[LISA LEWIS] The Am I Ok? Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith Fringes, the Holistic Counseling Podcast, and Beta Male Revolution, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast, where you will discover that being highly sensitive is something to embrace and it’s actually a gift you bring to the world. We will learn together how to take ownership of your high sensitivity, so you can make positive changes in your life, in the lives of others, and it’s totally okay to feel this way. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. I’m so glad you’re here for the journey. [LISA] Welcome to today’s episode of the Am I Ok? Podcast. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. Thank you so much for tuning in. I would like to remind my listeners that I offer a free eight-week email course titled highly sensitive people. My email course provides weekly tools that help you feel more whole in a world that isn’t exactly made for us. And I show you how your sensitivity can be seen as unique gifts and how many others are just like you. To find out more about my email course, please go to my website, amIokpodcast.com. Today, I have a very special guest on the show and I’m very honored to have him on Joe Sanok, the author of Thursday is the New Friday, a TEDx speaker, consultant, and top podcaster with over 600 interviews. He has expertise in brain optimization, slowing down to spark innovation and the four-day workweek. He is also the person along with his extraordinary marketing team to helped me launch my podcast. Welcome to the show, Joe. [JOE SANOK] Lisa, I am so excited to be here with you, [LISA] So excited to have you here too. It’s really an honor to have you on and to give back what you have given to me. So I’m very touched by that. [JOE] Yes. To be here and just see all that you’ve made with the show and to really have aligned with kind of the work that you’ve done and who you are as a person, it’s just awesome to see it all come together. [LISA] Thank you. So I want to ask you, as I ask all of my guests on the show, do you consider yourself a highly sensitive person? And if so, can you just share a little story about that? [JOE] I do not consider myself a highly sensitive person. I’m a sensitive dad and a sensitive guy. Like I cry at movies, way more than most people, but I definitely think that my oldest daughter has highly sensitive tendencies and it’s really just like to know that that’s okay and that the world needs people like that. She has a really strong startle reflex and is very in tune with the environment of, “Hey, can we turn the music down or can we change the lighting in here?” I mean, she’s 10 years old and she’s already feeling like she doesn’t need permission to say, this is how I want my environment to be. And then us as, me and the two girls as a family to then decide like, well, does that work for everyone and how do we negotiate that? And I think that it’s just interesting to watch your kids have different personalities. I don’t quite yet know with my seven year old where she’s at with it, but she’s really good at kind of be more introverted and asking for, not asking for, saying that she’s going to just go read a book or go take some alone time. So both my kids seem really in tune with what their individual needs are around sensitivity. So at this point I don’t feel like I necessarily have to label them highly sensitive, but they definitely have sensitivities. [LISA] Thank you for sharing that. And I know we touched upon that in another episode that we did together. So let’s shift gears and talk about you and what you’re really here for. Can you talk about how the week as we know it was made up and how has it changed and how do you see it as your perspective? [JOE] Yes, so this book, Thursday is the New Friday that I’ve written, I put together kind of the whole proposal, Harper Collins bought it. And then when I started to write it, I thought I want to just start with kind of a blank slate as if I’m approaching this idea from scratch. And I thought, well, what would I want to know about kind of the four-day workweek that would fill in some of the gaps? One of the big questions I asked myself was where did the seven day week even come from? Where did the 40-hour week come from? Because I thought if we can know, is this really normal and unchangeable, well then that’s a different conversation about kind of changing things than if this is maybe a little newer. So to know where the seven day week came from, we have to go back about 4,000 years to the Babylonians. So the Babylonians looked up and they saw the sun and the moon, they looked down and they saw the earth. They saw mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter. Those were the seven brightest things they saw. So they said we should have a seven day week. The Egyptians had an eight day week. The Romans had a 10 day week. Like we just as easily, could have had a five day week and had 73 of them in a year. There’s nothing in nature that points to a seven-day week. So even just starting from that point that we made this up, the power brokers of Babylon thousands of years ago made up the seven day week. This thing that feels unchangeable was just made up by somebody back in the past. So then let’s fast forward to the late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds. The average person was working 10 to 14 hours a day, six to seven days a week. They were working a farmer’s schedule without even being farmers at times. So the average person was just working all the time. So then in 1926, Henry Ford comes along and he says, we’re going to have a 40-hour work week here at Ford with the belief that his workers then would buy cars from him because they don’t necessarily want to get to work faster, but they would want to get to their weekend faster. They would want to enjoy that weekend more by having a car and it worked. And then the 40-hour work week started to take off. But again, this thing that feels so solid to us, the 40-hour work week actually is something someone created less than a hundred years ago. So then fast forward to the pandemic of 2020 and 2021. We have this global experiment around work and how we work. And we all see that, that industrial model of just having butts in the chair, 40-hours a week, doing things a specific way, just no longer works for us. So as the post pandemic generation or almost post pandemic generation, we get to decide for this window of opportunity, how we want to change things to say, did this old industrialist model work for us? Is our health outcomes where we want them? Are we spending the amount of time with our friends and our family in the way that we want? Or is there a better way that we can actually do this? [LISA] And how did you come up with four days, like maybe three days compared to five days? [JOE] So a lot of the research is starting to point towards the four-day workweek being that next step. I don’t necessarily believe that we’re going to say this is the end point. I mean, in the same way that Henry Ford, he switched things and then things switched over and then we’re switching things, we may in a hundred years or in 50 years say what, that four-day work week that just doesn’t work. We need to move to a three-day work week. But when I think about what’s a step that seems reasonable well, Friday is already a half work day. You know, people throw birthday parties then, it’s when they throw baby showers, it’s when they do cheesy team building activities at work. It’s just a day that people aren’t getting as much done as they are on say a Monday. So to just say, we’re going to call this what it is, it’s been a part of the weekend in a number of ways for quite a period of time. So then when we say let’s take that next step into it, the new model, the post industrialist model, isn’t saying, here’s the one blueprint that works for everyone. Instead, it’s saying, what’s that next step that we can experiment with? What data do we want to collect? And then how are we going to adjust and adapt that to different environments? Because there’s going to be different needs. Like an IT team can’t just say peace out, business. If you’re locked out of your password on Friday, you don’t get to get into the computer till Monday. They’re going to have to troubleshoot in a different way compared to say, if a therapist wants to just work a four-day week. So there has to be that flexibility and that experimental mindset that is shifting away from that kind of one size fits all industrialist mindset. [LISA] I was with you because you’re sharing that I was thinking about as I was growing up, a I think I’m much older than you. I remember my parents, the motto was working for the weekend. So I was thinking about that as you are sharing about just that five day work week. [JOE] Yes. So many people live that way where they’re burned out throughout the week and then maybe they get Friday night as sort of a sense of relief. They get Saturday and then by Sunday morning, they’re already thinking about Monday. And even the way that most people now are living their Saturdays they’re running to soccer practice, they’re caught in traffic, they’re getting groceries done. They’re just barely kind of getting by. And it’s reactionary to what life is throwing at them versus being intentional and saying, what do I actually want to get out of my weekend? What to me is good pacing for me and for my family? And that may not be being involved in soccer, that may not be being involved in gymnastics and a musical instrument and the boy Scouts. I mean, maybe your family needs to say on Saturday mornings, we’re going to chill out a little bit. [LISA] And that leads me to my next question. You argue that slowing down actually boost productivity. Can you tell us more about the brain research and give us some examples about that? [JOE] Yes. So when we look at the research, we want to look at kind of the macro side of it, so having the three-day weekend, but then the micro side of having micro breaks even within our week. So the Iceland study came out just about a month ago that looked at 2,500 people in Iceland that worked a four-day work week. So that was actually a 32-hour week. They didn’t cram 40-hours into four days. They saw a boost in productivity, boost in health outcomes and boosts and happiness from that. So we continue to see this be true in a number of other places and businesses that are implementing it. Like Kickstarter in 2022 has announced that they’re going to be testing the four-day work week. We see the other countries like Spain, Portugal and New Zealand are testing it out. And there’s places that have done it for a really long period of time. A case study that I talked about is Kalamazoo Valley Community College. It’s in Southwest Michigan, this guy, Ted Forester, he’s an HVAC instructor there, so he’s teaching heating and cooling in buildings. He noticed that on Fridays, there were very few students in a KVCC. So he took this to the board, he ran the numbers and he said, here’s how many millions of dollars we would save if we just had a four-day work week in the summertime. And for years now, they’ve had a four-day workweek and in addition to saving that millions of dollars, they’re finding that people are staying there longer so they’re not having to replace staff. The students are happier and doing better because they can come into the office earlier or later throughout the week. And then they still get that on the cake of the, of the AC units and the money that’s saved there. But then there’s also a lot of research around micro breaks and even just how we can work differently when we are working. And I think this is the part that’s often overlooked, especially in the discussion of the four-day work week. Because it’s one thing to just say, this is just the scheduling thing, but I would say it’s actually more of a posture towards life thing where we aren’t just saying we’re going to overwork all the time and we’re going to undervalue life. It’s saying, well, we need to have some balance here. So at University of Illinois, they just studied vigilance decrement. So vigilance how well you pay attention to something, decrement meaning breaking down over time. So the idea is that when you start a task by the end of that difficult task, you’ll probably be paying attention worse than you did at the beginning. So the idea is that you’re kind of pouring out a glass of water of your energy as you’re going through. I mean, this is, especially for your audience, Lisa, a really great thing to learn because energy levels and being sensitive and being drained by certain lighting or environments can be really tough for HSPs. So then what they did is they had students come in and they gave them a random four digit number, say it was 4, 3, 1, 2. So they had them sit at a computer and for about an hour, every time 4, 3, 1, 2 came up on their screen, they’re supposed to hit a button. So all these other random four digit numbers would come up there on the screen, on the screen, oh, there’s my number, they hit the button, just sit there, super boring task. So what they saw was vigilance decrement. At the end of the study, they did worse at identifying their number than they had at the beginning of the study. But then the second part of the study, they brought in students exact same set up, four digit number, push the button, sit here for about an hour. But at the one-third mark, they interrupted that task and they gave them a one minute break. So this one minute break wasn’t on screens. It wasn’t on their phone. It was just, “Hey, go sit in the lobby for a minute. We got to switch you over to a different computer. We’ve got to do something. Here’s the one minute break.” Came back to the middle third of the study, gave another one minute break and then came back into the last third of the study. At the end of that period of time, they saw there was no vigilance decrement, meaning they paid attention just as well at the end of the study as they did at the beginning. So even seeing that just two, one minute breaks over an hour period of time can be enough to reset the brain. So why is that? And when we think about how the brain has evolved, it’s still really old. Technology has really kind of outpaced the evolution of our brain. So imagine thousands of years ago, you’re walking through the jungle, you’ve been told that there’s a tiger there, you haven’t seen a tiger in 20 years. You haven’t seen tiger. There hasn’t been fur. No one you know has seen this tiger. It’s not in your evolutionary interest to stay hypervigilant for a tiger. You’re going to go get water for your kids. You’re going to take care of your kids. You’re going to do other things. Bbut say yesterday, your best friend said, oh my gosh, I saw a tiger. It chased me. I got away. It was this heroic escape. You’re going to be more vigilant towards tigers in that area. And the same sort of thing happens when we step away from difficult work. Our brain resets in a way where it can then re-engage in being vigilant. So when we have these really tough tasks, taking those micro breaks is almost as important as having that long weekend. [LISA] Well, that is this fascinating. I just love the history and the research that you’re providing behind this. I hear it as a movement to the post-pandemic generation movement. [JOE] Absolutely. Even at the end of the book, I have a manifesto of Thursday is the New Friday manifesto. And I see it as, not me necessarily being the leader of this. I’m not the Henry Ford, but I’m adding to the conversation. There’s lots of people that have been pushing for the four-day workweek for years. But I think we live in a unique time and we have a unique opportunity to really step back and say, did we really even believe that we were just, you know hours in the chair is the best key performance indicator in business? We don’t think about people in that way. We know they’re diverse. We know that they’re different. We don’t think of them as machines, but yet our school systems, our workplaces, so many of the things still have that fingerprint of the industrialists. And we have the chance right now to say to ourselves, do we want that to continue? I mean, I think imagine if we stepped back and we said, let’s be intentional about how our weekends look, but what feels best for you as an HSP and me as someone that wants to be in nature and for my daughter who wants to not have anything to startle her, how would our lives be different if we had that extra day to get some things done, to pace things at a pace that felt like it matched the neuro sinking of our brain, instead of just reacting to the stress and reacting to the expectations other people give us and reacting to what we think we’re supposed to do versus stepping back and saying, no, I’m going to be intentional about how I live my life and live my business and live my work life and make sure that aligns with what my needs are as an individual person. [LISA] Wow. That’s so powerful. And I just want to just shift to like highly sensitive persons. I know that you you’re not highly sensitive, but I’m wondering what are some of the benefits that a highly sensitive person can benefit from, from working a four-day work week instead of a five day work week? [JOE] So when we think about what it takes to do a four-day work week there’s kind of two sides of it. If someone’s more of an entrepreneur, if they moved to a four-day work week, what they’re doing for themselves is they have to start setting boundaries and bookends to save themselves, okay, work is done now. I’m going to tell myself that enough is enough. I’ve done a great job this week, and I’m going to turn it off. Because most entrepreneur types like you and me, Lisa, we have so many ideas. And it’s really a matter of saying, how do I capture those ideas and then reign them in and then work on them during an appropriate time. On the other side, we have people that work for someone else and that’s much different. It’s not going to be that your boss is just giving you all these ideas. It’s going to be, you kind of got to get some buy-in there. So what would that represent if you had a boss that said, yes, let’s experiment with what a four-day work week would look like let’s look at what your key performance indicators are, and let’s do a two or three month experiment. Let’s analyze this, let’s change things, let’s adapt things. To me that kind of boss or supervisor is going to be the kind of person that a highly sensitive person wants to have. It’s someone that shows that they’re adaptable, that they don’t think like an industrialist, that they don’t see people as machines that you just plug in. Whereas if you go to your supervisor and say, I just read this book, Thursday is the New Friday, I think that we could implement a four-day workweek and do a test around it and that boss says, no, there’s no way. That’s revealing something to you about kind of the flexibility or lack thereof. And that’s honestly why we’re seeing this great resignation, is that so many people are saying, I’m realizing I’m working for an industrialist. I’m working for someone that’s not flexible, that sees me as a machine. They want to plug me in and have me do the data entry, or do the accounting, or do whatever it is without that flexibility that most people really want that they’re now realizing. [LISA] I wish that we had more time just to keep asking more questions because I have a lot more questions and I know that we are running out of time. So I would like to ask my last question, and then also, I also want you to let the listeners know how to get your book, what is the most important thing you want listeners to know? [JOE] I would say that we, as a society have bought into the myth that if we work harder, we’re going to get better outcomes. And actually, if we slow down, that’s when our biggest creativity, that’s when our most productivity comes out. It doesn’t have to be something huge. It can be something as small as saying this coming weekend, I’m going to add something and I’m going to remove something. I’m going to add something in that’s going to give me more life. I’m going to give myself permission to spend two hours reading that book that’s been sitting on my nightstand forever. I’m going to give myself permission to have a glass of wine outside with my friend, or to remove something from your weekend to say I’m scheduled with that friend again, that every time I leave hanging out with them, I feel like trash. And they’re just a toxic friend. I give you permission to cancel that date. Maybe it’s having your groceries delivered, and you’re going to remove that from your schedule. When we slowly add something and remove something from our schedule over time, it shows us the kind of life we actually can live. And that’s, to me what’s most inspiring is to say, we get to define life that we live. We get to decide how work is going to be, and we can push against kind of what society has handed us and say, we’re going to reinvent this. [LISA] Well, I totally agree with that and I just hear just taking a step back, looking at your life, take an inventory what’s working, what’s not working and see what you can add or delete or shift or change to make it more purposeful or more fulfilling. [JOE] Yes. It’s so amazing to see when clients or businesses start to enact this, how they start to say to themselves, like why did we ever do it that old way? [LISA] Yes. So how can listeners get a hold of your book, Joe? [JOE] Yes, I’m sure your local bookstore would love to have you order it through them. Also, you can get it on Amazon, Target wherever you typically buy your books. It’s available on audible as an audio book. You can also get a digital version as well online. Also we’re doing something where in November, we’re hosting the Thursday is the New Friday mastermind group. So it’s going to be six sessions that we meet together. We’re going to meet every Thursday, skipping Thanksgiving, so it’s going to be for early November, till mid December, 2021 at noon Eastern. So the way to get access to that mastermind group is to purchase 10 copies of Thursday is the New Friday, and then go to thursdayisthenewfriday.com and submit your receipt there, and then you’ll get full access to that. So that mastermind group is going to be partially me teaching kind of next steps around Thursday is the New Friday. We’re then going to do some hot seats around people implementing it. So how do I do this here? How would I do an experiment in my own work? How do I structure myself differently? And then we’re going to have a bunch of time to really dig into networking and connecting with other people. We have some amazing podcasters that are going to be a part of it. We have some stay-at-home moms that want to implement this at home. We have some traditional kind of businesses they’re looking at the four-day work week. So it’s really awesome to see how that networking side of the mastermind group is going to be the part where people leave with all these connections that they can go deeper with and to continue to support each other through making Thursday the new Friday. [LISA] Well, thank you, Joe, for coming on the show today. [JOE] Thank you so much, Lisa, for having me. [LISA] Yes, it was great to have you here and to hear about your book. I can’t wait to get ahold of it and read it and giving it to other people that I know and even clients. And thank you for listening today. My listeners, remember to subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts. To find out more about highly sensitive persons, please visit my website@amiokpodcast.com and subscribe to my three eight-week email course. This is Lisa Lewis reminding each and every one of you that you are okay. Until next time, take care. Thank you for listening today at Am I Okay? Podcast. If you are loving the show, please rate, review and subscribe to it on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you’d like to learn how to manage situations as a highly sensitive person, discover your unique gift as a highly sensitive person, and learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, I offer a free eight-week email course called Highly Sensitive People. Just go to amiokpodcast.com to sign up. In addition, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email to let me know what is on your mind. You can reach me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want to professional, you should find one.