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February 6 - February 22, 2025
Feder and team found several factors that underpin our ability to be resilient: facing fears and active coping optimism and positive emotions reappraisal, positive reframing, and acceptance social competence and social support purpose in life, a moral compass, meaning, and spirituality
Whenever I’ve worked with professional sports teams, I’ve simplified this research into four key components after a game, win or lose: Shift out of protect and defend Keep it informational, not personal Reframe Revise
The half-life of adrenaline is less than five minutes. An adrenaline rush can be powerful, but it’s gone quickly. The half-life of cortisol is around ninety minutes. Its effects linger for hours afterward and can compound with additional hits or reminders of stress, keeping us in a cortisol-driven stressed state for hours on end.
Research on professional rugby players found that watching what they did wrong after a game led to elevated cortisol and worse performance the next game. Watching what they did well had the opposite effect: a bump in testosterone and better performance in the games that followed. It’s not that we want to avoid criticism forever. It’s that after a tough match, we are in a sensitive period. Our brains are looking to validate our feeling that we are a bit useless.
If you want to bounce back or prime yourself to perform, feel good! Reading your best writing before starting a new project, or having a “praise folder” on your computer to remind you that you’re competent before stepping into a big meeting can work wonders. When your brain is searching for validating your incompetence, give it evidence to the contrary to help get you through the sensitive period.
Failure has a way of putting us in a sensitive period that we can either take advantage of for positive change and growth, or we can have it push us to double down and cement. Which way we go largely determines how we handle this critical period. When moving on from a tough loss, joking around with friends may be just what we need.
Years after his initial research, McAdams summed up what they now know, “It’s good to tell life stories in which the protagonist is agentic, is engaged in warm close relationships, is resilient and forms a coherent narrative. Still, you can’t just make those up. Lived experience needs to resonate with the story.”
Hypercompetitiveness is about needing to win at all costs to protect our identity and worth. It’s linked to more physical and verbal aggression, and difficulty maintaining healthy relationships. In their book Top Dog, Ashley Merryman and Po Bronson describe this maladaptive competitiveness as “characterized by psychological insecurity and displaced urges. It’s the person who can’t accept that losing is part of competing. . . . He has to be the best at everything, and he can’t stop comparing himself to others even when the competition is over.”
Those who are hypercompetitive tend to need constant validation from the outside. Psychologists Jennifer Crocker and Amy Canevello divide our social motivation into two systems. An ecosystem motivation pushes us toward constructive and supportive relationships with others. We see other people as mutually beneficial and not threatening. An egosystem motivation pushes us to relationships with others and groups that allow us to defend or promote our self-image. As they explain, “Constructing, inflating, maintaining, and defending desired self-images becomes a means to satisfy their needs by
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Simplified, our approach toward competition can be by dominating to deal with our insecurity, refusing to play the game in either direction, avoiding the game to protect ourselves from the consequences, or seeing the game as being about our self-development, win or lose. We all occupy these four approaches to competitiveness at various points in our lives and pursuits.
The first step is to identify where you are on the spectrum between making things personal and being wholly detached from them. One way to do so is to ask these questions: If you walked away, separated yourself from the thing for a short time, how lost would you feel? Would the anxiety or stress feel overwhelming? Are you overly reactive to minor comments about your job or pursuit? For example, if you love taking ice plunges every morning or love the keto diet, and someone casually says they don’t work, do you immediately jump down their throat with why they are wrong?
Part of getting the right balance lies in how we care. Research shows that there are two kinds of passion that fuel drive: obsessive and harmonious. Obsessive occurs when we make the pursuits and the outcomes behind them self-defining. It fuels incredible drive but comes with the costs outlined in this book: burnout, cheating, and losing perspective.
Harmonious passion occurs when we consider the activity or pursuit important but haven’t attached our self-worth to the result. Instead, we focus on and enjoy the process. It’s where the activity is seen as a way to holistically grow, instead of the near-singular source of significance and meaning.
It’s about finding the middle path to have both security and flexibility—to be able to explore and commit, to try and let go, to feel secure in your story and be able to rewrite it—all while keeping intrinsic motivation, or pursuing joy, front and center. It’s when our being and doing collide that we often get stuck. We force when we can’t let go. We lose it and give up when protection and survival override anything else.
In the 1970s, professor of communication George Gerbner coined a term for a similar phenomenon—mean world syndrome. Gerbner found that we tend to see the world as more dangerous and threatening than it is and that it was related to the overabundance of violence on TV.
Social baseline theory posits that we outsource much of our emotional regulation to others as a way to minimize risk and conserve energy. We share the load. Instead of feeling the full burden of taking on a challenge or figuring out how to get through a verbal beratement, our brain counts on others to help us cope.
A large reason we end up living in survival mode is feeling like we don’t belong, both in terms of our social connection and the environment or spaces we occupy. When we feel comfortable where we live, work, or play, we turn down our alarms—not just because of the people who inhabit those spaces but because of the spaces themselves. If our workspace feels like home and reflects who we are, we’ll be more productive. If we can decorate our home, or if we feel like the tools or instruments we utilize every day reflect who we are, we are healthier, happier, more resilient people.
How do we feel understood and connected in a world that feels so disparate and isolated? Part of our problem is we’ve killed the primary way we form bonds: hanging out. We’ve replaced it with either the superficial or the overly scheduled. We don’t meet up and then figure out what to do; we put it in our Google calendars months in advance. We let some scheduler drive our interactions. And even when we do have those moments of being around others, we reach for a distraction to minimize the awkwardness, boredom, or filling time that dominated our interactions historically. We’ve taken away the
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absolutely this
The same holds true in our workplace. Markus Baer, a professor of organizational behavior, found that participants who took part in a negotiation performed up to 160 percent better when they felt at home in the negotiation room.
Feeling ownership of your workspace leads to an increase in positive feelings and greater commitment to the work. Psychologists have tied the benefits of such ownership to fulfilling some of our basic psychological needs: self-efficacy, identity, a sense of belonging, and having a place to call our own. When our environment allows us to be who we are, we feel and perform better.
Research shows that drivers who have a gun in their car experience more road rage. They drive more aggressively, flip people off more, and are more likely to tailgate. A 2018 meta-analysis looking at over sixty years of research found that having a weapon nearby increased aggressive thoughts, actual aggression, and appraising the situation and others as hostile.
Objects tell us which role to occupy. They change our perception not only of the environment but of ourselves. Whether on the athletic field or in our office, objects remind you who you are and why you’re doing it. We can invite the role of writer, runner, teacher, or student to be open to learn and grow. Or we can invite roles that make us feel defensive and under threat. We can use this to turn us into a fierce competitor or someone with road rage who lost their mind. Rig your environment wisely.
As organizational psychologist Adam Grant wrote, “The best way to find yourself isn’t looking inward to see who you are. It’s looking outward to see who you admire. Role models help you identify what you value and who you want to become.”
You’re finally on vacation, ready to catch up on well-deserved rest and recovery, when you put your head to the pillow, expecting to drift off to a sleepy bliss, and instead, you’re greeted with a restless night’s sleep. You aren’t alone. For over fifty years, scientists have known about the first night effect. We are initially more restless in new environments. In 2016, Masako Tamaki and colleagues gave us the reason why: half of our brain is acting as a night’s watch. When in a new environment, it’s on high alert, looking out for danger. When we’re at home sleeping, no night watchman is
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We perform best when we feel secure, challenged but not threatened. We need to ensure our environment aligns with our desired future self, where our inner values align with our external actions. The space we occupy can either reaffirm our sense of self in a positive way, telling us to feel secure and comfortable and to play like we are at home—or it can do so in a defensive way, telling us that our home turf is under threat and that we need to live in survival mode. We need to craft an environment that invites actions that support and align with who we are and want to become.
In a test of ideology and morality, Peter Hatemi, Charles Crabtree, and Kevin Smith found it was the other way around. Our political affiliation predicts our moral beliefs. Politics shape “how individuals rationalize what is right and what is wrong.” Your tribe does more to determine your morality than your morality does to determine your tribe. The researchers summarized their findings: “We will switch our moral compass depending on how it fits with what we believe politically.”
Our identity is more powerful than our principles or values. Recent research found that we value our identity much more than the accuracy of information. So much so that psychologist Jay Van Bavel concluded, “It turns out that if you insult and publicly criticize (someone), their identity needs increase, and they become threatened and less concerned about accuracy. You actually need to affirm someone’s identity before you present information that might be contradictory to what they believe.” The power of our group identity is why people believe crazy things.
Bestselling author and researcher Brené Brown first talked about this distinction in 2012 when she wrote, “Fitting in is the greatest barrier to belonging. Fitting in . . . assessing situations and groups of people, then twisting yourself into a human pretzel in order to get them to let you hang out with them. Belonging is something else entirely—it’s showing up and letting yourself be seen and known as you really are.”
Connection works in much the same way. Researchers found that our social identities intertwine in similar ways: dominance, compartmentalizing, or merging. When we try to fit in, we prioritize the external to fill our connection needs. We change ourselves with a mixture of compartmentalizing and assimilation. We may even ditch our prior beliefs or values to fit in.
Researchers of out Nipissing University in Canada found that testosterone increases when we watch our teammates win a competition. But there’s a catch. The surge only occurs if that teammate is “central to one’s own identity.” When our identity is entangled with others, our biology follows suit, even if we’re sitting on the sideline.
In his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, writer David Foster Wallace said, “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” Wallace went on to warn that most of what we choose to worship will eat us alive. When we experience a feeling of oneness, it might fill that hole of meaning, purpose, and belonging. It may validate who we are. But it blinds us, causing us to narrow so much that we can’t see beyond the thing that we are fused with. And
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The keys to belonging without fusing are: Balance individual and social self Find security, not safety Expand, instead of narrow Activate your moral self
In our modern world, we’ve tried to solve the anonymous society problem by insulating, narrowing, and tying ourself to a group. We’ve reached for significance and belonging via attachment instead of balancing self and others by expansion.
It’s no wonder that research shows when we have a spotter present, not doing anything but standing there, we can lift more. In one study, participants completed on average four and a half more reps in the bench press when there was a spotter nearby. It’s as if our brain goes, “Hey, we can take a bit more risk, and venture into the depths of fatigue because if we fail, we aren’t going to drop a weight on our chest and crush us.”
good partners are like spotters
In chapter 7, I discussed how putting pictures of your family on your desk at work improves performance by making you feel at home. It has another benefit, activating your moral self.
Whoever we surround ourselves with, whatever groups we belong to—we essentially hand over a piece of ourselves to them. They can either help us grow and expand our perspectives or push us toward fear and constriction. The way out is to belong instead of fit in. To balance distinctiveness and others. To balance self and others. To not attach or fuse with any guru, group, or ideology. To have a scientific approach: a belief in a thing but with an eye toward disproving it. Feeling like we belong is more important than ever. In an increasingly isolated world, where we try to fill that void with
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While repetition of the perfect movement has dominated our understanding of how to improve our skills in just about any task, recent work suggests a different path. It’s the paradox of expertise. We get so good at something that we fall right into that deeply worn groove. Our brain has been here so many times before it stops listening to the actual experience. We don’t feel what’s occurring. Our predictive machinery works so well that it tunes out what our body is doing.
To experience again, we need to disrupt the pattern. When we knock ourselves out of the rut of competence, our brain wakes up. We feel again and commence a search for a solution to the problem. It’s in this exploration where we become more adaptable and robust movers. Researchers call the tactic Tellez used “amplification of errors.” Doing something wrong shifts our awareness and attention, knocking us out of our traditional way of doing something and allowing us to find other ways to accomplish the same task in a new manner. It changes our information weighting.
Wilco singer Jeff Tweedy has a similar approach to Tellez. When he is stuck, he tries to write bad music. As he explained to Ezra Klein, “To avoid writer’s block, I write songs I don’t like. I get an idea for a song, and I just go ahead and do it, even though I don’t think I’m going to like it. And that frees me up to go to the next song.” While producer Brian Eno, best known for his work with David Bowie and Coldplay, introduces constraints to get out of a rut. He had a deck of one hundred cards with a simple command on each. They included such instructions as, “abandon normal instruments,
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University of Utah cognitive psychologist David Strayer found that nature recalibrates our mind. While being out in nature for any time has cognitive and emotional benefits, in Strayer’s research, he noted a “three-day effect,” a parting of the clouds and clearing of the mind after a few days camping in the wilderness. As he told National Geographic, “On the third day my senses recalibrate—I smell things and hear things I didn’t before. . . . If you can have the experience of being in the moment for two or three days, it seems to produce a difference in qualitative thinking.”
Famed acting coach Jerzy Grotowski also used long hikes in the woods, as well as more eccentric activities, to help get actors out of their own way. There was the exploitation of errors exercise, where instead of stopping when actors messed up a line, they worked the error into their performance. If they mispronounced a word, they carried that mispronunciation through the rest of the play. There was the tiger exercise, where Grotowski chased the actors around like prey, goading them to roar like a tiger and get lost in the strange game of acting like an animal during rehearsal.
Philosopher Joseph Campbell pointed this out decades ago in an interview with Bill Moyers: “People say that what we’re all seeking is meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
We can dislodge our brain by overloading it with physiological stimuli. If you are on the brink of panic, holding your breath and dunking your head in a bucket of cold water will send a strong stimulus in the opposite direction. It activates the diving reflex, which will drop your heart rate as your brain overrides other signals to conserve oxygen. This is what I’d call a physiological disruptor—a short-term mood or body state shifter.
In her book A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit traced more than a century of disasters. Contrary to popular belief, she concluded that the normal response to disaster isn’t selfish chaos but selflessness, generosity, purposefulness, solidarity, connection, and almost a sense of joy.
We can broadly name these four key phases or tactics that help get us out of survival mode and free us up to perform: Reveal and fill: Fill your basic needs with quality, genuine ingredients. Do something real. You can’t fake your way through it. You can’t put on a facade. You can’t substitute synthetic junk food for the real thing. Decenter: Let go of the protective mechanisms: ego, chasing external validation, attaching to groups, hiding behind labels or ideologies. Dislodge: Update your predictive system. If you feel stuck, change your perspective to get back to exploring, to find a new
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In the same analysis, the number of players who regularly rose to the occasion across multiple seasons was minimal, meaning that just because someone came through in the clutch one moment didn’t predict whether they were likely to do so in the future. There is no clutch gene. Despite our propensity to label players as “clutch,” the data largely isn’t there. The same holds true when we look at clutch performers in the workplace.
We can see the power of letting go in an unusual place: those who are cured of long-term disorders. When chronic epilepsy patients have successful surgery to eliminate seizures, one would expect mental health immediately improves. But researchers found that up to 60 percent of “cured” patients struggle mentally and emotionally years later. For much of their lives, that disorder has shaped expectations of what they are capable of, what they can do, and how their family sees them. But as a group of psychiatrists wrote, “the illness may serve both as a weapon and as a shield.” Those who struggle
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According to self-discrepancy theory, we have three main selves: who we think we are, who we want to become, and who we think we ought to be. In other words, our current, ideal, and ought selves. Research shows when there’s a discrepancy between who we think we are and who we ought to be or who we are striving to be, negative emotions abound.
In a meta-analysis, researchers out of the University of Southern California found that the discrepancy between ourself and our ideals impacted mental health more than ourself and what we think we ought to be. As organizational psychologist Adam Grant summarized the research, “Mental health depends more on living up to your ideals than to others’ expectations.” It’s winning the inside game.
We get to determine our ideals and values, and that impacts us more than any that are placed upon us. Or as we learned from Hannah in chapter 1, we need to stop chasing what we think others want us to and “learn how to be me.” Getting clarity, freeing ourselves up to perform, learning how to strive instead of survive, getting out of the predictive rut of choking is about finding a better alignment among yourself, your aspirations, and your relationships with others. It’s not balance. It’s dealing with the messiness, nuance, and nonduality of living and performing well. It’s putting emphasis on
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