How We Break with Vincent Deary

In this episode of The Evolving Leader, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to Professor Vincent Deary. Vincent is a writer, researcher and a practitioner health psychologist. He's a professor of psychology at Northumbria University and a former clinical fatigue specialist at the Cresta fatigue clinic. He has also worked as a cognitive behavioural therapist with an interest in researching new interventions. In 2015, the first part of Vincent’s ‘How To Live’ trilogy ‘How We Break’ was published, followed in 2024 by ‘How We Break’, where the focus is on what happens when our minds and bodies are pushed beyond their limits.

Referenced during this episode:

How We Are: The Force of Habit and the Work of Change
How We Break: Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living
The Cresta Fatigue Clinic

Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:

 Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)

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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

Transcript

Jean Gomes: 0:02

We live in an age of huge contradiction with remarkable innovation and techno optimism on one hand, and climate, despair, polarisation and inequality on the other. In this conversation, we talk to Vincent Deary, a psychologist who's deeply affecting books offer a wonderful perspective on the realities of our finite capacity for change. Both Scott and I left our conversations with Vincent both uplifted and soberly aware of the relentless and unrealistic messages from self help and management literature that nothing can break us if we don't let it that message is never the whole truth. So what happens when we do break? Listen in to the deep and self effacing wisdom of Vincent Deary.

Scott Allender: 1:08

Hi, friends, and welcome to The Evolving Leader, the show born from a deep belief that we need better, more accountable and more human leadership to confront the world's biggest challenges. I'm Scott Allender.

Jean Gomes: 1:21

And I'm Jean Gomes.

Scott Allender: 1:22

How are you feeling today? Mr. Gomes?

Jean Gomes: 1:24

I am feeling very fulfilled. Actually, I'm not so levels. I've had some really good experiences this week. And I've been looking forward to this conversation for at least two months with a lot of anticipation and excitement. The our guest today has done some amazing work. He's a deep thinker. And I know that our audience is really going to benefit from his insights and the the wisdom that he's accumulated in his life. How're you feeling, Scott?

Scott Allender: 1:59

Physically, I'm a little fatigued. I just took a two day journey home from New York on what should be a two hour journey. But with the insane weather we had, there was flight cancellations, and delays and bumps and all the things but but I'm feeling emotional and feeling grateful for what I got to observe. In the world. I was on delta and so free, free plug for delta, but I watched their gate personnel and their flight personnel and everyone just you know, handle the situation so beautifully. And you know, people are not at their best when they've been bumped from a flight and they're not getting to where they want to be. And I really saw leadership at every level, you know, keeping things that have come and moving forward and resolving people's concerns. And so I'm really grateful to have gotten to see that in the world. We don't always get to see things like that. And so that's fine, you know. And I, too, have been looking forward to this for for a couple of months as well, because I'm excited. We're going to get an answer today to a question that most of us are really too reluctant or afraid to confront, which is how to live. That's right, Jean, your decades of waiting for an answer will finally come to fruition momentarily as we are joined by Vincent Deary. Vincent is a writer, a researcher and a practitioner health psychologist. He's a professor of psychology at Northumbria University and a clinical fatigue specialist at the Cresta fatigue clinic, a role from which I understand he's just retired and prior to this, he worked as a cognitive behavioural therapist with an interest in researching new interventions. And he later made the transition from clinician to clinical academic and continues to focus on the development and trialling of new interventions for a variety of health challenges. He still works clinically one morning a week in the UK is first trans diagnostic fatigue clinic. You can remind me to get the address for this fatigue clinic at the end of the show. And when he was 50, he published his first book how we are, which is the first part of the How to Live trilogy published by Penguin Press. And these books bring together his clinical and his academic interests along with his interest in philosophy and literature and popular culture to paint a portrait of human life, suffering and well being. Vincent, we are so delighted you're here. Welcome to the evolving leader.

Vincent Deary: 4:34

Scott, thank you so much. That was a lovely introduction. And Jean, thank you too. It's really nice to be with you folks.

Jean Gomes: 4:43

Welcome to the show. Vincent, how you feeling today?

Vincent Deary: 4:46

Interesting state. I'm currently on sabbatical from University for a term so I'm kind of in a state of winding down in a state of kind of situational anxiety because this is going public and we're gonna get into stuff. But that's good. That's kind of postive arousal. And tomorrow I'm about to go on a silent retreat for 10 days. So I have this weird how do I feel about that yet complex feelings? It's a complex day. But they're all good things.

Scott Allender: 5:23

Well, here's an opportunity to get out everything you want to say to the world.

Vincent Deary: 5:28

In case I never come back or never speak again.

Jean Gomes: 5:32

Am I right in thinking you've done this before the Silent Retreat? Yes,

Vincent Deary: 5:36

I have you. I did a Pastner retreat in the Herefordshire countryside in the UK. If you use Baca, I do write briefly about it in the book. And yeah, I've kind of punctuated the last couple of decades with retreats of different flavours. And for me though, they're often a way of recharging the batteries. And so I am looking forward to that because you know, a bit like Scott, feeling slightly fatigued. So going away, just regrouping I'm really looking forward to that. Though. This one is totally me and my own thought I could be going stir crazy after two days, but I might be in the car looking for the nearest fast food restaurant, who knows?

Jean Gomes: 6:21

Before we dive into the contents of your monumental book trilogy, let's get our audience up to speed a chance to get to know you a bit. What led you to study and practice cognitive behavioural therapy and everything else that you you went on to do what was the driving force? But in being a health psychologist?

Vincent Deary: 6:40

How long have you got? I think the short answer is I have always made a living as an adult from care work of some description, or other. From very early on even my university, summer jobs were in an old person's home in Edinburgh. And as life evolved, and we need to become more professional, I guess I just tried to turn that more into a professional thing. So I started off being a trained to be a psychiatric nurse at the Maudsley Hospital in London, which I don't know if you've heard of it, where you folks are from, but it's one of the most prestigious institutions and in psychiatry in the UK, so very much wanted to train no specifically. And then from that training, went on to train in CBT, and was lucky enough to work with really good clinical academics who modelled for me the fact that we should always be looking at our outcomes, we should always be doing research as well as clinical work that they go hand in hand together and went from that to do a master's and then eventually got a Medical Research Council, doctoral fellowship, to kind of make the transition from kind of clinician doing some research to being a researcher doing some clinical work. So it's been a long journey, but it's been one that has allowed me to, to be, I guess, if you like, at the coalface of human suffering and mending it's really kind of dovetailed was my sort of personal preoccupations as well, which is, which has always been, how do we deal with this thing that we're kind of randomly assigned without, you know, without invite or permission, we just happen to be thrown into life, and we have to figure it out. So I've been lucky enough to see that process up close into and to help some people figure that out.

Jean Gomes: 8:42

What do you think that the core of you that's wanting to, to, not just to understand, but to care for people? Because that's a very big thing to do to kind of give your life to others in that way?

Vincent Deary: 8:56

It depends which theoretical framework, you go looking for an answer. And to some degree, I do remember reading very early on, I think, is Alice Miller, the drama of the gifted child, she was a psychoanalytic writer, writing about how people end up in care. And her hypothesis was it's often people who, in some way, are caring for those around them from very early on, so often people who are caring for wounded parents in some way. And that kind of fits the bill for me, I was the youngest child of a family of four with a with a mum who suffered the low I actually put her story at the heart of the book because, again, I was up close and personal, to her struggle in her suffering. And I thought I could make use of that in the book. But certainly from an early age, I learned to survive and thrive to some degree by reading her emotions and by helping her cope. So you could say if you wanted to to adopt that framework, it was kind of there early on. And I've come up with various theories throughout my life, it could be totally accidental, it might have been the only thing I was particularly good at, at the time, and then managed to be lucky enough to roll it into a career. But I think there is an element of you know, if I wanted to go out on a limb about it, I'm just said, I'm going off on a silent treat, and I'm very, very comfortable with my own company. And I do find I'm highly introverted, find other people or I certainly did, when I was growing up, I find them quite difficult. And one way I learned to manage being with other people, is to be intensely curious about them. So if you turn the focus on to other people, so really good place to hide in plain sight, if you keep asking questions, people tend to open up so I also became very good at that as a way of kind of slightly hiding myself. So yeah, there's a whole bunch of strands going into into this, I think, but just there's also a fundamental cure curiosity and just, I've always been curious about people in life. I

Jean Gomes: 11:12

love this part in your book called Introduction and orientation, it starts, they are not a threat. Let you tell us a little bit more about that, rather than me reading any more about it just that whole bit there kind of just opens up in people's minds that ever really interesting, reorientation to the experience that they have of others much of the time.

Vincent Deary: 11:38

Yeah, that was something that happened to me when I when I was on that silent retreat that I mentioned, the 10 day vipassana retreat in Herefordshire, where you're in the countryside in as far as I remember, because it's a few years ago, and my memories terrible, but in kind of fairly basic accommodation with loads of other people, I think my memory is it's kind of close to 100, but a big group of strangers, which is an introverts idea of how but you're you're doing this in what they call noble silence, so not only are you instructed not to talk to these strangers, you're also instructed not even to look at them, which for me, that's just heaven, it's like being with strangers and being given permission not to interact with them. And, and the purpose of it is it means you can do the work you can actually focus in on the, the process of meditation consciousness, your embodiment, whatever it is, it's coming up, you're given permission to focus on that for 10 days. So the bit that I was dreading was the bit where the silence is lifted on the final day. So you go for a big communal lunch, silence is lifted, and you're all allowed to talk to each other. And being the socially Tiberius creature that I am, that's the bit I was thinking, Oh, this is going to be terrible. And I was sat opposite. This young man who had noticed during the week who just looked that in many, like in many ways he would outclass me, I had this fancy that he was very handsome, he was very intelligent, I would be this kind of bumbling idiot. And so that social anxiety was already beginning to tell it's, you know, ridiculous narrative. And I was beginning to buy into, and I sat opposite him. And we started chatting, and I noticed a social anxiety arise. And I think that's one of the things that makes sick periods of silence and retreats and stepping back really valuable because you get the opportunity to notice the shape of things as they arise. Normally, we're so in the flow of stuff that we don't really get a chance to isolate it. But I saw the anxiety for what it was, which was, it was here I don't know if people can see on the camera, but it was basically kind of around my heart area. It was a very particular series of feelings, physical feelings, and I was like, ah, that's what the anxiety is. It's these kind of uncomfortable feelings that I don't want to have. And that's what made me it wasn't this handsome young man sitting opposite me that wasn't the source of my anxiety. It was the fact that I was having these feelings that I didn't want to have. But because I've been sitting with my bodily sensations for 10 days I was like, okay, don't I'm perfectly willing to have these feelings and it was almost it was like that bit as I write in the book and Alice Through the Looking Glass I think is or Wonderland I can never remember. Where is the Queen of Hearts soldiers are attacking her. And she just suddenly realises i You're nothing more than a pack of cards. And suddenly the whole confrontation is just diffused and it was a similar thing with me with the social anxiety. And that is why it started off that paragraph was your not a threat, it kind of reminded me that it isn't the other person who's the threat. It's my reaction to my own bodily sensations.

Scott Allender: 15:10

I love that story of awareness. What you can do with that from from your experience of retreating, I think it's really I'm inspired by your you're inspiring me to go do the same thing. So you set out, like I said in the intro to write your first book at 50. And, you know, Jean and I are authors as well. And we know what a massive undertaking it is to write one book, but you set off to write three Did you set off to write as a trilogy? Or did it evolve as you started working?

Vincent Deary: 15:40

Yeah, it's like talking says about Lord of the Rings, the tail grew with the tailing. And it certainly did, because I just set off to write one book in three parts. And I think actually, I decided to seriously embark on it when I was 40. So I was lucky enough to be able to take a just under two years of work just to focus on on kind of collecting everything I'd been thinking about for the previous 10 or so years. So it's really a decade's long endeavour. And, and so I did two years and kind of got the started work on what I thought was one book. And then it quickly became clear that this was going to kind of expand so finished the first book, probably in the first three, four years, but it was also started doing a PhD random at the same time. So it was took slightly longer. And then there's some stuff about this on the on the media, but it's true, I left it in the drawer for, I think four or five years, because I'd written I'd written the first book, and I really liked it. But I thought this is too weird. No one's going to quite get this. So I just kind of left it got on with my PhD switch my focus on to kind of my academic career. And then coming up to 50. I thought, Look, you've written it, you might as well see if anyone's interested. And through a friend got in touch with Patrick wolves, my agent, and it kind of took off from there. And I was very lucky that penguin said, Look, we realise that this is a planned trilogy. So we'll actually commissioned the other two, which slightly committed me to then actually writing the other two, unfortunately. So that's what I've been doing for the last 10 years since I was, since the first one was published is working on the second one. So

Scott Allender: 17:38

who are these books aimed at? This

Vincent Deary: 17:41

is going to sound really narcissistic, but I don't think it is I, I wrote it because I wanted a container for what I had learned. So I was. So when I say how to live, it's me figuring it out through writing. So it's not me coming down from the mountain with the tablets, saying, I've got it all figured out, folks, here we go. It's me saying, Look, I'm gonna go on this journey of writing and exploring and trying to put together what I know from these different sources. And there'll be some people who want to come along in this journey with me, but primarily, it was me. Writing for me is actually me trying to figure out how to live through the act of writing and curating for want of a better way of putting it curating, like you said, and that really lovely introduction, curating not just from clinical work and research, but from the humanities, from literature, from popular culture and trying to go Okay, can we make this coherent, colourful, interesting. And I guess at one level, it was also an exercise in writing. It was, Can I make a book that's a bit different from your kind of standard popular science book? So I think it's finding its readership. I know some people really like the fact that it is very elusive. So it does jump from you know, research to popular culture to stories about my mum, some people don't like that at all. And I'm fine with that. It's like the people who like it, and it speaks to it will speak to others might go, why doesn't this guy get to the point? i There's a couple of friends of mine who said that who are one of my best friends who just can't get on with my style. And I'm absolutely fine with that. It's that you don't need to this is for the people who kind of like that kind of more elusive style.

Jean Gomes: 19:31

I think I think what's true about your style, and the both the breadth of references and different disciplines that you bring to bear for the software, philosophical and culture and personal experience and so on, is that it's a deep read. It's not something that you pick up and, you know, sort of read a couple of paragraphs or chapters that you have to kind of get into it. And as a result, it's really powerful from that point of view. It might be worth us just getting Get a sense of the first book we have we are, which is really looking at how we habituate how automaticity kind of runs our lives and how we just get more aware of that. Can you just talk us through, from your perspective, why you started there and what you learned about yourself through through that experience?

Vincent Deary: 20:22

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I always one of the formative things aren't, did in the last couple of decades, was do a screenwriting course. And it really helped me think about structure. And I don't know about you, but when I'm doing a bit of writing, once I've cracked the structure, everything else kind of falls into place, it's then I've got a place for things to go. And I'm doing a screenwriting course I just, and I know there are newer narratives that are playing about and deconstructing this structure, but the three act structure where we, we set up a small world, we then disrupt it, and then watch someone adjust until they establish a new equilibrium and act three kind of new normal. That's certainly it's just a really lovely way of thinking about human change, human suffering, and human mending is essentially a three act thing. You know, we if, if we're lucky enough, we're in a fairly stable homeostatic state. Something then comes along to disrupt that for better or worse, often, for worse, we suffer, we struggle, we adapt, and then eventually we establish a new normal. And we've all become really used to the phrase the new normal in the last few decades, because we've gone gone through so many disruptions. But I do like to think I was one of the first people to popularise that the use of this phrase, right, I wrote about that a lot in the in the first book. And that was the purpose of where we are at was to say, this is the creature that is ours. In it's kind of more or less normal, pre lapse, Aryan state, this is in kind of normal habit and normal change. And that part of the reason that book became longer became a book rather than just the first third of a bigger book, because the more I went in, to looking at how habit is constructed it, the more it became clear that even just looking how we stay the same how we achieve homeostasis, homeostasis, and day to day life. That takes up the first half of the book. So the books into half saving and changing, because I think often casually, we think of habit as maybe something cognitive or something behavioural something that is just what we do, or what we think. But what I was trying to get across in this book is that we are what we call in psychology, where we're, we're for E, we're embodied, we're embedded, were enacted. And we are opposed to Force II, I always forget, and extended. So as creatures, we're not these little islands of cognition and behaviour, we were in environments where, for instance, look behind me in my study, that is Book Three happening up there. So that board is already doing a lot of the thinking for me, I've downloaded a lot of my thinking onto that. And if I turn the camera around, you would see this other charts, which all look slightly crazy. But for me that my way of extending my cognition. And if you think about how you see, for instance, make a cup of tea in an environment where you're familiar with where everything is, you don't need to do a lot of thinking, you could, for instance, take a highly complex phone call or listen to a podcast, while doing something fairly automatic. And that's because partly the environment is remembering it for you. We set up these environments, and I can particularly see us there, Jean, that do a lot of our thinking for us. And similarly, we can extend that thinking to think about cultural institutions, we can think of them as an embodied learning about how to live so our personal institutions or personal circumstance or collective institutions, or narratives in our stories, these are all kinds of embodied habit. So it was really extending the net of habit quite wide due to almost think of its kind of its socio sociological and political instantiations as well. So that's the first time for the book and then I go okay, what happens when that creature changes, you know, just normal change, like moving house getting a new job, just the normal stuff that we do, day to day, and that kind of set the stage for then Book Two which His okay, what happens when that creature is forced to adjust in ways that are really disrupting to its fundamental stability? And, and ease? So yeah, that was first book, it was setting the scene for the next book, which in turn will set the scene for the third book, which will be hopefully, how we meant, though it's worth saying to the potential readers out there, each book is free standing. So isn't the Lord of the Rings, zero need to read the first book for the second book to make sense?

Scott Allender: 25:41

Let's talk a little bit about the second one. Because that one really, I resonated with, with your, your framing, how we break. So navigating the wear and tear of living, which, as you say, is illuminating the exploration of suffering as you examine what happens when we're pushed to our limit. And part of the reason I really love that you wrote this is that to me, it feels a little bit like people are experiencing sort of longer and longer periods of prolonged difficulty. And as you point out in the book, when our world shrinks to nothing, but sort of our daily coping strategies, we become unhappy, and we become worried and hopeless and exhausted. And that just feels really important to explore. So can you can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Vincent Deary: 26:33

Yeah, it's part of what made this book take so long to finish. And it was never not writing it over the last 10 years, but it kept also it kept expanding, was because so I was working in the fatigue clinic for the last 10 years, and seeing people whose bodies and emotions their hearts or minds or wills, had got worn out by, by life by illness by, for instance, cancer and its treatment by liver disease. So we were seeing people who for whatever the cause of their fatigue, they could come to our clinic and see a physiotherapist and occupational therapist or consultant and myself, to help them manage. So I was kind of dealing with warm bodies, there. And also, in my research, we were doing different and developing different interventions, we were working with GPS to help them deal with people who had for instance, things like chronic pain, we were came up with an intervention for older adults who had fear of falling whose world shrunk as a result of that fear. We were working with head and neck cancer survivors looking at the relationship to food and how that changed. So we were working in a me being a lovely multidisciplinary team and each of those different areas. So working with people whose world to trunk whose worlds have become difficult, who had come up against the limits of themselves. But it wasn't only there, I was seeing it in my colleagues, I was seeing people both in I work in the academia and in the NHS in, in the UK. And both of those institutions have really struggled over the last decade with with austerity with imposed cuts. And so I see really conscientious colleagues doing their best to do really well, and always been asked to do more with less. And I've seen people kind of buckle under the strain of doing that. And I've seen it in my family and my friends. And I've seen I've seen it in myself over the last decade, I myself really struggled with physical and mental exhaustion, I went through a year where I was kind of really at the lowest I've ever been, both emotionally and physically. And it just struck me that it's it's not necessarily a matter of luck, who crosses the clinical line. But people on both sides of that line, you know, both friends and people in the clinic, they're struggling in essentially similar ways in that they're all being pushed to the limits of themselves. So I wanted to capture the fact that in a way, this is also a normal, and ultimately almost universal experience. We're all gonna come up against their own limits at some point or other. So I wanted to capture what that was like in a way that didn't say you need to have a diagnosis to feel like you're struggling because you don't I think lots of us are struggling on a day to day basis. So it was trying to capture that trying to capture both the individuality of it because in all those different areas that I mentioned, particularly when we were coming up with new interventions, one of the key universal findings was that no two cases are the same. Everybody has their own different set of facts. is pushing them to the edge. And equally, in terms of people mending are kind of moving on from that different things out for different people. So I wanted to honour the individuality of that, but also talk about what we had in common. And that's what made the book, quite a tricky act to pull together and why in the end, I decided to put cases at the heart of it, and encourage the reader to constantly reflect on their own case. Because I think when it comes to struggling, in a way, we're all a case of one. But we do have factors in common. So it's that mixture between the individual and the universal that the book is trying to square and I think it manages, ultimately,

Scott Allender: 30:42

one of the things that I know you observed in the fatigue clinic is that tired people often function at a very high level, but they've lost the capacity to sort of switch off get renewable. And in many ways, I assume that's because we've conflated so much of our sense of value and worth in terms of our productivity and output. So how, how do people wind up there? How do you how do you make them aware that this fatigue clinic could serve them? And in the process, how do you help people to kind of rewire their brains in terms of the addiction towards work and the compulsion to always feeling productive even at the expense of themselves?

Vincent Deary: 31:22

So really, key question, I think, Scott, and, like you say, one of the things I've observed not only in the fatigue clinic, but in, in colleagues in particular, I see a lot a lot in the work environment is we we struggle to, we struggle to rest, we struggle to recover. And we struggle to value that collectively. I think I think that's part of the issue. Because I think it's very easy, particularly when you're doing something like cognitive behavioural therapy to whose focus is what we would call idia centric, it's very much looking at the individual's beliefs. So it's a you know, they may have blocks around race, they may have conflated their worth with their productivity and your ROI. I think that's a key thing to kind of look at when it comes to struggling with rice, but I think that's really it's a transpersonal belief, it's a culturally embedded belief. And I think if you, if you look at the, the way that work systems are set up, I presume it's the same where new forks are from, there's increasingly a culture of audit of evaluation of 360 degree audit for people where they're inviting everybody to evaluate them, there's a sense that you're only as good as your last performance review. In, in academia, and in the NHS, we're constantly being evaluated by our outputs haven't been taught to do more. And Like said before, we've been asked to do more with less with less support with less time. So I think that equation of value and productivity is a really difficult one to unpick and particularly when it gets locked in to the, into the psyche and into the heart of someone like Anne, who are described in the book who we see working in the public sector and begin to become more and more worn out trying to service that public sector. But when it gets locked into conscientious individuals who want to do their best. So I think it's that kind of matching of conscientiousness with the culture of, we're going to keep squeezing you to get as much as we can from you. And I think it's part of the reason why the book was almost inevitably became, with a small p political, not party political, but I think it needed to see that we are embedded in systems that do not always serve as well. And that sometimes we need to perform an act of resistance to that. And that there's a title of an album by a band called idols. And I just love the title. It's called joy as an act of resistance. And I think that's a lovely way to think about it. And the other slogan I would put forward is also that rest and recovery is a skill. And we're very skilled at productivity, but what I was seeing in the clinic, and what I see in myself is we're not encouraged to learn how to genuinely switch off. So in, in the book, drawing and my field of how psychology, I talk about what's called allostatic load. So allostatic load is, is the, it's the costs of constantly having to adjust and adapt and be challenged. So Homeostasis is the work you have to do to stay the same. Alice stasis is the work you have to do to adjust. And allostatic load is the physiological as well as the emotional wear and tear that comes from having to constantly do that. And we all have a bit of that, you know, coming up to a deadline, you travelling at the beginning of this Scott, you know, your allostatic load is going up a bit, but hopefully you then get time to recover and replenish your resources. But what we see a lot what I saw in the fatigue clinic, what I saw, in more or less, everybody I knew at some stage in the last 10 years, is it's those times when we don't get time, or the space to switch off and recover. So the only way to really recover from that allostatic load is to do the opposite of being productivity is to lean in, of being productive. It's to lean into, to joy to race to revival, things that we're not very good at doing, let alone talking about I think collectively,

Jean Gomes: 36:03

we see that I mean, our own lives, obviously, I think like 99% of the population are experiencing this, what are you doing to help people to figure out how to do this in the context of reality as opposed to going off and having a retreat? Or? You know, absolutely,

Vincent Deary: 36:23

yeah, I'll do if you can, I mean, I'm aware that very privileged, and that I can actually do that. And I didn't know it when it sometimes it sounds like really small beer, but some of the stuff we were doing in the in the clinic is it's gonna sound ridiculously simple. It's just doing stuff like honouring lunch breaks. You know, because we're so much in the country where we think it's okay to keep to just keep working. And we come home, and we do more work, and we work at the weekends. And actually, there is nothing more exhausting. This is one of the things that really working with fatigue brought home to me than doing nothing but work, crash out work, crash out that cycle is really, it can only go on for so long before it spirals down. So often getting people to honour lunch breaks, take breaks when they got home. But particularly when you've got a low funder of energy, and you have that kind of conscientious duty driven personality, you often put whatever energy you've got in to the duty, you get the dutiful, done and your own needs tend to get put to the bottom of the list. So encouraging people to prioritise putting their energy and stuff that gave them energy back. So that was often connection or being in nature, or just doing stuff that was playful, or what they might regard as frivolous. But, you know, the other thing I came see is, Joy is a necessity, pleasure is a necessity, but often joy and pleasure are the first casualties of stress. So actually making time and prioritising them, again, in very small ways, but just beginning to weave them back in to the to the texture of daily life. That was some of the stuff that we were doing. But it's also finding that yeah, like I said, rest is a skill. So the several people I worked with over the last few years, they had to keep experimenting with what genuinely refreshed. And so for instance, for some people, the idea of a silent retreat would be hell, all my extra friends can't believe I'm going off to do this. For them, recovery would be much more about being with people going to a gig, other people that might be art, whatever it is, it's about beginning to experiment with the stuff that allows you to to experience some form of recovery.

Jean Gomes: 38:51

Well, I think this idea of trying to weave microneedle into the day and not necessarily always tried to set the bar too high, and then it feels unachievable. What I also noticed in myself is those periods where I have become very stressed, or very tired, and so on, and the move from being, you know, highly adrenalized and tonnes of cortisol in my body to then try and relax is very difficult. And I don't think I've ever got to acute burnout. But what what do you do to help people to kind of, you know, sort of get get down from that position?

Vincent Deary: 39:32

I think the first step is becoming aware of it. As always, in any therapeutic change is about becoming aware of the states that are less good for us. So, and again, this is not just in the clinic, but I often see that we can, particularly when we're driven we get quite out of touch with actually how we're feeling and actually beginning to tune into the physiological sensation. Since like I did with the social anxiety, it wasn't until I'd had 10 D silence, I could actually see how embodied that was and where it was embodied and how it felt and actually be able to kind of the way they often talk about this in the therapy literature that you can, then once you can see it, you can kind of contain it, you can be bigger than it as as opposed to it being you, you can kind of contain it. And you can do more than just be that. So I think becoming aware of it becoming aware of how embodied it is becoming aware of how interactional is. So one of the things that people with fatigue, often become really aware of is what they sometimes called energy vampires, you know, who are the people in situations that actually the great on the surface, but you can make it depleted? And, again, this is a it's an ongoing experiment that there is no, maybe the wrong answer. But I think there is no quick fix, I think is about leaning into experimenting, and finding out what actually works for you. And it will never be the same in every case. But what having said that, what I think is the key move, and this is the one that people often struggle with, is valuing it is valuing self care. It's valuing self compassion, and putting that as a priority. And I think we all struggle with that, to some degree, we're so caught up in narratives of worthless productivity, that it's really difficult to embrace the idea that doing nothing is absolutely fine. And that you're absolutely fine, just as you are. I mean, that is one of these radical ideas, often you find at the heart of many mystical traditions that there is nothing wrong with you. But it's almost like you have to go on this really difficult journey to get to that fundamental realisation that you and me and everybody listening, you're absolutely fine. You know, you don't need to prove it with, you know, writing the next paper or submitting the next grant. Having said all of that, if my bosses are listening, I will be writing the papers and the grants. But you know, yeah, even even the narrative inside my head is currently telling me that's a dangerous thing to say. Be careful. There are listening. So yeah, I think

Jean Gomes: 42:24

all of us it's a gift to all of us. We're all okay.

Emma Sinclair: 42:30

Hi, this is Emma Sinclair, business psychologist, occasional co host and fan of the evolving leader podcast. There are now over 100 episodes with an incredible list of guests, encompassing a broad range of disciplines, all handpicked by us to help you, our audience, understand and overcome your greatest leadership challenges. We have so much more to come. So wherever you get your podcasts, please subscribe, share rate and review. Now, let's get back to the conversation.

Scott Allender: 43:03

I want to pick up a little bit on what you said about it staying with this sort of micro renewal micro renewal idea. I want to pick up on what you said a moment ago, kind of in passing when you said you don't go on on this 10 day retreat, which I recognise is a certain amount of privilege that comes with that the fact that I can do that. Yeah. And I know that there are personality types out there that are doing exactly like you said, right, they write a story that says I always have to be productive. There's the real externalised pressure of people expecting them to be productive and they don't value rest and renewal and then there are people I think that feel like they don't probably, in reality have a lot of autonomy. Yeah, choose to value that right. They're working a couple of jobs. They're trying to like make ends meet all the time. Yeah. What are some suggested ways that even in that sort of sense of externalised demand, I feel like I've got less autonomy to prioritise these kinds of rest and renewal, you know, activities. But what can I do to sustain my well being even within this very difficult, you know, reality I find myself living in.

Vincent Deary: 44:09

So really difficult one, Scotland, because one of these stories aren't about to the stories at the heart of the book. One is Isabel, my mum. And the other is Sammy, who's a kind of fictionalised while not with that fictionalise it too, but the name has been changed as someone who I'm very close to you, and I will answer your question, but I need to do this slightly circumlocution sleep because that is my style. And during the pandemic, he was working as a healthcare assistant, which is that it's the kind of in terms of pay and in terms of regard within the healthcare system. It's often seen as the kind of the bottom rung. They're the kind of people who are doing the stuff that nurses and doctors no longer do. So In effect, the frontline of suffering, they are often dealing with all with death with body fluids with distress. And they're having to do the cleanup and the hand holding, while the kind of the medical management is slightly outsourcing that one removed from that. So Sammy was working through the pandemic, while most of us in the UK were sheltering indoors, he was working shift works that were determined by his boss, he saw night shifts, couple of days, they shifts, then late shifts, then more night shifts, he was on a zero hour contract. So he had absolutely no guarantee that he would get shifts, though, in fact, he did continue to get them because he was very needed. But he was also at the whim of whoever he had just worked with, and how they evaluated his performance, because you're only as good as your worst moment when you're on a zero error contract. Also, he's an Indian living in a bit of Newcastle where he quite often encountered racism from people around him. So for want of a better way of putting it, his allostatic load was incredibly high, he was constantly having to deal with a situation in which he had very little agency and a lot of exposure to stressors. And the reason I put his story at the heart of the blue can also to some degree, my mum who had a similar upbringing she got more agencies her life go on, is because I think we often blame ourselves for suffering, we often think we just need to do better. But actually, what you see in Sami is it's not only is he stuck in these situations where his his body is having to be geared up all the time. So of course, he's exhausted and worn out, of course, his immune system is going to be affected, but so is the way he feels about himself, because he's often working in circumstances where he's not valued. And also, his his emotions is going to be dealing with really difficult emotion. So both heart mind, and well, or rather, all three of them, are going to be affected by circumstance. And I think this is my way of saying, Scott, that often it's quite difficult to find the wiggle room, when someone is at the kind of the tough end of the socio political, sharp edge. So, for instance, if you look at life expectancy, in the UK, the difference between the most and the least privilege, there is something like 17 years, in terms of how long you can expect to live in terms of healthy life expectancy, I think gets closer to 20 years, i How long can you expect to live before you start suffering, either mentally or physically. So though these socio political factors, we can't kind of wish them away? What we can do, and this is the this is what makes the answer feel small as compared to the problem is we can look for the wiggle room, we can look for the bit that you can control. And so for Sammy, this has always been, and I was just talking to him today. It's always been a vision of a profession. So he has been working harder than anyone I know, for the last seven years to kind of better his kind of social and professional status and very incrementally, very gradually walking against his prevailing wind of difficulty, but he's getting there. And it's that sheer persistence in the face of difficulty that is really helping him improve his life, but it's not easy. You need support, you need lock, you need strategies, and you need to do you need to find a wiggle room that you've got. But I think in the middle of all that, realising it ain't your fault, because I think we probably both live in cultures where the people who are lucky enough to be successful often go, Oh, I did that. And I think we underestimate the value of luck in our lives. And so the people who are struggling I think first thing you can do is not blame yourself.

Jean Gomes: 49:19

You know, you you made these distinctions between self care and self compassion. But you know, one of the the moves that you talked about in the book is about having this healthy relationship yourself, which I think is encompasses a number of things that you've been talking here. I'm interested to bring that to life a little bit more in terms of how you what you've learned about yourself in that.

Vincent Deary: 49:44

Yeah, I'm a weird creature. This kind of, yeah, definitely. Definitely. And I really struggled early on in life, because I didn't fit in with my culture at all, and neither did my mom and I think often those don't fit. The way I put it in the book is we're given back to ourselves as work, we're constantly having to manage ourselves. So I think if you fit into your environment, you don't really need to think about yourself, you become fairly transparent. You just work where you are, where it is, when you don't, you're constantly having to pull the levers, read situations, read people, read yourself manage difficult emotions. I had a lot of that. When I was young, I kind of for the first couple of decades of my life, really, I was totally overwhelmed by my difficult emotions. And by me not fitting in, I think the flip side of that, and I'm probably going back to you know why I wrote the book and why I ended up doing what I've done, is you also have to get to know yourself better. Again, if you're lucky enough, if you're lucky enough to have the resources to survive that not fitting in. So yeah, I've got to know myself as quite an anxious person as someone with a very noisy internal monologue, which is probably what's drawn me to meditation. Because it's a way of stepping back from that a bit. Who, who's very easily worn out by stuff, or renting, and so finding ways of managing that like, for instance, ending up in a profession that is, I guess, more intellectual than physical, where the demands are more in my kind of capability of dealing with? So I think, and that's what I encourage the reader to do throughout. So there's various questions to the reader. There's even a kind of fun structured questionnaire at the end of the book, I hope it's fun, where I'm inviting the reader to go look, I've told you about my case, I've told you about my mom, I told you about Sammy, I've told you about some of the people I've seen in clinic. What about you, so I'm constantly trying to get them to use the book, to get to know themselves better, and to figure out how to manage themselves? Because I think what, like you were mentioning, I think one of the things that maybe it's obvious, but I think we don't talk about it enough is that the only, we are the only creature that has this elaborated relationship with ourself, we're constantly in a relationship with ourselves that quite often doesn't go that well, we can be self critical, we can be down on ourselves, we're out, we're often involved in what my friend, Claire and I have come to call chronic self improvement. So it's like, we're never quite good enough. We're always thinking, okay, how can I be better. And that is quite odd. When you think about it is quite odd to be in a relationship with the thing that you're also constantly trying to improve. Or that you're constantly got this message that we're not quite good enough as we are, which I think is what drives a lot of people to podcasts, to it is we're all looking for wisdom to be a better version of ourselves. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it is a weird thing. So I'm kind of drawing attention in the book to how we get caught up in these cultural narratives, how we get caught up in language. And that gives us this story about ourselves as something that needs some proven.

Jean Gomes: 53:15

One thing that I'm you know, sort of, because we're running close to the end of our time, but it's it's just to kind of pull this into some other direction, in terms of all the things that you've learned about this. Within the health system, you operate in terms of leadership, and what what are you seeing that is undermining our capacity to, to, to improve? In the situation that we're in, which is causing a lot of these issues? What do you think leaders need to do differently, to be able to help create a better environment?

Vincent Deary: 53:54

In the in the original edition, or in the original draft of this book, there was actually quite a long section on different forms of leadership, and it had to be cut down because the original book was twice as long as the published version, but I may publish some of that stuff elsewhere. But yeah, I did think quite a lot about work environments, because that's often where we experience either being or leaders or being led where that whole construct of leadership has salience is at work for a lot of us. And what I experienced at the same time in the, in the clinic, and again, in colleagues and friends, is often work that is significantly contributing to how we break it is often people being drained of their resources in the service of someone else's values and goals, which is essentially what work is and if we're lucky enough again, you know work will also give us something back, but often I was seeing it just drain and exhaust people and That often came down to the quality of the leadership. That was that was at play in those workplaces. So we talked about in the book, the woman who worked in the public sector, who sees a fictionalised version of people I saw in the fatigue clinic. And we see her go from having a boss who's some, something like my current boss. So my current boss, through all the institutional changes that's happened in academia over the last decade or so, has done his absolute best to protect his staff from the worst excesses of that. And he embodies this notion that I think I seen the best leadership is true leaders are servants of the people that they lead. They're actually there to enable the people that the lead not to tell them what to do. And he saw his his job, he sees it as his job to protect and nurture the people that are working under his leadership. So and in the book, we see her go from having a leader who was someone like that, to being a leader, who and this was during austerity in the UK when public services were being decimated. Who saw herself as or who saw her job as being a conduit for austerity, so zealously implementing staff cuts, zealously making people do all these performance reviews do more with less, constantly pushing and micromanaging her staff. And that was a significant contributor to the stressors that in the end, maidin, ill. So I know that it's a very simplistic way of looking at leadership as either kind of enabling and serving the people, or being kind of authoritarian. And just seeing yourself as a conduit for a process. It doesn't really care about the people that process has been implemented on. But I think it's a useful way to begin to think about what different styles of leadership there are. And it just seems to me to make sense if you start off with, however difficult the circumstances you're working in as a leader, if you make it your primary goal to try and nurture the people that you're leading, and to do your best to protect them and enable them. That just seems to me, a kind of no brainer. But again, it may be easier said than done. There are systems where you just can't do that, or you can only work around the edges of it.

Scott Allender: 57:29

Well, listen, Vincent, you've you've said it all, which is good, because you can't say anything else for the next 10 days. So

Vincent Deary: 57:38

I hope I've made some kind of sense. I feel I've just rambled quite a lot.

Scott Allender: 57:42

So it's been brilliant. And quite honestly, you haven't said it all. We could talk for hours more on all of this, because I think we've just sort of scratched the surface, but it's been really rich, and really important. And I encourage all of our listeners to get copies of your books right now. before they do anything else with their day to day because it's definitely worthwhile.

Vincent Deary: 58:00

Thank you.

Jean Gomes: 58:01

Yeah. Oh,

Vincent Deary: 58:02

it's been a pleasure gentleman to add. Thanks. Yeah, that that's been a real pleasure in my Friday. So you're good last people to talk to.

Scott Allender: 58:11

Alright folks, thanks for joining us again today. And remember, until next time, the world is evolving. Are you