The WorkWell Podcast™ is back and I am so excited about the inspiring guests we have lined up. Wellbeing at work is the issue of our time. This podcast is your lens into what the experts are seeing, thinking, and doing.
Hi, I am Jen Fisher, host, bestselling author and influential speaker in the corporate wellbeing movement and the first-ever Chief Wellbeing Officer in the professional services industry. On this show, I sit down with inspiring individuals for wide-ranging conversations on all things wellbeing at work. Wellbeing is the future of work. This podcast will help you as an individual, but also support you in being part of the movement for change in your own organizations and communities. Wellbeing can be the outcome of work well designed. And we all have a role to play in this critical transformation!
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Jen Fisher: Hi WorkWell listeners. I'm really excited to share that my book work Better Together is
officially out. Conversations with WorkWell guests and feedback from listeners like you inspired this
book. It's all about how to create a more human centered workplace. And as we return to the office for
many of us, this book can help you move forward into post pandemic life with strategies and tools to
strengthen your relationships and focus on your well-being. It's available now from your favorite book
retailer.
I live with anxiety and I'm not alone. In fact, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of
America, 40 million Americans also live with it. Anxiety is a daily struggle for me, but one lesson I've
learned from personal experiences is that you can't just focus on the neck up. You need to address
holistic well-being and better understand the root cause of your anxiety to truly manage it long term.
This is the WorkWell podcast series.
Hi, I'm Jen Fisher, chief well-being officer for Deloitte and I'm so pleased to be with you today to talk
about all things well-being. I'm here with Dr. Ellen Vora. She's a board-certified psychiatrist,
acupuncturist, and yoga teacher. She's also the author of the book “The Anatomy of Anxiety.” Dr. Vora
takes a functional medicine approach to mental health considering the whole person and addressing
imbalance at the root. All right, Ellen welcome to the show.
Ellen Vora: Jen, thank you so much for having me.
Jen: Absolutely. So, tell us, I want to get to know you, however, our listeners get to know you a little bit.
Tell us about yourself. Tell us how you became passionate about mental health and why you chose this
field, and then we'll kind of dig a little bit deeper.
Ellen: Sure. yeah, I mean, I think I found myself in the position I'm in right now basically because I was an
unhealthy and burned-out med student and in throughout medical school, I had these two parallel crises
going on. One was where I felt like I was being trained to masterfully medicate my patients and really
being trained in the craft and the art of Western Conventional Allopathic Medicine. But I had this
unnerving sense that there might have been a better way than it didn't completely jive with my nature,
which is to always think about prevention and to go upstream. And I felt like it was really teaching a
reactive approach to health, which is terrific when things have already gone wrong. That's a beautiful
aspect of conventional medicine, is the heroics we can do when things have already gone quite wrong.
But I just am personally more passionate about going upstream and preventing things from going wrong
in the first place. And that crisis was happening in parallel with the fact that my body was like a machine
with all of the springs popping out and nothing was working, and I was doing everything seemingly right.
I was eating what my half an hour med school lecture on nutrition told me was the right way to eat and I
was exercising.
Jen: Yeah, we need to fix that half an hour nutrition thing in med school, yeah.
Ellen: Indeed. And so, I thought, why am I so unwell? It doesn't make sense and that required really
going and doing creative approaches to research. Not just looking to my attending physicians or my
professors but looking at other sources for thinking about how do we keep the human body healthy and
well? And so those two parallel processes made me really take a different approach to health and that
informs everything I do to this day with my patients.
Jen: And so, you're also an acupuncturist, so tell me a little more about that as well.
Ellen: Yeah, indeed. There was a phase in med school and then it continued into residency where just
really out of a sheer state of crisis, I in disenchantment with what I had been taught and the limitations
of how I felt it could help with mental health. I wanted to pursue other approaches to health and
healing, so I studied Chinese medicine and acupuncture and a little bit of Ayurveda, functional medicine
nutrition, probably a variety of other little modalities, like a little bit of hypnotism and integrative
psychiatry. And so, all of that was born out of just wanting other tools. And acupuncture, I had actually
never even experienced acupuncture when I decided I was going to study it, which is weird, but I had a
strong intuitive hit that this was something for me to understand, and once I got into that training, I was
so glad I did, because even just the act of taking an entirely different paradigm for understanding the
body and human health was such a profound. It really helped expand my flexibility cognitively. And once
you take on one new paradigm, I think it makes it easier to take on other new paradigms. And so, it
really helped me think differently about mental and physical health.
Jen: Yeah, I love that and the reason I specifically asked about acupuncture is I I'm a breast cancer
survivor and when I was going through my kind of traditional treatment, chemotherapy, radiation,
surgery, all of which was absolutely necessary to keep me here and keep me where I am today. But I
also, I'm not a medical practitioner by any sense of the word, but I did some of my own research and I
started doing acupuncture during my treatment and I think it was certainly life changing for me and
certainly in many ways, I believe made my treatment a lot easier. So just very curious as to how you got
into acupuncture as well because I'm a big advocate for it.
But, as you were talking, I mean and you talk about this in your book, you take this whole person
approach to mental health and I want you to talk a little bit more about that, because I think for so many
of us, myself included for a really long time, we're kind of taught to believe that the brain and the body
are different. Like what happens above the neck is something different than what happens below the
neck, and that somehow, they're disconnected or not connected and right. There's like there's mental
health and then there's physical health. But really the truth is kind of what happens in the brain happens
in the body and vice versa. So, can you talk more about that?
Ellen: Yes, and I didn't know that about your health history, and I appreciate your sharing that. And I'm
so glad you're okay.
Jen: Thank you.
Ellen: And it just compulsively, I want to address one aspect of that and then also answer your question.
Which is, it's we are so all or nothing in our thinking and we think that it has to be one or the other and
in your perfect illustration of how these can complement each other. Like you can say yes to all of the
incredible advances that have happened in the conventional realm of oncology, and you can also get
acupuncture. And it doesn't mean you're sort of flouting the advances of Western medicine, and I think
that if nothing else, acupuncture reduces stress in the body. It tips the body into a parasympathetic
nervous system tone, which is a precondition for healing. We heal when if you learn in high school
biology, rest and digest and relaxation. We also called rest and repair when we're in the
parasympathetic tone, which is the opposite of the fighter flight sympathetic tone. That's when our
body can engage in housekeeping and healing. And modern life doesn't allow a lot of space for the
parasympathetic tone. And acupuncture at the very least, at least tips you into that state and you can
maintain that for a while. And that's if we're not even also recognizing potential psychospiritual realms
of where we develop illness, where we develop blockages. And that's sort of the more rarified aspect of
Chinese medicine. But I sort of, I find it all to be really eye opening in an interesting way of
understanding health.
Jen: Absolutely. Yeah, when people ask me about acupuncture, I'm like listen, if nothing else, it's going
to force you to like lay there and do nothing for like 45 minutes because you have needles in you. So,
you can't move right? So, like if there's no other reason, then you just need to go somewhere and like
lay and relax and like have a reason not to move, there you go.
Ellen: You want to be multitasking with them rolling on your phone, you cannot, yeah and yes, that's
right. So, to answer your actual question about a more holistic way of thinking about the body. You're
exactly right, mental health, we have been taught to think about. It really from the neck up that we think
our mental health is contained to the cranium and everything relevant to it is happening in the brain and
it has to do with our brain chemistry and our thoughts. And there is validity to that. I'm not here to
throw the baby out with the bathwater, or discard all of that. I just think that we owe it to the
population of everyone struggling with mental health to pan out a bit and widen our lens and think a
little bit more comprehensively and creatively because the real determinants of our mental health
certainly include our genes. I suppose they include our brain chemistry, but we'll drop a pin on that for a
moment. And these determinants of our mental health also include the quality of our sleep, our
nutrition, how we're moving our bodies, whether or not we are inflamed, the balance of our hormones,
all the way beyond the physical body to certain psychospiritual aspects of our health. The fact that we
cannot avoid we're human beings with certain fundamental needs for community for a connection to
nature, a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. I think even to be of service and make our
contribution. So these are also pertinent to our mental health and that can feel overwhelming
sometimes because it's like, well, I thought it was just my genes, there was nothing I could do about it
except taking medication, but my hope is that when we expand the menu of offerings that can actually
be empowering and give people reason for hope, because many people, when you focus on just the
genes and brain chemistry. For some people, our current offerings of treatment have been sufficient,
and they've provided adequate relief, and that's great. I count that as a victory, but that's not been true
for everyone, and I think a lot of folks are feeling pretty disenchanted, even demoralized. They think,
well, those are the treatment options, and they haven't worked for me. So, I'm stuck. And I want those
folks to know there's still reason for hope. There are so many more avenues to explore to support your
mental health. And genes matter, but it was only ever a predisposition. And there's not a whole lot we
can do about our genes, but there's so many actionable things that we can do with regard to the
environment that's bathing our genes. And that's where I think we can feel empowered to support our
own mental health. And that pin I dropped on the brain chemistry, is that there's been a lot of focus on
brain chemistry. We describe mental health issues as a chemical imbalance, but we now have this really
interesting meta-analysis that came out last summer around how there's actually never really been a
robust evidence basis for the idea of low serotonin contributing to depression, but I think that even the
extent to which brain chemistry is relevant to mental health, I've always suspected that it's a
downstream effect of all of these other upstream root causes of our mental well-being.
Jen: First of all, I love everything that you said and it just, it kind of it, to me it makes so much sense,
especially if you kind of look around in our world and the number of things that are impacting our
mental health. What do you think the state of mental health in America or just globally is today in the
context of the way you just described it? Because again, I think generally it seems like we're not moving
in the right direction, unfortunately.
Ellen: That's well said. Yeah, that we were already in an epidemic of mental health issues prior to the
pandemic, and then of course rates of depression and anxiety have precipitously risen in the last few
years. And I mean, on the one hand, that's just grim, that's have a big problem on our hands and
accessibility and affordability of mental healthcare really are an all-time fever pitch problem right now.
But I think that it does just further corroborate the idea that we need to move away from this idea that
our mental health issues are genetic chemical imbalance, because genes don't change in the course of
five years. We have had such an incredible uptick, and this just keeps pointing such a fluorescent arrow
at environment. And our environment is really tough on mental health right now in a number of
different ways and some of the well warned things that we look at are things like social media and
burnout with work. I think that we're maybe just beginning to appreciate how we are so chronically
sleep deprived as a society. I think that one is really impactful, really significant and quite actionable.
That's one of my favorite things to treat. And we can talk about strategies and sort of pearls to help
people with their sleep. I think nutrition is a fraught topic because it matters to mental health. So that
alone for some people is a bit of a paradigm shifting idea, to say, wait, what I eat is going to impact my
mental health. But then we get bogged down in really a lot of warfare on the internet around, this is the
right way to eat this is the wrong way to eat. Don't tell me what to eat, sort of all of this shame and
baggage and scar tissue wrapped up in choices around eating, and even that we emphasize this at all. So
that's a big topic to unpack. I think that without any of those kind of moral layers to it, we do have to
recognize that the brain is this piece of flesh. It's an organ like any other part of the body, and it requires
certain raw materials to function well. And so if we want good mental health that means we need
healthy brain function and to have healthy brain function, our brain needs minerals, vitamins, nutrients
that we get it from our food. And we are operating in a nutritional landscape that's relatively
nutritionally bankrupt. And so what we need to do is reclaim how we approach feeding ourselves. It
needs to be with an eye towards nutrient density. And I think a really important balance to strike there
is not to do that from a place of fear or feeling fragile or letting meal prep become an obsession and a
part time job from a place of ease and pleasure and affordability and convenience, but really, it's selflove as the operating system that we make our food choices from a place of radical self-love.
Jen: Yeah, I, I think that's so powerful and that really resonates with me. I want to not necessarily shift
gears but talk more specifically about your book. And that your book is called, “The Anatomy of
Anxiety”. So, tell me why you decided to focus specifically on anxiety?
Ellen: I decided to focus on anxiety for two main reasons. One was that that whenever someone walked
into my office, anxiety seemed to be a pretty recurring theme. So, I saw the scale of the problem and
there was a lot of unmet need, both on social media platforms where I was engaging with a population
there, but also in my own private practice. And then the other factor is that I really like treating anxiety. I
find in contrast to a lot of other mental health issues which are a little more challenging to treat. There
are a lot of quick wins with anxiety and what I would consider a lot of low hanging fruit aspects of how
to approach anxiety that we're not thinking about it correctly yet. And it only requires a little bit of
opening our eyes to new strategies and then you can bring somebody an enormous amount of relief
relatively quickly and easily. So that's fun for me. And yeah, I mean it was just a book, I felt like, well, I
thought I could just write this in my sleep, which may have been true for the first draft. But then there's
a process, as you know. And I think that that's been true. For me, I thought the big part that we've been
overlooking when it comes to our mental health is that the physical body plays a role in our mental
health. There's a colleague of mine named Will Cole and I believe he says mental health is physical
health. Like we just need to own that. And we can't really support our mental health adequately without
focusing on the balance of our physical body, our physiologic balance. And with anxiety, there are a lot
of little ways that our body gets tipped out of balance and it triggers a stress response and that creates
the experience of anxiety. And it's creating a lot of unnecessary suffering. I think of this as avoidable
anxiety. In the book, I refer to it as false anxiety, which through the course of the book tour I recognized
lands a little triggering and invalidating. But I don't mean this at all to dispute the very real suffering of
this type of anxiety but really just to point to the fact that there's a straightforward physical basis for it,
and a straightforward path out of it. So, this is the stuff of avoidable anxiety. We can do a survey of ways
that we might be out of balance. Address that at the route and eliminate a lot of unnecessary suffering.
Jen: So, I wanted to dig in more into the topic of false anxiety or avoidable anxiety, but I guess before we
do that, can you define for me like few things about anxiety. Like what is it and what is it not, right,
because like I actually think there's probably some confusion there. And then, like how common is it?
What causes it, like kind of take us on that journey. But then I do really want to talk about avoidable or
false anxiety because I read your book and it really resonated with me. It didn't trigger me; it actually
was very enlightening to me. Like, oh okay, wait. That makes a ton of sense. This is what I'm
experiencing. So, I do want to go down that path, but I think kind of stepping back and helping people
understand, what anxiety is what it isn't and what causes it and how common is it?
Ellen: Yeah, and I mean that certainly my hope is that it's resonant and gives people a hope and a feeling
of ok. There's something I can do about this, and I can be less anxious. But it doesn't always land that
way the first time around, which I get and we can unpack that a bit. I've experienced that myself, even
when someone pointed out one of my false anxieties, I was like hey you know well.
Jen: We all have them.
Ellen: My stressors are real. What do you mean like invalidating what's bothering me right now? Like no,
but maybe less coffee and then let's see how much it bothers you and so it was true. So, I think that, I
have bristled with the question of what is anxiety throughout this book tour, and I haven't made any
progress toward having a better answer. There are themes of anticipating a potential negative
consequence, themes around uncertainty control, all of this is relevant to anxiety, but I think part of the
reason I bristle at the question is that we are so of a cultural moment where we think the word anxiety
it says something about our identity that it's a permanent state, a fixed trait and something genetic and
sort of handed down on high. It's our destiny. And I just don't want to participate in supporting that way
of thinking about it. I think anxiety is often temporary subjective state of worry and really the kind of
subjective experience of a stress response in the body. And there's so many things that can cause that.
And some are our stressors, and some are physical states of imbalance. And so, and in the book, I try to
approach it with a new system of nomenclature, a new categorization rather than what I was taught,
which was to think about anxiety as generalized anxiety disorder or panic disorder, with or without
agoraphobia and OCD, and so on and so forth. I thought the most meaningful distinction and what
steers management in my practice is to identify two types of anxiety. What I call true anxiety and what I
call false anxiety. And false anxiety, especially if that term doesn't feel good. It's interchangeable with
avoidable anxiety. It's based in the physical body. It doesn't serve us. It's not our deep inner truth. It
doesn't need to be happening. Nobody wins with false anxiety, and to the extent that we can identify
what's causing it and address that and reclaim a state of balance. We can walk away from all of that
unnecessary suffering and just feel better. And then true anxiety, on the other hand, is not something
that we should be pathologizing. It's not something to suppress, and it's not something that we could
gluten free or decaf coffee our way out of. It's in many ways our true north and inner confidence that's
nudging us and urging us to slow down, get still and pay attention. There's usually some kind of call to
action baked into it where it's basically saying, you know this, but you haven't slowed down to really
know this, but there's something, some area of your life or the world around you or your community
where something's out of alignment. And you're being asked to do some form of a course correction.
And it can be so minor, it can be so grand. It could be that you know there is some activism cause that
you're meant to step into the front lines of and it could be that you're supposed to call your grandma
more often, and everything in between. But that true anxiety is a state of uneasiness that pertains to
something very real, very valid. And once we listen to it and honor it and transmute that feeling into
purposeful action, we don't feel quite so anxious. It feels like we are then imbued with purpose. And
we're there's momentum. And we don't just feel mired and stuck in our anxiety.
Jen: And you talk about this in the book that understanding true and false anxiety or being able to
navigate or identify, you actually talk about it as a superpower. Anxiety is a superpower which, like my
whole life I've lived with anxiety, and I've never thought of it as a superpower. So, of course I loved
being told that I now have this incredible superpower, so can you tell me more about that?
Ellen: That, and I'm truly not just pandering to.
Jen: No, and I don't mean to be making light of it, it was actually very empowering for me to kind of
change the way that I looked at it, as something that there's always been something wrong with me or
why can't I just overcome this? Or why can't, like, especially when you have anxiety when people in their
best interest or always like, well, just calm down or just stop thinking about it or just do this, all the that
you get, right, and like when you have anxiety, you live with anxiety, like over time I think learn to just
not express it because I didn't want to hear people telling me, oh we'll just do this or just do that and so
honestly, when I read your book, it was really empowering because I was like oh wait, what well now I
don't have to like hide this or be ashamed of it like I have new a new mindset and new tools and new
ways to actually think about it and deal with it. So, I don't mean to be making light of it at all. I just love
the fact that you told me I had a superpower.
Ellen: I am so emphatic about that, partly to push back on the ways I think culturally we've been getting
this wrong. So, there are so many ways that we exist on these spectrums, dualities. There's Yin and Yang
and masculine and feminine. And I think there is a spectrum of being more or less sensitive and our
culture will always place value on one end of that spectrum and not the other. And we're living in a
moment of I would argue, young and balance where we value productivity, and we devalue rest and
receptivity. And I think that when it comes to sensitivity, we've been in a moment where we say don't
be so sensitive, just as you say, just pull up your bootstraps and get it together. We've been shaming
anxious folks forever and saying don't be like this and we've got it wrong. So, nobody's better or worse
than anybody else. But we exist on a spectrum, and we need all types of people. We are omnivorous by
design and one person is unflappable and thank God for that person. We need them as a pilot or a
surgeon. We need their steadiness and the same breath we have someone else on the other end of the
spectrum who can't watch the news without crying. Who viscerally feels connected to the suffering of all
sentient beings in the world. And they will sometimes struggle in this very loud world, but that is not a
worse state of being. It's a very vital function that they serve. And so I encourage people with anxiety to
recognize. It's a liability cause our world is very loud. This is a form of being sensitive in every sense of
the word. You're sensitive to other people's emotions. You might be sensitive to gluten. You might be
sensitive to crowds and loud noises. It's sensitive in every sense, and that's a liability because our world
is noisy, but it is also an asset and I think that the sooner we can embrace that both the people who are
struggling with anxiety can embrace it for themselves, but the people around them can also recognize
rather than saying like stop being so sensitive, can we tell the anxious folks like tell me what you know,
because I think when somebody has a lot of true anxiety, this is not what's wrong with them. This is very
much what's right with them when they are viscerally connected to what is wrong with the world. I think
this is maybe a little superlative, but I think they are sometimes here in a prophetic sense. They are
tuned in to something that the rest of us might not yet be noticing.
Jen: So let's talk about that kind of, specifically, in the workplace. Mental health, for a long time was
something that didn't get talked about at all in the workplace, and people were even afraid in some
sense to use resources if they had any provided to them. I think, maybe because of the pandemic in a lot
of ways there has been much more of an openness and a focus in the workplace regarding mental
health and more and more companies are providing great resources for people. But when we talk
specifically kind of about anxiety and what you were just describing. How does that come to life in the
workplace, and how can teams like teammates, colleagues, leaders actually lean into those different
ways of being or different ways of thinking and seeing the world with our teammates and with our
colleagues?
Ellen: I think that there is this beautiful movement happening right now where we're destigmatizing
mental health. We're talking about it more. Gratitude to the younger generations for really ushering in
that conversation. Yeah, and I think that we have to get real about a fact of life like in certain ways there
was an untaxed benefit that corporations got in the past, which was we're going to work you really hard,
and you're going to get burned out and then your problems are going to be yours to deal with. It's not
our problem. And I think that we are increasingly seeing companies basically not only care about the
sort of most precious capital which is their people and care about their well-being, but also even
recognize that for the functioning of this overall organism of a company, we need good morale. We
need people to feel that their needs are met. We need less turnover, less burnout, and so really
everyone benefits when employees’ needs are met. And so, we're talking about it now. Finally, how do
we fix this? I think that there's the simpler hand wavier explanations, like, at Createspace we're talking
about it. We build in breaks, we set boundaries. We have time off and we participate less in the 24/7
responsivity culture and top-down modeling of that. I think all of that is impactful and I think that there
are bigger questions to ask right now about how do we truly keep ourselves intact while making a
meaningful creative contribution? And I think the sky is the limit in terms of how we can rethink the
balance of how much are we working and how much are we resting. I know that we've got that balance
slightly off right now. I think the question is how much off, but I really look back to the wisdom of
Daoism and the symbol of the Yin Yang, which always appreciated that Yang or masculine or sun or
doing energy exists in a 50/50 dynamic equilibrium with the in aspect of resting and non-doing and we
are in a culture that is obsessed with Yang and productivity and we devalue yen and we're all burned
out. So perhaps part of the strategy to go forward is to value rest in its own rate and not as a function of
our productivity. When you catch us being like I'm going to pick up a meditation practice so that I can be
more focused at work. There's something kind of that's Yang in Yen’s clothing. So, I think that you want
to really actually start to fiercely and unapologetically defend and protect your rest and your leisure for
its own sake because we are inherently worthy of rest and leisure and then to find the face of what I just
said, Yang in Yen’s clothing. It does actually end up making us more creative, more motivated, more.
Engaged, we are happier, more intact humans, and I think that there is an important insight to recognize
here, which is that, maybe sitting for I got a few things wrong, but I think he got it right when he
recognized that happiness is foundationally built on to love and to work. And we feel good when we are
industrious and when we are making a meaningful contribution, but we just have to do that from a place
of balance and that's where I think we're all rethinking what does work look and feel like. How do we
feel satisfied but not overstretched?
Jen: And it's very hard to make a meaningful contribution on any sustainable basis if you aren't resting.
Anybody that's been burned out can tell you that. So, I want to kind of end our conversation today and
talk to you about maybe there's some simple daily habits, even some not so simple daily habits that
people can try. That people can do to increase their mental health, their mental wellness to manage
anxiety. I know before you mentioned talking about sleep, which happens to be one of my favorite
topics to talk about, so I'm happy to dive into that. I want to get tactical here and give people some
things that they can really do or try or do differently?
Ellen: It's my favorite conversation, but the first half of my book, the actionable Mr. FixIt approaches to
anxiety. So, I do start with sleep as well, partly because some of the things we might get into, like
caffeine, gluten, alcohol. Nobody wants to have that conversation, but sleep, we want to sleep. We have
shifted as a culture. We no longer think I'll sleep when I'm dead or sleep is for the weak or the lazy. We
want to sleep, I think to the credit of people like Arianna Huffington, we've really had a shift where we
recognize that sleep is critical. It is our secret weapon, so now we're doing all the right things and sleep
still eludes us, and that's infuriating. And so, I really love to tackle the issue of sleep and my central
thesis, when it comes to improving someone's sleep, is to see this through an ancestral lens that your
body wants to sleep. It knows how to sleep, but we do have to give it the right inputs and not irritate the
system. And this centers most of all around light cues. And basically, this was a system that evolved over
millennia on the proverbial Savannah of evolution, where light caused us to release cortisol, and that
made us feel awake and alert, and darkness allowed us to secrete melatonin, and then we were able to
get sleepy. And that system was foolproof until we harnessed electricity and we got the light bulb and
eventually the phone and the social media platforms. And now nobody sleeps anymore. So, what we
need to do is fix our light cues and I think it's so powerful to recognize our body the way it has a 24-hour
clock, is based on light cues. There's a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, and it is
connected to the eyes and constantly scanning the landscape for light to understand what time of day it
is. And if you were just in nature, it would see the sunrise. It would see solar noon. It would see the
sunset. It would see the darkness. It would see the waning moon and the full moon and the waxing
moon and all of this would set a clock, both a daily clock and a monthly clock, and that helped our
bodies maintain its own rhythms. And these days we are indoors during the day. If we're working from
home, we might not go outside at all. And then in the evening, we're surrounded by this psychedelic
light show of modern life, with screens and overhead lighting and ambient light pollution outside our
windows. And then, of course we bring our phones into bed with us. And it sits on our bedside table. We
glance at it when we wake in the morning, or when we when we wake up in the middle of the night. And
so, all of this is suppressing our melatonin and disrupting our circadian rhythm. And we can correct
those cues. It starts first thing in the morning with a circadian walk, but to make sure that as early as
possible, you're getting actual sunshine into your actual eyeballs to start the clock, and then after sunset
it's really critical to block blue spectrum light from getting into your eyes and suppressing your
melatonin. So, you can achieve that by moving off the grid and homesteading and raising chickens, and
defenestrating your phone into the ocean or you can just get a pair of blue blocking glasses and I love all
the things like flux on the computer or all of the different modes you can do on your phone like night
shift mode or night mode. Those are great, but I think that they are necessary, not sufficient. And what
really makes the difference is a pair of blue blocking glasses that will block all blue spectrum light from
giving them to us.
Jen: And they make some really cool looking blue, black and glasses. They used to be like these big
clunky things that maybe all your grandfather would wear, but now they make some really cool ones.
Ellen: This is exactly right. I'm actually still going strong and wearing the ones that make me look like I'm
about to do metallurgy, but if you want to look normal and trendy, you can these days. You have that
power.
Jen: There's no excuse.
Ellen: And so, I think the use case for most of us is to just put them on at sunset, wear them till bedtime
as a rule. And that goes a long way to protecting our sleep. And perhaps the next best thing is to just
also pile it, not bringing your phone into the bedroom at night. You don't keep it on your bedside table
overnight. You set up your charger somewhere else, kiss your phone goodnight at a reasonable hour,
and then you enter your bedroom phone free, and that's protective of sleep along a number of
dimensions. Protecting you from the attention economy and the endless scroll without a natural
stopping queue from the blue light from the fact that when the world is a mess, we can feel surrounded
by danger and it makes it really hard to surrender and to sleep. And I think as the activist Brittany
Packnett Cunningham says, we need rested warriors. So, if we want to show up in a vital way for
everything that's wrong in the world, we need to protect our rest.
Jen: Couldn't agree more. I love that. Thank you. Any other quick daily habits or things that people can
do to. Increase their mental health and well-being.
Ellen: I mentioned that we didn't want to have the conversation around dietary intolerances, alcohol
and caffeine. I guess I'll say the very lightest touch on a couple of these things, which is that with
caffeine, no shame, I'm not throwing shade at caffeine. I just think that we do have a lot of bio
individuality when it comes to caffeine tolerance and some of us are slow metabolizers, which means
we're very sensitive to caffeine. So, we are pretty jittery and hopped up when we consume caffeine. And
of course, we do because it's a real drug. It has a real physiologic dependence, and we wake up every
morning in caffeine withdrawal. So, coffee of course feels like our one true friend in the world and our
salvation. It is, of course just correcting a problem it itself caused, but it's, I can understand why we love
it. But if you are someone who's sensitive, maybe you just decrease the overall amount by switching in
with some half caff or to black tea and pushing it a little bit earlier in the day to protect your sleep.
Because caffeine has a long half-life. With alcohol, I'm one of these people that is compelled by scientific
explanations and for me what actually move the needle for me to make different choices around alcohol
was to recognize that part of the reason we like alcohol is that it rushes our brain with a
neurotransmitter called GABA, gamma immuno butyric acid and that's very relaxing. It's our primary
inhibitory neurotransmitter of the central nervous system. So, it makes us feel calm. And if the story
ended there, I would say alcohol is a great treatment for anxiety and insomnia. Like the story doesn't
end there and our brain and our body doesn't really care whether or not we're relaxed. It's concerned
with our survival, so it sees all that GABA and it thinks we must reclaim a state of homeostasis for that
original state of balance. So, it achieves this by converting the GABA to a different neurotransmitter
called glutamate, which is actually quite excitatory and activating. And I believe this accounts for why,
when we've had a few drinks at dinner, inevitably we wake up at two or three in the morning, and then
we proceed to toss and turn and feel kind of racing thoughts and an agitated feeling.
Jen: I was going to say my heart's usually racing.
Ellen: Yes, exactly, and so we have lousy sleep. It disrupts our sleep architecture and that contributes to
really every mental health struggle under the sun, just that impact on sleep architecture alone. But I
think that that GABA to glutamate conversion cumulatively over time has a real impact not only on
anxiety or the handover anxiety the next day, but even cumulatively over time, and so I think that with
alcohol, this is such a tricky pickle, but the more that we can just make a choice once again from a place
of self-love is tonight a night where savoring a glass of wine with a special meal is the act of self-love, ok,
or is tonight the night we're ordering a seltzer with lime, is the act of self-love. And just to make sure
we're making those choices consciously, eyes wide open and not from a place of feeling peer pressure or
shame for our choices or habit, but really just from a place of reflective self-love.
Jen: Yeah, and if we could all, I think make all the choices of our life with that as the backdrop, maybe it
would be a better place for all of us to live in. I love that. Well, Ellen, thank you so much. This was so
meaningful to me personally. Like I said your book just kind of showing a big bright light on a lot of
things for me and change so much of my thinking, so it was a real treat to get to talk to you and to have
you on the podcast and dig deeper into some more of these topics. I know that so many people are
going to get so much out of this, so thank you for your time today.
Ellen: Jen, I'm so glad to know that and I have so much admiration for the work that you do and having
all of these conversations that are really shifting us in this area of life that matters the most. And so,
thanks for doing what you do.
Jen: Thank you so much. I'm so grateful Dr. Vora could be with us today to talk about mental health.
Thank you to our producers Rivet 360 and our listeners. You can find the WorkWell podcast series on
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