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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Less of the day seems driven by chance once we understand some of the forces that shape our choices and our emotions, and once we recognize how our thought patterns can affect everything from our perception of reality to the moods of those around us.
The central purpose of the book is to translate all that science into step-by-step techniques for improving your day-to-day life.
the practical pointers are highlighted with bullet points; each chapter also ends with a box that summarizes its advice for quick reference.
(If you would like to gather colleagues together to talk about the book’s suggestions, you’ll find materials to help you facilitate group discussions at www.howtohaveagoodday.com.)
“Why do perfectly reasonable people get their wires crossed?”
For much of its history, psychology was mostly concerned with investigating the causes of negative behavior.
one of psychology’s most well-known experiments was Stanley Milgram’s controversial exploration of how far people were willing to submit to authority—the one where he tested whether volunteers would be willing to give potentially fatal electrical shocks to strangers when told to do so by someone in a white coat.1 (A disturbing number of them obeyed.)
THREE BIG THEMES
seven building blocks of a good day,
The two-system brain: The brain’s activity is split across two complementary systems—one deliberate and controlled, the other automatic and instinctive. The combination of the two makes us smart and productive. But we can make our cognitive resources go even further if we adjust the way we work to reflect each system’s strengths and weaknesses.
The discover-defend axis: Subconsciously, we’re constantly on the lookout for threats to defend against and rewards to discover. It takes very little to put our brains into defensive mode, and we’re not at our smartest in that mode. However, a dose of self-awareness and the pursuit of certain types of rewards can help us move back into clearer-thinking discovery mode.
The mind-body loop: The state of our bodies and that of our minds are far more deeply entwined than we generally realize. As a result, certain simple physical interventions can immediately boost our intellectual performance, emotional resilience, and personal confidence.
THEME 1: THE TWO-SYSTEM BRAIN
it was Daniel Kahneman who brought the concept into the public spotlight when he accepted his Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002. He centered his acceptance speech on describing the distinction between “effortless intuition” and “deliberate reasoning,” concepts central to his bestselling book, Thinking Fast and Slow.4
The Deliberate System
the one that controls the things we do consciously and carefully.
reasoning, self-control, and forward thinking.
In short, the deliberate system is responsible for putting us on our best behavior. When it’s in full control, it makes us wise, self-possessed, and reliable.
It can give a good impression of multitasking when we’re on the phone at the same time as we’re checking email. But our deliberate system isn’t actually doing anything in parallel at all; it’s switching from one task to another and back again.7 It gets tired pretty easily, too. If we don’t regularly rest and refuel our brain, the quality of our reasoning, self-control, and planning declines sharply.
The Automatic System
the magic of this system is that it has automated the majority of what we do to get from one day to the next, and its quick, automatic processes remove the need for us to think consciously about every single thing we do.
it rapidly sifts through information and ideas, prioritizes whatever seems relevant, and filters out the rest.
As a result, the startling truth is that we don’t experience the world as it is; we’re always experiencing an edited, simplified version.
In this now famous clip, they showed that a person in a gorilla suit could walk through the middle of a basketball game without being noticed by half the people watching the video. That’s despite the fact that the “gorilla” stops to face the camera and ostentatiously beats its chest as the players pass the ball around
Since our reality is subjective, we might as well seize the chance to make that reality more of what we’d like it to be.
the subjectivity of reality also means that however bad a situation seems, there’s always a different way of seeing things. The way we interpret what we’ve experienced is much more up for grabs than we generally realize.
Your deliberate system is responsible for sophisticated functions such as reasoning, self-control, and forward thinking. It excels in handling anything unfamiliar, complex, or abstract. But it has limited capacity and gets tired quickly. When it’s overused, overloaded, or distracted, it’s harder for you to be wise, balanced, or reliable.
Your automatic system lightens the load on your deliberate system by automating most of what you do and taking fast shortcuts that filter out “irrelevant” information and options. That’s mostly helpful. But it inevitably leaves you with blind spots. And the fact that nobody ever experiences an entirely objective version of reality can lead to crossed wires and poor choices in the workplace.
THEME 2: THE DISCOVER-DEFEND AXIS
If you can tempt your brain’s reward system with something valuable, you’re more likely to be able to respond to a tough situation with the benefit of all your “discovery mode” intelligence.
As well as using these Jedi mind tricks for yourself, I’ll also show you how being generous in doling out brain-friendly rewards to colleagues can improve the quality of all your interactions
Things to know about the discover-defend axis:
In defensive mode, you become less smart and flexible, as your brain devotes some of its scarce mental energy to launching a fight-flight-freeze response to a potential “threat”—leaving less energy to power your brain’s deliberate system. Defensive mode can even be triggered by small personal slights.
In discovery mode, you’re motivating yourself with rewards: a social sense of belonging or recognition; a personal sense of autonomy, competence, or purpose; or informational rewards that come from learning or experiencing new things.
THEME 3: THE MIND-BODY LOOP
Sleep
It differs from person to person. But the vast majority of us need between seven and nine hours of sleep to function at our best.
Exercise
even a single session of aerobic exercise immediately improves our intellectual performance, giving us faster information processing and reaction time, more effective planning, better short-term memory performance, and more self-control.28 It enhances all the functions of the brain’s deliberate system, in other words.
Why is exercise so immediately helpful to us? Partly because it increases blood flow to the brain. But it also stimulates the release of the neurotransmitters dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin, which serve to boost our interest, alertness, and enjoyment.
Furthermore, research suggests that the majority of those cognitive and emotional benefits accrue after as little as twenty minutes of moderate daily activity.31 So even a fast walk at lunchtime can make a real difference to your mojo.
Mindfulness
But what is mindfulness? At its heart, the practice is simply this: you pause, focus your attention on observing one thing, and calmly return your attention to that point of focus if your attention drifts away. Pause, focus, return—for anything from a few seconds up to twenty minutes or more.
researchers are also finding that people can get results from practicing mindfulness for as little as five minutes a day—something
Striking a Pose
These “fake it till you make it” findings are useful to us, since they suggest it’s possible to use our bodies to reverse-engineer the state of mind we want.
Things to remember about the mind-body loop:
The way you treat your body has a direct, immediate impact on your brain’s performance, affecting both its cognitive and emotional functions.
Specifically, your brain’s deliberate system performs far better when you’ve had enough sleep, some aerobic exercise, and a few moments of mindfulness.
Mimicking the physical actions associated with feeling happy, confident, and relaxed appears to tell your brain that you are in fact happy, confident, and relaxed, creating a self-fulfilling loop.
