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The Importance of Taking Breaks
133 Plays3 years ago
As we wrap up season 1 of Doorknob Comments, Fara and Grant discuss the importance of taking calculated breaks as an act of self compassion and care.
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
there's this sort of underlying feeling like we're always supposed to be productive and busy.
Mission on Mental Health Awareness
00:00:14
Speaker
Hi, thanks for listening to Doorknob Comments. I'm Farah White. And I'm Grant Brenner. We are psychiatrists on a mission to educate and advocate for mental health and overall wellbeing. In addition to the obvious, we focus on the subtle, often unspoken dimensions of human experience, the so-called Doorknob Comments people often make just as they are leaving their therapist's office.
00:00:34
Speaker
We seek to dispel misconceptions while offering useful perspectives through open and honest conversation. We hope you enjoy our podcast. Please feel free to reach out to us with questions, comments, and requests.
Season Wrap-up and Personal Projects
00:00:47
Speaker
Hi, thanks for listening to Dorn Out Comments today. We are here to talk about wrapping up for the season, taking a little bit of a break. Grant, any thoughts? Well, in general, I feel pretty good. I'm working on a lot of projects that are quite fulfilling for me. We're working on a chronic disaster model based on our experiences in the pandemic, our being volunteer group I work with, the crisis emotional care team.
00:01:13
Speaker
at Vibrate Emotional Health. And it's a good time for me to have a breather with the podcast because I'll need the bandwidth because a co-authored book that I worked on is coming out in January.
Upcoming Book Promotion and PR
00:01:27
Speaker
Oh, I think. What are you going to have to do for that? Just promote it?
00:01:32
Speaker
Yeah, well, the publisher hires a PR person, the same person who helped us last time. And she's really great. So we're already getting like tons of bookings. And a lot of them are scheduled out in January. But even Tuesday morning, I did a podcast as well. So and those things, they're like, OK, we have a slot. You know, I need someone to respond immediately or a reporter wants an interview on this subject or that subject. And
Podcast Reflection
00:02:00
Speaker
so it it's a whole different cadence.
00:02:02
Speaker
when you're working in PR because it's just, you got to do it and do it and do it. When they say jump, you jump. One of the nice things about the podcast is that it's been a bit mellower and we've been taking it slowly. We haven't been driving hard to publicize or anything like that. I think I've learned a lot from doing it. We've had a lot of interesting conversations. We've had a couple of interesting guests as well.
00:02:29
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I, you know, I like having guests. I like just seeing where our own conversations take us too. I'm curious to hear.
00:02:38
Speaker
from listeners about what works and what doesn't, what they'd like to
Listener Feedback and Future Plans
00:02:42
Speaker
see more of. Are there things that like you would like to do more of when we come back? I'm hoping when you've had a chance to take your personal time off, you'll be reinvigorated to sort of call the shots a little bit more. And then, you know, I'm a very, very good conversationalist. Are you? Yeah.
00:03:04
Speaker
and widely educated in many different areas. As long as we talk about something grim, heavy, or intense in some way, I think I can be a good foil. I know. I have to keep it heavy, I think. My main focus is on how to live a happy, fulfilled life.
Therapist-Patient Relationship Complexities
00:03:25
Speaker
Yeah. Do you think that, I don't know, there are moments where I feel
00:03:31
Speaker
Like that's definitely the message that we send with certain episodes for sure. And then I think other episodes are just meant to be kind of more informative and maybe give people a little bit of like, you know, a backstage view of therapy and psychiatry.
00:03:50
Speaker
people often want to know more about what's happening on the so-called other side of the couch. Totally. That's more of what we call a relational model when there's more give and take and the therapist is not like a blank screen in the traditional Freudian model. When is it too much about the therapist though? Because really at the end of the day, you're there to get help and guidance.
00:04:17
Speaker
and not necessarily sort of just chitchat. Try to understand that relationship. But I think for a lot of people, it's hard to just accept the fact that the therapist is there for them. And at the root of a lot of the sort of curiosity, I think is concerned about what it feels like to just have someone who's there for you.
00:04:40
Speaker
Yeah, like what people call dependency. Yeah, I think right and the end fears of loss or abandonment. You certainly a lot of people, they don't quite know what to make of the relationship with a therapist because it's so defined and sort of narrow, right? Yeah, usually the same time every week and
00:05:02
Speaker
It often has a feeling, you know, by design, it's it's not like a quote unquote permanent relationship. Right. Though no relationship is permanent, really. But still people go into therapy, I think, more guarded and less open to the idea of like forming a real relationship, even if that relationship is bounded virtue of being a relationship with a therapist. Yeah, absolutely.
00:05:31
Speaker
I guess. What is it you're trying to tell us? No, no, I'm not trying to. I think I have it on my mind. It's on your mind, please. Right? Like I have on my mind how we sort of come and go from therapy. Because I'll be taking a break. Right. So you're dealing with it in your own practice. Exactly. Ah, right, right. Well, what's that like for you? Really hard. Because, you know, I don't, I have very strong attachments.
00:06:01
Speaker
So, you know, you're not to take a break ever, right? Right. And just stay together forever and keep recording.
Therapy Dynamics and Flexibility
00:06:12
Speaker
And, you know, so, but I think that the break is a good exercise because I think it'll give us information right for the podcast, but also in patient care.
00:06:23
Speaker
What do you miss about therapy or what will we miss about recording? I know I'm going to miss seeing you on a weekly basis. Maybe not. It's great. I never want to record again. I'll be happier without you. I don't know. It'll be fun to see. It'll give you a chance to incubate and see where you stand in relation to the podcast.
00:06:49
Speaker
Yeah, but I think mostly it's that sometimes it can be a little bit of both, right? Well, I'm also thinking of people who take time off from therapy. And sometimes therapists are like, no, you have to continue. And then sometimes people are like, well, I think I need the time off to kind of sort through things on my own. And that's really important. But then sometimes therapists are like, well,
00:07:17
Speaker
why can't you sort things through on your own and still be in therapy? And it's kind of tricky. I think it is, but when it comes to this type of thing, it's really important to tease apart like what's best for the patient and what's best for the treatment versus what's best for the therapist. And we should always, I think,
00:07:39
Speaker
go with what's best for the treatment or not necessarily, which is also what's best for the patient. But I think sometimes what we want
00:07:48
Speaker
is not necessarily what's best for us, right? Well, I think sometimes patients may kind of know better what they need, even if it's not what we recommend. Sometimes it's okay to take a break, certainly as long as there's nothing clinically really concerning. Exactly. And I think you have to be careful not to make that bad, not to pathologize it.
00:08:15
Speaker
Absolutely. I think one of my favorite things just these past couple of years and the way that I sort of have structured the practice is for people to be able to come and go from it. Right.
Frequency of Interactions in Therapy
00:08:29
Speaker
And maybe it's because I'm someone who doesn't come and go for things that easily. So I like to be there, but it's comforting for me to know that, yeah, I'm here whether or not people see me every week and I'll be here, you know, when they're ready to come back.
00:08:45
Speaker
Right. I mean, not to go too far into the professional stuff, but psychiatrists are more likely to see people, you know, a handful of times a year if there's no major clinical problems that require being seen more often. Whereas, excuse me, at least traditionally therapists see people every week. So that can definitely, you know, it can lead sort of like it's the same kind of thing that comes up in other relationships.
00:09:12
Speaker
when the two people's needs don't exactly align. And especially if like one person is making the decision, it feels like unilaterally and they haven't had a conversation. And certainly therapists, we always wanna talk about it and model that kind of mutuality, but also we may need it more than a lot of people to like talk through things.
00:09:36
Speaker
Yeah. Who goes into therapy, right? You're probably not going to be super dismissive. Right. If you're going to be working with people very often, you're probably more likely to have some capacity for a tighter bond, right? Right. So someone who just says, hey, I'm stopping therapy today. The therapist is going to feel something about that probably
00:10:02
Speaker
For sure. For sure. And that's why I think it can be helpful to, you know, have that discussion, but it doesn't mean that why we need to move from once a week to once a month or, you know, cause I see people more frequently when I first start working with them, usually on a weekly basis. Right.
Balancing Personal and Professional Life
00:10:22
Speaker
Yeah. And then just the natural progression is as
00:10:28
Speaker
they start to feel better, they need me less. That's very different from the weekly therapy model, the rigid, you got to come in at least once a week at the same time every week. You're probably more, what? Flexible, cavalier, I don't know. Why are we talking about therapy though? We always seem to talk about therapy. Well, I'm not going anywhere.
00:10:50
Speaker
Are you going to be incommunicado? Not at all. I'll be fully communicative. Are you on sabbatical? No, I'm on maternity leave. I think it's okay to say. It's your call. Yeah, I think it's okay to say.
00:11:10
Speaker
and weird, but I don't want to give people more information than they want or need. But if you were to go on sabbatical, what do you think you would do? Let's say you were taking time off sort of purely for yourself, as they say. What do you think you would do? Well, I would want to just read and write a lot more than I do right now. Like, what would you write? I'm not sure. I have a couple of ideas for some
00:11:34
Speaker
You know, I probably, I have mixed feelings, but I would really want to write short stories or novel versus what I think would be sort of the most valuable. Yeah. I have some ideas for books and papers, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That never really fiction, but also, I don't know. There's like, there seems to be this genre of therapists who sort of
00:12:00
Speaker
have these very psychologically minded stories. You know, that's very vague, but I have a sense of what you mean.
Self-Care and Breaks in Professional Life
00:12:08
Speaker
Yeah. Are you able to share more? I honestly haven't spent that much time thinking about it, but this, and I know you have like all of these different projects and creative endeavors and you run a business and, um, you know, I haven't like explored that side of myself in a really long time. So I think it would be.
00:12:28
Speaker
interesting to see what projects would appeal to me. Right now, we just had the group for advancement of psychiatry, the GAP meeting. And just hearing what other people come up with, these possibilities of different projects and putting stuff out there is like pretty exciting. I just don't have the time or the energy or the bandwidth for it right now, but maybe one day.
00:12:54
Speaker
Do one day, everyone at one will get better and they won't need my services and I'll take this back. What's with the, what do you think? Oh, what do I think about what? No, why were you, what was with the response?
00:13:17
Speaker
What did you say? Maybe one day, what? Need you as much and then you'll have time for yourself. Yeah, everyone will get better. That's better. Right? I thought we were entering the age of people realizing that they actually need more help. You know, we are, but I can fantasize about people being happy and healthy and I that's.
00:13:44
Speaker
what I would really want like for the world. It can be difficult because there are different levels at which people feel that they themselves are the only people who can help. Particularly for a clinician, it can be very difficult to do less individual frontline work
00:14:10
Speaker
And a lot of times clinicians will will do something else that sort of sublimates or justifies that they're not helping a lot of individuals when they take a step back, either for their personal life or for other professional pursuits.
00:14:27
Speaker
or the flip side is like researchers who do very little clinical care, but they're helping hundreds of millions of people.
Mental Health Awareness and Access
00:14:34
Speaker
There's something about the need to be useful to people, which is one of the things you're saying. When it comes time to self-care, that is a real hang up. It's like if I feel like I'm the only one who can do the jobs, so I can never take a break.
00:14:52
Speaker
Yeah, but look, I'm taking a break now, right? And it just, I just doesn't feel super comfortable in some ways. In other ways, I'm very accepting of it, you know? Yeah. It's a mixed experience, I guess. Exactly. I think for the podcast, what's been fun about it is that we don't know how really,
00:15:19
Speaker
you know, what the impact is. It could be, you know, that somebody hears something that has a profound effect or maybe not, but it's putting it out there in a different way. So I have felt good about that because I feel like really conflicted and I'm sure, you know, the same experience like that.
00:15:40
Speaker
our services are only available to like a very limited amount of people. So when you write a book, you can help thousands of readers, right? Do you mean conflicted or do you mean like guilty? Yeah, guilty. Guilty or just on one hand, it feels good. The one-on-one feels really good, but then I do think about the people that don't have, you know, a therapist or a psychiatrist.
00:16:08
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Well, for sure. It's a real problem. Especially the awareness is really a lot higher that this is normal, that people need help. Yeah. Mental health is just as important as physical health and all these celebrities and athletes and royal family are talking about their problems. And then when people go, oh,
00:16:28
Speaker
Yeah, I'm willing to be vulnerable and get help, then it's like, sorry, the system doesn't work. You can't find someone who takes your insurance. If you do, maybe they're not a good fit. And then out of pocket is very expensive. Yeah. And then there's just not enough therapists and mental health clinicians. Yeah.
00:16:49
Speaker
on the planet. Exactly. That'll change, who knows, over time. Maybe off of the planet, too. I don't know if there's any space therapists coming to save us, but there's just not enough therapists for everyone who could benefit from therapy to meet with someone every
Societal Views on Therapy
00:17:04
Speaker
week. You'd have to have hundreds of millions of therapists, given the population of the planet are that many. There's just you, really. How can you save one at a time? Actually, there are a lot.
00:17:17
Speaker
They're probably a lot in my neighborhood and in yours, but. Well, it's different because if you bump into someone on the street, there's a good chance they're a therapist. Yeah, yeah. I don't know what that says about, you know.
00:17:32
Speaker
Well, I think a lot of it is socioeconomic. You know, this is a place where therapists can thrive and people have the income and also the culture is very therapy friendly. It used to be like a cool thing to have a therapist. Yeah. We sort of talk about it at parties. I don't know how good that is, but yeah.
00:17:54
Speaker
I'm sure your patients talk about you at parties. I don't think so. Not for the most part, probably not. I heard there's a pretty significant buzz, actually. But you're right, it is a very different feeling to write a blog.
00:18:11
Speaker
You know, I write a lot of blogs about a lot of different things. I'm not very focused in that regard, but a number of them are about developmental trauma and happiness in adulthood and how to live a satisfying life. And periodically, you know, one or one of them does really, really well, gets hundreds of thousands of views, and then I'll get a bunch of emails from around the world. And that's a very
00:18:34
Speaker
sort of touching experience gotten emails from people that so I let I read I read the piece you wrote on parental loss and I just lost my father my mother and you know it helped me a lot like you know and what what should I do kind of thing
00:18:52
Speaker
Or the one that I wrote on giftedness right now is I've never had this happen but apparently it does happen on psychology today, but this is the first time I've had one blog post hit a million views in a few days, which
Podcast Impact and Listener Feedback
00:19:08
Speaker
It's a little hard to process, even though it's not that big a deal, right? Because there's all these people who reach so many more people, like millions and millions and hundreds of millions of people. But there's something about helping people, which is sort of a very, very strong human experience.
00:19:28
Speaker
And having a voice, right? That lots of people might be listening to, especially in today's day and age, right? With, with the, with the TikTok and everything. Right. Well, a lot of that though, a lot of it comes out on Instagram. I mean, we're realizing it's pretty toxic. Some of it is, is positive, but yeah, it's a mixed bag. And I guess.
00:19:57
Speaker
What you're saying is kind of giving me more motivation to find topics to talk about that are going to be helpful for listeners. And maybe listeners would get in touch with us and contact us with topics that they would like to hear about. It can't always be us just figuring it out. Well, we're not exactly overexerting, but yeah, I do agree that maybe
Entertaining vs. Informative Content
00:20:26
Speaker
Maybe that can be sort of our next step for when we come back for, would it be the second season? The first season was a couple of years, so I'm not sure how that works. We'll make it a little snappier. We'll be back probably in a few months, right? It all depends on you. Yeah, I think by February or March, we can be back and we can have some good topics, but in the meantime, yeah, I would love to hear about what would be most helpful for people.
00:20:55
Speaker
I think we've done a good job with that and some really like expert guests and you know it's been informative but I don't know if it's if it's been helpful to people in their daily lives and I think that's a good goal to strive for. Yeah I'm not sure if that's what people want in a podcast anyway because there's so much information now so
00:21:20
Speaker
Like what, what do you really want? What, when you, you're a much bigger consumer of podcasts than I think. What do you actually want in a podcast? I like to be entertained. It's entertainment, right? Yeah. I like to, oh, I like information. I like learning about new things, but sometimes, um, because my attention is like,
00:21:44
Speaker
I pulled in different directions I usually listen to a podcast while I'm folding laundry or while I'm driving or, you know, it can't be too much information. Yeah. The information is really just an excuse to be an entertained right. Yeah. You always have to be doing something practical right.
00:22:01
Speaker
I mean not you personally but I mean that's, that's sort of the mind trap that makes it very hard for people to be grounded, because there's this sort of underlying feeling like we're always supposed to be productive and busy.
00:22:16
Speaker
I'm sure plenty of people listen to podcasts for fun. And then a lot of people, they listen to, you know, like mental health podcasts for like advice. But there, I think people are also looking for company, right? That it's not just me that has these issues. And, and also, yeah, for company and also for a certain kind of entertainment, I suppose. Yeah, I like the idea of just not feeling alone with
00:22:42
Speaker
certain issues, right? Well, I think, yeah, I mean, I think podcasts and other forms of media
00:22:49
Speaker
They they keep people company in a really important way.
Technology's Impact on Relationships
00:22:53
Speaker
And a lot of people have trouble, you know, in relationships with with other human beings. And I've definitely seen some research on this and especially with social media, you know, say, as compared with like television 30 years ago, the relationship with these these virtual relationships are much more involved because you could basically kind of pick one tailored to what you need.
00:23:19
Speaker
Sure. You're looking very tired right now. Yeah.
00:23:24
Speaker
Something happened. They started having that hypnotic voice. Exactly. But I know a lot of people who, you know, a lot of their relationships are with YouTube people, people. Yeah. Someone was telling me like after school on the Starbucks, the Starbucks and Gramercy Park area is just full of teenagers drinking coffee in a crowd and they're all just looking like looking at their phones.
00:23:54
Speaker
Yeah, but they're also together. Yeah, but I think that's what the new togetherness is, right?
Cyber Cortex and Human Cognition
00:24:03
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I get it. Yeah, I think the new togetherness is the is just finding a way to integrate. I saw another supervisor pretty recently, actually a former supervisor, and I remember talking about like cell phones in the therapy room.
00:24:23
Speaker
Right. And that people would pick up their phones and she was like, well, the phone is kind of an extension of the self. And in a way cell phone, right. So bad, so bad, but yeah, I think we're not going to be able to do away with it. So how can we sort of integrate with these new technologies and make sure that.
00:24:47
Speaker
it adds to our lives rather than take something away. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, definitely there's there's research that shows that any time you use a tool, it gets incorporated temporarily into your sense of self. So it's like, OK, I have a back scratcher. If I pick up the back scratcher and start using it or like if I'm raking leaves, then whatever tool you're using, your brain kind of like draws an envelope around the tool and
00:25:15
Speaker
it is extended to your sense of where your body is. And that's how you know if you're going to do something with a tool, your body sense includes the tool. So I've always thought about this with computers and the internet because if your body sense and your sense of self gets invested in a rake, what happens when you invest it in a piece of technology that connects you with the whole planet?
00:25:42
Speaker
Your sense of, so I started calling that the cyber cortex a few years ago. The brain has the triune, the three-part model, the reptilian brain and the mammalian brain, and then the frontal cortex that makes humans different from most other animals.
Metaverse's Impact on Connection
00:26:03
Speaker
Now we have the cyber cortex. It's true, you want to know something, you just look it up. Right? That's true.
00:26:11
Speaker
you immediately have an answer, right? And so it's like you have this memory. You can remember anything by looking it up on the internet. It's as if you had this huge memory bank, right? And you can say, well, what's that word mean, right? What does paraprostopian mean? I don't have to go home to a book. Like I can immediately extend my mind into the cyber cortex and extract the information. It frees me up to do other things like play Candy Crush.
00:26:41
Speaker
Good. It means that we have to renegotiate, I think, the boundaries of self versus cyber cortex versus another and see how these things affect our connectedness and relatedness. Well, what do you think about this metaverse business? Have you ever read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson? Do you know how Facebook renamed itself meta?
00:27:10
Speaker
Oh, not really, because I don't partake so much. Well, so Facebook has set out to create the metaverse, you know, like the virtual reality that maybe one day everyone will spend a lot of time in. And the term metaverse comes from a classic science fiction book called
00:27:31
Speaker
snow crash. Okay. And Neil Stevenson back in the 80s or whatever. So you're saying, well, we need to sort of keep the clear boundary, but a lot of people are really just rushing headlong into it. Do you think we'll eventually have two different species of humans? Maybe, maybe, because I don't know how compatible that is with, you know, for everyone, right? There are going to be people that want to exist in the Metaverse and people who kind of like the world as
00:28:01
Speaker
as it is, but we'll see how it develops. And in the meantime, I think our bottom line is that we'd like to hear from listeners about how we can make this more helpful and more entertaining and what worked for these past few episodes and what didn't work as well. And we'll be checking in and hopefully trying to process some of that and coming back sometime in the spring.
00:28:27
Speaker
We're certainly to take people's suggestions into account. I might still be a little tired. No pressure. We certainly want you to enjoy your time off and to really free yourself from all the obligations and all the other complexities of your work life and really be fully available for yourself. Thank you.
Closing Remarks
00:28:55
Speaker
And thanks for listening.
00:28:57
Speaker
Yep, you can find us at doorknobcomments.com. Listen to us on Apple iTunes and leave a rating if you like what you hear. And again, feel free to reach out to us at hello at doorknobcomments.com. Thanks for listening and have a happy holidays and New Year's.
00:29:17
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Dornop comments. We're committed to bringing you new episodes with great guests. Please take a moment to share your thoughts. We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. You can also find us on Instagram at Dornop comments. Remember this podcast is for general information purposes only and does not constitute the practice of psychiatry or any other type of medicine. This is not a substitute for professional and individual treatment services and no doctor patient relationship is formed. If you feel that you may be in crisis, please don't delay in securing mental health treatment. Thank you for listening.