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

by Brad Stulberg

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.

Sure, immediate assistance can be highly satisfying. But when we succumb to the impulse for instant resolution, we miss out on a special kind of deep learning that only a challenge can spawn.

Or, just ask yourself: What does 3 + 2 equal? How about 6 × 4? Think back. Answering these questions wasn’t always so easy.

Just like struggling to eke out one last repetition in the weight room is a great method for growing the body, struggling to the point of failure and only then receiving assistance is a great recipe for growing the mind.

It isn’t experience that sets top performers apart but the amount of deliberate practice they put in. Although Ericsson would become associated with the Malcolm Gladwell–popularized 10,000-hour rule—the notion that anyone can become an expert at anything by practicing for 10,000 hours—his actual findings represent something quite different. Expertise is not about a certain number of hours practiced. Rather, it’s about the type of work that fills those hours. Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.

“It’s not that I can’t multitask,” he says. “But when I do multitask everything suffers. So I just don’t multitask. Ever.

Unlike other neurochemicals that are released when we’ve achieved something, the far more potent dopamine is released prior to the payoff of an event, when we are longing for or desiring something deeply. In other words, we don’t become addicted to winning; we become addicted to the chase.

When we met with Dr. Bob, he didn’t check his phone once. He didn’t even think about it. It wasn’t even in the room.

Are the elites simply immune to stress? Of course not. They just know how to channel it effectively.

Additional research, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, shows that 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). “Compared to those who attempt to calm down,” the authors conclude, “individuals who reappraise their anxious arousal as excitement perform better.” Put differently: The sensations you feel prior to a big event are neutral—if you view them in a positive light, they are more likely to have a positive impact on your performance.

are having a stress response rather than automatically being overcome by it. It’s as if we are viewing our thoughts and feelings as a neutral observer and then choosing what to do next. A weak prefrontal cortex gets overpowered by a strong stress response. But a strong prefrontal cortex lets us choose how we want to respond to stress.

Reflect on the times when you are most creative. What are you doing when the answers to tough problems you’ve been grappling with suddenly pop into your head? Odds are, you aren’t trying to solve them.

The lead author on this study, Christian Cook, PhD, professor of physiology and elite performance at Bangor University, told us that “a friendly post-exercise setting—particularly being able to talk, joke, and debrief with other athletes—seems to help with recovery and future performance.” When we shared this with Kelly McGonigal, PhD, (the Stanford University professor and stress expert you met in Chapter 3), she wasn’t surprised. “The basic biology of feeling connected to others has profound effects on stress physiology,” McGonigal told us. The positive effects of social connection include increasing heart rate variability (HRV), shifting the nervous system into recovery mode, and releasing hormones such as oxytocin and vasopressin that have anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. “What’s even crazier,” says McGonigal, “is that oxytocin helps your heart repair. It’s pretty poetic that feeling connected to others literally fixes a broken heart.

Happy hour tends to be a time when people who work together go out to commiserate about work. As such, far too often these hours are generally not very happy. Go hang out with your friends instead.)

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.

Remember the impact of mood on performance; positivity goes a long way.

When we shared Pharr Davis’s story with Strecher, the University of Michigan professor who studies purpose, he responded with an unusually short email: “Wow.” He later told us Pharr Davis’s experience on the Appalachian Trail is a profound example of ego minimization. He explained that she was harnessing the power of purpose to overcome her fears and doubts, and pointed us to new brain science that sheds light on what may have been unfolding inside her head.

In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl wrote, “A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life.

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.