Why High-Achieving Women Are Always Exhausted (It's Not What You Think) | Dr. Shruti Punjabi

If you've ever felt exhausted by work that nobody acknowledges, guilty for taking a vacation while the world is falling apart, or like you're carrying expectations that were never yours to begin with — this episode is for you.

Renae sits down with Dr. Shruti Punjabi, urban planner and applied social scientist, to unpack the invisible labor that high-achieving women carry every single day — and the layers that get added when cultural identity, gender expectations, and systemic barriers are part of the equation.

In this episode:

• Why your brain is valued in the workplace but your full identity isn't
• How cognitive overload and invisible labor are colliding in real time
• The hidden cost of being trapped in a role you can't walk away from
• Why inherited expectations masquerade as personal ambition
• What it means to redefine success on your own terms — not the ones handed to you

Dr. Punjabi has worked with the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, and the Fund for the City of New York. Her lens on burnout isn't theoretical — it's lived.

If this episode hits, subscribe and share it with a woman in your life who needs to hear it.

🔗 Connect with Dr. Shruti Punjabi on LinkedIn and Instagram: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shruti-punjabi/ 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shruti_punjabi/

And check out Dr. Punjabi's latest work: https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/10.1016/j.envsci.2025.104197 

🔗 Ready to do the deeper work? Grab the first week of Burn the Blueprint for free: [Week 1 of Burn the Blueprint].

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I don't think women think about success as something that's in isolation with the expectations. I think it is always tied to multiple expectations, pressures, fears, hopes, of not just something that they think, but of what people around them think. It's just a societal thing. It's just so ingrained in us. I don't think I've ever thought about success as an isolated term for myself. I think it's always about family, friends, partner.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

You just heard from Dr. Shruti Punjabi. Shruti is an urban planner and an applied social scientist who has collaborated with various international organizations and government bodies, including the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank's East Africa Regional Unit, and the Fund for the City of New York. She finished her PhD last year and is now working as a social science researcher at the Public Interest Technology Lab at Virginia Tech. What I love about this conversation is that it will hit home for anyone who has been exhausted by work that nobody acknowledges, but expected to still hold it all together while the world falls apart and still showed up anyway. But Shruti adds something that doesn't get talked about enough. What it costs to do all of that when your culture, your gender, and your visa status are all working against you at the same time. So without further ado, let's jump right in. Welcome back to Hustle Rebels, the podcast for people who know how to work hard but are starting to question the cost. Today's guest is Dr. Shruti Punjabi. Shruti is an urban planner and applied social scientist whose work sits at the intersection of collaborative governance, environmental planning, and how people exchange knowledge across systems and cultures. What stood out to me most about Shruti is the lens that she brings ambition, burnout, and identity, especially as an international scholar navigating spaces that welcome talent, but don't always make room for the full human behind it. So today we're gonna talk about invisible labor, cognitive overload, cultural expectations, and redefining what success actually means. So I'd love for you to tell us a little bit more about yourself in your own words.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

Absolutely. Thanks, Renee. That was amazing. I don't know if I can beat that, but I'm gonna just give an introduction. I am an urban planner. Since I was very little growing up, I saw a lot of homelessness around me. And then I was coming from a space of privilege. Since a very little age, I had this inclination that I want to serve and provide. So coming from someone who would sit on footpaths and help little kids learn about language and math and just sharing meals with them and just breaking the stereotype to actually being in the institutional space of creating a change. I've somewhat grown to be an individual who's really empathetic and I really appreciate when I can actually serve and be a part of a community that is going to serve a bigger cause, which is about making the world a better place one bit at a time. And that's how I think about my role in the world as an urban planner, as a social scientist, and just as even like a friend, a daughter, a girlfriend, and all of that. So all of that combined,

Global Talent Global Identity

SPEAKER_01 3:11

that's me.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

Oh, I love that. It's so beautiful. We were having a great conversation earlier, and I love how something that you had even written in the forum that you sent over, it was very powerful. And you had put down that the world imports global talent, but rarely makes room for global identity. And what does that mean for you from a lived experience?

SPEAKER_01 3:36

I've just navigated or like been in that tension for the last decade almost. And I think this is a question that I sort of wake up with and sleep with. And I almost always wonder that there's a lot of value that is given to the human brain in terms of like, hey, these are ideas. And when we think about human brains, there's no bifurcation in terms of where that brain is coming from. Is it a white brain, a black brain, a brown brain? Nobody cares about that as long as it's giving you knowledge. But the minute we put that brain inside a body, we sort of forget that there's differences. People come from different parts of the world and they're providing all of this knowledge on a platform that has been culturally scaffolded in a very standard unilateral way without considering the diversity. So the minute we think about the person that's actually bringing the knowledge, we don't really have the resources to think about where they're coming from. What do they value? And just to give you a little example, I've lived in the US for about a decade and I've traveled the world for my work all over and worked in different countries. But the fact that I come from a specific culture and I have some specific rituals, festivals that I value in a country that is so diverse, I would still have to think twice before celebrating or like thinking about a holiday or just taking time off on the day that matters to me. Let's say it's the Bali, and nobody in my company would know what the Wali is, but I would still have to manage working full-time on that day, taking care of my family, which is back home and here, and to also sort of fulfill myself with the little pseudo feeling that I have of, hey, it doesn't matter. I cannot take the day off or even take some time off to just enjoy and be in the moment because I also have to do my work. So just beyond the traditional understanding of cultural differences in the workspace, this is just a more human-level example of what I mean when I say that the brain's valued, but the minute the brain goes inside the body, there's very less understanding of where people are stemming from and how can we make them more comfortable. Because if we want to sort of monetize on or materialize on their knowledge, we also should give them some space so that they feel welcomed and they see like they're taken care of or valued for. And I'm not saying it's not happening. I see that sort of diversification happening all around the world. It's just happening at a very slow pace. I mean, I've been in this space for a decade and I still haven't got a heads up that, hey, this is something that you celebrate, take a day off, you know? And again, it is not just stemming from that. I am also an overachiever. So I would be like, hey, if I'm taking a day off, I want to work on a Saturday just because I'm someone who wants to constantly make sure I'm getting my work done. So I don't think it's just an outwardly thing, it's also an inward thing where women, or especially me, I would feel like this constant obligation to make up for it. I don't have to, but I feel that way.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

I feel like you bring up a couple of great points. One, all I could think about is you moving here and it being a melting pot. And we're we claim to be a melting pot in the United States and we're so constricted in our holidays in so many ways. I mean, not everything has to obviously be a federal holiday, but at the same time, if you are celebrating something, I feel it should be a custom for you to be able to take that time off or time away without being questioned about it. The second thing that you had brought up, you had said that the brain is valued until it's in the body. And I feel like that's such a loaded thing to say because our brains and our capacity to do something is so taken advantage of in so many ways. I just feel like I want you to expand on that too, and how that is involved in the hustle culture because that's where we lead to a lot of burnout and how we don't find value in ourselves because then we're being taken advantage of in so many ways at our job. I have a very vivid example coming to

Visa Traps And Lab Burnout

SPEAKER_00 7:45

my mind right now.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

I would really, I'm so glad because if you have a platform to talk about something so important, but I was a part of a big research lab very recently for the last couple of years, and I saw that the culture in that lab was something that made a lot of younger early career professionals uncomfortable because of the way the duties and the responsibilities were explained and bifurcated and sort of just delegated. There was no clarity in terms of how people were like the early career professionals were taking up roles. They were just sort of expected to do anything that comes across the next morning. And we had a very diverse lab. It was people from around the world who have now come in the US and want to just exchange knowledge and work on a large climate problem. And what I saw was over time, a lot of people who had the flexibility to move jobs because they are like, let's say, US citizens or like have no visa restrictions. I think two years into me being in that lab, that lab did not look as white as it looked before. And I don't know if I'm about to say that, but I could see a lot of people from around the world. There were people from all different races working really, really hard. And then I could suddenly see a lot of locals or white people sort of leaving. And I had a conversation with one of my really close friends and colleagues, and again, I was like, hey, what's happening? And they were absolutely dissatisfied. They were equally struggling in the role as I was. The only difference was they had the flexibility to leave, and I did not. And my fellow international peers did not because we had other sort of restrictions. And these are invisible restrictions that nobody really talks about. So even if I also felt some, I wouldn't say exploited because that's a big word, but I did feel constantly exhausted and lost because of the way the culture was, I couldn't do much about it because I was tied to that role. And I could see a lot of peers having a lot of flexibility because they don't have to worry about the visa. They don't have to worry about who's gonna write me a reference letter or how will I move on to something next, as much as I had to, and some of my other international peers had to. And I think this sort of is the very vivid example of what we were just talking about, because it's still knowledge, it's still the same amount of brain power, same amount of exhaustion, but not the same amount of response to exploitation or harassment or like mental exhaustion, you know? Yeah. It's different responses. And I think that really stuck with me because I was like, wait a minute, I don't have the same flexibility. Some of my peers don't. We cannot do that. We just have to put our head down and keep working. That hit hard. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:29

I feel like in a lot of ways we're still stuck in the industrial revolution. And it I can only imagine how much more difficult it is when you're tied to other things, you know. And it's funny that you even had mentioned the more flexibility of it, someone being white or you guys having to need that visa or needing to provide for your families. And it's something that I want to talk about with this podcast are the things that we shy away from in many other conversations. And that is a big dynamic. Things that unfortunately we have the privilege to walk away from because we don't have to worry about doing that. But there's such a strong, powerful way that if we come together as a whole civilization against these powers, we could be so much stronger than we really are. And you describe a lot of this burnout or this mental capacity as being trapped in a system that exhausts you and also not allowing you to recover, which I feel like is sharp and really painful to hear. Can you kind of unpack that a little bit more?

SPEAKER_01 11:35

I understand that in

Nontraditional Paths Pressure

SPEAKER_01 11:37

the world there are people who take different parts, different career options. But we do know that, especially in the world where I initially come from, originally from India, and then I've been everywhere around the world after that for my work. And lately I've just been in the United States because that's where I wanted to do my PhD, and that's where I've been working since the last decade. I really feel like there are traditional career butts, and that's usually the route that is sort of been the standard poster for how the journey is supposed to look like for a traditional woman, is where you do your education and then you get married, and then you have kids, and you know, and then on the side or alongside, if you want to, you can build a business or work. But what we sort of forget is that there are outliers, there are situations where people would want to do different things. And the minute you decide to take that decision as a woman for yourself, you've been put into so much invisible pressure that you never really could comprehend. As someone who decided to take that non-traditional path, when I decided to do a PhD, I had this goal that no matter what happens, I want to finish my PhD before I turn 30. And that was a personal goal that I'd set for myself. And I was like, hey, I want to do this. What I did not realize is that this is the age when traditionally you're expected to also get married and also have children, these unset expectations, at least from the part of the world that I come from. And suddenly here I am working 12 to 14 hours a day, constantly thinking about my research, also experiencing pressures from my academic life and navigating all of these other silent emotional, personal battles by myself. And I think that really just made me think about the different layers of struggles that are often just not talked about. It's just something that we forget because we are like, hey, this is a traditional route and this is how it's supposed to be done. But what if you didn't choose that path? What happens then? What happens when you want to do something different? The type of questions, the type of pressures, and just to clarify, these are not just all external pressures. As someone who's very self-critical, I would also put pressures on myself. Where I would be like, hey, I have family who's always looked after me. I'm not doing justice to them. I'm being selfish. If I'm just thinking about my career, and then if I'm thinking about them, I'm like, hey, I'm not doing justice to my PhD because I'm not spending enough time, even after spending 12 hours a day for five years, with maybe like what, five, 10 weekends off. I've never taken a weekend off in the last five years because the work was that intense. So just unpacking that, I just feel like it's there's a lot that goes on the minute you decide to take control because everyone's asking us to take control as women. They're like, oh, go carve your path, do this, do that. You have the freedom now, you have the power. But nobody talks about that. The minute you take control and you decide to do something that's not traditional, what happens after that? There's a lot that needs to be also taken care of that nobody's really working on or thinking about. They're just like, now you have the freedom, do it. And once we start doing it, we are like, hey, do we really have the freedom? What about the 30 other things that we have to take care of that nobody is really helping us with? Because we can't do everything, you know?

SPEAKER_00 15:01

I really don't know if I answered your question, but no, you did.

unknown 15:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

No, you did absolutely. And I feel like that's part of the thing that's especially as women, we have those internal pressures. But and you say that it's not all external, but I will challenge you on that because although it's not directly external, at some point it was external, right? And that's actually something I talk about in one of my programs called Burn the Blueprint, because at some point in our lives, whether it was identified as a child, someone told us those things, right? They told us that we should think about those things. And I think about so many times things I inherited that I heard from my mom that she probably heard from her mom. I had this very vivid thought about how I told my boyfriend that I would I make him coffee every morning, and I'd be like, I could pack your lunch too. And he'd like, why would you do that? Because my mom did it for my dad, you know. So I was just ingrained in my brain that it doesn't matter if I have my own job, if I have my own responsibilities, I grew up viewing that as what the wife does, you know. So that's what I'm going to do if I'm living with my boyfriend. And then I'm home making dinner. Even last night, I was thinking, like, oh, he texts me, he's on his way home. I gotta stop what I'm doing. I gotta go start cooking dinner. Like, it's just a program that's built up inside of us. So while it's not directly external, we have these internal beliefs that is just built inside of us. And until we start removing some of those identities, we can't go forth and do, like, oh, just do whatever you want. We can't rebuild that new identity. It's really interesting. From your perspective, how can you tell if someone is chasing that success that actually matters to them versus some sort of inherited expectations?

SPEAKER_01 16:52

I feel like those lines have always been blurry for me, you know, what I wanted to do versus what I thought would make my parents feel proud of me. And I'm not stereotyping an entire culture here, but coming from Asia, I really feel like there's this thing where the parents are like, they would always want their children to make them, you know, like do math, do science, make us proud, be a doctor, be an engineer. And things have changed over the last decade or so. There's a lot more diversity in the way people think about work now, think about gender roles now. And there have been multiple great films that have been made in this direction. And they're doing a great job with educating people and populations in different parts of the world now as to how to think about gender roles, how to think about profession and just work that makes you happy versus work that is just work. And I'm grateful that that progress is happening, but it is very blurry, those lines, you know. There were times in my PhD where I thought, hey, I just cannot, I cannot do this. I need to give up. And it's funny that the thought that kept me going is not because I want to do this, but because it's gonna make my parents feel so proud of me. I have to do it for them. They've worked so hard their entire life to give me everything that I have. Like in terms of identity, they play a big role and they've been so supportive. So if I give up, isn't that me kind of cheating on them or not being unfair towards everything that they've done for me so far? You were talking about something being ingrained in you. I think that is something that was always ingrained in me. Like, hey, I need to do this because I want to make my parents proud. And it's not like I did not want to do a PhD, it was always my dream. But during the journey, in times where I was giving up, that was somewhere my motivation, but also like somewhere the push that I had to just be like, hey, I need to keep going. I cannot disappoint them. And there's this constant pressure that I put on myself. It's like, oh my God, they're gonna be disappointed. They're gonna feel a certain way. And you know, like that's not how they raised me. And all of these internal pressures, it just comes to me. And when I look back right now, I'm just like, success as something that was expected, and success as something that I thought of is really at the transition phase I'm at right now. Because I'm like, now that I've finished my PhD, I have 10 doors open. Do I want to be like in Geneva working for the World Health Organization? Or do I want to be here? Or do I want to be in Malawi? Or do I want to be? And I have all of these doors, but again, I'm like, hey, my boyfriend's here. What happens now? Do I just stay here? Will he move for me if I move somewhere for my work? What will happen? So I don't know if men think this way. I really don't know. Maybe nowadays they do, because I'm glad that my boyfriend said that he would be very happy to make that transition. But I don't know if everyone thinks that way, and I don't know how it would look like when it will actually happen. He is talking about that, but I'm just saying, like, I don't think women think about success as something that's in isolation with the expectations. I think it is always tied to multiple expectations, pressures, fears, hopes of not just something that they think, but of what people around them think. It's just a societal thing. It's just so ingrained in us that we never I don't think I've ever thought about success as an isolation, as an isolated term for myself. I think it's always about family, friends, partner.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

Yeah. That's so interesting. Success and isolation. I really don't think women do think of success in isolation. And when I think of men in the aspect, anyone that is a man listening, I would love for them to comment because when I think of men in their success, I feel like they do just assume the next thing that's gonna happen. And I was just actually having a conversation earlier today with another woman, and we are talking about how specifically us, when we were thinking about the next thing that we were going to do, our mind starts racing for the next thing that's going to happen or the next reaction that our spouse or our significant other is going to have, which is going to lead the domino effect of the plethora of other things, you know. It brings me to the point of seeing what your own personal experience is as a woman that has not only had the struggles of being a woman in everything that you have accomplished, but the cultural differences as well. I would love to have you share some of that because I feel like it's something that we don't always talk about as women. And speaking of invisible labor and invisible struggles, we often keep them very close to our hearts because we think that we need to put on these facades and be the chameleon, just pretend that everything is okay. We hold it all together most of the time for families or for just everything, relationships.

Chameleon Culture And Invisible Labor

SPEAKER_00 21:42

So I would love for you to share that aspect of your life.

SPEAKER_01 21:45

Definitely. I think there's two strands to it the cultural difference stand and then the invisible labor strand. And I think they talk to each other, they're interconnected. But just in terms of cultural difference, I would say that when I knew. That I wanted to become an urban planner, I was really excited about like, hey, that would involve so much travel, that would involve so much learning about different cultures, different places, and I would have the opportunity to go in some of the most underdeveloped parts of the world and serve. What I did not realize is that I'm still a woman from a particular part of the world and I would always be perceived like that. No matter, I'm not gonna change my skin, I'm not gonna change the way I look. That's not gonna change. So I will still be perceived a certain way when I enter a certain contextual setting, and I will have to learn. Nobody teaches us these things. I will just have to learn how to become a chameleon and mold myself to that space. And culturally, when you're dealing with data on the field, now you're in a setting which is extremely rural and you have to sort of blend in. Otherwise, you'll be treated differently. You'll never get to the depths of things that you would have got if you were like, I don't want to stereotype again, but I don't know if a white man is expected to do that. If they are in like the fields in South Africa, they can still be the white man and they can use that as a privilege to then do data collection and people will still come to them and talk to them a certain way. But I don't know if the same applies for a brown woman, you know? It does not. So I really had to understand culturally that if I'm stepping into this space and if I really want to understand how people think, I will have to really learn about them beforehand and be like, hey, this is how they usually dress up. And maybe I won't have to completely change the way I dress, but I will still have to blend in the culture for them to believe me, for them to trust me, for them to have faith in the way I'm gonna deal with whatever information that they're gonna share with me. And then a completely different setup is let's say I'm in a conference in a national funding organization setting and I'm presenting my work, and suddenly I'm with a very different set of peers, and I'm still a brown girl, and I still have to mold myself. I still have to talk in the language that peers or traditional white men and urban planning sphere understand, you know. So I still have to do that. And there's no training that's given to people, even as urban planners, we are not taught how to mold yourself in different spaces, but we are expected to be in all of these different spaces. And on top of this expectation, as a woman, there's a whole different layer that you just have to navigate on your own, that nobody's gonna help you out with. You mess up certain interviews, and you realize, hey, this is not working out for me. Maybe I need a different approach. You do your research, you go back to the field, and you get the data again. So the space looks very different culturally when you think about differences. And even like me just being in the US, if I think of cultural differences and having to navigate that, it's a very loaded question. I would like to reflect on something that we both of us were talking about before the podcast, and it's just about women sometimes having to reclaim their space, and it almost seems like women sort of pitting against each other. I was in a situation where I had to deal with great overachievers in my field coming from different parts of the world, and I expected them to understand my struggles. And I was like, hey, come on, like this is gonna be easy. Well, guess what? It wasn't. It was even worse than I would have expected. Like it was really bad. It was just, it was a nightmare. And I was really shocked because I was like, hey, you're a woman in power and you come from a different space in the world, and now you've built this whole legacy for yourself in a different part of the world, you would understand. And I almost felt a lot of sense of insecurity, a lot of sense of actually using the cultural difference as a disadvantage or as something against me from someone who actually comes from the same culture. And I was really shocked. And it took me a very long time to navigate that. It was really hard. And the way I thought about that situation then versus the way I think about it right now is very different. I understand their perspective now, it's different. But at that time I was really shocked because I was like, I thought you would understand, but they did not, and they really made my life hell. I stopped believing I had major trust issues, but I was like, I don't know if I can trust anybody in this space. I will just have to be really cunning and I would have to develop that personality where I really have to put my point forward, otherwise, nobody's gonna listen to me. So that's the cultural differences strand of it. The invisible labor strand of it is something I think you, me, any woman on this planet would resonate with, and that they are gender-decided. And you were just talking about your mother, and I'm pretty sure when she was raising you, or my mom was raising me, these are not paid jobs. They just are exhausting, mentally and emotionally draining. And it comes from a space of a lot of love that women provide all of that nurturing to another individual, and it's also expected by the society to do all of that. Nobody's paying them for that. That's invisible labor. And on top of that, you are also taking care of a husband, of a family, of your work while silently dealing with a lot of things that nobody will really understand. Sometimes, even if you're talking to a fellow mother, or like in my case, let's say I'm talking to a fellow PhD scholar, they wouldn't get it. It's culturally different, it's contextually different. And sometimes you just have to sit with those thoughts and you have to be like, is it really worth it to sit with someone and talk for four hours when you know that they won't understand? Let me just deal with it on my own. Let me just be quiet. I think I'll be fine in two days. Let me just take some time off. Which, by the way, you cannot, because who has the time? But so you just sort of shelf all of that. You keep building on that. But invisible labor as a concept, as something I've studied even as a PhD scholar, is very understudied, is very undervalued, is very underdid and understood. Nobody really makes an effort to dissect that and how deep that is, and how much of an emotional and mental and cognitive struggle it is for a man or a woman, especially women, because of the different unset expectations that we have puts on us. I really wish more people were talking about it, but I don't think they are.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

So something that I really hope people talk about. It's great that we're talking about it now. And I think the hardest thing, too, about the invisible labor is that a lot of it comes with it just being expected. And I feel like that's why housewives and mothers they get so burnt out. Right now, there's actually an issue going around against a woman in a local town where she was actually postpartum and she ended up unfortunately killing her three children, and then she tried to commit suicide by jumping out of her window while her husband was away gathering errands and medications. Unfortunately, she ended up becoming paralyzed from the incident. I think it happened a couple of years ago, but now it's going forth in the court system right now, and so it's kind of a big to-do. But people are 50-50 right now because people are obviously looking at it like you're a monster, you try to kill your children, but at the same time, they're you can look at it out of perspective and be like, she was postpartum, she was struggling with a lot of hormones up and down. She had children that were very close in age. It's just people don't A understand what postpartum is, and B, the whole entire fact that it could take two to three years for a woman's body to recover from having a child and she had three within a short period of time. And then on top of that, the invisible labor that comes with burying the children and then doing all the household responsibilities, and then the expectation to get zero credit for everything that was going on. And it's things that are just not talked about at all. And then the mother is blamed, and then she's paralyzed, you know, and now she has to go through a court system. What I love about what's coming forth right now, though, is a lot of women backing her and being like, you're not in a mental capacity to even understand what this woman was probably going through, to be at such a low that she would even consider doing those horrendous acts to her children. So it's

Cognitive Overload In The Digital Age

SPEAKER_00 30:12

just an interesting concept when you bring invisible labor and tying it into something that you have researched yourself, cognitive overload, which is something that I also understand with burnout recovery. In plain language, why is that something that everyday people should actually care about?

SPEAKER_01 30:30

I think it's very important that in today's time we care about the different aspects of invisible labor and the cognitive overload, is because we've been constantly under an availability of excess of information coming from ample of sources. And what we don't realize is that our brain can only comprehend so much. So when we are already exhausted based on everything that we are dealing with on our own, and now we have all of this information. Sometimes we don't even need those pieces of information from different parts of the world. Different personalities deal with that sort of information in very different ways. And I think it gets very overwhelming as an individual to then deal with those emotions and be present in today's time. Cognitive overload has everything to do with us already as human beings dealing with our own emotions and the outflux of this whole digital revolution. Now we have social media, now we have access to the number of deaths that took place in a part of the world at 3 a.m. that we don't need to know at that point because our brains already overwhelmed. So I think it's very important for us to, at this stage, especially, because this is a peak time when we are in that transition of relying more and more on digital technologies and social media, that we reflect on that balance because it's not like us as individuals are not dealing with any emotions, we are not robots, that we can be fed hundred different pieces of news every single day, all day, and we would not have a reaction to it. We are human beings, we have emotions, we are going to have certain behaviors, we all come from different personality types. Keeping our current bandwidth emotions and pressures in mind and the amount of cognitive overload we are experiencing with the current boom of AI and social media, it's only a recipe for disaster. Because we have not navigated the tools to deal with our emotions just yet to actually then be amongst a sea of all of this, ample of information. And we still don't know what we are fed. We still don't know if the information that we are fed is correct or not. The lines are very blurry. And we are here dealing with minds which are four-year-old, six-year-old, ten-year-old, teenagers, adults, women, men, elderly, minds that are very moldable, minds that are very easily influenced. So there's a lot of layers to that. So I think thinking of these two concepts together, which thanks to you, Renee, that I'm also thinking of for the first time in intersection, which is invisible labor and cognitive overload, we're not ready for this. Our brains are not ready for this. The problem is there's no control. We don't have any policies, we don't have any regulations, we don't have mechanisms in place that would help us sort of keep these two, even think of these two simultaneously right now. And we are moving at a really fast pace where it'll be really hard for us to catch up to then regulate these, both institutionally and mentally, both individually and as a society. It's going to be very difficult.

SPEAKER_00 33:44

What do you say to people that are on vacation and are feel guilty? Because I actually it makes me think about when you're saying that I literally can see my friend's Instagram story when she's in sunny Florida in the middle of the winter when shit's hitting the fan across the world, and they're like, Oh yeah, I'm on vacation. I know I shouldn't be feeling great right now because of the world just like shitting on itself. But you know what? I'm trying to have a good time. And I just specifically remember sending her a message being like, you need to just enjoy yourself. We are not meant to know what's happening out in the other side of the world with your personal experience of the research and everything that you've done. What would you say to people that are feeling guilty for enjoying their life or doing what they need to do while half the world is in shape? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 34:34

And to your friend, I'm also guilty just so that I've done that all I'm a Gemini, and I think that makes me it's just the empath thing. It's really bad because I feel bad for my boyfriend because I would wake up at 3 a.m. and be like, you know what? I just read something this afternoon and I can't sleep because there's like 200,000 children who are like not now orphan in this part of the world, and what's gonna happen to them? And he will be like, Woman, you've had the most difficult day and just like grieve, you know, you deserve some time off, and I don't know how to take that time off. Because then Pat and being in this field of international development, I'm constantly fed with news all day, every day. And to have that switch off, when to have that off, I think it is, I'm still in the phase of learning that, but I think I'm slowly getting better to sort of disassociate from all of this. It's really hard. It's really hard because we've created all of these capitalistic mechanisms to feed this information to the populations on this planet, but nobody is thinking about how it is going to be consumed, what happens after that? Because we are making money by disseminating all of this information, but we are not worried about how that is gonna be absorbed by people. What is it actually doing to those populations? We're trying to inculcate all of this capitalistic nature by showing us those Instagram ads of things that we're thinking of, but we're not thinking that what happens once someone's addicted. I think I was addicted to just being aware about the world. And it took me a while to sort of be like, there's only so much that you can do, and you have to make peace with that. And that part is really, really tricky. It takes a long time to just sit with yourselves and be like, is there anything I can do about that right now? No. Is there something I am doing to contribute, even if it's 1%? Yes. I have to make peace with that. I have to constantly remind myself of my contribution. And I think to your friend or to even me, at that point, it'll be very important to remind ourselves that we are here, we've deserved this little holiday. By celebrating or enjoying, we are not doing any injustice to people that are in other parts of the world. If we sort of come out of this little break that we have taken happy, more recharged, we might be able to do our job better going back into it. And we really would have to just make peace with that. And I used to tell this to myself when I used to wake up at 3 a.m. and be like, if I stay up all night worrying, I won't be able to do any work tomorrow. And that is the real work that's gonna eventually support the cause one day, you know. Right. So I really need to keep myself sane. And the only way to do that is disassociate yourself, which is the most tricky path because information's thrown at us from all sorts of spheres of life right now. But yeah, I think we need more mechanisms of disservation than of association at this point. We need to invest money, resources, brains, knowledge towards ways to pull people out of access of information and just to give them the space to be creative themselves, think themselves, be with themselves, in isolation, with family, in that personal space of in-person interaction or non-digital access. It's gonna be tricky, but that's where the future is, I really feel.

SPEAKER_00 37:56

Yeah. I think too an important thing to remember that as a collective, if we're so stuck in a worried state of mind, that is pushing forth a, I mean, everything is a vibration and a frequency, right? So if we're stuck in a vibrational state of worry and unrest, that is pushing that frequency and that vibration into the collective, which is not helping anyone and is probably just perpetuating everything to be worse anyway. So if we're not taking up the space that we need to rest and recuperate, then we're not positively affecting the collective as a whole.

Redefining Success And Final Question

SPEAKER_00 38:33

But you also challenge the more means good mindset. So, what do you think success should be measured by instead?

SPEAKER_01 38:42

Personally, I think we've been fed something since we were very little. When we go to the store and we get that little toy that we always wanted, we associate our happiness with that toy. But as we grow up, we associate happiness with the ability to buy that toy. And I think that's a problem. That's a big problem. We lose the sense of where that joy is coming from. Is the joy coming from just that enjoyment of being around something that's new, that's exciting, that could be nature, that could be some activity, that could be some experience. And then as we grow up, I think the focus almost goes to being able to afford that, being able to have the most of it, you know? And I think there's a big problem there. Because I think a person can enjoy or feel happy initially just by being in that space. It doesn't have to be a five-star or a seven-star resort. It could just still be a very simple experience in the nature. It does not always have to be the top notch of everything, you know. The fact that you are living that experience, and that is happiness has been taken away from us because of the consumerism, the capitalism, the way the society has been functioning. We've been fed that you will only be happy and you will only enjoy something if it's done a certain way, which is not true, which is an absolute bullshit. That's not how it works at all. But I think most of our answers lie in our own childhood. So if we could just sit back and just ask ourselves, what makes us happy? What does happiness and success mean to us when we were growing up? You know, we would get a lot of answers. And I think it's gonna be very subjective, it's gonna be very personal. But if even people who are listening to this, if they could just sit back for one second and just reflect and think about what made me happy, you know? What was I dream dreaming of or thinking of when I was growing up? Am I still doing the same thing? Why am I not doing the same thing? Just those bigger questions. We never really sit down and ask those questions to ourselves. And about success, I feel like it's again the traditional past that we've always been fed or thought about is that hey, you need to finish your education, buy a house, get married, have children, send them to school. And I just really want to ask people where is this written somewhere? Is this encrypted somewhere where you're like, hey, this is how life should be lived? It's just this narrative that's been said to us that we need to do things a certain way. And the same applies to success. We've been told that success is when you accomplish something which is big. Who said that? Success is something where you accomplish something that's fulfilling. It does not have to be big. And big is subjective. What's big to me might not be big to somebody else. But we've just been constantly said that narrative that for me to be successful in my seal, I have to be a top-notch someone in the World Bank, or like I have to be the top-notch professor in an ex-university. That's not true. If what if I want like a life which is slow? I want to be in a suburban area where I'm in a part of a university that's more inclusive, that teaches students a more well-rounded approach towards problem solving. And that could mean success to me. That could be fulfilling to me. So I think more means good is the way the society has sort of made us think about success, but it's not always true. What happiness and success could mean to me could not necessarily mean to somebody else, and could not necessarily be the benchmark. But it's my happiness and it's my definition of success. And we need to find a peace in that. And we need to own that. We cannot really always go by standards set by some experts and we still don't know where Adi's coming from. But we need to question and challenge those. It's time. I really think that.

SPEAKER_00 42:34

I think people are afraid to actually do it. I don't even know if people think they have permission to do it. So I guess for anyone that's listening, you have permission to ask yourself what your definition of success is. But I have a question for you too. What is something that you've personally had to unlearn to become more of yourself or to define your own definition of success?

SPEAKER_01 42:58

Lots of things, but I would just say one very important thing that applies to everybody is to be comfortable in your own skin and is to just believe in yourself. I really think we constantly put so much pressure on ourselves that we have to be the gold standard set by somebody sitting somewhere. It's not true. I really had to unlearn how to be the best at everything. I don't want to be the best at things that don't interest me. Just because let's say a person in my workplace thinks that I should be good at that, I sometimes take that as an expectation or a command, and I don't question it. I think we should question it. This is our life, too, and we should question it very respectfully. And we should be like, hey, but this is something I'm really interested in. Would you mind if I provide my skills and expertise to this thing rather than investing energy and learning something that is not of interest to me? And I think we've stopped questioning. We've sort of just we're just taking feedback and thinking like this. Is it, you know, this is just something that we're supposed to do. It's okay to constructively question the feedback. Because feedback's gonna come from 10 places, and not all 10 places will be giving you feedback in your favor. Sometimes it also comes from a place of insecurity, dominance, maintaining power, and we just don't question those things. So I think I really had to just unlearn how to how to just accept everything that's given to me and just believe in myself more and just believe in my skills, my ideologies, my way of doing things without disrespecting someone, but really believe in myself. Just question things. And I think we've sort of forgotten that. I think we've just stopped questioning things. We just accept it as it comes. We have Chat GPT, let's just accept what it's telling us. We have a boss, they're telling us this is right and this is wrong, we'll just accept it. That's not how it works. Even with our parents, I would say, I would always constructively challenge them and be like, this is what your generation taught you, but this is what I'm learning. Do you see value in what I learned? Would you want to talk about it? And they would always be excited. But what if I would have never questioned? What if I would have just accepted everything? So yeah, just challenge things, you know. And I never did that. So I really had to change that about me. And like, it's okay. What's the worst that can happen? I'm not here on no. That's okay. I can take a no.

SPEAKER_00 45:17

That's fine. That's great. I used to be called insubordinate at work because I would just ask questions. And there's nothing wrong with asking questions. In fact, it's how we build trust in ourselves too. I do something called I'm a brain spotting practitioner, which is derived from EMDR, but a lot of the times it's really just the other person's brain healing themselves. And so when I'm trying to guide them into be curious about that, because if they have a thought that comes up, ask your brain what it's trying to tell you. A lot of the times a response from the other person will be like, I don't know. And I'm like, but you do know because it's your own brain telling you. And you're like, I just don't know. And I'm like, you do know though, but you're just so reliant on like the meme telling you a therapy session or some long drawn-out story on Facebook that you're relating to. You know, we just get so caught up in everything else telling us what we should do, what we should know, how we should feel, that we stopped questioning our own intuition and what we should be questioning. I really do love that perspective you bring to that. And so I just have one final question for you. So if someone is listening right now and they're feeling exhausted from trying to just fit in rooms that they've outgrown, what would you like them to hear today?

SPEAKER_01 46:34

Instead of what I think they should hear from me, I would like to leave them with a question. If they could think about that in their feet time, and I think that's something that's gonna definitely help them feel a little less burnout and a little less exhaustion. And this question is something that I was asked during my PhD journey, and it just sat with me. And I was like, wow, it just brings me so much joy just thinking about this. What if I would do something about it in the future? So, to all the listeners, and I would really like to just ask them this one thing that they should think of when they're feeling a burnout is if money wasn't a concept, what would you be doing right now? I just want them to sit with it. And every time I sit with that question, it just brings me joy. And I'm like, oh my God, what would I be doing right now? You know, like what is it that would bring me joy and fulfill me in terms of passion towards work, you know? So every time I feel exhausted, I just zone out and I think about that. And the next day or in that evening, I would just sit with it and I would do something on that ground, just so that I feel fulfilled. So if they would like to do something like that, I think that it would bring them a lot of joy.

SPEAKER_00 47:43

I love that question. I feel like that's a great ending to have. Well, Shruti, this was a very thoughtful and important conversation for everyone listening. Thank you for bringing both research and the real human aspect side of these topics as well. So, for everyone that is listening, where can people connect with you and follow your work?

SPEAKER_01 48:02

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, Rene, I had a great time chatting with you. Thank you so much. I think you're doing a great job by bringing some of this really key topics that really need to be talked about in the forefront. And I really appreciate it and I really support you. And I wish that you keep having these amazing discussions with people and share your experiences because I'm really looking forward to keep learning from you and the people who keep joining this community of yours. So kudos to that. But to connect to me, you can connect to me on LinkedIn. My first name and my last name is Shruti Punjabi and on Instagram, it's my first name and my last name again. You can just find me on Instagram there. And Renny, if you could leave it in your text bubble somewhere, and I would love to chat with people who would like to teach me something on this or learn from me or just talk more, share experiences. I look forward to that.

SPEAKER_00 48:55

Yeah, absolutely. I'm gonna definitely put everything in the show notes as well so that all those links will be available to be able to connect to. If today's episode resonated with you, make sure you subscribe and follow. So until then, thank you again for this awesome conversation and we will see you guys next week. See you guys. Bye.