I’m angry,’ try the linguistic trick of saying ’there is anger’ to create distance from the emotion. This helps you recognize that emotions are passing phenomena rather than inherent parts of your identity.
28. Recognize Emotions Are Transient
When sitting with difficult emotions, observe how they change and pass over time, realizing they are not as permanent or intractable as they initially feel. This understanding provides relief and reduces the intensity of the emotional experience.
29. Fight Job-Hopping Bias
Before jumping ship to a new job, actively fight the cognitive bias that ’the grass is greener’ by accurately simulating what the new situation would truly be like. This hard work can prevent you from making unnecessary career changes based on fantasy rather than reality.
30. Start Meetings with Chit-Chat
In virtual work environments, begin meetings with 10 minutes of informal social chit-chat to replicate the natural connections that occur in physical offices. This fosters social connection and belonging, which ultimately improves team performance.
31. Give Specific Gratitude
As a manager, openly express gratitude for colleagues’ contributions, especially when they do something great or brave, and provide specific reasons why you appreciated it. This subtle yet powerful technique makes people feel their work matters and contributes to a sense of belonging.
32. Personalize Birthday Recognition
For managers, take time to personalize birthday wishes to employees, mentioning a specific positive contribution they’ve made. This small gesture makes individuals feel seen, valued, and that their presence and work on the job truly matter to the company.
10 Key Quotes
The only way out is through to feel the difficult feelings instead of letting them own you.
Dan Harris
The whole point of meditation is not to feel some specific way or to stop thinking to clear your mind. The point is to become familiar with how wild the mind is, so that the chaos and cacophony doesn't own you as much.
Dan Harris
Pretend your thoughts are coming from the guy next to you or from somebody, you know, in the apartment across the way or from the cat leading the corner, whatever. These thoughts, which have so much control over us, are actually, as Joseph says, little more than nothing.
Dan Harris
To call it your anger is, in the words of one great Buddhist monk, a misappropriation of public property. It isn't your anger.
Dan Harris
My job is to make awesome shit that helps people do their lives better. And to work on the relationships in my life, including my relationship with myself. Those are my jobs.
Dan Harris
Wise selfishness.
Dan Harris
Every time a friend of mine succeeds, a little part of me dies.
Dan Harris
Whatever accolade or achievement has arrived at the doorstep of your enemy was somehow headed to you, but they intercepted it. But it's almost never true.
Dan Harris
If you care about your colleagues and also managing work and balancing that with your home life, if you care about all of that, like, it's hard to do that if you're a mess. You know, so you need to schedule and prioritize whatever self-care it is that, you know, recharges your battery. That's not self-indulgent. That's mission critical.
Dan Harris
How am I complicit in the conditions I say I don't want?
Dan Harris
4 Protocols
Beginning Mindfulness Meditation
Dan Harris- Sit comfortably and close your eyes; a chair is fine, no lotus position needed.
- Bring your full attention to something neutral and sensory, such as your breath coming in and going out, the feeling of your body sitting, or sounds in the environment.
- When you get distracted (which will happen quickly), notice the distraction and gently bring your attention back to your chosen object of meditation, repeating this process as a 'bicep curl for your brain'.
Mudita (Sympathetic Joy) Meditation
Dan Harris- Sit or lie down, beginning the practice with a couple of deep breaths.
- Envision one person who is currently experiencing success.
- Send them a set of phrases such as 'may your happiness increase, may your health improve, may your success expand,' wishing for their increasing happiness.
- Move to another person and repeat the process, doing it for multiple individuals.
Walking Meditation for Sleep
Dan Harris- Stake out a patch of land (e.g., 10 yards) in your house or outside.
- Walk back and forth very slowly, bringing your full attention to the feeling of your body moving (somewhere between a zombie pace and normal).
- Use soft little mental notes like 'lifting,' 'moving,' 'placing,' 'thinking,' or 'planning' to help stay focused on the sensations of your body moving.
- If you get into bed and find yourself tossing and turning, get up and do more walking meditation (or another fun activity like reading or watching TV) to avoid teaching your brain that the bed is a place to struggle.
Reflective Listening (for Communication)
Dan Harris and Lori Santos- Listen very carefully to what the other person is saying, actively avoiding planning your next response.
- Repeat back to them, briefly and in your own words, the core message or the bones of what they just communicated.
- Optionally, follow up by asking, 'Did I get that right? Or did I miss anything?' to ensure complete understanding and allow for clarification.