We live in a digital world, and more and more the digital devices around us are having a negative impact on our lifestyles and performance when we don’t manage them correctly.
To help me discuss why this is the case and how to combat it I have Australia’s leading expert on peak performance in a digital world, Dr Kristy Goodwin.
Kristy’s keynote insights and inspiration are used by elite corporate clients in Australia and internationally. For senior executives, business leaders, human resources managers and staff who are always switched on, but rarely powered up, Dr Kristy provides the keys to lead, live and work more effectively.
She shares practical brain-based solutions to power up employees and leaders in the digitally-intense world they now operate in.
In this episode Dr Kristy shares:
- How she got into research on the effect of digital devices
- The serious accident that made her reconsider how she interacted with digital technology
- The actual physiological response that happens when technology sucks us in
- Why digital detoxes do not work
- The skill that trumps EQ and IQ
- How to use digital dashes
- The sorts of digital guard rails and strategies workplaces should have in place
Key Quotes
“Many of us developed some really unhealthy digital behaviours in the pandemic out of necessity.”
“We are designed as humans for effort and recovery, we are not designed to work for 14 hours straight.”
“We often see rest as your reward, I say rest is your responsibility and it’s your right.”
Episode Resources
The page to purchase the book is here and the code for free shipping is fsdd. You can access her Chronotype page here.
For all the info she shares, follow her on linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-kristy-goodwin/
Jessica Spendlove Website – www.jessicaspendlove.com
Jessica Spendlove Keynotes – JessicaspendloveKeynotes – Jessica Spendlove
The High-Performance Profile Quiz https://jessicaspendlove.com/quiz/
Jess Spendlove Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jess_spendlove_dietitian/
Jess Spendlove LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-spendlove-64173bb8/
About Your Host
Jessica Spendlove | Wellbeing Speaker & High Performance Strategist
Jess Spendlove is an international wellbeing and high performance speaker, coach, and advisor. With over 15 years of experience across corporate leadership, elite sport and the military she is known for helping ambitious leaders and teams optimise energy, build resilience, and sustain peak performance.
As one of Australia’s leading performance dietitians and a trusted voice in executive wellbeing, Jess delivers science-backed strategies that empower individuals, teams and organisations to thrive under pressure and achieve long-term success.
Episode Transcript
The following transcript has been automatically generated and not checked for accuracy
Jess (00:07.406)
Welcome to another episode of Stay at the Top. This week, I am joined by a very special guest, Dr. Christy Goodwin, who is a neuro performance scientist. Christy specializes in digital wellbeing and productivity.
We all know that we are on our screens so much. And today’s conversation is not going to tell you to have a digital detox and to go cold turkey, but instead it is going to give you practical and tactical tips on how you can embed micro habits to work in congruence with the digital world that we’re living in and our human biology.
The thing I love about Kristy’s work is she is so grounded in science. Everything she does is the latest evidence -based information, but she is so practical and tactical with her tips and her recommendations on how we can take that science and actually embed it into our lives with ease.
Jess (01:27.214)
Today’s episode has something for everyone.
Today’s episode has something for everyone. We’re living in a digital world. It’s going nowhere. If anything, it’s only going to be accelerating with AI and meta and…
The reality is we’re all living in a digital world and that isn’t going to be stopping anytime soon. In fact, it’s only going to be increasing with the likes of AI. So…
Jess (02:05.614)
So if you’ve been looking for an episode, so if you’ve been looking for access.
So if you’ve been looking for ways to enhance your focus, work more effectively, optimize your peak performance, but overall reduce your risk of burnout and stress, well, this is the episode for you.
I know this is one where you’ll have your notepads out or the notes section in your phone because we cover so much practical information. There’s plenty of ways you can connect with.
Jess (02:44.462)
please make sure you head along to the show notes as well so you can find out how you can follow Dr. Christy Goodwin’s amazing work. You can get your hands on her amazing book, Dear Digital, We Need to Talk. And you can also find access to some of the quizzes and some of the resources that we speak about in today’s episode.
Dr Kristy Goodwin (00:00.398)
no, that’s the worst.
Jess (00:00.41)
so I just moved house and like yeah I was like my god yeah but came back on
Dr Kristy Goodwin (00:07.694)
Not what you need.
Jess (00:14.362)
Alrighty, and if there’s any lag, my editor just fixes it, but I did one with Sophie last week and it was a bit laggy at different time points. So hopefully not. All right.
Dr Kristy Goodwin (00:28.43)
that all good. It was perfect actually until you said that as the minute you said a lag it’s so odd.
Jess (00:38.01)
The good thing about Riverside, it kind of just like, even if the internet does, it kind of doesn’t seem to mess with the capturing of the audio. Yeah. All right.
Dr Kristy Goodwin (00:47.822)
That’s awesome.
Jess (00:58.874)
screens.
Jess (01:04.41)
Team, I’m thrilled this week. I have a guest episode and it is going to be an absolutely wonderful one. This week I have neuro performance scientist, Dr. Christy Goodwin, sorry, Dr. Christy Goodwin joining us to talk all things digital wellbeing, the neurobiology of exactly what is going on when we’re on our phones, on our screens, and most importantly, the thing I love about Christy’s work.
She’s a researcher, she’s grounded in science, but everything she does is so practical, tactical, and it’s all about micro habits. Dr. Kristy, welcome to stay at the top.
Dr Kristy Goodwin (01:33.806)
Thank you.
Dr Kristy Goodwin (01:48.366)
Thank you, great to be here Jess.
Jess (01:52.314)
Now, a wonderful place to start just so people can really grasp the wealth of experience you have and probably also take us on the journey to the point in time that you’re doing the work that you now do. I know it’s evolved a little bit over time, but take us back to where it started and tell us all about the work that you’re now doing.
Dr Kristy Goodwin (02:16.654)
Yes, so my research initially began looking at the impact of technology on what I colloquially refer to as screen ages, kids and teens. And so for years I was really interested, some might say obsessed, with studying the impact that technology was having on children and teenagers developing brains and bodies. But over the course of a number of years and a very serious incident that happened in my life personally,
I began to recognize that none of us, adults included, are immune to the digital pool. I think we all get sucked into the digital vortex. And I think for years as adults, we were wagging our fingers at young people saying kids and teens, they’re addicted to their devices, they can’t put them down. But we never actually looked in the mirror and examined our digital habits. So I had been asked to deliver a keynote, ironically, for Apple.
to talk about young children and teenagers’ digital habits and digital wellbeing. And I had arrived back home from Singapore. I’d been away for three nights. And I landed back home in Sydney and did what most people do, pulled out my phone at the baggage carousel and saw the avalanche of email notifications. And I thought I’ll triage those in the taxi ride home. However, I fell asleep in the taxi, got home and at this stage I only had two sons. I have since acquired a third.
But my second son was the first time we’d been away for three nights, and so he needed some extra mummy cuddles upon my arrival home. Now I had ambitiously, some might say foolishly, scheduled a work call during his expected nap time that day. But when I arrived home and realised that he needed extra cuddles, I needed to send an email to cancel that work call. Now this is back in the time where we were having work calls on Skype. That was the innovative technology we were using.
So I opened the lid just to send one email, and I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, Jess, or to your listeners, but I saw that awful red icon declaring that my inbox was now bulging. I think I had 144 unread emails. Even though I went in just to send one email, I became so digitally distracted trying to triage that avalanche of emails that I wasn’t watching Billy, my 15 -month -old son.
Dr Kristy Goodwin (04:30.158)
And he was climbing on the lounge adjacent to where I was furiously trying to triage my inbox and he fell face first off the lounge, smashing his face requiring urgent medical attention. Now I will declare to ease my mother’s guilt that he’d done the exact same thing two weeks prior when my husband was dutifully supervising him. So I’m suggesting that the very serious facial injury that he sustained was just a reopening of an existing wound.
But it was a moment in time that I will never forget. Still to this day, he has quite a pronounced scar on his lip as a concrete reminder of what potential costs my digital distraction could have had on him. And so at this point in time that I realized as adults, we are struggling with this just as much as young people, but we’ve often legitimized our tech habits and our digital infatuation. I don’t want to use the word addiction, but our…
our digital obsession and infatuation and we legitimize it under the guise of work. You know, I need to respond to the email. I’ve got to triage my teams chats. And I recognized at that point in time, even though I research and speak about this, I didn’t have a handle on my tech habits. So that began my journey to study what is it about the online world that sucks us all in? Why do we get drawn into the digital vortex? What makes the online world so appealing? But more importantly,
how can we use it and leverage it? Because I often say digital abstinence, you know, doing a digital detox is not a long -term solution. The reality is whether we love it or loathe it, technology plays an integral role in our lives professionally and personally. So how can we start to use it in ways that are congruent with what I say is our human operating system, the way our brains and bodies are designed? So that serious accident was the impetus for me to start to look at my own habits, but also,
adults habits and behaviors and make sure that we can start to use technology in ways that are congruent with our human operating system which I describe as our brain and our body, our neurobiology.
Jess (06:36.441)
such a sliding doors moment. And it’s a nice refresher that I’d mean it’s a terrible situation, but again, I think it’s so important when you’re an expert in a field that you are relevant and you’re not untouchable and you’re not preaching something which is so far from the day -to -day struggles and that everybody’s facing. And I’m so interested to know that…
I mean, there’s so much about it, but how did we get here? Talk to us about the neurobiology. Talk to us about what we’re physiologically being drawn into when we open the phone or when we open the screen and we see the 144 emails and we have the best intention to respond to the one and next minute we’re in the vortex. How does that happen?
Dr Kristy Goodwin (07:33.102)
Yes, so I like to start by going back to our brains. I call it our HOS. The way we are designed as humans, unfortunately, we have some biological constraints. We cannot outperform our human operating system. We have some fundamental, like a biological blueprint that we need to adhere to. And so if we start to think about how our brains and bodies have been designed to function as humans, I can say we have ancient
Paleolithic brains we have brains that were designed to go and forage hunt and get information But in our always on digitally demanding world today What is happening is information is constantly being thrust at us unsolicited information Alerts pings and dings have become the soundtrack of our day And so our brain was designed as I said to go and get the information. I don’t remember Jess I don’t know if you remember I should say
Do you remember a time when we used to go to the library and borrow a book or we used to go and get an encyclopedia? We used to phone somebody’s secretary back in the day when people had secretaries to organize a meeting. But today, because information has become so accessible, we’ve got mobile technologies, what is happening is a huge amount of information is being thrusted our brains. Now our brains often perceive…
an unsolicited stimulus like a vibration, a flashing sound, you know, the red notification bubble as a potential stressor or danger. Because remember, we have brains that were designed to go and get that information, not to have it constantly thrust at us, nor were our brains designed to process the sheer volume that we are today. Research estimates that the…
average adult is processing a whopping 74 gigabytes worth of data professionally and personally every single day. That is more than our ancestors consumed in an entire lifetime. So part of the brain, it’s called the hippocampus, which is our brain’s memory center or hard drive. Our hippocampus has not got any larger to accommodate that extra information. And so we are processing an inordinate amount of information and at a pace and a cadence that is completely
Dr Kristy Goodwin (09:49.934)
completely incompatible with our human operating system. And so this is why we are seeing, I believe, increasing rates of stress and burnout. This is why I think we are seeing a whole lot of other cascading consequences because our tech habits are often incongruent with our human operating system. You know, we are working in a world and living in a world where we are always on, rarely focused and never recovered.
And that is the complete antithesis to how we are designed to function as humans. And so I think it has been almost, I’m not going to say passive acceptance, but I think this sort of digital onslaught has crept up on us. And my concern is if we don’t get on top of it now, you know, by the time AI, the metaverse are truly enmeshed in our lives, we will be confronting really significant problems.
Jess (10:43.8)
And the thing which I love that you called out and there’s so many parallels between the work you do. And I feel like even the work I do in that a detox or a fast or completely stepping away from a behavior is a short -term fix. It’s not actually finding a way to remedy the situation. And when we get back on, we’re probably exactly where we were, if not worse. So it really is, I think a lot of people know we’re on our phones too much.
We’re cognitively exhausted, we’re wired, we’re tired. And despite knowing this, there’s like an inability to take action or the right action. And I guess, you know, I know that the thing I love about what you do, it’s you’re all about the micro habits and you’re all about stepping people through and giving them really practical tips. So we’ve got this issue, we’re not in alignment, we’re overloading our brain, our human operating system.
How do we start to take back control?
Dr Kristy Goodwin (11:45.518)
Yes, and I’m so glad you addressed this whole notion, because I’m often asked, should we just do a digital detox? There’s almost this simplistic narrative or proposed simplistic solution that the remedy to our digitally intense world is to step back from it. And I want to say this has actually been researched. And what we know is that when we do engage in a detox, it often creates a binge and a purge cycle. And I’m sure it’s much the same in the field that you’re in.
Yes, we can go offline for a weekend or we can take away the apps, but we come back on Monday morning after our weekend off and there’s a barrage of notifications, there’s a bulging inbox. And a study actually examined what happened. They compared two groups, one group that did a full detox and another group that simply reduced their social media hours that they were spending each day. They compared the groups and after the study had been completed,
They went back about 12 weeks afterwards and compared the results who was still spending less time on their devices after the intervention period. And interestingly, the group that did the detox had reverted back to their original habits. The group that simply reduced the amount of time that was spending on social media still had reduced social media usage. So I think clearly illustrates that this detox solution isn’t the answer.
What I think we need to do, I think there’s three pillars. If we want to achieve peak performance in the digital world, there’s three things that we have to do. The first thing is that we have to reframe our relationship with recovery. We’re living in a world that’s always on, that’s digitally intense. We have to be more proactive than ever to take breaks, to make sure that our digital habits aren’t eroding our sleep, that we have time for our mind to meander. I don’t know about you, Jess, but I never come up with a…
creative idea or a solution to a complex problem in my inbox or in an Excel spreadsheet. Those ideas come when I’m offline. So that first pillar is all about reframing recovery. The second pillar, I believe, is that we have to build our stress tolerance. We are living in an age where stress is an inevitable part of our lives.
Dr Kristy Goodwin (14:00.43)
And so we need to build our capacity to deal with stress because our digital habits often increase what I call our micro stresses. And at the same time, our digital habits have eroded the biological buffers that used to once bring us back to a stress baseline. You know, we used to have far more human connection. We used to sleep better. Even the way that we breathe has been radically altered by our screen habits. So we’ve really got to make sure that we’re managing that stress. And the third pillar, I believe,
And this one I say is the super skill of the 21st century. For years we were told that a predictor of someone’s lifelong success was often their IQ, their fluid intelligence. And then in more recent years we were told, no, no, no, a person’s EQ, their emotional intelligence was a good predictor of their success. I believe there is a new super skill that trumps your IQ and your EQ, the super skill, without doubt in the 21st century is our FQ.
and I have to be careful how I say that one because it sounds like I’m saying something inappropriate. Our focus quotient. We are living in a world that has been deliberately engineered to be distracting and disruptive. And so our capacity to manage our focus, our attention span will be the determining skill. So they’re the sort of three pillars that all my work hinges off that recovery, building our capacity for stress and our capacity to focus.
Jess (14:58.103)
Hmph.
Jess (15:23.064)
Amazing. And if we can maybe even dive into each of those in a bit more detail, maybe starting with recovery, because this is, you will talk about it in a much more detail than me, but recovery, looking at our macro recovery, our sleep, but those micro recovery moments, I term them brain breaks, but it’s really looking at those opportunities in the day. So can you just share a little bit more about that recovery pillar and maybe your top?
tips there or micro habits that can be supportive of that.
Dr Kristy Goodwin (15:54.766)
Yes, so like you, I call them sometimes micro breaks. In my book, I used a coffee analogy, and I don’t know if you would approve of this particular analogy, obviously in inappropriate dosages and the right times of the day. But a piccolo break, I refer to as those two to 10 minute breaks that we intersperse throughout our days. Now, research has told us that they are by far the most effective type of recovery that we can embed in our days to beat burnout.
So those two to 10 minute breaks where we give our brains and bodies a chance to recover. We are designed as humans for effort and recovery, effort and recovery. We are not designed to work for 14 hours straight as many people are often attempting to do. One of the harsh biological constraints that we have as humans is that the part of our brain that does our cognitively challenging work, it does our mentally taxing work, the prefrontal cortex.
One of our harsh biological limitations is that we only have a four to six hour battery life on our prefrontal cortex. Now, please don’t misconstrue what I’m saying. I get a lot of angry emails from people’s HR directors after they’ve heard me speak. And I know there’s a lot of talk at the moment about the four day work week. And people say, we’ve heard about the four day work week. But this lady called Christy said that I should only work for four hours per day. That is not what I’m suggesting.
for what I’m suggesting is that for you to successfully accomplish and perform at a high level, your most mentally taxing tasks, you really only have a four to six hour window per day. So we have to make sure that we are using that four to six hour window effectively. And one of the best ways we can do that is to work in what I call digital dashes. We are designed to sprint and then recover.
sprint and recover, just like we’d never get on the treadmill, at least I wouldn’t. I don’t know if you’re adept at this, Jess, maybe some of your athlete clients would. So maybe I’m not talking to them here, but none of us really can get on a treadmill at speed 22 at incline two and run for 40 minutes straight. Like you were just not designed to do that. We will fall off, we will trip over our feet, we’ll exhaust ourselves. So we are designed to work and recover. And another reason that we should work like this is we have something in our,
Dr Kristy Goodwin (18:12.142)
brains and bodies called an ultradian rhythm. And this means that we biologically are designed to go through a peak for roughly about 90 minutes whilst we’re awake, and then we’ll inevitably have a 20 minute trough. Now we can ignore that desired cadence of our days and keep pushing through, but in doing so, we’re working against our human operating system. And this is why we end the day feeling fatigued. This is why our focus is often compromised.
because we’re not putting in those piccolo breaks throughout our day. So trying to structure our day so that it works in that way. So that would be my tip for trying to make sure what are some piccolo breaks that you can put in? Something as simple as closing your eyes for 30 seconds. Many of us are spending the preponderance of our days looking at our screens. And when we do, part of our brain, it’s called the occipital lobe, it processes what we see. Our occipital lobe gets really fatigued. So,
closing your eyes for 30 seconds, trying to put in place some little habits, staring off in the distance. One of the reasons that we often feel stressed on our screens is because when our eyes fixate on a very small surface area, like they do on our laptops or our desktops, that narrow gaze biologically triggers our stress response. So a really simple micro habit is to stare off in the distance.
So really achievable things that we can put in place so that we are working with rather than against our human operating system.
Jess (19:43.511)
And out of interest, I don’t know if this has ever met with resistance, maybe it’s not, but I always wonder, and I think we’ve had this conversation personally, because we both work with, I guess, entrepreneurs and business owners, and then in the corporate world. And there’s a little bit of a difference, I guess, in terms of how people can potentially set their day up. So if someone’s listening and they’re thinking, or they’re meeting this with a little bit of resistance, because sometimes we can be a little bit.
I don’t know, pushed and challenged on some of our ideas, but how can we maximise those four to six hours within the, say, the typical work day for someone who works for a business or an organisation and they’re a little bit more bound by how they have to work?
Dr Kristy Goodwin (20:29.838)
Absolutely. And I want to point out during that 20 minute trough that I was talking about with our old trading rhythm, I’m not talking about laying, you know, doing the downward dog for 20 minutes or lying on your yoga mat or laying out in the sun. That 20 minute trough, two to 10 minutes should be some sort of recovery based activity. But the other 18 to 10 to 18 minutes could be dispensed.
doing what I call or Cal Newport talks about your shallow work. So it’s the less taxing, less demanding, less cognitively challenging types of work. So maybe it’s some quick triaging of your inbox. Maybe it’s doing some admin work. Maybe it’s making some phone calls. So just trying to work in a cadence where you’re doing some more effort -based tasks and then more, sorry, less taxing, less demanding tasks.
The thing I would say for everybody, and I say this is a privilege, particularly for knowledge workers, is that we now have, depending on your particular role, many of us, I should say, now have far greater autonomy and a locus of control over our work schedules than when we work. And so one of the best opportunities that will maximize your performance and will ensure that you are working with rather than against your human operating system,
is to identify your chronotype. Now, I’m sure many of your listeners have heard about this, but for those who haven’t, your chronotype is biologically determined and it dictates what times of the day you are most focused and alert and when you are your preference for going to sleep. Now, if you can, now, the first to admit trying to adhere to this five days a week will not work for anybody. So don’t set yourself up for failure. But where you can,
Can you identify what hours of the day you tend to be most focused? And we tend to fall into three categories. We’re either the early risers, our lions, we are our energy peaks in the early hours of the day. These are your colleagues who are in the office at seven o ‘clock. They’ve already done an F45 workout and two hours worth of work before they skid into the office to sip on their green smoothie. The next type of your bears, their peak performance window.
Jess (22:40.053)
you
Dr Kristy Goodwin (22:43.566)
is usually between 10 a and 3 p So the traditional work what day works quite well for them and a small proportion of people are afternoon evening types and their sort of peak performance hours are late in the afternoon and into the evening and these are your colleagues sending emails at nine o ‘clock. The trick is where we can identify what are your peak performance windows. I call it your power zone hours and if possible again not five days a week can you
build a fortress around your focus as best you can for some of those times. Because when we can get our most challenging work done during our chronotypes focus hours, we get far more done without having to exert more mental effort. And so this, I think, is the silver lining of the pandemic. If we do have to some extent, and again, not all roles have this flexibility, but if you can, even just a small proportion of your day.
A McKinsey and Co study found that most knowledge workers were spending around 5 % of their work week doing their most taxing work during their most productive hours. They bumped that up just to 20%. So the equivalent of one full day of the week where they were doing their most focused work during their power zone hours. What resulted by making that slight adjustment was a 55 % increase in productivity. This is about working smarter, not harder.
This is about working with rather than against our human operating system. So my biggest suggestion, regardless if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re an employee, you’re a business leader, is to pinpoint your chronotype and as best you can, even if it’s one day a week, to fiercely protect, build that fortress around your focus so you can get as much of your deep productive work done without being distracted.
Jess (24:36.44)
Do you have a, I think I believe you used to have it. I’m not sure if it’s still available, a quiz to do the chronotype. And if not, do you have one that you recommend for people?
Dr Kristy Goodwin (24:45.55)
That was it.
Yes, so I adapted, there is a standardized assessment, it’s called the morningness and eveningness questionnaire, and it has been validated as a tool to identify your chronotype. Most people I say intuitively know what their chronotype is, and I often say to people, if you’re not sure, after about five days into your annual leave, if you weren’t bound by work deadlines or other commitments, when would you naturally fall asleep? When would you naturally wake up? And when would you tend to be most alert and focused?
And so you can go off your own intuition, but if you wanted to scientifically validate this, I have created a diagnostic assessment that pinpoint your chronotype and then gives you a suggested structure for your day according to your chronotype. So it sort of spells out exactly in an ideal world how you could optimize your day so that you’re working with rather than against your chronotype.
Jess (25:45.432)
Amazing if we could maybe grab that link and I can pop it in the the show notes But really what I’m hearing here and and I always talk about it It’s self -awareness and I really believe it is the greatest superpower and the more we know ourselves the more we can create space and not just Be in the reactive rat race of doing all the things if we can just find a way to pause and take a step back
Dr Kristy Goodwin (25:51.15)
Yep.
Jess (26:11.033)
and be a little bit more proactive and take back a little bit of control, find ways to do that. It really just ripples into every other area of our life. And our digital wellbeing, our peak performance, it’s something everybody needs to consider whether you’re a knowledge worker, whether you’re a parent of a teenager. As you said, we’re all on our phones. I think I read in your book,
33%, a third of our waking hours we’re spending on our phones. I don’t know if that’s gone up since the book was written or, but what, that’s what, five hours? If we’re awake 16, five, six hours, that’s crazy.
Dr Kristy Goodwin (26:58.19)
It is. And that statistic blows out if we add it up over our lifetime, the average Australian adult, it is estimated, will spend 17 years of their entire life on their phones. Now, as I said, this is before the metaverse has crept into our lives. This is before AI has taken a real hold. And so I often say to people that if we aren’t in control of technology, if technology controls us, you know, if you get an alert on your phone and you salivate like Pavlov’s dogs,
then perhaps that’s a red flag that you’re not in control of technology. If we do not control technology and it dominates our days, technology has and will rob us of our three most important human resources, our time, our focus and our energy. And they are non -renewable resources. And so we have to make sure that as I’ve said repeatedly in this episode, that we have adopted digital habits that…
are congruent with our human operating system, not in conflict. And when we do that, we can power ourselves up. We don’t have to do the digital detox. We don’t have to give up social media or cancel Netflix. We can start to certainly leverage technology, but do so in a way that works for us rather than against us.
Jess (28:13.721)
This might be a tough question because I’m sure there’s more than one. So if there’s a few, that’s okay. But if you had one wish for everybody, it was a behaviour or something people just knew and did that would help take a step forward in this direction. What would it be? I guess it’s kind of like, would it be don’t use your phone for this many hours in the morning or don’t sleep at the phone in your bedroom or turn your notification? I don’t know. There’s probably so many, but would there be one or two?
really key standout ones that you’ll like start here, these are the most important.
Dr Kristy Goodwin (28:50.062)
Yes. I wish there was one silver bullet that we could all apply and we remedy all of our digital dilemmas and digital ailments. But the reality is, I think the one thing that many people are unaware of is the very pervasive but often invisible yet subtle way. And I know that sounds contradictory. There is a very subtle, I believe, silent stress epidemic.
I think our digital habits, and let’s face it, that our professional and personal lives have become enmeshed together. But I think our digital behaviors professionally and personally are making us often feel stressed and in visible ways. And I know your work encompasses this stress, Jess, that when we are stressed, it has cascading consequences on our physical health, on our mental wellbeing, on our performance and productivity.
And I mentioned before that when we look at a screen, we have a very narrow gaze and that that triggers a stress response. Another really interesting thing we’ve only discovered in recent years is that when we are looking at our screens, we don’t even sigh as much as what we should. Now as humans, while we’re awake, we are biologically designed to sigh roughly every five minutes. It’s a natural biological mechanism to regulate our stress response because it regulates our oxygen and carbon dioxide levels.
But when we look at our screens, we breathe in a totally different way. And in fact, it’s been studied. There is a condition called email apnea where we literally go into our inboxes, we hold our breath, our pupils dilate, our heart rate accelerates. We have a physiological response and then we get that one email. We’ve all got that one client or colleague and our stress is elevated even more. So there’s a whole lot of very pervasive ways that technology is making many of us stressed.
When we are stressed, we cannot perform at a high level. Put simply, our prefrontal cortex cannot work in an optimal way when our body is stressed and brain is stressed. When we are stressed, our brain releases cortisol and cortisol inhibits neural pathways. So our performance, our physical health, our mental wellbeing is compromised for many of us, yet we don’t even recognise that we’re being stressed by technology.
Dr Kristy Goodwin (31:09.486)
So a couple of things that I say to people, some of the most generic universally applicable strategies or micro habits that really work is to, I mentioned before, build that fortress around your focus. When you want to get your deep focused work done, put your phone somewhere where you can’t see it. When you want to be present with a loved one, to have an important conversation or just to chat, because research tells us that even if our phone is on silent and face down, if it is in our line of sight,
it drops our cognitive performance by an estimated seven to 10%. Put bluntly, seeing your phone makes you around seven to 10 % dumber. So can you put your phone somewhere out of sight when you want to get your work done? Can we start to structure our day so we effort and then recover? So can we start to structure our days in sprints with some recovery in between? And my third strategy is to control notifications.
Regardless of how we are distracted, whether it’s the ping of an email, whether it’s chatty Cathy coming up to our desk at work at the most inopportune time for the quick chat, whether it’s your noisy neighbor if you’re working remotely, after we are distracted, it takes the average adult around 23 minutes to get back into a focus state. So we need to eliminate as many distractions as possible. So my three golden rules for notifications is number one,
disable all non -essential notifications. Unless you are in customer service or sales, I don’t believe any of us, apart from those two categories, need email notifications. So turn off all your notifications. Number two is do you know how to bundle or batch your notifications? So now on Teams, on Slack, on WhatsApp, and the plethora of social media platforms we all use, you can now nominate what time or times of the day those distractions come to you or…
alerts and notifications, I should say, rather than them dribbling in and distracting you throughout the day. And my third golden rule for notifications is to create a VIP list. So when you activate focus mode or do not disturb mode, everybody gets blocked apart from those people who might be a VIP. Maybe it’s your partner. Maybe if you’ve got children, it’s childcare or daycare. Maybe it’s a colleague in your working or a client on a time sensitive project and they will get through.
Dr Kristy Goodwin (33:26.446)
So controlling those notifications really helps us to build that fortress around our focus.
Jess (33:33.752)
such wonderful tips and really, regardless of who you are, we all have the, this is something which we all need to take a little bit more ownership and control of at an individual level. I know you do quite a bit of work at an organizational level, developing policy and helping organizations set digital guardrails. I’m not sure if I’m using the right term, but developing the policy. Can you share a little bit about how the difference may be in doing that?
at the individual level with the talks and the tips and your books and all of the amazing content you put out and then how you extrapolate that to an organizational policy level.
Dr Kristy Goodwin (34:14.606)
Sure. So digital guardrails actually grew out. I was often during the pandemic and after the pandemic doing a lot of speaking work and a lot of delegates would come up and say, I’ve been trying to implement some of these strategies, but it falls flat because my boss is emailing me at three o ‘clock on Saturday afternoon and I feel obligated to reply. I know I don’t have to, but when everybody else on my team is replying, I don’t want to look like the slack one and ostracize myself.
And so this guardrails work was born out of the pandemic because I think very, you know, let’s be honest, most organisations were thrust into remote work and then hybrid work. And we really haven’t had the luxury of time for any other sort of change management program or change program that we’d roll out. There’d be a whole lot of planning and preparation.
And so what I think has happened is that many of us adopted some really unhealthy digital behaviors in the pandemic out of necessity. I’m not trying to make anyone feel guilty or embarrassed, myself included. And so what we need to do is to take the time to co -create. And that word is so important. This is not the C -suite writing a policy. This is at an organizational level at a cross -section of teams, across sections of roles and responsibilities.
articulating what are our digital norms, practices and principles. What is an acceptable internal email response rate? When do we use Teams or Slack versus email? How do we handle after hours communication? Do we have what I call or does your organization have a communication escalation plan so that if there is a legitimate after hours emergency, how do we disseminate that information?
so that people feel, and this is where legislation is stepping into place now, they have the right to disconnect. And so I think we need both. We certainly need legislation in this space, but we still need businesses actually articulating what are their digital guardrails. And coming up, as I said, co -creating these agreements and these norms, you know, with virtual meetings, a camera’s on or a camera’s off. How do we signal participation in virtual meetings?
Dr Kristy Goodwin (36:30.19)
How do we escalate an urgent issue? A lot of organizations I’m working with have created what they call call collaboration hours. So each day there is a window of time when everybody is expected to be responsive, but the rest of your business hours are completely at your discretion as how you structure your day. So these guardrails are working really well with organizations who’ve taken this time. The trick however, and the only way that they ever work is when leaders walk the talk.
So I’m sure you see this with your work too. We need leaders embedding this, not just presenting these guardrails and going off and reverting to their own habits.
Jess (37:12.504)
100%. And I love what you’ve said there about it’s not a top down approach. It’s a, an intersection of everyone at every level, co -creating something that is specific to that organization, that department, that team, and so on. But you’re exactly right. It’s not just lip service. It needs to be role modeled. It needs to be led from the front. And I guess it’s like anything though. It’s.
If we’ve got a long way to go, we can’t necessarily expect to click our fingers and we’re there, but we need to, again, I guess as there’s this through line of take ownership, have this self -awareness, there’s amazing people like yourself putting this information out there available to work with different teams and organizations to help them put this into place because everybody’s getting busier. You know, the workforce is changing.
people are taking on more work and this probably just seems like another thing that a leader or HR department or something might have to do. So if anyone is listening, if this sounds like something your organization would benefit from, please definitely reach out to Dr. Kristy. She’s the best in the business with all of this. And if you’ve really loved what we’ve spoken about here today, I would definitely encourage you to, well, first of all,
Follow Christy on all of the channels. Where’s the best place for people to find you? I mean, you’re on LinkedIn and Instagram and all the places, but is there a best place?
Dr Kristy Goodwin (38:48.462)
Yeah, LinkedIn is probably where I share more corporate information and information about really achievable things that we can all do. I also share up to date things. So one of the things that I’m just about to share, because this field is changing at exponential rates. I was very tentative to write a book because I thought the research that I cite will become obsolete in a little while. And, you know, even just in the last two weeks, at the time of recording this,
we have seen a whole area of research, particularly around screens and blue light and the impact on sleep completely debunked. For years, many sleep researchers and sleep experts said that the blue light emitted from our screens had a really detrimental impact on our sleep. The research that has recently been published, it was a rather large -scale meta -analysis, says that the impact of blue light is actually quite minuscule. Now I’m not saying use your phone right up to bedtime.
because we know that the hyper aroused effect on our brain can impact our sleep. If we’ve got elevated levels of stress, it can adversely impact our sleep, but we don’t think it’s the blue light effect that we once did. So trying to keep up and disseminate timely research, I’m trying to do that on predominantly LinkedIn and a little bit on Instagram as well.
Jess (40:04.249)
And was that research saying it’s light in general, so light from all areas, or was it saying that light is less of an effect than what we initially thought?
Dr Kristy Goodwin (40:13.614)
Yes, it was, yeah, the blue light hypothesis that as I said, many of sleep researchers identified as a key trigger to impact our sleep. It’s not having the deleterious effects that we once thought. It does impact our sleep latency. So that’s the time it takes for us to fall asleep, but it is a tiny amount. I think it was close to six minutes. So it’s not having the profound effect that we thought. What we think and again, I still recommend.
I mean, the coaching clients that I work with and the corporate teams that I work with, I still advocate for switching off at least one to two hours before we go to sleep because that hyper arousal effect means that we often find it harder for our brain to unwind. So they’re thinking it’s the hyper arousal effect. We also think it’s the displacement effect. So if we are on our phones later at night or triaging our inboxes whilst we’re watching Netflix, as many of us do, what…
is happening is we’re eating into the time that was once available for our sleep. So it’s the quantity and also possibly the quality of our sleep that’s still being adversely impacted, but that blue light isn’t having the potent effect that we once thought.
Jess (41:23.353)
There you go, very interesting. So definitely LinkedIn for the most up -to -date research. I would definitely encourage everybody gets their hands on Did Digital We Need To Talk, which is your second book, most recent one that’s out, if I’m correct.
Dr Kristy Goodwin (41:39.15)
Correct. Thank you, Jess. That’s appreciated.
Jess (41:40.569)
and they can head to your website or where’s the best place for people to grab a copy.
Dr Kristy Goodwin (41:46.99)
Yes, if you head to my website in the show notes, I’ll give just a link. We’ll send if you’re in Australia and we’ll happily send this out to you for free. So we’ll give you a special code so that you don’t have to pay for dreaded shipping and handling. And we will give you that and as well a special link to access the chronotype assessment that I mentioned before as well.
Jess (42:07.545)
Fantastic. We’ll make sure all of that is in the show notes. Now, I like to ask all of my guests before we finish, when it comes to yourself, so it doesn’t, you know, whether we’re talking digital wellbeing, overall wellbeing, optimal health, peak performance, what are your three behaviors or strategies that help you stay at the top?
Dr Kristy Goodwin (42:32.558)
What a good question. Can I share, this wasn’t always the case and I really struggled with this. I had a very serious health incident that forced me to confront the fact that I could not keep operating in the way that I was. I actually faced a possible fatal incident and was hospitalized because I had ignored the whispers.
from my body that I was stressed and I was so burnt out that I had a really serious health issue and was in hospital. And so I was forced, even though this is what I research and speak about, forced to start working with rather than against my human operating system. So the three big levers that I have pulled that have had the most profound effect on my performance, sleep, getting good quality and quantity of sleep, it really is the elixir of life.
The second thing that I have done is really tried to reframe recovery. We often see rest as a reward. I say rest is your responsibility and it’s your right. And so reframing my relationship with rest and seeing that time off, you know, that time for our mind to meander as an opportunity for ideas to germinate and to solve the complex problems.
And the third one is to build that fortress around my focus. So, you know, turning my phone off, turning it, you know, when I’m scrolling social media more than I should, turning it to gray scale, you know, logging out of the app if I really can’t resist the temptation, you know, taking my digital Achilles heels off my home screen of my phone, you know, if it’s TikTok or Snapchat or whatever it is, hiding it. So just trying to build that capacity to focus. So sleep.
Resting and managing my focus. Three key things to get to the top and then stay there.
Jess (44:31.962)
amazing and I know that there could be so many and I love that you’ve called out that it’s evolved. I think that’s a really important thing. We go through seasons, we learn lessons. You know, I know when you shared that experience with me, the health scare, the burnout, everything you were faced with.
It’s a familiar story and it’s, you know, we’re in these roles and you have the knowledge, but that doesn’t, the knowledge and the behavior don’t always marry up. So I’m so grateful that you have recovered, you’ve healed, you’ve found what works for you and you’re doing this very important work, which everybody and anybody can benefit from. Dr. Kristy, thank you so much for joining me today and stay at the top.
Dr Kristy Goodwin (45:15.502)
Thank you, Jess.
Jess (45:20.921)
Everybody check out the show notes, make sure you follow Kristy’s work, grab the book, do the chronotype quiz. And on that note, that brings us to the end of today’s episode. So if you’ve enjoyed it, I would absolutely love for you to share it with a friend, tag us both on social media, all that jazz, not overusing it, but when you go on there, share it and tag us. And if you haven’t subscribed, please do that. You’ll get every episode each Tuesday. And if you haven’t left a rating in a review,
It really does help the podcast so much and it also is just really lovely to read the nice things people write. So thank you for joining me. I will see you all again next week. And in the meantime, I hope you will keep staying at the top.