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

by Brad Stulberg

These stories aren’t unique. They happen everywhere and can happen to anyone. Including us. We, the authors of this book, are the runner (Steve) and the consultant (Brad).

What started out as a two-person support group morphed into a close friendship founded upon a shared interest in the science of performance. We became curious: Is healthy, sustainable peak performance possible? If so, how? What’s the secret? What, if any, are the principles underlying great performance? How can people like us—which is to say, just about anyone—adopt them?

Although many experts believe the naturally occurring rate of ADHD is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to 6 percent of the population, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that the diagnosis is being made at twofold rates, or in about 11 percent of American youth. But from Sara’s perspective, just about everyone on campus was using Adderall, regardless of whether they had an ADHD diagnosis or a prescription for the drug.

As we’ll soon learn, drugs or no drugs, performing in this nonstop manner without sufficient rest is suboptimal at best and dangerous at worse. 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.

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.

Obsession, perfectionism, hypersensitivity, the need for control, and high expectations are common traits in great artists, and they are all linked to creative burnout.

Another pursuit in which passion and pressure commonly collide is athletics, where burnout is one of the main reasons why everyone—from kids to weekend warriors to professional athletes—quits playing sports. So frequently do athletes push themselves too hard without taking a break that there is even a medical term for it: overtraining syndrome. In overtraining syndrome, the central nervous system is thrown out of whack, yielding a cascade of negative biological effects. Ultimately, overtraining syndrome results in deep fatigue, illness, injury, and performance decline. It’s the body’s way of saying “I’m done—absolutely no more.” A forced shutdown of sorts.

These principles—each time-tested, safe, ethical, and legal—have been used by great performers for centuries. Only now, however, is fascinating new science revealing why and how these performance principles work. This understanding makes them accessible to everyone.

emerge. In the words of Eric Weiner, author and innovation expert, breakthroughs occur when “people realize the arbitrary nature of their own [field] and open their minds to, in effect, the possibility of possibility. Once you realize there is another way of doing X, or thinking about Y, then all sorts of new channels open up to you.”

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.

In the world of exercise science, this cycle of stress and rest is often referred to as periodization. Stress—and by this we don’t mean fighting with your partner or your boss, but rather, some sort of stimulus, such as lifting a heavy weight—challenges the body, in some cases pushing it close to failure. This process is usually followed by a slight dip in function; just think about how useless your arms are after a hard weight-lifting session. But if after the stressful period you give your body time to rest and recover, it adapts and becomes stronger, 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

is. Stress demands rest, and rest supports stress.

writers. Just as Seiler found that world-class endurance athletes migrate toward a similar style of work, Csikszentmihalyi found that the same held true for creative geniuses: the brightest minds spend their time either pursuing an activity with ferocious intensity, or engaging in complete restoration and recovery.

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.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •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. 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.

While Selye’s dreams of discovering a new hormone were dashed, his consolation prize was a big one. He unknowingly stumbled upon a concept that would become one of the foremost concerns in modern society: stress. By doing something—anything, really—that shocked or caused pain and discomfort in the rats, he could trigger an innate stress response that we now know is shared by just about every living organism.

As we mentioned earlier, strengthening a muscle, such as your bicep, is a wonderful example of how stress works in a positive way. Lifting a heavy weight to the point of exhaustion causes micro-tears in the muscle’s tissue and triggers the stress response. The body becomes aware that it’s currently not strong enough to tolerate the stress it is under. Consequently, once we cease lifting weights, the body transitions into something called an anabolic state, in which the muscle is built up so it can withstand more stress in the future. This same process unfolds after just about any hard physical effort—from lifting weights to running to rowing to a challenging CrossFit workout.

If the amount of stress is too large or lasts too long, however, the body fails to adapt. It actually does the opposite of growing stronger: it deteriorates. Selye called this the “exhaustion stage.” Today, many refer to the exhaustion stage as being under “chronic stress.” The body rebels and enters something called a catabolic process, or a state of persistent breakdown. Rather than signaling for repair and then subsiding, elevated inflammation and cortisol linger at toxic levels. The adrenal system, constantly on guard, becomes overworked and fatigued. This is why it’s not at all surprising that chronic stress contributes to myriad health problems; the body as a whole can withstand only so much tension before it breaks.

Drilling specific, testable facts in preparation for rigid, standardized tests doesn’t promote learning. Rather, science shows that learning demands open-ended exploration that allows students to reach beyond their individual limits. In a series of studies involving middle school and high school math classes, 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. Another study, titled “Why Do Only Some Events Cause Learning During Human Tutoring?”, found the answer was straightforward: because most tutors swoop in with answers and support far too early. In surveying different university-level physics tutoring systems, the researchers discovered that “regardless of the tutorial explanations employed, when students were not at an impasse, learning was uncommon.” 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.

Nic Lamb is one of the best big-wave surfers in the world. He rides waves that are as tall as four-story buildings. Though his performances on the water seem magical, they are grounded in a meticulous approach to training and a bulletproof mindset that he cultivates day in and day out. When Brad interviewed Lamb for Outside magazine, he was especially interested to learn how Lamb prepares himself to face the strongest swells. Lamb’s secret lies in making himself uncomfortable. “During training, I seek out and try to ride waves that scare me,” Lamb said. “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.”

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.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •Stress stimulates growth. •As the chess prodigy turned martial arts champion Josh Waitzkin says, “growth comes at the point of resistance.” •Developing a new capability requires effort: Skills come from struggle. •When you struggle, System 2 is activated and true development is underway; myelin is accumulating and neural connections are strengthening. •Fail productively: Only seek out support after you’ve allowed yourself to struggle.

take. A little doubt and uncertainty is actually a good thing: It signals that a growth opportunity has emerged.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •Think of a skill/capability that you want to grow. •Assess your current ability to perform this skill/capability. •Actively seek out challenges that just barely exceed your ability. •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.

So what exactly makes perfect practice? Ericsson found that 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.

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.

Even in individuals who claim to be great multitaskers, fMRI scans of the brain reveal it is impossible to do two things at once with a high level of quality. When we multitask, our brains either constantly switch between tasks or they divide and conquer, allotting only a portion of our cognitive capacity to a specific task. As a result, as countless studies show, the quality and, ironically, even the quantity of our work suffers when we are multitasking. Although the switching costs may seem trivial—sometimes just a few tenths of a second per switch—they add up over time as we switch back- and-forth between tasks. Researchers at the University of Michigan found that seemingly innocuous multitasking can cannibalize as much as 40 percent of someone’s productive time. Although it may feel like we are getting twice as much done when multitasking, we’re actually getting close to half as much done.

As Ericsson’s expert violinists and the Renaissance man Dr. Bob all demonstrate, engaging in a task with singular focus is how we grow from stress.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES Apply the components of perfect practice each time you set out to do meaningful work: •Define a purpose and concrete objectives for each working session. •Ask yourself: What do I want to learn or get done? •Focus and concentrate deeply, even if doing so isn’t always enjoyable. •Single-task: The next time you feel like multitasking, remind yourself that research shows it’s not effective. Keep in mind Dr. Bob’s secret: “Do only one thing at a time.” •Remember that quality trumps quantity.

To unravel why this is the case, let’s turn to another addiction that ruins many lives: gambling. When a gambler awaits their next card at the blackjack table or pulls down the lever on a slot machine, they get a hit of the powerful neurochemical dopamine. Dopamine excites and arouses us. Under the influence of dopamine, we feel revved up and alive. 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.

While writing this chapter, Brad began testing “out of sight, out of mind” in a number of situations in his own life. Whether he was doing hard intervals on the elliptical trainer, lifting weights, or writing this book, his performance improved when his smartphone was completely removed from the picture. Real and objective performance measures for each activity—such as watts generated, pounds lifted, and words written—all increased. This objective data supported what he subjectively experienced. Without his smartphone visible, Brad quickly forgot about its existence. He felt as if he had another 10 to 15 percent of effort to give to the task at hand. Not having the option of turning on his phone and looking at it did far more than lift a small weight out of his pocket. It felt like a huge weight had been lifted off his shoulders.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •Identify what interrupts your deep focus. Common intruders, many of which are enabled by smartphones, include: Text messages Social media The internet Television •Remove distractors: Remember that only out of sight truly leads to out of mind.

In his years of studying experts, Ericsson found that top performers across all fields are unable to sustain intense work and deep concentration for more than 2 hours. Outside of rare, short-term situations, once this threshold is passed, neither the body nor the mind can sustain the workload. Great performers, Ericsson found, generally work in chunks of 60 to 90 minutes separated by short breaks.

While Ericsson’s work focused predominantly on creatives (e.g., artists) and competitors (e.g., chess players and athletes), new research shows his conclusions also hold true in the workplace. Recently, an international social networking company called the Draugiem Group wanted to uncover what habits set apart their most successful workers. To do so, they partnered with the makers of DeskTime, a time-tracking app sophisticated enough to distinguish between when employees are working and when they are not. The Draugiem Group found that their all-star workers adhered to a particular routine: They spent 52 minutes engrossed in their work before taking a 17-minute break. Similar to the Draugiem Group, other companies have manipulated and analyzed their employees’ work. Without fail, regardless of industry or job description, chunks of hard work followed by short breaks yielded the best performance. The most productive workers in a meat processing plant worked in hourly cycles of 51 minutes on and 9 minutes off. Agricultural workers performed best when they worked in 90-minute cycles of 75 minutes on and 15 minutes off. Other studies examining the habits of workers performing highly demanding cognitive work found cycling between 50 minutes of work and 7 minutes of recovery generated the best output. 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 intens...

Much like it takes time for a runner to build the fitness necessary to execute high-intensity intervals, it may take time to build yourself up to blocks of undistracted work. This is especially true for people who are accustomed to multitasking or working amid digital-device distraction. If you find yourself struggling to maintain full attention (e.g., checking your smartphone for notifications, pulling up your email browser, mind-wandering), start with small chunks of 10 to 15 minutes and gradually increase the duration every week. No different from any other skill, deep work is a practice that must be cultivated over time.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •Divide your work into chunks of 50 to 90 minutes (this may vary by task). Start even smaller if you find yourself struggling to maintain attention. •As you develop “fitness” in whatever it is you are doing, you’ll likely find that you can work longer and harder. •For most activities and most situations, 2 hours should be the uppermost limit for a working block.

Ghrelin is the hormone associated with hunger, and its decline told their brains that “I’m full.”

word. This is an unfortunate and costly bias that is difficult to overcome. Kelly McGonigal, PhD, is a health psychologist at Stanford University. For many years, like every other health psychologist, she worked tirelessly to help people avoid stress. Her outlook was this: Stress is bad and her job was to figure out how people could minimize its negative impact. But then she came across research that blew her mind. A 2010 study found that the small portion of Americans who view stress as facilitative have a 43 percent lower chance of premature death than those who view stress as destructive. The obvious explanation, or course, is that the people with a positive outlook toward stress developed that mindset because they didn’t experience stress very often. That is, if you’re never feeling stressed, then of course you would think that stress isn’t so bad. But when the researchers compared the total number of stressful events that each group experienced, they were shocked to discover that the number was virtually the same. Researchers controlled for just about every variable besides mindset and still saw significant mortality differences. Could something as simple as one’s attitude about stress truly contribute to extending life?

Of the many hormones at play when we are stressed, two are particularly important: cortisol and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA). While neither is categorically “good” or “bad” and both are necessary, chronically elevated cortisol levels are associated with lingering inflammation, impaired immune function, and depression. By contrast, 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.” Sure enough, studies show that people who react to stress with a challenge response have a higher growth index of stress versus those who perceive stress as a threat. In other words, 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. And, according to the 2010 study on stress and mortality that we mentioned earlier, you might just live longer, too.

Although allowing ourselves to be stressed and doing so with a growth mindset can feel hard, it turns out that might actually be the easy part. In a paradoxical twist, the second half of the growth equation, rest, can be even harder. Ernest Hemingway said that as difficult as his blocks of writing were, it was “the wait until the next day,” when he forced himself to rest, that was hardest to get through. Or, in the words of another great author, Stephen King, “For me, not working is the real work.”

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •Remember the power of mindset: How you view something fundamentally changes how your body responds to it. •In situations when you feel the sensation of stress, remind yourself this is your body’s natural way of preparing for a challenge; take a deep breath and channel the heightened arousal and sharper perception toward the task at hand. •Challenge yourself to view stress productively, and even to welcome it. You’ll not only perform better, you’ll also improve your health.

Three years into his work as a consultant, Rennels stumbled upon a few articles and a book about mindfulness meditation. He started studying the practice, and, much like Tan at Google, he saw in mindfulness a solution to many of his problems. He committed to meditating regularly, starting with 1-minute sessions every day.

Whether you are an engineer or an athlete, mindfulness serves as a gateway to rest, helping you get there faster and more predictably. But as we’re about to discover, in an interesting twist, when you enter into that restful state, “rest” turns out to be anything but passive.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •Grow your mindful muscle. The best way to do so is by practicing mindfulness meditation: Choose 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, 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. Allow your breath to settle back into its natural rhythm and focus on nothing but the sensation of breathing, noticing the rise and fall of your abdomen with each breath; if 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 mindfulness abilities in everyday life. •Have “calm conversations” during stressful periods. •Realize when you want to “turn it off” and then choose to leave stress behind. Pausing to take a few deep breaths helps to activate the prefrontal cortex, your brain’s command and control center.

For the next 70 years, research focused on the task-positive network, or the network in the brain that is activated when we perform effortful, attention-demanding tasks. It wasn’t until 2001 that Marcus Raichle, MD, a neurologist at Washington University in St. Louis, re-engaged with the puzzling passive activity that Berger had discovered a lifetime ago. Using fMRI scans to look inside the brain, Raichle found that when people zone out and daydream, a particular part of the brain consistently became active. He called this the default-mode network. Interestingly, as soon as Raichle’s subjects started focusing again, the default-mode network went black and the task-positive network became active again.

If not in the shower, maybe your best ideas come to you when you are on a run or a walk. Many esteemed philosophers, from Kierkegaard to Thoreau, held their daily walk as something sacred, the key to generating new ideas. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow,” Thoreau famously penned in his journal.

OUR CREATIVE BRAIN

Although Goss was never a serious athlete, he was following the art of periodization: stressing his mind and then letting it recover only to find new ideas, to grow.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICES •When you are working on a strenuous mental task and hit an impasse, stop working. •Step away from whatever it is you are 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, if you aren’t sleeping (more on this soon), perform activities that demand little to no effortful thinking. Though we’ll explore in great detail how to fill your breaks in Chapter 5, some examples include: Listening to music Going on a short walk Sitting in nature Taking a shower Doing the dishes •You may have an “aha” moment of insight during your break. If you do, great. Even if you don’t have an “aha” moment during your break, your subconscious mind is still at work. When you return to whatever it is you were doing, you’ll be more likely to make progress.

In a society that glorifies grinding, short-term gains and pushing to extremes, it takes guts to rest. Just