The pandemic amplified the highs and lows of working in tech - new opportunities on one side, isolation and lost security on the other - while erasing the transitions that used to separate work from home. When your desk sits in your bedroom, the mind never quite gets to clock off.
Clinical psychologist Sherry Walling offers practical ways to protect mental wellbeing one moment at a time: manufacturing transitional rituals, guarding your focus instead of pretending we multitask, and letting identities beyond work matter. She makes the case for sleep as a neurological superpower, for setting honest expectations when our internal resources are stretched thin, and for talking openly about mental health at work before people reach burnout.
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For our next session, here we are with Doctor. Sherry Walling. Thanks so much for joining us, Sherry. Are, let me get this right, you're clinical psychologist and entrepreneur and podcaster and author. So you've got a lot to keep you busy through lockdown. Yeah, there's some other slashes.
Wife, mother, dog owner, all the things. Yeah, and married to an entrepreneur, which must be, my wife tells me that's rough. Yeah, it's like a circus at our house between my business, my husband Rob's business. It's always fun, always interesting. So one of the reasons I was so delighted that you could join us for Level Up today, I mean, you and I met a few years ago in Glasgow when yourself and Rob were traveling around Europe and we had a good chat then.
I've always had you in the back of my mind to get you over to Turing Fest. It could have been a trip to Edinburgh, but instead it's a Zoom, but that's just the way the world is right now. That's really sad, but it's okay.
We'll see if we'll work on that another time for sure. Mental health is an area that we've been covering a little bit more than previously in Turing Fest over the past, it was actually for the past few years. And it's obviously a topic that people are more aware of than they had been.
It feels like tech is taking it very seriously or much more seriously than we did. And obviously we've all had a lot of mental health challenges in the last year, unprecedented. So yeah, maybe just, I guess, talk us through a little bit of what you've seen in the people that you speak with and your clients and from the in the tech world and the entrepreneurial world, how have people been dealing with the last twelve months of COVID and everything we've all been dealing with?
Yeah, I think the last twelve months have really amplified the up and down nature of what it means to work in tech. I mean, I think those of us who are technologists, we're used to things changing fast. We're used to moving fast. We're used to updates and iterations.
And I think this season, though, has made the highs higher and the lows lower. So a lot of folks are doing well. There have been really interesting innovative opportunities that specifically technology has allowed for where as people are stuck at home, technology is helping people stay connected and do different things, new things.
So I think in some ways, it's important to tell the story about opportunity and problem solving. But then of course, on the other side of that, the world's in chaos and lots of people have lost jobs. Lots of people have lost revenue. Lots of people have lost their plans and their sense of security.
And so the lows, the uncertainties have become much more poignant and I think much more painful for people. So it's not one thing, it's intensely stressful and isolating and lonely. And then for some folks, are also lots of interesting and neat opportunities. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty much how I've found it.
Definitely ups and downs. One of the things that we've all been hearing a lot about for the past few years, I think, certainly from founders talk about it a lot is work life balance. And work life balance has been, it's been harder than ever to achieve, think over the past year, not least, I mean, the past few years, things have been shifting perhaps anyway with things like Slack and it's kind of harder to get away from work than it used to be.
The upside, of course, you've got more flexibility and more geographic flexibility, but the last year, the separation between life and work has really become a blurred line. How do you think about that and how have you seen that affect people? Yeah, I think that is one of the most stressful sort of experiences of having, particularly people who are raising and parenting children, having them home for school and having all of their kind of activities disrupted and their support systems disrupted means that you are a professional and you are sort
of twenty fourseven parents. And most of us are not super well set up for that. And so while again, the gift of the pandemic is everybody's getting lots of family time in, the truth of that is it's extraordinarily stressful and demanding. And I think those of us who are figuring out how to do that well are trying to find some transitional moments.
We're trying to find spaces where, okay, for these two hours, I'm just a professional. I'm just focused on work. I get to do a deep dive into whatever problem I'm trying to solve or whatever project I'm working on. And then to create some transitional space and realize, okay, for these thirty minutes or for this hour, I'm a parent or I'm a partner.
And I'm just focused on this human in front of me. The more that we are forcing ourselves to go through quick transitions, the more that we're actually fatiguing our brains. I think all of us like to think that we're really good at multitasking, but the neuroscience doesn't support that.
When we are shifting quickly between tasks, even if we're just jumping into check Slack or jumping into check email, we're fraying our brains. Like our brains don't like to do that. So it's super challenging right now, course, to whatever, find this whatever you want to call work life balance.
But I think the ticket is to choose a thing, to do that thing with as much focus as you can, and then to shift and really to avoid these micro interruptions and small distractions as much as possible. Yeah, I mean, many of us were probably struggling with that anyway before.
Yeah, right, on a good day. Yeah. It's also something that we've probably all become so aware of is the connection between physical space and psychological well-being. And as I'm recording this from my bedroom, which I'm spending far too much time had back from, at Turing Fest we've been working from home since March, as I imagine most people here today are in a similar boat.
At some point, I think we're all gonna be back in offices in some form or in some way, or many of us will be. How do you think that lack of physical, I mean, it's just that even if it's the walk to work, if it's a ten minute walk or if it's a one hour train ride or whatever, you have a time where you transition from being okay, I'm in home mode or I'm in work mode.
And we've lost that for the past year. And that's been very hard, think. Yeah, I'm Supermanner. I'm Clark Kent. I do think that's really hard, the lack of transition. When everything first shut down, we moved Rob's office into our bedroom, similar probably to what you're doing.
So the first thing that I saw when I woke up every morning was his desk and his computer and all his stuff. And I think it certainly sets this tone of, can't get away. I can't have other thoughts. I can't do other things.
And I think that we have to, in some ways artificially create these transitions. So as silly as it sounds, I still kind of dress for work, even if I'm not wearing shoes. But you get in a mode where you say, Okay, I'm putting on my Turing Fest t shirt because now I'm doing Turing Fest work.
And then maybe at the completion of your work day, you change into some other t shirt that's like your family t shirt, your kid hanging out t shirt. So we have to artificially create these transitional spaces because again, maybe you're walking five feet.
You're not really moving any distance, but how do you help your mind and your body to know you get to have a break from the intensity of work right now and dive deeply into this other part of your life. And sometimes, or traditionally that's context cues.
It's the situation, it's the scene, it's your desk or your workspace versus your bedroom or your family room. And so when in the absence of those clear delineations of space, we have to kind of hack the system. We have to artificially introduce those, which I think does help people realize, okay, I'm putting on my suit jacket or my touring fest t shirt to do work and then I'm Something I've seen you speak about before at MicroConf, I think, is the idea of psychological delineation entrepreneurs that you can't make your whole
psyche and person about your business. I could be wrong with this, but it feels like a lot of people who are not necessarily entrepreneurs, but we've all kind of been forced into that a little bit lately. We've all been forced into this kind of mode of always on with work or and then the flip side of it, sort of monotony of COVID life, it's been pretty goddamn boring.
Yes. For a year. Truth. How do you, yeah, from a psychological perspective, I mean, is it more important than ever to have other interests beyond, we all have interests beyond work or most of us, but how we achieve that delineation? I really think it is more important than ever to have other things that you care about.
I think those of us that professionals, we're hardwired to have our work be our identity. You meet someone at a pub back when that was a thing and you say your name and then often someone will say, what do you do? After your name, it's kind of the most important thing about you.
And I would like to push back on that a little bit. I don't think that needs to be our most important defining characteristic. And so I think if we're gonna change that for ourselves, we have to decide that we are going to let other parts of us be a core part of our identity.
So diving into being a musician, I don't know, it seems like everyone's baking sour bread, but like things that are available to you that you care about growing a garden, woodworking, writing, doing other things that are central to who you want to be and to what you want to put out into the world and letting those matter enough to give them time, space, and energy.
And then to talk about them in your own introduction to say, I'm a developer, but also, or my other passion is I love wordfide pizza, like to have something else be part of that introduction that's really core to you. Yeah, seems like we all need to be a bit more intentional about our psychological building blocks and taking care of that.
Something on a personal level, I've definitely struggled to do my best work over the past twelve months. It's something we've talked about as a team. Nobody seems to be on sort of the top of their game right now. Is that a reasonable situation?
Should we be expecting more from ourselves or should we be cutting ourselves a break? And how do we deal with our colleagues and our bosses when it comes to us not being even close to a hundred percent? Yeah. The the book that I'm working on right now is about how people like high functioning folks work through grief and loss.
And so it sort of speaks to this question of when a lot of our internal resources are taken up by something else, they're taken up by just sort of coping with a world that's in chaos, or they're taken up with working through something that's painful for us as individuals.
We just don't have the bandwidth to show up with the same level of energy and creativity as we may normally. And I think we have to tell the truth about that to ourselves so that we can roll back expectations and say, I may not be able to work as fast or I may not be able to be as creative, but these are the three to five things that I can meaningfully do this week to really set expectations so that we can be successful with the expectations that we set rather than expecting ourselves to
function at the pre COVID level and then being disappointed and frustrated over and over and over, which of course adds to this mental cycle of us sort of berating ourselves for not being who we used to be in the before times or not being able to work at the level that we used to work.
And I do think that should be an open conversation in our workplaces, not as a way to say that we're not lazy or slacking, but the reality is that our internal resources are more divided than they've ever been. And if we continue to push and push and push, there comes a point where we'll we break, where we experience burnout or where we are pushed into depression.
Mean, depression and burnout are the number one causes of disability in the world. Those are real things to contend with and worth preventing by having reasonable expectations and communicating about those with people that we work with. Does it seem to you that that conversation is more open than it has been previously?
And has COVID accelerated that or has it made it worse? I think it is happening much more openly than it has before. I mean, big organisations, big tech companies have been taking every other Friday off. They're creating a little more margin or a little more space for their employees to have a little bit more work life balance or just a little more space in their lives.
I think that it's become undeniable, the real limits of what we can do, people are having to recognize that. So I think that the conversation is softening. I've been talking about mental health in the tech world since I guess about twenty seventeen, which is when Aaron Schwartz died by suicide.
And there have been certainly a series of wake ups in the tech community, whether it's losing key well known people to suicide or seeing a lot of turnover and burnout and depression really affect what companies can do. And I do think that COVID being such a worldwide like shock to the system has disrupted expectations in some ways a positive way.
I think that we're a little bit more open to the toll that mental health stress can take on someone's ability to function while at work. So out of that sort of chaos that's been imposed upon us, what do you feel are the opportunities or the skills that we, that as professionals in the tech industry that we you know, it seems like we have an opportunity to sort of rebuild, remake our world a little bit, even if that's in sort of an internal situation, but also remake the workplace.
And, you know, the geography of the workplace has definitely been and what that's gonna look like post COVID, that's shifted for sure. But on a personal level, around mental hygiene and things like that, what should we be thinking about? I mean, I think that the demands for or the invitation, I'll say, frame it positively, the invitation to become really excellent at communication is different than it's been before, right?
We're communicating more asynchronously, We're communicating digitally. We don't have that sort of water cooler connection points. And so the way that we rebuild relationships at work, think is important and an important skill moving forward, assuming that we will extend some version of sort of hybrid or distributed teams probably for some time to come.
And so the way that we connect and make friends and can form relationships with our colleagues is changing. And I think, again, this idea of mental hygiene, of assuming not only this deep responsibility for our own physical health, but understanding that our work is only going to be as good as our brain is rested, right?
So paying attention to what helps to protect our focus, what helps to protect our energy, those mental hygiene kinds of activities become extraordinarily important as an edge to productivity and to creativity for sure. So on the, you mentioned rest. Sleep is a thing that, I don't know, we didn't seem to be talking very much about sleep in our pre COVID world, but I hear lots of people talking about it and writing about it.
Know, obviously it's pretty important part of our life cycle, but we don't seem to take it very seriously before. I mean, I've got two little kids, so it's a different place for me, but So you're liking if you get sleep. Yeah, they're not too bad. They're not too bad.
Do you see that people are taking sleep more seriously as a part of their life that they need to actively manage or mind? Yeah, I mean, I think we're all home at night now, right? So what else are you going to do? Go to bed.
And really from a neurological perspective, sleep is our superpower. I mean, that's where our brain does all of its juicy work to rebuild, to create memory. And if we can have that strongly in place as something that we sort of take with us post COVID as the value of really getting, you know, for most adults, it's seven to nine hours of sleep every night.
Most of us don't get that. That's often the first thing to go when we're busy or we're stressed or we're working on something important to us, but it's absolutely core to us being able to maintain productivity, creativity, neurological flexibility, and just good old fashioned mood.
Extraordinarily important. And then those other basics, right? The things that probably our parents taught us back when we were little kiddos, but the value of drinking water, the value of having good nutrition, and then the value of simple movement of getting out for walks and exercise.
I mean, suddenly when we weren't able to move around as freely, at least for me where I live, taking a walk outside was the event of the day. That was the thing that we planned the day around. But again, what a valuable activity to give time and energy for because it's so essential to our mental emotional well-being.
Yeah, it feels like in a lot of ways we've all had a bit of a, I don't know, a bit of an epiphany or a bit of a reset on what we care about, particularly when some things that were previously just always available are no longer.
Sheri, we're pretty much out of time just before we go. You wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Entrepreneur's Guide to Keeping Your **** Together. It's not just for entrepreneurs though. It's just kind of general- For humans. Yeah, humans. So we'd recommend that to anyone watching today.
And then if people wanna catch up with you, the Zen Founder podcast is your regular output and you're on Twitter too, right? Yep, ZenFounder. Okay. New book coming out next April? Yes. Okay. So how do people get their hands on that if they want to?
Yeah, I think the pre sales page isn't even up yet, but it's going through a traditional publisher, which is a whole other journey for me. So I think if folks want to learn about that, can sign up for my mailing list at either sherrywalling dot com or zenfoundr dot com or just follow me on Twitter.
I'm sure I'll be chatting it up there. Perfect. Perfect. Well, Doctor. Sherri Walling, thanks very much for your time today. Cheers. Hey, it's good to be with you. Thanks, Brian. Take care.
