Do you struggle with the new normal that the pandemic has brought — constant Zoom calls, online webinars, and limited face-to-face interaction?
 
The big changes brought about by the pandemic altered how we function day-to-day. And many of these add stress to our life. So how do we adapt to these sudden big changes and face the new normal?
 
Dr. Amy Mednick is a psychiatrist working in her own private practice. She received her medical degree with Distinction in Research from Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a Bachelor of Science in Brain & Cognitive Sciences from MIT. She specializes in the overlap between the humanities and neuroscience and leads a lecture series for psychiatric residents in training, social workers, and psychology trainees. She’s been involved in both brain research and linguistic research and has authored articles in Clinical Psychiatry News. Her new book is Humanizing the Remote Experience through Leadership and Coaching: Strategies for Better Virtual Connections.
 
In this episode, Amy dives a little bit deeper and explains the unconscious cognitive change the pandemic has brought in our day-to-day functioning and interaction whether in the workplace or in life.
 
 
What you will learn from this episode:
  • Uncover why you feel more tired and exhausted with the sudden shift to the online world
  • Explore different ways to overcome mental fatigue in the new normal
  • Learn the three warning signs you need to watch for and the action you then need to take
 
 
“Do things that someone running from a tiger wouldn’t do.”
– Dr. Amy Mednick
 
 
Valuable Free Resource:
 
 
Topics Covered:
 
01:55 – How the Pandemic Started It All: Dr. Amy shares why she and Dr. Leonard decided to write the book
 
04:05 – Boundaries Between Anything: What made the pandemic hard for most people?
 
05:25 – The Warning Trio: Dr. Amy talks about the warning signs that our needs are not getting met
 
06:44 – Need for Safety: Why is it so hard for you to focus especially when everything’s transitioning virtual?
 
08:45 – Need for Understanding: Why do you end up more exhausted from WFH rather than F2F
 
09:49 – Need for Belonging: How can exclusion and isolation actually hurt us physically?
 
12:18 – Dr. Amy explains how the feeling of exclusion manifests in us
 
19:55 – How to Simplify the Complex: Dr. Amy shares how women leaders can address the complexity the pandemic brought in the workplace
 
22:29 – What can you do to help your team recharge, especially during the pandemic?
 
24:31 – Sending Virtual Hugs: Dr. Amy shares how can you create a sense of safety and belongingness within your workplace
 
25:18 – Does the remote work setting still overlooks women and their capabilities?
 
26:16 – Disconnecting Online, Connecting Offline: What can you do to avoid misunderstandings and disconnections in remote settings
 
29:55 – Take Care of Yourself First: Dr. Amy talks about the importance of self-care in lowering your team’s stress levels over Zoom and the new normal
 
36:10 – Dr. Amy shares why psychological safety is so important
 
 
Key Takeaways:
 
“We get used to anything. As humans, we adjust to anything. So, I think now it’s a way of life. And it’s getting easier.” -Dr. Amy Mednick
 
“It’s a lot of work to make sense of things. So, if you’re exhausted at the end of a workday, it could be a warning sign that your brain is working excessively hard just to make sense of what is going on with others around you and that maybe there’s an adjustment that you could make there.” -Dr. Amy Mednick
 
“Mental fatigue, mental work, brain work affects your physical strength.” -Dr. Amy Mednick
 
“Your brain does not like discrepancy. It does not like things it can’t explain. So, when something doesn’t match what it expected, like a laugh at a joke, it’s going to work really hard to try to fix that.” -Dr. Amy Mednick
 
“Anything extraneous that you can take away the overload is going to be really helpful.” -Dr. Amy Mednick
 
“The remote experience is ambiguous enough. Do not add any ambiguity, make things extra, extra clear, extra explicit. Make goals explicit. Make the goals of meetings and the structure very explicit.” -Dr. Amy Mednick
 
“Even though you’re leading a team, you need to be okay. You need to be in a good place. You need to have safety and comfort. You need to be grounded so that you can connect.” -Dr. Amy Mednick
 
“You’re going to be happier and more productive if you’re giving your brain a chance to stop.” -Dr. Amy Mednick
 
 
Ways to Connect with Dr. Amy Mednick:
 
 
Ways to Connect with Sarah E. Brown
 
 
Full Episode Transcript:
 
Amy Mednick 00:00
Mental fatigue, mental work, brain work affects your physical strength. So, when your brain is tired, your body is going to feel it, as you describe at the end of the day.
 
Sarah E. Brown 00:19
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women, where we talk about challenges senior female leaders face in being happy and successful at work. I’m your host, Dr. Sarah E. Brown.
 
Sarah E. Brown 00:38
My guest today is Dr. Amy Mednick. She is a psychiatrist working in her own private practice. She received her medical degree with Distinction in Research from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and she has a Bachelor of Science in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT. She specializes in the overlap between the humanities and neuroscience. And in that capacity, she leads a lecture series for psychiatric residents in training, and for social workers, and psychology trainees at Mount Sinai, Beth Israel Hospital. She has been involved in both brain research and linguistic research, and has authored articles in Clinical Psychiatry News. And she has a new book, which she co- wrote with Dr. Diane Leonard, entitled, “Humanizing the Remote Experience Through Leadership and Coaching: Strategies for Better Virtual Connections“, something that is very, very pertinent today. Amy, thank you so much for being here!
 
Amy Mednick 01:46
Thank you for having me!
 
Sarah E. Brown 01:48
So, I am very curious about why you and Dr. Leonard decided to write this book.
 
Amy Mednick 01:55
Yes. So, like everyone else, the COVID pandemic happened and changed our work a lot, work in home and social lives dramatically. So as a psychiatrist, I was seeing people in my office mostly up until 2020. And I had to adjust rapidly and switch everything to online, which, fortunately, in psychiatry is possible. So, I was seeing people all day long on the computer and dealing with that for myself, balancing that with the rest of my life going on outside of the computer, and then also through all of my patients and clients seeing what it was doing to each of their lives. So, I kind of had this huge slice of, you know, what it was like for people in New York City, doing this online, and a lot of problems. And it’s really fascinating, and my co-author, Diane, as a teacher, was going through, you know, moving her class online, going through similar transition. So, we really just wanted to dig into it and figure out why it was so hard, especially at the beginning. We were all kind of feeling weird, and not exactly sure why. So, we wanted to figure out why, figure it out for ourselves and for our own experiences, and then start to tackle. What do we do about it? You know, how can we fix it? And how can we continue to have good connected human experiences, even if we’re talking on a computer to each other?
 
Sarah E. Brown 03:19
Well, I’m really delighted to dig into why and what the research is saying now. And also, what do we do about it? Now, as I was telling you, before we started recording, this is very much in line with my dissertation almost 20 years ago, when I was looking at decision making, global decision making, teams and how they were interacting with each other across long distances. And some of it was synchronous, and some of that was asynchronous. And, it was a complex picture then so I’m really interested in getting updated. But you mentioned, as you started to talk about this, that most people are experiencing it as hard. Would that be correct?
 
Amy Mednick 04:05
You know, I think now people are- we get used to anything. As humans, we adjust to anything. So, I think now it’s a way of life. And it’s getting easier. But I really saw a lot of people through this struggle in the first year, year and a half. And yeah, I think it was really hard doing everything that way and things getting lost in communication and also the way that, you know, on top of, with a pandemic, on top of things, the way that we were kind of all living our lives on the computer, in our homes. Everything– everything in the same place at the same time and not entering that in a measured and thoughtful way but kind of just doing everything at once. Home became work. I think that was part of what made it the hardest. Boundaries between anything. Yeah.
 
Sarah E. Brown 04:55
So, you characterize it as a human needs not getting met in your book, and you actually talk about the fact that there’s some warning signs of this. And I love that because one of the big parts of my practice is getting in touch with your needs, and then figuring out how to get them met and needs are often not obvious. So, I’m curious what you identified as the warning signs that our needs are not getting met,
 
Amy Mednick 05:25
Yes, I would love to talk about that! I find it very interesting. So, we know some of the more basic needs, right, food and water and, shelter, and we know when those are not being met. But as you’re saying, there’s a lot of other ones we really don’t always realize that they’re there. The three needs that I focus on are very socially-based, and they arise from our, as humans, being social creatures. So, there’s certain things that are hardwired into us to kind of keep us that way and keep us in the group, right, because evolutionarily, that was the best way to survive. So, these three that I focus on are the need for safety and comfort, the need for understanding and the need for belonging. And I’ll talk about each of them briefly, and then the warning sign when they’re not met. And the idea, as you’re saying, you know, the warning signs, I think, are really useful tool. Because in virtual interactions, right, we’re calling it hard. We’re calling it overwhelming. We feel tired and crazy at the end of the day, but it’s really hard to pinpoint why. And so, when you have these specific warning signs, you can kind of, they should help you to identify what’s missing, what’s the need, that’s not being met, where’s the problem area that you can focus on in your remote experience to improve it. Just like when you’re hungry, “Oh, I should go up and get some food.”
 
Amy Mednick 06:44
So, the first is safety and comfort. And the warning sign when that’s not being met, is actually problems and attention, which is one of my areas of a lot of interest. So, you have the need for safety and comfort. And mostly that need is met by being around other people. So, we equate the presence of other people with safety. That comes from day one, because human infants are completely helpless for a really long time, unlike other animals that can get up and walk and go hunt. So, we have that built-in need to have other people around to feel safe. It doesn’t really go away. So, when that need is not met, you can feel a bit hyper vigilant, a bit on edge, not necessarily having a fight or flight response, but kind of ready for one, you know, because that’s sort of what happens to humans when they feel like they’re alone.
 
Sarah E. Brown 07:35
So, can I ask does that manifest itself as lack of focus? Oh, great. Yeah.
 
Amy Mednick 07:42
So, you can feel that way when you’re alone. And just because there’s faces on the screen, it’s tough. You know, are there actually people there or not? So, when you’re hyper vigilant, your attention is hyper focused on the possibility of threat. You know, what’s happening. You know, you jump at any noise, things like that. Not focused on the task at hand. You’re on alert. So, you’re not- it’s just very hard to put all your attention on something that your nervous system doesn’t really think is as important as, you know, “where is everybody” kind of a thing. So, if you are consistently having problems focusing, staying on task, it might be a warning sign that you’re just not comfortable in your space, that your body is feeling the lack of other people being around, and maybe it’s time to, you know, close the computer and go get lunch with a real person. And you don’t go do something in real life that makes you feel connected and makes you feel like there are really are other people around.
 
Amy Mednick 08:45
So, the second need is a need for understanding. And so again, our brains are built with this need to make sense of other people and what their intentions are and what they’re doing and what they want from us and all of that. The warning sign when that’s not met is cognitive overload and fatigue. And I’ll tell you how we get from point A to B. So, because we have this wired need to understand other people, we actually have a lot of mechanisms and tools built into our brain that have evolved over a lot of time to help us do that. In virtual, so many of those fall flat, pun intended, like flat on the screen, you know, so your brain is doing a lot more work. And I can get into more details of what it’s doing, but the bottom line is it’s tiring. It’s a lot of work to make sense of things. So, if you’re really exhausted at the end of a workday, it could be a warning sign that your brain is working excessively hard just to make sense of what is going on with others around you and that maybe there’s an adjustment that you could make there.
 
Sarah E. Brown 09:45
Ah okay. Uh-huh.
 
Amy Mednick 09:46
And then the last- go ahead.
 
Sarah E. Brown 09:47
No, no, keep going. Keep going.
 
Amy Mednick 09:49
So, the last one is the need for belonging. And that one’s a little easier to wrap our minds around because we experience it a little bit more consciously. We have the need to belong. We have the need to be part of a group and when that’s not met, obviously, we can have feelings of exclusion and isolation. What’s especially interesting about that is that your brain actually perceives social pain of exclusion and isolation, in a very similar way to physical pain. So, it’s processed in the same part of your brain. Studies have even shown that if you think back on an incident of being left out, it’s going to cause a greater pain response in your brain than an incident of getting physically hurt. So, for our brains, being left out is the most relevant thing. That’s why you know, the brain brings so much attention to it. And it doesn’t even matter if it was, in a lot of these studies, it doesn’t even matter if you know why if you’re left out of a game or something, and you know, it’s because of random error or whatever. It doesn’t matter. It’s still the same reaction from your brain. So, then we have the remote environment, you have less. You’re not there in the office with people. You don’t have those brain chemicals kind of flowing oxytocin and endorphins and dopamine and all the things that kind of come from human interaction and eye contact and physical contact and just being together. So those aren’t flowing. Our brains actually synchronized when we’re working together. There’s less of that happening. And so, it’s a very different experience. And, you know, for example, you might know that no one’s met your – let’s say your sound’s not working. And so, in a meeting, you know no one’s asking you any questions, because you already told them like, “Hey, I’ll listen. But my mics funny, so don’t ask me any questions”. You know that, but your brain and your social instinct and all that doesn’t necessarily get that message because it doesn’t know Zoom. It doesn’t know it. All it knows is that no one’s talking to you. So, you’re going to feel that. You’re going to feel that exclusion, even if you don’t realize consciously that it’s affecting you. So, if you’re kind of getting that feeling frequently, there’s your warning sign that you have to look at that need.
 
Sarah E. Brown 11:55
So let me ask about that warning sign in particular. what I’m curious about is drilling down into the feeling. So does the feeling of exclusion manifest as a real feeling of exclusion? Or is it more like depression? And then you start having fear of missing out? FOMO? And stuff like that? How does it actually manifest?
 
Amy Mednick 12:18
I mean, I think it could probably be any range of ways. And you’re lucky if it’s very obvious. In that meeting, and you say, “I feel like I wasn’t even part of that meeting.” It’s great if you can recognize that. But what’s, you know, more dangerous is the meeting ends. And then you know, you go yell at your partner because you just feel like off and you don’t know why. And that’s how, you know, that’s where we need to pin these things down and figure out like, “What is the thing that kind of pushed me into this state? What am I missing?”
 
Sarah E. Brown 12:51
Okay, so if I summarize then your warning signs. So, the first one is, if you’re having problems focusing and problems with the tension, that’s probably indicative of your need for safety and comfort is not being met. Right? Is that right?
 
Amy Mednick 13:07
Yup, exactly.
 
Sarah E. Brown 13:08
Okay, if you if you’re experiencing a lot of fatigue, it’s probably that your need for understanding is not being met. And if you’re just off, you’re really cranky, and you’re feeling just something is amiss, then it’s probably a warning sign of exclusion. And it’s a key that your belonging needs are not being met. Is that?
 
Amy Mednick 13:34
Yeah, exactly!
 
Sarah E. Brown 13:34
Okay. All right. So, you get to the end of a long day, and you’ve been on like my days go, Zoom call after Zoom call, and you get to the end of the day, and you sit down and you’re just wiped. And that actually happens to me. I am absolutely wiped at the end of the day. I can’t say anything is really wrong. I can’t pinpoint it. I’m just wiped. Is that related to this?
 
Amy Mednick 14:04
It sure is! Yes, I think it is. I think that it relates to the second need mostly, that need for understanding and it speaks to the trouble with translating the 3D experience of the world and of people and of everything we learned our whole lives into a 2D experience. But the first thing you need to know about fatigue, really, that we don’t always fully appreciate is that mental fatigue, mental work, brain work affects your physical string. So, when your brain is tired, your body is going to feel it as you described at the end of the day. So, there was a really nice study like two over 10 years ago out of the UK that showed this really elegantly, where they had two groups of people. One group watched just like emotionally neutral movie for 90 minutes and the other group did really hard mental work for 90 minutes. Then they put both groups on stationary bikes and said, “Ride as far as you can. Just ride until you can’t, until you’re just completely physically wiped, and you can’t go any further.” And the group that had done the mental work was able to go much less time than the group that had done that emotionally neutral work. So, it’s kind of like, and what that shows, it’s like you have this shared gas tank. No matter what you’re doing physical, whether you’re running a marathon, or you’re doing back-to-back Zoom calls all day, it’s all drawing from the same tank, and it’s finite. And when you burn it all up, it’s just gone. And it’s, you know, with the mental, we don’t always fully realize that, right? With the physical, your legs collapse, right? You stop. You can’t run anymore. You can’t bike any farther. But with the mental, “I’ll just go a little farther. I’ll drink some coffee. I’ll just push.” It’s harder to realize that the gas is gone. And we tend to push through. I think women, especially, we just kind of keep going. So that’s the problem with fatigue. And then on Zoom, adding to the problem is that it’s a lot more work. It’s a lot more work for your brain. There’s a lot less information. There’s a lot less context. So, you’re building this picture of a 3D world all day long. Your brain’s filling in a lot of gaps, even without you realizing a lot of this stuff is just out of our conscious perception. But it’s still happening. So, like, for example, let’s say you’re talking to a supervisor, and you make kind of a stupid joke. And then there’s a pause, and nothing happens for five seconds. And then they explain, they say, “Oh, sorry, my internet cut out. What’d you say?” Fine, no problem, move on. But in those five seconds, your brain is chugging away, even if you don’t do it consciously. Your brain does not like discrepancy. It does not like things that can’t explain. So, when something doesn’t match what it expected, like a laugh at a joke, it’s going to work really hard to try to fix that. It’s going to say, you know, “What did I say?” It’s going to go over what you just said. “Did I miss the mark? Do I not know this person?” It’s going to start planning.” What should I say next? Should I apologize?” You know, it’s doing all this work for nothing. The five seconds pass and everything’s fine, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re doing all of that work. And that’s things like that are happening throughout the day. So, in terms of what we can do about it, you know, the book goes into a lot of this. The whole second half is about strategies for what to do about it. But I think the basic message is we’re overloading our brains. We’re asking a lot of them to do this unnatural thing all day, to talk to people on a computer instead of face to face. So as much as you can reduce that overload, as much as you can simplify things for your brain, the better. So, things like turning off your self view, which a lot of my clients at the beginning of the pandemic didn’t even realize they could do. I think people are getting a little bit more used to Zoom. But looking at your face is kind of unnatural, right? You don’t go to a meeting and have a mirror propped up in front of you. You check the mirror like, in a regular day, like a couple of times. You go to the bathroom, maybe in the morning, and you’re checking the mirror a couple of times. You’re not looking at your face all day long. And yet, it’s a very relevant cue. So, your brain is drawn to it. Your brain is going to look at your own face and it’s going to think things about it. It’s going to do things. So, giving yourself a break from that, from having to analyze your face. Check your image, make sure your set up, turn it off. That can help a lot in other thing. You know, and whatever is extraneous. If there’s a chat, you know, that’s not really adding anything. Anything extraneous that you can take away the overload is going to be really helpful.
 
Sarah E. Brown 18:40
Hi, this is Sarah Brown, again, the host of the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women. I hope you’re enjoying this episode, and gaining some tips and inspiration on how you can be happier, more successful, and experience less stress at work. If you would like to learn more about how you can empower the women in your organization to do the same, simply click on the show notes to see how you can connect with me. As an added bonus for my podcast guests, you will see how you can book 30 minutes with me to explore how you can implement a scalable self coaching program for the woman in your organization. Simply visit bookachatwithsarahebrown.com. Now back to this informative episode.
 
Sarah E. Brown 19:37
Okay, I want to get into all of the strategies but again, for my audience who’s probably leading teams as well, are there things that the leaders can do that helps bring their team along or address some of the stuff in the process?
 
Amy Mednick 19:55
Yeah, for sure. I think the best thing that leaders can do towards the same end, towards, you know, not adding any extra complexity on top of an already complex situation is just making everything as clear as possible. The remote experience is ambiguous enough. Do not add any ambiguity, make things extra, extra clear, extra explicit. Make goals explicit. Make, you know, the goals of meetings and the structure very explicit. It’s something that, of course, leaders are aware of, and should, you know are trying to do all the time, but just especially important to be really clear and deliberate. That will prevent adding extra layers of work on to your team’s brains. Another thing to consider is whether videos are always the best way to do things. It’s nice and it’s it feels more connected. But when you give all of what, you know, it gives a lot of information. You’re getting visual and auditory information, you got to do more with that. When you’re just on a phone call, you get less information, but you have to you know, work with it. You use someone’s voice, you read into it, you know, you take things from it. It’s actually been shown to be less work for the brain than adding in that video stream.
 
Sarah E. Brown 21:06
I am so glad you brought this up because the whole time you were talking about the last five minutes, I was thinking about my research back in the 90s. And we didn’t have video access back then. And everything, except for email and the like, was audio. You know, we got on old fashioned telephone calls. And I thought, you know, we didn’t experience as many of these problems. And I was wondering if there was anything that video was bringing in that was exacerbating this problem. And you just nailed it and said, yep, it is!
 
Amy Mednick 21:40
Yeah. I mean, they’ve been looking at video conferencing since it came around, I think, in like the 90s. And kind of analyzing what it does, and how much work it is. And of course, there’s benefits. And, you know, it’s great to see someone’s face when you’re talking to them, but, you know, lots of research has shown it is more mental work, just by nature. So sometimes it’s appropriate. And then when a phone call would suffice, you know, you could consider mixing in some phone calls with your team. And then of course, when it can be an email and not a whole meeting– great?
 
Sarah E. Brown 22:16
Okay, so simplification is one, varying the medium is another example. Is there anything a leader can do, or say to the team, or encourage the team to do to recharge?
 
Amy Mednick 22:29
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s definitely a tendency to get right to business. For some reason, when we’re doing things on Zoom, like we all sign on, and then-
 
Sarah E. Brown 22:38
I do that.
 
Amy Mednick 22:39
Yeah, then we go because we can and we could go meeting to meeting quick as we can. You know, we’re so efficient. And you know, on the one hand, you don’t want to waste your team’s time. You want to value their time. But, you know, that couple minutes at the beginning that some people do a check in or doing something else not related to the topic at hand, can do what you’re saying, can be pretty helpful. Like I mentioned, brains tend to synchronize when they’re working all together. People actually show similar brain patterns. And the more connected people are, the more their patterns sort of sync up. It was shown in classrooms that students who are more synced, like were more connected and did better, were more connected with the teacher. So, we’re missing that. I wonder if kind of doing an activity at the beginning, like all listening to kind of having music going, somebody will have music going in the background when they sign in. I wonder it’s not the same, but if we’re all kind of like listening to the same music and kind of moving in the same way, does that bring back a little bit of the synchrony to get us on the same page. But I think any of those little activities at the beginning of a meeting could probably go a long way to add to that, yeah.
 
Sarah E. Brown 23:51
What I was thinking as you were talking about these things, is that if a leader thought at the beginning of a meeting, how can I create safety? How can I create a sense of belonging? What is one thing I might be able to do? Probably can’t. I’m asking. I’m just hypothesizing out loud. Probably not. I can’t rationalize anything that he or she could do to create understanding but the safety aspect she could probably do some things to, with that, check in to create safety and a sense of belonging and I just wonder if that would help?
 
Amy Mednick 24:31
Yeah, I think even kind of talking about your own, if it’s appropriate, your own individual spaces, right? Usually, we join and we’re all in person. We’re all in the same space. We have the same distractors, right? There’s a loud noise we’re all going to look the same way and wonder what it was and then go back. In our separate spaces, all those distractors are individual and separate us so I think even drawing attention to that and maybe even like talking about briefly kind of where everyone is individually in their own home and their own space could add to that safety and comfort because it kind of decreases that, separate that, natural separation because we’re not in the same room and kind of bring each other into each other’s room a little bit could help.
 
Sarah E. Brown 25:18
Changing tangents just a bit. One of the things that I experienced when I was in corporate America, and it still is true today is women’s voices at the table are often not heard, you know. They get overlooked. Is there anything that the remote working has done to make that problem worse?
 
Amy Mednick 25:39
Not that I know of specifically. I didn’t come across any research on that specifically that I can think of? I mean, I can talk more generally about kind of how our voices can get- how kind of our message can get lost? And, you know, women might be a little bit more prone to that.
 
Sarah E. Brown 26:00
And is that worse in remote situations?
 
Amy Mednick 26:03
Yeah, I mean, it’s very common for things to get lost and distorted. It goes back to that lack of context and that difficulty with understanding.
 
Sarah E. Brown 26:13
And what do you find can be done about that?
 
Amy Mednick 26:16
Yeah. So, it has to do with, you know, we start with why it happens. It’s kind of how we structured in the book, why does it happen? And then what can we do? You know, what’s the problem? What’s the disconnect? And so, kind of getting a little more in depth about the whole understanding problem. It helps to know what’s supposed to happen, and what’s going on. Your brain has actually- because understanding people is so energy intensive, we couldn’t even do it. We couldn’t go through a day like we would need to sleep after a few hours, if we were just trying to understand this complex world all the time. So, the brain has evolved really excellent capacity to predict. There’s this whole like kind of prediction machinery built into your brain. And it’s constantly thinking about the outside world, making predictions about incoming information based on what it already knows. And then if its expectations are not met, it’s going to modify them. And it’s going to look for more information, kind of, like I said, with that bad joke on the phone call. And then your whole life, you’re learning signals, and you’re associating them with meaning. And you have all this setup, and then we go to Zoom or whatever platform we’re using, and all goes out the window. You had these shortcuts. You can’t get rid of them, but they don’t work. They don’t work as well. Either, you can’t use them, or they give you a wrong answer. They kind of go bad because of the way that they don’t translate. I think sound is a really good example of that. So, like, normally, we walk into a room and someone yells our name from across the room, and they’re over there. And somebody you know, is having a side conversation, and you’re not really paying attention. Someone’s whispering in your ear– obvious! You know most of those people are. You know their relationship to you. You go to a meeting on Zoom, and it’s all collapsed into one headphone jack. And so, this queue that we’re kind of used to all the time, now we’ve lost it. And so, there’s a great research study that kind of looked at what’s the result of that misprediction. And they looked at people having remote conversations, and they study that sound delays. And they found that if there was a sound delay of less than 1.2 seconds, no problem. If there was a sound delay of more than 1.2 seconds, people in the study would consistently perceive the speaker as being less attentive, less conscientious and less extroverted. And they would consistently attribute it to the speaker and never to the technology. You know, it comes from a lifetime of talking to people and knowing what a pause means and what a long pause means, you know, and then we take those things to Zoom. And we have to make the same predictions and assumptions, because that’s how our brain works. So, it just kind of breaks down and this you know, machinery that’s adapted over millions of years, we’re giving it, what, like two years to continue to adapt to a different way of communicating and it’s just not yet. So, for, you know, for issues that women have in meetings, like same kind of thing. It’s all going to be magnified. We’re going to have the same problem, but then everything’s going to be a little bit worse because these things are still at play and then they’re not, you know, we’re not communicating as well. So, if there’s preexisting communication issues, it’s often not going to get better.
 
Sarah E. Brown 29:34
Okay, so let’s, let’s sum it up, what should leaders do to- what are the three to five things that leaders should do to lower the stress level of their teams working over these technologies, and actually create more of the safety and belonging?
 
Amy Mednick 29:55
Great, so I’ll go through some of, just kind of a range of the strategies because they kind of go run the gamut. So, the earlier ones really focus on you. And even though you’re leading a team, you need to be okay. You need to be in a good place. You need to have safety and comfort. You need to be grounded so that you can connect, so that you can be there for your team, so that you can be a good leader, so that all these Zoom issues are not affecting you. And the way that we suggest to do that in the book is just at the most basic level is to keep in mind that your brain is taking input from the outside world to decide if things are safe or not. That’s why breathing, slow breathing works. Because if you hyperventilate, it kind of sends a message, something might be wrong. And if you breathe slow and deeply, it sends a message that things must be fine. We often describe the fight or flight response as like, when you’re running from a tiger, right? That’s kind of like the classic explanation. Do things that someone running from a tiger wouldn’t do, like breathing slowly, eating a nice, slow, nutritious lunch, instead of grabbing an energy bar and like never stopping, you know. Take care of yourself. Do things that you can’t do while you’re running from a tiger. Send those messages to your nervous system that you’re calm. It will put you in a better place. It’ll make you a better leader. And of course, you know, you’re modeling it for your team too. So, you’re taking care of yourself. Hopefully, your team is following your lead. So that’s very body focused, and a second strategy that’s more focused on what’s going on in the head is just to name your emotions. Sounds simple, but it’s extremely powerful. Your emotions tend to live in this part of your brain called the amygdala, which is the seat of like really raw experience. So, if you’re terrified that terror is living in your amygdala, and your body is reacting without even much input from you. Feelings, on the other hand, have language attached to them. And by definition, language has to live higher up in the cortex. So just by the act of attaching language to a feeling, you can actually move it. Move it into the higher-level part of your brain. And you can change how you experience them and make them more manageable, just putting a name on and that’s definitely something that a leader could do for herself. And, as a team, you know, it’s a good method for the team to use. So next strategy kind of look at, “Okay, you’re in a good place, now engaging with your task.” The best thing to do, though, I think the best strategy we have there is alternating rest with activity. This is based on research by Jim Lauren Tony Schwartz, who studied professional athletes and saw who was the best, who performs the best. And what they found was it all depended on their rest, who was the best at taking breaks. And the same has been seen with, you know, huge thinkers throughout history, like Darwin. He’s famous for his work schedule and having these long breaks and these short periods of focus time. So, Lauren Schwartz recommends 15 to 20 minutes of rest for every 90 to 120 minutes of work. And I think it’s a great idea, really should be heavily stressed in a work day. If you work for eight hours straight, you’re not going to get more done than if you work in these blocks with breaks. You’re going to be happier and more productive if you’re giving your brain a chance to stop.
 
Sarah E. Brown 33:26
And okay, so let me stop for a minute and reiterate that because I think that is kind of a crucial thing. I think you said, but make sure I got it right, 15 minutes of rest for every 90 minutes of work.
 
Amy Mednick 33:40
90 to 120. So, you’re working for one and a half to two hours, you should take 15 to 20 minutes of rest.
 
Sarah E. Brown 33:50
I don’t do that.
 
Amy Mednick 33:51
It’s so hard! Even as we were writing the book, we were like talking about this every day and saying we need to start doing this. It’s hard. It’s really hard to make yourself do! At same time, if you keep this in mind, and once I learned this and started really thinking about it, I felt it at 90 minutes. You know, as I was hitting that 90 to 120 minute mark and not writing as well and getting stuck. I was, you know, I would say, “Oh, my prints kind of done!” and it gives you an excuse to just put it down. “Put it down for a little while. You’re going to do better work if you put it down, and then come back.”
 
Sarah E. Brown 34:27
Okay, got it. And I would guess that’s even more critical when you’re doing Zoom, which is going to be even more fatiguing than the normal work.
 
Amy Mednick 34:36
Exactly.
 
Sarah E. Brown 34:37
I’m going to have to redo my schedule going forward. Now, what are some of the other strategies, I don’t want to lose?
 
Amy Mednick 34:44
Sure, yeah. Yeah, no, that’s a very, very important one. It’s a very hard one to self enforce, but set a timer. So, another one is more towards that goal of decreasing your cognitive load decreasing the work because there’s so much work to do. I really like the strategy of just take things out of your own head. Use things outside of your head, right? So, we can juggle everything. We can remember everything. We can keep everything up here. But as soon as you put it on paper or your phone or whatever, as soon as you write it down, it changes the way your brain is processing that information. It’s really good to offload it. Post its are your friend. I’ve gotten to love Post its. As soon as a thought or something I need to do hits me, take it out of your head and put it on a piece of paper, deal with it how you’re going to, develop your system. But it’s very powerful to take things out of your head. A good study proving that showed that they had people write a really detailed to do list right before bed, and another group just kind of journal. And the to do list group slept way better, the people that wrote a detailed to do list for the next day. And it’s kind of like they took it out of their head and put it external to them. And it changed their stress level. So, I think that’s always-
 
Sarah E. Brown 36:01
So, it kind of helps you let it go is what you’re saying? It’s just the act of writing it down helps you to let go of it, okay.
 
Amy Mednick 36:10
It really does. Writing is very powerful because of the way the brain tends to ruminate on things that it’s holding on its own. Yeah. And then the last one is kind of a whole talk on itself is increasing psychological safety, which is kind of a climate in a group where people feel comfortable taking risks and making mistakes, and kind of feels like the group is going to give them the benefit of the doubt. So, Google did a great huge study. They called it “Project Aristotle” where they looked at all of their teams, all the teams throughout all of Google engineers, and all other kinds of people to say, who’s the best team? Which teams work the best together? Which teams are the most successful? And they looked at all kinds of factors to find what’s that one factor is that the team’s overall intelligence is this, is that. They couldn’t find anything that was consistent, until they found two aspects of psychological safety, which had been shown in other research as well as being important, equal turn taking and understanding each other’s emotions in the group. No matter what the other characteristics of the group, if they were good at those two things, they were a very successful working group. And so, you know-
 
Sarah E. Brown 37:24
Does that mean like sensing when John is upset?
 
Amy Mednick 37:29
Yeah.
 
Sarah E. Brown 37:30
The rest of the group is sensing something when John is upset, is that what you mean by that?
 
Amy Mednick 37:34
Yeah. People being able to sense what’s going on with the other group members. Both of those are harder in virtual. Obviously, understanding people’s emotions is hard. Turn taking is funny because sometimes you can really facilitate it in this medium. And other times, when you’re not good at speaking up, it’s even harder to speak up when you have to, like, you know, get on the mic and everything. So, focus on those two things and how to adapt those to the virtual experience and be, again, extra deliberate about them. It’s supposed to make for pretty successful teams.
 
Sarah E. Brown 38:06
Very, very interesting! Dr. Amy Mednick, her book is, “Humanizing the Remote Experience through Leadership and Coaching: Strategies for Better Virtual Connections“. Where else can our listeners find you?
 
Amy Mednick 38:22
So, my website is Dramymednick.com. Lots of information on there and my blog and stuff about me, and there’s a page about the book too, so you can check out more about that. And were on Amazon, too.
 
Sarah E. Brown 38:35
This has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for being here today!
 
Amy Mednick 38:40
Thank you very much!
 
Sarah E. Brown 38:42
Thanks for listening to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women. If you like what you are hearing, please go to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave a review. And if you would like more information on how we can help women in your organization to thrive, then go to www.sarahebrown.com. You can sign up for our newsletter, read show notes and learn more about our podcast guests, read my blog, browse through the books or contact us for a chat. Goodbye for now!
Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown

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