Recently, I had a brain specialist here at Live On Purpose TV, he's back today,
James Garrett with five brain hacks to improve personal performance.
I have my
friend, James Garrett, here with me a few episodes ago, you may have cut that one
about how to get inspiration for writing. If you missed it, you can link to it
right up here. We're back because we didn't finish our conversation, James.
There's so much to this. James is a specialist in brain stuff. I know
that's kind of a sloppy way to say it but our brain is such an important
contributor to every aspect of our experience so when we're talking about
improving performance or increasing productivity or we're going to draw on
this resource to make that happen and there's different modes of brain
functioning you'll, see that in the other video that we did. James, in the other
video and on our podcast earlier, you referred to it being kind of like your
cell phone battery and you know the little icon that shows that your
battery's full, I've even seen commercials about this you know, for
energy drinks or something but people are going around with full battery and
there's others that are depleted and they're getting into the red, yeah?
Right? Can you just share briefly that analogy again and and how our brain,
different modes of attention contribute to that.- Yes, so the basic idea is that
your brain is like the battery, think of it like your cell phone battery so
when you wake up in the morning, it pretty much has a full charge, as you use
that battery, meaning it costs your brain energy, physical energy, to operate.
- It's literally consuming power. - It's consuming power. - It operates on
electronics processed there right just like your other cells right right and so
it's using that energy for concentration, it's using
up that energy if you're you know, doing errands with your kids and trying
to be vigilant and keeping them watching, directing your
attention, all of that requires energy, almost every activity
requires some form of energy. So again, as you use it up, you're
left with less of it for later on in the day.
It an exhaustible resource. What's cool about it is you can actually
recharge it throughout the day. Most of us don't do this, most of us go
throughout our day where it's go go go go go go go. - Get it done, right?
Because you got to close the deal or you got to get the paper
submitted or whatever, right? I mean there's deadlines. - There's so much
pressure. - And keep working. - And we've been taught in the form of
successes, just go go go go go and we all do this, we've all bought into it on some
level, we all do this and then we collapse at night and we're kind of the
worst versions of ourselves late at an night when we're with our kids or other places
because we're this exhausted depleted physically and mentally depleted
versions of ourselves. Well you can recharge that battery and some
activities do recharge and some don't. So your brain is really good at
demanding a break when it's exhausted, it's really bad at
telling you what kind of a break is going to actually restore that battery.
- So you'll be cruising along, doing your thing, right? And you just start to feel
like you feel the depletion. - I call the three knots yeah - There you go,
okay and you felt it too, haven't you? And so your brain is telling, hey, you need a
break but it doesn't what kind of break you need. What we
really want to do is recharge that battery so we talked about improving or
increasing performance, let's make sure we've got a full energy supply and that
by its own nature is going to improve our performance, is that fair? - That's
right because in order to get into high states of concentration like peak states
of focus, it's like this flow. You need a full battery.
If you don't have a full battery, you can't tap into flow. - Okay, that makes
sense so brain hacks, you got a few? - Yeah. So the kinds
of activities that will recharge that mental battery
are going for a walk, taking a nap in the middle of a workday.
I mean, it seems so crazy. - James, I got a couch over there. I'm a
psychologist after, right? - I used to be a little embarrassed to admit this
but if I have a missed appointment, if I've got a little break between clients
or between projects that I'm working on, I take the couch, yeah. You're
telling me that's okay. - I'm not only telling it's okay, it's what every highly
successful person actually does. - Well there you go. - So Winston Churchill in the
middle of the world war two, would do this like clockwork, no matter how much
pressure there was, he would get in his pajamas and take a full afternoon nap,
like a full sleep cycle. It was 90 to 120 minutes.
I don't recommend. So a sleep cycle takes about an hour and a
half to two hours to complete but if you want just like a quick one, - Power
naps what I call. - 10 to 30 minutes if you want to just like go for it, 20 minutes.
Start with 20 minutes, see what it does for you. - There you go. That's why I invited him on
the show, so I'll fell better a little bit.
The NAP helps to recharge the better and I have found that too. I have found if
I'm starting to get depleted and I'm not really tracking my clients as well or
I'm not writing with the kind of power that I would want to, then nap. I'm
coming back a whole lot better and now you've helped me to understand why.
That is awesome. What about, okay, you said something earlier, I don't think we were
on the camera at the time, about things like the social media and the digital
draw because sometimes that's where we go, right? I mean when your brain tells
you you need a break, you whip out your phone and you start swiping,
you know, go through your social media. Can you just address that for a moment?
You know, there's nothing wrong with that, you just got to
know what it's doing to your mental battery and be aware of that, right.
So unfortunately, technology as it currently exists, most things on the
internet drain the battery, social media is a good example of this so what are
you doing when you're on social media? You're making all sorts of little micro
decisions, like, not like, comment, not comment, click, not click.
- Compare, not compare. - Social comparison is another thing that drains
your battery change your battery. Managing the impression you're making on
others, is depleting for the battery. You're also
multitasking a lot of times, right? So you're clicking on this other tab and it opens
up.. Multitasking is one of the most
depleting things your brain can do because you actually can't
multitask. What you do is you task switch very rapidly from thing to thing, it
feels like you're multitasking but what you're actually doing is having to
redirect your attention multiple times. - They've shown multi tasking is a
myth, it's not. We don't do it. - We actually can't do it. - So you're saying
that the natural draw that we might have toward our social media and it's so
convenient , it's just there in the palm of your hands. - Yes, but it's fun. - And it is
fun and there's some benefit for fun but you're saying
because of the of the way it engages our brain, it's not necessarily the break
that we need. Our brain tells us we need a break but it doesn't tell us what kind
of break we need so if we get into that, we're really not helping the situation.
That's right. You would do much better to open a meditation app for 10
minutes. - Meditation? That's pretty old school.
Does that stuff really work?
The science behind meditation and you've
probably use this word, mindfulness, right? Mindfulness, all it means, it's not
complicated, all it means is a heightened state of awareness.
- Being present, being conscious and aware.
So the meditation helps us to recharge the brain? - It does and it does it in a
number of different ways. What you're basically doing is, you're activating the
calming response in your body. Think of it this way, anything that elevates your
stress is going to drain that battery faster, anything that calms your body
down is going to recharge that battery. That's the basic clinical so when you're
meditating, it doesn't have to be a full meditation, you can just breathe.
Sometimes I tell people, look, you've got to wait in line at least a
couple times a day, maybe it's in traffic, maybe it's at the grocery store, maybe
pick up your kids for preschool. What do we do in those moments? We often get
frustrated, in this surge of like you know, it's low-level but some
negative emotion for stress, frustration, like what's taking so lon,g whatever,
right? - Right because you got to get back to it.
Round and round we go, right? So you see those moments as opportunities
to breathe, it's not complicated, you just want
to breathe out slower than you breathe in, that's it. If you do that, it will
activate the calming response in your body and start restoring that mental
battery. - Almost like a switch. Well you've talked about it as a switch
before yeah we're switching from executive functioning over to that calming,
more creative mind wandering. - What they've what they found is that
having creative ideas, having your best ideas, almost always happens in a calm
bodily and mental state. This is how we have good
ideas in the shower. - Right, warm water, no pressure at the moment.
- Right? I've gone so far as, I actually have a
notebook in my shower. - You've had good ideas in the shower, you know you have.
People know this, there's
companies, there's something called aqua notes that I use. They're like
waterproof notes because if you have a good idea, you don't want to lose it and
you can't bring your paper in the shower or your device, it'll get ruined.
So there's creative ways to capture all those microbes that
happen to you in these relaxed states. - Yeah, cool. I think we've
covered naps, walks, meditation, taking the right kind of a break.
So instead of getting drawn into that social media or the electronics to allow
that to go a little different direction, maybe go take a walk or a nap,
this is the kind of break that your that your mind needs, social connection, did I
miss anything that we've talked about already? Maybe you've got another one
that you can think of. Positive emotions. I get excited
about this but you're bringing a different perspective to this. Can you
help us to see why positive emotion would be important to increasing
performance? - Sure. - Take that challenge. - So positive emotions, so the old paradigm
was that positive emotion followed success, you achieve some goal, you
achieve something then I'm going to be happy, right?
On a long timeline or life, what this means is we'll be happy someday.
After we get through this really
right state stressful career and our kids are raised. - James, there is a
correlation between happiness and success, there is a correlation but
you're right, we got it backwards, we used to think, well that means that if we're
happy we'll be successful, I mean, if we're successful, we'll be happy, we got it
backwards. - Yeah, well what the psychologists find is that happiness
predicts success. - Right, in other words, if we are happy, we'll be successful.
- So when we think of productivity, we're always
thinking about again, go go go, how do we make this efficient efficient efficient?
When there's a strong case to be made that what you want to be
focusing on is you and your people's well-being, happiness and flourishing.
And that it's those positive emotional states that drive focus, productivity,
connection and creativity. - Wow, that's so awesome. You know what, and it's good news.
- It's great news. - It is good news. We say that if you are
happy you'll be successful, really if you are happy you are successful.
What else do you want, right? But it's also tied, as you pointed out,
it is tied to every other measurable aspect of success that we've ever looked
at so what that means is, you establish this state of mind and then
everything else clicks better, more efficiently, more
productively. So how do we increase performance? Well some of the answers are
going to surprise, right? Get yourself in a happy place.
- Yeah, gratitude. So like, there's all these strategies positive psychologists
have discovered, really meaningfully boost happiness, one is gratitude.
So creating even a habit of like, every time you use the restroom,
after I use the restroom, I will say in my mind one thing I'm grateful for,
right? You're going to do that five times a
day and you need something to
stack it on, we've got habit stacking or pairing. - Brushing your teeth, is another example.
- Brushing your teeth, after every time I brush my teeth, I'll write in my
gratitude doodle three things that was positive that day. - Oh, that's
good news. Thank you, James. We got it. I'm just so pleased
that some of the answers are actually things you're going to enjoy. Let's get our
brains working for us instead of against us. I'll see you tomorrow at Live On Purpose TV.