This is here After, and I'm your host, Megan Divine. Each week we tackle big questions from doctors, nurses, and other helpful folks that let us explore how to show up after life goes horribly wrong. This week, it's all about reclaiming your time in your family system and out in the wider world with Eve Rodsky and doctor Aditya Rukar, hosts of the new show Time Out, a fair play podcast. We'll be right back after this first break. Before we get started, one quick note, While I hope you find a lot of useful information in our time here together, this show is not a substitute for skilled support with a licensed mental health provider or for professional supervision related to your work friends. So I would say that the number one question I get for the show is some variation of how do I manage to be a good fill in the blank when I'm handling multiple losses and stressors in my own life? So that blank is usually filled in with therapist, nurse, partner, parent care provider, hairgiver. Burnout is a massive topic and addressing it is one of the core goals of this show. So this week I invited two special guests to come dive into this topic with me from two different angles. Eve Rodsky is a New York Times bestselling author and the creator of fair Play, a step by step approach that helps partners rebalance their domestic workloads. Dr ADITYA Rukar is an internal medicine physician, public health expert, and medical correspondent with an expertise in stress, resilience and mental health. Together, even Adity hosts the new show Time Out, a fair Play podcast which maps the ways caregivers can reclaim their time inside families and other systems that often invalidate women's contributions. Now. You don't need to be female or identify as a woman to listen to this particular episode, but we do explore a largely gendered social construct around caregiving. If the genders and the pronouns don't reflect your life, hopefully the concepts beneath them will. If you're a caregiver in an a capacity, this conversation will leave you with both validation of how hard this all is and give you some tools to help you both deliver and receive the support you most need now. Content note here there is a lot of information in this show. It's sort of a hazard of having brilliant people on his guests. They have a lot of things that they want to share with you, but don't worry about following every single detail. We're going to summarize it at the end and make sure you have places to go for more detail in the show notes. It's going to be a great episode with lots of useful insights. So let's get right into it with my friends, Eve and add I am so glad to have you both in the Zoom Zudio studio. Zoom Studio. That's what I'm gonna start saying. Anyway, I'm really glad you're here. Thanks for having us, Megan, We're so happy to be here. It's the one big happy, I heart family right now. Okay, So we have a lot of things to get into today, so I want to jump right into it, if that's okay with you. Yeah, okay. So one of the things that I love about you both, both you individually and both of you together is the way you sort of turn on the black light around issues of gender and service. If you think about the way that we care for others, whether personally or professionally, how does gender play into that. It is the dirty little secret I think, Megan, the intersects our work with yours, that caregiving um our. Entire society has been built on the backs of the unpaid labor of women. And I do think that maybe this is the one silver lining or a silver lining of the great disruption we just went through, which is that burnout and especially on women, is something I don't think in longer be ignored, and no longer do I think it can be fixed by a walk around the block or, as one woman said to me, gratitude journaling herself to death. Uh. We have to start looking at this idea of you know, self help as mutual aid. What does it look like to live in connected communities that actually care about each other. That's going to be translating all the way from the work Addy and I do with agency for empowering people in their personal agency, but also in how we communicate and connect as a as a society as well. Add where does that intersection of gender and service show up for you? You know, Megan, so much of Eve's work really resonates with me first as a working mom, and when we think about women who are physicians or caregivers, any type of caregiver, we also wear so many different hats, right, Like we are parents, spouses, siblings, daughters, and so much of our work, whether we do it in a professional space or personal spaces, caregiving and often caregiving of any form false to women, even in medicine, and particularly for me as a working woman, working mother living through the pandemic and seeing what's happened with burnout and st us and mental health from the perspective of a physician who specializes in these things, there's so much synergy between Eve's work in the gender division of labor and how to find parity and equity in the home to how that translates into the workplace. Yeah, and and all of that begins with really hard conversations, not with the practice of gratitude or taking a walk, Like I love that you brought that up, that like, we can't self care our way out of this. We couldn't self care our way out of this, like before the pandemic or as you called it, the big disruption, Like these are systemic fault lines that have been around for a very long time. And I think you know, one of the things that the pandemic experience has done is really exposed those fault lines like, we can't pretend we don't see them anymore, not in our professional lives and not in our personal lives. Oh yeah, those cracks are are there. They're they're not unfearable anymore. As you said, the term that I think, indeed and I like the most for this dir Little Secret care is invisible work. In n This term was coined invisible work. That the work of caregiving, the hard, hard work of of raising a society. The social contract falls on women's shoulders, and it's invisible and it will always remain invisible because women do it. I do think as we enter the twenties, we will, as you said, Megan, have have this heightened awareness that women's time is considered by society is infinite like sand. It's our most valuable currency, and we're taught from births to give it away to others for free. And what happens to our mental and physical health when we continue to do that? Whereas men's time, men's time in our society has been historically viewed as diamonds. It's finite. All you have to do is call fifty schools like I did for my research and fair play and asked, why do you call women when kids are sick to pick them up, and you'll understand how men's time is guarded. Yeah, there's this idea that the woman or the identified caregiver in those domestic partnerships, like they can drop anything at any time and go serve and serve and serve and show up. I know that your research shows that women's shoulder two thirds or more of unpaid domestic work and child care for their homes and families, and like that. I love like same ship, different decades. Like I start thinking like same ship, different century, right, Like you think about Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass, Like why could the white man go to the woods and write his beautiful things that everybody quotes. Well, it's because he had his wife and his daughter coming in doing his laundry and feeding him and making sure that he was like not going off the deep end like women have always done invisible labor. And and we can't really put that back in the box once it starts to go out. I mean, we could go on total tangents here about like why we oppress and repress women so much because the power of women it's so threatening, it needs to be bottled up and stuffed away and suppressed, like bring on my undergraduate degree. But what I want to do is get into a listener question, because it really is that that invisible labor that shows up in daily life, but also when loss and grief of any kind erupts into the domestic sphere. So you're ready for the first listener question. We're ready. Okay, that's roll. So this question is from a person grieving the loss of a family member, and they said, my dad died in an accident a little less than a year ago. It's been hard on all of us, but not exactly equally hard. I'm the fixer in my family, meaning I'm the one who makes things happen. I'm the one figuring out the finances and cleaning out my dad's house. You talk a lot about letting grief take up all the space it needs, but how can I do that when I'm the one holding the world together for everyone else. I've got all of the end of life details to work through, plus my kids feelings around the loss of their granddad to manage, and lunch is still need to be made, the dog needs to be walked, and I have a full time job. Something's got to give. But I don't see what can change. So I think you can see why why I chose this question for you. I've had lots of patients in this exact scenario where they are managing the loss of an elderly relative, usually apparent they have other siblings, many of whom are local, that they shoulder the burden of end of life care as well as tying up all loose ends after the death. This is a tough one. It's unfortunately all too common. Particularly I'm assuming, and I please correct me if I'm wrong that the listener who wrote that question isn't is a woman. We all have roles within our family structure, and since birth or early childhood, we're defined in a certain way in families. Grief is a complicated process, and Megan, you really dive into this in your podcast and in your work as a psychotherapist. No two people grieve the same way, No two families grieve the same way. So it's highly personal, highly individualistic, and and it's complicated, messy, and can also be very painful and difficult. Very few families and patients that I've taken care of come from families where the grieving process is this kumbaya moment. We've talked about fault lines before. A lot of these Achilles heels of families. Once that matriarch or patriarch passes on, all of those achilles heels become major at the forefront issues. And for this particular reader, first I just want to say that you are not alone. I have had thousands and thousands of patients who have felt the same way. It is normal for you to feel a sense of overwhelm because you are managing an abnormal situation, so you are having a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. The first is to understand that you can't do it alone, and it's not a sign of weakness or vulnerability to say that I need help. And if you can't rely on your family members or next can to help you, then there are professional services to do that. Anything you can outsource. Try to outsource. Have someone come into your home to help with lunches, Have your spouse help make lunches. Forget the laundry, let it pile up for a little bit. Relax your standards of what you used to do and what you were like prior to this event that's really shaken your family. And once you outsource a lot of those things and try to hire some professional help you create a little bit more space for yourself. So it's difficult to create space and chaos when all of the walls are collapsing on top of you. So if you can outsource a little bit more, you can create some space, and then what you do with that base is so important. You know, many of us under periods of stress, we scroll through Instagram, or we just get into these habits and patterns that are quite destructive and certainly not beneficial for our mental health. So when you create that space for your particular reader, do something that feeds your soul. You know, maybe you can in time with your loved ones. I really believe in the therapy of a twenty minute walk every day to clear your head, to create some structure around your day. There are so many ways that you could try to lessen the burden of what you're feeling. And without going too long, I will finally say that the analogy I like to use when someone's under a stressful situation is the idea of a tea kettle. We are all tea kettles during stress. We all think we can change the heat of the moment, like dial down the heat and it will get better and the water will kind of cool off and become tepid. But unfortunately, life happens and you can't always dial down the temperature of external events. There's many ways in the doing that we can manage our stress in our day to day small incremental changes that can open that lever to release the steam, and that alone can be very therapeutic. I love that you brought up that last piece because I think one of the things that can happen when you're in that overwhelmed I'm doing this really emotional thing and I'm also in charge of making sure this family keeps is like, oh great, self care is one more thing I have to do. But one of the important pieces of what you just said was this isn't about at a twenty minute walk in to solve this problem or on top of everything else you're doing. It's first we need to have a conversation about where can you share this load, whether that is bringing somebody in outside the family or reconfiguring things within your family units so that you do have more space, and then you get to make some informed choices for yourself inside that space and figuring out how to have those conversations about who does what in a family system and this is really your deal house. Yeah, I started off trying to understand what was happening to women. What that has done for me over ten years is it allowed me to understand family systems like this and to say, Okay, how do you make your decisions. Let's pretend our home is our most important organization and this person's decisions with her parents is the most important thing that that person in their family structure is dealing with right now. The only way that you can actually move forward with a mental space, which is structured decision making. And so what I mean by that, as as a d D said, we don't care who's doing the execution, whether again you're able and have the privileged outsource, or whether it's two people in your family with the understanding that the execution is that what we're talking about here, what we're talking about as the cognitive labor, the thinking, the planning, the monitoring. There is no excuse for all of that to follow one person. What ends up happening is the gendered assumptions come back in. You start saying, well, in the time it takes me to tell him her, they what to do I should do it myself, and you end up in the same terrible patterns of resentment and rage on repeat. The only way to break that cycle is to start understanding that within the specific tasks of the home, when you hold the conception, planning, execution together, that ownership mindset is how you break the cycle of rage and resentment of having to hold all of those cognitive labor tasks in one mind, which can literally bring you down. My bet is that that dynamic of the woman in this family, the person who asked the question, that that assumption presumption mom takes care of all of the planning and the organization and understanding why the item is important to do and making sure it gets done on time and in the right order that existed way before this death intersected with this family, Right, Like, these are not yeah, I mean these are These are not systems that arrive along with the death. These are systems that crack, right, And I love actually thinking about like that idea of invisible labor. We think about like, oh, right, the women's work as a service provider in and out of the home is the invisible part. But it can be invisible to the woman in this question as well, right, Like, we don't really realize how much work we do until we suddenly can't do the work for whatever reason, Like when the caregiver breaks even the care ever starts to see the sort of breadth of everything they've been holding together, and there is often that sort of breaking point where they like, I can't do this anymore, like even if I wanted to, I can't do it. And so what I love about sort of applying the work that both of you do to this sort of there's been a death space is we're talking about ways to start working with your family dynamics so that during this time of crisis or tragedy, when there's something really big spiking. It isn't just a quote unquote solution for this, but this is really a way to evaluate how does this family work? And how can I start claiming my time back? Going back to what you said a DT, like, when I can start claiming a little bit of time back, then I can make informed choices about what life do I want for myself. You know what's so fascinating about the intersection of my work and Eave's work is Eve is so brilliant in thinking about systems and the larger societal forces at play, and my background as a clin mission is thinking about the individual biology. Right. So, for this particular reader, she's under a period of stress, active acute stress, but has had chronic stress for a long time that she hasn't fully recognized or come to terms with because she's always been the caregiver and always been the primary caregiver and her role in the family, and she likely has a very high level of highly functioning stress. She is doing so many things as we know many caregivers do. Caregivers stress is a real entity. It is something that we do not talk about enough. If there is a silver lining of this pandemic is that mental health has come to the forefront caregivers as an entity, and the needs of caregivers has really come to the forefront. We need to work with our biology, not against it, if we want change to happen. And you can't fill someone else's cup unless your cup is full. So the reason that the biology of stress is so important in this particular scenario is because she is highly stressed. In addition to managing a stressful situation, she's already running on fumes and so reclaiming her time creating and carving out a space is a way for her to truly equilibrate within, to bring her biology back to baseline, out of that fight or flight state, back into that rest and digest state. And we have to flip the switch. We can flip the switch through incremental changes in our daily lives. And I think that's where the secret sauces between eaves work and my work is first the understanding that they can make a change, why it's important to make a change, and then giving them the tools to actually make that change happen in their lives, both for themselves and their families. All Right, we'll be right back after award from these sponsors. Friends, I'm talking with Evrodsky and dr Adina Rukar. Before the break, we were talking about women and grief in their personal lives and that overwhelm of stress. So we've got like the big arc of gender constructs and how they do a disservice to women and any genders in the world, how they do damage to the ways that we care for ourselves and care for each other. We've been talking about brain things and like there's there's so much in there and what I want for people to take from this part of our time together is not, oh my gosh, I have to become an expert in all of these things in order to survive this thing that I'm currently living through. No no, no, no, no no no. Like I don't know, I don't. I don't want our conversation to to add to that, but that there is a lot of research out there in a lot of different areas that really speaks to this deeply gendered imbalance that shows up in so many different parts of life, both the professional sphere and the personal sphere. So what I want people to to hear here is that, as you said a DT like, you're not alone if you're wrestling with this stuff, if you've been feeling burned out and overwhelmed and irritated, either in your home life or in your professional life, and the pandemic has brought up a lot of stuff, a lot of losses certainly that have caused those existing fault lines to erupt, And this is a really good time to talk about what are some actual steps the person in this first listener question might take. Knowing that they probably don't have the bandwidth to do a full deconstruct of the systems in their life. What are some things that they might be able to do to help themselves in this moment start to move towards a more equitable time share in their home life. Well, the good news is we've done it for them, so that here is the one oh one. We have tools, definitely, we have tools. And the other good news is that the data shows that there's actually a secret formula. Megan, I love a formula. It's an important Again, as Megan was qualifying that the you know we're going dark to go light here, the first half of the show was you're not alone. That that's what we're telling you, not that you have to solve this, but that you are not alone. This is not a you problem. Private lives are public troubles. That's what c Right Mills says, one of my favorite sociologists in the twentieth century. So here's the secret formula. It's really a combination of boundaries, systems, and communication. And so if I could just give one line for each one, the boundary is we have no excuse anymore to value women's time and to allow them to choose what they do with their time. There's no excuses that your partner would have four hours to check a power point and work out, and you're in service of your family until your head hits the pillow two hours after they are sleeping. There's just no excuses. We're entering the no excuse so and there's too many systems, there's too many tools out there, there's too many people to support you in living in that space. And so that's a true boundary of true boundaries, we said, even though it starts with self care, and we don't have anything againstaking walk around the block. That's a starting point, but that's not what a boundary is. A boundary is believing your time is diamonds, believing you deserve time, choice and how you use your day, and making sure that you have the adequate support to assert that your time is diamonds. And you're not going to be the one picking up your child from school, even if your job is more flexible, even if you make less money than your partner, even if you believe you're a better multitasker, even if you believe in the time it takes you to tell the other person what to do, you should do it yourself. Those are all toxic messages that we have no excuse to retire that's a boundary. A system is, as we said earlier, structured decision making. Don't be afraid of systems. It's just asking questions, Hey, why don't we like think about how do we create more time and efficiency so we're not living in overwhelming boredom. Maybe that means we should make some decisions in a van so we're not struggling with who's taking the dog out? Maybe you do full dog days Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I'll do the other days and we'll try that out. Let's see how that works. So the ownership mindset, that's that's the system. And then the third is this communication, which comprises two parts self talk, which is what we just said, the burning of guilt and shame, the belief you deserve equal time choice as the people around you. And then how you communicate what you need to those around you. And that often is the hardest step, Megan, because as you know, with grief, this idea of how do you articulate these things of such again a combination of rage and sadness and the lack of hope, and those are hard things. When you're in that space, emotion is high and cognition is low, and so it's very hard to get out of that space. So if there are times and emotion is high cognition is low, that's often not the right time to commune. Kate, write it down, come back later when your emotion is low and your cognition is high, and I'm sure Duty will have things to add to those three frameworks. I love those three frameworks. It's so clear to me when you share your formulas. It's like, yes, Aha, of course I love what you said, Megan. I don't want that person or anyone who's in a similar boat to think, oh, I need to be an expert, I need to have figured it all out, because just having that awareness that, oh, wait a second, I think I'm in trouble, you're already halfway there. So for this particular reader or a listener, you know, the person who wrote the question. For this particular person, what I would first say to them is gentle, gentle dental, Please be gentle with yourself. Protect your sleep. It's something that is we overlook but sleep as a therapeutic intervention. Someone who is going through grief and mental health struggles, who feels like the walls are caving in typically sleep is one of the first things that's impacted. So fragmented sleep, lots of awakenings during the night. People are staying up late, trying to burn the midnight oil, trying to finish all of the tasks of the day. As this person has suggested, there's just a sense of overwhelmed. So protect and prioritize your sleep. It has incredible brain benefits, body benefits, and impacts every cell, oregon, and tissue in the body. So protecting sleep as a therapeutic intervention is really important and there are many ways to do that. The second is to potentially seek some professional counseling and therapy for this particular person, not for everyone, but for this person as a way to air out some of those grievances and challenges. If someone is in a role of caregiver in the family, they're always on and they are the ones that everyone comes to, so they hold a lot of the families challenges, struggles, secrets, and they need some respite to ill. Timately, we're not bionic, we're mere mortals. I know many caregivers feel like they're bionic, but we are all frail mortals and we need an outlet. So that would be an important suggestion and tip for this reader. And then the third would be to find, particularly for this reader, find outlets that bring joy and a sense of lightness. COVID. The pandemic and the public health challenges of it have been heavy and weighing us down. We also know that seventy of the workforce has at least one feature of burnout. We in our field in medicine, we've always known that mental health has been a major issue, but it's you know, now much more of an issue that everyone understands. It's considered the shadow pandemic, and so finding ways to bring that sense of joy which might seem very frivolous. That we're joy might sound frivolous, but it has deep clinical benefits for the brain and the body, and there are many ways to bring that joy. We talk about this in our podcast, the concrete Ways to bring joy when you are really in the ship, because in many ways, we're all in this ship in some form or the other right now, year three of the pandemic. I love that we keep coming back to the things that are broken now. We're broken before the pandemic, and what the pandemic has done is really made us as a culture, I think, unwilling to pretend that what's broken isn't broken, right. I love that kind of the core of what both of you just shared, those three action steps that you each shared, Like the thing that they have in common, at least to my mind, is telling the truth. Right that there is power in telling the truth. It's not a solution for all the systems that are broken. It's not a solution for grief. It's not a solution for health care system breakdown and burnout and all of the things that spiral out from the undervaluing of service and labor. But telling the truth is one of the most revolutionary acts we can do, I think, and that means telling the truth to yourself and telling the truth in the systems in which you operate. Right. Truth is how we make that change happen. So I think that's a really beautiful place to bring our time together here to a close. Thank you so much. Friends. We are going to link to your new show, Time Out, a fair play podcast in the show notes, but please let everybody know where they can find you in each of your respective worlds and whatever else you want everybody to know. You can download the Time Out podcast anywhere you listen to your podcasts, and also some of these tools can be found on fair play life dot com and in our Instagram at fair play Life Excellence, so we will make sure to link to all of those ADDI where can people find you when they want to know more about all of your work My website doctor a d D dot com, d r A D I t I dot com or any social platform at doctor a d D near rut Car. Okay, coming up next, your we questions to carry with you and how you can send in your question for us to use on the show. Don't miss that part, friends, We will be right back each week. I leave you with some questions to carry with you until we meet again. It's part of that whole This stuff gets easier with practice. Thing. We covered so many topics and interventions and actions in this episode. I want you to just choose a few things to practice so that you don't get overwhelmed trying to fix your overwhelm. A lot of the imbalance around service and support comes from outdated and deeply entrenched gender and social constructs that have us undervalue service in both the home and the workplace. That doesn't mean there aren't real life, day to day ways you can combat these issues. This week a little inventory. Make a list of all of the things you do to keep things running on the job or in your home. Next, go through and underline some things you'd like help with. It could be domestic chores like laundry and trash, two big points of conflict according to Eve's research, or it could be of a more emotional nature. It's a much bigger assignment to communicate those places where you need help, but identifying the needs is an important first step. That's why we talked about telling yourself the truth is a really important act. Here for ideas on how to communicate those needs. Be sure to check out the podcast Time Out for a detailed discussion of Eve Rodsky's fair play approach to domestic time share. I bet you'll find all of her work useful as we navigate. As they say, these uncertain times, I can't believe I said that phrase these uncertain times either, everybody, So just stick with me. Sorry, sometimes I have to use common phrases. We didn't get a listener question too in this episode, but that doesn't mean we won't do it another time. Even though we've got a lot of questions to work with. I still want your questions. I want to know how to submit your question for me to possibly at us on the air. This show is nothing without your questions. It is literally a Q and a show. You can ask me anything you'd like. Bring me your clinical questions, you're I'm trying to be a good friend, frustrations, the things that scare you. Ask me how to handle that one thing that always leaves you feeling like a deer in the headlights and you really need a script for it. Let's talk it out. Call us at three to three six three three seven six eight and leave a voicemail. If you missed it, you can find that number in the show notes or visit Megan divine dot c O. If you'd rather send an email, you can do that too. Write on the website Megan Divine dot c O. We want to hear from you. This show, this world needs your questions. Together, we can make things better even when we can't make them right. You know how most people are going to scan through their podcast app looking for a new thing. They're going to see the show description for hereafter and think I don't want to talk about that stuff. Well, here's where you come. In your reviews, people know it really isn't all that bad. In here. We talk about heavy stuff, but it's in the service of making things better for everyone. So everyone needs to listen. Spread the word in your workplace, in your social world on social media and click through to leave a review. Subscribe to the show, download episodes, and send in your questions. Want more Here After? Grief education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. Life is full of losses, from everyday disappointments to events that clearly divide life into before and after. Learning how to talk about all that without cliches or platitudes or simplistic think positive posters is an important skill for everyone. Find trainings, workshops, books and resources for every human trying to make their way in the world after something goes horribly wrong at Megan Divine dot c. O. Hereafter with Megan Divine is written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Tanya Ujas and Elizabeth Fasio, edited by Houston Tilly, and studio support by Chris Urn. Music provided by Wave Crush god Lord. That was like pulling pulling teeth today with my ability to enunciate goodness. There were a lot of big words alright, Piece

This is here After, and I'm your host, Megan Divine. Each week we tackle big questions from doctors, nurses, and other helpful folks that let us explore how to show up after life goes horribly wrong. This week, it's all about reclaiming your time in your family system and out in the wider world with Eve Rodsky and doctor Aditya Rukar, hosts of the new show Time Out, a fair play podcast. We'll be right back after this first break. Before we get started, one quick note, While I hope you find a lot of useful information in our time here together, this show is not a substitute for skilled support with a licensed mental health provider or for professional supervision related to your work friends. So I would say that the number one question I get for the show is some variation of how do I manage to be a good fill in the blank when I'm handling multiple losses and stressors in my own life? So that blank is usually filled in with therapist, nurse, partner, parent care provider, hairgiver. Burnout is a massive topic and addressing it is one of the core goals of this show. So this week I invited two special guests to come dive into this topic with me from two different angles. Eve Rodsky is a New York Times bestselling author and the creator of fair Play, a step by step approach that helps partners rebalance their domestic workloads. Dr ADITYA Rukar is an internal medicine physician, public health expert, and medical correspondent with an expertise in stress, resilience and mental health. Together, even Adity hosts the new show Time Out, a fair Play podcast which maps the ways caregivers can reclaim their time inside families and other systems that often invalidate women's contributions. Now. You don't need to be female or identify as a woman to listen to this particular episode, but we do explore a largely gendered social construct around caregiving. If the genders and the pronouns don't reflect your life, hopefully the concepts beneath them will. If you're a caregiver in an a capacity, this conversation will leave you with both validation of how hard this all is and give you some tools to help you both deliver and receive the support you most need now. Content note here there is a lot of information in this show. It's sort of a hazard of having brilliant people on his guests. They have a lot of things that they want to share with you, but don't worry about following every single detail. We're going to summarize it at the end and make sure you have places to go for more detail in the show notes. It's going to be a great episode with lots of useful insights. So let's get right into it with my friends, Eve and add I am so glad to have you both in the Zoom Zudio studio. Zoom Studio. That's what I'm gonna start saying. Anyway, I'm really glad you're here. Thanks for having us, Megan, We're so happy to be here. It's the one big happy, I heart family right now. Okay, So we have a lot of things to get into today, so I want to jump right into it, if that's okay with you. Yeah, okay. So one of the things that I love about you both, both you individually and both of you together is the way you sort of turn on the black light around issues of gender and service. If you think about the way that we care for others, whether personally or professionally, how does gender play into that. It is the dirty little secret I think, Megan, the intersects our work with yours, that caregiving um our. Entire society has been built on the backs of the unpaid labor of women. And I do think that maybe this is the one silver lining or a silver lining of the great disruption we just went through, which is that burnout and especially on women, is something I don't think in longer be ignored, and no longer do I think it can be fixed by a walk around the block or, as one woman said to me, gratitude journaling herself to death. Uh. We have to start looking at this idea of you know, self help as mutual aid. What does it look like to live in connected communities that actually care about each other. That's going to be translating all the way from the work Addy and I do with agency for empowering people in their personal agency, but also in how we communicate and connect as a as a society as well. Add where does that intersection of gender and service show up for you? You know, Megan, so much of Eve's work really resonates with me first as a working mom, and when we think about women who are physicians or caregivers, any type of caregiver, we also wear so many different hats, right, Like we are parents, spouses, siblings, daughters, and so much of our work, whether we do it in a professional space or personal spaces, caregiving and often caregiving of any form false to women, even in medicine, and particularly for me as a working woman, working mother living through the pandemic and seeing what's happened with burnout and st us and mental health from the perspective of a physician who specializes in these things, there's so much synergy between Eve's work in the gender division of labor and how to find parity and equity in the home to how that translates into the workplace. Yeah, and and all of that begins with really hard conversations, not with the practice of gratitude or taking a walk, Like I love that you brought that up, that like, we can't self care our way out of this. We couldn't self care our way out of this, like before the pandemic or as you called it, the big disruption, Like these are systemic fault lines that have been around for a very long time. And I think you know, one of the things that the pandemic experience has done is really exposed those fault lines like, we can't pretend we don't see them anymore, not in our professional lives and not in our personal lives. Oh yeah, those cracks are are there. They're they're not unfearable anymore. As you said, the term that I think, indeed and I like the most for this dir Little Secret care is invisible work. In n This term was coined invisible work. That the work of caregiving, the hard, hard work of of raising a society. The social contract falls on women's shoulders, and it's invisible and it will always remain invisible because women do it. I do think as we enter the twenties, we will, as you said, Megan, have have this heightened awareness that women's time is considered by society is infinite like sand. It's our most valuable currency, and we're taught from births to give it away to others for free. And what happens to our mental and physical health when we continue to do that? Whereas men's time, men's time in our society has been historically viewed as diamonds. It's finite. All you have to do is call fifty schools like I did for my research and fair play and asked, why do you call women when kids are sick to pick them up, and you'll understand how men's time is guarded. Yeah, there's this idea that the woman or the identified caregiver in those domestic partnerships, like they can drop anything at any time and go serve and serve and serve and show up. I know that your research shows that women's shoulder two thirds or more of unpaid domestic work and child care for their homes and families, and like that. I love like same ship, different decades. Like I start thinking like same ship, different century, right, Like you think about Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass, Like why could the white man go to the woods and write his beautiful things that everybody quotes. Well, it's because he had his wife and his daughter coming in doing his laundry and feeding him and making sure that he was like not going off the deep end like women have always done invisible labor. And and we can't really put that back in the box once it starts to go out. I mean, we could go on total tangents here about like why we oppress and repress women so much because the power of women it's so threatening, it needs to be bottled up and stuffed away and suppressed, like bring on my undergraduate degree. But what I want to do is get into a listener question, because it really is that that invisible labor that shows up in daily life, but also when loss and grief of any kind erupts into the domestic sphere. So you're ready for the first listener question. We're ready. Okay, that's roll. So this question is from a person grieving the loss of a family member, and they said, my dad died in an accident a little less than a year ago. It's been hard on all of us, but not exactly equally hard. I'm the fixer in my family, meaning I'm the one who makes things happen. I'm the one figuring out the finances and cleaning out my dad's house. You talk a lot about letting grief take up all the space it needs, but how can I do that when I'm the one holding the world together for everyone else. I've got all of the end of life details to work through, plus my kids feelings around the loss of their granddad to manage, and lunch is still need to be made, the dog needs to be walked, and I have a full time job. Something's got to give. But I don't see what can change. So I think you can see why why I chose this question for you. I've had lots of patients in this exact scenario where they are managing the loss of an elderly relative, usually apparent they have other siblings, many of whom are local, that they shoulder the burden of end of life care as well as tying up all loose ends after the death. This is a tough one. It's unfortunately all too common. Particularly I'm assuming, and I please correct me if I'm wrong that the listener who wrote that question isn't is a woman. We all have roles within our family structure, and since birth or early childhood, we're defined in a certain way in families. Grief is a complicated process, and Megan, you really dive into this in your podcast and in your work as a psychotherapist. No two people grieve the same way, No two families grieve the same way. So it's highly personal, highly individualistic, and and it's complicated, messy, and can also be very painful and difficult. Very few families and patients that I've taken care of come from families where the grieving process is this kumbaya moment. We've talked about fault lines before. A lot of these Achilles heels of families. Once that matriarch or patriarch passes on, all of those achilles heels become major at the forefront issues. And for this particular reader, first I just want to say that you are not alone. I have had thousands and thousands of patients who have felt the same way. It is normal for you to feel a sense of overwhelm because you are managing an abnormal situation, so you are having a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. The first is to understand that you can't do it alone, and it's not a sign of weakness or vulnerability to say that I need help. And if you can't rely on your family members or next can to help you, then there are professional services to do that. Anything you can outsource. Try to outsource. Have someone come into your home to help with lunches, Have your spouse help make lunches. Forget the laundry, let it pile up for a little bit. Relax your standards of what you used to do and what you were like prior to this event that's really shaken your family. And once you outsource a lot of those things and try to hire some professional help you create a little bit more space for yourself. So it's difficult to create space and chaos when all of the walls are collapsing on top of you. So if you can outsource a little bit more, you can create some space, and then what you do with that base is so important. You know, many of us under periods of stress, we scroll through Instagram, or we just get into these habits and patterns that are quite destructive and certainly not beneficial for our mental health. So when you create that space for your particular reader, do something that feeds your soul. You know, maybe you can in time with your loved ones. I really believe in the therapy of a twenty minute walk every day to clear your head, to create some structure around your day. There are so many ways that you could try to lessen the burden of what you're feeling. And without going too long, I will finally say that the analogy I like to use when someone's under a stressful situation is the idea of a tea kettle. We are all tea kettles during stress. We all think we can change the heat of the moment, like dial down the heat and it will get better and the water will kind of cool off and become tepid. But unfortunately, life happens and you can't always dial down the temperature of external events. There's many ways in the doing that we can manage our stress in our day to day small incremental changes that can open that lever to release the steam, and that alone can be very therapeutic. I love that you brought up that last piece because I think one of the things that can happen when you're in that overwhelmed I'm doing this really emotional thing and I'm also in charge of making sure this family keeps is like, oh great, self care is one more thing I have to do. But one of the important pieces of what you just said was this isn't about at a twenty minute walk in to solve this problem or on top of everything else you're doing. It's first we need to have a conversation about where can you share this load, whether that is bringing somebody in outside the family or reconfiguring things within your family units so that you do have more space, and then you get to make some informed choices for yourself inside that space and figuring out how to have those conversations about who does what in a family system and this is really your deal house. Yeah, I started off trying to understand what was happening to women. What that has done for me over ten years is it allowed me to understand family systems like this and to say, Okay, how do you make your decisions. Let's pretend our home is our most important organization and this person's decisions with her parents is the most important thing that that person in their family structure is dealing with right now. The only way that you can actually move forward with a mental space, which is structured decision making. And so what I mean by that, as as a d D said, we don't care who's doing the execution, whether again you're able and have the privileged outsource, or whether it's two people in your family with the understanding that the execution is that what we're talking about here, what we're talking about as the cognitive labor, the thinking, the planning, the monitoring. There is no excuse for all of that to follow one person. What ends up happening is the gendered assumptions come back in. You start saying, well, in the time it takes me to tell him her, they what to do I should do it myself, and you end up in the same terrible patterns of resentment and rage on repeat. The only way to break that cycle is to start understanding that within the specific tasks of the home, when you hold the conception, planning, execution together, that ownership mindset is how you break the cycle of rage and resentment of having to hold all of those cognitive labor tasks in one mind, which can literally bring you down. My bet is that that dynamic of the woman in this family, the person who asked the question, that that assumption presumption mom takes care of all of the planning and the organization and understanding why the item is important to do and making sure it gets done on time and in the right order that existed way before this death intersected with this family, Right, Like, these are not yeah, I mean these are These are not systems that arrive along with the death. These are systems that crack, right, And I love actually thinking about like that idea of invisible labor. We think about like, oh, right, the women's work as a service provider in and out of the home is the invisible part. But it can be invisible to the woman in this question as well, right, Like, we don't really realize how much work we do until we suddenly can't do the work for whatever reason, Like when the caregiver breaks even the care ever starts to see the sort of breadth of everything they've been holding together, and there is often that sort of breaking point where they like, I can't do this anymore, like even if I wanted to, I can't do it. And so what I love about sort of applying the work that both of you do to this sort of there's been a death space is we're talking about ways to start working with your family dynamics so that during this time of crisis or tragedy, when there's something really big spiking. It isn't just a quote unquote solution for this, but this is really a way to evaluate how does this family work? And how can I start claiming my time back? Going back to what you said a DT, like, when I can start claiming a little bit of time back, then I can make informed choices about what life do I want for myself. You know what's so fascinating about the intersection of my work and Eave's work is Eve is so brilliant in thinking about systems and the larger societal forces at play, and my background as a clin mission is thinking about the individual biology. Right. So, for this particular reader, she's under a period of stress, active acute stress, but has had chronic stress for a long time that she hasn't fully recognized or come to terms with because she's always been the caregiver and always been the primary caregiver and her role in the family, and she likely has a very high level of highly functioning stress. She is doing so many things as we know many caregivers do. Caregivers stress is a real entity. It is something that we do not talk about enough. If there is a silver lining of this pandemic is that mental health has come to the forefront caregivers as an entity, and the needs of caregivers has really come to the forefront. We need to work with our biology, not against it, if we want change to happen. And you can't fill someone else's cup unless your cup is full. So the reason that the biology of stress is so important in this particular scenario is because she is highly stressed. In addition to managing a stressful situation, she's already running on fumes and so reclaiming her time creating and carving out a space is a way for her to truly equilibrate within, to bring her biology back to baseline, out of that fight or flight state, back into that rest and digest state. And we have to flip the switch. We can flip the switch through incremental changes in our daily lives. And I think that's where the secret sauces between eaves work and my work is first the understanding that they can make a change, why it's important to make a change, and then giving them the tools to actually make that change happen in their lives, both for themselves and their families. All Right, we'll be right back after award from these sponsors. Friends, I'm talking with Evrodsky and dr Adina Rukar. Before the break, we were talking about women and grief in their personal lives and that overwhelm of stress. So we've got like the big arc of gender constructs and how they do a disservice to women and any genders in the world, how they do damage to the ways that we care for ourselves and care for each other. We've been talking about brain things and like there's there's so much in there and what I want for people to take from this part of our time together is not, oh my gosh, I have to become an expert in all of these things in order to survive this thing that I'm currently living through. No no, no, no, no no no. Like I don't know, I don't. I don't want our conversation to to add to that, but that there is a lot of research out there in a lot of different areas that really speaks to this deeply gendered imbalance that shows up in so many different parts of life, both the professional sphere and the personal sphere. So what I want people to to hear here is that, as you said a DT like, you're not alone if you're wrestling with this stuff, if you've been feeling burned out and overwhelmed and irritated, either in your home life or in your professional life, and the pandemic has brought up a lot of stuff, a lot of losses certainly that have caused those existing fault lines to erupt, And this is a really good time to talk about what are some actual steps the person in this first listener question might take. Knowing that they probably don't have the bandwidth to do a full deconstruct of the systems in their life. What are some things that they might be able to do to help themselves in this moment start to move towards a more equitable time share in their home life. Well, the good news is we've done it for them, so that here is the one oh one. We have tools, definitely, we have tools. And the other good news is that the data shows that there's actually a secret formula. Megan, I love a formula. It's an important Again, as Megan was qualifying that the you know we're going dark to go light here, the first half of the show was you're not alone. That that's what we're telling you, not that you have to solve this, but that you are not alone. This is not a you problem. Private lives are public troubles. That's what c Right Mills says, one of my favorite sociologists in the twentieth century. So here's the secret formula. It's really a combination of boundaries, systems, and communication. And so if I could just give one line for each one, the boundary is we have no excuse anymore to value women's time and to allow them to choose what they do with their time. There's no excuses that your partner would have four hours to check a power point and work out, and you're in service of your family until your head hits the pillow two hours after they are sleeping. There's just no excuses. We're entering the no excuse so and there's too many systems, there's too many tools out there, there's too many people to support you in living in that space. And so that's a true boundary of true boundaries, we said, even though it starts with self care, and we don't have anything againstaking walk around the block. That's a starting point, but that's not what a boundary is. A boundary is believing your time is diamonds, believing you deserve time, choice and how you use your day, and making sure that you have the adequate support to assert that your time is diamonds. And you're not going to be the one picking up your child from school, even if your job is more flexible, even if you make less money than your partner, even if you believe you're a better multitasker, even if you believe in the time it takes you to tell the other person what to do, you should do it yourself. Those are all toxic messages that we have no excuse to retire that's a boundary. A system is, as we said earlier, structured decision making. Don't be afraid of systems. It's just asking questions, Hey, why don't we like think about how do we create more time and efficiency so we're not living in overwhelming boredom. Maybe that means we should make some decisions in a van so we're not struggling with who's taking the dog out? Maybe you do full dog days Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I'll do the other days and we'll try that out. Let's see how that works. So the ownership mindset, that's that's the system. And then the third is this communication, which comprises two parts self talk, which is what we just said, the burning of guilt and shame, the belief you deserve equal time choice as the people around you. And then how you communicate what you need to those around you. And that often is the hardest step, Megan, because as you know, with grief, this idea of how do you articulate these things of such again a combination of rage and sadness and the lack of hope, and those are hard things. When you're in that space, emotion is high and cognition is low, and so it's very hard to get out of that space. So if there are times and emotion is high cognition is low, that's often not the right time to commune. Kate, write it down, come back later when your emotion is low and your cognition is high, and I'm sure Duty will have things to add to those three frameworks. I love those three frameworks. It's so clear to me when you share your formulas. It's like, yes, Aha, of course I love what you said, Megan. I don't want that person or anyone who's in a similar boat to think, oh, I need to be an expert, I need to have figured it all out, because just having that awareness that, oh, wait a second, I think I'm in trouble, you're already halfway there. So for this particular reader or a listener, you know, the person who wrote the question. For this particular person, what I would first say to them is gentle, gentle dental, Please be gentle with yourself. Protect your sleep. It's something that is we overlook but sleep as a therapeutic intervention. Someone who is going through grief and mental health struggles, who feels like the walls are caving in typically sleep is one of the first things that's impacted. So fragmented sleep, lots of awakenings during the night. People are staying up late, trying to burn the midnight oil, trying to finish all of the tasks of the day. As this person has suggested, there's just a sense of overwhelmed. So protect and prioritize your sleep. It has incredible brain benefits, body benefits, and impacts every cell, oregon, and tissue in the body. So protecting sleep as a therapeutic intervention is really important and there are many ways to do that. The second is to potentially seek some professional counseling and therapy for this particular person, not for everyone, but for this person as a way to air out some of those grievances and challenges. If someone is in a role of caregiver in the family, they're always on and they are the ones that everyone comes to, so they hold a lot of the families challenges, struggles, secrets, and they need some respite to ill. Timately, we're not bionic, we're mere mortals. I know many caregivers feel like they're bionic, but we are all frail mortals and we need an outlet. So that would be an important suggestion and tip for this reader. And then the third would be to find, particularly for this reader, find outlets that bring joy and a sense of lightness. COVID. The pandemic and the public health challenges of it have been heavy and weighing us down. We also know that seventy of the workforce has at least one feature of burnout. We in our field in medicine, we've always known that mental health has been a major issue, but it's you know, now much more of an issue that everyone understands. It's considered the shadow pandemic, and so finding ways to bring that sense of joy which might seem very frivolous. That we're joy might sound frivolous, but it has deep clinical benefits for the brain and the body, and there are many ways to bring that joy. We talk about this in our podcast, the concrete Ways to bring joy when you are really in the ship, because in many ways, we're all in this ship in some form or the other right now, year three of the pandemic. I love that we keep coming back to the things that are broken now. We're broken before the pandemic, and what the pandemic has done is really made us as a culture, I think, unwilling to pretend that what's broken isn't broken, right. I love that kind of the core of what both of you just shared, those three action steps that you each shared, Like the thing that they have in common, at least to my mind, is telling the truth. Right that there is power in telling the truth. It's not a solution for all the systems that are broken. It's not a solution for grief. It's not a solution for health care system breakdown and burnout and all of the things that spiral out from the undervaluing of service and labor. But telling the truth is one of the most revolutionary acts we can do, I think, and that means telling the truth to yourself and telling the truth in the systems in which you operate. Right. Truth is how we make that change happen. So I think that's a really beautiful place to bring our time together here to a close. Thank you so much. Friends. We are going to link to your new show, Time Out, a fair play podcast in the show notes, but please let everybody know where they can find you in each of your respective worlds and whatever else you want everybody to know. You can download the Time Out podcast anywhere you listen to your podcasts, and also some of these tools can be found on fair play life dot com and in our Instagram at fair play Life Excellence, so we will make sure to link to all of those ADDI where can people find you when they want to know more about all of your work My website doctor a d D dot com, d r A D I t I dot com or any social platform at doctor a d D near rut Car. Okay, coming up next, your we questions to carry with you and how you can send in your question for us to use on the show. Don't miss that part, friends, We will be right back each week. I leave you with some questions to carry with you until we meet again. It's part of that whole This stuff gets easier with practice. Thing. We covered so many topics and interventions and actions in this episode. I want you to just choose a few things to practice so that you don't get overwhelmed trying to fix your overwhelm. A lot of the imbalance around service and support comes from outdated and deeply entrenched gender and social constructs that have us undervalue service in both the home and the workplace. That doesn't mean there aren't real life, day to day ways you can combat these issues. This week a little inventory. Make a list of all of the things you do to keep things running on the job or in your home. Next, go through and underline some things you'd like help with. It could be domestic chores like laundry and trash, two big points of conflict according to Eve's research, or it could be of a more emotional nature. It's a much bigger assignment to communicate those places where you need help, but identifying the needs is an important first step. That's why we talked about telling yourself the truth is a really important act. Here for ideas on how to communicate those needs. Be sure to check out the podcast Time Out for a detailed discussion of Eve Rodsky's fair play approach to domestic time share. I bet you'll find all of her work useful as we navigate. As they say, these uncertain times, I can't believe I said that phrase these uncertain times either, everybody, So just stick with me. Sorry, sometimes I have to use common phrases. We didn't get a listener question too in this episode, but that doesn't mean we won't do it another time. Even though we've got a lot of questions to work with. I still want your questions. I want to know how to submit your question for me to possibly at us on the air. This show is nothing without your questions. It is literally a Q and a show. You can ask me anything you'd like. Bring me your clinical questions, you're I'm trying to be a good friend, frustrations, the things that scare you. Ask me how to handle that one thing that always leaves you feeling like a deer in the headlights and you really need a script for it. Let's talk it out. Call us at three to three six three three seven six eight and leave a voicemail. If you missed it, you can find that number in the show notes or visit Megan divine dot c O. If you'd rather send an email, you can do that too. Write on the website Megan Divine dot c O. We want to hear from you. This show, this world needs your questions. Together, we can make things better even when we can't make them right. You know how most people are going to scan through their podcast app looking for a new thing. They're going to see the show description for hereafter and think I don't want to talk about that stuff. Well, here's where you come. In your reviews, people know it really isn't all that bad. In here. We talk about heavy stuff, but it's in the service of making things better for everyone. So everyone needs to listen. Spread the word in your workplace, in your social world on social media and click through to leave a review. Subscribe to the show, download episodes, and send in your questions. Want more Here After? Grief education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. Life is full of losses, from everyday disappointments to events that clearly divide life into before and after. Learning how to talk about all that without cliches or platitudes or simplistic think positive posters is an important skill for everyone. Find trainings, workshops, books and resources for every human trying to make their way in the world after something goes horribly wrong at Megan Divine dot c. O. Hereafter with Megan Divine is written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Tanya Ujas and Elizabeth Fasio, edited by Houston Tilly, and studio support by Chris Urn. Music provided by Wave Crush god Lord. That was like pulling pulling teeth today with my ability to enunciate goodness. There were a lot of big words alright, Piece