How to Recenter Yourself With Dr. Liane Davey

Morra Aarons-Mele (0:04)

When's the last time you felt able to sit down at your desk or wherever, roll up your sleeves, and have a great, great session of work? I was in my garden on Saturday, and I dug out a whole bed. I mean, I get a little nuts. I dig out old roots, I get the shovel in there. But after a couple of hours, I looked at the bare patch of dirt, and I felt like a million dollars. I hadn't worried during that time. My brain wasn't like swirling or ruminating. I was just focused on clearing out that garden bed and damn it, I did. Today's guest wants you to have more days like that at work, and less days caught in what she calls the Thoughtload.

If you've been listening to the show for a while, if you follow mental health at work, and if you're way up on your anxiety knowledge, you know that burnout isn't actually about workload. It's about anxiety, it's about the thoughts, it's about being triggered, it's about the swirl, it's about the what ifs. The Thoughtload is dragging us down and it's helping ruin work, says Liane Davey, an organizational psychologist, author of many books, including The Good Fight, one of my favorites on productive and healthy conflict, which we'll talk about. We'll talk about how understanding your family of origin can help you have a healthier relationship with conflict and the new book, Thoughtload. We get really practical on how to make space in your brain to stop feeling always in a swirl and more like you can have a good day's work. My conversation with Dr. Liane Davey.

Liane.

Liane Davey (1:55)

Hello, Morra.

Morra Aarons-Mele (1:56)

Hello.

Liane Davey (1:57)

Hello.

Morra Aarons-Mele (1:58)

Hello.

So I'm really excited to have you on the show and there's such a thread between all your work. I'm going to seal a question that a fellow podcaster, Kate O'Neill, asked you because it's such a good one. I mean, I think a lot of people know you for your great work on conflict, your concept of conflict debt, the idea of good fights at work. Your new book is about the thoughtload, the cognitive emotional price of being overwhelmed in our heads and in our to-do list. Is there a connection between conflict or conflict debt and the thoughtload?

Liane Davey (2:45)

I really am starting to think there is a very direct line in dark black sharpie between the two. If we think about the three pieces of thoughtload, there's the load part, so all that we have to pay attention to like the cognitive piece, and then the emotional piece, that's the load, and we carry that load with our physical, cognitive, emotional, spiritual energy. Those three pieces, so attention, emotions, and energy. Now let's think about, if I have heavy thoughtload, let's think about whether I'm set up for a good fight or not. So A, to have a good fight, I have to actually have been paying attention to the topic I probably needed to have read the primer documents, right? I need to have some mental bandwidth to have insight, to add something of value. If you're high thoughtload, that ain't happening.

I'm here in the meeting, but I did everything I could just to get my bit prepared. I haven't read your stuff, right? There's that piece. Secondly, you have to be emotionally invested and willing to say something that might upset somebody else, might cause defensiveness. When you're emotionally triggered, who wants to do that?

You're the hang in there kitty.

Morra Aarons-Mele (4:02)

Exactly.

Liane Davey (4:03)

You want me to. Then on the energy piece, who has that spare little bit of energy? Maybe there's a couple of moments in your week where you're like, I got this and you take the high road and you start The Good Fight. But Thursday at four o'clock, you ain't doing it.

What I've come to realize in putting the two pieces of work together, of course, The Good Fight came first and then Thoughtload. But now I'm realizing if we don't manage our Thoughtload first, there's no hope that we are going to have the wherewithal to have The Good Fight. I'm realizing there is this incredible link. They're connected.

Morra Aarons-Mele (4:42)

Take us through.

I want to talk about your work on conflict, A, because I know my audience loves to talk about this, and you have done such wonderful work on the connections between emotion and conflict. But talk us through Thoughtload. What is Thoughtload? Why is it an important thing for now for us to think about?

Liane Davey (5:00)

Yeah. So we know the statistics. We know that people are just feeling incredibly overwhelmed, getting to Friday night and feeling exhausted, but not able to point to anything meaningful that they're proud of accomplishing. And like I got here, but I don't know what I accomplished. And so most of us immediately go to like, the workload is just too high, it's too high. But the organization scientist in me was watching and monitoring and looking at productivity levels and in the actual clients I consult with, I was watching and stuff wasn't actually moving ahead. I started to realize it's not the workload that's killing us. Most of us would love to just be able to do the work. It's everything else around the workload and I've called that Thoughtload. So all the things that are taking your attention, the decision fatigue, the diluted attention, it's all the things that are triggering us, making us feel vulnerable, under threat, and all the things that are wearing us out, physically, emotionally, spiritually, all of that. So that's our Thoughtload, an invisible tacks on our performance that comes from this treacherous triad. And the scary thing is the neuroscience, I know your audience loves the neuroscience, the neuroscience of the three pieces of Thoughtload are terrifying because every single piece amplifies and exacerbates the others. So if you think about it, as your energy goes down, unfortunately, one of the first things to go is your ability to calibrate what to pay attention to and what not to.