Ep#225 Neuroscience Proves These Leadership Habits Damage Your Brain
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[00:00:00] Hi, everyone. My name's Dex Randall, and this is the Burnout to Leadership Podcast, where I teach professionals to recover from burnout and get back to passion and reward at work.

[00:00:22] Today, my friends, we're going to look into the neuroscience of how leadership habits that you may have might be secretly damaging your brain.

[00:00:34] Don't skip these if you want to keep your brain sharper for longer.

[00:00:39] As I continue to see escalating levels of stress in leadership, I do reflect more and more on the compound damage stress does to individuals, to organizations, and of course, to families. How mental acuity, mood, and emotional responsiveness suffer if we're up to our eyes in stress.

[00:01:01] And this episode is research-based. You can find the links in the show notes.

[00:01:06] So we're going to look at five strong habits of most leaders and how they reshape, respecialize, and resize our brains.

[00:01:16] Sounds great to me. My brain's had fair use, so it should be the size of a planet by now.

[00:01:22] It isn't. Another reason I'm making this episode is that my personal adventures in chronic stress are now, as I begin to age, affecting my neurology and my own brain function.

[00:01:35] I self-diagnosed with ADHD many years ago, but I didn't do much about it 'cause there didn't seem to be much on offer.

[00:01:43] It's recently got a lot worse, along with my sensory and movement functions. As a child, I used to have a high IQ. I think it was around 140, but I think it's quietly eroding now as my memory, attention, focus, and cognitive function begin to fray around the edges. I'd say it's partly due to having my amygdala jammed on for a lifetime.

[00:02:11] I did want to protect myself from the wear and tear of this, but I really couldn't. I didn't have the knowledge that I have now, and I'm acquiring every day.

[00:02:19] By the way, I'm reading another fascinating book right now about biological ways to reduce ADHD, and it has so far been astonishingly helpful. I might dig into that next week and share the news with you all, because I know ADHD is on the rise in children and adults as well.

[00:02:38] But anyhow, I'm using my personal story today as a cautionary tale. In this overstressed world, some of the ways that we use our brains are short-term gain for long-term pain. If you're routinely frying your synapses, you might want to pull up and reconsider how you're using your precious asset after you've listened to what I've got to say today.

[00:03:05] So I'll talk about the five habits of leadership, what they're doing to your brain. If you like this episode, also listen to episode number 222 on AI Brain Fry. Similar kind of topic.

[00:03:18] So we'll start with overwork and overwhelm. Overwork ranks high as a chronic workplace stressor, as does overwhelm that comes with it. Overwork is defined in one study as more than 52 hours a week. Wow, where does that put you?

[00:03:36] The good news. The cognitive demands of overwork initially increase brain volume and improve brain function, but chronic overactivation shrinks the prefrontal cortex, the decision, problem-solving, memory, and empathy brain, and grows the amygdala, increasing fear and reactivity.

[00:04:00] It tips the balance the wrong way. You literally become a worse leader.

[00:04:05] You might have heard of the Whitehall II longitudinal study, which shows that people working more than 55 hours a week had reduced cognitive performance and a 40% greater risk of developing dementia. Working 52 hours a week also increases stroke risk by 33% and heart disease by 13%. The good news just keeps coming.

[00:04:32] Overwork seems inevitable today, but it truly isn't. The traps of overwork include things under our own influence as professionals and leaders. We might inaccurately schedule work, accept additional tasks we know we can't fit in, offer to help others when we're too busy, say yes when we mean no, overrun deadlines as a consequence, attend meetings from FOMO, spend too long perfecting tasks that are effectively already complete, allow drive-by interruptions, procrastinate, read every message as its notification pops up, and get distracted by our phones or socials.

[00:05:22] Is any of that true? Do we have any control?

[00:05:26] Every client tells me, "No, I can't do anything about my time", and then they supply a big, long list of reasons why. But who's making the decisions there?

[00:05:36] We all live under time pressure, and most of us think our time management is excellent, top shelf. Often, that's wildly inaccurate, especially if we're overworking.

[00:05:48] So what is the drive behind overwork? Anxiety? Fear of failure? Unwillingness to say no? Worry that people will judge us?

[00:05:59] In my Leadership Without Burnout coaching program, I teach the skills to move efficiency to a new level of mastery where all of those blockers melt away.

[00:06:10] You'd be surprised. This is always possible for anyone in any role. I've never met anybody, even physicians, for whom it's not possible. So far. And for your performance, your brain, your sanity, and your family, could be a really good idea to try for greater efficiency, just to forget what you know and begin again.

[00:06:33] Preserve the asset, my friend. Be good to yourself. Make it possible to achieve top-shelf results from a place of calm authority. It will take confidence and assertiveness to do that, but as Greg McKeown points out in his book Essentialism, your colleagues will respect you more once you upgrade your professionalism and leadership this way, not less.

[00:07:01] You'll be more reliable, meeting deadlines, for one thing.

[00:07:05] And I have seen countless clients uplevel their leadership, enjoying work like they haven't for years after applying the techniques. It becomes a game to see how many hours they can save and still get better results. And honestly, I really do love to see their smiling faces when they realize what's possible for them in economy of time.

[00:07:29] So overwork and overwhelm, you don't need to stay there. If you want that smile of confidence too, the, I'll put the coaching link in the show notes here. Come and see me.

[00:07:40] Okay. We've pounded the streets of overwork slightly.

[00:07:44] Let's look directly at our arch enemy, number two in the lineup, chronic stress.

[00:07:51] Every leader is swimming in it.

[00:07:54] Stress, of course, produces cortisol and adrenaline, which upregulate things like heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, blood sugar, and so on. That surge of adrenaline in the office can actually make us feel powerful.

[00:08:10] There's something quite seductive about it. And many people do claim to do their best work under stress. But really, if that's the case, they're using it a bit like a drug. Just my opinion. I used to do the same.

[00:08:25] The negative effects of chronic stress are ongoing elevation of the blood pressure, heart rate, et cetera.

[00:08:34] Then your blood pressure's up and your heart's racing all day, to the point you're jittery, unfocused, irritable, and another coffee is too risky.

[00:08:43] But the real risk is that cortisol and adrenaline also down-regulate cognition, growth, immunity, decision-making, digestion, human connection, sleep, and many other repair functions.

[00:09:00] So in chronic stress, both your body and your brain are undernourished.

[00:09:06] You lose attention, problem-solving, negotiation, analytical thinking, decision-making. In the brain, cortisol keeps your amygdala sensitized, on high alert. This keeps you anxious.

[00:09:21] Cortisol floods the hippocampus, physically reducing its size and plasticity over time, which means leaders lose memory, judgment, and emotional regulation.

[00:09:33] Cortisol dampens the prefrontal cortex, affecting, as we said, decision-making, executive function, impulse control.

[00:09:41] And when stress becomes habitual, our brain, like any other system in our body, adapts to that.

[00:09:49] It makes sense then, that chronic stress also contributes to hypertension, cardiovascular disease, sleep disorders, depression, anxiety, and hearing loss, all of which, in turn, invite Mild Cognitive Impairment, which is what leads to dementia like Alzheimer's

[00:10:11] So as with overwork, there might be initial benefits to stress. Of course there are. You need stress. But chronic overuse is destructive.

[00:10:21] One of the fundamental skills leaders can optimize for is unlearning that tight bundle of stress formed around chronic overwork, overwhelm, frustration, outrage, and anxiety, the fear of not being good enough, or imposter syndrome, and on the flip side, the overlooking of one's natural talents, skills, experience, and work ethic. The intrinsic value they bring to their role. This doesn't need to be reflected back by others, it needs to be reflected and valued internally. We can do it for ourselves, and this factor is most often neglected, and we're hanging out to do better tomorrow than we did today to feel okay. To flog ourselves harder, to become some imaginary best self.

[00:11:12] How do I know about all this? Of course, it's how I was.

[00:11:17] I left my last CTO job in a tantrum in 2018, never to return, thinking my failure so abject as to be unrecoverable. A year later, over a reconciliation coffee, my erstwhile boss said he'd been devastated at my departure, and the startup had almost folded. I'd been the only thing holding it together.

[00:11:42] If only you could step into full confidence of your leadership ability and performance, eh? What would change for you?

[00:11:50] Because you can, and your boss will love you for it, and your peers will too. With guidance on which levers to pull, you can easily adjust to come up smiling and advance your career. I must say, I do recommend it.

[00:12:06] One client of mine who was in big tech leadership in a very difficult time of sweeping layoffs swiftly acquired a second team to lead when his boss saw firsthand his newfound confidence, authority, and performance that he gained in his coaching program.

[00:12:22] You're invited yourself to join the Leadership Without Burnout coaching program if you'd like to maximize your work presence, authority, and performance with much less stress and overwork.

[00:12:34] So that's number two, stress. Another thing that's affected by stress is sleep, obviously. So let's now investigate number three habit of leaders, sleep deprivation.

[00:12:47] Adults are recommended to get roughly seven hours sleep a night. Some people recommend more, some less. But leaders routinely sacrifice sleep even knowing the recommendations.

[00:13:00] It's just easier to resume work after the kids have gone to bed, eh? Or have that global meeting in the wee hours.

[00:13:06] Sleeping for six hours cuts prefrontal cortex function significantly. The brain regions governing empathy and risk assessment go offline first. Shorter sleep is linked with increased Alzheimer's and depression risk, and it shrinks your brain.

[00:13:26] Sleep deprivation disrupts circadian rhythm, which in turn disrupts signals to your prefrontal cortex, impairing memory, attention, judgment, and cognitive function. It particularly modulates emotional and rational decision-making.

[00:13:45] Long term, you'll probably see delayed response, cognitive decline, emotional instability, poor memory, attention, decision-making, and increased risk of mental health problems and dementia.

[00:14:02] I'm starting to see a picture forming here. I don't know about you.

[00:14:06] We all know that sleep dramatically affects performance, but somehow we ignore that and venerate being ON all the time.

[00:14:15] However, you can make new choices about sleep. I would encourage you to consider it. You can choose to improve your duration and quality and to protect routine.

[00:14:29] But to do this, you will need to take your sleep needs seriously, perhaps by reviewing the effect poor sleep has on your mood, your work, and your family, and on your continued resilience and brain power.

[00:14:42] I do suggest if you're having difficulties with anxiety, stress, overwork, or overwhelm and resentment, start there.

[00:14:50] Start improving those first because when you reform those key work habits to protect your brain energy, it's going to give you a bit of space back to deal with sleep.

[00:15:01] I let my career steal my rest for many years voluntarily, and that did require occasional extended breaks between jobs to reset. But when I started to see how long-term patterns of sleep deprivation contributed to my burnout, stress, and exhaustion. When I recognized the futility of throwing my professional assets against the wall, I did begin to choose more wisely what I conceded to others and what benefit I gained from that.

[00:15:33] In fact, attaining balance only increased my leadership effectiveness personally.

[00:15:40] So I don't see any valor in working insane hours and starving ourselves of sleep. It for sure doesn't make us fun to be around, and it does impact our success.

[00:15:50] But in the end, of course, it's up to you.

[00:15:53] Listening to today's episode, you might be asking yourself a lot of questions about your own daily habits, and I think it's a healthy thing to do.

[00:16:03] So let's turn now to decision fatigue, another accident black spot for leaders.

[00:16:09] I learned that we make around 35,000 decisions a day. I'm pretty sure most of those are subconscious and habitual, otherwise we'd be floored by lunchtime, wouldn't we? But if we include swiping, scrolling, clicking, every conversation. Now how many decisions?

[00:16:32] And specific to high-volume decision makers such as leaders, the brain depletes its cognitive resources significantly by making decisions, and at some point, your energy-hungry brain will run out of puff. Maybe by 3:00 PM, default mode kicks in, shortcuts, avoidance, brain fog, or impulsive choices. Are you hitting that after-lunch glucose dip?

[00:17:04] You can self-assess the output quality of your brain, of course. How does it deteriorate when you've had too many meetings, a torrent of work requests? How many decisions is too many for you?

[00:17:18] The key here is to practice discipline in decision-making. Start saying no, preserving your high focus time.

[00:17:27] Stop entertaining random drop-ins. Decline meetings. And importantly, don't check your messages as they come in. Switch off notifications. It's okay to set expectations on when you will reply to messages and contain them to fixed times every day. Then, of course, you provide a channel for truly urgent messages that you do monitor real-time.

[00:17:53] Don't check socials. Don't distract yourself away from your own work. If you're involved in high-focus tasks, it takes up to twenty minutes to re-immerse yourself in it once you've broken off, and that's where premium quality scheduling, an hour at a time for deep work uninterrupted, really pays dividends.

[00:18:15] These high-performance habits give your brain space to do one thing at a time. After all, multitasking is in fact constant context switching, extremely inefficient.

[00:18:28] And the other truly useful focus habit is to ensure that you make good quality decisions on the big stuff and don't keep second-guessing yourself.

[00:18:39] This is the headline source of decision fatigue, constantly rehashing a decision you've already made but aren't 100% confident in. Look at it this way, all decisions come in at less than 100% confidence, otherwise you wouldn't need to make a decision at all. But when your reasoning is clear and well-informed, just back yourself, even when you do need to communicate your confidence rating to others along with the risks.

[00:19:07] Don't let low confidence trap you in chronic decision fatigue. Abandon the need for certainty, 'cause that safety you want doesn't exist.

[00:19:19] There is no perfect decision. There's only a decision made on the best available knowledge. It's always the best you can do at the time. So never look back on a decision and think it's bad, just because you know more now.

[00:19:34] In case of error, simply make a fresh decision and keep going. That's the nature of decision-making.

[00:19:41] Decision confidence, leadership presence, and authority are areas of huge opportunity for many professionals thrust into leadership without training. Join the Leadership Without Burnout coaching program to bring yourself up to a new level in leadership and find a new ease and enjoyment as you do. The coaching link is in the show notes.

[00:20:02] And finally, we'll look at that curse of the work-thrashed human, negative self-talk. The secret one, nobody frames it as brain damage, but your inner critic activates the same threat cycles and circuits as actual danger. Sustained, harsh self-talk keeps cortisol elevated, impairing memory consolidation, analytical function, communication, and decisions.

[00:20:32] It also flushes dopamine by diminishing the connection to the brain's dopamine center, the nucleus accumbens, stunting reward, motivation, pleasure, and learning.

[00:20:47] This, of course, ruins your morale, something that often rubs off on other people.

[00:20:52] And if you're hard on yourself, of course, you're quite likely to be hard on other people, too.

[00:20:57] They don't tend to like that so much, do they? And often won't give you their discretionary high levels of performance, loyalty, and innovation, and that doesn't help your bottom line.

[00:21:09] So your inner critic, once activated, traps you in a stress loop of anxious thinking that re-triggers the amygdala, that promotes more anxious thinking. Round and round you go.

[00:21:21] In a chronically exhausted brain, that's already shrinking from overstress, the last thing you need is to stimulate that stress cycle yourself.

[00:21:31] Of course, your inner critic originally has a protective function, helping you avoid social blunders, poor work choices, repeated mistakes.

[00:21:42] So don't blame it for still trying to save you when you're overwrought.

[00:21:47] But if it's become an institution in you, if it's living rent-free in your head, now might be the time to evict it and save your brain from further attack.

[00:21:58] This skill alone, which I also teach, will change your life and protect your brain.

[00:22:05] ' Cause imagine living without that rod on your back. How much energy and enthusiasm do you think will flood back for you? How much confidence and freedom? How much more pleasant will it be to work with other people?

[00:22:19] Of course, that voice doesn't ever go away, but you can certainly stop it bludgeoning you to death at every turn.

[00:22:28] It's lying to you anyway. You're not a disastrous underachiever. You're a person in fear. You've racked up plenty of unacknowledged credit over the years, haven't you? What if you got back in touch with that?

[00:22:41] For many people, it sounds inconceivable to quieten the inner critic, but it's not. It's simply habit change, and habit change is committing to simple daily rituals, reminders of who you want to be and why.

[00:22:57] It's tiny, incremental actions over time, and that's why it's possible to quieten your inner critic. You can adopt a habit change process that will make that happen if you stick to it.

[00:23:10] So if you're fed up with feeling beaten down, put down the rod, why don't you?

[00:23:15] I could show you how to move away from self-criticism to a style of self-support that will help you flourish and live from your natural driver and desire to excel.

[00:23:26] And this is how you get your mojo back, and your mojo is every good thing about you, including passion, energy, your merits and skill.

[00:23:40] So that's a quick roundup on some ideas that I've only recently discovered about the interaction between behavior and our brain structure and function.

[00:23:50] Even though we're all familiar with neuroplasticity, we might before have viewed it as an optional positive, an upgrade, security against lapses in performance, or an easy win towards creating a better future.

[00:24:04] Perhaps collectively we haven't looked too hard at how daily life can collapse or erode brain function through the same neuroplasticity. If we have hard-driven work habits, we're likely to be very invested in them and repeat them ad infinitum, entrenching damage to areas of our brains that we rely on.

[00:24:28] We kick that can down the road. Unfortunately, that road might not be as long as we think, and our negative habits already impact our performance, happiness, and success. The way we support ourselves, relate to our people, and raise our children too.

[00:24:46] In conclusion, I leave it with you to choose how you want to work with your marvelous brain.

[00:24:52] Neuroplasticity remains active until your last gasp, but now might be a terrific time to remold a few behaviors to protect your brain structure and your brain function, and it has a lot of other side benefits for mood as well.

[00:25:07] If you'd like help with those five areas we've covered today, overwork and overwhelm, stress, sleep deprivation, decision fatigue, and the inner critic, I cover all these and many more skills in the Leadership Without Burnout coaching program, providing a very stable platform to develop out your leadership skills and create more impact at work.

[00:25:30] Thank you for listening today. Until next time, please take care of yourself.