 Great. So first I just want to say thank you for coming. I really appreciate you taking the time. I know that in tech conferences it can be kind of a stressful thing to be kind of like I need to go and learn all the things. So I know that this is not a technical talk per se. So I just appreciate you taking the time. It's a quite an important topic. I think that if these are things that we can incorporate into our lives on a regular basis, it makes us more effective overall. So I just want to make sure at the beginning if you're not sitting within the general vicinity of somebody else, because this is a workshop and we will do some interacting with each other, if you maybe want to sit a little bit closer to at least one other person, that would be a good idea. So let me just kind of introduce myself. So my name is Nathan Huick. I live in Copenhagen, Denmark, currently. I'm from the US originally. My traditional background is clinical social work. I have a license in therapy and substance use disorder treatment. I don't do that work anymore. When I moved to Denmark three years ago, I started to become a developer. So I started developing in Ruby on Rails and first then I moved to Berlin to work for a chatbot startup. And I was doing Python development and C sharp development. And now I work at DSP, which is Denmark's kind of trained provider and doing process automation and automation in general. So the reason I'm doing this talk is because I'm interested in these two areas of tech and mental health, which brings me to this organization. So I'm giving this talk kind of in accordance with a group called open source and mental illness. This was a group that was started in 2012. And the idea behind it was to raise awareness about mental health issues in tech. So they do an annual, one thing that they do is an annual mental health in tech survey. The 2017 results have just been kind of processed and looked at. And so if you navigate to this URL here, you can see the latest results. So that's Azmi. The next thing that I wanted to kind of stress is that I would love this to be as safe of a place as possible. I'm not practicing therapy right now. So I can't guarantee confidentiality when we're doing this because this isn't any place that we can actually do that. But to whatever extent that you want, because we're going to be talking with other people in the workshop and you don't have to say anything kind of to the whole group. But if you, whatever you want to share, feel free. There's no requirement to do so. But it kind of improves the experience if there's some disclosure. The thing that I wanted to say here is that another motivation for me doing this presentation is that I have experienced burnout, depression, and anxiety. And I continue to kind of deal with these things on a day-to-day basis. So to me, there's a personal component to it as well. So I just like to talk about ways that we can better deal with these things. Great. So since this is a workshop, there will be some behavioral components to it. So this includes discussion between each other. This does include some practice as well. And then depending on how much time we have, some kind of role-place type situations. Now these are not in front of the group or anything like that. We're not taking an acting class. But it's just to have some more kind of workshop-oriented things to give people tools to kind of see how they might interact with the things that we're talking about. So I have three main objectives for you. It's for you to know what is burnout. At the end of this, it's to have some constructive ways to work mindfulness and the possibility of flow into your life. And I want to provide a little bit of a framework, a way to think about how we think about behavior change. Because there's a lot of tips that exist on the internet. There's a lot of things that say, OK, if you do these five things, you'll be the most productive person in the world. But there's no really... What doesn't accompany this is ways that you can actually change your behavior. And so there's some stuff that comes from especially substance use ways of working because these people really need to change habits that they have, quite serious habits. So just to give you a little bit more of a foundation about how to think, how can I actually change this behavior? So that brings me to burnout. So if you follow existential comment on Twitter, you might be a little bit too Marxist for me. But the idea is that even though technology has been improving, we still are working quite long hours and we're still being pushed to produce. And this, in turn, creates a lot of stress. So there's kind of a constellation of factors that happen when we are working. It's quite interesting to think about things like anxiety, burnout, and depression. And I'll touch a little bit on that. But I think we would all agree that we have to have a little bit more of a... There has to be some good stress for us to produce at our highest level. So then there's kind of like good anxiety or what we might call you stress. And with this graphic, what I like about this is that there's maybe some anxiety at work. And this can kind of increase performance or increase the way that you work. But then if the anxiety becomes too much, then you get burned out. And then it can be to even more serious things. So let me give you kind of a rundown of burnout. So there's three main characteristics that kind of specify burnout. So this is high degrees of exhaustion, cynicism, or depersonalization. So not really caring or just feeling like you're kind of actually angry at the work that you're doing. And then feelings of low professional efficacy. So this is the kind of the reality of I just really don't feel effective. I don't really think that I'm doing a very good job. And I don't feel like I'm getting the credit I deserve. So if we take these three things together, we can kind of have a recipe for burnout. Other related factors are kind of compulsion to prove oneself, working harder continually on a continual basis, neglecting one's personal own needs, and just kind of filling up all your time with work. So this brings me to the first kind of interactive component. So what I would like you to do, and remember that this is a safe place, so at whatever level you're comfortable, I want you to find another person. And I'll give you, I don't have a ton of time to add in too much discussion, but I'll give you a few minutes to discuss. Have you, do you know someone else, or do you somebody that you know? Have you ever experienced symptoms of burnout? So I'll start at the clock, and yeah, find someone to talk to. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We have about 30 seconds to wrap it up, and then we'll start again. Thank you. Great. So one thing I want to say is that I'd love to take any of these further conversations offline, just because I have about 45 minutes and I need to pack a lot of stuff in. So I'll have my Twitter handle, email, and whatever else you want to contact me, and please talk to me after the talk as well, just so we can continue things on after. So that's kind of burnout, and that's us sharing if we know somebody that's had burnout. So some risk factors that contribute to the potential for the formula of burnout would be things like mismatching your workloads or just having too much work, not having control over who specifies your tasks or what your tasks are, so then people are making decisions on your behalf. This is quite a risky situation. Lack of appropriate awards or just receiving attention for the work that you're doing. Also just a loss of personal connection with other people in the workplace. So this can be especially prevalent if you're working remotely or I think just if we're working on computers all day, there's such a tendency to be very concentrated on the screen, and then we lose this face-to-face connection. And then also conflict of internal values with the work that you're doing. So if you're doing things that you're not very comfortable with doing, over time this kind of adds up as we're working and we have developed cognitive dissonance between kind of like, what's important to me and what am I actually doing? And so as we do that for a longer period of time, then we can have this situation where we feel cynical or we're just kind of really not connected to the work. So what's interesting about burnout is that it's not at least in kind of the disorder Bible. It's not a diagnosable mental health condition. So this is important because this is the way that services are built in a lot of countries. So if you have to be able to have services reimbursed, you have to have a disorder. And so if you have depression or anxiety, these are diagnosable mental health conditions. But burnout per se is not a condition. So I think it's also an interesting thing to talk about how it's so connected to work because it's almost kind of like a humble brag in addition. It's like, I'm so burned out because I'm working so much. And so it's a different way to talk about kind of the same thing which might be depression and research shows that burnout can be a precursor to depression. They're not the same things, but sometimes you have burnout, you have these three, the exhaustion, cynicism, low professional efficacy, and then you can lead into depression which is a little bit more of a serious, not kind of role-related condition. So since it's not a diagnosable condition, it's difficult to estimate the cost, but depression and anxiety affect these, and mental health in general affect about 700 million individuals worldwide. It costs about $1 trillion due to loss of productivity and about 12 billion days of loss of productivity. So there's a reason that we address it. So that brings me to interventions. So I am obviously a therapy advocate, so if this is something that works for you, I highly advocate for that. I can't provide specific tips because this is different in every country, but if you want to talk about that, we can definitely talk more about that after. So we're not doing therapy here, but I would highly advocate for that. So structural changes, obviously since the risk factors for many of them are kind of outside of our control. They're things of what's your workload, what are your work hours, how is your manager, what are your managerial expectations of yourself. So I'm not talking necessarily to managers, so I'm not really going into that. What I want to provide to you is kind of a protected space within yourself to work within situations. If you are feeling that I'm burnt out, if I'm feeling a little bit too stretched, I want all of us to increase our internal resources that we can be able to better cope with this. So that was really what I was trying to focus on. Just having a few more tools or just having a little bit more of a sense, okay, I'm feeling this way, so that means I need to, and so that's kind of that formula that we're working with. So flow. When I was kind of playing with these ideas, burnout, depression, too much work, feeling stress, I came across an article, and it was a 2018 article from some Swedish researchers that were, what they were looking at is proneness to flow as a protective factor against depression and anxiety, meaning if people can move into a flow state, does this then protect them from symptoms of depression and anxiety? And I was very curious about this idea, because flow has been around for about four decades, but then flow combined with mindfulness and burnout, I think is a very useful way to kind of approach how we deal with this. So does the ability to move into flow, does this then help you not be burnt out? We don't have research yet, but we do have research that can protect against depression. So then I think that if we're kind of in this developer mindset or just tech in general, I'm thinking that we have a lot of us that have had flow experiences ourselves and there's something that is really nice about it, and it's kind of like everything is blocked out, and I'm just in the moment. And so that's really what got me interested in it, and that's why I want to talk about it. So there is a Hungarian researcher. Is anyone Hungarian here? Or can anyone at all pronounce, help me with pronouncing his name? But he is here. He started looking at flow experiences around 1975. So he was just curious, what are the states that artists, musicians kind of created? What is the state that they get into when they just seem fully engrossed in what they're doing? So what he has found, he has pulled out six main factors. So you have intense focus and concentration on the task at hand. You have emerging between your awareness and your action. You have a very high sense of control over what you're doing. You have a loss of self-consciousness and lack of concern about kind of your self-image, so your ego falls away. Your idea of time, your perception of time changes, and you have an intrinsic motivation. So if we're already thinking about what is burnout and what is flow, you can see that there's something that's kind of within that's happening with flow. Whereas burnout, you're kind of like there's external demands on you and you're not necessarily able to cope. So then if we match this external and internal world, if we start thinking about it in this way, we can really kind of think about what are ways that we can possibly improve the situation. So this is a relatively useful graph. So he also says that some other points that are important with flow are that the activity has to be challenging and it has to be beyond, slightly beyond our abilities. So to be able to be fully engrossed in an activity, it has to be slightly more difficult than what you can do. He also says that you have to have a very high degree of skill. So this is where my opinion diverges a little bit, or at least I can't say anything because I'm not really a researcher. But I think in terms of usefulness, we have to think about it that I need to be doing something that's a little bit harder than my ability. So we have to have a little bit more of an idea about what our abilities are and we have to know what it feels like when we're kind of pressed beyond that. And not too far because then we have things like anxiety and stress and that situation does not work. So I'm not too keen on saying that all of us have to be complete masters and I'll touch a little bit on that next. What I want you to next discuss, and we have about two minutes for this, is that think about a time when you might have been flowing or you're so interested in what you're doing that you had some of the six characteristics and I'll put them back up. And I just want you to discuss kind of what was happening around that situation and what do you think led to you entering that state. So, go. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Just about 15 seconds to wrap it up. Thank you. So when I was looking a little bit more about kind of what is flow, I kind of played with some other ideas. So the top book is the flow book. Has anyone read any of these three? So it seemed like there was some sort of a constellation here because it's like, okay, what is people, what is flow, what is play, what are these. Because when I heard that, okay, flow, you have to have this high degree of mastery, you have to be extremely good at what you're doing, then what is play. Because if you watch a kid play on a playground who maybe can't do the monkey bars in any way, they can be extremely into what they're doing and they can have kind of these other characteristics of flow while they're doing it. So to me, it was less important to have, okay, am I flowing, am I having all six characteristics, blah, blah, blah. What I think are two quite important ones are the loss of self-consciousness. I think the falling away of kind of like the, my attention, am I paying attention or who am I? Or kind of like these questions of like really what are people looking at? Are they laughing at me? Like when that falls away and when we have some intrinsic connection to it, when we have motivation, these two were the ones that I felt like kind of fit with these other three, play and deep work. Now we can split hairs and kind of say, well maybe some of these other ones should be added in there and that's fine. But I feel like if we just don't think about the other four and we think about these two, it can open up a lot of space. Now the 6.1, if we think about this, this is a bit challenging at work because can we always work on things that are intrinsically motivating at work? No. So I don't have an answer for that. My answer for that is that if we think about burnout as kind of like this thing that our work lives expanding out into our other parts of our lives, then this pushes out the opportunity to do other things that you want to do, to do other things that are intrinsically of value to yourself. So then that might be some boundary work or some more structural changes that you might have to make in your own life to provide the time to do something else that can then provide a potential flow state for you. So that's kind of an overview on flow. There's not really activities that you can do to say, okay, now go flow for five minutes. So what I wanted to connect this with is mindfulness. So there's a lot of talk about mindfulness. You get ads on Instagram who knows what for different meditation apps. And this is kind of a commercialization of Buddhism which is conflicting. But that's kind of what happened with everything. So when I was thinking about what practices can we do to try to get into flow, I thought of mindfulness. So I've been kind of doing this. There's something called mindfulness-based relapse prevention in substance use work. And there's a lot of good activities that one can do to start becoming more conscious about kind of the world in general. So this leads us to the question. If we're trying to raise awareness and concentration to the present moment, which is mindfulness, is that flow? They seem kind of conflicting. They seem kind of to, because when the flow is the loss of the ego or the falling away of self-consciousness, they're kind of opposing. My take on this is that to increase the potential for flow, we have to first be mindful. We have to first bring attention to a situation. We have to first know what's happening within ourselves. And from my personal experience, and what the research says about mindfulness and yoga and breathing on depression is that it helps. And it improves these symptoms and improves these conditions. So I would love that the research community continues to do research on these topics. We don't have necessarily just really great studies that encompass all these different regions. So I'm trying to kind of bring them into one. And so to do practice-based things, I said, let's do mindfulness. So all right, let's do some more things. So I have about 15 minutes. I will try to fit as many of these practices in as possible. And the first one that I want to start with is breathing. Who has actually practiced breathing here? Breathing. Breathing. Conscious breathing. It's amazing here we do it all the time, as we should. But we never, or rarely, I think increasingly, we are taught how to breathe. And this is important for many reasons. The two that I want to touch on are heart rate variability and vagus nerve stimulation. The first heart rate variability is the difference in your pulse between when you're inhaling and exhaling. And when you're inhaling, your pulse quickens. When you exhale, your pulse slows down. And if you have a higher difference between these two, you have more relaxation. So people that have chronic anxiety, their heart rate variability is very low. And so they have very little difference. And when you breathe and you do conscious breathing of inhaling of less time than you're exhaling, you're actually practicing this, because then you're providing yourself your heart rate variability or the opportunity to slow down as you're exhaling. The other is vagus nerve stimulation. The vagus nerve is connected to your parasympathetic nervous system. And when you breathe, especially when you hold your breath, but of course I cannot advocate for any holding of breath or for extended periods of time, and we won't do that here, it stimulates your vagus nerve. And so this induces your relaxation response, which is connected to the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic nervous system. So this is your response that kicks in after you've had some sort of physiological heightening and it brings your system back down into equilibrium, kind of its normal state. So that's kind of a few concepts behind it. So what we're going to do today is some abdominal breathing. So what tends to happen in life is that we breathe with like the upper third of our lungs. So our lungs are quite long and if you have gone to a yoga class, a meditation class or anything like this, they'll usually talk about some sort of abdominal breathing. So this can actually take a lot of practice because you are working on these muscles around your abdomen and it can be interesting the first time. So if this is your first time, I encourage you to have an open mind. And we are going to do a breathing activity right now. So only you can kind of decide, you know, am I doing abdominal breathing? One thing that you can do is to put both hands on your body, one on the top, one on the bottom. And then when you're breathing, when you breathe in, your bottom hand should actually move more than your top. So then when you're kind of providing feedback, you can see, okay, am I actually pushing out my abdomen or not? So what we actually will do next, we're going to do a breathing activity for about three minutes. There's a little graphical interaction that we have here. So there's some geometric shapes. And when they expand, the idea is to inhale and when they kind of contract again to exhale. So I'm going to also participate and I will start the clock. So I think I have to come here. All right, so this is starting up now. So if we want to start when it comes down here again. All right, so another short, yeah. One question is, is there a difference if you breathe through your nose or your mouth? And what if you have both? Good question. So this is, it can be kind of traditional to breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. Sorry, I didn't mention that. But this is also personal preference. And you can see what works and what doesn't. So I tend to get quite dry mouth if I breathe in through my mouth. So I prefer to do in through the nose, out through the mouth. And that's kind of the traditional way, I guess. But this is also personal preference. So if we could just take about two minutes to discuss with the partner. What did you notice? Anything that came up when you were doing that? So, yeah, go ahead. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, so I have about five minutes left. So I want to kind of really nail down. So if we do the breathing, if we think about increased attention to the situation, one way to kind of structure this is meditation. We're not going to do a meditation. But this, I think it's so vast is that it can be overwhelming. So if to provide constructive tips, so if you're kind of just starting out, if you want to increase attention, there's plenty of apps and we can talk about that. I have resources that I will share. I have kind of a collection of resources. I think another really good idea is to pick a marker that whenever you do it, you say, okay, now I am bringing attention to this situation. So you can do this for any period of time. So you want to do it for a week and you say, every time I brush my teeth, every time I tie my shoes, just pick one. But every time I walk through a door frame or something like this, if you choose one thing and do it for a specific period of time to then increase awareness, this can be a very good way to start. If you're kind of just kind of, how do I get started? Is there something that I can do? Now if you're a developer in your programming, this could be some, if I run my tests, then I'm going to be mindful or something like this. Like it can be used in every, it can be used in every single way possible. The thing that I want to say about mindfulness and meditation is that there's no wrong way to do it except to not do it and to not try to do it. You can get caught up in dogma as you can with anything. I encourage that you do your best not to. Because if we at least try to do it sometimes, that is great. That is an improvement over what previously existed. And I see no downside to that. So that was kind of the more ideas. So a very important thing with this is limiting distractions. One cannot have flow if one is distracted. So can you just give me a quick raise of hands? In the last 5 to 10 minutes, who has peaked at their smartphone? Yeah, so this is a ubiquitous problem. There's a whole kind of, I think there's a group called Humane Tech or something like this. There's a lot of groups, there's a lot of Google is paying attention to this, Ablo is paying attention to this. Our devices are extremely addictive. They really kind of hijack our brains in the worst way possible. So again, I could list all ideas about how to limit distractions, but this is a personal process. This is something that you have to nail out on your own. You have to kind of see what works for yourself and what doesn't. But again, just with the markers, I would say start with something as small as possible. There are certain apps that actually monitor exactly how much time you're spending on your phone in different apps and then give you reminders. That has some privacy concerns in my book. But balancing this situation to be able to work as best you can in the time that you have is a very personal process. So one quote that I kind of like, this is from Deport, instead of scheduling the occasional break from distractions that you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional break from focus to give into distraction. So this kind of turns it on its head a little bit. Of course, you cannot be in deep work or flow forever. You cannot be from the moment you wake up to when you go to sleep. But one should see what's possible in terms of structuring the day so that, okay, this is my time for focus. These are my break from focus for distraction. And then at what point am I kind of done? Am I shutting down? Am I done for the day? No more deep work or potentially flow. But if I'm going to go to art class, then I want to go have flow. So one thing that is helpful, very helpful is Pomodoro. I'm sure almost all of us have heard of this. Or if not, we can find some things. This is a basic practice of taking 25 minutes of work, five minutes break, 25 minutes work, five minutes break. You can do this however you want as well. If you do four work trips in a row, maybe your break is 15 minutes. And there's plenty of apps on this one as well. But this is another way to structure. So you say, in the 25 minutes, I'm not going to look at Facebook. Maybe that's your first goal. And then you try not to look at Facebook. And then you take the five minute break and you look at Facebook. Whatever your struggle is, you know it best for a believer in that. So I encourage you to kind of start somewhere. So I don't have too much time. But the last thing that I want to do is cover integrating changes or how to think about possibly making changes in one's life. So there is a stages of change model that came out of substance use work. And there are five stages in this model. So pre-condemnation is not having any idea about making a change. So moving on to contemplation, this would be kind of like, I'm thinking about possibly making a change. And it's relatively self-explanatory. What I want to get across in this is that trying and not succeeding is the norm. So if we look at cigarette smokers, I think the average quit attempt one does is 13 or something like this. The idea being that if you try and you fail, you make small improvements, it's so possible to try again. There's really no failure. The only failure in life with meditation and mindfulness is that you stop completely. So the worst thing that you can do is beat yourself up and then give yourself shame and then not do it again and not be able to approach it again because you feel so shameful. So if we think about this in kind of a growth mindset, and we step away from it a little bit, which is also why meditation and mindfulness help, and you say, I'm kind of in contemplation right now where I've moved back. Maybe I've had kind of a relapse. I just wasted three hours on Reddit or I played this stupid game for three hours. You say, okay, now what can I do to move back to kind of get away from that again? So yeah, I'd encourage you to just kind of think about depending on if there's a change that you want to make, what stage might I be in and what does that mean? Am I just kind of like, I don't want to think about it at all. I know I have to do it, but I screw it. I'm not going to do it. Maybe you're kind of earlier in the process and there's some ambivalence there. And this kind of should I do it, should I not is also completely normal. And it's not something that we should judge ourselves about, but just notice that I'm having it and it's really normal. So then kind of what happens next. So what happens next is you can go to therapy, you can kind of find somebody to help you make that behavior change. But what you've done is then provided yourself kind of that formula where I'm feeling this. That means that I should try to do this. So I don't have time for these role plays, which is fine. What I do have, I know that I've thrown a lot at you in 45 minutes, but I do have this repo where I'm continually updating, so I just have kind of a start. And I can provide this link to you in whatever way is possible. I can go back and show you the presentation. But we have apps on here. I have a flow and work, things like this. So I couldn't think of a great way to share this with you because I can't get your kind of information because of GDPR. But if you want it, then Twitter or whatever, we can do it. We can also share it with everybody afterwards. Perfect. Great. So that's all the time I have. Again, this is the organization that I was kind of doing the presentation with. If you have any other questions, comments, tweet me, send me an email. Talk to me after. And if you want to say, I want to do this, I would like some ideas, we can brainstorm and write things down, we can do whatever is useful. So, yeah, just one last thank you. And yeah, I hope we have a great conference and time.