Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long
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Become friends with people you work with by sharing personal experiences.
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fairness is a primary need for the brain. A sense of fairness in and of itself can create a strong reward response, and a sense of unfairness can generate a threat response that lasts for days.
Vijay Gopal
And if i find God unfair?
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FAIRNESS CAN BE MORE REWARDING THAN MONEY
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Gustatory and social disgust are being processed in the same part of the brain—just as social reward and gustatory reward are processed in the ventral striatum.
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So an increasing sense of fairness increases your levels of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin.
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remember that strong limbic arousal is good for physical activity but reduces creative thinking.
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A sense of fairness can be a primary reward. A sense of unfairness can be a primary threat.
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Punishing unfair people can be rewarding, and not punishing unfairness can generate a sense of unfairness in itself.
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Be open and transparent about your dealings with people, remembering that unfairness is easy to trigger.
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Along with relatedness and fairness, status is another major driver of social behavior.
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A sense of increasing status can be more rewarding than money,
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Your brain manages status using roughly the same circuits used to manage other basic survival needs.
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Marketing departments use two main levers to engage human emotions through advertising: fear, and the promise of increased status.
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when your perceived sense of status goes up, or down, an intense emotional response results.
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People go to tremendous extremes to increase or protect their status. It operates at an individual and group level, and even at the level of countries.
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Exclusion and rejection is physiologically painful.
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Social pain can be as painful as physical pain, as the two appear synonymous in the brain. Think of the drop in your stomach when someone says to you, “Can I give you some feedback?”
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Remember that the limbic system, once aroused, makes accidental connections and thinks pessimistically.
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Many of the arguments and conflicts at work, and in life, have status issues at their core.
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The Status Syndrome, by Michael Marmot, which illustrates that status is a significant determinant of human longevity, even controlling for education and income.
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Even an increase in hope that your status might go up one day seems to pack a reward.
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An increase in status is one of the world’s greatest feelings.
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People with higher status are better able to follow through with their intentions more—they have more control, more support, and more attention from others.
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You can elevate your status by finding a way to feel smarter, funnier, healthier, richer, more righteous, more organized, fitter, or stronger, or by beating other people at just about anything at all. The key is to find a “niche” where you feel you are “above” others.
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fighting for status can impact relatedness, which means people won’t collaborate well.
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If you want to have a potentially threatening conversation with someone, try talking down your own performance to help put the other person at ease.
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Another strategy for managing status is to help someone else feel that her status has gone up.
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You can harness the power of the thrill of “beating the other guy” by making that other guy (or girl) you, without hurting anyone in the process.
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To play against yourself gives you the chance to feel ever-increasing status, without threatening others.
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I saw that there are five domains of social experience that your brain treats the same as survival issues. These domains form a model, which I call the SCARF model, which stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness.
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Think about what it feels like when you interact with someone who makes you notice what’s good about yourself (raising your status), who is clear with his expectations of you (increasing certainty), who lets you make decisions (increasing autonomy), who connects with you on a human level (increasing relatedness), and who treats you fairly.
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focusing on an expectation of increased calm will increase your calm; that’s the power of expectations.
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She has allowed herself to be wrong, which has raised his status by dropping hers.
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A sense of status going up, even in a small way, activates your reward circuits.
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A sense of status going down activates your threat circuitry.
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People pay a lot of attention to protecting and building their status, probably more to this than any other element of the SCARF model, at least in organizations.
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There is no one fixed status scale; there are virtually infinite ways of feeling better than others.
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Reduce status threats in others by lowering your status through sharing your own humanity or mistakes.
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Reduce status threats in others by giving people positive feedback.
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Research indicates that we have more influence over other people, but less control, than previously thought.
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surprisingly, giving feedback is rarely the right way to create real change.
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that annual performance reviews, “Essentially just reduce performance for six days each year: three days while people prepare for it, and three days recovering from it.”
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Unless you take care to label your emotions when they are at a high level, and not dwell on them, bringing problems to mind will increase limbic arousal, making it harder to solve them.
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The key is to make sure you solve the right problem, which means the most useful problem, not just the most interesting one.
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when you focus on an outcome, you prime the brain to perceive information relevant to that outcome (find a taxi), rather than to notice information about the problem (not getting to the airport). You can’t be looking for solutions and problems at the same time.
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One of the most common strategies human beings use to help one another solve problems involves these techniques: giving advice about what to do or what not to do. Ohlsson shows that this is only marginally effective.
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Insights happen when people think globally and widely rather than focusing on the details.
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Insights require a quiet brain, meaning there is an overall low level of electrical activity, which helps people notice subtle internal signals.
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