Thrive Global - Aaliya Yaqub
Podcast Summary
In this episode, I talk with Aaliya Yaqub, Chief Medical Officer at Thrive and a Board-Certified Internist. In this episode, you are going to learn about preventing chronic stress. You are also going to learn a lot about cultivating and living with self-compassion and self-kindness. And you're going learn about guilt and how to have way less of it.
Aaliya has incredible experiences, so she is the Medical Founder of Simple Health Kit, was the Adjunct Clinical Professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, Founding Medical Director for Steady Health. Medical Director, and in charge of Enterprise and Strategic Partnerships at Carbon Health. She was the medical founder of Forward, also has experience at Facebook and many others.
I met Aaliya through my husband, as our husbands went to school together, and I am so excited for you to learn from her, be inspired by her, and just make sure you're taking notes because there is a lot of wisdom and useful tools in this show.
Contact Information for Aaliya Yaqub:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.aaliyamd/
Personal Website: https://www.aaliyayaqub.com/
Business Website: https://thriveglobal.com/
Transcript:
Tia Graham: Hi, Aaliya.
Aaliya Yaqub: Hi Tia, how are you?
Tia Graham: I'm good. I am so excited to be talking to you today, and I can't wait for everyone to learn from you and about you.
Aaliya Yaqub: Oh, I can't wait either.
Tia Graham: So you have an incredible history of experience and the type of work that you do and the passion that you put into everything. I would like to start off by understanding what's your favorite part about your current role at Thrive?
And I know that's not all you do, um, but what do you, what do you really like about this particular role that you're in right now?
Aaliya Yaqub: Yeah, I think that's such a great question. I remember actually being five years old and knowing at five that I wanted to be a doctor, and then I went through the whole sort of medical training and residency and fellowship and I practiced for many years.
And it's so funny when people say, well, now you're in a different position and you work at Thrive and you work with, um, you know, Sort of like corporate environment and helping with behavior change and stress reduction and wellness and educating people about lifestyle medicine. And it seems so different from what you went into.
And I often say, actually this is the full realization of sort of my purpose, which is I went into medicine wanting to help people. That's all I knew at the age of five,
Tia Graham: By the way, you just gave me goosebumps. My whole body just went , goosebumps.
Aaliya Yaqub: And, then it wasn't until I took this job that I realized you can do so much by empowering people with knowledge, teaching them about how their brain works and how to regulate stress, and how to deal with those really difficult things that we all go through, right?
Like stress is a ubiquitous experience for all 8 billion of us on this planet, and if you don't know how to disrupt stress and prevent it from becoming chronic and cumulative, it has all of these impacts that we know, right? Like increased risk of depression, anxiety, burnout. Um, it leads to failure in relationships, it leads to anger management issues, um, alcohol and substance abuse.
I mean, the list just expands as you start talking about it. And so it's been very fulfilling for me to work with large populations in a corporate environment and teach them about all of these things. And I do executive coaching, I do group coaching with Thrive. We also, have a wonderful behavior change platform where all of this content sort of lives and gets, distributed to people through Microsoft teams.
And so we have folks using our tools every single day, and I think hearing their response to that is just the most fulfilling thing for me. That is, that truly is my purpose, is to help people in that way, to share this knowledge and to empower them to take control of these things that are really hard in our lives.
Tia Graham: Yes, Oh my gosh. And it's so needed, as you said, all 8 billion. So, I'm sure you could spend weeks with people, with your knowledge. Everyone listening to the show has a lot of stress, personally and professionally of the type of people that listen and most of them are in the corporate environment, which you're in.
Can you share one or two, one or two tips that are a must when it comes to preventing that chronic stress? Right. it's about before you get to that breaking point to that point where you are, you know, being angry at your kids too much or whatever, right. All the different ways that it comes out.
From your perspective, your experience, what are those one or two things that are the non-negotiables for stress prevention?
Aaliya Yaqub: Yeah, that's, um, I think a really key thing for people to recognize because we don't just one, you know, one moment in our day kind of blow up and have that like breakdown. Yeah. It's that the stress kind of builds up.
Yeah. And it can happen really fast. Yeah. But if we don't recognize it, then it blows up. Right. And it manifests in a lot of different ways. and it could be, you know, us yelling at our kids, even though we didn't mean to do that, or us snapping at our partner and saying, oh my God. Like, why did you do that?
Even though it's, you know, they put the wrong trash bag in the trash can or something. It really wasn't that big of a deal, which we can all relate to.
Tia Graham: That’s not a true story or anything.
Aaliya Yaqub: It’s a representative example I would say, but I think, teaching people to recognize that their stress level is going up acutely, recognizing the signs of that in your body.
We start taking shallow, quick breaths when we're stressed, and that's because our sympathetic nervous system is activated. We're in that fight or flight response. Some of us start feeling jittery. Some of us have that GI upset. You might feel like your heart's racing, your palms are sweating.
You're nauseous. You know, we've all had that feeling where we're so stressed that happens. And so if you understand that stress can be downregulated by switching from the sympathetic nervous system to the parasympathetic, and I know I'm using various scientific terms here, but the parasympathetic nervous system is where we feel like grounded and relaxed and at peace and you can, you can switch between those two modes through breath work.
It really is that simple. So, by doing some deep breathing exercises and there are thousands out there, that you can do, but just paying attention to your breath, taking deep breaths in and vigorous exhalations, you can calm yourself down and move from that sympathetic activation to that parasympathetic.
You can calm yourself and ground yourself. So, so much of it is about knowing what are the tools. So, breathing is a big tool. Meditation is a big tool. Um, Positive affirmations are a fantastic tool. Even something. Getting outside and just going for a walk around the block, a five minute walk where you just say, okay, I'm very stressed.
Let me look at the trees. Let me look at the sky. Let me experience childlike wonder. Just connecting with that part of yourself brings you to a more relaxed and calm state. So those are the tools that I typically recommend, and all of them are rooted in the science and are incredibly effective. But there are lots more too that we could talk about.
Tia Graham: No, thank you, and I think for many people, and I speak for myself included, especially pre-kids when I worked in the hotel industry, is we get so used to the feeling of shallow breaths, heart, chest. That we don't even notice. You know, it's almost where that, that's our state of normal, right? And so, I think for many people I, yeah, just that, that interoception of like, what is going on in my body?
And I wrote down the word chest, like for me it's like all in my chest is where I feel it the most. And, just recognizing like, no, it's not normal to always be breathing quickly and having that tightness or, you know, having back pain or what, you know, snapping at your husband, you know, that, isn't the normal state.
So I think it's really powerful what said of just that the recognizing of the signs is such a powerful foundation.
Aaliya Yaqub: Yeah, and then also knowing you can do really small things to kind of course correct. It takes 60 to 90 seconds to disrupt your stress in the moment. That's all it takes.
Tia Graham: That’s really powerful. Oh yeah. Like it, it doesn't, is you don't need to take an hour.
Aaliya Yaqub: Yeah. You don't have to meditate for an hour. You literally need to breathe for 60 to 90 seconds.
Tia Graham: Love it. Love it. That's gonna be, a quote that we pull for this. Okay. I want to switch and talk about a, topic that I'm really, really passionate about and I know we were texting about before, and this is around self-compassion and I’m really, really passionate about self-compassion.
It has changed my life over the past 18 months, in terms of parenting as one of our children is autistic, and I've needed self-compassion more over the past 18 months than I have ever before. And so my first question is, how and when did you know that you needed to be more self-compassionate to yourself?
Aaliya Yaqub: I actually never had that realization. I never actually got there. What actually happened is I was in residency and I was really struggling with like, what fellowship do I do? What career move do I make next? And I remember it was one of my mentors who said, you would really benefit from understanding your personality type.
There's this wonderful psychiatrist. She works with a lot of young doctors. She'll help you understand your personality type, and then from there she can help you figure out, sort of explore what the best career path would be. So innocently I go and I visit her and she makes me do the Myers-Briggs personality test.
But then she starts asking me questions, and we get to the point where she realizes very quickly that I'm a people pleaser, that I say yes to things. I fill my plate, I overfill my plate. I feel resentful, I feel overwhelmed, but nobody knows about it except for me, and I'm hard on myself. I hold myself to really unrealistic standards, and then I have a lot of guilt because there's a mismatch between what I think is ideal and where I am.
And so she helped me sort of unpack that and say, listen, the first thing is you have to stop saying yes when you really mean no. And that was a critical moment in sort of my personal development where I actually realized, that I was doing that first off. And then secondly, I started understanding that you can say no and that it's not gonna disappoint people.
That you'll still have friends, that people aren't going to hate you and that there's a way to do it gracefully. And so that was, that was when my journey sort of started. And then from there, I think when you start feeling empowered to say no and stop people pleasing, then you also start thinking about what are my boundaries?
how do I communicate them? And this is a big thing for women in the workforce, is something called boundary incongruence, which means that we internally have boundaries that we want other people to, or that we want to uphold, but sometimes we don't communicate those boundaries. Or sometimes other people don't hold to that party line of that boundary, and so they creep on the boundary or they'll push you and expect you to budge.
And so, that's the boundary incongruence. When we have boundaries and they are not being upheld, we start feeling really bad internally.
Tia Graham: And we're not upholding them like we have them. People are not respecting them, we're not commuting it. And then we're not actually saying, yeah, this is a boundary or this isn't working.
And then we have, and then we sort of suffer. We, and we have painful emotions cuz we're not in a way standing up for herself. Is that kinda what you're saying?
Aaliya Yaqub: Yeah, absolutely. And then what happens there is you bring in this really unproductive emotion. I think it's the most unproductive emotion called guilt.
Tia Graham: Oh God. I could write 50 million books on guilt. I'm glad we're talking about it!
Aaliya Yaqub: Guilt. I mean, it's most commonly, I mean, there's mom guilt, there's parental guilt, there's survivor's guilt, there's so many. There's…
Tia Graham: Work guilt!
Aaliya Yaqub: Yes. There's so many types of guilt and what guilt is, and the reason it's so unproductive, and I would like to at some point understand why evolutionarily it developed, but what guilt is, is we have a standard somewhere up here, and then we have our reality, which is on the other side of this, so down here, and there's a mismatch between our reality and the ideal.
And that gap is where we start feeling like, well, I'm not the ideal. So I'm not good enough. I feel guilty, I should be doing more. I should be doing things differently. And that's where self-compassion comes in. You have to give yourself grace and say, I actually need to be kind to myself so that everything that I do in my life, all the roles that I play, are sustainable.
Whether you're a parent, you're a mom, you're somebody's child, you have parents yourself. You’re a partner. You’re a friend. Sibling. You are an extended family member. You're a member of a community, you're a member of a team, whatever it is. So you have to give yourself a pass.
And, and it's hard to understand self-compassion, I think, because it's not something we societally talk about a lot. And people think about self-care, but they don't really think about self-compassion. And a lot of people say, well, what does that actually mean? That’s you talking to yourself in your head and verbally the same way that you would talk to a good friend who's going through something tough.
Tia Graham: Yeah, yeah. No, I, like I said, um, someone, someone recommended this book by, um, Dr. Kristen Naf, called Self-Compassion and in addition to talking to yourself that you would a friend, which is so, so important and can be very hard, of course, for people that have high ideals like both you and I.
What also is really helpful is connecting to common humanity. So for me, this looked like, um, when my daughter is having a panic attack, which are very stressful and it's heartbreaking and a really, really, really challenging situation is, and I would always feel so alone, right? Because I would be like in my house with my, maybe my husband was there, but this, you know, feeling very alone in this situation with a child and connecting to common humanity has helped me in that when I'm in those situations, I pause and I think, how many other moms around the globe have an autistic child who's having a panic attack right now? Or had one today? And just connecting to, I'm not alone. This is actually a common human experience, and even though I'm not talking to those moms at that exact moment, it's like I know that they're there.
Um, and that practice has been really, really helpful. Um, really, really helpful for me. Yeah, in addition to the, to the self-talk, so for people that rarely talk to themself like a friend, you know, where their inner critic is so loud, I call mine The Scorekeeper is so loud and bossy and you know, opinionated.
What advice do you have for them to start on that path of, of that friendly voice, that kind voice?
Aaliya Yaqub: Yeah. First off, I just wanted to say, oh my gosh, I didn't know that you were going through that as a parent and, I wish I could give you a hug. I mean we'll have to download on this some other time, but, it sounds like you have learned to give yourself grace and to figure out a connection between you and other folks who are going through that, and there's so much power in the shared collective.
Both storytelling, like actually you talking about this, because someone listening might be experiencing the same thing. Um, and also that shared human experience that we have. Like, we all have really tough things that we go through. Yeah. And you're, you're not alone. And it's that loneliness that reall puts us into a corner where we start feeling shame and guilt and frustration and all of these really difficult emotions.
But, but to get to your question about the inner critic and at Thrive, it's funny, we call that person the Obnoxious Roommate.
Tia Graham: Oh, that’s good! in your, oh,
Aaliya Yaqub: I like the scorekeeper. That, that's a great, separate angle that also gets at what our inner critic does. It's about creating new neural pathways so that you not only quiet that inner critic, but you train your brain not to allow that inner critic to have the space to start commenting sort of in your brain.
And the way that you do that, one of the greatest tools for that is actually using positive affirmations. So positive affirmations, as you know, are scientifically validated statements that typically begin with “I am.” And the more that you say them to yourself, the more that you are actually retraining those neural pathways to believe those things.
So some of my favorite positive affirmations are, I am strong, I am worthy, I am capable of doing hard things, for my daughters, I, have them say I am beautiful because beauty standards for little girls are really tough. And they get all sorts of messaging from all sorts of places. So, it's really about you training your brain to believe those things that you're saying and that counteracts that inner critic.
One of the most powerful things when it comes back to guilt. I used to experience a lot of mom guilt.
Tia Graham: Ugh, me too.
Aaliya Yaqub: I know that's kind of a ubiquitous experience, that, you know, people go through. And it really wasn't until I decided I'm not going to feel guilty anymore for being a working mom. I'm just not going to feel guilty about not being with my child 24/7. I'm gonna do my best at work. I'm gonna do my best at home, and I'm gonna carve out some time for myself amongst all of my responsibilities. And that's what life looks like for me, and that for me is my ideal. So I'm not gonna feel guilty about that.
When I decided, it was really liberating, but then it was about how do I put that into practice? Like how do I actually stop that guilt from happening? And that's where positive affirmations came in. And I had to say, I'm a good mom, even though I'm going out on a date night with my husband and I'm leaving my children at home with a nanny.
I'm a good mom. I'm investing in my relationship, in my marriage, and the best gift that you can give your kids is seeing healthy relationships and is seeing self-regulation of your feelings. And when you're overwhelmed as a parent, it's hard to self-regulate. So I always think of it that way, like, it's better for me to do the things that I need to do professionally and personally, and model, you know, stress reduction techniques, so my kids learn them and self-regulation of my emotions and what healthy relationships look like.
And once that all came together, I was like, why did I ever feel guilty? That feels so silly.
Tia Graham: Yes, yes. Oh my gosh. I can, there's so much I can relate to. I too, there was a time where I was like on the track of, are you good enough? Are you doing enough? Are you good enough as it relates to parenting, because I've always been like, no work, I'm good. I'm a good wife. Okay. Am I good enough, mom? Am I good enough? Over and over that track. And I got to the point where I was like, I am so sick of this track playing over and over in my head. Um, and what this, this might help people too, what helped me is I actually have a picture, I have a few pictures, um, of my home of this really beautiful old, wise woman.
She looks a little bit indigenous and um, basically, instead of asking, are you good enough? Are you doing enough? Are you, you know, et cetera. All she asks me is, are you loving yourself and are you loving your girls? And every day I'm like, yes, yes. So I'm like, I'm good. I am good. Instead of, you know, like you said, the time of, oh, did I spend enough time with him today, or did I, was I present? It's like, no, you know?
Aaliya Yaqub: I love that. I think that is such a great strategy.
Tia Graham: Oh, thank you. I think it’s; I think that point of like enough is, you know, it's interesting we both had that where we were like, no, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna do this to myself anymore. Like you said, then you need to put it in the practice.
But that's the first step of making that decision. Like, I'm not gonna talk to myself this way anymore.
Aaliya Yaqub: Yeah. It's so powerful when you have that realization. You start taking action and you realize that all of these things that you believed about yourself or these standards that you held yourself to are fluid. You can change them. You have power over them.
Tia Graham: Yes, yes. I love that. The fluid standards. Yeah, and I wanted to ask you, and this just because of time be the last question, because standards and ideals, we all have it, right? And, and in different parts of our life versus reality. So for you, do these standards, do you think, come from your childhood or more from what society tells us?
Or do you think it's a mixture of both or, or maybe something else in terms of how we should be, you know, as, as in your career or marriage or et cetera?
Aaliya Yaqub: Yeah, I think society shapes us in tremendous ways. It impacts us, right? We wear certain clothes. We behave certain ways because that's what we feel is societally accepted or upheld on a pedestal.
And I think all of us have to, at some point ask ourselves on a deeper level, like what's most meaningful for me? What is the right thing for me to be doing or how is the right way for me to be showing up? And so just taking a step back and examining that, and I was actually just talking to some girlfriends this morning about this.
We were talking about how you can just get so lost in the day-to-day shuffle of work and family and kids and partner. And you never really have the time and the space and the quiet to think about what are my goals? Who am I without all of these other roles that I have?
What do you want out of life? Out of this chapter, out of the next chapter, what's on my bucket list? Like that mental exploration. I feel like we're so digitally connected all the time that we don't have the space for that anymore. And so I like to encourage people to do a personal offsite, which basically just means you take,
Tia Graham: Sounds amazing. Yes. Everyone…
Aailya Yaqub: You take a day, you disconnect from your technology. You go out into your favorite form of nature, whether that's a beach environment, the woods, um, a marsh, you know, the mountains, and you take a journal and you just go through those exercises. Who am I? Like what fulfills me in life? What's my purpose?
What are my goals? What do I want out of my next chapter? What do I want to be known for? And then you enjoy a nice meal. You go for a walk or a hike and then you return to your life. That's the best personal offsite.
Tia Graham: I just finished the book, The Good Life, the 84 year study of all the different Boston and yeah, I'm, I'm immediately thinking of like.
When you're, when you're 84 or when you're 94 and you're looking back, it's like, what's gonna matter and what, you know, it's not about the whirlwind and, and everything. So I love, I'm gonna tell everyone about the personal offsite. I will quote you. I think that's such a great idea. Um, I personally would love to go to Hawaii by myself for three days and just do that cuz I lived there before, husband and kids by myself. So I think that is such a wonderful, beautiful idea.
Aaliya Yaqub: And I highly encourage you to do that.
Tia Graham: I will, I will! I'll probably not this year, maybe next year. But the day for sure the day in the mountains. I can do. Oh, Aaliya, thank you so much. Oh my gosh.
You gave, you just gave so much in a short time. So thank you so much for coming on the Arrive at Happy.
Aaliya Yaqub: Thank you so much for having me. It was such a joy to be here with you today, not only to talk about some of my favorite topics, but also to reconnect with you and see your face!
Tia Graham: Yes, we'll have to do it in person, in person soon.
Thanks for all the amazing work that you're doing and for people that want to learn more about you, connect with you. Where is the best place for them to go?
Aaliya Yaqub: So I'm on LinkedIn. I'm also very active on Instagram at @dr.aaliyamd Um, and maybe we can put that text somewhere cuz it's a, a little bit of a text spelling and then, you can reach out to me through Thrive Global as well.
Tia Graham: Perfect. And the, let me ask you about this, the app. Um, can people get it individually or is it only if their company, I mean, there could be people listening that wanna actually bring it into their company, so that's that. But is the app available for individuals as well?
Aaliya Yaqub: So, it's available to organizations that have signed up five, but if you have a friend or a family member at one of the organizations that we serve, we make it available to friends and family, So it is available to an extended population through that, but unfortunately not available to individual users.
Tia Graham: okay. So basically people bring it into your organization and that's how you can, that's how you can get the awesome tool. Yeah. Okay, well thank you so much and uh, hopefully we can talk again soon.
Aaliya Yaqub: Thanks, Tia.