Guy Winch

So what a lot of people are ruminating about after hours is, oh my God, I have so much work to get done.

Oh my goodness, that coworker was so unpleasant to me in the meeting, and that boss dismissed me and was rude, and why didn't I get that promotion?

And those kinds of slights,

make us ruminate about work, and we can do it for hours.

How many people listening have had a fantasy argument with their boss or with a co-worker in which they're really, you know, giving them a piece of their mind in their head and imagining, I could have said this, I should have said that, in discussions they'll never actually have?

But we can lose hours for that when we see this rise of of incivility, of bullying, of harassment, of unpleasantness in the workplace.

And it's and it's really rising.

And the other thing that's rising is job insecurity with AI, with mergers, with with layoffs, with with cuts.

So there is a lot of stresses and we don't have time to process them.

during the workday and we tend to do that at home and we tend to do it in ways that make us chew over the day and activate all the stress and in ways that really are damaging to us and that can happen for hours after work.

It is happening mostly under the radar, because when we ruminate, which is considered a very unproductive form of self-reflection, because you're really just playing out the same scenarios over and over and over in your mind, you're not actually problem-solving.

You're not actually doing something useful or figuring something out.

You're just replaying the insult.

You're replaying the worry, those kinds of things.

It feels very compelling, and it feels like you're actually thinking about something you need to be thinking about, but you're doing it in very...

unuseful ways.

And so we're not aware of it.

Here's another thing that we're not aware of.

When we are under stress all day at work and we are in meetings and it's tense and all of those things are going on, we absolutely need to recover from those stresses in the after hours.

And what a lot of people do is they come home after a very difficult day at work and they feel, I am wiped out.