It’s Hard Being Grown-Ups All the Time, with Lexi Reid

Lexi Reid: Hi, my name’s Lexi Reid, and I am eager to be healthy.

Michael Scott Eger: My guest today is Alexandra Reid, who most people call Lexi. Lexi has a PhD in plant molecular biology and spent years working in science and medical devices. Then the pandemic hit, and burnout got so bad that even painting, something she loved, felt like a chore. What brought her back was five pressure-free minutes of drawing. That small habit grew into Mind Art Wellness, where she now helps high-achieving women ease stress with short creative practices. And here’s the good part: you don’t have to be an artist. Lexi, welcome to Eager to Be Healthy.

Lexi Reid: Thank you. Thanks, Michael. I’m happy to be here.

Michael Scott Eger: All right. We want to remind everyone that this is a value-for-value podcast. That means we don’t put ads in our podcasts. If you see ads, get yourself an open podcast player and listen to us. But we are donor supported. So if you want to give us some value for the value you receive, visit eagertobehealthy.com/support and learn how you can give us time, treasure, or talent. And Lexi, have you always been healthy?

Lexi Reid: It’s definitely a work in progress right now. Having hit burnout, I had to learn what burnout was and how to avoid it in the future. So I would say no, I haven’t always been healthy. During the pandemic, like you mentioned, I was working 24/7 trying to get emergency ventilators into the hands of the public, because that was before vaccines were available. And working all the time, I couldn’t even enjoy the hobbies I used to use to relax. You mentioned my little five minutes of drawing, and it actually was on a Zoom call, because that’s all we were doing. I just started doodling. I’d never been a big doodler before. I was much more a painter, collage. But I started realizing that my breathing was relaxing, my shoulders were unclenching. So I started looking into art therapy, which led me to creative coaching. And I decided I could use art therapy exercises proactively to help with wellness. That’s what I’ve been doing with other women like myself in science, technology, engineering, and math.

Michael Scott Eger: Okay. Now, I know you answered some of this question already, but we have to ask you: have you always been happy?

Lexi Reid: It’s funny. Happiness, I think, comes and goes. Sometimes you can be happy in your career, and sometimes you can be happy in your home life, and sometimes the two of those will clash. During the pandemic I found I was running a really short fuse. Because I was not sleeping well and not eating well, I started lashing out at my family, and that wasn’t happy for anybody. So that’s another reason I try to stay on top of my wellness activities, whether that’s getting outside for a walk, getting a good night’s rest, or eating better. It’s a work in progress. To be happy and healthy takes some work.

Michael Scott Eger: I empathize with that, because when the pandemic hit, I was working direct support in human services. While everyone else was at home working on Zoom, playing with the dogs and cats, I was out in the field passing meds, dealing with people who might not like me, giving them the care they deserved, putting my health at risk, and doing massive overtime. That was not good for my health, and it was not good for my sleep. And yeah, that caused burnout on my end too. You were dealing with ventilators?

Lexi Reid: Yeah. The company I worked at at the time had landed a government contract to build emergency ventilators. It was a Canadian company working with the Canadian government. We went from very early designs on paper all the way up to working prototypes, basically getting them ready to be in the hands of the Canadian public if we needed to roll them out for the emergency.

Michael Scott Eger: Were you on the production side, or more in design or support?

Lexi Reid: I worked on the quality and regulatory side. On quality, we were looking at all the documentation, all the labeling, all the instructions, making sure these devices were safe to use. On the regulatory side, we were given dispensation from Health Canada to shorten some of the bureaucracy of getting approvals, but we still had to meet all the requirements they asked for, to show it was safe and effective for the public to use.

Michael Scott Eger: Okay. Now, you were working in the office during most of that time?

Lexi Reid: No, I was at home. In fact, the day before we were sent home, my husband came home first from his work and claimed the downstairs office. So I ended up setting up a folding table and a chair in my bedroom, which is pretty much where I worked for the next two, three years almost. And I think that also caused me issues, because there was no separation of home or office. It was all literally in my bedroom. Not great for getting away from work.

Michael Scott Eger: Yeah, I can’t even have my computer in my bedroom. That’s a major disruption in sleep. You were living and working at home. You had virtually no separation from your husband and kids…

Lexi Reid: And kids. They were also at home.

Michael Scott Eger: …you lost the ability to have that separate social interaction with your coworkers, and you lost the ability to have that space from your family. And you lost that variety of seeing other things. And that sucks.

Lexi Reid: It did. It was really hard to get out of your head. The most I could do was take my dog for walks around the neighborhood. I’m very glad I had that excuse to get out of the house and away from my computer: “I have to go walk the dog.” So I did walk the dog a lot. But you’re right, your whole social life is just nonexistent. And because you’re with your family all the time, you don’t give each other the space everybody needs either, which is not good. Having healthy boundaries is healthy. When all the boundaries blur, are you a teacher? Are you mom? Are you a coworker? All your roles end up on top of each other.

Michael Scott Eger: Even when I was working out at the home, not my home, the home where we provide services, when I came home I was not emotionally available for my wife, because I spent all my day caring for people who were not mentally well, and I needed time to completely disconnect. And that’s when she needed me the most. So those dynamics were very interesting. I don’t know about you, but I suffered my first bout of real depression during that period.

Lexi Reid: Well, for me, I’ve always been an artist, and I couldn’t actually make any completed artwork during that time. I was seeing all these beautiful posts on Instagram from wonderful artists who now had all this time to create art. And I was blocked, I think, because I was so burnt out from working all the time and being under this high pressure to get these devices out. I’d go into my studio and just stare at the supplies. It felt too overwhelming to start a new painting, a new collage. But somehow, just by doing those doodles, which led me to reading more about art therapy, I realized you didn’t have to be an artist to get a benefit from doing these exercises. They were Pictionary-level drawing. If you could draw stick people, there was benefit, because it was a way of translating all of these thoughts and emotions in your head and getting them out of your head and onto paper. It’s almost like visual journaling. These pictures were symbols of what you were feeling, and you could start talking about it with people. So when I do a lot of my coaching with women, either one-on-one or in a group, I give them simple exercises. Maybe it’s: imagine your perfect day. What do you need? For some people it was, “I need a family celebration.” For other people, it’s, “No, I want to be alone in the woods in a hammock.” But it was a way of reflecting on what you needed to recharge. A lot of times we don’t take the time to figure out what we need. We just go on autopilot, pushing through, thinking we’ll relax later. But we never do, because we don’t allow ourselves to stop.

Michael Scott Eger: Now, you love painting, is that correct?

Lexi Reid: I do. I do. For me, that used to be, and it is now… but for the longest time during the pandemic, it was hard. I couldn’t create. I’d start things and then feel overwhelmed, and then I just couldn’t even start. It’s almost like I got numb. A lot of people say when they hit burnout, a lot of things become numbed out. There’s no joy, there’s no spark. Everything’s just this flat gray. What used to be a terrific outlet, where I could go into my studio happily and lose track of time, during that burned-out time I couldn’t even go in. I’d just walk in there, stare at stuff, and walk out again.

Michael Scott Eger: Have you figured out what the difference is? Because they’re both forms of art. But what made the drawing easier for you to do, and what made the paintings so exhausting?

Lexi Reid: It came down to putting expectations on myself. We do it to ourselves, right? I’d been conditioned to think if I go into the studio, I must make something. I must make a finished product. I used to sell my artwork at galleries. So it was, if I’m taking this time away from work and away from my family, I have to produce something. It was really hard to get past that pressure on myself, until the point where I just stopped making anything. It wasn’t until I almost gave myself permission again to play, like a kid. Kids don’t worry about whether their drawing looks good or not. They just draw. I almost had to relearn how to do that, because I’d come from quite a high level of making art and selling art, and then suddenly it was just gone. It was like there was a wall between me and past me and future me, and I had to figure out how to get past that and enjoy it again. That did take time. But I’ve worked with a lot of women who enjoy the visual journaling aspect of these activities, even though they claim they’re not artistic. They enjoy the playfulness of it, and it relaxes them. And then they may tap into other realms of creativity. One woman got back into cooking; another woman got back into quilting. If you give yourself little permissions to play and be creative, it opens up a lot more opportunities you hadn’t thought about.

Michael Scott Eger: So you hit on something. Let me have you expand on it, and it comes with a question. When did you discover that making art was less about creating and more about producing a product?

Lexi Reid: For me, I had to almost come back to enjoying being creative for creativity’s sake. What did I love about making art? I do love playing with paint and mixing colors. I almost had to take it away, not expect to make something, if that makes sense. I had to relax into being in the studio, and maybe it’s making something small and just playing a little bit. I had to take all of those rules I’d imposed on myself. And they were self-imposed. Nobody was saying, “Get into your studio and churn out some paintings.” I was doing that to myself. And I think a lot of the women I work with are so type A. We’re so used to being the A student that we feel we have to be productive in all aspects of our life. We have to be the best mother, the best colleague, the best artist, and there’s no room for play. Because what’s play? That seems to be not productive. You’re not finishing anything. It’s open-ended. But that’s what lets our brain relax, and our stress response relax as well: just pausing and playing. Those two things.

Michael Scott Eger: That’s a key concept. For you, art stopped being play and started being more about producing a sellable product. And I’m not sure if that was pride or if that was just you saying, “Hey, I can produce something of value. I expect that. And now this hobby is a business.”

Lexi Reid: And it does become that. You start off as an amateur and you get better and better, and then somebody likes your work. And then suddenly you feel that any time you spend in the studio, you have to achieve something at the end. That’s putting a lot of pressure on yourself. I was already burned out from work and family, and putting one more pressure on myself was just too much. So I almost had to unlearn all these habits I’d trained myself in. Like, I trained myself to answer email at all times of the day, and I had to put a stop to that. Okay, I’m not checking work email after five o’clock. Yes, I can check it at nine. Just giving myself permission to step away from the computer was huge.

Michael Scott Eger: Now, the drawing: was that just because it was something you could do in spare time with nothing? Was it because you felt it was disposable and you could experiment? What really made it therapeutic?

Lexi Reid: It’s a lot of those things. The nice thing with just picking up a piece of blank computer paper and a pencil or a pen is that supplies are minimal. I didn’t have to worry about wasting my good art supplies. I wasn’t breaking out the oil paints or the pastels. And when I work with my clients, I say you don’t need to rush out and buy a whole bunch of art supplies. This is all about visually putting your thoughts and feelings on paper, and a pen or a pencil is great. But what’s interesting is, when we start doing these activities, they start looking for more color. Maybe they grab some highlighters, maybe some colored pens. That first bit is like a building block. I don’t want to overwhelm them. So, just drawing simple shapes. There’s a grounding exercise where you draw in time with your breath, and you’ll find that your breathing slows down. You might have started out with very sharp, jagged doodles, and what’s interesting is they become softer, more wave-like, in time with your breathing. It’s a great feedback mechanism to calm yourself down. It’s something you can do in between meetings. If you’re really stressed out from one meeting, you sit down, take a few deep breaths, and somehow the movement of a hand on paper with a pen is very relaxing. It gets rid of a lot of pent-up energy that way too.

Michael Scott Eger: Yeah. I’ve tried drawing on computers and tablets, and it comes down to this: there’s something nice about a stylus rubbing over paper. The sound, the feel, seeing my imperfections show up in pen and not being corrected by smoothing logic. I haven’t gotten to the point where I journal my art, but sometimes I just draw something and throw it away.

Lexi Reid: And that’s allowed too. You don’t have to keep everything, and that’s okay.

Michael Scott Eger: Yeah. Because if I did, I would have more clutter than I already have, and that’s not good. We ADHD people love clutter. But the point is, it allows you to express yourself, it allows you to have a tactile experience, it allows you to be analog. That’s harder and harder to do these days as we lean more into technology to automate more of our life. There’s something nice about just sitting down and cooking a meal, or drawing, writing on paper, going out in the park and walking, without the car. I’ve actually moved to a car-optional community now, and my wife, who doesn’t drive, wonders why I’m walking so much. It’s because now it’s not mandatory. Plus parking’s a pain. She doesn’t have to park; she doesn’t drive. She hires people to drive her. I deal with all the hassles of driving in the city outside of DC, and it’s not fun. So the analog tasks of walking, riding my bike, drawing, all kind of reset me. They get me out of the pressure cooker of doing something because it needs a financial reward. Even this podcast is a very analog experience for me, because I get to have a conversation with someone like you and learn something about connecting with other people. In your case, it’s putting pen to paper and letting emotions flow.

Lexi Reid: I love the analog experience. Yes. I would definitely say we’ve lost sight of that. It comes down to this: time is a precious commodity. We all feel like we don’t have enough time, and we feel like machines should be making our lives better. But I bet now that you’ve given yourself that option of walking instead of driving, you’re probably thinking different thoughts. You’re experiencing different smells, different sights. Quite often when I’m walking my dog, I listen to podcasts, but I find if I need to think about something, it’s better just to walk and listen to the sounds around me, as opposed to having a story in my head that somebody else is telling me. I do love podcasts, but I think sometimes we forget it’s okay to just be with our thoughts too, and observe the world around us.

Michael Scott Eger: And that hits on a good point. When I walk, when I’m drawing without intent, when I’m writing without intent, I find the spare cycles of my brain go to problem solving. Problem solving things that have been in the background, that might be a low priority but have always been a stressor. During that process, my brain can work this stuff out while the body is doing something. It takes my need to be active out of the equation, and everything else, my intellect, goes into free-flowing brainstorming. The number of solutions to things that have been bugging me for years that just appear to me while I’m doing this simple thing of putting pen to paper, putting one foot in front of the other, looking across the street, looking at the trees, looking at the birds, smelling the flowers… The freedom to just disconnect is amazing. I’m not sure if that’s what you feel when you sit down to draw, or when you actually paint for painting’s sake, not for production. Because I know you’re a good painter. I can see the pride in your eyes. And these are sellable products. But in the process of knowing it’s a sellable product, you don’t get the chance to experiment, you don’t get the chance to break rules, you don’t get the chance to try new things. There’s a formula that sells. “I know it sells; that’s why I keep repeating it.” People like Bob Ross: “Happy little trees.”

Lexi Reid: Happy little trees. Happy little clouds. Yes.

Michael Scott Eger: But the point is, he knew what worked. And sometimes you’ve got to have the freedom to break the rules, and in that, you can create something new. More importantly, you take the stress off being right, you take the stress off creating stuff, and you can just live in the moment.

Lexi Reid: No, I think we all need to spend more time… you’re right, in that flow state, in the moment. We get so distracted by our to-do list. It’s like, I need to run to the store, I need to make dinner, I need to do this, I need to prep that. A lot of times we don’t cook for just the fun of cooking. We cook because we need to get the meal on as quick as possible and get off to do the homework and out the door. It’s when you take time to just enjoy the activity. Maybe it’s as simple as washing the dishes after work. Sometimes I find even folding laundry, if I can just relax and not fuss about the five different things I should be doing, if I can just take time and let my brain idle… I think of it as my brain going into idling mode. It’s just running things in the background. And you’re right, you start thinking of interesting solutions to problems you’ve kind of pushed down because you don’t have the attention for them. Your brain bubbles along in the background while you’re occupying your hands doing something, or your feet because you’re walking. You get some really interesting solutions that way.

Michael Scott Eger: Yeah. So, art therapy. How do people find you? What makes them think, “Hey, I need to draw for my mental health”?

Lexi Reid: Often the women I work with have tried everything, and they’re like, “Well, I haven’t tried that.” Or they say, “I used to love being creative, and I haven’t been creative in so long. Let me try that.” So it’s a bit of both. There are the folks who have tried everything and run out of things to try, and there are the folks who remember enjoying it and would like to try it again. I work with two separate camps of people, but they both end up really getting a lot out of these simple exercises. I call them art-therapy-inspired exercises, because art therapy is often looking back into past traumas, whereas I want to use art to be healthy, to be proactive. It’s like the difference with wearing a Fitbit to count your steps. I want people to make art and play to feel better, as opposed to feeling like it’s something they should do. I have a lot of resources on my website at mindartwellness.com. There are free resources, like a newsletter where I send out activities each week, and a free challenge where you get an email each day with a link to a video of me demonstrating some of these activities, with journaling prompts. So you get a taste of what creative wellness coaching, as I call it, is all about.

Michael Scott Eger: Okay. Just to clarify: my work history includes time in direct care, and I know more of art therapy in the OT, the occupational therapy, space. But your art therapy is more focused on mental wellness.

Lexi Reid: Yeah, I use it in combination. Coaching is all about setting goals for yourself. They could be big goals, and then you break them into small goals. So it’s all about having a positive mindset. A lot of these drawing exercises I do are about planning for goals, how you want to change your life, as opposed to trying to deal with past trauma. So there are two different flavors, I think, with art therapy. There’s the reflective, looking back into your past, and then there’s the proactive, thinking of your future and how you want to change. That’s the side I focus on more.

Michael Scott Eger: So you focus more on the transformational, forward-thinking type of creative process, instead of ruminating on and addressing your past trauma. Forward thinking, much better than ruminating.

Lexi Reid: And there are some folks who do get stuck in the past, and they do need to go through the therapeutic side before they can allow themselves to have the positive forward look. I often talk about it like a lifeguard. There are the people who have to rescue the people drowning in the pool, but I want to work with the people who have an idea of how to swim and want to get better at swimming. They want to move easier through the water. So when I’m doing the exercises, it’s like: your life isn’t great, let’s fix the things, and we’ll take baby steps. It’s just giving yourself time to put it on paper, reflect about it, and talk about it. A lot of coaching is asking questions and getting people to think about what they want. What do they really want? It’s hard work sometimes to figure out what we really want in life, because we don’t give ourselves time unless, you know, you’re going out for a walk to think about it.

Michael Scott Eger: So people understand how someone could find a person like you: do you onboard people with the help of a therapist? Do you find people by word of mouth? Are you purely virtual? Do you do workshops? What does it look like? How do people build a relationship with an art therapist? And what does that work look like, so people can imagine it in their daily life?

Lexi Reid: For me, I’d say the easiest thing is that I do work virtually. I live out on an island, so it’s easier for me to work with folks online. I’ve worked one-on-one, and we go quite deep together. I also run groups occasionally, and we get together as a group and talk about the various exercises. If you’re working one-on-one, you can go very deep into that person’s challenges. If you’re working in a group, there’s that peer sharing. People have a lot of common experiences, and they can provide suggestions to each other. It’s not just me providing suggestions about how to achieve their goals. So I do both. And if I’m talking with somebody and I can tell they’re really troubled, I would definitely refer them to a true art therapist, because I’m more on the coaching side. That’s how I draw the distinction.

Michael Scott Eger: So is there anything you’d like to cover that we have not covered yet?

Lexi Reid: No, I’ve quite enjoyed our conversation. I think people would understand that they need to take a break and, as you said, go a bit more analog and give themselves permission to play. It’s hard being grown-ups all the time. People have to realize it’s okay to take a break and just relax and play, and not expect to make something, as you said, that’s a product you have to sell at the end of the day.

Michael Scott Eger: You might have just come up with our show title: it’s hard to be a grown-up all the time.

Lexi Reid: There you go.

Michael Scott Eger: So if someone wanted to work with you, how would they find you?

Lexi Reid: Again, easiest thing: my contact info is on my website at mindartwellness.com. I’m also on LinkedIn, because I work with a lot of professionals there. Those are the two easiest places to find me, either on LinkedIn or just go to my website, and my email’s there as well.

Michael Scott Eger: Sounds good. With great gratitude, we want to thank you for coming on to Eager to Be Healthy. And till the next time we speak, be well.