Achieve Peak Performance by Learning to Shift the Gears of Your Mind
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Summary
Meghan Cerrone is a Cambridge-trained physician, a neuroscience researcher, and the author of Hyper-Efficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work. She explains why you should treat your brain like an engine with three different gears, how people have different gear personalities, and how to use environmental cues, specially structured 90-minute cycles of work, and even caffeine to shift your brain to the optimal gear for different mental challenges.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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The Industrial Revolution changed the nature of work so that many people labored in factories
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continuously performing the same task at the same pace for the duration of their shift.
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Two centuries on, even though most folks have moved from working with their hands to working
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with their heads and from manufacturing set outputs to solving complex problems, generating
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creative ideas, and processing information, we still tend to work as if we're manning
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My guest says that being stuck in this factory framework is to our detriment and that there's
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a much better way to do knowledge work, one that's less like manning an assembly line and
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Me Too Cerrone is a Cambridge-trained physician, a neuroscience researcher, and the author of
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Hyper Efficient, Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work.
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Today on the show, Me Too offers a modern approach to achieving peak performance and explains
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why it's better to impose the natural rhythms of our brains on our work than to impose the
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She shares why you should treat your brain like an engine with three different gears, how
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people have different gear personalities, and how to use environmental cues, specially structured
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90-minute cycles of work, and even caffeine to shift your brain to the optimal gear for different
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After the show is over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash hyper-efficient.
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All right, Me Too Cerrone, welcome back to the show.
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So we had you on back in 2019 to talk about your book, Stress Proof.
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You got a new book out called Hyper Efficient, Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work.
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How is this book a continuation of your thinking and writing that you did in Stress Proof?
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So when I wrote Stress Proof, the main focus was on the neuroscience of stress.
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And following the book, I've been working with various organizations in different fields
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to really dig deeper into the world of work and how stress manifests and really how the
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And while doing that, I realized that one of the biggest questions we ought to be asking
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right now is, is it really that stress arises on its own from the world of work as it is
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Or are we doing something fundamentally wrong in the way we work?
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And this set me down a rabbit hole and I started looking at why we work the way we do and why
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we in industrial urbanized societies have quantity of work, which is actually very comparably almost
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lighter than the work that many non-urban, non-industrialized societies do.
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And yet we still have this higher burden of a lack of fulfillment, of mental illness, of
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So all of these questions sort of led me to dig deeper into asking why we work the way
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we do and could there be something fundamentally wrong with the way we work?
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And that led to going down lots of rabbit holes and discovering that there is indeed something
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very wrong and very peculiar about the way we work.
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The big overarching argument in this book is that the way most white collar workers, knowledge
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workers work today goes counter to the natural way our minds and bodies want to work.
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So first we have to look at what is not the natural way.
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So we have, from the era of Fordian assembly lines and Taylorism, when mass production was
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in productivity, we started adopting this model of assembly line style working, which revolved
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around manual work, assembling things with your hands, so working with muscle.
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And in that sort of framework, the faster you worked, the longer the hours you put in, the
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So the shorter your breaks or the absence of breaks, even all of these led to more products
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along the line and hence improved productivity and equated with success.
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Now, after the Second World War, when the kind of work we did started to change and a lot
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of work went from the hands to the head, where people locked into offices, manual work, the
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share of manual work went down, the share of knowledge work went up.
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We started doing different kinds of work, but we never really changed the way in which
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And that should really strike alarm bells, you know, looking back with the benefit of
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hindsight, because when we started working with the mind, we assumed that the mind works
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in exactly the same way as muscle, but it doesn't.
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With muscle, you work when you work and your muscle rests as soon as you stop.
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The faster you work, the faster your products that are assembled get assembled.
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When you think about the mind at work, however, it's very different.
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Putting the mind into this box of continuous, constant-paced working during an entire day,
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clocking in in the morning, clocking off late in the evening with an hour for lunch, putting
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that sort of assembly line framework on the mind is a very unnatural way to force the mind
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We know that when it comes to the mind at work, the mind suffers from fatigue, just
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But unlike muscle, the mind doesn't perspire, doesn't grow red, there are no sore joints
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And we have created a world where the signs of mental fatigue, which tend to be very subtle,
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are always ignored, especially when they are manifesting at 11 in the morning.
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So we are forcing the brain, the mind to carry on working, ignoring fatigue.
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And when we start to do that, what happens is the mind can continue working, but at a
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But when it comes to really thinking at sort of at really peak levels, at performing at
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peak levels, at thinking of innovative ideas, original ideas, solving difficult problems,
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for all of these things to happen, the mind needs to be in a particular state, a very fresh
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It cannot do all these things if it has been working continuously for long hours.
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So the way we work force the mind to work at a lower level to the level it could be working
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at. And instead of using this assembly line template, if we get the brain to work or get
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the mind to work in more of a rhythmic cycle, so cycles of on and off or cycles of high intensity
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followed by medium and lower intensity, we can keep mental fatigue at bay and we can let
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mental output continue and continue at a very high level.
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Okay. So just to recap here, whenever we work with our physical bodies, we naturally
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want to take breaks because our muscles just can't go on anymore. So we take a break. We
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might even take a break on the weekend if you work in a manual labor job so your body can
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recover. With mind work, we don't allow our mind that same sort of rest because you don't
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notice the fatigue the same way you do muscle fatigue.
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Correct. So mental fatigue, because it manifests in such a subtle way, I mean, practically the way
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you would feel it is you're working on something really, really well, you're focused, you're getting
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these great ideas. And then about 20 minutes, 30 minutes down the line, suddenly you find that your
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mind is kind of drifting, your thoughts are drifting, your attention is floating away. Now that is actually
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a sign that your mind is tired. And that's your brain's natural mechanism to lower the load to
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step off the pedal. But we interpret that as, oh, we are being distracted, we are not working hard
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enough, it's only been 30 minutes, we should carry on, we're clearly not aspiring, we're not aching
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anywhere, there's no reason to stop. And if your manager sees you not working, and you're on the
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seat. Again, there is a perception that that equates to lower success, lower productivity. So we just
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force ourselves on. But as soon as you start to do that, the brain can indeed continue to work,
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we can work without having any sleep, but the level of excellence of your work immediately slides down.
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And adding on to that, even when we're not working for the job we do to make money,
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a lot of just life requires a significant amount of cognitive work, you know, paying bills,
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managing insurance, managing schedules for your kids. So even when you're off the clock,
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your brain never gets a break. This is exactly right. And it's actually a symptom of our time,
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because in one way, we are making the world easier to handle with technology by simplifying things by
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making things easier. We no longer need to post letters, we can type them in an instant,
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we no longer need to kind of have different notebooks and different records, we can put them
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all into a file in our computer. But what all of this is actually doing unbeknownst to us,
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because we've evolved and we've trained ourselves to think that fatigue equates to actual physically
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manifesting fatigue, the kind of feeling your body in your muscles. But what this world
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is actually doing is it's putting a huge load on our minds. And because the mind's fatigue doesn't
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manifest in the same way, we are ignoring the fact that it exists. But by piling this onto the mind,
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the mind is having to struggle with a lot more than it used to have to do before this era of
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so much technology, when we used to actually process information, process data in more of a
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distributed way in more of an embodied way. So you're right, we live in this world. And in addition
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to this, while we are working, the workload itself is increasing. But at the same time, the way we work
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is not taking account that the mind is needing to take breaks, because the brain is essentially creaking
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So something you do in this book is you introduce readers to a framework to understand how our mind
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works when we work. And you call it the gear network. I thought it was a really useful mental
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model. What cognitive and neurological processes does this gear network framework represent?
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So when you're working at any kind of knowledge work, it really helps to think of your mind in being in
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different states. And you can intuitively you will you will all know you'll know this because you know
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that sometimes when you're working on something, you need to be really deeply focused. So you're
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reading a really important report or email, with lots of nuances within it, you have to focus
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completely on that. You might be doing a different task on a different day where you're thinking of
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new ideas, new ideas for innovation, you might be in a software company, you're trying to come up with a
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new product. In that sort of mental space, you want to be in a sort of slightly mind wandering, kind of
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gentle, rambling state of mind when you're thinking of new ideas, you want those aha moments of insight
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to appear. And there could be a third state of mind where you are just on automatic, you are just
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responding, reacting, you are working to a deadline, you don't have time to think, you just need to react.
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So these are all different states of mind that any worker, any knowledge worker will come across
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during a typical day's work. And what we know is that these different states of mind are tightly
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correlated to the activity of a particular network in the brain. Its official name is the locus
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ceruleus norepinephrine network. But essentially, you can see it as a sort of gear network, because your
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brain's entire activity pattern changes when this network changes its pattern of firing. So if it
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fires very slowly, you're in this very slow mind wandering state of mind. If it fires very fast,
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then you're in this reactive state of mind without actually dipping into stress. And there is a
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Goldilocks zone right in the middle, where the norepinephrine levels are just right to engage
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the part of the brain that sits at the front of your head known as the prefrontal cortex,
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which is responsible for higher thinking, analytical problem solving. It comes alive when you're playing
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chess, solving equations, solving difficult things. So in this Goldilocks zone of this middle
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level of norepinephrine, which I refer to as gear two, this is where you reach the optimal state to do
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any kind of mental work that requires concentration, attention, and focus.
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Okay, so yeah, just to recap, there's gear one, it's when norepinephrine is at a low state,
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not firing off as much. This is when you're daydreaming, this is when you're recharging.
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Gear two, that's when you're locked in. As my teenage son would say, gear two is when you can do a lot of
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mental work, you can concentrate, you can problem solve. But you say with gear two, there's two
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states, there's like a low energy state and a high energy state.
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Right. So gear one is mind wandering, gear three is reactive. Neither of these two gears,
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these two extreme gears allow you to sit down and focus. In gear two, you can because this part of the
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brain is fully engaged because it responds to this specific level of norepinephrine. So in gear two,
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you're in the right mental zone, just as your son puts it. But even when you are in the right mental
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zone, when you can focus, you can still find that there are small nuances about that. So you could
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be in a state of great focus, but you're also able to kind of let your mind go every now and again,
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just to wander over an idea, just to kind of come away from a problem and look at it through different
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angles. You could also be in this optimal gear two zone and have really sharp focus and kind of
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charge ahead along different ideas. So you can feel the pace of your mind being slightly slower
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or being slightly faster. And this is what I describe as being low energy and high energy gear two.
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Gotcha. So gear two is the ideal, but you know, gear three, sometimes you need to be in gear three
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when the pressure's on, right? Right. So, you know, taking a broad picture of this,
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when you're doing mental work and generally when you're doing anything where you're engaging with
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the world around you during the day, gear two seems to be the state we all gravitate towards. It's a state
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we like to be in. We feel good in because that's where we can concentrate the best. But there is a
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spectrum of norepinephrine across gear one, gear two, gear three, where gear one, it's very low,
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gear three, it's higher. And all of these gears actually have a role to play. So small bursts of
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being in gear three is actually very helpful. Not only is it helpful when we are in emergency
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situations and we need to react very quickly, it speeds up our thinking, it actually increases speed
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at the cost of accuracy, but there are times when that's a helpful thing. And at this very high level
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of norepinephrine, you actually have a slight enhancement of certain types of learning and
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memory. So you remember certain emotionally charged situations really, really well. That's because of
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this huge spike in norepinephrine you get being in this gear three situation. But the thing with gear
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three is you mustn't be in it for too long because as soon as you're in it for too long, you have too much
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norepinephrine in there for you to be able to concentrate and pay attention. This is why you
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have to quickly come back to being in gear two again. Okay, so we shift gears based on context that
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we find ourselves in. But you talk about in the book that we all have a gear personality. What do you
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mean by gear personality? Right. So when you are doing anything at all, and you as a human being have
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to pay attention to something to engage with it. And this applies to whether you're working, whether
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you're doing something at home, whether you're cooking, whether you're tidying something, all of
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these things need you to pay attention. And the ability to pay attention is optimal when you're in
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gear two. Now, what is really interesting is that we all aspire to get into this gear two state. And when
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we do, we feel really good. And different people need a different level of stimulation to get there.
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So again, going back to this analogy of a gearbox of a gear network, if you imagine a set of gears,
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a gearbox, or it's really hard to push the lever up to push the gear up, stimulation and uncertainty
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and just excitement has that same effect on your brain. So just again, taking a step back.
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When we talk about these three different gears and this network in your brain that releases
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norepinephrine, what we know is that your brain is always trying to adapt to what is asked of it.
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So if you give your brain a challenge that's difficult, it will step on the pedal,
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and it will ramp up its gear to fulfill that challenge. And that challenge can be in the form
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of stimulation, it can be in the form of uncertainty, it can be in the form of excitement. And different
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people will respond to the same level of stimulation in a slightly different way. So if we all start in
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gear one, some people will react very powerfully to a small amount of stimulation, their brain will
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crank the gear right up, and they will go right up to gear two, or even overshoot to gear three.
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A different kind of person has a stiffer gearbox. And for this person, the same amount of stimulation
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will do very little. So for them, their brain will need a bigger sort of stimulus or bigger reason to
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press on the pedal. So they will react to a bigger volume, a bigger kind of intensity of uncertainty or
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of stimulation. And they will need that to kind of ramp up from gear one up to gear two. Ultimately,
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both people want to be in gear two, but the first person needs very little stimulation to get there.
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The second person needs a lot of stimulation to get there. And practically, you can see this at play
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in any workplace or just, you know, amongst the people you're around. There will be some people
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who get very rattled by the smallest uncertainty, by the smallest level of stimulation. And there are
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other people who need uncertainty, who need competition, who need threats, who need excitement,
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just to stay in a happy mental space to get into gear two. And this is what I describe as gear
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personality. Different people thrive in different environments. I talk about work environments,
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but this is true really of environments that, you know, at large, whether you're talking about a city
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versus a very slow village, just all environments. And the reason for this is some people's gears
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go up very slowly. Other people's gears are very sensitive, and they move very easily.
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And one of the determinants of whether we are happy in what we're doing, we're happy in a particular
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workplace, doing a particular type of work, this can be influenced by this gear personality. So if
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you're someone who loves uncertainty, who loves going into the unknown, and who needs that level of
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stimulation to be in the right mental space, then you would thrive in situations of being an
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entrepreneur, or doing extreme sports, or doing something really challenging, taking risks.
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Whereas if you're someone who is easily moved by uncertainty, then you would probably do much
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better in a different type of job where you are in an environment with lower uncertainty, with
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lower volatility, where you have more control. Now, this does in no way reflect on your intelligence.
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So two people can have exactly the same level of intelligence, of ability, but where they thrive
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is starkly different because of the way their gearbox reacts to the environment.
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As you were talking, this made me think of my wife and I and our different approaches to
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what time you should get to the airport. My wife, she loves getting there like the very last minute.
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She loves the challenge of being like, okay, how close can we cut it? So she has that,
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I probably should have that stiff gear personality. Me, on the other hand, I'm like, I want to get
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there an hour and a half before the flight leaves. I want to have time just to relax. I want to make
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sure we have time for any contingencies that might show up. So I probably have that more looser gear
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Right. And very interestingly, procrastination actually comes into it also, because when we're
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procrastinating, what we're needing is we're needing to create some kind of motivational drive to
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perform the action if the motivation isn't there already. And for some people, the slightest glimmer
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of threat provides enough motivation to actually get it done. Whereas for others, you have to wait
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and wait and wait until not doing the task has got such severe consequences that it's only at that
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point that your motivation reaches a threshold and you go and tackle it.
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Is our gear personality, is this primarily genetic?
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Yes and no. So the gear personality actually, research on that has started about a hundred years
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ago. And you might have heard of the labeling of type A and type B personalities. And this labeling
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began in a paper published around about the First World War period, where they found that different
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people are more susceptible to certain diseases, certain conditions because of the way they react
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to certain situations. So we know that there is a difference in the way every human being responds
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and reacts to uncertainty, to pressure. But a large part of it can be modified and can be changed.
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Your environment is a big factor. So for instance, if you take people coming back from combat zones,
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take combat veterans coming back after these very, very frightening, threatening, high uncertainty
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sort of way of living for months and months or weeks and weeks, then following that period,
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these people are going to have a much higher threshold for uncertainty tolerance. Whereas you can
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also have the reverse. You can take someone who has a very, what I refer to as a stiff gear,
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and if they are in an environment of very low uncertainty and they're suddenly put into an
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environment of high uncertainty or a period, they are going to appear to be hyperreactive to
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uncertainty until they adjust. So the environment can modify it, but we also have these innate
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differences. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:24:28.740
And now back to the show. Okay. So we've talked about how it's best to work in a rhythm. Can we use
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our body's natural rhythm to make our work rhythm even more effective? You know, like our body has a
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circadian rhythm. So are we able to use that to our advantage that we can work more efficiently with this
00:24:48.160
gear metaphor? Yes, absolutely. So we do have these, as you say, circadian rhythms,
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rhythms, but actually the brain and the body, we have so many rhythms that the brain follows
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many, many rhythms and each rhythm is embedded within another rhythm. And we now know that
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within the brain, information is carried in the form of oscillations or waves, rhythms of waves.
00:25:13.340
So rhythms essentially are fundamental to the way the brain exists. Circadian rhythms is something
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most of your listeners will be very familiar with. We all know about dark and light and that we all
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have this 24 hour body clock. What is very interesting is it seems that we also have some
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kind of a circadian rhythm in terms of the way the brain likes to work. So it seems that the first part
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of every day, so the hours immediately after waking up and the last part of every day, so late in the
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evening or early at night, just before you're falling asleep, those are two windows where creative
00:25:56.960
thinking seems to happen best. We also have a rhythm in terms of focused attention. So focusing,
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the ability to focus, to pay attention seems to peak from around the mid-morning to lunchtime
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and again from around mid-afternoon to early evening. So these are two rhythms embedded within this circadian
00:26:20.960
rhythm and doing these kinds of work at these kinds of times can help you ride these rhythms and do them
00:26:30.460
in a much better way than you would if you did them at different times. And another rhythm to just bear in
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mind here is immediately after lunchtime, we all have something called a post-lunch dip, which is a
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slight slump in the way we pay attention. And if you're from the Mediterranean or from different parts
00:26:50.420
of the world that have a tradition of a siesta, this is almost innately known to people who are in the
00:26:56.800
habit of taking a short post-lunch nap. But really, this dip in attention seems to be there in
00:27:05.880
everyone. You can override it with caffeine and it doesn't manifest quite as powerfully if you've had
00:27:12.780
a good night of sleep before. But the reason why it's significant is if you're trying to do focused work
00:27:18.700
during this period in the day, you're going to do it badly. And you're actually going to work
00:27:24.040
against your body's physiology to force yourself to do focused work. So rather than working as per
00:27:31.920
a schedule or routine that everyone follows at the same pace, if instead you tailor the work,
00:27:39.120
the tasks that you have to do, and you divide them into the kind of work that they involve,
00:27:44.060
and you time them to these peaks in the day, you're much more likely to be able to do them with less
00:27:57.160
So just to recap there, so wake up to 9 a.m., our brain is in that gear one mode. So that's great for
00:28:03.020
creativity. And then about 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., that's when it's easier to shift into that gear two mode
00:28:09.220
naturally for focused work. Then we're going to have that post-lunch dip. So maybe don't do any,
00:28:14.720
don't have a working lunch because your brain's just not going to be great for that. And then about 4 p.m.
00:28:20.240
to 9 p.m., we have that second peak of focused attention where it's easy to be into gear two.
00:28:24.800
And then from 9 p.m. to when we go to bed, our brain, our mind naturally wants to go to gear one.
00:28:30.580
So again, maybe do some creative work. Don't do any of that focused work. And again, these numbers we
00:28:35.320
just gave were approximations. This is going to change depending on your personal circadian rhythm.
00:28:39.680
You know, some people are early birds and some people are night owls. That's going to shift depending
00:28:44.060
on that. Exactly. Exactly. It shifts according to your own personal rhythm. Some people are shifted
00:28:49.320
towards the morning. Some people are shifted towards the night. And so you have to shift these
00:28:54.100
rhythms with that. It will also shift a little bit depending on your latitude. So where in the world
00:28:59.200
you are. And also within these periods, of course, you can tailor how you work depending on the kind of
00:29:05.940
work you're doing. So if you're doing work that involves focused attention, working in 90-minute rhythms
00:29:11.880
is extremely helpful because what you're trying to do is you want to be in that gear two state for as
00:29:17.580
long as possible. But in order to be in that gear two state, you need to kind of come up for air.
00:29:23.580
You need to wind down to gear one very regularly in the form of breaks. And that lets you keep going.
00:29:30.500
So working in these 90-minute cycles, if you're doing focused work, also helps within this sort of
00:29:37.220
schema. Okay. So when you're in that focused work period, you know, gear two, you don't want to
00:29:41.800
stay in it indefinitely. So maybe you could do something like the Pomodoro method where you
00:29:46.240
work like 25 minutes and then take a five-minute break and then repeat.
00:29:51.160
Right. That's a very popular way of tackling it. I actually use a slightly different approach. So
00:29:56.640
what I've done is I looked at how we used to work before these assembly line templates of work were
00:30:05.340
imposed on us. So I've looked at pre-industrial societies. I've looked at knowledge workers in
00:30:11.760
the form of great scientists and great thinkers, again, in the pre-industrial 19th century era and
00:30:18.100
looked at how did they work when they actually produced their best kind of work. And so one way
00:30:24.840
to do it is just as you say, is to work intensely for a bit and then give the brain a rest. But if you're
00:30:31.000
doing that in the workplace, your manager is going to not be very happy if they find you vacate your
00:30:36.860
seat every 20 minutes and take a half-hour break. So you can fuse all of these together. And one way
00:30:44.680
of doing it is by working in a very energy efficient way by working to a kind of parallel. So you're doing
00:30:52.520
really intense work right at the start of every 90-minute work cycle. And that intense work is something
00:31:00.880
that, you know, you really, really need to pay attention, concentrate. It's difficult. It's challenging. It takes
00:31:07.040
mental stamina out of you. If you can, limit that to around about 20 minutes, around the time where you would
00:31:15.240
stop, according to your Pomodoro technique. So limit that to around 20 minutes and then move to work
00:31:22.540
that is lighter. You don't have to stop working necessarily, but you move to work that's lighter
00:31:28.060
and do lighter work, sort of medium intensity work or the next 40 minutes or so. And then for the last
00:31:35.280
20 minutes, you do really light work. So what this lets you do is it lets you pace yourself without
00:31:42.440
stopping work completely. And this is a very wise approach to take because there is now data that
00:31:49.940
shows that if you do really, really intense work for more than a total of four hours across the day,
00:31:55.920
when I say four hours across the day, I don't mean you don't do any other work. I mean the intense work
00:32:01.240
specifically continues for more than four hours across the day. Then the fatigue from that spills over
00:32:08.940
into the next day, you don't get rid of it even with a good night's sleep. So if you can just space
00:32:16.180
out your intense work to 20 minute bouts within each cycle and then move to something lighter,
00:32:22.680
you can carry on working. You can still do your full day of work without compromising your mental
00:32:30.000
performance, both from the level of avoiding fatigue, but also from the level of preventing fatigue
00:32:36.900
from in any way disabling the quality of your mental output.
00:32:42.460
So gear two, that's that ideal work state. What do you recommend for people who, if their day is
00:32:49.520
punctuated by gear three moments, how long should they stay in that ideally? And then what should
00:32:54.740
they do for recovery after they're done with it?
00:32:58.580
The very simple way to think of this is again, with this sort of power law approach. So the more
00:33:04.880
intense your work, the longer your break ought to be and the shorter you should do the work for.
00:33:11.700
So if your work is full of gear three moments, first try to keep those moments as short as possible.
00:33:19.860
Follow them with as long a recovery period as possible. And if that means you can't actually
00:33:25.280
leave your desk, then do very, very light work following those bursts of gear three activity.
00:33:31.520
And you just have to buffer it with really long periods of rest and recovery. And, you know,
00:33:40.220
as an analogy, if you look back to, and I've cited these in the book, to pre-industrial societies,
00:33:46.980
hunter-gatherer societies, whenever they had periods of really, really hard physical work,
00:33:52.720
when they had a hunt that would last a whole day, they would follow that with a few days of doing
00:33:58.900
nothing. Similarly, if they hunted every day, every morning, they would spend a burst in the morning
00:34:05.520
working really hard, and they would always follow it by a long period of the day when they're just
00:34:12.280
pottering around, just doing very little physically. So we naturally gravitate to working in this way.
00:34:19.180
And it's unfortunate that we have imposed these templates in the way we work to prevent us from
00:34:24.780
doing so. But if you are in gear three situations, the best thing you can do is just try to include
00:34:33.320
as many breaks as possible and try to limit the periods in gear three, or as much as you possibly
00:34:39.340
can. Are there things we can do to our environment, or to ourselves even, to manipulate the gear shift?
00:34:47.960
Yes. So coming back to the idea of your brain being an engine working in three different gears,
00:34:54.600
your brain is an information processing machine, and it slices information depending on what is
00:35:02.580
demanded of it. So if it perceives that there is danger, that there is uncertainty, that the world is
00:35:09.340
moving very fast, it starts processing information faster. If it perceives that the world is very safe,
00:35:16.640
or time is passing very slowly, it processes information slower. Your gear correlates to the
00:35:25.340
rate or the speed of information processing. So when you're in that sort of very slow,
00:35:30.760
gear one, mind-wandering state, your brain perceives that the world around you is slow,
00:35:37.420
is slowly moving, and there's also no imminent threat, no imminent danger of uncertainty.
00:35:43.920
Similarly, if your mind is, you know, really racing, if you are thinking quickly, reacting fast,
00:35:51.340
you're doing it because the brain, your brain thinks that it's necessary to do so.
00:35:56.500
So we can use this to use really three things to modulate the way your brain is processing
00:36:04.960
information, and hence the gear you're in. One is by playing with your mind's perception of time,
00:36:12.120
and we all intuitively know this, because we know that faster music, speaking quickly,
00:36:18.440
speaking loudly, speaking a language, all of these things makes us more alert. Similarly,
00:36:24.440
slow music, relaxing drum beats, the kind of music you hear in a hotel reception or on a dentist's chair,
00:36:32.800
those types of music and sounds give you the perception that time is slowing down. So you can
00:36:40.700
modulate the apparent pace of your environment by being in an environment that's calmer, that looks
00:36:46.820
like it is slower. This is why nature gets so much praise when you're talking about resilience,
00:36:53.240
when you're talking about relaxation, because in nature, if you're walking through a park, walking
00:36:57.420
through trees, there's nothing there that shouts at you, that warns you of uncertainty or of danger.
00:37:04.860
Time appears to pass very slowly. So time is one factor. Another factor is uncertainty. So as soon
00:37:12.940
as you think that there is an imminent deadline, as soon as you perceive competition, as soon as you
00:37:19.200
perceive time moving so quickly that danger can appear at any moment, all of these things, again,
00:37:25.280
puts you into a higher gear, which is why some people perform really well under pressure and others
00:37:31.720
don't because they need that pressure to raise their gear from gear one to gear two. You can reduce that
00:37:39.440
by creating a perception of security, of controllability, of transparency, by reducing the
00:37:48.800
frequency of deadlines. So by having one big deadline at the end, but not having lots of small ones that
00:37:54.320
constantly make you feel like you have to reach a certain point. And the third thing you can use
00:38:00.980
is your cognitive load. So it sounds a little bit counterintuitive, given the information we're
00:38:07.640
always told about multitasking. But if you are doing something and it feels really boring and
00:38:14.760
understimulating, doing something else on the side. So adding to that workload by multitasking can
00:38:21.340
actually put you into the right gear. So if you're in gear one, it can put you up into the optimal gear
00:38:27.040
two. Similarly, if you are in gear three from having to multitask furiously, removing a few of those
00:38:34.380
tasks and lightening your mental load can bring you back into gear two. So these are the three things
00:38:40.060
physically. And a fourth thing, of course, is your body's physiology. So you can tap into your
00:38:46.700
autonomic nerve network to slow down or to speed up.
00:38:53.280
Yeah, some things you can do to speed up your nervous system. Cold can do that or hot being in
00:38:59.920
a sauna can help with that. Another, I think one thing that office workers use to shift gears,
00:39:04.900
they might not know that they're shifting gears in their mind, but caffeine, you know,
00:39:08.380
having that cup of coffee can help you shift up to that higher gear.
00:39:11.440
Exactly. So caffeine or coffee is the oldest gear shifter. We all know, we all use it. We've been
00:39:20.320
using it for a long time. And in fact, some researchers believe that coffee and the industrial
00:39:26.120
revolution went hand in hand. And I've read some people even go so far as to say that it's because
00:39:34.280
of coffee that we managed these assembly lines and the era of the industrial revolution. So yes,
00:39:40.440
coffee and caffeine raises your gear. If you're in gear one, it'll put you into gear two. But if you
00:39:46.160
take too much, you could overshoot into gear three. And that's when your thinking becomes too reactive.
00:39:51.640
You miss nuances, you can use biases, you don't see the whole picture. You mentioned physiology. Yes.
00:39:58.320
So cold exposure, heat exposure, anything that shocks your system raises your body's sort of fight or
00:40:04.340
flight activity, that sort of response, an alerting response. Anything that does that will
00:40:10.100
raise your gear? And doing the opposite. So calming your body down. And we know again of techniques
00:40:16.380
like breathing exercises, stretching, relaxing muscle after contraction, all of these things
00:40:22.260
lower your gear by creating a sensation of relaxation and calm.
00:40:27.300
How can we use this gear, our gear network to have some control over our motivation to work?
00:40:33.520
Because I know that's a big issue a lot of people have. There's like, I just don't feel like
00:40:36.180
working. I got to motivate myself. How can this gear network help us do that better?
00:40:41.280
So in really in two ways. Now, motivation is a really big and important conversation we have to
00:40:46.240
have today because our traditional markers of motivation are changing because of AI and automation
00:40:52.700
and the way the work landscape is changing. The traditional guarantees of motivation, you know,
00:40:58.820
a job, job security, career progression, all of these are changing. Now, motivation is very interesting
00:41:05.980
because what you want to do when you're working is you want to be in gear two. And the optimal state
00:41:11.660
to be in within gear two is this sort of high energy gear two state because in that state, you are
00:41:18.800
optimized for learning, for making progress and all of these things. What is very interesting is that
00:41:26.120
your motivation pathways in the brain are in direct conversation with this network that I call the
00:41:33.820
gear network. And if you can tap into a special kind of motivation known as intrinsic motivation, it's
00:41:41.700
basically being motivated by the pleasure, by the sensation of what you're doing, not its eventual results.
00:41:49.020
So for instance, if you feel intrinsically motivated while learning, it's the feeling of learning of
00:41:56.420
accumulating knowledge of having those aha sparks of that's why this this happens or that's so
00:42:02.640
interesting, that sort of feeling you get, that is what we call intrinsic motivation, as opposed to
00:42:10.240
learning for an exam. So you're learning because you want to pass the test. So if you can create
00:42:16.880
the sensation of really feeling pleasure in the process and the feeling of what you're doing,
00:42:22.940
you immediately push yourself into gear two, specifically into this high energy gear two state.
00:42:31.200
And that keeps you that sort of locks you into into gear two, and you can carry on doing what you're
00:42:36.520
doing for long periods of time, without feeling tired and without losing motivation. On the flip side,
00:42:43.720
if you can use tools such as, you know, what we've just discussed, your physiology, your
00:42:49.620
environment to put you into gear two, you're more likely to inspire motivation, because you're in that
00:42:57.000
frame of mind, where what you're doing is most likely to bring you pleasure. So it interacts in both of
00:43:03.520
these ways. And I'm going to introduce a third thing into it, which is how do we get this kind of
00:43:10.180
motivation when you start enjoying what you're doing for its own sake? Now, this has really
00:43:16.740
puzzled people for a long time, because you can always tempt people with a carrot or a stick,
00:43:21.320
and we always have done. But how do you make someone get that motivation, that kind of inner fire
00:43:27.940
from the inside? And one way to do it, which also links into the gear system is by something known as
00:43:35.240
learning progress. It's a mechanism coined by two researchers in Paris, Pierre-Yves Oudet and
00:43:42.120
Frederick Kaplan. And what they've done is they've taken intelligent machines, and they've tried to see
00:43:49.820
what can we do to make these machines learn in environments that they have not been programmed for.
00:43:56.020
And they've taken inspiration from how a child learns, because when a child is learning,
00:44:00.440
or a young infant is experiencing the world, the infant does so without getting any external
00:44:07.300
reward. So you're not giving the child a prize or anything, they're just exploring, they're just
00:44:12.580
finding things out for its own sake, because it's pleasurable to do that. So coming back to this
00:44:18.640
mechanism, what we know is if you are doing something that is resulting in a rapid and progressive
00:44:27.260
accumulation of mastery in some domain, it doesn't matter what that domain is. But it has to be
00:44:34.860
progressive. So it mustn't be okay, I'm learning French, I've learned to so and so level, I'm done.
00:44:41.940
Instead, it should be continued progress, you're never really reaching the end, but you're making
00:44:47.360
rapid progress as you go along. If you can put yourself into that frame of mind, whatever you're doing
00:44:54.020
seems to almost miraculously create a sense of intrinsic motivation, and what you're doing
00:45:00.200
becomes pleasurable. And one of the reasons for this, or one of the factors in this is that
00:45:05.800
every time you are increasing your skills, you're stretching the skill set you already have. So you
00:45:12.920
are just at the edge of comfort, you're just at the edge of your sort of really comfortable gear to
00:45:19.560
zone. And right at the edge of comfort, your norepinephrine levels are just optimal for you to
00:45:26.460
really, really prime the ability to learn to think flexibly, and to gain mastery over whatever you're
00:45:34.060
doing. And this is precisely the mindset that we see in people who experience flow. And flow locks you
00:45:44.300
in to this gear to high energy state. So all of these things come together with a simple principle
00:45:50.900
of finding elements in your environment in your work where you can make rapid, continuous progress.
00:45:59.520
Any advice on how to structure your work so you can create that feeling?
00:46:03.660
So yes, in you can do it in different levels. So if you are a manager, for instance, and you're
00:46:09.780
managing a team, and you have a bunch of tasks that you want to delegate. So one way of doing it is
00:46:16.180
delegating your tasks and checking to see which members of your team are not just doing what needs
00:46:22.120
to be done, but are actually making progress and making rapid progress. So they may not have completed
00:46:26.840
the task, but how fast are they making progress in it? You might find that a bunch of people are making
00:46:33.040
great progress, but another group are really not making any progress at all. They're doing things,
00:46:38.280
but they're not making progress. So shuffling the tasks around to fit to progress and not just
00:46:44.780
output is one way of doing it from a manager's point of view. If you are the team member and you
00:46:52.060
are given a task by your manager to do, then one way to engineer this sense of progress is by using
00:46:59.600
what I term as an 80% rule or an 80% heuristic, which is that whenever you're doing something,
00:47:06.460
try to find a difficulty level where what you're doing is just 20% beyond your skill set. So if
00:47:16.080
you're plunging into a task you know nothing about, first find a little island that you're familiar
00:47:21.600
with. It doesn't matter how small it is. It can be something really periphery and really
00:47:26.320
inconsequential. Jump on that island and then expand into the territory of the unknown by only 20%
00:47:34.840
at a time. Eventually your island will grow and grow and that 20% chunk will be objectively bigger
00:47:41.520
and bigger. But if you can carry on in this way, you will be able to really start enjoying what you're
00:47:48.160
doing and derive pleasure from it. And finally, if you're sitting down to do a task and it just looks
00:47:55.500
so boring and you have to read a report just say in front of you, again, using this strategy can help
00:48:03.020
find one thing that you find really interesting or where you have some kind of a curiosity gap
00:48:09.100
and you make a tiny bit of progress by closing that gap. That creates momentum for you to jump to
00:48:16.720
something else that's interesting. So rather than read the whole report in order or do the whole task
00:48:22.780
in order, jump from one island to another. Find something really interesting, expand that a little
00:48:29.580
bit, use that momentum to jump to a different island. Well, me too. This has been a great
00:48:34.300
conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? So thank you so much
00:48:39.260
again for having me. The book is available in all bookstores. You can get it on Amazon. It's also
00:48:45.920
available on audio and I have a website, me too. Steroni.com. I'm also there on LinkedIn and on X.
00:48:54.380
Fantastic. Well, me too. Steroni. Thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:48:59.000
My guest today was me too. Steroni. She's the author of the book,
00:49:01.440
Hyper Efficient. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more
00:49:05.140
information about her work at our website, me too. Steroni.com. Also check out our show notes at
00:49:08.920
aom.is slash hyper-efficient where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.
00:49:20.740
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at
00:49:24.620
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00:49:28.320
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Helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a
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