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A culture that pushes people to break the law and cheat just to stay in the game, let alone get ahead, is not a good one—nor is it sustainable.
Nonstop, frenetic work won’t just leave us feeling completely depleted; it’s also bad for our health.
The key to strengthening your biceps—and, as we’ll learn, any muscle, be it physical, cognitive, or emotional—is balancing the right amount of stress with the right amount of rest. Stress + rest = growth. This equation holds true regardless of what it is that you are trying to grow.
allowing you to push a little harder in the future. Over time, the cycle looks like this: 1.Isolate the muscle or capability you want to grow 2.Stress it 3.Rest and recover, allowing for adaptation to occur 4.Repeat—this time stressing the muscle or capability a bit more than you did the last time
The days, weeks, months, years, and entire careers of master athletes represent a continual ebb and flow between stress and rest. Those who can’t figure out the right balance either get hurt or burn out (too much stress, not enough rest) or become complacent and plateau (not enough stress, too much rest). Those who can figure out the right balance, however, become life-long champions.
Stress demands rest, and rest supports stress.
a common process across almost all great intellectual and creative performers, regardless of their field: 1.Immersion: total engagement in their work with deep, unremitting focus 2.Incubation: a period of rest and recovery when they are not at all thinking about their work 3.Insight: the occurrence of “aha” or “eureka” moments—the emergence of new ideas and growth in their thinking
Alternate between cycles of stress and rest in your most important pursuits.
Insert short breaks throughout your work over the course of a day.
Strategically time your “off-days,” long weekends, and vacations to follow periods of heavy stress.
Determine when your work regularly starts to suffer. When you find that point, insert a recovery break just prior to it.
Scientists have discovered that the more we resist temptation, think deeply, or focus intensely, the better we become at doing so.
A new line of research contests that willpower in particular is not as limited as scientists once thought, and suggests that by successfully completing smaller productive changes we can build the strength to complete larger ones in the future. Either way, whether it is the result of willpower, ego-depletion, or some other mechanism, we cannot continuously use our mind (at least not effectively) without at some point experiencing fatigue. And we cannot take on more sizeable psychological challenges without first building strength through smaller ones.
Remember that “stress is stress”: fatigue on one task spills over into the next, even if the two are completely unrelated.
Only take on a few challenges at once. Otherwise you’ll literally run out of energy.
Tweak your environment to support your goals. This is especially important at times when you know you’ll be depleted. It’s incredible how much our surroundings impact our behavior, especially when we are fatigued. fatigue—be it to resist temptation, make tough decisions, or work on challenging cognitive tasks—it, too, won’t function very well.
Growth comes at the point of resistance; we learn by pushing ourselves to the outer reaches of our abilities.
learning demands open-ended exploration that allows students to reach beyond their individual limits.
students who were forced to struggle on complex problems before receiving help from teachers outperformed students who received immediate assistance.
Skills come from ...
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The most effective tutoring systems, on the other hand, all shared one thing: They delayed instruction until students reached the point of failure. Growth comes at the point of resistance. Skills come from struggle.
failure. Rather than simply answering a specific question, it is beneficial to be challenged and even to fail. Failure provides an opportunity to analyze a problem from different angles, pushing us to understand its deep underlying structure and to hone the transferrable skill of problem-solving itself.
struggling to the point of failure and only then receiving assistance is a great recipe for growing the mind.
If you want to continuously improve in whatever it is that you do, you’ve got to view stress as something positive, even desirable. Although too much or never-ending stress can be dangerous, the right amount serves as a powerful stimulus for growth.
A little doubt and uncertainty is actually a good thing: It signals that a growth opportunity has emerged.
The little voice inside your head saying, “I can’t possibly do this,” is actually a sign that you’re on the right track.
when it came to differentiating top performers, experience was not the critical variable.
It isn’t experience that sets top performers apart but the amount of deliberate practice they put in.
Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.
top performers actively seek out just-manageable challenges, setting goals for practice sessions that just barely exceed their current capabilities. But that is only half the story. What really differentiates deliberate practice is deep concentration.
multitasking not only makes the work we do today suffer, but it also makes the work we’ll do tomorrow suffer.
engaging in a task with singular focus is how we grow from stress.
the best solution for preventing smartphone distraction is to remove it from the picture altogether. It turns out there is a lot of truth in the expression “out of sight, out of mind.”
one of the best methods for self-control is to move the object of desire out of view. (Or in the case of vibrating phones, perhaps “out of feel.”) Mischel’s findings explain why recovering gamblers are prohibited from being near casinos and why dieters have long been told to keep unhealthy foods hidden in hard-to-access places or outside the house altogether.
Great performers, Ericsson found, generally work in chunks of 60 to 90 minutes separated by short breaks.
alternating between blocks of 50 to 90 minutes of intense work and recovery breaks of 7 to 20 minutes enables people to sustain the physical, cognitive, and emotional energy required for peak performance.
For most activities and most situations, 2 hours should be the uppermost limit for a working block.
The lens through which we view the world affects everything from learning to health to longevity to our hormonal response to “different” milkshakes.
Some individuals learn to assess stressors as challenges rather than threats.
In the midst of stress, those who demonstrate a challenge response proactively focus on what they can control. With this outlook, negative emotions like fear and anxiety decrease. This response better enables these individuals to manage and even thrive under stress.
DHEA has been linked to a reduced risk of anxiety, depression, heart disease, neurodegeneration, and a range of other diseases and conditions. DHEA is also a neurosteroid, which helps the brain grow.
When under stress, you want to release more DHEA than cortisol. This ratio is aptly named the “growth index of stress.”
if you frame stressors as challenges, you’ll release more DHEA than cortisol. As a result your growth index of stress will be higher, and you’ll actually experience health benefits instead of health detriments.
cultivating a growth mindset and a challenge response to stress is highly beneficial. These mindsets increase our health and longevity.
Are the elites simply immune to stress? Of course not. They just know how to channel it effectively.
instead of trying to calm yourself down, “reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement” is often advantageous.
When you try to suppress pre-event nerves, you are inherently telling yourself that something is wrong. Not only does this make the situation worse, but it also takes emotional and physical energy to fight off the feeling of anxiety—energy that could be better spent on the task at hand. Fortunately, according to the authors of this paper, simply telling yourself “I am excited” shifts your demeanor from what they call a threat mindset (stressed out and apprehensive) to an opportunity mindset (revved up and ready to go).
rather than try to push the stress away, they welcome and channel it toward the task at hand.
Stephen King, “For me, not working is the real work.”
