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January 1 - January 3, 2021
Stress + rest = growth. This equation holds true regardless of what it is that you are trying to grow.
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.
She’s even called her workouts the easy part. What sets her apart, the magic that has allowed her to run so fast and so far for the past 25 years, is how she recovers: the 10 to 12 hours of sleep she gets each night; her meticulous approach to diet; her weekly massage and stretching sessions. In other words, it’s all the things she does when she isn’t training that allows her to do what she does when she is. Stress demands rest, and rest supports stress. Kastor has mastered the inputs, and understands how much stress she can tolerate and how much rest she requires. Thus, the output—a lifetime
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the brightest minds spend their time either pursuing an activity with ferocious intensity, or engaging in complete restoration and recovery. This approach, Csikszentmihalyi discovered, not only prevents creative burnout and cognitive fatigue, but it also fosters breakthrough ideas and discoveries
•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.
Other experiments show that after someone is forced to exert self-control, activity in the prefrontal cortex diminishes altogether. It’s no wonder that when we are mentally drained we struggle with complex problems and self-control, opting for cartoons and cookies instead.
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.
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.
Stress can be positive, triggering desirable adaptations in the body; or stress can be negative, causing grave damage and harm. The effects of stress depend almost entirely on the dose. And when applied in the right dose, stress does more than stimulate physiological adaptations. It stimulates psychological ones, too.
Growth comes at the point of resistance; we learn by pushing ourselves to the outer reaches of our abilities.
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.
This is not to say that aimless struggle promotes learning. But it does mean that the best learning occurs when we really have to work for it. 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.
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.
It isn’t experience that sets top performers apart but the amount of deliberate practice they put in.
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.
Telling someone they can keep their cell phone within arm’s reach but cannot check it is not much different than telling a drug addict he can keep a loaded syringe in plain sight but may not use it. In both cases, the craving for reward, and the emotional and chemical addiction to it, is overpowering.
•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.
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.
The difference was that the nonelites viewed stress as something to avoid, ignore, and try to quiet. They felt stress would hurt their performance. The elites, on the other hand, interpreted the stress and the sensations that came with it as an aid to their performance; it prepared them to get the most out of their bodies.
It’s not that elite runners don’t feel pain and discomfort during their hard workouts, it’s just that they react differently. Rather than panicking, they have in their minds what Steve calls a “calm conversation.” The calm conversation goes something like this: “This is starting to hurt now. It should. I’m running hard. But I am separate from this pain. It is going to be okay.”
•Frequency trumps duration. It’s best to meditate daily, even if that means keeping individual sessions short.
Piece these interesting anecdotes together and a powerful theme emerges. Our most profound ideas often come from the small spaces in between otherwise deliberate thinking: when our brains are at rest. Science bears this out. 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’s only when we stop trying that our conscious mind fades into the background and our subconscious mind (the default-mode network) takes over.
Those who took as brief as a 6-minute walk outdoors increased creativity by more than 60 percent versus those who had remained seated at their desks. Although walking outdoors yielded the most pronounced benefits, those who walked indoors still generated about 40 percent more creative ideas than those who didn’t walk at all. This suggests that even if you can’t walk outside (e.g., it’s winter, there are no sidewalks nearby, etc.), taking a few laps around the office or hopping on a treadmill is still highly beneficial.
Walking occupies us just enough to help us stop thinking about whatever it is we were working on, but not too much as to prevent mind-wandering.
It’s not that they sleep because they are elite. They are elite because they sleep.
Staying asleep for more than 30 minutes, however, can be counterproductive. This is because with longer naps we run the risk of waking up feeling even groggier and more sluggish than before we fell asleep. This condition, called “sleep inertia,” occurs when we are awoken in the middle of a deep sleep cycle.
Keep your smartphone OUT of the bedroom entirely. Not on silent. Out.
Unfortunately, we’ve lost the notion of smart work at the expense of hard work, which somehow almost always gets confused with more work.
Those in positive moods demonstrated increased activity in a region of the brain that is associated with decision making and emotional control. This region of the brain is also integral to problem solving (the anterior cingulate cortex). Those in negative moods, however, showed little to no activity in this brain region.
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.
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.
In other words, great performers are highly aware of their unique chronotypes and do everything they can to align their activities with their energy levels. You can strive to do the same.
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.
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.
In situations that feel scary or overwhelming, our brain—our central governor, our ego, our “self”—automatically tries to protect us from failure. It shuts us down and tells us to turn in the other direction. Even if failure doesn’t mean physical injury, our ego doesn’t like emotional injury, either—it doesn’t want to risk getting embarrassed, so it ushers us down the safe route. It’s only when we transcend our “self” that we can break through our self-imposed limits.
Purpose fosters motivation; motivation lets us endure a greater perception of effort; and enduring a greater perception of effort often results in better performance.
In his New York Times bestselling book Give and Take, Grant references research from across fields—from teaching to nursing—to show that giving back is a powerful antidote to burnout.
