Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success

by Brad Stulberg

Research shows that breaks lasting 7 to 10 days have positive effects on motivation, well-being, and health that last up to a month. Other studies have shown that a week-long vacation can diminish or even completely eliminate burnout. But here’s the catch: If the conditions that led to burnout in the first place aren’t resolved, the symptoms of burnout inevitably return just a few weeks later.

it’s better to think of extended breaks as part of a broader “rest” strategy that includes mini-breaks, sound sleep, and off-days.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •Regardless of the work you do, take at least 1 off-day every week. •Time your off-days strategically to follow periods of accumulated stress. •The more stress, the more rest that is needed. •To the extent that you can, time your vacations strategically to follow longer periods of stress. •On both single off-days and extended vacations, truly disconnect from work. Unplug both physically and mentally and engage in activities that you find relaxing and restorative.

Billingslea isn’t alone. Whether it’s a writer preparing to draft a story, an athlete prepping for competition, or a businessperson heading into a high-stakes presentation, great performers never just hope they’ll be on top of their game. Rather, they actively create the specific conditions that will elicit their personal best, priming themselves for performance. As we’ll learn in this chapter, these priming strategies are effective because of their specific components and consistent repetition. It’s this combination—developing the “right” routine for you and repeating it over and over again—that serves as a gateway to peak performance.

Chade-Meng Tan (aka a Jolly Good Fellow, the mindfulness pioneer who you met in Chapter 4) is known for his unique way of entering conference rooms. When Tan first walks into a meeting, he quickly glances around and makes a silent comment to himself about each individual in the room. Unlike the stereotypical corporate operative, Tan isn’t sizing everyone up in preparation for white-collar battle. Rather, he’s taking a brief moment to say something nice about each person, even if he hasn’t yet met them. Melissa is wonderful to work with . . . Jim is a great marketing manager . . . That lady with red hair looks like she is filled with positive energy . . . In doing so, Tan is overriding a common instinctive reaction of seeing each person as a potential threat or obstacle. By uttering just a few simple words in his head, Tan primes himself into a positive, cooperative mood.

Be kind to yourself and others who are going through challenging times, and recognize that disconnecting “work” from “life” is an illusion.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •Reflect upon the activities in your life that are most important to you. •Determine what state of mind and/or body they demand. •Prime yourself for performance by readying your mind and/or body prior to key activities. •Test and refine various priming techniques, eventually developing customized routines. •Be consistent: Use the same routine each and every time you engage in the activity to which it is linked (more on the importance of consistency in a bit). •Remember the impact of mood on performance; positivity goes a long way.

Ecological psychology suggests that the objects that surround us are not static; rather, they influence and invite specific behaviors. Experiments show that the mere sight of an object elicits brain activity associated with particular actions. For example, when we see an image of a chair, the parts of our brain responsible for coordinating the act of sitting (i.e., motor programs) start firing, even if we haven’t physically moved at all. It’s as if the chair is speaking to us, saying, “Hey, come have a seat,” and our brains are listening and responding accordingly. This phenomenon helps explain why athletes in action sports, like football, often report that they don’t “think” about which direction to run; the linear process of reasoning would take far too long. Rather, when a gap opens up on the football field it literally invites players, on a level far deeper than what they experience in their consciousness, to run through it.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •Create “a place of your own” in which you do your most important work. •Surround yourself with objects that invite your desired behaviors. •Consistently work in that same place, using the same materials. •Over time, your environment will enhance your productivity on a deep neurological level.

“Don’t wait for the muse,” King writes in his memoir. “Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you are going to be every day from nine ’til noon or seven ’till three. If he knows,” King writes, “I assure you he’ll start showing up.”

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •Link key behaviors to specific cues and/or routines. •Be consistent and frequent; execute the same cue/routine every time prior to the behavior to which it is paired. •If possible, link key activities to the same context (e.g., time of day, physical environment, etc.). •If your pursuit requires variable settings, develop portable cues/routines that can be executed anywhere (e.g., a deep-breathing routine, self-talk, etc.). •Consistency is king. The best routine means nothing if you don’t regularly practice it.

2In particular, The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal, PhD, Give and Take by Adam Grant, The Sports Gene by David Epstein, Quiet by Susan Cain, Drive by Daniel Pink, and Presence by Amy Cuddy.

At work, Joyner doesn’t engage in politics or office gossip. And while there are countless seminars and conferences that he could attend literally every day, he often chooses not to, as they would detract from his deep-focus work. When Joyner returns home in the evening, he does his best to “turn it off,” rarely, if ever, engaging in extracurricular activities. In order to do great work, he told us, “You need to say no to a lot of things so that when it’s time to say yes, you can do so with all your energy.” Joyner will be the first to tell you that saying no isn’t easy. “I could have lived in New York, Boston, or Washington DC,” he explained, “but I was attracted to Rochester, Minnesota, because it was a place where I could most easily focus on what is most important to me: my research and family.” And since Joyner loves both his research and family, he’s extremely happy.

The key to being a minimalist is making a routine out of just about everything that is not core to your mission. When decisions are automatic, you skip the conscious deliberation and associated brain activity. You move straight from encountering a situation (e.g., I need to get dressed) to performing an action (e.g., putting on the same shirt as I do every day) without expending energy in between. In a sense, you are cheating fatigue, saving your mental muscle for things that actually matter to you. The more decisions you make automatic, the more energy you’ll have for the work you deem important. The most essential part about adopting the minimalist-to-be-a-maximalist lifestyle, then, is figuring out what really matters to you—what is actually worth expending energy on—and devoting minimal energy to everything else.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •Become a minimalist to be a maximalist. •Reflect on all the decisions that you make throughout a day. •Identify ones that are unimportant, that don’t really matter to you. •Automate as many of the decisions that don’t really matter as you can. Common examples include decisions about: Clothing What to eat at meals When to complete daily activities (e.g., always exercise at the same time of the day so you literally don’t need to think about it) Whether to attend social gatherings (It’s not always a good idea, but during important periods of work, many great performers adopt a strict policy of saying no to social events.) •In addition to eliminating as many decisions as possible, don’t devote brainpower to gossip, politics, or worrying about what others think of you. (Unless, of course, your core mission is to be an elected official—then these things are, in fact, critically important.) •In addition to reflecting upon daily decisions, think about the second- and third-order effects (e.g., commute time, financial pressures, etc.) of larger life decisions, like where to live.

DETERMINING YOUR CHRONOTYPE To help determine your chronotype, you can use an evidence-based questionnaire designed by researchers from the Sleep Research Center at Loughborough University in the UK. While information on how to access the full version is in the Bibliography and Source Notes and portion of this book, answering the three questions here should give you a good idea of where you fall on the lark-owl spectrum. 1.If you were entirely free to set up your evening, with no commitments in the morning, what time would you go to sleep? 2.You have to do 2 hours of physically hard work. If you were entirely free to plan your day, when would you do this work? 3.You have to take a 2-hour test, which you know will be mentally exhausting. If you were entirely free to choose, when would you choose to take the test?

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •Determine your chronotype using the previous tools and suggestions. •Design your day accordingly—be very intentional about when you schedule certain activities, matching the demands of the activity with your energy level. Protect the time during which you are most alert and use it for your most important work. Schedule less demanding tasks during periods in which you are less alert. Don’t fight fatigue! Rather, use this time for recovery and to generate creative ideas that you can act on during your next cycle of high energy and focus. •Work in alignment with your chronotype—it not only maximizes performance, but it also helps to ensure an appropriate balance between stress and rest.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •Recognize the enormous power of the people with whom you surround yourself. •Positive energy, motivation, and drive are all contagious. Do what you can to cultivate your own village of support, to surround yourself with a culture of performance. •Remember that by being positive and showing motivation, you are not only helping yourself, but you are also helping everyone else in your life. •Unfortunately, negativity and pessimism are also contagious. Don’t put up with too much of either. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

The best performers are not consistently great, but they are great at being consistent. They show up every day and they do the work. A large body of social science suggests that attitudes often follow behaviors. Great performers understand this and, if nothing more, they make sure to at least get started on all their working days.

If you think about it, everything we’ve discussed in this chapter works in service of showing up and being at your best when you do. Perhaps the real secret of world-class performers is not the daily routines that they develop, but that they stick to them. That they show up, even when they don’t feel like it. Call it drive, call it passion, or call it grit; whatever you call it, it must come from deep within. But, in an interesting twist, this strength that comes from deep within is often rooted in something “without.” When the going gets tough, great performers don’t show up for themselves. They show up for something greater than themselves. As a matter of fact, they transcend the very notion of the “self” altogether. That’s where we’ll turn next.

Strecher discovered that throughout history, when people focus on a self-transcending purpose, or a purpose greater than themselves, they become capable of more than they ever thought was possible. Strecher believes this is because when we concentrate deeply on something beyond ourselves, our ego is minimized. A large part of our ego’s role is to literally protect our “self.” It is our ego that tells us to shut down and flee when faced with threats. When we transcend our “self” and minimize our ego, however, we can overcome the fears, anxieties, and physiological protective mechanisms that so often hold us back from achieving major breakthroughs. A whole new realm of possibilities emerges.

Noakes repeated similar versions of this experiment and observed the same result. Although participants reported being totally depleted and unable to contract their muscles after exercising to what they thought was failure, when electrical stimulation was applied, without fail, their muscles produced additional force. This led Noakes to conclude that contrary to popular belief, physical fatigue occurs not in the body, but in the brain. It’s not that our muscles wear out; rather, it is our brain that shuts them down when they still have a few more percentage points to give. Noakes speculates this is an innately programmed way of protecting ourselves.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •Our “ego” or “self” or “central governor” serves as a protective mechanism that holds us back from reaching our true limits. •When faced with great challenges, our ego is biologically programmed to shut us down, telling us to turn in the other direction. •By focusing on a self-transcending purpose, or a reason for doing something beyond our “self,” we can override our ego and break through our self-imposed limits. •To the extent you can, link your activities to a greater purpose (more on how to do this in Chapter 9). This way, when you are faced with formidable challenges and your mind is telling you to quit, you can ask yourself why you are undertaking them. If the answer is “for someone or something greater than myself,” you’ll be more likely to push onward. •Thinking less about your “self” is one of the best ways to improve yourself.

When it comes to increasing motivation, a wide body of research suggests doing something for others is far more effective than traditional incentives like money or reputation. Perhaps this is why after unbelievable, record-breaking performances—ones that inevitably required enduring immense pain and suffering—athletes never say they were thinking about how great it would feel to be a champion or how much money they would win. Rather, after crossing the finish line, they almost always report that when the pain came on, they began thinking about their family, their god, or their friend who has cancer. They were able to endure the pain, to say “more” when their bodies were screaming “less,” because they were supremely motivated by a self-transcending purpose.

Purpose fosters motivation; motivation lets us endure a greater perception of effort; and enduring a greater perception of effort often results in better performance. This equation holds true in every field—from the track to the workplace. And as we’re about to see, it even holds true in the artist’s studio.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •We are constantly balancing perception of effort, or how hard something feels, with motivation. •If we want to endure more effort, which often leads to better performance, we may need to increase our motivation. •The best way to increase motivation is to link our work to a greater purpose or cause. •Not only will focusing on activities that help others make the world a better place, it will also make you a better performer. •Especially when we are feeling tired or worn out, we should think about why we are doing what we are doing.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •Find opportunities to give back in the context of your work; these can be more intensive, such as coaching and mentoring, or less intensive, such as posting sincere advice in online forums. •The only criteria is that your “giving” is closely linked to your work and that you give without the expectation of getting anything back. •While “giving” is especially powerful for preventing and reversing burnout, you should still aim to avoid burnout by supporting stress with appropriate rest.

By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic “the self-transcendence of human existence.” It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.

•Courage

•Enjoyment

•Kindness

•Positivity

•Relationships

There is widespread evidence that self-talk boosts performance. In particular, studies show that self-talk increases motivation and willingness to endure uncomfortable situations. Self-talk is most effective when what we tell ourselves is short, specific, and, most important, consistent. Thus, if your purpose is on the lengthy side, when using it as a self-talk strategy you may want to condense it into a few words that capture its essence. Self-talk is especially helpful in situations when our bodies and/or minds are telling us to quit, but we want to keep going. It helps us keep our cool and avoid amygdala hijack, or the emotional takeover of the brain that we discussed in Chapter 4. And, especially if the content of self-talk reflects a self-transcending purpose, it can empower us to do more than we ever thought possible.

“Expressive writing”—a type of journaling that involves exploring issues that are integral and foundational to our lives—has been shown to strengthen the cells in our immune systems. In addition, expressive writing is associated with declines in depression and anxiety, reduced blood pressure, fewer visits to the doctor, improved lung and liver function, and increases in positivity and social connectedness. Scientists speculate that expressive writing yields such profound results because it gives us a safe space to reflect on the issues that are most important to us. Many of us otherwise inhibit these thoughts and feelings, keeping them to ourselves. But as anyone who has kept deep feelings bottled up inside knows, doing so can cause a great deal of tension. Yet, at the same time, sharing them with others can also be a less-than-comfortable experience. By letting the words that reflect our deepest values and emotions pour out onto the page, we release tension and in doing so improve our health. In the words of University of Texas at Austin professor James Pennebaker, PhD, a pioneer of expressive writing research, “Standing back every now and then and evaluating where you are in life is really important.” If anything epitomizes Pennebaker’s definition of expressive writing, it’s when we reflect on our purpose in an effort to determine how closely we lived in accordance with it.

Once you’ve developed a purpose, do whatever it is you can to build a life that allows you fulfill it.

SYSTEMATICALLY GROW BY ALTERNATING BETWEEN STRESS AND REST

Stress Yourself

Seek out “just-manageable challenges” in areas of your life in which you want grow •Just-manageable challenges are those that barely exceed your current abilities. •If you feel fully in control, make the next challenge a bit harder. •If you feel anxious or so aroused that you can’t focus, dial things down a notch.

Cultivate deep focus and perfect practice •Define a purpose and concrete objectives each time you set out to do meaningful work. •Focus and concentrate deeply, even if doing so isn’t always enjoyable. •Remove distractors such as smartphones; remember that out of sight is truly out of mind. •Do only one thing at a time. Next time you feel like multitasking, r...

Work in discrete blocks •Divide your work into blocks of 50 to 90 minutes (this may vary by task). Start even smaller if you find yourself struggling to maintain attention. •If deep-focus work is new to you, start with blocks as short as 10 to 15 minutes. As you cultivate a deep-focus practice, gradually increase the duration you go dee...

Nurture a growth or challenge mindset •Keep in mind that how you view something fundamentally changes how your body responds to it. •In situations when you feel the sensation of stress, remind yourself that this is your body’s natural way of preparing for a challenge. Take a deep breath and channel the heightened arousal and sharper perception into the task at hand. •Push yourself to view st...

Have the Courage to Rest Grow your mindful muscle with meditation so that you can more easily choose rest •Find a time when other distractions are minimized, such as first thing in the morning, after brushing your teeth, or before going to bed. •Sit in a comfortable position and, ideally, in a quiet space. •Set a timer so you aren’t distracted by thoughts about the passage of time. •Begin breathing deeply, in and out through your nose. •Focus on nothing but your breath; when thoughts arise, notice them, but then let them go. Direct your focus back to the sensation of the breath. •Start with just 1 minute and gradually increase duration, adding 30 to 45 seconds every few days. •Frequency trumps duration. It’s best to meditate daily, even if that means keeping individual sessions short.

Apply your growing mindful muscle in everyday life •Have “calm conversations” during stressful periods; remember that you are separate from the emotions and sensations that you are experiencing. •Realize when you want to “turn it off” and then choose to leave stress behind. Taking a few deep breaths helps because it activates the prefrontal cortex, your brain’s command-and-control center.

Take smart breaks and let your subconscious go to work •When you are working on a strenuous task and hit an impasse, have the courage to step away. Step away from whatever it is you were doing for at least 5 minutes. The more stressful the task, the longer your break should be. For really draining tasks, consider stepping away until the next morning. •During your breaks, perform activities that demand little to no focus. Go on a short walk. Sit in nature. Meditate. Recover socially. Listen to music. Take a shower. Do the dishes. •You may have an “aha” moment of insight during your break. If you do, great. Even if you don’t have a...

Prioritize sleep •Reframe sleep as something that is productive. •Aim for at least 7 to 9 hours of sleep per night. For those doing intense physical activity, 10 hours is not too much. •The best way to figure out the right amount of sleep for you is to spend 10 to 14 days going to sleep when you are tired and waking up without an alarm clock. Take the average sleep time. That’s what you need. •For a better night’s sleep, follow these tips: Ensure you expose yourself to natural (i.e., non-electric) light throughout the day. This will help you maintain a healthy circadian rhythm. Exercise. Vigorous physical activity makes us tired. When we are tired, we sleep. But don’t exercise too close to bedtime. Limit caffeine intake, and phase it out completely 5 to 6 hours prior to your bedtime. Only use your bed for sleep and sex. Not for eating, watching television, working on your laptop, or anything else. The one exception is reading a paper book prior to bed. Don’t drink alcohol close to bedtime. Although alcohol can hasten the onset of sleep, it often disrupts the later and more important stages. Limit blue light exposure in the evening. Don’t start working on hard, stressful activiti...

Take extended time off •Regardless of the work you do, take at least one off-day every week. •To the extent that you can, time your off-days and vacations strategically to follow periods of accumulated stress. •The more you stress, the more you should rest. •On both single off-days and extended vacations, truly disconnect from work. Unplug bot...

PRIME FOR PERFORMANCE

Optimize Your Routine

Develop warmup regimens for important activities/performances •Determine what state of mind and body your performance demands. •Develop a sequence of activities that puts your mind and body in that state. •Be consistent: Use the same routine each and every time you engage in the activity to which it is linked. •Remember the impact of mood on performance; positivity goes a long way.