Russ & Co - Burnout, Anxiety, and Focus, Practical Tools to Master Your Mind with Dr. Gregory T. Obert

with bussing less. You'll go chillan with brushing last hang out Chus now your bother with nothing but the best space driver.

back control of their focus, emotions, and decision making. He brings a powerful mix of science and real world mental performance tools. He's worked on the front lines of trauma care and high pressure environments, and he is the host of the long running podcast Meditations, where he has turned

deep psychological insight into practical everyday strategies manspaceination. This is a conversation you definitely don't want to miss and welcome in my guests, Doctor Gregory t Obert, Hello, Rash, Hello, Hello, Oh, thank you so.

thank you for spending time with me here. So if you could just kind of share with the man Space Nation a little bit about yourself and how did you get into the world of psychology.

very difficult for me. I was struggling a lot in school and I ended up seeing a therapist myself, and she was absolutely wonderful. She really helped me put things into perspective, gave me that space to work through everything

that I was thinking and feeling. And coincidentally, at the same time, which was very odd for high schools, at least from what I've heard, we also had a psychology course offered, so I took a high school psychology course, and between both of those things, I just I had a sense of this is what I want to do, and once I had that, there was no looking back.

You know, that adds on, like added stress to try to find something, find a career, just to do something in general, just to pay the bills, keep a roof over your head, you know. With that, I mean, we talk about stress on this show and emotional health and things. What do you feel is some of the biggest ways as we could alleviate some of the stress that we deal with in our lives. I'm jumping right into the deep end.

and when we have the necessary resources, we're fine. We can handle it, it's no problem. It's when we start to lose out or not have those resources to still meet those demands that things start to get a little bit tricky. And of course we can do that for

a little bit. You know, I suspect you and your listeners as well, have been in spaces where sometimes you just didn't quite have it an you or you think you didn't have it any and you just pushed a little bit more anyways, and you're able to get through. But if you're someone who's doing that chronically and just scraping the bottom of the barrel day after day, week after week, you're going to find yourself in some really dicey territory.

this one. Being a clinical psychologist and helping people deal with focus and things like that, what is your opinion when it comes to medicine and this descriptions that a lot of doctors give to help deal with, you know, attention deficit and different things like that.

go all meds or go you know, no meds. I kind of think about medication is more like a crutch, and maybe you need it for a little bit of time to kind of get through whatever it is that you're working through, possibly in combination with some sort of talk therapy, but after a while you may not need it, though it's okay to get off it. The problem is, I think what you were speaking to, which is a lot of medical doctors, and this includes psychiatrists as well.

Because they're mds, they don't really know much about talk therapy, nor are they supposed to. I mean, they don't go to school for that. Although I do get a little judge with the psychiatrists because I can't tell you the number of times I've run into psychologists who are asked to teach psychotherapy courses and how these psychiatrists just sleep

through the classes, just don't show up at all. So they're supposed to know how to do it, but they don't always so of course, the incentive is there to just prescribe a medicaltion, and being that our culture is very instant gratification much of the time, Okay, well I'm just going to use this pill and I'm going to feel better. It's a very slippery slope for many people. Now, if you happen to have a medication that works for you, it evens you out. Maybe you've been on medication, you're

able to get off it. Maybe you needed to go back on it for a little bit. That's okay. But I think if people just tend to go, oh, I'm going to go to my doctor, I'm going to get a medication and then I'm going to be fine. Unless you're part of that twenty five percent of the population, it's probably not going to be enough.

type of deal. It's kind of my opinion from what I've seen with some some cases, and you know, it becomes a little I think that goes back and adds even more stress into a situation for everybody who's around the person, you know, trying to make sure oh yeah, go ahead.

say a typical day. Maybe you wake up a little bit late, or maybe you're a little slow starting, and you hop on the road, and of course there's traffic because of all days, maybe there's a minor fender bender, and naturally everybody's got to and look at it and go ten miles an hour rather than just keep on going.

And you've taken some time off work recently, so of course you're late to the office, and your boss has given you the side eye, thinking that you need to be on time, especially after you've had all this time off. And then you sit down open your email and you have a ton of emails from all the time off you had. I could keep going, but I suspect you and maybe some of your listeners have been in this exact position. Heck, maybe they're in this exact position now

as they listen to this episode. What can start out as Okay, well, I can handle being you know, a little bit slow today, maybe a racing thought or two, you know which which could could be I can handle it. I might have the resources in that moment. It could also be what is wrong with me, like I should have known it, I should have gone to bed earlier. I should have I should have, And now I'm bringing the hammer down on my self and judging myself for it.

That can then spiral a little bit more with the added traffic jam, which can then spiral a little bit more with the side eye from the boss to the point where it's almost like death by a thousand cuts, as they say. Right, So, these these little pieces of stress add up to the point where your anxiety, which is just a clinical term for fear, your anxiety is

going to start to raise. And I say you're able to operate logically in your zero to seven range, because typically when you're in that range, the logical part of your brain. This is the most neuroscience I'm going to give you and your audience. The space right behind your forehead is the prefrontal cortex, and that has to do with all of our decision making, our planning. And when we're in zero to seven, that signal is still pretty loud. It's able to calm themtional centers of the brain. Or

at least regulated enough that we can get by. As soon as you find yourself at eight, that part of the brain gets very quiet, and the emotional part, which is in the very center of your skull, it just takes over. And now, instead of responding to the stress, you know, thoughtfully, consciously, you're just on autopilot. You're reacting, and this becomes I'm not even really thinking about what

I'm doing. I'm just so worked up and activated and stressed that I'm just gonna do whatever I need to do to get that emotion out, which might be snapping at people, that might mean isolating, that might mean trying to hurry up and get through your work. And of course it's not going to stay at work. If it is coming out at work, it's going to come home to well, if you're buyers, live by yourself, it's going to come out in you know, some negative ways. Extreme

ways could be like drinking by yourself. Even with family, it might be not wanting to spend time with them, being short with them. So stress is something that can impact us on the daily and it can start out very small but ultimately have pretty lasting effects.

away from everything. I don't want to look at a screen, I don't want to talk to anybody. I'm just going to stare at the wall for a little bit until I can decompress. Excuse me, Wow, another thing, I'll give you this last one or third thing. I could keep going, but the third thing that you're going to notice when you're chronically stressed, you're going to notice those physiological changes

in your body. And because we're always in our bodies, we're not necessarily always aware of the changes, because again they're subtle and they can build over time. Are you clenching your jaw a lot more? Are you storing tension more so than you do? So? For me, it's in my shoulders, right. I know that if I'm walking around like a scarecrow, then there's something going on. So if you're able to pay attention to these signs. It's not, of course, a surefire away that you're dealing with too

much stress, but it is they are likely signs. They are signs that you are likely dealing with too much stress.

nature that all play into it. Wow. I was also telling her, well, you made me think of I used to work it for a company, and I'd been there for a long time, but I got to the point where I was just so exhausted and so burnt out with it that when I would pull into the parking lot in the mornings, I would sit there in my car and just have to close my eyes and meditate for ten to fifteen minutes just to try to make it through the day, to give myself the strength to

even walk in the building, because I didn't want to be there and it was just that bad. And when my wife and I, when we started dating, we would give ourselves ten minutes. Okay, you got ten minutes, tell me about your day, you know, get it all out, and she gets hers out, I get mine out, and after that we don't talk about work anymore.

That is not always easy to do, yet it is something that can be extremely helpful well, because imagine if someone even with the meditation, just came home and just wanted to rage and kind of vent for the next hour. I mean, right, that's a whole hour out of the day, and then maybe you know, as the night goes on, Oh, this thing reminded me of that other thing that I forgot to tell you about it working. Now we're right back on work and it's now we're spending upwards of

one two hours just just simmering in this negativity. And understandable if you have a job where you're feeling burned out, it's also not always going to help you through that burnout.

to deal with. But yet you have this negative energy that you have not gotten out, and now the kids are starting to fill the brunt of all of this, and yeah, it's it's a it can be a very dangerous cycle if we don't deal with it in the right way.

simple idea that nobody likes to be uncomfortable. Nobody likes to be in a space where they're just feeling overwhelmed. They're feeling flooded with all sorts of responsibilities and not enough resources, and sometimes oftentimes people don't even recognize what's happening.

So there's this internal battle going on, and then somebody just completely innocently is going to step in and maybe ask you for something, or even just want to have a conversation how was your day when that's the last thing that you want to talk about because it just drove you bonkers. So if we don't have those outlets to get out whatever is going on with us, it's just going to make things that much worse. Again, it's not going to necessarily fix the situation, just like when

you're talking about speaking with your wife. It didn't fix your job for you, no, but it did give you that space to release some of the pressure. And so if someone's out there dealing with this stress and they don't have that, yeah, they're just going to start reacting, even when they don't necessarily mean to do that.

a thousand bucks, I get it. I'm going to save you and your listeners thousands of dollars on mindfulness seminars because I'm going to tell you everything that they're going to tell you right here for free.

them to be. Essentially, this idea of mindfulness is being aware of what's happening with us, within us, around us, in the moment, and that again, that sounds so basic, like duh, I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel here, I am trying to tell you what works. To sort of draw a parallel to this. For anyone familiar with twelve step program, Step one of twelve is recognizing that there's a problem. Now, there's eleven more steps after that, but you can't do any of those steps unless you

recognize there's an issue. And so I can't change my reactivity to stress if I'm not aware that I am stressed, if I'm living my life on autopilot day in, day out, because maybe I was never taught how to look inside myself, check on my thinking, check on how my emotions are impacting my body. Maybe when I work with the veterans, we say I'll censor myself for the show, but you get a case of the efforts right. I don't care. I know this is bad for me, but I'm just

gonna do it anyways, because efort right. Right though, whether it's because you don't have the skills or you just don't care in the moment, if you're not mindful, you're just going to continue to react. So step one of anything is identifying how you perform under pressure, and what are some common signs for you personally that you're feeling stressed. I gave some generic ones earlier. Your other guest also mentioned some great clues. Once you're able to find those,

you can make changes. Now if you're saying to yourself, Okay, Greg, that sounds great, but I don't really understand how to be more mindful during the day because this sounds very woo woo. I have to be on the go, I have so many things to focus on. Well, that's the thing. Mindfulness doesn't need to be, you know, like being a monk on a mountain somewhere and being up there for

hours to be mindful. You actually touched on this a little bit already, Russ, when you said, Hey, I'm going to spend ten minutes just being with myself, being present and not focusing on anything else. We can start to build these mindfulness muscles by doing little things. So classic example, I use suspect you and hopefully your listeners as well,

brush their teeth this morning. So while they were brushing their teeth, I doubt very many of them were feeling the weight of the toothbrush, tasting the flavor of the toothpaste, feeling the bristles on their teeth, on their gums. They're probably doing that on autopilot and thinking about everything else. I know I've done it before, and thinking about what

comes next and multitasking. Yeah, but if I spent my one to two minutes brushing my teeth and focusing just on that, even if my mind wanders, just bringing it back, just okay, gently, non judgmentally, just bringing it back, focusing on that experience as it is, probably going to have a very different experience with brushing my teeth. And if I can start to do that with brushing my teeth, imagine what that looks like at work, Imagine what that

looks like with family members. Because you're building those muscles, you can start to be more mindful throughout the day. So that's That's a lot of me talking. But hopefully all that makes sense.

go for it. So one of the things that I struggle with is, you know, you talking about the toothbrush and focusing at that point is shutting my mind off because I'm constantly thinking of things, whether it's my nine to five work, whether it's doing this podcast, whether it's doing you know, doing all the editing, and thinking of my next guest and what am I going to talk

about with the next guest. I'm constantly going to bed thinking of all these things, and to the point, if I get up at any point in the middle of the night, my mind instantly goes to thinking of all of these things. Now I have I went and bought one of those Bluetooth sleep masks so my eyes are covered, and I tend to listen to podcasts at night, or

sometimes I would listen to UH meditation. I've listened to different uh the vibration tones at night, and I've tried all of those things, and it works for a little bit, and then I get back into the same old bolt

where you know I've tried. I can't think of the guy's name, but he tries to UH talk you talk you to sleep, And so for a couple of minutes, I'm listening to every thought where he's now just imagining yourself and a running river, and by the time it gets the river, I'm thinking of Okay, so I have to interview this person later at four o'clock, and so now I've missed like fifteen minutes of what he's talking about because my mind is already thinking of what I

got to do. What are some of the tips and that you would have that you would recommend for a person to be able to shut their mind off some and be able to just focus on what they're doing in the present.

sorts of things. And so when you notice that you can't even focus on you know, Joe mcsleepy's really nice guided meditation to get you to bed, that is a sign that something is wrong during the day, that there's probably too much stress, too much stimulation. Now we can look at that and just judge ourselves. Right, this is the judgmental piece coming in of I wish it wasn't that way. What's wrong with me? I'm so stupid, I'm just a loser. That's not being mindful, right, that's just

making things worse, spinning things up. We can start to build the mindfulness muscles by focusing on the physical. That's how we can get a little bit more in touch with what are my thought patterns coming up throughout the day, what are my emotions and what are their intensity level? We have to work up to that. So I mentioned the idea about brushing your teeth. Maybe it's a matter of setting an alarm on your phone to check in

with yourself. What am I thinking? What am I feeling? Sometimes, if you're not quite there and you want to focus on the physical, something as simple as hey, how does your shirt feel on your skin right now? How does that chair that you're sitting in hold you up?

We want the mindfulness to be the habit so that you're automatically starting to check in with yourself once you have that down with the sensory stuff, checking in with your thoughts, checking with your emotions, checking in with your behaviors even can be something that will help out a lot. So as an example, when we find ourselves very stressed,

we're going to breathe a lot into our chests. And this is useful when we're in very stressful situations because breathing into our chests activates our fight or flight system. Even if you think about working out right, there's gonna be short, shallow breathing wonderful.

out there. I'm talking diafromatic breathing. That kind of thing is going to help slow us down throughout the day. And if I have those autopilot interrupts throughout the day, well then by the time I get to Joe mcsleepy, my mind might not be racing so much.

in a therapy room for example. So when we're in the eight to ten range, the logic part of our brain again is turning off. So just like you said earlier, we'll just say stop it to someone who's you know, in eight to ten, someone who's raging, just calm down, calm down, that nothing bad will happen with that. So what we need to do instead is we need to focus on the physical the body, because when we cool the body down, we're going to cool the mind down

because there's a reciprocal relationship there. So I suspect wherever you are speaking, unless you're in the middle of nowhere, in some cornfield somewhere, I suspect that there's going to be running water that you can set to cold and just like if we were to jump into a pool of cold water, that's gonna shock us and calm us down, well not honestly calm us down, because we're going to be in a survival mode. I got here, but we're not going to be overthinking in that moment. It's just

going to be let me get out of this. And for my navy veterans in particular, they tend to know what I'm talking about. It's that dive response. We can use that principle to our advantage if we find ourselves in the eight to ten range, So splashing cold water on our face, having a cold compress, putting it on our forehead, putting it on the back of our necks. If there's a bowl available, you know, putting some cold

water in that again that freezing. I want you to hurt yourself, but just cool enough that it's going to cool your body down. If I did that for thirty seconds, which at thirty seconds is a lot longer than we think, especially if you and I sat here in silence for thirty seconds, Yeah, that would be I mean, surefire, you know, wonderful podcast.

smooth inhale, smooth exhale, it's gonna calm me down just enough. Again, imagine taking let's say twenty breaths, which may take a minute two minutes, a minute to two minutes of dead air that's a long time. A minute to two minutes of deep breathing that's also.

we find a pattern? Was there that one person you know in grade school who laughed at you when you gave a book report in front of the class, And for some reason that just still sticks with you and Eve internalized it as a part of you that yes, I'm just a bad public speaker. Well, by once again making these things more conscious, be a mindfulness, we're better able to tweak them, to challenge them, and to then start to think a little bit more accurately about ourselves.

I'm never the guy that's like, let's just think more positively and everything will be fine. If it was that simple, you know, none of us would have problems and I wouldn't have a job. What I'm saying, it should be great. You know, I find something else to do. But what I'm saying is we want to think more accurately about ourselves instead of I'm just a garbage public speaker. Maybe it's you know, I have some good performances, some not

so good performances. Overall, I'm an average public speaker. That's very different from I'm just a piece of trash and can't handle being in front of a crowd.

a talk on depression. One of the things that they asked me to do was to come up with something people could take with them, and so I decided, well, why not have a brief meditation on depression to just kind of help people get through it, and maybe a couple weeks before they canceled the event. So here I am with this meditation and not really knowing what to do with it. But I always liked listening to podcasts, so I decided, why not just put this up and

see what happens. And that's how Meditations by Gregory t Obert was born, and for many years I did every other week of posting free guided meditations. It could just be something to help relax somebody, it could be something to work through a deeper issue. For example, I've had ones on grief, I've had ones on self love, and

I posted mostly consistently over the last nine years. But ever since I opened my practice, as you mentioned at the top, royal Otis Psychotherapy Institute, I decided to start filling in the off weeks with additional topics. So that initially started as a therapy one oh one series, so for people who don't really know much about therapy or

how certain disorders can show up in people's lives. I created a whole series on that, and then I ran out of ideas for the series, so I decided what better time than to start doing the thing that I like listening to, which is interviews. So I've started to have people on the show in the off weeks, and in fact, i'm not sure when this episode is going up, but you and I will have an interview at some point. You've generously agreed to come on, and I'm looking forward

to that very much. So it's really a mix of these guided meditations and then these discussions from people who I think can bring a lot of wisdom and knowledge to the table around mental health, around wellness, and sometimes even spirituality when people feel comfortable enough to talk about that. So it's been good. It's been happening for a long time, and I've had people reach out over the years telling

me how wonderful the meditations have been. In fact, very recently I had someone in England even reach out and say, I've been listening to you since day one. I'm like, that's amazing. Yeah, because there was about I said mostly consistently, because there was maybe about nine months in grad school where I just kind of fell off the face of the earth, and he's like, yeah, I've listened through that.

I listened after. So it was just it's really rewarding and heartwarming to know that, you know, my simple meditations that started out in you know, a basement have reached so many people and have helped them out a lot.

states that aren't part of sypacked. Eventually they'll get on board, I think. On my web site too is my podcast. There's also links to my book, links to live streams that I do, including a dark Psychology series where I talk about the well dark psychology of people, gaming videos I do with my wife. So okay, yeah, everything is

on that website. It's the best touch point as well as the best place to get in contact with me over email, but you can also find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and I'm sorry X and Instagram.

I hear this a lot, in particular with the veterans that I work with and when they come into the treatment program which I work on PTSD in a trauma unit. There's so much shame and guilt around it, and even in outpatient work that I do, there's shame and guilt around all I have to see someone. But the truth is that it's not it's not a shameful thing to say.

I just need help. So for those out there that are thinking it's a weakness, I would encourage you to maybe still to think about why it's a weakness in mental health, but maybe in other areas of your life. It's actually a strength to reach out to someone to collaborate.

Make sure you go check out his website, make sure you go follow check out the gaming listen to the podcast, and let's just continue to push all of this forward. And you know, and and if you're in a situation and you need help. Here's the man that can help you. So check him out, Doctor Gregory. As we close out, thank you so much, and man Space Nation, we are out of here. No gimmicks, just game that a sur in sight.