Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The Still Human Podcast is for teachers, leaders and school staff navigating the realities of working in education today.
Hosted by Julie Liddell and part of Edwin People's wellbeing and culture offering, this podcast features thoughtful conversations with teachers, principals, psychologists, authors and education leaders exploring what matters most: leadership in schools, staff culture, workload, burnout and sustainability.
Each episode focuses on supporting the people behind the roles, because thriving educational communities start with looking after the humans within them.
Still Human delivers training, workshops and strategic support for staff wellbeing and thriving cultures. Edwin People provide strategic leadership and HR services that help schools and multi-academy trusts grow confidently with people-centred solutions. Both part of the Edwin group, we work together to positively impact the lives of young people.
Learn more at www.stillhuman.co.uk and www.edwinpeople.co.uk
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Still Human Podcast, where we dive deep into the heart of staff wellbeing within the education sector. In each episode, we bring to the table a diverse array of guests, including experienced teachers and leaders, experts in psychology, health and wellbeing, as well as thought leaders in the sector.
[00:00:17] Whether you are looking for practical tips, inspirational stories, or innovative approaches to wellbeing, our podcast aims to [00:00:25] support, inspire and empower those dedicated to nurturing the next generation. I'm your host, Julie Liddell, and today I'm chatting to tamu Thomas. Tamu is an author, keynote speaker, leadership consultant.
[00:00:39] She helps height, even women stop. Overworking and redefine success so it fuels their ambition without eroding their quality of life. Tamari worked for 15 years in social work [00:00:50] and her expertise is in behavior change. She's known for her work on the biology of belonging, demonstrating how nervous system safety underpins psychological safety, inclusion, and sustainable high performance.
[00:01:03] She helps leaders understand how culture is experienced in the body and how signals of safety or threat directly shape behavior, retention, innovation, and growth. She has a rare ability to make [00:01:15] complex, often uncomfortable topics, feel accessible, engaging, and even joyful. Blending science, storytelling, and personal insight to connect with diverse audiences.
[00:01:26] She's the author of Women Who Work Too Much, A Guide for Women Ready to Stop Proving Their Worth through Exhaustion. It was an absolute joy discussing Tam's book with her exploring not only the ways in which women who find themselves [00:01:40] trapped in toxic productivity can support themselves, but also explores the culture and systems that have normalized the desirability of productivity.
[00:01:48] In this episode, we talk about capitalism, patriarchy, and women who work too hard as well as dancing, looking for the good and rave culture. Enjoy.
[00:02:02] I am so excited to [00:02:05] welcome today's guest, uh, TAMU Thomas, coach, speaker, and author of Women who Work Too Hard. Tam's work, I think, is, it's. It's beautiful. And when I read her book, I read it on a flight, um, to Prague, and then I read it again on the way back. Um, and it's just full of post-it notes and full of moments where I just kind of [00:02:30] had to put it down and, and let it sink in.
[00:02:32] Um, what she was talking about, it speaks directly to women, especially black women, um, who've been told that their worth is measured in output, productivity, and perfection. So, TAMU welcome. Hey Julie, thank you for having me. I am very happy to be here today. Fantastic. So shall we just dive in and it [00:02:55] would be great just to start at the beginning really.
[00:02:57] And if you could share a little bit about your background and what inspired you to write women who work too hard. Yes. So my background is I was a totally burnt out social worker. I was frazzled to a crisp and I was probably that way for the best part. I'm saying probably I was that way for the best part of [00:03:20] a decade.
[00:03:20] So, um, I qualified as a social worker in 2005. I started my training in 2003. I became a senior social worker in 2009, and that coincided with my daughter turning two and progressing from a child minder to nursery. So we had both graduated in a way, and she found the transition very challenging and. I [00:03:45] did what I was trained to do, and I mean trained by society, by my parents and everything.
[00:03:50] I thought, I just need to be better. I need to work harder. So I started to spread myself even thinner. And as a parent, as a single parent, I felt like it was my duty to excel in the workplace and also my duty not to let that impact my parenting. And I'm just sharing that to set the scene. I was [00:04:10] brought up as part of the generation of women who were told over and over and over again, you can have it all.
[00:04:17] You need to work really hard in order to have it all. And I didn't realize that having it all meant doing it all. There was no difference to me whatsoever. So I'm just setting up that context. I was a local authority social worker, working in child protection, and predominantly I [00:04:35] worked in court teams. So I did the assessments of families to see whether or not children were able to be returned to the care of their families or could stay in the care of their families.
[00:04:46] I worked with interdisciplinary teams. I was the lead professional, so I was coordinating, leading everything. Um, so there was a lot of pressure. So as a child protection social worker, [00:05:00] for me, the responsibility felt as great as playing God to a lesser or greater degree because your recommendations would heavily inform courts decisions about where children should live.
[00:05:13] Sometimes this meant short-term foster care. Sometimes it meant long-term foster care. Sometimes it meant living with relatives, and on some occasions it meant adoption out of families. [00:05:25] So it was very serious work. It had very serious consequences. I was very, I'm still very passionate about it and I knew that I had to give the job my all, and as a, as someone who always wanted to be a mother, as somebody who was at the sharp end of the consequences of not as I put it, giving your parenting your all.
[00:05:47] I didn't want my passion for [00:05:50] my work to compromise my ability to parent my child, which meant that I was the one that was compromised. My daughter was compromised a little bit because there were times, this is what I feel, she will tell you something different. The people around us will tell you something different.
[00:06:07] But I recognize now that I would've preferred if I was able to care for her more than I did. I was [00:06:15] forever getting somebody to pick her up because I was late, because visiting children had to happen after school mostly, which meant getting home on time was very challenging. So with all of that, I felt like it's not that I was doing too much, it's that I wasn't enough.
[00:06:34] So rather than assessing what I was doing and seeking support, delegating [00:06:40] or pushing back against managers, trying to allocate me more work when there was no room for it to fit. I did all kinds of things to try and optimize myself, so I was already depleted and exhausted. I signed up for a bootcamp. I thought I need to exercise more so that I've got more energy.
[00:06:56] So I was up and out of my house at 5:30 AM three times a week, sometimes four, to get to the bootcamp for 6:00 AM. I did all of [00:07:05] these extra trainings and courses because I felt like me not being able to keep up was much more to do with me not having the skills rather than recognizing I was just doing too much and there was no weekend where I hadn't organized some kind of something on top of my daughter's extracurricular activities to make sure we were having quality time together.
[00:07:25] And it culminated in my brain has kind of blurred that period of [00:07:30] time. So it was either. 2016 or 2017, I think it was 16. I was on my way to court. It was a very contentious court case. By this time I had left full-time social work and I was freelancing. I had my own practice and my cases were way more complicated.
[00:07:48] I worked as a freelance family court advisor for, so I was advising the courts, and I would also be doing [00:07:55] assessments in cases where effectively things had gone wrong and the courts wanted an independent social work assessment because the assessments that had done previously were deemed to be not very credible.
[00:08:06] But I had autonomy over the cases I would take on, but still, I felt overwhelmed. And on that day, in September, I was on my way to court and I had a panic attack. I felt [00:08:20] like I was dying. I didn't know what a panic attack was because I had witnessed panic attacks in my clients. But these were people with intergenerational trauma.
[00:08:30] These were people who were impacted by really challenging socioeconomic difficulties. So their anxiety and panic looked very different to what I was experiencing. And I was a girl boss. I was a professional. [00:08:45] There was no way I could be experiencing anxiety or panic attacks. I was very resilient. Um, and I say all the time, people who are resilient, high achievers, anxiety and panic attacks, or breakdown burnout, looks like panic attacks.
[00:09:02] Or in a worst case scenario, it looks like heart attacks. So I had a panic attack. I thought I was dying 'cause I [00:09:10] didn't know what it was. I contemplated calling an ambulance. I was that worried about myself. But I dismissed myself. I said, don't be literally, I heard myself saying, don't be so ridiculous. Get yourself together.
[00:09:21] Get to court. In that tone I did sensory things. What can I see, hear, touch, taste, smell. Got myself together, went to court, gave fantastic evidence. Was commended by the court for my evidence [00:09:35] and my work with the family. And when I got back home, I went straight to the gp. I didn't even bother risking, phoning 'cause you can never get through on the phone.
[00:09:44] I went straight in to make an appointment with my gp. Fast forward, was referred to a psychologist, had an assessment and the psychologist said that basically I was experiencing a moderate, [00:10:00] no, a severe level of moderate depression. I had left that and it had morphed into anxiety. I had left that, and then it developed into me having a series of panic attacks because that panic attack I had wasn't the first, but it was the biggest, the ones that happened previously.
[00:10:18] I was just calling them heightened periods of anxiety and she was saying no, there were anxiety attacks and the panic attacks was because your [00:10:25] body was saying no more. The health service being what it is, overwhelmed and oversubscribed gave me enough information to kind of see the top of the iceberg.
[00:10:37] And then I saw a nutritional therapist who broke down what I was experiencing and I had blood tests that showed that my neutrophils were very low and there were a particular type of white blood cell to do with your immune [00:10:50] system. My iron was like through the floor and my nutritional therapist explained that there is a link between our biology and our psychology.
[00:11:01] It's a constant feedback loop, and my lack of care and the pressurized environment I was working in compromised my biology, which then compromised my psychology and my psychology [00:11:15] continued to compromise my biology. When I heard that, I knew I had to change everything about, not just how I was working, but about how I was living as well because I, my first thought was, I don't wanna role model what I witnessed as a child to my child.
[00:11:33] I like, my book is called Women Who Work Too Much for a Reason. I grew up seeing generations of [00:11:40] women working far too much and they made lots of progress with that, working far too much, but the cost was very high. They were not able to enjoy the fruits of their labor. I witnessed women being exhausted all the time and I didn't wanna role model that as normal.
[00:11:56] I could see how I dealt with doing too much by believing I wasn't enough in part because of what was role modeled as well as the [00:12:05] societal messages. And I wanted to be a role model for my daughter that she could be successful and success could support her satisfaction. I didn't want it to be the other way round.
[00:12:15] So, um, I decided to, well, I first started on my own burnout recovery journey. And that took me to the world of positive psychology because I'm a very curious person and I like to learn stuff. I did [00:12:30] a short course in positive psychology and that's when I discovered the world of coaching and I decided I wanted to become a coach, but not like what I had seen online, which was like slim women on the beach in a caftan saying, I can work from anywhere.
[00:12:45] I didn't wanna work from anywhere. If I was on a beach, I wanted to be able to frolic, but I wanted to utilize my social work skills to be able to support women. 'cause I could just [00:12:55] see women around me living their own version of what I had been experiencing. Women were saying things, me included, like fantasizing about having a mild accident on the way to work so you could have a little bit of whip whiplash so you could have a break.
[00:13:09] I had countless women talking about in December, wishing that they had an illness that wasn't too bad, but required hospital admission over the Christmas period so [00:13:20] they could get care. And at that time we were saying it in such a flippant way. Once I'd experienced my like burnout saying, you're not doing this anymore, I realized those were warning signs.
[00:13:32] Those quote unquote fantasies were warning signs that something was severely wrong. Um, so my positive psychology journey led me to the world of, um, [00:13:45] neuroscience and neuroscience led me to the world of somatics and somatic coaching, and bearing in mind my experience and what I had understood from the nutritional therapist, Lenise brothers of Eat, love move.
[00:13:58] I have to shout her out. She's also written a book called You Can Have a Better Period. She specializes in hormones. So after that I decided that I wanted to train as a somatic coach because I [00:14:10] could see how we totally do not understand how much our biology influences our psychology and that we forget that we live in our bodies first, and our bodies literally are the vessel for our lives.
[00:14:26] And then at that time, I know I've said a lot, but um, the context is necessary. I remembered my Auntie Aminata. So when I [00:14:35] was a child, I had this aunt, well, I still got this Auntie Aminata. I haven't seen her for donkey's years. So my brother wasn't born yet, so I must have been five or six when I used to see her on a regular basis.
[00:14:46] She lives in Sierra Leone, but at the time she worked for companies or organizations like the United Nations and people would describe her as an international business woman. She speaks seven languages and it's still [00:15:00] difficult for people in Syrian to travel. It was even more difficult for with people in Syrian to travel at that time.
[00:15:06] Yet here she was a single woman with no children, happy as Larry traveling all across the world. Doing her interpreting translation, whatever it was for these massive organizations. I didn't even know what that was, but I knew that [00:15:25] she exuded a radiance. The women around me on a regular basis didn't, she was so jolly, she would laugh with her whole body.
[00:15:33] You could see her back teeth when she laughed. She smelled of Reeve, gosh and poison perfume. She wore suits. She carried lovely handbags and she didn't stay with us in our council flat on the 13th floor of an estate in Labate Grove. She stayed in a [00:15:50] beautiful apartment in Baker Street where everything was cream and gold and crystal chandeliers, whereas I'm talking about the early eighties.
[00:15:59] Everything around us in terms of decor, furniture was orange and brown and mustard. Yeah. And hers was totally different. And I just looked at her and I thought. When I'm older, I want to be an international businesswoman like Auntie [00:16:15] Amta. And when I did the positive Psychology and started my own out my own burnout recovery, her presence became very strong.
[00:16:23] She became my anchor, and I realized she was always within me. The marks she left was always within me, but it had been overshadowed by what was being role modeled to me constantly. So it's almost as if my brain presented her to me when I [00:16:40] decided I was not going to be on this burnout train anymore. I was provided with a role model with somebody to look towards because, you know, representation matters.
[00:16:49] And she represented a different form of womanhood, a form of womanhood. I felt like I could get behind completely. And then I set up my business. And my business primarily was. Uh, helping women work [00:17:05] better so that work wasn't consuming their whole entire lives so that they could experience more joy. And what I witnessed, the more I worked with women.
[00:17:14] Is that the main barrier between women and enjoying who they are and then enjoying their lives was the way they work and the way they are in heterosexual relationships. And, um, I have very limited [00:17:30] capacity for. What I would consider as neglecting myself and abandoning myself in a heterosexual relationship.
[00:17:38] And I thought, I'm not the one for you to come to with repeating issues about your partner. 'cause I would just say, what are you doing there? But with the work, and that was my experience, I could absolutely support. So I was sharing what I saw on social media, and I just thought this [00:17:55] productivity that we think is so wonderful, actually these women are operating at toxic levels of productivity the same way we can have toxic relationships, the same way we can have toxic work environments and filter the relationship with talk with productivity is toxic.
[00:18:11] So I was talking about toxic productivity so much that a publisher from one of the big publishing houses, uh, a commissioning editor sent me a message on Instagram. [00:18:20] Basically saying she loved the conversation I was having about toxic productivity. Have I thought about writing a book about it? Unless I hadn't thought about writing a book about toxic productivity specifically.
[00:18:30] I've always wanted to write a book. When I was a child, I thought I would write a poetry book. So, and I'm one of these people, if I'm presented with the right stimuli is very inspiring for me, and that's what led to the book. Ta-Da[00:18:45]
[00:18:47] and Breathe. Fabulous introduction. Oh, thank you so much for sharing that. There's so much in there that I wanna ask questions about because you know, in a nutshell, you've kind of. Summarize there a, a lot of what the book is saying and it reflects it and mirrors, you know, your story. I think if I could start by just picking up on [00:19:10] this idea of toxic productivity, because what your book does is it provides sort of practices to support women, um, who I've worked too hard and there's lots of suggestions and little activities and journaling prompts and breath work in there.
[00:19:26] But it also provides that context around the culture that you've spoken to there. Yeah. In which we've learnt about this [00:19:35] relentless productivity, how it's desirable, how it's been normalized. So people might not have heard this phrase before. Could you just share a little bit around that? Of. Where that's come from?
[00:19:47] Where, where have we learned that? So, uh, the way I describe toxic productivity is the obsessive compulsive need to be productive. It is an addiction and it's not [00:20:00] confined to work. It's all over the place. So it's your friend who you go round to her house for dinner, she's organizing a dinner party and she never sits still.
[00:20:08] She's flitting around all over the place. She probably hasn't even eaten before. You finish drinking your drink, she's cleared it away. She's put it in a dishwasher. She's the type of person where you talk about something you're experiencing and before you've even finished, she's volunteering to be able to help you.
[00:20:23] Even though you know she's [00:20:25] got 1,001 things on. She's the type of person where you are in your own home and you've invited her round and you are clearing the table and she insists she must help you clear up. She must help you pack the dishwasher. She must help you put things away. She can't just sit down and enjoy.
[00:20:42] Time and space. She can't just sit down and enjoy company because for her, she needs to be productive [00:20:50] and she'll use things like, oh, I just like to make myself useful. So those are the kind of, that's that's, that's a key phrase. People like that share. It's in the workplace. Someone who has got too much on already, they're moaning and complaining about it, but if somebody's asked to volunteer for something, they'll find themselves with their hand up volunteering or they won't, but people will come to them.
[00:21:11] I was the classic, I was a senior social worker or [00:21:15] consultant social worker in teams. I had a really heavy caseload and I was, I'm, I'm such a curious person and I love nuance. I would take the cases people didn't like. So cases that were about things like, uh, neglect and emotional abuse, those things are much harder to quantify and identify because the evidence is subtle and it builds over time.
[00:21:37] But these are things like you're working with [00:21:40] parents with mental health diagnoses. They've got, uh, what used to be called borderline personality disorder. Uh, so you were working with very, very tricky cases. So I'd have all of that. And then a new starter would come in and, oh, TAMU Tamu will be your buddy.
[00:21:58] She'll help you with your, um, orientation. She'll support you. Or, I was, um, I [00:22:05] didn't do the work-based supervisor training because I knew if I did, I would be inundated. No, the workplace practice educator training, but somehow I found myself being a practice supervisor, so I would have student social workers.
[00:22:18] And then I was volunteered to be a mentor for newly qualified social workers. And I took that very, very seriously because I know how it felt to be a newly qualified social worker who was left floundering. [00:22:30] If it was somebody's, I love birthdays, I love celebrations. People know that. So if it was somebody's birthday, somebody was going off on maternity, they could rely on the fact that I would get the card, I'd get the K, I'd coordinate the collection and all of those kind of things because I had a need to be productive.
[00:22:46] And underneath that is a driver to be accepted, to be seen, to be appreciated, to be valued. So [00:22:55] toxic productivity underneath it is pleasing behavior. And you'll find that lots of people who are high achievers. They're operating in toxic productivity and if they were able to be really honest with themselves, the tri, the driver is proving themselves as worthy people who identify with like that type A go-getter, highly ambitious, um, personality type.
[00:23:17] The driver behind that toxic productivity [00:23:20] is a desire to please, a desire to be seen as valuable to earn your place. So it's very taxing. It means that even though you might have walked away from a situation like your workday has ended, you are gonna be rehashing what's gone on to see how you could do things better.
[00:23:37] You'll be revisiting conversations you've had with people because you're mindful about how you've come across. You are constantly. Now [00:23:45] I'm naturally curious, but there's a difference between learning because you enjoy it and you wanna hone your skill and learning because you feel like you're lacking.
[00:23:55] And this is a way you're gonna make up for a shortcoming. And it comes from, in my book, I talk about the trinity of oppression or the oppressive trinity, which is, so, first of all, my book was gonna be an exploration of capitalism [00:24:10] because that's what I was seeing everywhere. And the more I researched, the more I saw where there was capitalism, there was white supremacy and patriarchy.
[00:24:20] Capitalism exacerbates white supremacy and patriarchy. If we look across our history, most of the travesties that have happened to human beings have been generated by greed. It has been generated by [00:24:35] growth for the sake of growth, hoarding wealth and resources for the sake of hoarding wealth and resources.
[00:24:41] And it has led to catastrophic events. And when I talk about this, I want to be clear. When people hear me talking about capitalism, lots of people don't really understand what capitalism actually is. They will talk about, they will say, well, having a business and wanting to create [00:25:00] 500,000 pounds a year is capitalism.
[00:25:02] No, it's not the same. It's trade. Capitalism is a system of exploitation, patriarchy. People think that you are man bashing. People think it's missionary. No, it's not. I'm not talking about individual men. I'm talking about a system that says men are superior to women. That men should be in control and in charge of everything and everyone.[00:25:25]
[00:25:25] And it selects a specific type of man to be the model for not just manhood, but being a human being. And that tends to be white, heterosexual, cisgendered, able bodied, strong men with wealth. And they set the tone for everyone. Patriarchy impacts every gender. It's not just [00:25:50] something that impacts women and non-binary or trans folks.
[00:25:54] Men are negatively impacted by patriarchy as well. Men will talk about women wanting a provider, women wanting a man that earns lots of money. Women wanting being gold diggers, wanting men who pay for everything. That is not something that women designed. That is something patriarchy designed. Patriarchy is designed saying that men should be the [00:26:15] breadwinners and providers because that's the way men control women.
[00:26:19] So I'm talking about a system. I'm not talking about individual people. And the same with white supremacy. I'm not talking about individual white people. I'm talking about a system that says there is a racial hierarchy. White people are at the top, black people are at the bottom. Everybody else is somewhere in between.
[00:26:39] And that [00:26:40] we should aspire to be the type of white that is masculine, male, heterosexual, cis, all of those sorts of things. And the system of white supremacy doesn't benefit white people the way we think it does, because as a white woman, for example, in under white supremacy, when you dovetail that with, um, patriarchy, white supremacy says that [00:27:05] white women are infants.
[00:27:07] They don't know any better. They need a man to make choices for them. And we can see that was enshrined in law with women not being able to have bank accounts until the seventies or whenever it was. Women having to fight for the right to vote. Women not being able to get mortgages and credit cards on their own unless they had a male backing them.
[00:27:25] And it positions white women as these very frail, [00:27:30] feeble damsels in distress who need a knight on shining armor. And conversely, it positions women of color, particularly black women, as masculine, as savage, as aggressive workhorses to justify treating black women, women of color in that way. And there are exceptions, but it's not, uh, in a positive light.
[00:27:51] For example, the way that Asian women, [00:27:55] particularly East Asian women and Southeast Asian women, are positioned as submissive and, uh, very malleable. Not in the same way as white women. It is to their, their detriment. Whereas white women are damsel in distress because they're gonna have this hero husband who saves them and looks after them.
[00:28:15] So these systems work together hand in hand to create an [00:28:20] environment that we are all breathing in. We are all impacted by in some way, shape or form. And as a black woman who is aware of these things, something I am very curious about is how have I internalized these systems? How do I weaponize them against myself?
[00:28:39] How do I weaponize them against other people? And how do I make assumptions and [00:28:45] judgements about people based on this air we are all breathing in. There is a, um, man whose surname is Quinte. I can't remember what he does, but he does something to do with activism, and I think it was during 2020, or maybe it was a bit before that there was a quote of his that in quote, in 2020, the quote of his was going around all over social media where he said, [00:29:10] white supremacy is not the shark, it's the water.
[00:29:13] And when we recognize that, we can see that we are all being conditioned by this water we live in. And when we can take a step back and look at how we're all being through a critical lens, we can start to see these systems for what they are, [00:29:35] rather than blaming individual people, we can understand the context in which we've all been shaped so that we can start to make changes that benefit us all at the moment.
[00:29:47] Especially when we are seeing things like, um, with America and their backlash against DEI. So diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging is now being used as a slur when you don't [00:30:00] appreciate that. These are systems that have impacted us all. You would believe that equity is like a piece of pie, and if you're taking one piece of that pie away and giving it to somebody else, you're taking a piece of pie away from somebody else.
[00:30:15] No. Actually, what we are saying is, and let's have a look at all of this and create something new that benefits us all. So in my book, I want people to [00:30:25] understand it is not our individual fault. So when I talk about toxic productivity, women will put position it as, oh, it's my fault. I should have left. I should have known better.
[00:30:36] I should have moved on. Actually, it was very difficult for you to know better because the system in which we've been created, and it goes way back, it's intergenerational, it impacts our [00:30:50] DNA as well as our psychology has created an environment that has normalized us, abandoning ourselves for productivity, for success, for external validation.
[00:31:02] So we can waste time blaming ourselves if we want. It's not gonna help us. Or we can utilize compassion and connection and understand the context and look at how we can make different [00:31:15] choices that support us and support each other, and crucially support our. Absolutely, and I think you've, you've summarized there perfectly that kind of, that desire that you have in your book to remove that blame and shame from us as individuals and, and to recognize that we're products of the system as you've just, you know, explained there.
[00:31:39] But [00:31:40] what I, I also think that you do is you also don't remove the power. So rather than just say, well, okay, it's not my fault. I'm like this, it's their fault and it's out there, which could lead to a, definitely there's nothing I can do about it. Whereas you do is then go, well, let's kind of remove that blame and shame from.
[00:32:00] As individuals, let's recognize where it's come from, but let's also take back and [00:32:05] empower ourselves to absolutely kind of protect ourselves, which I just think is, you know, you do so beautifully in your book. Thank you. And you just said there, um, and, and it's kind of terminology that you use in your book that many of those have abandoned ourselves in favor of kind of our productivity.
[00:32:23] Yeah. And I know you talk about the nervous system in, in the book and you talk about how the nervous [00:32:30] system kind of adapts when we sideline our needs. And, and I think that lots of people listening, me included, can recognize ourself in that where we become just. Somebody who's serving and functioning rather than looking at ourselves as a person.
[00:32:47] And you use the term of high functioning freeze. Yes. And I wonder whether you could just explain how we can kind of [00:32:55] recognize when we're in that state and, and what you meant by that term. So the freeze response is a survival response. So our autonomic nervous system is branched off into our parasympathetic nervous system and our sympathetic nervous system.
[00:33:11] So the parasympathetic nervous system has two branches. One branch is about safety and connection. One branch is about collapse. We've had [00:33:20] too much. So people who experience, um, ongoing depression, for example, really struggle to get out of bed and function. That is the dorsal end of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is all about shutdown.
[00:33:35] So when we were like single cell organisms and we couldn't protect ourselves by fighting or fighting, our only option was to kind of like freeze and [00:33:45] play dead. And then as we evolved, uh, the sympathetic branch of our nervous system evolved. So as we started to become mammals and we had the ability to run away or to stay and fight, depending on the circumstance our sympathetic nervous system developed.
[00:34:01] So that's how it is in its survival state. But when we are not in a state of survival, the sympathetic nervous system is brilliant. It enables us to get up and [00:34:10] go. It's where our motivation comes from, our drive, our ambition. It's like our starter motor. But when we're in survival, it's like we flawed the, um, accelerator and we're just revving our engine constantly, either to run towards, uh, whatever we need to fight off or run away from it.
[00:34:29] And then the other branch of the parasympathetic nervous system that's all about safety and [00:34:35] connection and engagement. And I wanna be clear. When we talk about safety on a nervous system level, we are not talking about I'm protected from, from all ills, I'm protected from all danger. It's about having a level of safety internally that enables you to be courageous, that enables you to take risks, that enables you to stand up and be counted.
[00:34:57] So I wanna be clear about that. So [00:35:00] that is the kind of like healthy, flexible branch of the parasympathetic nervous system and freeze. Uh, so I did some training with Deb Dayner, who does wonderful work in relation to polyvagal theory by Steven Ports. She breaks it down so that it's easy for therapists, coaches and other practitioners to integrate it into their therapeutic [00:35:25] work.
[00:35:25] And I learned from her. So people previously would describe freeze as a blended state of that sympathetic survival activation and a blend of dorsal shutdown. But what she said is it's not actually a blended state. It's your nervous system running basically between fight or flight and shut down, fight or flight and shut [00:35:50] down.
[00:35:50] If you imagine your nervous system as a little person constantly running between shut down. Fight or flight. That is exhausting. And when I say exhausting, it's exhausting on a cellular level because it is constant. It doesn't shut off when you go to bed. So somebody who's in freeze, [00:36:15] they will experience a lot of anxiety.
[00:36:17] They may find that their sleep is disturbed because their cortisol levels and their adrenaline is very high. And they may like find that they wake up at like 3:00 AM 4:00 AM in the morning because they're very restless. They're constantly walking around with like a sense of dread, oh, I forgot to do this.
[00:36:34] What if something bad happens? They wake up first thing in the morning. I've gotta do this, I've gotta do that. I've got to do the other. [00:36:40] I talked about it like I was in my phase of I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. I've got do this, I've got do the other. It's constant. And when you are operating like that.
[00:36:49] You deplete your energy reserves, and when your natural energy is depleted, it starts to tax your organs. So when people talk about things like adrenal fatigue, it's because you are rinsing out your adrenals in order to keep this going. [00:37:05] But then on top of that, we're ambitious go-getters. We like to keep our word.
[00:37:09] We don't like to let people down. We are resilient. So we are able to push that down and kind of yank ourselves out with resilience and override the freeze that's going on. So the freeze is still going on, but we will learn how to optimize our calendar so that we are able to [00:37:30] operate on top of it. We are the people that organize everything.
[00:37:34] We never shut off. We can't keep still, because if we keep still, we are gonna feel. We are gonna feel all that freezy business that's going on inside. And Freezy business is a term that this wonderful organization called Organic Intelligence use to describe. We are now strategizing, doing all of these things to avoid [00:37:55] all the freezy business.
[00:37:56] We are freezing on the inside because we have suppressed it for so long. We don't know what these feelings are and they feel so anti productivity, so anti being resilient, that we believe if we actually contact those sensations and we actually listen to our emotions, we will drown down some kind of black [00:38:20] hole and never be able to get up again.
[00:38:21] So it's like you're, you are constantly the organizer. You are constantly on the go. You cannot sit still. Your up down. Uh, the idea of meditation feels like it's a totally useless endeavor. Why on earth would you sit down doing nothing? Uh, it could be a, like today, the weather is really beautiful, but you could be totally depleted.
[00:38:43] Feel like you can barely get up. [00:38:45] But because it's a good weather, you feel like wasting the day resting would be a travesty. So you'd rather go out, be absolutely exhausted because you don't wanna waste any time. You are constantly looking at how you can be more efficient. And people will say like, high functioning freeze.
[00:39:02] People say things like, they wish there was more. There were more hours in the day. Because they just constantly want to do more, [00:39:10] more, more. And when they do things like exercise, which is a beautiful way of taking care of your body, they're not actually taking care of their body. They're trying to push their body to its limits.
[00:39:21] So they will be absolutely depleted, but they'll still be caning it on the treadmill because they have to keep up. They have to be able to maximize and optimize constantly. I'm sure there [00:39:35] is hundreds of people just listening just with their hand in their air. The air going, yeah, me, that was me down at bootcamp.
[00:39:42] Yeah. Yeah, 100%. You talk a lot. About the importance. So it, so we kind of could be kind of living in this high functioning freeze. And, and you talk about the importance of building that sort of self-awareness, don't you? Um, yes. I'm just gonna quote a bit from your book here because I, [00:40:00] I, I pulled it out all the energy.
[00:40:02] My youth had generously laed me, now, sent an overdue bill that my body refused to settle. My body had had enough and let me know with endless sinus and throat issues, heart palpitations, anxiety, and lethargy. I love that line. It was like, yeah, you could get you so far, you can kind of pull from all of these other resources and you can keep [00:40:25] going.
[00:40:25] But actually. That overdue bill kind of said, right. Yeah. Come on Tamoo, let's kind of get this settled. Let's you know. Yeah. Pay up. Let's, yeah. So I love that. But I do think that, you know, that self-awareness is key, isn't it? Because you can keep running. If you block out them signs, you can kind of keep going.
[00:40:46] And you talk about self-awareness, practice of [00:40:50] embodiment as kind of study to overcome it. Could you just explain a little bit about some of the practices or suggestions that people could be engaging in that will be helpful? Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, the first, in the first chapter, the practice I shared was UJA breath, which is from the, um, yoga tradition.
[00:41:11] And the reason I did that is because breath [00:41:15] is one of the most fundamental ways we can nourish ourselves. Pay attention to ourselves and over time grow our capacity. So when we are in a state of stress, like our breath is one of our first indicators about what's going on. So I'm thinking about when you know you've got a deadline looming and you're not sure you are going to be able to meet it, you are [00:41:40] sharp, inhale.
[00:41:42] And what we tend to do in those times is we kind of hold our breath or our breathing becomes very shallow. Because when you are in a state of survival and you are very stressed, you haven't got time to be doing big, deep belly breathing. So you are giving your body the minimal breath it needs to be able to function.
[00:42:01] Yeah. You are giving your [00:42:05] body the minimal breath it needs to function. Okay. When we don't breathe, we die. So it's almost like we are slowly killing ourselves. In order to be productive or whatever it is. I, I really want people to understand that, and our breathing does so much for every single vital organ [00:42:30] and the blood running through our veins.
[00:42:32] Sometimes people poo poo it and they dismiss it, but your, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of your breath. Similarly, when we are having a moment of connection, we're experiencing something we find really beautiful or moving, and the oxytocin is flowing and we are [00:42:55] feeling really safe and connected, you will notice that it might cause us to gasp for a moment.
[00:43:02] Then our breath tends to get deeper and wider. We tend to bre breathe in deeper. We tend to exhale fuller or whatever the phrase is. So I'm thinking about. There's a peace garden near me at this time of the year. It is one of the most [00:43:20] beautiful places to be on this planet as far as I'm concerned. And the way my breath alters when I'm looking at the flowers and the interplay between the birds, the bees, the butterflies, that is really regulating nourishing breath because you're slowing the breath down, you're breathing deeper, et cetera.
[00:43:39] And also breath is a wonderful way for us to complete the stress cycle. So UJA [00:43:45] breath is a really great way of doing that because the way we are. Pushing the breath out of us is a really great way to release pent up stress, feelings of anger, resentment, all of those protective emotions and sensations.
[00:44:02] We're able to, uh, detox, expel that from our bodies with breath. So I will always recommend some kind of breath [00:44:10] work. I also, one of my favorite practices in the book is, um, taking in the good, which, um, I shared my slightly adapted version from Dr. Rick, Rick Hanson, who is a neuroscientist. And this is a really affirming practice of taking in and celebrating, like really allowing yourself to savor accomplishments, good things, these things that feel good [00:44:35] rather than bypassing them.
[00:44:36] And it's very good for our nervous system. One, because we are affirming ourselves. We're telling ourselves we are important, and what we've, um, accomplished is important. And we're also acknowledging it. People who have tendencies towards toxic, toxic productivity don't tend to celebrate or acknowledge their accomplishments.
[00:44:56] So it feels like we haven't done anything, so we would've done a [00:45:00] whole load, but because we haven't acknowledged it, it feels like we are behind. So it gives you an opportunity to do that. It also regulates your breath and, um, it gives you the opportunity to take stock of what you've done. So I really, really love that practice.
[00:45:14] And, um, dancing. So one of the practices is, um, dancing. My preference is to hip hop. And I read a study about the impact of [00:45:25] dancing to hip hop music. And one of the reasons why I recommend dancing is because it has. An ongoing impact. So there was something I was reading a bookmarks, it, goodness knows where I put it, where it was showing that dancing.
[00:45:41] On a regular basis is more impactful for depression than antidepressants. It's the combination of [00:45:50] moving your body and moving it like our body's full of hinges. So I'm waving my arms around. We've got like just in my arms, we've got our knuckles, we've got our finger joints, we've got wrists, we've got elbows, we've got shoulders.
[00:46:05] Okay? We are full of hinges because we're supposed to be moving around a lot. When you dance, you have a tendency to move your body in ways you don't. In ordinary movement, you [00:46:15] are dancing to a rhythm or not, but there is some kind of rhythm your body is naturally following. Furthermore, you are listening to the beat of the music.
[00:46:26] If it is music that has got lyrics, you're listening to that. If you are listening to, like, one of my go-tos is like music from the nineties because there's so much nostalgia. So it is a total mind, body, spirit [00:46:40] experience that connects you with something bigger than yourself. It is, it can be quite a spiritual experience.
[00:46:49] So you'll, you'll hear people, especially like, you know, when I was part of rave culture, they would talk about like the dance floor being like going to church, having a transcendent experience, having a spiritual experience. So I share that, like I'm always dancing around because it's such a beautiful [00:47:05] way to connect with your body and to connect with, you know, spirit, whatever else it is you want to call it.
[00:47:11] So those are three things that I would speak to that are in the book, because they're free. We don't have to pay any money. We don't need to pay money to breathe. We don't need to pay money to take in the good, we don't need to pay money to dance. In fact, all of the practices I've shared in my book are things that the only thing we need to pay [00:47:30] with is our time and energy.
[00:47:31] You don't need to spend money to do all of these things because our bodies are like one of the most sophisticated organisms on this planet. Everything we need is within us. And what I want to do, or what I aim to do with this book is not just empower you, let you know, look, I'm, I'm flooding my fist on my hand.
[00:47:50] Let you know that you are powerful and if you [00:47:55] slow down and take your time. Give yourself the gift of your time, you will see how resourceful this piece of kit we call our body actually is. And then there's the journal prompts and reflections so that you can actually bring conscious awareness to these things so that you are getting the somatic experience and you're also getting the psychological [00:48:20] experience and you can tie them in together.
[00:48:23] So when I was writing the book, I don't know if that's the way I am as a person or it's because I come from a social work background. I wanted to create something that almost felt like a, um, practical guide so that people had a book they could do. And I love poetry, as I said, as a child, I wanted to write a poetry book.
[00:48:44] I [00:48:45] also. Right in a style that in some places can be quite poetic because this is confronting. When you are confronting this stuff, it can feel really shocking and you can feel really bereft and full of grief and rage because of how society has treated you, because of how society has conditioned you to treat yourself, yourself.
[00:49:06] And whilst it is confronting, I also want us to take comfort [00:49:10] wherever we can so that we can apply oodles of compassion to ourselves and also others. So rather than getting stuck in rage. We can utilize that rage, learn the lessons, and apply it towards our growth. There are lots of things that speak to, um, post traumatic stress disorder.
[00:49:30] Whilst I am speaking to the trauma and the stress, [00:49:35] I would love this book to be positioned as being part of post-Traumatic Growth, being a resource that enables us to grow from our experiences. I think you absolutely do that. I think, um, that is exactly what you do in the book and you kind of, you kind of talk about the, these kind of ways in which we can grow, ways in which we can nurture ourselves, ways in which we can develop.
[00:49:58] But against the [00:50:00] fact that we can also have those emotions like anger and rage and that they're okay too. Um, absolutely. Let's kind of look at how we can move on. And I'm definitely behind you all the way with the revolution. Tamoo. I was like banging my Yes, yes. More of that.
[00:50:19] That was brilliant. Um, one thing that you do so beautifully in that book, [00:50:25] and I think this follows on. From, from kind of those suggestions that you've given is you, you kind of extend that permission to slow down, to feel, to rest, and you talk in sort of terminology about knowing your bandwidth and also around capacity versus capability.
[00:50:46] There's that diagram that you give and yeah, the docs are all the [00:50:50] same, but the circle on the outside is more spacious and bigger and I think, uh, it's absolutely not unique to women working in education. But, but I do think in that education space that there's a lot of teachers and leaders and support staff.
[00:51:05] Constantly giving, rarely receiving, putting themselves at the bottom of the to-do list. And I think those elements of the book are really [00:51:15] important. So could you just talk a little bit about these ideas of resting and capacity versus capability? Yeah. Uh, and teaching Similar to social work, you've got such a huge responsibility and, um, one of my friends or two of my friends, they're teachers in special needs schools, and they both came from mainstream, uh, mainstream education background into special needs.
[00:51:39] And [00:51:40] when they speak, I'm like. Not only are you educating, you are mothering these children to a lesser or greater degree whilst they're in your care. So there's a lot going on there. And what I speak to is we have a natural bandwidth, right? And we are constantly encouraged to go outside that bandwidth.
[00:51:59] And speaking to what I spoke to earlier, that comes from somewhere. So when we are going [00:52:05] beyond what we can do, it's not just like, I would joke my first car was a fiat tepo. And I would say it's a miracle because it would be on empty and somehow it would still keep running on fumes, right? That's a calf.
[00:52:18] And it would damage the engine if I continued. We do that to ourselves, okay? We are running on fumes. And similar to the way, if you do that to the car, you'll damage the engine. You are gonna damage your engine. So we look, we're [00:52:30] talking about your organs, okay? So it's really serious stuff. Recognizing that there's a difference between our capability and our capacity is very important.
[00:52:40] Our capability is based on what our brain thinks we can do. Our capacity is on what our bodies are actually able to do, and when we recognize what our bodies are able to do, we can start to work within our [00:52:55] bandwidth so that when we go outside, we're making a conscious choice to do that for a finite period of time because we need to, rather than operating outside our bandwidth as a standard, our society conditions us to operate outside our bandwidth as a, as a standard and is impacting our health.
[00:53:14] We have the most modern, uh, health innovations [00:53:20] ever. We've got supplements and this that and the other to the hilt. Yet considering all we've got with the Ill list we've ever been, when you consider all of the advances in medication and health, that is because we are constantly running outside our bandwidth.
[00:53:33] When you are able to recognize what your bandwidth is and you operate within that, you then start to recognize that productivity fluctuates for all human [00:53:45] beings and especially human beings who menstruate. We have different times of the month where our energy is different and we stop judging ourselves by.
[00:53:56] Productivity on one particular day, we will have one day that's not as productive as we want it to be, and we are ready to write off the whole week. We are really chastising ourselves when we zoom out and see the bigger picture. [00:54:10] For example, as a woman who menstruate, I used to judge myself by who I am at ovulation, which lots of us do.
[00:54:16] Ovulation is a short window in our menstrual cycle. If we keep holding ourselves to that standard, we make who we are for the rest of the month. Not good enough. Let's look at ourselves over the passage of time and start to recognize our patterns. What I recognize now is that in my follicular phase, [00:54:35] my productivity ramps up and during that ovulation window of however many days, let's be generous and say a week, it's not a week, but let me be generous.
[00:54:45] I can do three weeks, four weeks worth of work in that one week because I have that energy reserve. So when you zoom out and see the bigger picture, you start to see your productivity as something that is over a cyclical time period rather [00:55:00] than the sum total of what you are able to do in any given moment.
[00:55:04] So you give yourself more grace, and then you start to recognize that when you operate within your bandwidth, your capacity actually expands because you're not constantly rinsing yourself out. So I use the analogy of going to the gym. When you go to the gym after you do, like, I love strength training.
[00:55:23] After you do strength [00:55:25] training, first of all, you warm up to get your muscles ready, then you do your session. Yes, let's move our shoulders. Then you do your strength training sessions. Then you do your call down to recover from that strength training. And anybody that goes to the gym on a regular basis knows that you need recovery time.
[00:55:43] You don't just cane it in the gym seven days a week. And even if you do go to the gym seven days a week, at [00:55:50] least one of those days will be active recovery. When it comes to our productivity for work, we don't give ourselves that time of recovery. We think we are recovering at the weekend, but we're squashing in so many things.
[00:56:02] We don't actually get that time. And people get concerned because they think, well, I haven't got time for that. I'm really busy. I've got all of these deadlines. We can give ourselves pockets of recovery. And when we do that on a regular [00:56:15] basis, it has a compacting effect effect. It accumulates over time. So one of the things I highly recommend to people is.
[00:56:22] When you've had a meeting, try not to have back to back meetings and give yourself up to five minutes after that meeting just to come back into your body. And I'm gonna do a really abridged version of it now. So if you've had a meeting where you've been sitting down for an hour, 90 minutes, stand [00:56:40] up. You could do this in your office, whether it's open plan, whether you've got the corner office, or whether your office is the dining table in your kitchen.
[00:56:48] Stand up. Pay attention to your breath. No need to change it. Just pay attention to how you're breathing. And as you pay attention to how your breathing, you may notice that your breath automatically changes. Pay attention to your connection with the ground and then [00:57:05] on an exhale, allow your body to soften so that you feel heavier where you are standing.
[00:57:11] You can do this seated as well, but if you've been sitting down, I recommend standing. And then as you feel yourself being heavier, just imagine. The floor rising up to meet you, rising up to support you. And as you exhale, allow yourself to [00:57:30] feel a little bit heavier. Then imagine as you exhale, your exhalation is going all the way down through your body, and imagine it coming out of your feet.
[00:57:41] And as you inhale, imagine drawing up energy from the earth into your body and repeat that as many times as feels good to you. So you are inhaling up through the supportive earth. [00:57:55] You are exhaling down through into the supportive earth. So you are giving yourself some deep, nourishing breaths. And if it feels good for you to do so, you can lay one of your hands on your chest so that you connect with your heart and feel your heart beating
[00:58:13] and just continue to breathe like that.
[00:58:19] And when you are [00:58:20] ready, not a moment before, if your eyes are closed, gently allow your eyes to open.
[00:58:28] Just doing that after meetings, after doing a piece of deep work brings back some regulation into your system. And when you do that on a regular basis, you start to build a trusting relationship [00:58:45] with your body. Your body starts to know you are gonna give out loads of energy, but you are also gonna take back moments where you are able to replenish and restore and come back into your body.
[00:58:56] That alone, if you work on, uh, 90 minute sprints and you do your deep work for 90 minutes, and then you give yourself that for five minutes, and you do that twice a day. [00:59:10] Maybe three times because you have a meeting thrown in there as as well. If you do that for five minutes, that's 15 minutes of nourishment you've given yourself.
[00:59:18] If you do that five times a week, whatever, 15 times five is, my math is atrocious, I'm not even gonna try. Then that compounds over a month, that compounds over a quarter, that compounds over a year. And what you find is when you start to give yourself those regulatory [00:59:35] moments, you feel more open to giving yourself those regulatory moments in other ways.
[00:59:40] So just that alone can not only change your relationship with yourself, it changes your relationship with your work. And because you've given yourself that moment, and I call it like you let your brain just flop about for a minute, you are much more open to be creative, innovative, and resourced. So it is also a leadership [01:00:00] tool.
[01:00:00] There are some of us that need to know it's gonna benefit us in some way because we're so hooked on being productive. Your nervous system. Is your leadership advantage if you know how to work with it. And when you are regulating yourself, you work with a lot of people who teach when you are regulating yourself, because we are designed for co-regulation.
[01:00:21] When you are a regulatory presence, you [01:00:25] share that with the. Little or not so little humans you work with day by day and also your colleagues, you start to become what in polyvagal language they call a super co-regulation. So when somebody sees you, your mirror neurons signal to their mirror neurons and they immediately start to regulate because you are a signal for regulation for that [01:00:50] beautiful parasympathetic rest and digest, um, energy, gorgeous and then passing on that kind of safety signals, isn't it Exactly.
[01:00:58] To two others, which is so powerful. I think that's just a gorgeous place to finish Tamu, I just think you sharing that practice and I did it along with you there, and as you were talking, I was reminded of a conversation I had a long time ago with a colleague and he said, do you know what [01:01:15] your problem is, Julie?
[01:01:16] He said, you just set your bar too high every day. He said. Bring that bar down a bit and then we went through a process for a long time When we saw each other, he'd go, just drop that bar a bit. Julie. You know, it's okay to have some days when that bar is just, I've got really low. That's beautiful. So, yeah.
[01:01:35] So a gorgeous place to finish. We always finished with a final [01:01:40] question, Tam, I'd like to ask you if you could share with our listeners just one kind thing that they could do for themselves today, what would it be? At the end of the day, ask yourself what went well today. Even if you are scraping the bottom of the barrel, and I'm a huge advocate for [01:02:05] journaling 'cause it just helps us to consciously register what has gone on for us somatically.
[01:02:10] So write down one or two sentences about what went well and how it felt or how it feels to acknowledge what went well. I do that at the end of every workday. I am not so good at the weekend unless something really stupendous has happened, but it really does help you grow your appreciation for [01:02:30] yourself.
[01:02:30] Gorgeous. Perfect. Thank you so much, Tamu. It's been an absolute joy talking to you. Everyone needs to go out and buy a book or gift it and buy it to somebody else, women who work too much. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.