Everybody's had this experience, you know, you get in a fight with your girlfriend,
your boyfriend, your boss, your sister, your mom, and then you try to go to work,
how well can you focus? How much energy do you have?
It's impinging on you physically.
When I know I'm burned out, it's always the feeling of,
“oh, my God, I'm going nowhere”, like I'm working really hard and the
quality of the work is like it doesn't matter, when I'm burned out, doesn't matter how many
times I write a paragraph, it's still shit.
I can rewrite it 100 times, 100 different ways and they're all crap.
Let's talk about the second half of the question, which is what the hell do you do about it?
So here and this is really stuff I cover in, “The Art of Impossible”,
under what I call the positive psychology basics.
So positive psychology has sort of spent 30 years identifying six things,
three on the physical side, like this is what you need to do for energy
and three on the mental side, this is what you need to do
to sort of like manicure your brain and turn down anxiety and calm the fuck down.
They're really not negotiables, but they're not all that arduous
and there's options. So like on the physical side,
there's three things. One is,
and this is the first thing you could do if you're burned out, is sleep.
We human beings need seven, eight hours of sleep a night.
You cannot perform at your best without seven, eight hours of sleep at night.
Not a new idea, 100 years ago, William James in the first psychology textbook
ever written says, “The great thing in any education
is to make your nervous system your ally instead of your enemy”.
This is not new information, there's just our biology
and it works in specific a certain way and just there's no way around this one
and we're designed to function with seven, eight hours of sleep a night.
You need that to function physically, if you start looking at the list,
we talk about multitool solutions, sleep solves so many problems,
it's insane to cut back on that. Second thing on the physical side,
we're not going to linger here, but nutrition and hydration.
Eat good food, drink plenty of water, enough said. And then the final thing.
This is often, talked about this as a positive psychology basic
but the people put it on the cognitive side and there's a mistake there and
I’ll explain in a minute, which is social support. Chris Peterson, a brilliant positive psychologist
at the University of Michigan says, “You can sum up 30 years in positive
psychology in one phrase, which is other people matter”.
We are social creatures, we're hardwired. The reason it’s on the energy side,
and like everybody's had this experience, you know, you get in a fight with
your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your boss, your sister, your mom,
and then you try to go to work, how well can you focus?
How much energy do you have? It's impinging on you physically.
What people also don't realize is, any time you encounter a challenge,
a problem, anything, your brain does an instantaneous risk assessment
and part of that risk assessment is, “do I got possie?”
Because if you've got to solve a problem alone, that's a big problem, could be,
but if you've got six or seven friends, family backing you up less a problem.
What I always tell people and this is important is,
under normal conditions you can usually screw up one a day.
Like, you can't do it every day, you've got to get them right a bunch
but you screw up one a day and still probably perform at your best,
you can't get enough sleep, but you've dialed in social support,
you’re hydrating, you’re eating right, you probably can power through and do it.
Under stress conditions, which is the question you ask
I don't think you can screw up on any of them. Under what we've been dealing with,
whether it's the economy or covid, the election, I mean, take your pick up of
everything that we've gone through over the past year
and the turbulence it brought to all of us, I don't think we get to skimp on any one of those.
The other side is the cognitive side, and it's how do we deal with the anxiety
and so much peak performance, including flow. And there's two things to know,
one, affirmations, which is the new age spiritual side,
literally are disasters, they don't work. And we'll talk about why, and gratitude works.
So the thing you have to understand is that, one, we have what is known as a negativity bias.
We take in more negative information than positive information.
So we take in nine negative bits of information for every one positive bit that gets through.
When you do a daily gratitude practice, this tips the ratio.
And a daily gratitude practice is, list three things you're grateful for
and turn one of them into a paragraph, It's a five minute practice,
or list ten things you're grateful for and just really try to feel the gratitude
and what you do is you tip the brain's negativity bias,
you start taking in like 6:1 instead of 9:1 or 5:1,
and this is a huge, huge, huge deal. And the reason gratitude works and
affirmations don't work is your brain has a
fantastic built in bullshit detector. We all know this, you can't lie to yourself.
You can lie to almost everybody else but you cannot lie to yourself
for too long, you can't look in the mirror and go, “I am a millionaire, I'm a millionaire,
I'm a millionaire”, if you work at Wal-Mart.
Your brain goes, “dude, shut up, you work at Wal-Mart”.
And that's massively demotivating, really, really, really demotivating,
you were going in the exact opposite direction. The next thing is mindfulness, right?
You've had guys talking about meditation. The thing that I think gets lost is,
you don't need all that much mindfulness, but 11 minutes a day of breath work
is enough to do it. And the final thing you
can do for your head is exercise, 20 to 40 minutes of exercise.
And by the way, what do you get then? You get exercise induced transient hypofrontality,
the deactivation of the frontal cortex we talked about earlier.
That's what happens when you work out in the gym., it gets quiet upstairs about twenty,
twenty five minutes in, that's what's happening,
your prefrontal cortex is deactivating and it's efficiency exchange.
Literally, your brain says, “oh, fuck, you need a lot of energy because
you need to focus on the treadmill, you're running on”.
It shuts off non-critical structures, that's what happens.
The point on the cognitive side is, five minute gratitude practice,
11 minute mindfulness practice or 20 to 40 minutes of exercise.
Pick one a day. You don't need to do all three,
and in crisis situations, covid where we are right now, if you're burned out etc.
Maybe two out of three. So it resets the nervous
system, if you're burned out you can't reset your nervous system,
that's one of the reasons you're burned out. So automatizes that,
and the other thing that I want to add for the burned out crowd
is active recovery. Passive recovery is,
“I worked all day, it is a TV and a beer”, and that actually blocks what you want.
Active recovery, epsom salt bath, infrared sauna, dry sauna,
restorative yoga, a long walk in nature to go back to the earlier topic,
gardening, any of these things are sort of restorative active recovery.
Get a massage, foam rollers, take your pick.
But we have found at the, “Flow Research Collective”,
that if you are sort of paying attention to the positive psychology basics
and I don't mean like, “you get it right every single day, I do all of them”,
I mean, you're just trying to be smart about it. You get regular once a week access to flow,
even if it's just twenty minutes, a half an hour, an hour
and you have an active recovery protocol, we don't have data on this yet,
but as far as we can tell, you can't burn out. Like it seems to be prophylactic against burnout.