#532 Stress Resiliency: From Burnout to Full Charge in Work and Life
with Neha Sangwan
Neha Sangwan
Wherever you are on the spectrum, from burned out to fully charged, can be determined by whether you have a net gain or a net drain of energy on a physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual level. Stress, emotional trauma, words thrown around a lot. I want people to understand that sometimes it’s a big milestone that happens for you, and sometimes it’s being the fourth child and nobody is making a baby album for you. You realized that it doesn’t seem like people care., but it’s not that they don’t care.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Our guest is Neha Sangwan, an MD, CEO, and founder of Intuitive Intelligence. She empowers individuals, leaders, and teams with effective communication skills that address stress, prevent burnout, inspire accountability, and empower collaboration. She consults for top organizations like Google, Amex, Kaiser Permanente, and the American Heart Association. She has shared her work across three TED stages and authored a couple of books we’re going to talk about today: Talk RX, and also Powered by Me, which is her new book that’s out and you can learn more about her work, do a deeper dive at www.intuitiveintel.com
Neha, welcome to the show!
Neha Sangwan
Excited to be here.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and why you’re doing the work you are today?
Neha Sangwan
Let’s talk about how far back I should go here. I’m the middle daughter of immigrants that came to the US after an arranged marriage in 1965. I grew up in Michigan and spent a few of my young years with my grandparents. They were stationed in the United Nations out in Africa. So, I went there for three months, came back for two years. The reason that’s important is it sets the stage for everything that comes next, which is my devastation around leaving my grandparents and not really fitting in, with my own family because I was two years old before I ever got there. A little bullying happened, all sorts of things. So, I became, like many people, a master of the external world. I was going to know what everybody in the room needed from me. I was going to give them whatever they needed from me, so hopefully, no one would send me away again. Of course, I didn’t understand this at the time. At the time, I was just a little kid trying to survive and make things happen. But I grew up and realized that athletics and academics were what my community, my parents, my grandparents, everybody wanted from me, and what would get me accolades. So, I’m a biomedical and mechanical engineer. I went on to become an internal medicine physician. I burned out when I was 34 years old, and for the last 20 years, I’ve made it my passion and my job to heal myself and help the world demystify this thing, this overall global overwhelm we’re feeling, really personalize it to each person because how each person gets there is unique, as unique as their fingerprint. And then give powerful and practical tools to heal. In 2008, I left my partnership at the hospital. I was an internal medicine physician for many years, and I left and became an entrepreneur, and now I speak and write, transforming stressful cultures into healing organizations.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Right, yeah. And I love that you’re a medical doctor trying to teach people about burnout and stress because, for me, when I’m working with people, one of the biggest roadblocks to healing is because they’re so stressed out, or their response to their circumstances, or their emotional trauma, that fear of abandonment, that perfectionism and other things that propel them to eventually become burned out. So, can you talk about that emotional trauma component?
You said, “The fear of abandonment” I’ve had, trying to get my father’s approval through academics as well. And people pleasing, it’s so annoying. Now, I have this personal mantra: my needs are just as important as other people’s, if not more important. You feel guilty. you can feel guilty about focusing on yourself.
Neha Sangwan
Let’s start with stress that causes or exacerbates more than 80% of all illness. Why are we not asking people what’s at the root of their stress? And I think it’s that whole idea that our lives are so different and complex. How are we going to find a common way? Well, what I do is I say, wherever you are on the spectrum, from burnout to fully charged, can be determined by whether you have a net gain or a net drain of energy on a physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual level. You mentioned stress and emotional trauma when you’re young. Words are thrown out a lot. I want people to understand that sometimes it’s a big milestone that happens for you. You know, someone’s physically abused, sexually abused, they get in a car accident, it could be lots of things. Sometimes it’s being the fourth child and nobody is making a baby album for you. And nobody’s paying attention because they’ve already been through three other experiences like yours. So, you might start walking and nobody’s clapping for you. And you realize that it doesn’t seem like people care. But it’s not that they don’t care, they’ve got three other people running around that they care a lot about. It’s just that there’s too much. And so, it’s this perceived helplessness that causes trauma if some of our needs don’t get met, that can feel traumatic to someone. And so I want people to understand that, just like burnout ranges from being fully charged to burned out, trauma can also be this catastrophic thing to feeling alone and not having your needs met. It could be anything in the middle. It’s not “Oh, my trauma doesn’t matter. Because other people…” No! Each of us has our own; it’s like a soul blueprint. It’s our own life school that we have to go through, that our soul is learning and growing from. And so, none of them are more or less important. Some of them are more or less obvious; some of them are more visible, and others less visible. But they all shape how we show up today, and how resourceful, how resilient, how able we are to live in a world that’s moving faster than our biology can handle. So, I’d start there, with the true understanding that there’s nobody that escaped this. There are people who are better at suppressing it than others, but emotional disappointments—like, I think, we don’t—we’re in a world that doesn’t teach us to handle disappointment; we deflect it on others, we act like it didn’t happen. But very few people say, like, “Okay, let me feel this, let me reveal it, feel it, and heal it. And let me use it to elevate myself.” And I think that’s where we’re headed. I think the people, the companies that are going to excel, are going to be the ones where you don’t just do that for your leadership team; you do that for everybody. And that’s the mental and emotional health crisis that we’re in.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes, and it’s so important to be looking at your stressors. Because, in the research, we see that heart rate variability, which is a measure of stress, is a more important variable than your level of exercise, your diet, your cholesterol level, whether you smoke or not, whether you’re overweight or not. It’s the heart rate variability, the stress, that you really need to be paying attention to. And monitoring your heart rate is a variable too.
Neha Sangwan
Yeah, and that’s something that is about how flexible is your heart? Can it adjust? It’s really the name of the game is agility, right? How able are you to handle the unknown and stressors? We all went through a pandemic a few years ago, and the idea there is, for some people, it was like, “Oh, alright, looks like I’m gonna need to shift how I’m doing this.” And they moved into it quite easily. Other people were like, “Thank God, I don’t have to be around people.” And then other people were like, “Oh no, losing the control of the ways, the routines, the ways they functioned.” That kind of forced change, I think, is a glimpse of, with AI and other things coming, how fast the world is going to be changing. Right here, right now, is the slowest the world is going to be for the rest of our life. And so, how well we learn to.. and you’re right, markers like heart rate variability, show that agility of your own physiology. And these are markers that are in your body and then there’s the emotional agility. Do you take risks? Are you able to handle disappointment? Or do you protect yourself? And if you protect yourself from disappointment, devastation, heartbreak, whatever it is, I want you to know that you’re also limiting the amount of joy you can feel. So, you aren’t just limiting and protecting yourself from the hard, uncomfortable emotions; you’re also probably going to be wondering, in a short amount of time, where did all my joy go? Because that is limited too. So we’re living in a very complicated world. And I think it’s really important for us to remain as lifelong learners, for us to grow and learn from each other, to admit when we don’t know, to be agile, and not only measured by your heart rate variability. My wish for people is, do one thing that scares you each day. Build your own self-trust. Make one agreement with yourself and keep it; it can be as simple as, “I’m gonna get in bed by 10 o’clock, I’m going to read, and then I’m going to go to bed by 11.” And just make that agreement and keep it. And now, all of a sudden, you have a little more self-trust; you believe in yourself. And if you keep doing that, you will. And the other one, if you want to take it to another level, do one thing that stretches yourself, that’s outside your comfort zone, that will also build self-trust.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes and I know that a lot of people can feel stress and anxiety because they don’t deal well with uncertainty, or they don’t want to be out of their routine or out of their job they’ve had for 10 years, or whatever. But if you can learn to cope with uncertainty and accept it, and then also learn to be more flexible, again, that goes a long way in reducing stress. Easier said than done. What are some of your tips for people to avoid burnout or to deal with that? Because it’s really hard for people to say “no”. They take on too many things. They feel obligated to their family or their kids. And it’s hard to say no and just slow down.
Neha Sangwan
Well, here’s what I’ll say: when you’re saying yes to something, you’re saying no to everything else. So, anybody listening to our podcast right now, you’re saying yes to this, and you’re saying no to whatever else could be going on. So, we’re always saying no to something. The question is, are you, when you’re saying no to someone else, getting really clear on what you’re saying yes to? Because you might be, let’s say, someone says, “Hey, could you take my weekend shift?” And you say, “You know what, I think this weekend, I’m gonna say yes to a good night’s sleep.” That’s what you’re saying yes to. So, I think this no-yes flip is really important. Let’s dial it back. What I was saying in a burnout… burnout is where you are from burned out to fully charged is whether you have a net gain or a net drain of energy on a physical, mental, emotional, social, spiritual; we’re on social right now. Because you’re navigating yourself and others. I’m going to talk about that for a minute. And then I think it would probably be good, we’ll just run through them so that people can have an idea. And I’m also happy to give you the awareness prescription for burnout if that’s something you want to put in the show notes and give your listeners. But essentially, what we’re doing here is, You were speaking about moving into uncertainty, there’s structure and routine, which has value, and then there’s flexibility. So, you’re holding a paradox that holds true for many things. Because too much of anything becomes a weakness, too little of anything becomes a weakness. So, as sexy as it is to be amazing at anything, true balance is what keeps you from being burned out. Mother Nature has figured this out. It’s like exerting your body and then resting. Right? Why is one third of our life spent sleeping? That’s our rest. So, with people, there’s this choice, that really isn’t a choice in the world for children. And it’s, do you show up as who you are, and start crying when you’re unhappy and tell people and express yourself, loudly sometimes in public? Or do you behave in a way that maintains your attachment to the people who care for you? So, it’s authenticity versus attachment. And for a child, it’s not fair because they don’t really have a choice. They must choose attachment over authenticity. There’s a way to behave in society, and we learn it young. You want to get a smile, you want to get the things you need from your parents and your caretakers and the people around you, well, then you suppress the authenticity, and you focus on the attachment. And that’s what you and I were talking about, like athletics, academics, what’s going to make them happy, and we start playing this game, which is, what do you want me to be? I’ll be it. So that’s the social section. And what I’d say there is if you want to know whether you’re having a net drain or net gain in the social energy section, this is how you do a pulse check. (1) Write down the five people or groups of people that you spend the most time with, in person or online. And as you’re writing that, okay, that’s using your mind you’re writing that down. (2) pay attention to your body, because sometimes our mind and our body are not in alignment. And it’s your body as you’re writing these names down, constricting, heavy, tight, or is it open, relaxed, and light? So, if I’m writing someone’s name down, and I’m like, “Oh, my heart starts racing, or my stomach starts turning,” or whatever’s going on there, that gets a net drain of energy. And you do that for five of them. And then you look at all five, and you see what you’ve written. And then underneath you check. Overall social energy is net gain or net drain? So, that’s social. Let’s jump back up. And let’s do physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Okay, so physical, the question I asked you there is, “If you could give yourself a rating between one to 10 on how satisfied you are, by how well you nourish yourself?” Do you sleep seven to nine hours not only for quantity of sleep, but for quality? Do you wake up in the morning feeling rested? Do you have fun and joyful ways to move your body multiple times a week? And do you have an even energy throughout the day? Are you someone who’s famished, and the first time you realize that it’s 2 pm when your stomach’s growling, and then you eat something, and then you have an energy dip? Where are you in energy? How steady is your energy? So, once people do that, then it’s about, okay, if there’s anything that was less than a 10 for you, what would make it a 10? And right there, you’ve got your plan on the physical level. Now, there’s also physical symptoms, like people have joint pain, back pain, like anything that they might be struggling with, knee pain, they had an injury whatever it is. So, you also want to take an assessment of your fist on your physical level, like, “Hey, is there anything that kind of bugs you that is kind of draining you of energy?” and then you do the same thing. Overall, look at your answers. And then check in with your body, I call it your body map. And it’s like, “Hey, do I feel tight, heavy, constricted, as I’m doing this? Or do I feel open, relaxed, and at ease?” Overall, are you having a net gain or a net drain of energy on a physical level? So, you’re kind of seeing like, what I want to do is, I know that everybody at certain times in their life are going to have different areas that are going to be gains and drains, and all of that. And I wanted to really give people a way to do a pulse check, not just from here, because your mind sometimes can say, “Oh, who needs sleep? Who needs sleep? I have too much to do, like I’m not going to waste time sleeping.” So, for all of you out there that think sleep is a waste of time, I’m gonna say you’re right. If what you’re talking about is what’s not getting done on your external to-do list, but your internal to-do list in your body needs that sleep. And that is memory consolidation, physical repair of your immune system building, rebuilding your muscles if you’ve worked out, and emotional processing. So, you don’t have good sleep for a few days, you’ll be the one who catches the cold right after that, and it’ll force you into bed. So, all of these pieces, it took me 20 years to say, “Alright, if we don’t know how to do this as doctors and we don’t really have a plan to help people figure out how they got here. We need to build one because people expect us to be helping them figure this out.” And so, that’s when I wrote Powered by Me.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes and when you go to your doctor, you aren’t really getting any advice on how to reduce stress. People are told to eat better, exercise, but how? What do I do there? It’s because that’s so individual. So people are told, “You need to reduce your stress.” But yes, I know that, but you’re not really getting any concrete answer. So, let’s discuss the mental aspect, since we’ve already talked about the physical and the social aspects.
Neha Sangwan
Mental energy is really about your thought patterns. So, when things don’t go as planned, do you blame yourself? Do you blame other people? Do you tend to think it’s something bigger than you or them? That’s personalization, projection, and generalization. And so, often, because I was a little girl sent away and came back, I couldn’t blame the caretakers I was with. So, I blamed myself. “I wonder what I did that had people send me away?” So, personalization became my default way of being. But you can imagine that when I’m blaming things on myself, that can be a big drain of energy. Now, our world and politics and everything that’s going on is all about, “It’s your fault!” “It’s your fault!” “It’s your fault!.” And so, we have this projection way of thinking, or some people want to avoid conflict altogether. And they’re like, “Oh, I wonder if the plane landed? Okay, I hope the weather was okay. I hope they didn’t get in an accident,” and they make it bigger than me, are you, and then nobody has to be blamed. That’s a generalization. The truth is, most situations have a component of every single one of those. There’s something I did, there’s something the other person did, and there’s something in the environment that changed. So, when you start to understand your thought patterns, it’s really helpful.
So, one of the things I do in the mental energy section is, you have 70,000 thoughts per day, and 90 to 95% of those are the same as yesterday. That’s a little depressing. But in that space, why would anyone change what they’re thinking unless there’s a crisis, unless something unexpected happens, right? So, what you want to do is you want to pay attention to the thoughts that are running on autopilot in your mind. Write down three of them that you have on-repeat when you’re in the shower, or when you’re on your commute, when you’re waking up in the middle of the night, or first thing in the morning. Like, what’s going on in the background of your mind, almost like your playlists that would be on repeat. And write those down. Are those thoughts that give you energy? Are they thoughts that drain you of energy? Are you someone who sees the world optimistically or skeptically? Where are you on that spectrum? And it’s not right or wrong, but you want to understand why that is. There are questions people need to ask themselves to become aware, to understand why they’re showing up in the world the way they are, and if they’re undermining their own thoughts. When somebody has a differing opinion than you, do you double down, dig in, and say you’re right, or do you get curious, not furious? Who are you at that moment? These are some of the questions that will help you understand whether your mental energy is a net gain or net drain. And then overall, look at it again and just kind of do a little body map inventory. Am I having constriction, tenseness, heaviness? Am I open, light, and at ease? And give yourself an overall mental energy, net gain or net drain.
Emotionally, it’s really easy. So, let’s move to emotional energy. I can figure that out so quickly because this is all I got to ask you: Tell me where in your life you’re avoiding conflict or challenging emotions—work, home, significant other, children, families, social life, finances. Tell me where you’re avoiding conflict or challenging emotion, and I’ll tell you where emotional energy is getting drained.
Dr. Wendy Myers
It seems like authenticity in your life can be found in having those uncomfortable conversations and getting into alignment with what you should be in alignment with. And that starts with having those hard conversations with people and addressing the things you’re avoiding.
Neha Sangwan
I wrote an entire book on this, and it’s called Talk Rx: Five Steps to Honest Conversations That Create Connection, Health, and Happiness. I link your physical health to your ability to communicate. This goes back to what we said earlier, which is that stress causes or exacerbates more than 80% of all illnesses. What’s at the root of people’s stress? The inability to communicate with themselves and each other. They’re not getting messages from themselves; they don’t know what to do with their throat constricting, or their back hurting, or whatever it is. They don’t feel like they can be authentic in their relationships with their work. They don’t feel like they know what their purpose is; they feel lost, left out, they don’t belong—all these ways of us communicating with ourselves and each other. That was my first book. I published that in 2015. It’s available as an audiobook. I got the rights back from the publisher after seven years, and I haven’t had it printed again.
This book is about how you get into inner alignment and how you lead in the world from the inside out, versus from the outside in. If you’re leading from the outside, your energy changes every room you walk into. You’re like driftwood in the ocean, going whichever way the wind is blowing, versus being a sailboat with a rudder where the wind influences you, but you’re charting your course. You’re taking in other people’s feedback, but you’re not allowing it to dictate who you are. And I think that a lot of people are in the process right now of really learning that.
On emotional energy, I take inventory by asking what areas of your life bring you play and joy. Now, you can see where you have a net gain and where you have a net drain of emotional energy. We already did social, where you did the five people or groups of people you spend the most time with, in person or online, and did they give you a net gain or drain of energy.
Lastly, spiritual energy. This is so interesting. People said to me, you wrote a business book, why would you have included spiritual energy? And I say “because it’s the most important energy of them all.” Spiritual energy is about what matters to you. It’s about your highest values, why you spend energy doing the things you do every day—this job, this relationship, this family, this city. Why did you pick these things? There’s something important to you, and those are your highest values. That’s your spiritual energy. For some people, they think of it as religion or faith. it’s more about how you navigate mystery, which comes with spiritual energy, too. But it’s about how you navigate the unknown. How do you make sense of the unthinkable, of loss, of grief? And so, to me, it couldn’t be just that. One of the questions I ask is, “Tell me a time that you felt really valued and appreciated.” So, if you can tell me when, what compliment someone could say about you in a room that would mean so much to you, that will tell you what you value. Or if someone wants to pick someone in the world they admire, it can be someone you know, a celebrity, anyone. And then say the three things they admire about them. Now, you know some of your highest values are. You can see them in other people, but those are also in you. And then, it’s about trust in the world, navigating a world of unknown and mystery. The name of the game is self-trust. How much do you trust yourself? With a couple of questions, I can find that out pretty easily. “Tell me where you take risks and where you don’t.” For me, I take risks mentally, emotionally, socially, spiritually, and entrepreneurially and financially, I do not. Until recently, I have not taken risks romantically in my life. And, physically, I don’t really take many risks. I’m not the one jumping out of an airplane, skydiving, or scuba diving, not me. So, now you can see where they trust themselves and where they don’t. Self-trust, highest values, feeling valued and appreciated, having a higher purpose, and what do you do when the whole world falls apart? What do you have faith in? What do you lean on to give you strength as you walk into the mystery of the unknown? To me, those kinds of questions will help you understand your spiritual energy, which is the foundation that fuels everything else.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I love that because, for me, when I think about the pandemic, I believe there’s a larger, big picture, a spiritual battle happening on the planet. I’ve become more in touch with my Creator, which has given me a tremendous reduction in stress. Realizing that and connecting more spiritually, praying more, and getting guidance in that way has been interesting. Surrendering to that was a huge stress relief and still is every day for me, making time for connecting with my Creator. I think that’s the biggest component here, the most important component in stress reduction.
Neha Sangwan
Yeah, what’s helped me a lot is changing the way I look at failure, mistakes, and missteps. What’s helped me is now thinking of this whole experience in life as Life School. It’s like I’m a soul in a body on Earth, so I can interact with Earth, pick up data, and play with each other. My soul is here, and every experience, interaction, and relationship is an opportunity for us to grow, learn, heal, and unite. So the real question is, do I trust myself and others enough to have authentic conversations, take risks, and learn our life lessons together and grow? If I do, then we can all evolve together as one world family. As soon as I realized I didn’t have to conform to society’s version of success but understand what mattered to me, that my soul evolves, that I’m growing, taking risks, and not looking perfect or never making a mistake—because that means I’m in my comfort zone—I wanted to stretch, make mistakes, grow, and experience the adventure of life. Growing and experiencing this makes me feel successful. So, redefining that and considering myself spiritual, the idea of life school for my soul, and having grace for other people as they navigate their own way, has really taken away the need to get an “A” or figure out someone else’s measure of success and meet it. It got me far, but it didn’t get me where I’m going.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, maybe happiness isn’t bought, but I do like looking at life as a school and a growth opportunity. Looking at “failures,” like maybe a relationship or a project not working out, or having those hard conversations that might scare you into detaching from something, it’s all going into alignment for what’s in everyone’s highest and best interest. It can be scary, but these things cause us to grow, to meet the next person or find the next job that’s going to be better for us. That takes away a lot of stress when you don’t view failures as failures, or think a relationship is the end-all-be-all. There’s always something better out there for you if you trust that everything’s falling into alignment for you. But you have to believe that, too—your thoughts and mindset become your reality.
Neha Sangwan
And I think, you know, the way that I do it is, when I lose money—let’s say I’m an entrepreneur, right? So, I did engineering, did medicine, and I started my own business. While I never got an MBA, I didn’t do business school. So, every time I lost money on something, like I made an investment or a decision and it didn’t work out, what I say to myself is, “Okay, now, that’s your MBA on the ground. You just learned that lesson. What did you need to learn from that?” And the quicker you learn that lesson, the faster you are going to graduate from that lesson, and the less tuition you’re going to have to pay for that lesson. And so, the question I tend to ask myself in a relationship or in a situation is, “What do I have to learn here?” And as soon as I get the lesson, I know I won’t repeat it again. And I think that’s a really important thing. Because people will say, “Well, how do you have that mindset?” Well, for me, it’s, “Listen, what did I learn from that relationship? Where do you forgive me? Why did I say yes? And what did I need to outgrow?” Or like, I’ll tell you, last year, there was, you know, a funding of a major programme that we’ve been running for four years, and it got pulled for this year. And so, first, I had a pit in my stomach. And I was like, “Oh, my God, that’s our largest funder.” And then the next thought I had was, “Oh, I guess 25 CEOs at a time must not be big enough. We must be being moved into a space where we’re going to have a larger impact.” So, we I can view it as, “Oh my god, like, there’s not the security that there was,” or I can say to myself, “Oh, I wonder what the next level is.” Because it’s true, after four years, I kind of got comfortable there. And so, it’s almost like the universe is saying to me, “Okay, you learned what you came here to learn. Let’s apply that and it’s time to stretch yourself.” You know, and so, I think, sometimes, we we get to choose the wake-up call on our own. And if we don’t, we get a little too comfortable, the Universe kicks us in the butt a little bit… or a lot.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You always have to get back in the saddle. You just don’t have any choice.
Neha Sangwan
Yeah. And when you don’t, it turns into things like coping with other things; it might become an addiction; it might be when people start to falter, when they don’t get back in the saddle, or they lose belief in themselves, when they don’t have a support system around them to remind them of who they are. And I feel that that’s why the whole spiritual and social aspect is so important. Because when I lose faith in me, because I will, I need to have surrounded myself with people whose eyes I can look at, that will reflect that belief in me. So I think the spiritual-social aspect is pretty remarkable.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So, what advice do you give people who have fallen off their path or are not living up to their standard or their vision for their life? Are people that have maybe fallen into addiction, and they’re in that dark space right now? What do you recommend to them?
Neha Sangwan
If you’re struggling physically and don’t know where to turn, I would tell you a good resource is www.DrHyman.com, Dr. Mark Hyman and his books—I don’t even know how many, maybe 15 or 18. They’re solid, really good. He’s the head of Cleveland Clinic’s functional medicine practice. www.DrHyman.com is a site I would recommend. He wrote the foreword of my book, and I refer to him there, so they’re going to be solid. He knows his inner connections in the physical world. If you are struggling with addiction, emotional issues, addiction, trauma, grief, I would send you to Gabor Maté, a Canadian doctor. He’s all over the internet, his book, “The Myth of Normal,” a huge bestseller. He is around 79 or 80 years old, a really wise physician who connects your physical health to your mental, emotional, social, spiritual worlds. I love that he says people make addiction bad. I’m not worried about the addiction. The addiction saved you from something really important and worse than the addiction. The addiction was your savior. I don’t ask why the addiction; I ask what is the pain? What’s the pain underneath that you’re thinking opioids, alcohol, drugs, gambling, retail therapy, scrolling the internet is better than that? I think we’re a world that hasn’t spent enough time teaching people emotional intelligence to understand how to navigate their hearts. So, when they feel disappointment, devastation, grief, loss, trauma, they don’t know what to do. I’m actually proud of them for finding a way to soothe themselves when they didn’t know how. And then, when you realize that, you’re like, “Oh, this is covering something else up that’s much worse. Now I’m strong enough, now I’m old enough, now I’m resourceful enough, I’m ready to heal that.” And then you just don’t need the other thing, whatever it is. You can choose it if it’s something you enjoy, like a glass of wine, but you don’t need it. For trauma, grief, loss, all of that, I would say Gabor Maté is great. Oh, and David Kessler too. David Kessler is another resource, www.grief.com. If anyone’s had a traumatic loss of a spouse, child, any of that, he has some really powerful groups and online courses.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So tell us about your book. So give us kind of an outline and just a little bit more tips about it.
Neha Sangwan
So, I’m going to go through both books. The first book is “Talk RX,” which addresses two things: (1) how our inability to communicate makes us physically ill, and (2) if you’re someone who avoids conflict, healthy conflict, and you want to learn how to lean into it, speak when you hold back, or not explode but do it in a way that’s really going to strengthen your relationships, reduce your stress, and make you feel more personal power in the world and deeper connections to others. That’s “Talk RX.” You’ll find that in the audiobook. “Powered by Me: From Burnout to Fully Charged at Work and in Life” is really that overview we did, which is where are you having a net gain or net drain of energY? On a physical, mental, emotional, social, spiritual level. Once you figure that out, let’s demystify burnout. Let’s personalize it to you. So you know where the net gains and net drains are, where you need to focus. And then let’s give you powerful, practical tools to heal. sso that’s really what “Powered by Me” is. It’s that, you know, each one of us, we can’t do this for each other, we actually need to do it for ourselves. We need to know, for me, my throat constricts and my stomach turns. Do you know how your body talks to you when you get out of your comfort zone? What is it doing?
Dr. Wendy Myers
I get a tightening in my throat, I used to. I don’t anymore. But I did some work, some emotional trauma work on that. But I, for sure, my throat would just tighten up.
Neha Sangwan
For some people, it’s like heart racing, sweating, stomach turning, you know, a sinking feeling. Some people get headaches. When you start to tune into your body, you also do not want to get a clean bill of health from your doctor. But not all things that are physical have a physical cause. Like my mom, many years ago, I wrote about this in “Talk RX.” My mom had debilitating migraines. My parents had an arranged marriage in 1965. They didn’t know each other, and they came to a strange country and started having kids. So they barely knew each other. And as they got to know each other, my dad has a temper and expresses himself. My mom gets quiet and culturally thinks “If anything goes wrong with this family, it’s my fault. Like, I got to hold the glue of the family together.” So she’s not speaking up. He’s expressing himself whenever he is upset. And she develops migraines. After they do scans and they do all this stuff saying, “Oh, nothing’s wrong with your head. Like, there’s no mass in there anything.” She goes to a psychologist, and he says, “Do you think your husband would come in and join us in this meeting?” And she’s like, “Sure.” So my dad’s like, “Yeah, I mean, I just wanted your mom to feel better.” So they’re sitting in the meeting. And the psychologist says, “I think that a combination of your culture has had you stay quiet, you don’t speak. So you have to learn to voice and your husband just blows up whenever something disappoints him or upsets him. And you absorb that. So not only are you absorbing and holding your own, you’re then absorbing his anger. And I think that those experiences for you, your inability to communicate and your husband’s temper, I think that that’s what’s causing your migraine.” My mom said she walked out of that office, never had another migraine again. And I remember that really affecting me when I was little saying things like, “Wow, Mom, you’re really powerful.” Like she said, “Neha, once I understood that everything physical is not physical, sometimes unresolved things on a mental, emotional, social, and spiritual level, show up in your physical body to get your attention.” So if somebody’s out there listening, and they’re like, “Yeah, I mean, I got a clean bill of health medically and physically and all of these things, and I don’t know what’s going on,” what I’d ask you to do is pay some attention. Let’s “Talk RX” sets pay some attention to what else might be going on on another level that’s showing up in your physical body to get your attention.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, it is our body’s cry for help. You have to listen to it. It’s not always a physical solution for a seemingly physical problem.
Neha Sangwan
In traditional medicine, we have a lot of ways we can numb your pain. So we’ve got a lot of ways where we can make it temporarily go away. But what I like to say is listen, Mark taught me this, Mark Hyman taught me this. Your headache, it’s not an Advil deficiency. Advil is gonna get you through the next podcast, through the next meeting, through the next whatever. But that’s not why you have a headache. That’s a coping mechanism to get you through a deadline, or through an event. So you gotta know on what level are you solving something?
Dr. Wendy Myers
So tell us about your free download. You’d mentioned that earlier. And I can put that in the show notes. If you guys go to www.myersdetox.com/NehaSangwan then you’ll find the show notes to download..
Neha Sangwan
In “Powered by Me,” I didn’t include it in the book, which is interesting. I’ll share one that’s in the book and one that’s the assessment. An overall assessment, if you’re interested, consists of six videos, short videos of me walking you through each of these sections. If you want that, visit intuitiveintelligenceinc.com/burnout-rx. If you’re someone who’s saying, “I just need to ground myself right now. I’m feeling uneasy, I don’t know how to recenter myself,” you can go to intuitiveintelligenceinc.com/PBMresources, That’s on page 20 of the book. It’s a website I created as a toolkit for anyone who needed to get grounded right now. They don’t need to read the rest of the book; what they need is to find a way to ground themselves. It’s where I put a lot of the resources for the book. But I’m thinking if somebody needs to learn soft belly breathing, they need to learn what guided imagery is, and have some experiential tools to help guide them. There’s a lot more than that on there. But at least it’s a way for someone who might be struggling or feeling anxious or uneasy to reground.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Neha, for informing us. Oh, that’s such a good show. I just love that conversation. It’s so important for people to get tools for reducing burnout, reducing their stress, and adopting all of the things you talked about in the show today, and improving their skill set around having those uncomfortable conversations.
Neha Sangwan
I am envisioning a world where we do this one company at a time together, like all of us learning one community at a time. I think it’s time now; the world is moving way too fast. And I think we need to do it. We didn’t do it in school, we didn’t do it in our families. Now we’ve got to do it in our companies because an entire 30% of the workforce is Gen Z by 2030. They grew up on digital devices. I’m not sure that conflict and real-time communication is their strength. In order to have our world—they’re going to be taking care of us. So, it’s our job, I think, to help get them these tools and for us to learn them as well. So, thank you so much for having me.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes, thank you. And that emotional IQ can be more important than your actual IQ when it comes to succeeding in the world. So, it’s really about happiness, right? Yes, happiness.
Neha Sangwan
In your job and your relationships ability. I call it the difference between personal power and positional power. Like everybody’s craving the name on the door, the fancy title, like whatever it is, but like, personal power, is you really having the confidence inside you and the self-trust to navigate change.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Absolutely. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And everyone, thanks so much for joining us for the Myers Detox Podcast. And I just love doing these interviews every week and love giving you this information that you can use to uplevel your health, your mental health, your happiness because you do deserve to feel good. So that’s why I do this show. Thanks for tuning in.
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The Myers detox podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast including Wendy Myers and the producers disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guests qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have direct or indirect financial interest and products or services referred to herein if you think you have a medical problem consult a licensed physician.
