I'm Maura Aronsmeli, and this is The Anxious Achiever.

We look at stories from business leaders who have dealt with anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges,

how they fell down, how they picked themselves up, and how they hope workplaces can change in the future. So we've been crunched up, closed off, wound up tight for over a year now.

Work has been nearly impossible for many of us with kids

crawling up and down the walls. And while this has been happening, we don't always think about

our bodies. We can't always be in our bodies. We're just trying to get things done. We hear a lot

now about self-care, even at work.

But that term, it can just feel like another thing to do.

And is it even effective?

Well, I want you to know that if you're fried, anxious, always on edge, you're just done.

You are not alone.

And there's a reason why you feel wound up and fried. It's your body trying to do the best it can with the information it has. So as we try to untie

the knot, unravel, look ahead and adjust to this next phase of life. We need to recognize

there's a direct connection between our physical health, our mental health, and our performance,

especially at work. Here to help is our guest, Dr. Christine Runyon.

She's a professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and she's co-founder of Tend Health.

For her entire career, which includes a six-year stint as an active-duty psychologist in the U.S. Air Force, Dr. Runyon has been practicing teaching

and training behavioral health providers and physicians in models of collaborative primary care.

Dr. Runyon will help us understand a lot of the whys behind all those popular self-care techniques

we're hearing so much about. She'll help us breathe and help us get where we want to be.

I don't want to dwell too much in the past in this conversation, but I want to acknowledge where we're all at.

And you said, I've come to conceptualize a lot of what's happening in COVID

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