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

by Brad Stulberg

The process of setting a goal on the outer boundaries of what we think is possible, and then systematically pursuing it, is one of the most fulfilling parts about being human.

Over the past decade, machines have learned how to process regular spoken language, recognize human faces and read their expressions, classify personality types, and even carry out conversations.

Hawking told the BBC, “The primitive forms of artificial intelligence we already have proved very useful. But I think the development of full artificial

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.

Workers, perhaps fearful that they must always be “on” because someone else will be, check their cell phones almost 150 times per day.

One study found that more than half of white-collar workers believe they’ve reached a breaking point: They simply can’t handle any more information, and they report feeling demoralized as a result.

Even so, regardless of how futile our efforts might be, we feel compelled to keep up. This urge is especially common among Americans. Only a third of American workers say they take a proper lunch break (i.e., leave their desks). The other 66 percent opt to eat while working, or not at all. It’s not just lunch that Americans are working through, but dinner, nights, and weekends, too. In an aptly titled paper, “Americans Work Too Long (And Too Often at Strange Times),” economists Daniel Hamermesh and Elena Stancanelli found that 27 percent of Americans regularly work between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., and 29 percent of Americans do at least some work on the weekends.

But that’s not the case. On average, American workers leave 5 vacation days unused at the end of each and every year. When you add all of this up, as Gallup did in 2014, you find that the typical American workweek is 47 hours, not 40. In other words, American workers are grinding away for almost an entire extra day each and every week. Against this backdrop, it’s by no means shocking that 53 percent of American workers report feeling burnt out.

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.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •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.

Much like how after you’ve lifted weights to the point of fatigue your arms won’t function very well, after you’ve used your mind to the point of fatigue—be it to resist temptation, make tough decisions, or work on challenging cognitive tasks—it, too, won’t function very well. This fatigue might lead you to eat cookies, give up on solving a tough intellectual problem, or even prematurely give in during physical challenges. In the worst case, you might even cheat on your significant other.

Scientists have discovered that the more we resist temptation, think deeply, or focus intensely, the better we become at doing so.

Put all this together, and a paradox emerges. Stress can be positive, triggering desirable adaptations in the body; or stress can be negative, causing grave damage and harm.

Growth comes at the point of resistance; we learn by pushing ourselves to the outer reaches of our abilities.

students who were forced to struggle on complex problems before receiving help from teachers outperformed students who received immediate assistance. The authors of these studies summarized their findings in a simple yet elegant statement: Skills come from struggle.

They delayed instruction until students reached the point of failure. Growth comes at the point of resistance. Skills come from struggle.

“It’s only when you step outside your comfort zone that you grow. Being uncomfortable is the path to personal development and growth. It is the opposite of complacency.”

It’s only when we activate System 2, by really working hard and struggling to figure something out, that we have the best chance of examining new information critically and integrating it into our web of knowledge. True learning requires System 2.

What we are suggesting, however, is that for the capabilities you wish to grow—whether they be financial modeling, portrait painting, distance running, or anything in between—you should regularly seek out just-manageable challenges: activities that take you out of your comfort zone and force you to push at the point of resistance for growth.

isn’t experience that sets top performers apart but the amount of deliberate practice they put in.

He compartmentalizes his day down to the hour. Each compartment has a concrete objective. These objectives range from, for example: write 500 words for a paper; learn enough about a company to make an investment decision; have a free-flowing conversation with an interesting person; keep his heart rate at 80 percent of its maximum in a fitness class; influence a decision maker in a highly political meeting; enjoy dinner with his wife and kids. This type of compartmentalization ensures he follows his governing rule: “Do only one thing at a time.” Dr. Bob’s secret to doing so much is doing so little. He is the ultimate single-tasker.

for the workshop

For 99 percent of us,1 effective multitasking

Although it may feel like we are getting twice as much done when multitasking, we’re actually getting close to half as much done.

Great performers, Ericsson found, generally work in chunks of 60 to 90 minutes separated by short breaks.

While the exact work-to-rest ratio depends on the demands of the job and individual preferences, the overall theme is clear: 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. This

The growth-mindset students were willing to push themselves harder, sought out just-manageable challenges, and viewed productive failure as a positive. In contrast, the fixed-mindset students avoided challenges and quit when the going got tough.

Were we rewarded for hard work and effort (growth-mindset promoting)? Or were we rewarded only for outcomes (fixed-mindset promoting)?

If we cultivate a growth mindset and believe that skills come from struggle, then we are more likely to expose ourselves to the good kind of growth-promoting stress.

Could something as simple as one’s attitude about stress truly contribute to extending life?

the sensation of stress, remind yourself this is your body’s natural

And as we’re about to see, it’s this system—one that is “on” when we are “off”—that is often responsible for creative insight and breakthrough.

Researchers have found that despite spending the vast majority of our waking hours in effortful thought, over 40 percent of our creative ideas manifest during breaks.

It is in these parts of the brain, in the vast forests bordering the narrow “if-then” highway that our conscious mind runs on, where our creative ideas lie.

it’s only when we turn off the conscious mind, shifting into a state of rest, that insights from the subconscious mind surface.

Rest isn’t lazily slothing around; it’s an active process in which physical and psychological growth occurs. To reap the benefits of stress, you need to rest.

There are many ways to step away from our work of course, and not all of them are created equal. Browsing social media, for example, isn’t nearly as effective as taking a walk.

Stepping away from your work takes a lot of guts, especially when you’re on a tight deadline.

Fortunately, the latest science shows that taking just a 2-minute walk every hour is protective against many of sitting’s ill effects.

If you experience these sensations, you might want to consider a short bout of mindfulness meditation. Sit down in a comfortable position, close your eyes, and take 10 deep breaths, in and out through your nose. Focus on only the sensation of your breath. Physical pain, tightness, and negative thoughts may arise. If they do, do not ignore them. Rather, acknowledge them non-judgmentally, let them go, and then return to focusing on your breath.

After you’ve taken 10 breaths, you could continue focusing exclusively on your breath for the duration of your break. Or, you could consider transitioning to a technique called “open-monitoring” meditation, sometimes referred to as a “body scan.” In open-monitoring meditation, though you continue to breathe rhythmically, you shift your focus from your breath to various parts of your body. Start at your feet and work your way up. Focus on the feeling of your toes in your shoes, your skin against a chair (or your clothes), your muscles loosening, and your heart beating. Studies show that just 7 to 10 minutes of open-monitoring meditation

“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.”

you often feel tired, and know that you just don’t get enough sleep, you have company. Lots of company. About 195 million Americans, to be exact. That’s right, a whopping 65 percent of Americans get less than the medically recommended 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night. Forty percent sleep less than 6 hours. This wasn’t always the case. In 1942, the average American slept 7.9 hours every night. Today, that number is down to 6.8 hours. Much, if not all, of our collective sleep loss is related to the technologies that keep us connected at all times and allow us to work at all hours.

Let’s pause for just a moment to reflect upon this in the context of the equation stress + rest = growth. During our waking hours we expose ourselves to all kinds of psychological stimulus (stress), and during our sleep (rest) we make sense of it all. As a result, we’re literally more evolved when we wake up the next morning. In our sleep, we grow. And we grow not just our cognitive and emotional muscles but our physical ones, too.

This is to say that the stress of hard physical training breaks us down, and it is only when we follow stress with rest that adaptation and growth occurs. This is especially true with sleeping, which is a catalyst for physical growth. Just as the brain is actively processing the work we’ve done throughout the day, when we sleep the body is doing the same.

In another study, and one more relevant to most of our earthly situations, researchers pitted napping against coffee. They found that individuals who took a nap of 15 to 20 minutes awoke with more alertness and went on to perform better during the remainder of the day than those who, instead of napping, drank 150 milligrams of caffeine, or about the same amount in a Starbucks grande-size coffee.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •Sleep 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, consolidated from the world’s leading researchers: 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 activities—be them mental or physical—after dinner. If you struggle with a racing mind, try inserting a brief mindfulness meditation session prior to bed. When you feel yourself getting drowsy, don’t fight it. Whatever you are doing can wait until the morning. Keep your room as...

Unfortunately, we’ve lost the notion of smart work at the expense of hard work, which somehow almost always gets confused with more work.

But here’s the thing: If we never take “easy” periods, we are never able to go full throttle and the “hard” periods end up being not that hard at all. We get stuck in a gray zone, never really stressing ourselves but never really resting either. This vicious cycle is often referred to by a much less vicious name—“going through the motions”—but it’s a huge problem nonetheless. That’s because few people grow when they are going through the motions. In order to give it our all, and do so over a long time horizon without burning out, we’ve got to be more like Bernard Lagat: Every now and then, we’ve got to take it really easy.

we are recommending that you strategically insert longer periods of rest to follow longer periods of stress.

That we said 2 days later is worth noting. Sometimes it can take both the body and the mind a day to get back into the swing of things. This is why prior to a big Sunday race, many athletes rest on Friday and do a light workout on Saturday to “wake their body up.” This is also why some of the savviest professionals schedule big meetings on Tuesdays instead of Mondays. Some people snap right back from a break, but others take