Hello and welcome to the Karma You podcast. This is your host, Chloe Brotheridge. I'm a coach, a

hypnotologist and I'm the author of The Anxiety Solution and Brave New Girl. And this podcast is all

about helping you to become your calmest, happiest and most confident self. Hi there. I've got a

quick message for anyone who finds it hard

to switch off. So maybe you've got a holiday coming up. Maybe you're somebody that

finds that their work spills into the evening or you do bits of work at the weekend or you're constantly checking your phone

your emails. This idea comes from a guy called Cal Newport who wrote the book Deep Work and he talks

about respecting the shutdown and I wanted to just read a little bit from this book that I think is really, really powerful.

He writes, if you keep interrupting your evening or your holiday to respond to email or put aside a few hours after dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline, you are robbing your directed attention centres of the uninterrupted rest that they need for restoration.

Even if these work dashes consume only a small amount of time, they prevent you from reaching the levels of deeper relaxation in which attention, restoration can occur. Only the confidence that

you're done with work until the next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level

where it can begin to recharge for the next day. Put another way, trying to squeeze in a little more work out of your evenings might actually

reduce your effectiveness the next day to the point where you end up getting less done than if you

had instead respected a shutdown. So is this you? Let me know. Are you just catching up on a few emails after you put

the kids to bed or after dinner on holiday? Do you find yourself not fully switching off? You could be

robbing yourself of time and energy and focus later on. We want to respect the shutdown and give

ourselves permission to fully switch off, recharge and then know that we are going to be in a better

place, to work, to focus, to do deep work, to be creative, to make good decisions, all that

stuff that we really want.

So let me know what you think about this. Do you find yourself finding it hard to switch off?

Do you have a holiday coming up? This has reminded you that you need to put your laptop in a drawer,

put the out-of-office on and just have those boundaries with your work so you can properly switch off.

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