Dear Mind, You Matter

Making Stress Suck Less with KD Hurlbutt

Episode Summary

In this episode, we talk to KD about burnout, how to make stress suck less, and using your body, breath and brain to figure out and help when you’re stressed.

Episode Notes

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KD is a Stanford environmental engineer, burnout prevention coach, creator of The Reset Deck, a card game with 45 ways to make stress suck less, and the CEO of Bask + Being — a company that builds workplace wellness strategies, that well, work. After experiencing her own case of burnout, KD left her role as a brand director and sustainability manager for a Fortune 500 company to become a TEDx speaker and a burnout consultant for companies like Salesforce, Apple’s Media Arts Lab, Kaiser Permanente, and more. Committed to (re)building an economic ecosystem (not an empire) that’s inclusive, just, and equitable for people and the planet. KD weaves accessible science, relatable stories, and practical tools to shift the way people experience stress and sustainability.

KD is a TEDx speaker, B.S. Environmental Engineering, Stanford University M.S. Civil Engineering, Stanford University Licensed Professional Engineer, California Certified Health Coach, Health Coach Institute 500-Hour Experienced Yoga Teacher.

Social Media: IG @curiouslykasey @theresetdeck @baskandbeing LI: @kaseyhurlbutt
Publications:
- TEDx: https://youtu.be/t8UcRjBJJ0A
- https://medium.com/authority-magazine/beating-burnout-kd-hurlbutt-on-the-5-things-you-should-do-if-you-are-experiencing-work-burnout-305e78aaaaed

Memorable Moments:

4:16 According to the World Health Organization, [burnout is] chronic workplace stress that has been unsuccessfully managed. And usually the ways that you can tell that you are burnt out is there's a decrease in professional efficacy, in energy, chronic exhaustion, increase in irritability, and/or decrease in engagement, just to name a few.

5:01 Most importantly, what burnout is, it’s chronic stress that has been unsuccessfully managed. And the reason that's so important is because it takes, I think, an often hard to define, hard to recognize, hard to wrap your hands around concept of burnout, and it makes it that much more tangible. Plus, it makes it actually something you can tackle and do something about because there's a lot of ways that we can go about handling our own stress levels and how we interact with the stressors in our life.

7:07 I was high functioning. So to the rest of the world, they perceived me as she's got her stuff together. She is on the track. She's checking off the boxes. But on the interior, I felt like everything was falling apart. I had a handle on nothing and it felt debilitating. So I quit my corporate gig and I started to try to heal my own nervous system.

7:48 What I started to figure out is that all health and wellbeing, including our mental wellbeing, if it's a house, it sits on top of a foundation that is a healthy, nervous system that we know how to regulate.

10:53 Because when you actually know what stress is, it's not a good or bad thing. It's a neutral thing. Stress has let us evolve into the creatures that we are today. And it's one of the reasons that human beings have been able to survive. Like, there's a very important role that it plays in our lives and keeping us safe and in, honestly, helping us to activate a lot of our systems that get us energized to have productivity and creativity.

11:21 Stress in and of itself isn't bad. Where it gets to be a challenge any why the goal is to make it suck less, is because too much of it too often actually drives, clinically proven, health consequences. Everything from inflammation, digestive disorders, intercepting our endocrine system, which means we can have fertility and reproductive challenges, to high blood pressure, clogged arteries, like the list goes on and on and on, in my opinion, all disease is either caused by or correlated to our stress levels. So, too much of it is the problem. The other problem is there are too many stressors and the number of stressors that we're exposed to now versus what our brains, our amygdala in particular, were adapted to be able to filter for us and interpret for us are no longer aligned.

12:26 So to try to eliminate stress, even to try to eliminate all negative stress is just like, it's a fool's errand. Let's not even try it. So then the question becomes okay, if we're not trying to eliminate stress, but we are trying to eliminate burnout because maybe we don't have to be chronically stressed, and if we're trying to make it suck less, how do we do that?

17:05 How [your body] speaks to you is through the three B’s, which are breath, body, and brain.

19:13 Boundaries are value-based, energetic limits on where you wanna invest your time and talent.

19:19 The reason I think the mental health crisis, the burnout crisis and the climate crisis are all connected is because they're all rooted in a fundamentally faulty assumption, which is that you can take energy and resources from people or the planet with no limits or boundaries and no respect for rest or restoration and not have consequences. That just actually defies physics and the law of conservation of energy.

19:51 Ownership is about staying accountable to those boundaries that we are, or are not, setting and communicating them because nobody is a mind reader. So even though we want people to be mind readers, they're not, and they often need help understanding where our boundaries are and why.

20:33 Support is two-fold. It's what is in your support system of your self-care tools and the ways that your daily habits that you're using and leaning into to help reduce the total amount of stress and create resilience when triggers come up. But it's also about how are we asking for help?

21:16 Self-compassion is, in its simplest state, is learning how to not judge ourselves. That doesn't mean we're not holding ourselves accountable. That's why ownership is there. We definitely hold ourselves accountable, but we can do it in a way that's loving in a way that supports our growth and our learning.

22:11 And when we pause and ask ourselves, okay, but what's your purpose? Why are you here? What brings you joy? How do you wanna show up and serve this world? What is the most daring vision of your life and this world that we're all in, that you want to invest your talent and energy in? It helps to flip the script on like, okay, I see that the problem is not that I am driven.The problem is not that I like to work hard or to contribute, but that maybe the why that underpins all of that is unfulfilling and/or just not for me and that's okay.

24:25 I think the biggest thing that we get wrong is that we assume it's the problem of the individual. And so I'm so elated and excited for the amount, the increase in investment and emergence of apps and technologies and tools that help individuals support their own wellbeing. It's an incredibly important part of the systemic solution and it’s insufficient because the environments and cultures that are creating those challenges and/or making it impossible for somebody to set a boundary or to have a courageous conversation because they don't feel psychologically safe or other systemic challenges that they're facing, they can't solve, they actually don't have the agency or control to do anything about. And so it is amazing that we have these solutions and it's not enough.

25:55 The same kind of self-compassion you can extend that to organizations for organizational compassion. You can have, you can assume positive intent. You can assume that everyone's doing their best inside of an economic system. That makes it really hard to change and to, it's fundamentally not designed to prioritize people's wellbeing, but you can have compassion for all of that and say we can do better and we can do differently. And how do we do that in conjunction with supporting the individual so that they converge, and then you have this amplified ripple impact.

Dear Mind, You Matter is brought to you by NOBU, a new mental health, and wellness app. To download NOBU, visit the app store or Google Play.

This podcast is hosted by Allison Walsh and Dr. Angela Phillips. It is produced by Allison Walsh, Ashley Tate, and Nicole LaNeve. For more information or if you’re interested in being a guest on this podcast, please visit https://arsnobu.page.link/arsevents.

Episode Transcription

Allison: Hello and welcome to the Dear Mind, You Matter Podcast. My name is Allison Walsh, I’m a long-time mental health advocate and Vice President at Advanced Recovery Systems. On each episode, I will be joined by my colleague and clinical expert, Dr. Angela Phillips. This show along with our mental health and wellness app Nobu, are just some of the ways we are working to provide you with some actionable tips to take care of yourself each and every day.

So sit back, relax, and grab your favorite note-taking device. It's time to fill your mind with things that matter.

Well, Katie, thank you so much for being here. Would you mind introducing yourself to our audience?

KD: Yeah, thank you both for having me. I'm really excited to be here. My name is KD and I run a company called Bask and Being, which does workplace burnout prevention and relief.

And I like to say it as we build workplace wellness solutions that actually work and in addition to that, I also created something called the Reset Deck, which is a really fun game that makes stress suck less using just your breath, body, brain. And I also happen to be an environmental engineer who cares a lot about climate change and really likes to geek out on the intersection of our mental health and the climate crisis that we're in cause I think they're really deeply connected.

And you might in the background, one of the most important things about me is that I am a dog's mom to a 12-year-old pup named Tucker. Who loves when I'm on the mic with people to actually start to run around and scratch himself on the floor.

So if you hear him in the background, that's just Tucker.

Angela: I love it. We've, we've got dogs all over, but I will have a snoring bulldog that likes to make an appearance named Stella. So we totally get that. And thank you so much again for joining us, Katie. We're so excited to have you, and I love everything that you're working on and that you're doing, and we can't wait to dig in.

Wish we always had more time with people, but before we get at, you know, one of these things Allison and I are constantly talking with folks about, which is burnout that we wanna dig into a little bit more. But before we get there, I wanna make sure that you can really educate our listeners a little bit more about sort of the stressors that lead to that.

And then, like you said, like how to make that suck less by using some of these ways that you've really tapped into. And I love the deck, everybody, she's got the deck of cards on her wall behind her and it looks so snazzy with that jacket, but yeah, if you can just speak to that a little bit and then I think, you know, also what would be helpful for folks about having something like this too, whether it's your deck of cards that sort of, you know, leads them to a little bit more support or just sort of what the overall idea behind that is.

KD: You bet. So we'll start with the, I think it's helpful to start with the definition of burnout, which according to the world health organization, which officially recognized it as a syndrome in 2019, just before the pandemic, which is ironic, cause the pandemic has made it so much worse.

But according to the world health organization, [burnout is] chronic workplace stress that has been unsuccessfully managed. And usually, the ways that you can tell that you are burnt out is there's a decrease in professional efficacy, in energy, chronic exhaustion, an increase in irritability, and/or decrease in engagement, just to name a few.

What's interesting is that they specifically talk about it in relation to the workplace, and it's important that they, for them, for the world health organization, that that's how they contextualize it. I personally believe that burnout can come from a lot of different sources, not just the workplace, but that's my own personal belief, you know, me versus the world health organization.

So take your pick on that one. But most importantly, burnout is, it’s chronic stress that has been unsuccessfully managed. And the reason that's so important is becauthatakes, I think, an often hard to define, hard to recognize, hard to wrap your hands around the concept of burnout, and it makes it that much more tangible. Plus, it makes it actually something you can tackle and do something about because there are a lot of ways that we can go about handling our own stress levels and how we interact with the stressors in our life. So that's the core of what we teach here at Baskin Being and what we do inside of workplaces.

The way we came to that conclusion was actually, we kind of backwbackward neered into it through PTSD which is also a stress disorder. And it was one that I suffered from in my twenties in combination with burnout, from working at a corporation and doing a global job that had me up at all hours of the day and night.

And I, and what I started to recognize, which by the way, in like 2010, 2014, when I was going through this, no doctor, no therapist that I was working with was telling me this. Is that I couldn't react normally to stress. It was like on one hand I was addicted to it. I needed it to kind of breathe and then on the other hand, anytime a stressor that I wasn't anticipating that I hadn't chosen to include in my life, like spilling coffee on myself, for example happened, I had a disproportionate and kind of like absurdly large response to it that didn't feel natural or healthy and I didn't know why.

Low and behold almost died when I was 24, we can dig into that if you want later. That was then, succeeded by three years later, being an emergency plane landing where I heard my pilot say mayday, we landed safely, spoiler alert, and then burnout from my corporate job.

So by the time I hit 2015. I just, honestly, I was high functioning. So to the rest of the world, they perceived me as she's got her stuff together. She is on the track. She's checking off the boxes. But on the interior, I felt like everything was falling apart. I had a handle on nothing and it felt debilitating.

So I quit my corporate gig and I started to try to heal my own nervous system. I didn't know I was doing that at the time. I didn't have the language for that, but that's what I was trying to do. And I did it through, I became a yoga teacher and I started to learn meditation and I got even, I spent even more money becoming a more advanced yoga teacher.

And over time when I did all these modalities, what I started to figure out is that all health and wellbeing, including our mental wellbeing, if it's a house, it sits on top of a foundation that is a healthy, nervous system that we know how to regulate.

And the reset deck, what we did there is all we, we just kinda like backwards engineering. This is the engineering in me, right? The more I learned about all these different modalities, what I figured out is, okay, the only thing people are teaching me how to do is how to use my breath, my body, or my brain. To change the way I feel and to help me turn on my relaxation response, but no one teaches it that way. And it would be so much simpler, more accessible for people if we did.

And then on the burnout side of things I was looking at, okay, what's the systems that create burnout that are outside of an individual's control. And then inside of an individual's control like me, as a human being, what are the things that I need to do and, and have agency over to change.

And then if we tackle both of those at the same time, what can we make happen and turns out a lot of really awesome things. So I'll pause there cause I know I could just keep talking and talking and talking about this stuff forever, but I think that gives you a good solid background of how I got here and my philosophy on it.

Allison: Well, and your story is fascinating. So thank you for sharing more about how you got here. And I think there are probably so many people that are listening that can relate with at least some part of it. You know, as soon as you said, like high functioning on the outside, everything looks great. On the inside you're like, ah, like silently screaming or, you know. I think there are a lot of people and myself included that probably felt that way at some point where the achiever in us is like, go, go, go. But the inside, like, wait for a second, like this isn't sustainable. I, you know, there's all these emotions and all this other stuff going on as a result.

So thank you for being so candid about that and I'm sure there are a lot of people that are appreciating that as well. I want to get more into this whole concept of, do you make it suck less using your words? You know, like how do you, how do we do this? Because Angela and I were recording some content for Nobu, the app that we, you know, we've built and we were focused on like burnout the other day.

And it was just like, yes, yes, we need to be talking about this more. Just like what you said, like they, people weren't talking about this 10, 12 years ago. And yet here we are. I think the good thing that came out of the pandemic is people are actually talking about the stuff that is impacting them.

And this is one of those major areas because this pandemic, talk about a run for two years has been a lot. So there's probably a lot of people that need to know how do we handle this? What do we do? How do we use the tools that you've made available? So let's go there. So gimme more information.

KD: Yes, this is, I love talking about this.

So first, let's talk about why other than because it's fun to say, why the goal is to suck less and not to eliminate totally. And I’ll acknowledge when I originally started on this journey. 10 years ago, I thought the goal was gonna be eliminated totally. Which is wild to think. Right?

Because when you actually know what stress is, it's not a good or bad thing. It's a neutral thing. Stress has let us evolve into the creatures that we are today. And it's one of the reasons that human beings have been able to survive. Like, there's a very important role that it plays in our lives and keeping us safe and in, honestly, helping us to activate a lot of our systems that get us energized to have productivity and creativity.

So stress in and of itself isn't bad. Where it gets to be a challenge any why the goal is to make it suck less, is because too much of it too often actually drives, clinically proven, health consequences. Everything from inflammation, digestive disorders, intercepting our endocrine system, which means we can have fertility and reproductive challenges, to high blood pressure, clogged arteries, like the list goes on and on and on, in my opinion, all disease is either caused by or correlated to our stress levels. So, too much of it is the problem. The other problem is there are too many stressors and the number of stressors that we're exposed to now versus what our brains, our amygdala in particular, were adapted to be able to filter for us and interpret for us are no longer aligned.

So to try to eliminate stress, even to try to eliminate all negative stress is just like, it's a fool's errand. Let's not even try it. So then the question becomes okay, if we're not trying to eliminate stress, but we are trying to eliminate burnout because maybe we don't have to be chronically stressed, and if we're trying to make it suck less, how do we do that?

And that's where I love acronyms and alphabet soups. Like, I love things that help me. I love things that are easy to remember because it makes it so I can actually do it. So we teach the three R’s, the three B’s and the boss strategy. And I'll go through those quickly, and then you guys can tell me if you want me to zoom in on one of them.

So the three R’s are, how do you make stress suck less? Well, first you gotta recognize it, right? If you don't even know that you're stressed, there's no chance in being able to relieve it or reduce it. Then you gotta be able to relieve it.

So engineer over here, all pipes have relief valves. That's on purpose because sometimes what are you gonna do? Like the pressure just gets to be too much and you need to be able to quickly release it. The truth, the same for humans, no matter how good we are at this, there are gonna be times where we're so overwhelmed that we just need the quick relief.

And then there's the harder work of reduce. So growing up, I was really lucky and blessed. I didn't have to do a ton of chores, but I did have to do the weeding and I hated it. And my dad would've always hand me a bucket and tell me to go outside and not to come back in until I was done. And the first few times, I did it took me like one or two times to learn this lesson.

I'd just go out and I'd quickly grab, you know, grab him up by the top, put it in the bucket, hand it dad, and say, I'm done now. Can I go play with my friends? And he'd look at me, he'd look at the bucket and he'd ask, did he get 'em up by the roots? That's not actually how my dad talks. I imagine it in my memory and no is the answer.

Right? So then this like little five, or I imagine that I was six years old. I was probably like eight or nine. Went back outside, got super dirty and sweaty, you know, and hours later, which is probably like 30 minutes later, came back and had finally gotten the weeding done and I was so exhausted that I had to go take a nap.

Right? That is what reduce is. It's dirty. It is not glamorous. It often is annoying and it takes more time. And so that's not what people like to talk about when we talk about making stress suck less or self-care, but I think it's a really important thing to talk about and to acknowledge. So those are three R's: recognize, relief, and reduce.

Then we go on to the three B’s. How do you recognize stress and how do you relieve it? Right. If it was, it's not really, it's not very easy to tell when we're feeling stressed out, unless we know what to look for. Right. Cause it's not like our body is telling us. Hey KD. I am stressed out right now, but we can learn to listen to ourselves in a really interesting way.

So do either of you speak pig Latin?

Angela: Unfortunately, no. Allison?

Allison: No, not one of my cool traits

Angela: Yeah, we're not that cool. Teach us!

KD: *Pig Latin* I’m not even that good. *Pig latin* I roughly said for all the fluent and pig Latin folks you'll be like, that was atrocious.

I roughly said when I was a kid, my siblings used to play it. So my it's just a game where you take the very first consonant you move it to the end and then you add the A on it. My big brother, my big sister played it all the time and they wouldn't let me in on the secret. So I, they were talking about me behind my back.

They were like making jokes with each other and I felt so left out. And the more and more I tried to force them to tell me it, they resisted. Even my mom was like, I'm not gonna get involved in this one, this is not World War three, I don't care. So the only option I had was to eventually get really, really, really quiet.

And listen really, really, really carefully and decode it myself. And the same is true when it comes to being able to recognize stress. Is that at any given moment in time, our body is speaking Pig Latin, just like my siblings were. And it's not that you can't learn it, it's that no one taught it to you.

But if you learn to listen carefully, you can understand it too. You can decode it. And how it speaks to you is through the three B’s, which are breath, body, and brain. So your breath is always telling you, Hey, am I in a neutral state? Am I in a stressed state? Or am I in a pretty relaxed state? And you can usually tell that by the depth of it and the speed of it.

If it's long, deep, and shallow, chances are high that you are in a relaxation response, which is the opposite of a stress response. If it's shallow, fast and or hard to catch, chances are high that you're in some kind of stress response. That might be a good stress response. Cause maybe you're jogging, right. It could be a bad stress response cause maybe you're actually in danger or it could be cause you're you just got an asked to email and you're like, what do I do about this?

The second B is your body. So your body's always telling you through your heart rate through sensations that you might be feeling through tension that it's holding, how it's feeling. So I like to carry a lot of my tension in my shoulders, my chest and my stomach. They're like my tell, tell, and my back, my back, I have a back injury and interestingly enough, when I'm feeling mentally stressed out, I will feel it physically in my back, but those are places in my body where I can tell. Hmm. If there's sensation there, there's something to get curious about. Everyone's different. Those might be the same ones for you guys. It might be the same for the audience. We can all learn and, and figure that out for ourselves.

And then finally our brain by that, I mean, our thoughts that are happening at any given moment in time, what are we focusing on? Are we able to focus? What's our inner monologue saying? And the more that we tune into that and recognize it, is it feeding us thoughts that are keeping us stuck in an emotional loop, that's creating stress or are we able to focus, zoom in on something, maybe be a little stressed out, but in a good way. Cause we're getting something done or even like in wonder in awe being amazed at the world that we're living in and in a relaxation response.

So breath, body, brain. And then the final one is how do you reduce stress? How do you go do that? We, if that's what you wanna do, and that's where you get to be a boss. Now, this is important, cause it's misspelled. It has an extra S at the end, it is B-O–S-S-S and it stands for boundaries, ownership, support, self-compassion and service.

Boundaries are value based, energetic limits on where you wanna invest your time and talent.

The reason I think the mental health crisis, the burnout crisis and the climate crisis are all connected is because they're all rooted in a fundamentally faulty assumption, which is that you can take energy and resources from people or the planet with no limits or boundaries and no respect for rest or restoration and not have consequences. That just actually defies physics and the law of conservation of energy.

So boundaries are really important for so many things in our life, but especially for making stress suck less and avoiding burnout.

Ownership is about staying accountable to those boundaries that we are, or are not, setting and communicating them because nobody is a mind reader. So even though we want people to be mind readers, they're not, and they often need help understanding where our boundaries are and why. That usually requires some kind of courageous and or difficult conversation that most people avoid because they're afraid it's gonna create conflict.

And so we teach how to have those courageous conversations in ways that turn conflict into opportunity for co-creative collaboration and or cohesion. So how do you actually turn 'em into repareative experiences for everyone?

Support is two-fold. It's what is in your support system of your self-care tools and the ways that your daily habits that you're using and leaning into to help reduce the total amount of stress and create resilience when triggers come up. But it's also about how are we asking for help? Many of us are great at giving help. We are people pleasers and/or perfectionists and/or high performers: the three P’s. But we're really, really bad at the humility and vulnerability, and actually the gift of asking for help from others and being able to receive it. So how do we do that?

Self-compassion is, in its simplest state, is learning how to not judge ourselves. That doesn't mean we're not holding ourselves accountable. That's why ownership is there. We definitely hold ourselves accountable, but we can do it in a way that's loving in a way that supports our growth and our learning. And in a way that takes out the sting of shame and judgment so that we can stay on the track basically.

And finally, service, which is why are we working so hard? Why are we killing? We're literally killing ourselves. I mean, we started this off with like, here are all the ways that burnout and chronic stress are driving disease. These are actual mortal issues we're facing, why are we doing it? And the answer is usually because we think we have to, because we're afraid to step off, because we're not sure this is the only thing that's been modeled to us.

And when we pause and ask ourselves, okay, but what's your purpose? Why are you here? What brings you joy? How do you wanna show up and serve this world? What is the most daring vision of your life and this world that we're all in, that you want to invest your talent and energy in? It helps to flip the script on like, okay, I see that the problem is not that I am driven.The problem is not that I like to work hard or to contribute, but that maybe the why that underpins all of that is unfulfilling and/or just not for me and that's okay.

So that was BOSSS: boundaries, ownership, support, self-compassion and service. And that is how we make stress suck less.

Angela: I love it. And I think it's so like, you know, as you already know, tangible and easy for people to kind of run through and just do an inventory on it may take a while, right.

That's where you really need those skills to just sit back. And like you said, get quiet. Listen, and sort of figure out what's going on. We actually use a similar analogy in, in our app Nobu called download and code. And we really try to help people understand that, you know, quieting the mind first, listening to that, and then sort of downloading the information you don't know what to do with quite yet.

I love that you’re a nerd too, this makes me so happy. Anyway, we don't have too much time left with you. And one other thing I just wanted to touch on really quickly. I know this is gonna be hard. You know, because I know you do so much work with workplace wellness and really you're probably seeing more and more and, and folks are, I'm sure reaching out to you more about, you know, how do we improve this issue of burnout within the workplace?

What can I do? What do you, what would you just say are like, you know, maybe one of the top issues or the top few issues that you're seeing really exists. In what we are getting wrong and how to kind of like at least shift the conversation or reframe what that's looking like in the workplace so that we can at least start moving toward the right direction and, and getting people out of that space and into more space at wellness.

KD: This is something I'm also, I'm just thank you for touching on all the things I'm passionate about today.

I think the biggest thing that we get wrong is that we assume it's the problem of the individual. And so I'm so elated and excited for the amount, the increase in investment and emergence of apps and technologies and tools that help individuals support their own wellbeing. It's an incredibly important part of the systemic solution and it’s insufficient because the environments and cultures that are creating those challenges and/or making it impossible for somebody to set a boundary or to have a courageous conversation because they don't feel psychologically safe or other systemic challenges that they're facing, they can't solve, they actually don't have the agency or control to do anything about. And so it is amazing that we have these solutions and it's not enough.

And so what I, I love doing is not only supporting and helping whoever it is, a leader, an HR executive, a team leader help their employees and teammates understand what resources their company may have already invested in are out there, ect. but also to help look at the bigger picture of, from a data perspective, what's driving the dis-ease inside of your team, inside of your culture, inside of your organization and without judgment, right?

The same kind of self-compassion you can extend that to organizations for organizational compassion. You can have, you can assume positive intent. You can assume that everyone's doing their best inside of an economic system. That makes it really hard to change and to, it's fundamentally not designed to prioritize people's wellbeing, but you can have compassion for all of that and say we can do better and we can do differently. And how do we do that in conjunction with supporting the individual so that they converge, and then you have this amplified ripple impact.

So that is something that I'm both proud of in workplace wellness. That's been, I've been seeing a trend in, in the past three years, especially it's also something that I hope to continue impacting, see others impacting in terms of looking different in the future.

Allison: Well, and I love that you do what you do, because I think that there are a lot of employers that are providing a lot of resources. People don't know how to access them, what to tune into, what to use and also we found in a data study that we did during the pandemic that at this point 74% of employees are expecting that their employers have mental wellness tools and mental health resources.

It's not just a nice to have anymore. It's a need to have, but then it's a connection, right? It's like, this is available. This is how to access it. This how this is how to utilize it, plug it into my own life. And like, don't be ashamed about asking for it.

It's there for a reason, right? Like that's the intention is to help you. So anyways, I appreciate you sharing all of this. We love before we wrap up, we love to ask our guests. At this point in your life, what matters to you most right now?

KD: This is gonna maybe sound funny. So I told you at the beginning that my sweet pup Tucker is 12 years old.

And so he's what I've got. I am currently a happily single and live alone human being who, he has been with me. I might even start crying. This is so important to me. He's like been here since the beginning of the PTSD journey. He was really, he was actually part of my support system.

And this is so funny, I laugh when I cry. Just like really being such a loving adventurous mom to him for as long as I get him is weirdly like the most important thing to me right now.

Angela: Not weird at all. I love it.

Allison: Yeah we love our fur babies. Let it out! Let it flow!

Angela: Katie, my Bulldog's been with me through schools, cities, boyfriends, now a husband, like she's been through everything and she drives everyone around me absolutely insane. But I often find myself thinking about when I know she's gonna move on and I'm just like, What am I gonna do? They just go, they go through so much. So I love that you share that and thank you so much.

And oh my gosh, it's been so great to talk to you. I know we could sit here and just tap into so much more, but I really want our listeners to know where they can find you, follow you on social media or otherwise. Can you share that?

KD: Yes, absolutely. If you wanna follow tips and tricks that are fun, fast and easy.

Go to Instagram, you can follow me @curiouslykasey, which kasey is spelled K A S E Y. Or you can follow the reset deck, which is the cards and by the way, the cards are 45 ways to make stress, suck less using just your breath, body, or brain. And what's cool about them is they're just their fun games and activities that take less than two minutes to do so you can find demonstrations of those.

If you're like, I wanna purchase them or I don't wanna purchase them, but I just wanna know the exercises to check out the insta and you can get it for free. And then if you wanna know more about them, like the details and the thought leadership around, workplace wellness and also the intersection with mental health and the climate crisis.

LinkedIn is the best place to connect with me there. And you can follow me at K D Hurlbut. That's my real last name. It's very fun. H U R L B U T T.

Angela: Love it. Thank you so much, Katie. Hopefully, we'll talk to you soon.

KD: Thank you both. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you're not already subscribed, we hope you join us regularly, and please leave us a five-starr review.

OUTRO: Wherever you get your podcast. We hope that this podcast is beneficial to you and your wellness journey. Dear mind you matter is brought to you by Nobu, a new mental health and wellness app. You can download it today, using the link in our show notes. We'll talk to you next time. And until then, remember you and your mind matter.