5 Resets to Reduce Stress and Burnout with Dr. Aditi Nerurkar
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Stress and burnout are at an all-time high, and sometimes they both show up in ways you'd never expect. As Harvard physician Dr. Aditi explains: "If you're wondering, 'Is this me?' chances are you are most likely not the exception but rather the rule."

In this episode, we're going to unpack the subtle signs of stress and burnout that most of us overlook and walk through some practical science-backed strategies to manage stress, build resilience, and reclaim energy. I'm Chris Hutchins, and whether you think you're stressed out or not, I think you'll really enjoy this episode. And if you do, please share it with a friend or leave a comment or review. And if you want to keep upgrading your life, money, and travel, click follow or subscribe. Now let's get into it right after this.

Thank you.

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Dr. Aditi, you've said that 70% of people, so seven out of 10 people, are currently feeling a sense of stress and burnout. What kind of impact does something like that have on us? When you look at those numbers, Chris, we're seeing stress and burnout at unprecedented rates now more than we have in years past.

And that's like saying in a room of 30 people, 21 people are struggling with stress and burnout. So when you think of those ramifications, both at home, at work, in every room you enter, including Zoom rooms that we enter so often for work,

When you are aware of those statistics, I think you can conduct yourself a little differently, giving yourself lots of grace and self-compassion in the process, but also when you are engaging with others. And particularly when it comes to the workplace, over-communicating about mental health. And at this stage, someone asked me recently, what does that mean? So what does it mean to over-communicate?

And based on the data, Chris, it's like, I don't even know if that is a thing anymore to over communicate because so many people are struggling. It feels like one of those things where everyone now thinks, OK, well, there's a lot of people that have stress and burnout. I don't know if I'm one of them. How do I know if I'm one of the seven out of 10 or 21 out of 30?

Chances are, if you're wondering, is this me? Could I be experiencing stress and burnout? Based on the data, just the sheer volume of people, chances are you are most likely not the exception, but rather the rule. Even me, knowing all of the science of stress and burnout and how it influences your brain and your body, I have been prone to feeling both stress and burnout over the past several years, particularly this last year that many people had symptoms.

similar symptoms. And you can think about, is this me? Could I be experiencing this? The first is what I call your canary in the coal mine. So historically, when coal miners went down into the mines, they would take down a caged bird, a canary, and then the canary would sing and they would work.

And when the canary stops singing, that's when they were like, wait a second, we got to get out of the mind. That reference is important because we all have a canary within us. Your tell, the sign that is telling you, wait a second, hang on. I think your stress is a little out of hand.

And we as humans are historically really bad at knowing our limits, similar to the coal miners. We keep toiling and working without really paying attention to any of the signals until you have that canary singing. So for me, my canary in the coal mine was a stampede of wild horses.

that I felt and my body probably gave me lots of other signs, but I wasn't paying attention. And so think about something, a symptom that you may be having that could be linked to your stress. And you can keep a log of it if you want. You can write it down. You can just think about something that's happening to you that you notice more when you are stressed. So you might not ever have the experience of stress. Like you might never say, oh, I feel stressed, but maybe you have headaches, neck pain,

back pain, abdominal pain, dizziness. Are you quick to anger? Do you have anxiety or depression, insomnia, hypervigilant? A lot of people describe this feeling of like an inability to relax, always feeling like the other shoe is going to drop.

So the first step is if you're noticing a particular sign or symptom, go to your doctor. I have to always say that as a physician myself. You want to go to your doctor and get checked out. Make sure that this is nothing organic or rather something in the body because stress is a diagnosis of exclusion, meaning only once we rule everything out can we then say, oh, it's most likely due to stress. And so what is your canary in the coal mine? What is the canary that's singing in

A tune within you that you might not be paying attention to. And you've noticed like, hey, wait a second, this particular symptom, my canary song is getting louder and louder. I think of stress in a lot of different ways. There's times where it might be really acute, like got a parking ticket. Maybe that's anger. Maybe it's stress. I'm not sure. Then there's like, I have a lot of work. Can we back up a little and maybe define stress?

stress in a way that might give people more context on what should fall in that bucket? I would love to. That's a great place to start. There's actually two kinds of stress and they're not created equal. And so when you think of stress, when you and I, your friends, your colleagues say, oh, I'm so stressed or I've had a stressful year or it's been a stressful day.

What you're referring to is called unhealthy stress. Scientifically, it's known as adaptive stress. This is the kind of stress that's dysfunctional, unproductive, can fly off the rails. And it's the kind of stress, this unhealthy stress that causes all of those physical and mental health manifestations that I mentioned, that canary symptom that you might have.

However, there is another kind of stress known as healthy stress, the second kind of stress. This stress is scientifically known as adaptive stress. It's productive. It's motivating. It moves your life forward.

forward. And it doesn't have a lot of those mental and physical health manifestations. So examples of healthy stress, rooting for your favorite sports team, falling in love, organizing your vacation. I remember the last time we were going to speak, you were headed to Hawaii with your family. Takes a lot to make that happen, to coordinate vacations and trips, getting a new job or a

falling in love, getting married. There's so many ways that your life moves forward because of these various instances of healthy, productive, adaptive stress. And the goal of life is not to live a life with zero stress. It's actually biologically impossible to do that because these sorts of healthy stressors that happen throughout your day, your weeks, your months and years help get you out of bed quite literally through a biochemical response.

So the goal of life is not to live a life with zero stress. It's to live a life with healthy, manageable stress that serves you rather than harms you. It sounds like stress isn't a binary thing. It probably exists on a spectrum where there might be two different kinds, but you could have a lot of it or a little of it. How do you think about a spectrum versus an on-off switch?

It's definitely not an on-off switch. It is on a spectrum, stress overall, both healthy and unhealthy stress. And when you have this acute thing that happens, so your brain and your body are expertly designed to handle short,

bursts of stress. In fact, that is what your brain and your body, the fight or flight response, are designed to do. That's the sympathetic nervous system. Changes. There's also the idea of acute stress and chronic stress. And so that stress response or the fight or flight response, evolutionarily, it's like when we were all cave dwellers living in the forest.

You would see a tiger in the forest and you'd either fight the tiger or you'd run away. So there's a whole cascade of things that happen in your body biologically when you go through that fight or flight response. The key, though, is after that fight or flight response, whether you fight the tiger or run away, you come back to baseline. There's a period of equilibrium and you get back to a certain rhythm. And then you might have another acute stress, another tiger that you see in the forest weeks later.

or months later. The challenge now, Chris, is that in modern times, our metaphorical tigers aren't once in a while, but rather all the time ongoing and chronic in the background.

relationship problems, lots of struggles, financial stress, maybe, you know, work deadlines, not to mention things happening in the world that because we are so hyper-connected, our brains don't recognize the difference of things happening in our neighborhood or very far away. And so for all of these reasons and more,

your brain doesn't really have a respite, nor does your body. There's very few things I would categorize as acute stress right now because it's morphed into chronic stress because we're not really having that return to baseline. And so your brain and your body, while they are expertly designed to handle short bursts of stress,

Your amygdala, your sympathetic nervous system, these parts in your brain and your body that are designed to manage your stress response, the fight or flight response, instead of now turning on and off like a switch, they're always on in the background at a low hum. And that comes at a cost. And that is why we're having these all sorts of mental and physical health manifestations because of that chronic stress response that never seems to shut off.

And is there any kind of diagnosis that someone could take to try to figure out their level of stress, whether it's a quiz or questions to ask yourself?

Sure. So there's lots of what we call scientific instruments, which are just basically surveys that you can use to see if you are stressed. And, you know, what I hope to do in a lot of the work that I've done with my patients clinically is to quantify stress. So it's not this like mythical, magical, vague thing, but it can be quantified just like blood pressure, for example.

So I have a quiz in my book, The Five Resets, that I've used with patients. There are other tests. There is something called the Perceived Stress Scale that is available online, both four questions and 10 questions. It's a validated instrument. Scientifically, that simply means that it's something that's been used and tested hundreds and if not hundreds of thousands of times.

with various patient populations. And so there's lots of ways that you can use different surveys and tests. What I use in the five resets, my book, it's something that I have used with patients. The key with any instrument or survey, if you're going to measure yourself when it comes to your stress, try to use that same survey and give yourself what I typically have said to patients in the past is everything.

four weeks, give yourself a test. And then every four weeks, measure your stress score. And so you have something to work with.

You also want to understand how the brain works. So it takes about eight weeks to create a habit in the brain. Falling off and getting back on is part of the habit formation process and the way your neural circuitry is being designed and rewired. And so I say give yourself four weeks. Every four weeks, check in with yourself and give yourself a stress quiz, whichever one you want to use.

And that can help because in eight weeks when you've created a habit, at 12 weeks, at 16 weeks, et cetera, you can actually see demonstrated changes in your stress score based on what you do in the day to day.

Is there an example of the questions in your quiz that we could just kind of walk through so someone could get a sense of how to answer it and how to think about it? Sure. Let's go through all of the questions of the stress quiz. And it's also available on my website. I believe it's available on Amazon. So the way you're going to figure out your stress score, five questions in total. I'm going to list the questions and you think of the responses for yourself.

Number one, in the past month, how often have you noticed your canaries warning signs? We talked about what the canary was. Number two, in the past month, how often have you felt overloaded or unsettled by your stress? Number three, in the past month, how often have you felt depleted or low energy because of your stress? Number four, in the past month, how often have you experienced disrupted sleep because of your stress?

Number five, in the past month, how often have you felt that stress has interfered with your day-to-day life and everyday activities? And when you're answering these questions, it is not yes or no. It's not binary. Instead, there are five categories. So never,

Almost never, sometimes, fairly often, and very often. And you give yourself a score. You circle the one that describes you best over the past month and

And never is zero. Very often is four. And then you score yourself. You will get a certain number. And then four weeks later, you'll answer the same set of five questions. And then you can compare and contrast. And the reason I have created this quiz and included it in the five resets and why I like to have a quantifiable number is simply because you can't rely on yourself when it comes to like, do I feel better? Am I calmer? What does that even mean?

You want something to hang your hat on. And we work well with numbers. So just like a blood pressure or cholesterol or HbA1c or whatever number you want to use, you can use that as a biometric to test. Okay, how am I doing? And then how am I doing in a month? Because like I used in the coal miner example, we are typically really bad historians when it comes to ourself.

So when I heard the questions, I was like, okay, how much has your sleep been affected by your stress? But I don't actually feel personally like I would know whether stress is the cause of the bad sleep. Are there symptoms they should look for outside of that? Or how is someone who may be stressed but isn't certain able to determine whether they are?

The reason sleep is so important in this particular assessment is because sleep is often the first tell and the first symptom of like, oh, wait a second, maybe I am stressed. That's not to say for everyone. Some people have excellent sleep, but then we'll have other manifestations. For me, sleep is one of the first signs of like, okay, wait a second, I'm not really sleeping well. I probably have to do a better job managing my stress. And then I double down on the five resets. You

You might not actually feel like stress is the reason you are not sleeping well. But if you have noticed over the past month, you have been under a lot of stress for all sorts of reasons. You might not even know the reason why you're feeling stressed, by the way. It's not like you have to identify the cause of the stress because sometimes it's lots of things and it's hard to pinpoint just that one thing. But you can say like, I'm feeling a general sense of stress or it's

You might not even have that sense of awareness because it might not be a direct correlation for you. But you might notice that, you know what, I've been having a lot of deadlines. I've been traveling a lot. I have a lot happening and my sleep is affected. So you might be able to see the potential cause and the symptom and not necessarily draw the correlation, but see them together and be able to draw those conclusions yourself.

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Are there other common signs or symptoms that you said sleep is often one of the first ones? Are there some other ones? Oh, there's so many. There's like a million flavors of stress. So we can do head to toe. What are some common physical manifestations of stress? Headaches, eye strain, neck pain, shoulder pain, back pain.

aches and pains in the arms and legs, numbness and tingling, abdominal discomfort, abdominal pain, indigestion, nausea, perhaps vomiting, reflux, heartburn. Then you can go into the mental health manifestations like anxiety, depression, insomnia, hypervigilance, difficulty with emotional regulation, quick to anger, lupus,

low energy. The key with any of these, if you're having a symptom that you notice in yourself and you're saying, huh, could this be related to my stress? Of course, the first thing you want to do is see your doctor. You want to get a medical workup because all of these symptoms are vague and they could be due to something else because stress in medical terms is a diagnosis of exclusion. You need to rule out everything else and

And then you say, oh, this is most likely stress. And that is my personal experience. So when I was a stress patient, I was first a stress patient. And then I became a doctor with an expertise on stress. And I was a medical resident working 80 hours a week in the hospital. And I felt a stampede of wild horses across my chest. I was in the cardiac ICU.

taking care of everyone else's heart and not really ever thinking about my own. I had an erratic sleep schedule. I didn't really eat well, certainly wasn't exercising, except running from patient room to patient room. And it knocked the wind out of me. I went to my doctor. She did the full medical workup, EKG, echocardiogram, blood test for anemia and thyroid and electrolytes, and everything checked out fine. And she was like, Aditi, great news.

Everything is great. Your heart's fine. It's most likely just stress. Try to relax. And so I did all the things.

I relaxed. I got massages. I watched movies, hung out with friends, retail therapy, took a vacation. Nothing actually solved my stress except when I put my scientist hat on and really figured out what is happening to my brain and my body. I found my way out of stress because I had access to lots of scientific journals that I could read and research papers. And then when I found my way out of stress is when I vowed to become the doctor I needed during that difficult time.

And so my clinical approach that I've developed over the several decades since that time is because I was a stress patient and I didn't have answers and I was searching for them. An answer beyond just relax. That wasn't enough for me. Sounds like that became the basis of the five resets. Maybe we can walk through that and talk about how people can put them into action.

Sure. So the five resets is essentially my clinical approach that I've used with patients. And it's five mindset shifts along with 15 science-backed strategies. The

The key here, Chris, is that for me as a physician, every single thing in the five resets is free and it's cost free. And it's important to know that you can scientifically rewire your brain for less stress and burnout without spending any money. Right. The second is that they are time efficient.

You have competing work and life demands and priorities. So things that are time efficient are really important even to me. And then, of course, practical and applicable. You need to be able to build the stuff into your life without it causing you stress, because the irony is that you don't want to be doing things to manage your stress and then feel more stressed at the end of it. And so we can start with the first reset. It's get clear on what matters most.

And that reset is essentially a way for you to create a roadmap so that you can manage your stress. And what does that reset do? When you're feeling a sense of stress, Chris, you might say to yourself, like, what's the matter with me? Why do I feel like this? What's going on? Instead, it's about reframing that narrative in your head. It's not about what's the matter with you, but rather what matters most to you. And most is an acronym.

It stands for M, motivating, O, objective, S, small, and T, timely. And it's an approach I've used with patients. They create their most goals. So what is a goal that you could work towards? At the start of our conversation, we talked about quantifying stress and making it like something that you could measure rather than just say, oh yeah, I feel better. I think I feel better.

better? I'm not sure if I feel better. But how do you make it very concrete? You create a most goal. And then once you have that goal, you

you can figure out how you can reach that goal using the framework of the five resets and the various strategies. And is that goal related to stress or could it be a goal in life in general? So examples of the most goal are I had a patient who was undergoing cancer treatment and she said she wanted to be a children's book author. And so she did it. I've had patients who've said, I want more energy. I hate my job.

It causes me a tremendous amount of stress, but I don't have the energy to look for a new job. Common complaint, I want more energy. Or I have a lot of stress because I can't move my body and I have a lot of pain.

I want to have less pain. So what is something that you are living with that is really uncomfortable or bothering you and something that you would love to change so that you could have less stress and burnout? Maybe it's the source of your stress and burnout. And so think about a goal that you have professionally or

or personally, the reason creating a most goal is so important at the start of your stress journey is because by design, your amygdala, we spoke about the amygdala a little bit at the start of our conversation. The amygdala is a small almond-shaped structure deep in your brain, and it is what governs the fight or flight response. By design, your amygdala is focused on your immediate survival and needs, like what's happening in the here and the now.

Because that's just what the amygdala does. It's focused on survival and self-preservation. Creating a plan, strategic thinking, future thoughts and strategy is the prefrontal cortex's job. And so when you create a Mosegul, it is your first step to get out of amygdala mode back to the prefrontal cortex.

cortex. One of the most common things that happens when you're feeling a sense of stress, Chris, is that you can't get out of your own way. You might know that like, wait a second, I don't feel good or I want to get better, but you just can't get there because you are driven by the amygdala and by design.

your amygdala is focused on your immediate needs. So biologically, it's almost impossible when you're feeling that sense of stress to say, hang on, let me back up for a second. Let me look at the big picture. We say all of these things cognitively, but in fact, when you're feeling a deep sense of stress, it's virtually impossible biologically to do that. And so your most goal helps you do that. And then there's several other strategies in that first reset to help you create a roadmap to get you out of amygdala mode back to your prefrontal cortex.

And just one quick question. When I think about balancing the M and the S, so it needs to be motivating and exciting, but it needs to be small enough I can achieve it. Where in that balance do you suggest people try to find something that's exciting enough, but still achievable? That's a great question. When you're thinking about like, what could be a goal I could really work towards? It can be something as simple as maybe you want to take a vacation with your child or maybe something physically demanding.

There's some goals that need a little bit of a longer time, some goals that are short. But when it comes to this most goal, you are creating something that you can actually track and measure. It can be something personal or professional, and it can change as you move through your journey to less stress. So it should be motivating and aspirational. That's the M. It should excite you to get out of bed in the morning. O, objective, very clear, something that you can measure.

small enough to virtually guarantee success. And then T, you want to achieve this most goal for yourself anywhere from two to three months, understanding that it takes eight weeks to build a habit. The second reset is all about digital boundaries. We have boundaries in every aspect of our life,

boundaries in every relationship with our spouses, our partners, our children, our colleagues, our friends. And yet we have porous boundaries when it comes to technology and our relationship to our digital devices. There's no such thing as mindless scrolling. It's something that we all do all day long. But in fact, it has a direct influence scrolling on your brain because when you are feeling a sense of stress and your brain and your amygdala is in high alert,

you have a greater predilection for developing something called popcorn brain. And popcorn brain is a biological phenomenon of you feeling like when you spend too much time online, how your brain starts popping. And that can have a direct influence on your stress and burnout. Also, when you are feeling stressed and burned out, you have a greater risk for developing popcorn brain because you have a primal urge to scroll. We

We talked about the amygdala and the stress response and how your amygdala is always scanning its environment for danger. So back when we were all cave people, we would...

sleep and the night watchman would look around and scan for danger, right? Like while the tribe slept. And now we're all our own night watchman. So we scan and scroll all day, all night. And creating digital boundaries is a way to do that. So there's several strategies I offer in that reset. First is switching your phone to grayscale. That can really help. It's a way to decrease your scrolling time and make scrolling less enticing. Particularly important at night.

removing your phone off your nightstand, investing in a low-cost alarm clock instead, giving your brain a buffer for a few minutes at the start of the day and at the end of the day. This is not about becoming a digital monk, Chris. This is about decreasing your reliance on your devices. The science shows that in fact, complete abstinence and becoming a digital monk is in fact not as great for your mental health, stress, well-being as is decreasing your reliance.

Yeah, the one that's really helped for me is got do not disturb mode, which is like complete silence, but you can create your own modes. And I've created one called no distractions, which is not quite as aggressive as do not disturb, but it auto turns on every morning before I wake up. So when I'm awake, it's like,

I'm not getting push notifications and reminders throughout the day. Now, if I need to, you know, I'm expecting something important, I can turn it off. But I kind of default into a state of mostly do not disturb. And if you have an iPhone, you can really easily tweak what do I want in these modes, you can have all the apps on your home screen disappear in a certain mode. And so I'd encourage people to play around with the settings on their phones, because you could do a lot and

I actually did an interview with John and Jake, two guys who wrote a book called Make Time, and we went deeper on that. So I'm going to not go too deep down digital boundaries because we've talked about it in the past, but I'm a big fan of this one. Me too. It's probably been the biggest game changer for me, especially at night. All right. Let's talk number three. The third reset is sync your brain to your body. And this is all about tapping into your mind-body connection. Okay.

And what the mind-body connection is, very simply, is that your brain and your body are inextricably linked and in constant communication. What's good for your body is good for your brain and vice versa. And the mind-body connection is working always in the background, but you have the power to influence it and actually change it.

And so one way you can do that is by practicing something called Stop, Breathe, Be. It is one of the strategies that I have used. It was actually the first thing that I learned when I was a stressed medical resident. We can do it together. So you're going to stop,

breathe, and just be. It's a three-second exercise. You want to do this throughout your day. So it's great and ideal before you join Zoom or when you're about to look at your Slack channel or checking your email. I learned it in medical residency long before the invention of smartphones. When I would knock on the door and turn the doorknob as I would enter the patient's room, that is when I would say to myself, stop, breathe, be. And so every patient room I entered, it was a moment for me to get

grounded. Why does it work? It helps rewire your brain for less stress and more resilience because it taps into your mind-body connection. When you do it incrementally over time, what happens with Stop, Breathe, Be is that it gets you out of the future-focused thinking. So anxiety is a future-focused emotion and it gets you out of like all of that what-if-be

doom and gloom thinking. And it gets you back to what is in the here and the now. I'll just share, there's this one video that somehow has become a nightly ritual in our family, the rainbow breathing video. And it's like a two minute video that every night my daughter wants to watch it. And she's two years old. It's basically a rainbow building up each arc. And in between it says, okay, when the arc comes up, breathe in, when the arc comes down, breathe out.

And now she's to the point that she doesn't even need the video. She's just like, let's walk through the colors. And I'm like, red. And she goes...

Oh, amazing. This isn't true every single night, but there are nights where it takes her from like a very excited mode to a very calm mode very quickly. And so I do want to come back after we talk about the five resets to talk about how we can think about this as parents. But there is an example of this. If you want to try it with children, this video, for whatever reason, our kids absolutely love it. And I'm like, if they're running around crazy, I'm like, do you guys want to watch the rainbow video? They're like, yes. And then they just sit and then they breathe for two minutes. And it's really interesting.

That's so cool. And the reason that works, the reason breathing is a great gateway to tap into your mind-body connection is because, first of all, your breathing is the only physiological mechanism in the body under voluntary and involuntary control.

So your heart doesn't have that capability. Your brain waves don't. Digestion. The respiration is the only biological mechanism under voluntary and involuntary control. So while you and I are hanging out, we're just breathing. We can also modulate our breathing for certain reasons.

The breath is also fascinating because it is the toggle between the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. Just like there are two kinds of stress in your body, there are two kinds of nervous systems in your body. And so the sympathetic nervous system is fight or flight. The parasympathetic nervous system is rest and digest.

And so when you are anxious and keyed up and really feeling a sense of high stress, you have thoracic breathing, short, quick breaths originating from your chest. It's called sympathetic overdrive or your fight or flight response. Parasympathetic nervous system, rest and digest, your breathing when you're feeling relaxed usually comes from your belly. It's called diaphragmatic breathing or slow, deep breathing.

So your kids might be running around, excited, thoracic breathing, and then you do the rainbow breathing video, and then they slow down and they start doing diaphragmatic belly breathing. And so they have effectively switched out of sympathetic mode and into parasympathetic mode.

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I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com slash deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. Where does movement fit into this mind-body connection? Is it important in this kind of third reset area?

I talk about the power of exercise and lots of different resets. Some form of daily movement is important. For patients that I've had who have been mostly sedentary, even five or 10 minutes of a walk is enough.

This is not about physical fitness or the promise of physical fitness. It is the promise of mental fitness. And the reason you want to do a five or 10 minute walk if you're mostly sedentary is because you are priming your brain and you're building a habit.

And when you are doing something new, Chris, it is easier to do a little bit every day rather than once in a while because it avoids decision fatigue. We've all been at moments in our life like there are moments now I am a daily exerciser, but there were moments in my 20s when I was essentially sedentary or not really working in the hospital 80 hours a week.

but I didn't have a dedicated exercise regimen. And when I said to myself, oh, I'm gonna exercise and you're feeling a lot of stress and you're like, oh, I'm gonna work out three or four days a week. Chances are you'll do zero or one because it's hard for your brain to wrap itself around when you're feeling a sense of stress. Okay, I'm gonna carve out this hour to go do this. Something comes up at work, something comes up at home. And so instead building in some form of daily movement every day.

Five, 10 minutes of a walk. And as you're walking, if you can, articulate your feet as you're walking on the floor. Really think about the surface area and create mindful movement. Your feet have 30 bones and 100 muscles in them. And that's like a lot of grounding power. So as you're walking, articulate your feet on the floor. Take some deep breaths. And there's lots of reasons why daily movement is so important for stress and burnout.

We know that it changes the brain, some form of movement, but even five to 10 minutes of a walk is enough for the purposes of this conversation and really rewiring your brain for less stress.

I feel like we just walked a little bit into the fourth reset. A lot of the time I might go for some movement is also coming up for air. So let's talk about that as well. Yes, the fourth reset, come up for air. It sounds like it would be about breathing. That's actually the third reset. Come up for air is about creating mental bandwidth. In this particular reset, I talk a lot about multitasking and it being a myth reset.

We know that you and I and everyone else who's high functioning and high achieving has probably been a multitasker for a long time. I am actually a recovered multitasker and I pride myself on being a monotasker. We know that multitasking is a myth because it's a scientific misnomer. There's no such thing. Your brain is wired to do one thing at a time. And even though 100% of human brains think that we're excellent multitaskers, the truth is only 2% of human brains can effectively multitask.

And when you are multitasking, and I put that in air quotes, what you're effectively doing is task switching. So doing two separate tasks in rapid succession. And because your brain is wired to do one thing at a time, multitasking, what it actually does is it weakens your productivity, ironically.

It also weakens your prefrontal cortex, which is that area right behind your forehead that we talked about at the start of our conversation, which is responsible for memory, planning, organization, complex problem solving, strategic thinking. And so at this stage of life and with the state of the world, we can't afford to multitask. We have to monotask instead.

And what is monotasking? Doing one thing at a time. It preserves your productivity and the function of your prefrontal cortex. And one of the most common questions I get asked, Chris, is like when I suggest monotasking, people are like, oh my God, doing one thing at a time, that's not even realistic. Like I get a lot of arms crossed and a lot of anger. And I have actually been able to monotask and do lots of things. And the way you do that is by creating a system called time blocking. And so it takes practice. It's like riding a bike. It's just a skill.

You just spend...

10 to 15 minutes focusing on one task. Let's say you have four tasks to complete. And I have a whole workflow in the five resets of how you could bring monotasking into your everyday life. It's by creating time blocking. Instead of doing all four tasks at once, you know, spend 10 to 15 minutes on task one, then take a short break. Task two, 10 to 15 minutes, take a short break. Same for task three and four. And over time, build yourself up. So now, Chris, I can go to 50 minutes of monotasking before I need a break.

But when I first started, I started in medical school doing time blocking and I could only do 10 minutes, if that, without needing a break, simply because my brain wasn't trained. You know, your brain is a muscle, just like your biceps, because through this process called neuroplasticity and in the same way that you can train your biceps,

for hypertrophy and lots of different things, you can train your brain in the same way to rewire itself for less stress. And one of the ways is through time blocking and monotasking rather than multitasking. So that's like one of the takeaways of that particular reset. I like it. Okay. In the interest of time, let's run to number five. The fifth and final reset is bring your best self forward.

And there are several strategies in there. One which I really like to use and people have used in so many different varieties and instances is called therapeutic writing. And so what you can do is if you've gone through a traumatic event or something that is eating you up, it can be something small, big. Really, it's about you and your lived experience. It is a technique coined by James Pennebaker, who's a psychologist at Vanderbilt.

For four consecutive days, you're going to spend 20 to 25 minutes every day and write down a stream of consciousness. Whatever that issue is that you're having, just set a timer and write. And on day two or three, you might feel an uptick in negative emotions and it will level out by day four.

Expressive writing is really powerful as a tool to unravel some of those mental knots you may have about certain issues. It is also a fantastic way to decrease your stress and burnout about a particular event or an associated event. I've used it with many of my patients, some of whom have had events happen 10, 15 years ago, like a particular traumatic event or something that they're just like holding on to a grudge or something. And then just four days of 20 to 25 minutes of

of writing has helped to manage all of that stress and burnout. It is a remarkable tool when you look at the science of expressive writing. Hundreds, if not thousands of studies, it has been shown to decrease hospital admissions and all sorts of fascinating health outcomes.

That's so fascinating. So that's a practice in this reset. I think the title was bring your best self forward. Yes, that's right. Would you consider that both internal and outwards or is really the focus on the way you treat yourself, the way you present yourself to others or both?

Ooh, that's a great question. Another strategy in this reset is really leaning into this idea of self-compassion, like you say. And we know that self-compassion isn't a nice to have. It actually has an influence on your amygdala. It can decrease the volume of your amygdala. And self-compassion works directly on your amygdala, in fact, to decrease the volume of the amygdala and slow down the volume of your stress response.

And so when you're talking about your best self and bringing it forward, it's not necessarily that it's about how you can be with others, but rather also how you can be with yourself. Because when you create a sense of self-compassion and lead with grace and really give yourself lots of room for error and mistakes and getting back up on the horse once you fall off, which is when we talked about habit creation, that's a normal and healthy part of new habit formation. Giving yourself self-compassion is really important. And

Understanding that the journey to less stress can be fraught with lots of things that you need to work out. So when you're more compassionate with yourself and silence that inner critic, and when you can silence that inner critic, then you can also show up better in the world. I love it. We walked through all five, obviously not in as much detail as in the book. So if people want to go deeper, we know that option. If someone's feeling stressed and it's like, okay, I want to run through this process and

Is it run through one at a time, pick one to focus on? I feel like if you tried to do all five all at once, it would probably be too much. So you can do the five resets in whatever way feels good to you. But the key to remember is the rule of two. It's how your brain makes change happen. When you are thinking of New Year's resolutions, I've had so many patients come in, Chris, with like binders of like, this is everything that I've been doing or want to do, right?

and everything with the kitchen sink approach. What often happens when you are starting something new is even positive change, like bringing a reset into your life or a fabulous New Year's resolution, is actually a stress on your brain. And your brain can only sustain two new changes at a time if you want those changes to stick.

anything more in your system gets overloaded. And this is from a seminal study done by two men who are psychiatrists back in the 1960s, Drs. Holmes and Rahey. You can read all about that study. The findings of that study are fascinating and I encourage people to really dive into it either in the five resets or read about it on their own.

But because the findings of that study, the discovery was that even positive things that happen in your life can cause stress. And so that is why New Year's resolutions fail, because we take on too much and then your brain needs some energy to adapt to all of these new changes. And it simply can't keep up and it gets overloaded. So you don't do anything or you do something for, you know, up until like February 1st. Then you're like, that's it. I'm done. I can't keep up.

Instead, when you're thinking about how to rewire your brain for less stress and burnout, we've talked about several of the strategies, but there's many more in the five resets. And a lot of my work is in sharing these strategies. Just pick two. Pick two things that you can try. Give yourself eight weeks to try those things.

Build those into your life. And then when they're incorporated into your life, add two more. And then keep going eight weeks at a time to build in those two more things. So by the end of six months, you will actually have made way more progress than

on your journey to less stress and burnout than if you had just brought in a binder to me, for example, and say, like, I want to do all of these things immediately. If we fast forward, not eight weeks, let's go 16, 32 weeks, someone who's been able to identify some of their causes, their symptoms, their canary,

put into place some of these resets, how do you think they would describe how they feel in that future state to their current self? Like what is the ultimate benefit of being able to tackle all of your stress and the impact that would have on how you live your life?

That's a beautiful question, Chris. And I think it very much depends case by case on what you want to achieve. But the overarching feeling is one of empowerment and really cultivating your sense of agency. So what do I mean by agency? Scientifically, it simply means that your belief that you can change your life, something small, something big, but that feeling that you have like, I am powerful and I can make change happen for myself.

When you are feeling chronically stressed and when you're feeling burnt out, your sense of agency, Chris, diminishes because you feel so overwhelmed with your stress and burnout. It's so hard to get out of your own way. Again, this is not you. It is not your fault. It is how your brain and body are designed.

Instead, when you start focusing on these resets and really focusing two at a time and thinking through what are the two things that you want to do and at eight weeks, 12 weeks, 16, 32 weeks, and you suddenly are like a new person, right? You've brought in a lot of these strategies. You're feeling good. So when stress does happen externally, you're able to manage it and you can have that bounce back feeling.

from various things that happen, you feel a greater sense of control over your life and you feel like, wow, I can do this, I can do anything. And so that is that promise of agency and really fanning that flame. I deeply believe, Chris, in my work, and I've seen it thousands of times with patients, that each one of us, we all have that power to

to make meaningful change in our lives. You have it, I have it. Every single person listening today has the power to make change happen. You might not feel like you do, but that's just your amygdala talking. And when you follow the five resets, it's really just working with your brain,

working with your biology rather than competing against the biology of stress. And that's how you make change happen. And then once you feel that sense of agency and like, I can make meaningful change happen in your life, perhaps you'll take on more and more. And it is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. And who knows where you'll be in 16 or 32 weeks. You might be a whole new person.

Love that. So that's 1632 weeks for someone listening who's like, what's the first thing I should do after this episode ends? What would you recommend? I think the first thing you could do is, of course, order the five resets. You can order it. Audiobook. I narrate it. The paperback copy is coming out this January. We have the digital copy.

But as you're going through, think about one thing. And if you can, two things from this conversation today that you would like to try in your everyday life. Stop, breathe, be. A five-minute walk. Digital boundaries. Multitasking. Switching over to monotasking. There are so many strategies that Chris and I have shared today. And...

try to pick two of those to try and give yourself a metric. Do a most goal and say, okay, I'm going to see if this worked for me in the next four weeks and then keep going. Because sometimes when you're feeling that sense of stress, you just need that like whisper of, wow, it's going to get better. And then you can really hold on to that. And then that will fuel your journey towards less stress and more resilience.

Okay. And finally, if people want to go deeper, where else can people find your work? I am on every social media channel. You can follow me at Dr. Aditi Narukar. That's at D-R-A-D-I-T-I-N-E-R-U-R-K-A-R. Or check out my website, 5resets.com, number 5resets.com. Amazing. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Chris, for having me. I really appreciate it.

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