Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

by David Rock

To reduce arousal, you need to use just a few words to describe an emotion, and ideally use symbolic language, which means using indirect metaphors, metrics, and simplifications of your experience. This requires you to activate your prefrontal cortex, which reduces the arousal in the limbic system. Here’s the bottom line: describe an emotion in just a word or two, and it helps reduce the emotion. Open up a dialogue about an emotion, though, and you tend to increase it.

That’s because uncertainty feels, to the brain, like a threat to your life.

Over and over, scientists see that the perception of control over a stressor alters the stressor’s impact.

It appears that the perception of choice may be more important than diet and other factors for health. Choosing in some way to experience stress is less stressful than experiencing stress without a sense of choice or control.

This first type of reappraisal involves reinterpreting an event.

The second type of reappraisal is at the heart of many effective management and therapeutic techniques. It goes by the name of normalizing, and it’s a widely useful tool.

Having an explanation for an experience reduces uncertainty and increases a perception of control.

The third type of reappraisal is a little more complex, but essentially it involves reordering information.

Think of this type of reappraisal as repositioning, as you are finding a new position from which to look at an event. It could be from another person’s position, or from another country or culture’s perspective, or even from a perspective of yourself at another time.

As you learn more about your brain, it becomes possible to stay calm in just about any situation, including the overwhelming limbic system arousal driven by uncertainty about the future. It’s reappraisal that gives you this capacity.

The research on reappraisal shows that it’s a strategy with few if any downsides, and significant upsides.

To me, reappraisal is one of the most important skills needed for success in life, the other being the ability to observe your mental processes.

However, there is another angle to this, a reappraisal if you like. Consider this quote from one of the great neuroscientists, Walter Freeman: “All the brain can know it knows from inside itself.”

Humor may also be a form of reappraisal. John Case, a retired CEO I know, had a phrase he used when people got tense in a meeting: “Did I tell you I just got a great deal on car insurance?” Out of context, this comment made people crack up, which shifted their perspective from serious to funny. From away, to toward. You have probably noticed how much easier it is to see options when you laugh at an otherwise tough situation. With humor, you don’t need that cognitively expensive step within reappraisal of trying to scroll through lots of alternative perspectives and come up with the perfect new perspective that triangulates all your different objectives: just choose the perspective that makes you chuckle. In this way I like to think of humor as a type of cheap reappraisal.

WHAT YOU EXPECT IS WHAT YOU EXPERIENCE

Unmet expectations often create a threat response, which I explain further later in this scene. Because the brain is built to avoid threat, people tend to work hard to reinterpret events to meet their expectations.

Unexpected rewards release more dopamine than expected ones. Thus,

The link between expectations, dopamine, and perception may explain why happiness is a great state for mental performance. Perhaps the elusive search for happiness is actually a search for the right level of dopamine.

Managing your expectations is also an opportunity for your director to be more proactive, setting the scene for good performance rather than just sorting out problems when things go wrong.

A FINAL WORD ON ACT 2

Success in most jobs today requires a strong ability to collaborate with others. For some people who build their mental maps around logical systems such as computers or engineering, the chaos and uncertainty of dealing with people can be overwhelming. But it turns out there are rules to successful engagements in the social world.

Discovered by Italian neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma, mirror neurons have opened up a rich new understanding of how human beings connect with others. Rizzolatti discovered that mirror neurons throughout the brain light up when we see other people do what is called an “intentional action.” If you see someone pick up a piece of fruit to eat, mirror neurons in your brain will light up. These same mirror neurons

collaborating with people you don’t know well is a threat for the brain.

Research within the positive psychology field shows there is only one experience in life that increases happiness over a long time. It’s not money, above a base survival amount. It’s not health, nor is it marriage or having children. The one thing that makes people happy is the quality and quantity of their social connections. Daniel Kahneman, from Princeton University, did a study in which he asked women what they most liked to do. Surprisingly, connecting with friends was at the top of the list, above being with their partners or children. The brain thrives in an environment of quality social connections, of safe relatedness. Happiness is not just a good dose of dopamine, but a nice oxytocin buzz, too.

When you sense someone is a foe, all sorts of brain functions change. You don’t interact with a perceived foe using the same brain regions you would use to process your own experience.

Thinking someone is a foe can even also make you less smart.

When you think someone is a foe, you don’t just miss out on feeling his emotions; you also inhibit yourself from considering his ideas, even if they are right.

“‘ Inequity aversion’ is so strong,” Tabibnia explains, “that people are willing to sacrifice personal gain in order to prevent another

Many arguments between people, especially those close to us, involve incorrect perceptions of unfairness, triggering events that activate an even deeper sense of unfairness in all parties. This often starts by someone misreading one person’s intent, being slightly mind-blind for a moment. The result can be an intense downward spiral, driven by accidental connections and one’s expectations then altering perception.

Just remember that strong limbic arousal is good for physical activity but reduces creative thinking.

Surprises About the Brain A sense of fairness can be a primary reward. A sense of unfairness can be a primary threat. Linking fairness and expectations helps explain the delight of the kindness of strangers, as well as the intense emotions of betrayal from people close to you. When you accept an unfair situation, you do so by labeling or reappraising. Men don’t experience empathy with someone who is in pain who has been unfair, whereas women do. Punishing unfair people can be rewarding, and not punishing unfairness can generate a sense of unfairness in itself. Some Things to Try Be open and transparent about your dealings with people, remembering that unfairness is easy to trigger. Find ways to sense increasing fairness around you, perhaps by volunteering or donating money or resources regularly. Don’t let unfairness go unpunished. Watch out for fairness being linked to other issues such as certainty, autonomy, or relatedness, where you can get intense emotional responses.

The Doge’s palace in Venice is one of the most lavish and ornate centers of power the world has ever seen. Much of it is still in good condition today. At the heart of the palace is an unusual room lined floor to ceiling with drawers for thousands of documents. The documents kept here for hundreds of years, while precious, didn’t relate to money. At least, not directly. They listed the “status” of every person in the city. If you were a Venetian a few hundred years ago, one of these documents listed whose child you were, whose child they were, and how you were connected to royalty, merchants, or others of importance. The document implicitly defined where you would live, what you would eat, how much you would be educated, whether people trusted you, how much attention others paid to you, even how long you would live. Times haven’t changed much. High status today, whether you are a pop star, top athlete, or CEO, comes with similar benefits that have a deep impact on quality of life. We just keep records differently. At the top end of town, that’s now the job of gossip magazines.

Whatever framework you think is important, when your perceived sense of status goes up, or down, an intense emotional response results. People go to tremendous extremes to increase or protect their status.

experiment. 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?” That drop in your stomach is a similar feeling to walking alone at night and sensing that someone is about to walk up and attack you from behind: perhaps not as intense, but it’s the same fear response.

Because of the intensity of the status-drop experience, many people go to great lengths to avoid situations that could put their status at risk. This aversion includes staying away from any activity they are not confident in, which, because of the brain’s relationship to novelty, can mean avoiding anything new. This can have quite an impact on the quality of life. This is Gross’s situation selection working against you.

The threat response from a perceived drop in status can take on a life of its own, lasting for years. People work hard to avoid being “wrong” in a situation, from a simple mistake made on a document, to an error in judgment about a major strategy.

People don’t like to be wrong because being wrong drops your status, in a way that feels dangerous and unnerving.

Remember that the limbic system, once aroused, makes accidental connections and thinks pessimistically. Just speaking to your boss arouses a threat. If you manage someone, just asking how her day is going can carry more emotional weight than one might think. Many of the arguments and conflicts at work, and in life, have status issues at their core. The more you can label status threats as they occur, in real time, the easier it will be to reappraise on the spot and respond more appropriately. The director has a big role to play when it comes to status. But be careful about trying to help another person see what is going on. Saying “that’s just your status threat talking” isn’t a great idea at a meeting.

I noticed a surprising pattern while putting this book together. 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. The model describes the interpersonal primary rewards or threats that are important to the brain. Getting to know these five elements strengthens your director. It’s a way of developing language for experiences that may be otherwise unconscious, so that you can catch these experiences occurring in real time.

focusing on an expectation of increased calm will increase your calm; that’s the power of expectations.

Surprises About the Brain Status is a significant driver of behavior at work and across life experiences. A sense of status going up, even in a small way, activates your reward circuits. A sense of status going down activates your threat circuitry. Just speaking to your boss or a person of higher status generally activates a status threat. 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. There is no one fixed status scale; there are virtually infinite ways of feeling better than others. When everyone is trying to be higher status than others there is a decrease in relatedness. Because we perceive ourselves using the same circuits we use when perceiving others, you can trick your brain into a status reward by playing against yourself. Playing against yourself increases your status without threatening others. Status is one of five major social domains that are all either primary rewards or threats, which form the SCARF model for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness. Some Things to Try Watch out for people’s status being threatened. Reduce status threats in others by lowering your status through sharing your own humanity or mistakes. Reduce status threats in others by giving people positive feedback. Find ways to play against yourself, and pay a lot of attention to any incremental improvements. The slightest feeling of improvement can generate a p...

Giving others feedback is often the first strategy people use to facilitate change. Yet, surprisingly, giving feedback is rarely the right way to create real change. While there are many “techniques” to improve the performance of feedback, people miss the basic reality of this approach: feedback creates a strong threat for people in most situations.

The problem with “constructive performance feedback” is that, like a wolf sniffing a meal across a field, even a subtle status threat is picked up unconsciously by our deeply social brain, no matter how nicely it’s couched. As “constructive” as you try to make it, feedback packs a punch. The result is that most feedback conversations revolve around people defending themselves.

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. Solving difficult problems, after all, involves getting around an impasse. This requires a quiet and generally positive and open mind, as we learned in scene 6. Getting lost in large amounts of history and detail doesn’t make your brain quiet at all.

The key is to make sure you solve the right problem, which means the most useful problem, not just the most interesting one.

The decision to focus on an outcome instead of a problem impacts brain functioning in several ways.

First, 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).

When you look for solutions, you scan your environment widely for cues, which activates more of the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than drilling down into information that activates the left hemisphere.

When you focus on problems you are more likely to activate the emotions connected with those problems, which will create greater noise in the brain.

Whereas focusing on solutions generates a toward state, because you desire something. You are seeking, not avoiding. This increases dopamine levels, which is useful for insight. And if you are expecting you might find a solution, these positive expectations help release even more dopamine.