Ep. 2 Burnout in the Tech Industry with Linnea Butler

Signs of burnout, Zoom fatigue, Neurodiversity & Ketamine

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WATCH: YOUTUBE

Welcome to Episode 2 of our Tech Minds Unwind Series!

In this episode, my guest is Linnea Butler, a licensed mental health professional, and a psychotherapist who is also the founder of a psychiatry practice based in the heart of Silicon Valley. Having begun her career as a molecular biologist, then worked in the tech industry as a product manager and director of marketing, and having gone back to school for psychotherapy and now a business owner, she knows what stress and BURNOUT are actually about.

We discuss signs of burnout, the effects of COVID, strategies, and tools on how to reduce stress and manage burnout. We also dig deeper into what is neurodiversity, how it is related to those in the tech industry, autistic burnout along with the psychedelic 'Ketamine' which is legally permitted for use (waitlist for this therapy experience in the Bay Area).

Linnea's practice in the Bay Area: https://www.bayareamh.com/

Get alerts from our social media channels as well:
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Chapters:

0:00 - 0:55: Introduction to Ep2 of Tech Minds Unwind
0:55 - 2:13: Working in Three Different Careers, Linnea's Introduction
2:13 - 9:29: Discussing Burnout in the Tech Industry and COVID's effects
9:30 - 16:55: Multi-tasking, Software releases, cortisol and not much coffee can do 16:56 - 20:36: Signs of Burnout in People
20:37 - 22:58: Preventing burnout and recovering from it
22:58 - 28:26: Self-Compassion and Self-Acceptance
28:27 - 34:53: Ketamine Psychotherapy and Psychedelics

Tools and references mentioned in this podcast:

Mindfulness Bell: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mindful...

Sapolsky's Research, Stanford, TED talks: https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_sapo...

Emily and Amilia Nagoski, burnout:   Emily Nagoski and...  

Kristen Neff, compassion:   The Space Between...  

Devon Price, Unmasking Autism: https://www.amazon.com/Unmasking-Auti... #mentalhealthawareness #thementalbalancepodcast #therapy #mentalhealth

Transcript:

(00:00) [Music] foreign [Music] series my name is Vidhi and I work in the Silicon Valley in the tech industry we will discuss insights and tools that are available to you so that you can Infuse them in your day-to-day lives in this episode we'll be joined by linear Butler linear was formerly a scientist and biotech marketer and is the founder and owner of Bay Area Mental Health which is a group Psychotherapy and psychiatric practice based on the heart of Silicon Valley will discuss why being bound out in the tech industry is so nominalized and how

(00:41) that attitude could be harmful to maintain hello I'm so glad to have you here today welcome to the show thank you so much Didi and I think what you're doing with this this show is really important and really timely thank you so much all right let's jump in so tell us about your three different careers you know it's interesting because it would seem on the circus that the three careers have nothing to do with the other from molecular biology I've researched to marketing and now to psychotherapy and the skills that I

(01:11) learned as a scientist coming very handy when I'm looking at new technologies for mental health new approaches but also just the sort of foundational fundamental skill of critical thinking so I use that all the time and then the work I did in marketing gave me a deep understanding about how to conceptualize either business to business or visit to Consumer Communications and that feeds into both my role as a psychotherapist and also as a as a practice owner and I'm excited to bring some of those insights here today and ultimately as a

(01:46) therapist this is the career that fills my soul the most and so each time I was in a career I loved what I was doing but this was much more nurturing to sort of the essence of who I am and it's also the result of lifelong self-exploration that brought me to where I am today that's very inspiring okay so then let's just address the elephant in the room it's like what is with burnout and the tech industry yes well I think burnout certainly is not exclusive to the tech industry but the tech industry is well known for Burnout

(02:18) and it has been for quite some time and I do think that it is normalized in Tech so for example when I was working in biotech marketing it was almost a badge of honor the horse you looked when you came into the office and you had big bags under your eyes if you were like oh God I'm so tired I was working till three in the morning that that was the General water cooler conversation and I remember thinking that if I wasn't sending emails at two o'clock in the morning I was slacking and it was just

(02:47) sort of expected and I've worked in small startups you know under 30 people and I've worked in medium to large Science Tech organizations and the message is sort of the same it's always like that and if you're doing a push let's say you have a launch coming or a new release or a product Roadshow something like that then of course you're going to have those days where it's all hands on deck and you do what needs to be done and that's fine provided you have time to rest in between

(03:15) and what's happened is that that availability for rest time has gone away and so the hard push has become the normal and it just doesn't work we are not built for that kind of sustained level of stress we're built for periods of high stress interspersed with periods of rest and recovery and we don't get that yeah anything in particular why you think this is for the tech industry as much is it because of the people that you've seen so far in your life in your clinical practice or just you live in

(03:45) the Bay Area so things that you see around you or even your husband's lifestyle as well so yes well my husband has been in the tech industry his whole career from the early days of networking he's he's done startups well most of his career has been startups in Tech and the the market has changed dramatically and it's evolved so let's let's go back to around 2000 number in the the tech boom and there was so much Innovation happening it was so exciting and there are all these new ideas and plenty of

(04:16) space to create new ideas and disruptive Technologies and once you establish disruptive technology then you have the ability to iterate on that and it creates more and more opportunity that was a very exciting time but it can't last forever and so one of the things that has happened is we're moving into we're moving away from early stage capitalism and into late stage capitalism and the opportunities for Innovation have gone down at the moment no with the with AI coming on board we're probably going to see another

(04:46) explosion of Innovations because this is a disruptive technology so that's one piece of it the other piece is if you don't have space for new innovation new products new markets you have to create new income and profit in some way because big organizations you have shareholders and they demand a return on their investment if you're not creating something new then the only thing left is to do more with less and that's been happening for decades in the tech industry and initially you can build in some

(05:19) efficiencies and you can get profit that way but over time there's more and more of a squeeze on the folks doing the work to get more done and that is increasing the stress level and increasing the burnout now covet accelerated everything but one of the things that that quota did is it moved a lot of work to Telehealth which actually has been wonderful in a lot of ways but people get Zoom fatigue but Zoom fatigue has actually I think increased some of the burnout in the early days because we just got tired of

(05:47) sitting on a screen and we are designed we are evolutionarily adapted to be social creatures we need to be in contact with people and when we lose that face to face there is something that cannot be replaced by Telehealth and one of the things I love about this podcast that you're doing is it's in person so even though our you know the viewers are not here we're still modeling that person interaction yes and not having that decreases our resilience to stress and that would increase the burnout rates as well and

(06:17) then on top of that sort of so many layers for this on top of that now there's a big push to go back in person and a lot of people who have been doing Telehealth for the last three years don't want to do it and so there's stress with that too anyway that's sort of a snapshot of how I see the landscape no I think that's what it works yes that's where VR things are normalized and burnout is normalized in the tech industry especially after covert it's like people do not want to agree that they went through a pandemic

(06:44) and something happened and the way things are working in the way burnout is working in the way teams are working is fine because it's supposed to work that way sort of like the the book in the movie The Perfect Storm but if all these factors come together in that case it was about a storm that never should have happened unless you have everything hitting at just the right time we are in that right now with burnout anybody who is struggling with let's say mild depression or anxiety it went up during the pandemic and maybe it's moderate to

(07:12) severe now or maybe somebody had trauma history but there's traumas got me triggered by the isolation or by the political division in the world and in particular in our country that has also increased stress so we're seeing so many different factors that are impacting the burnout that's happening right now and then in short it's just not sustainable we have to find a new way of working a new way of living a new way of achieving that balance which is I think the whole point of the series yeah no exactly but going back it's also

(07:44) said that once in a lifetime everyone that lives around here will have some of the other mental illness at some point maybe it's anxiety or depression and I think over just expedited all of it because of all the loneliness all the sadness everything that I brought along with it so yeah this is it's going to be a different time once we see the after effects of this in the next few years for sure yes yeah and we will continue to see The Fallout as you said for the next several years all right so then what would burnout

(08:11) look like in the tech industry or like in a tech workplace like what would you have to say about things like multitasking is that normal maybe multitasking because I feel like a lot of us have three monitors for the reason it's because every monitor is doing something different yes and how does that affect us later in life I'm really glad you asked the multitasking question is it's funny because I always prided myself on being very good at multitasking and actually most companies that I worked for the annual review

(08:40) would include a section on how good are you at multitasking and I'm like okay well I'm good I can multitask and this is in the days of the blackberries the cranberries and I had my Blackberry in one hand I had my personal cell phone at another and I had an email I was trying to read I was trying to listen to a voicemail have a conversation I'm reading at the same time what the hell are you doing because obviously none of it was working yeah that was my first time that I got a little overboard on this attempt to

(09:09) multitask and it was I had to step back and laugh at myself at this moment like who are you and at the around this time I began to learn about mindfulness and one of the things I was taught is that multitasking is not possible and what I learned is that we actually can't do two things at once what we do is called context switching and you can go from one task to a next and I I'm very good at switching between tasks 80d flavor in there my mind is always thinking about multiple things at once but every time you do that every time

(09:38) you switch you lose a little bit of momentum so in reality number one there's no such thing as multitasking number two context switching is not efficient even if you do it quickly because you lose a little bit of time each time you switch so it's actually much more efficient to do things like time blocking or when I when I worked at a company where we had a lot of Engineers they all had headphones on as they were coding right because they don't want distractions yeah because distractions will interrupt

(10:06) the flow of what they're doing yeah now very well but it's my brain is starting to rethink every time that I'm multitasking how I should find a way to alert myself and not do it next so I'm only thinking on how I'll do that but yeah if you have any tips or tricks where you can have someone remind themselves while they're multitasking their case so actually I do oh great there is an app for the phone called mindfulness Bell okay and you can program it to ring at very specific intervals or at random intervals and all

(10:35) it does is it makes a little thing okay and when you hear that Ding it's a reminder to come back to the mountain and it's not specific for multitasking but if you are multitasking and you hear that little Bing it's like oh I need to come back yeah no that those are great tips I'll make sure I link that here and I feel like I need to use it as well just to come back in the moment okay yeah let's jump into more of what do you think are the causes and reasons for these burnouts on top of everything that we've discussed like

(11:07) anything specific to the tech industry where we create an environment apart from normalizing it in Tech in particular whether it's software hardware for Hardware it's a little bit longer for software it's very quick you have you know dot releases and so that Innovation cycle has gotten much faster right and if you're doing if let's say you're doing software development and you're doing Dot releases it's like boom boom boom you're always on top of a new release and they're only so you're you

(11:33) used to be a product manager yeah I had that role as well and you only have three levers you can play with either the requirements the time or the resources and there's not a lot of flexibility there when you have if you're in a larger company do you have announced a release you cannot Flex all the time if you promised certain features you can't Flex on those features and if you don't have enough resources most companies will not hire to fill that out and so it's more pressure on the existing

(12:03) people now one of the things that started happening a lot in the.com boom is that base operates went down and people were compensated with stock options in fact my first startup we all went to go see Mission Impossible I think it was the second one and there's a line in there where the the criminal is like no I want stock options and we don't the whole team is cracking up laughing because we all signed up for the stock options yeah stock options are going to motivate people to work harder because you're going after that

(12:31) achievement that has a very high risk Ward reward relationship and so that again that can happen in short bursts but you can't sustain it and so that that rapid development cycle is not sustainable if you have the same people to even push all the time I see so it's like the high risk get some sort of adrenaline and you were to just go up to keep churning and then that chair and keeps pushing you because yeah you have released this to deliver too so it's a thrill in the beginning but then it turns into burnout very quickly yes not

(13:03) an efficient model and some more individual yes we do there's actually a researcher at Stanford named sapolsky and he wrote a book called by zippers don't get ulcers he's also got a couple of TED Talks I highly recommend watching the TED Talks or reading his book and he studies cortisol and adrenaline stress responses in baboons and he studies them in baboons because the structure of their society is actually very similar to the structure of human society and we are designed to have short bursts of

(13:31) stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol and that's fine and that gets us out of you know if the Predator is chasing us we need that short burst to be able to run away or you know whatever the short-term urgency is but what happens is if that stress response does not go down we're not designed to have cortisol running through our body at all times but what it does that leads to drill fatigue when your adrenals get tired you don't have the energies you start adding the coffee and you lean on coffee and maybe other

(14:01) stimulants yes yeah I think that's a great reminder because I think a lot of people keep running thinking it will show up every morning because that coffee mug will show up and that's what will keep pushing me but at some point that coffee my boy so will stop working yeah yeah and your body will also stop giving you the things that you need to keep churning yeah yeah so what would be the common signs of burnout that someone who's watching right now can understand that they are feeling burned out as well

(14:28) one of the things I tell people to look for is when you start having friends and family say are you okay maybe you need to take a little break so friends and family or co-workers expressing concern that is a big sign because usually other people see it before we do I remember I was at a sales meeting this is the biotech world I was working for PD biosciences at the time and we had an afternoon off and I had elected to go get a massage and one of my co-workers said oh my God you really need one oh I guess my stress levels are apparent

(14:59) to other people yeah so that's one another one is an increase in irritability where things are really hitting you sideways and you're much more irritable than you normally would be when I look for in me personally is I start to get more cranky when I'm driving in traffic and if I start getting irritable when I'm driving and I'm like oh that person cut me off you terrible person you like that's a sign to me that something is going on it's not about the traffic it's that my tolerance level has dropped because my

(15:27) stress level has increased so those are things to look for changes in sleep patterns either you're sleeping more than you usually do or you're sleeping less those are indicative major depressive disorder often includes a change in sleeping patterns okay and would these be like micro if they don't even like micro irritations where in your everyday life you just get so used to getting irritated with several things maybe you forget all together that you're getting irritated which is where then you start to have to take anointing

(15:56) then just be like okay there's a different feeling today out of meditation because I feel I went through that in covert where I was so irritated with everything I forgot that every day waking up with irritation is not normal right so there's an internal normalization that's happening yeah well of course I'm stressed and if I start getting Snappy to my husband or you know I trip over my cat and I'm convinced that he's trying to trip me on purpose yeah yeah no one of those things those

(16:21) are I think good signs but because I feel like not only me a lot of people around me got very used to being okay with being irritated every day it's like this is how you wake up but that's not normal and that's what we need to like understand and do something about so okay those are very good signs and reversing that normalization internally is really important yeah and it's that's the hardest place to do it because you actually have to look Inward and we don't tend to do that enough but yeah so

(16:47) I know we covered points on being short-term but is there anything else that you want to cover related to Tech and being short-term good in terms of signs of burnout yeah well being short tempered would be an external sign internally you might start to feel much more resentful you might wake up in the morning with a kissing I don't want us I don't want to go to work I don't want to do this you have mental blocks you have no access to creativity and actually if you are in a role that demands creativity like if you are in a

(17:12) startup or if you're coding or doing new product development and you don't have access to that creativity that's a problem so that is one sign of burnout because you cannot access creativity while you are burned up so yeah thank you for that and what would be some strategies or tools that you suggest for all of these issues that we've talked about that you have the most important thing to me is increasing self-awareness so and to me the best tool for that is informal mindfulness practices but even

(17:44) if that's not comfortable you can do you can like download a free mindfulness app there are so many right now insight timer is one of my favorites yeah me too and the more you practice that the more you'll get in tune with what's happening inside because it's a lot easier to prevent burnout than to recover from it recovering from burnout is very difficult so please don't let yourself get all the way there because it's hard to come back as someone who has been there and it is hard to come back and

(18:09) you often need to take quite a bit of time off just to be quiet through the cover so number one is increasing your level of self-awareness so you can spot the warning signs number two is rest and actually there's a wonderful book written by Emily Emilia nagoski called burnout highly recommended and there's a whole chapter there based on sleep but but they they speak a lot about the quality of rest and we'd be very clear rest true rest is not what we think it is binging Netflix is not restful that

(18:39) is even though you're like maybe laying down a couch that's not restful watching TV of any sort not restful reading a book not restful rest lying down quietly without distractions or it could be going for a walk in nature we need a lot of rest and this counteracts the rest and digest phase is how you recover from the stress phase and you need to be able to go back and forth and we don't go to the rest of digest phase so that's going to be very important now there are skills that you can use coping skills part of what we

(19:11) teach in DBT these are life skills that help us deal with emotions and that can help you to become more self-aware but also to figure out how to increase your resilience to difficult emotions let's jump into the other part which we discussed virtual self-compassion self-acceptance okay another thing I want to mention is the importance of self-compassion work my husband calls it Lulu that I embrace I love and yes I have crystals in my office I absolutely do but I'm also a scientist at heart and so there's a level of natural skepticism

(19:43) that I hold curiosity combined with skepticism you know show me the data that that scientist in my soul is never going to go away I always am curate to that data yeah and when I first heard about self-compassion work I was like oh that sounds very fluffy to me yeah which not so surprising I struggle with it myself it's you know when you come from an environment where you're hard on yourself the idea of self-compassion feels almost threatening it feels too soft right Kristen Neff is sort of the thought leader right now on

(20:14) self-compassion work and I think that self-compassion is a big missing piece in our culture and there's more and more movement toward it now but we are at the infancy let that work yeah no thank you for sharing that you can practice it as simply as just it's okay almost imagining yourself as a child that you're comforting yeah giving yourself Grace and it's actually much more powerful than it sounds I'm saying this and I'm realizing there was a time when I somebody said this to me and I

(20:40) was very skeptical but it is it truly is essential because if you can't have Grace and compassion for yourself you can't really have it for other people yeah it's not because it's a contradiction to you know how they show it in all the other movies where like like the Wall Street The Wolf of Wall Street and stuff yeah if people are moderating themselves it's like I can go do it I can go do it because this is like it's fine if it didn't work out I think we have to lose for it motivating

(21:02) yourself to be like you can go to it but if it doesn't work out there's nothing like oh shoot then you're down the dams when instead you could be using self-compassion and self-acceptance you know it's I'm glad you brought that up because I think that we are in a transformational period of time we're in a sea change where we went from you know greed is good and the Wolf of Wall Street and all of that and the you know motivational speakers go do be and all these tools to be more and we kind of

(21:29) there's only so far you can go and now we're transitioning into okay so yeah that has its place but if that's all you do that's not gonna work we actually need to get quiet we need to be contemplative we need to get back to Nature we need to get back to interpersonal relationships and seeing people in person not just over a screen yeah I know so much so that now all of those motivational things that we enabled as toxic positivity yes yes then now that's being tuned as oh that's toxic to be that positive you need to be

(22:00) more realist it's like Skip Hop and jump sort of thing there yeah and generationally there's something really happening with like Millennials in gen Z and the value systems are changing and so I'm Gen X and it's so funny because my mom who grew up during the during depression or right around there she has that toxic toxic positivity in space and one day I was talking to her on the phone and she's like oh you just need to look on the bright side one mom I love you but do not invalidate my pain right now

(22:29) I am having a bad day and you didn't let me have a bad day yeah we have to acknowledge that we have bad days and you know I I don't want to sort of get rid of the positivity and the motivation those are beautiful things and you know positive psychology is a wonderful movement but it has to be held in balance with rest and reflection and acknowledging that not everything is positive yeah coming back to the theme of balance light and dark you have to have both you cannot have one without the other the other thing that really is ramping

(23:00) up right now and my gosh in the last three years it has completely exploded it's ketamine assisted psychotherapy and ketamine is currently in California anyway the only legal psychedelic it's kind of a pseudo psychedelic but we do expect that there are going to be other medicines available in the very near future but the reason I mention this is that I have seen a very high percentage of people coming in for ketamine Psychotherapy people who are burned out and they're either people working in Tech or in healthcare or in the schools

(23:33) yeah and that is an excellent way to combat burnout because burnout is a very isolated lonely feeling and loneliness is in my mind a pandemic that's been going on for longer than coven and exerting a lot of harm so connecting with sort of the sense of universality through any of the Psychedelic medicines can be very healing in a way to combat burnout yeah so what is your gender observation with all of these things in hindsight with burnout tech industry normalization how everything works what would be your

(24:05) major takeaways that you absorb through these things in your personal practice so far for so many years well there's there is something that I've been noticing and it's it's correlated with burnout but it's especially true in the tech industry and that is this concept of neurodiversity and neurodivergence so let me step back neurodiversity the neurodiversity Paradigm essentially just says that we have to say that our brains are structured that largely comes from the fact that we are born with a lot more

(24:31) neural connections than we have as an adult and during childhood up through our early 20s we go through pruning where extraneous bits are are trimmed away much like pruning and overgrown bush with people who are neurodivergent so the minority of the population estimated about 15 to 20 percent the pruning is not as efficient so there's actually more neural connections that are happening that means that somebody who is neurodivergent which includes me can get easily overwhelmed by environmental stimuli because we're

(25:00) taking in more information than somebody who is neurotypical so I promise I'll just get a bit back around it makes sense it's been it's been noticed for a while over the last several decades there is a higher than average percentage of ADHD and autistic people in the Bay Area in the Bay Area and those diagnoses that fall with in the neurodivergent descriptor it's not just those two but those two are sort of essential and people who are who have who have are often drawn to Tech fields and there's also a genetic component of

(25:38) this so the fact that we live in Silicon Valley which is where I mean we are one of the the major Tech homes in the world and people are meeting people Engineers or meeting engineers and having babies and there's a genetic component so that is increasing that that relative percentage now the reason this is important is there is something called autistic burnout now autism is a lot of people have this idea that autism is a screaming child or It's Raining Men And while that's true there's a beautiful

(26:08) statement that when you've met one autistic person you've met one autistic person in other words none of us look like each other we're all very very different and and it can be very easy to mask Autistic or ADHD traits and that takes energy so if if you are somebody who is highly sensitive to environmental stimuli and maybe your brain works in a different way you know if you're part of that 20 if your brain works differently than that 80 and that 20 to 80 is the population at large not just Bay Area I

(26:38) don't know what it is in the barrier Bay Area but I'm sure that the percentage of neurodeiversion is higher than that oh okay because it requires a lot of energy to sort of modulate the internal experience people that are neurodivergent can hit burnout a lot faster autistic burnout looks like depression it looks like a major depressive episode and it can very easily be misdiagnosed but the way that you treat major depression is not going to work for autistic burner in fact it could make it worse and so that is also a factor to be aware

(27:08) of I actually just started a group last month for people who were late diagnosed neurodivergent and it's it feels remarkably fast we do a lot of group therapy you know I'm a big fan of group therapy because of the interrelationships we need that social interaction we need reinforcement for peers but also because there's healing that can happen in a group that doesn't happen just one to one and not surprisingly there's a lot of tech people in that group wow so if someone who's listening how or even for

(27:41) me actually I'm curious how do I know whether I'm neurodivergent or not there there are a couple of excellent books my favorite one is actually called Divergent mind there's another book I love by Devin Price called unmasking autism and in an effort for because I realized I was seeing a lot of neurodivergent claims I'm like oh well this is interesting and I started reading these books to try and understand my clients and I realized I was showing up in these books like holy cow well yeah it was a

(28:09) real eye-opener for me and at first it was it threw me and then I felt like it was very freeing to understand that these are literally brain differences and neurodivergence is not an ADHD and autism even though they're called disabilities and deficiencies they're just a different way of being and so I think that was really relieving but what we're not seeing is some of these big companies being able to adjust to their staff who are neurodivergent who have different needs and that is a real missed opportunity

(28:44) um so now that you mentioned it's a disability so there is a way to diagnose this as well oh yes okay to get a formal diagnosis of either ADHD or Autism the best way is to get a full neuropsych evaluation which is very expensive but you don't need a formal diagnosis unless you're looking for like HR accommodations or an IEP or something like that a lot of people now are self-diagnosing do not recommend self-diagnosing on social media because Tick Tock is going crazy with like therapy talk I think is

(29:17) what they're calling it please don't self-diagnose on social media yeah but maybe read or listen to some of the podcasts and hold it Loosely because we're talking really about neurotypes more so than diagnoses yeah now maybe we can go back into the piece where we discuss ketamine Psychotherapy and psychedelics and the growth that you've seen where folks are coming in and asking for more plan because of burnout or whatever trauma and other issues that they might have in life so what is your take on like things

(29:47) that are growing right now with MDMA and algorithms as well oh yes the Psychedelic field is is truly exploding uh and I've been curious about because I used to be in big Pharma and used to be instantly involved with clinical trials I've been watching MDMA for quite some time and so for the illustrious who who may not be aware the clinical trials for ndma assisted therapy have concluded stage three has completed and been published and the results were amazing 70 remission of PTSD complex PTSD which is incredibly hot and then they have

(30:20) also sorry review the results and confirmed them and so now it just it remains with the FDA to see if that's going to be cleared I do think it will if it isn't that would be shocking to me because the data is incredibly robust but I'm going to say when when it clears FDA is available it's probably going to come with a lot of restrictions so it's going to probably only be available for PTSD with possibly only with an index trauma a very particular trauma that is being targeted and it will have the same

(30:50) format of the trials which are these eight hour sessions space roughly one month apart with two therapists cousin and now and I I was the first cabinet psychotherapist in the South Bay oh wow but now there's a whole bunch of them and Kevin meat is beautiful because number one is legal it is sort of a pseudo psychedelic it's legal yeah unlike the classical psychedelics of LSD DMT and psilocybin and also MDMA but that's not a classical psychedelic all of those medications you can't take an SSRI and antidepressant

(31:23) and take the Psychedelic medications because there are interactions that can either render the medication inert or you can have very serious health consequences timing doesn't have that restriction so that makes me very excited and also the ketamine sessions are very short Academy has a short half-life so instead of an eight-hour session you have a three hour session and only an hour and a half of it is when you're under the influence of the medicine so it's much more accessible than the other medicines and

(31:51) I think it does have a huge role to play partly for dealing with the treatment resistant depression whereas we know that antidepressants work on you know there's a good 60 of people that they they don't work adequately they may work some but not adequately and I would much rather have somebody try ketamine than go get ECT treatment for example which is invasive and causes long-term problems so it's helpful for depression and for anxiety because it helps to boost neuroplasticity which is creating

(32:20) new Pathways in the brain so letting go of ruminations or limiting core beliefs but but also excuse me it also factors into this sort of search for meaning that we're all going through the more techie we get and the more disconnected we are from each other and from our own humidity The More We crave that so I believe that part of the drive for psychedelics is this need to reconnect with our essential selves and our Humanity and all of these medicines have an element of that to it so there's a craving for spirituality but if that

(32:53) word makes you uncomfortable it's a crazy thing for connection it's a craving for meaning there has to be more to this world than just collecting a paycheck yeah and we're seeing this in the in the younger Generations they're like that that is not enough for me yeah for sure I think especially because of the way the state of the world is everything has become I think for for me and so then I'm saying this a lot like you mentioned around me too where people are like what's the point about this yes

(33:16) so and I don't believe in coincidences happen for a reason but we're almost in a global existential crisis that was it really took off in 2020 and it wasn't just covid it was also social unrest it was the murder of George Floyd it's it's climate change and all of this is coming at the same time and of course it feels like the world is going to hell in a handbasket I personally believe that you know nature will find a way but it takes a lot to have that faith when we look around and it feels like

(33:48) we're living in chaos awesome so thank you so much for a lot of things and insights for the tech industry here and I'm sure there's a time before them to gain so if they really relate to you and want to reach out to your clinical practice that you have here in the valley where should they be do she now the easiest way is just through our website which is Bay areamentalhealth.

(34:09) com and there there's an encrypted chat widgets there's you can also reach us by phone or email and so that was one of my Visions in creating a group practice is to bring together a team approach a collaborative care approach where we have different areas of specialty yeah all right thank you so much thank you and I've been really enjoying getting to know you and sort of our early conversations and as we've been chatting here today thank you so much thank you all for being here with that we'll actually be coming around with another episode for

(34:34) psychedelics and academic therapy here because they are the pros and experts here in the Bay Area so watch out for that cool thanks everyone one of them I don't want to say we are the Pros yes

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