- We live in a world
where the threats that we face are probabilistic:
Terrorists might attack.
The economy might nose dive, right?
These are 'probabilistic dangers.'
The problem is, the brain's designed
not to turn off the fear response
until a danger is gone completely.
But probabilistic dangers never are gone completely
so we tend to be a little more hyperreactive.
So how do you tune up the nervous system
rather than having to reach for psychopharmaceuticals?
I often define 'peak performance'
as getting our biology to work for us
rather than against us.
What I'm really talking about are the systems
underneath what we call motivation,
learning, creativity, and flow.
'Flow' is an optimized state of consciousness
where we feel our best and we perform our best.
The research says there are three tools you can reach for:
Gratitude has really precise impacts
on the brain and anxiety.
I like to write down 10 things that I'm grateful for
and I write down each one three times.
Gratitude is literally you're just pointing out
to the brain things that have already happened
that are good.
And it tilts this ratio
so we're taking in a lot less negative stuff.
This, by the way, lets more novel stuff come through.
Gratitude can work as a 'flow trigger' that way.
The second one is mindfulness-
11 minutes a day of mindfulness practice.
You know, follow your breath,
focus meditation basically, is enough
to really calm down your nervous system,
make you less emotional-reactive.
Your third option is exercise-
20 to 40 minutes worth of exercise is enough.
And if you're exercising for mental hygiene, right,
for cognition, and I wanna get into flow,
you wanna exercise until basically the voice in your head
gets really quiet and your lungs open up.
Both things happen
because there's a global release of nitric oxide,
it's a gaseous, signaling molecule
that's sort of everywhere in the body.
One of the things it does
is it flushes stress hormones out of your system.
It'll reset the nervous system
sort of back to baseline, back to zero.
When I talk about peak performance,
we always emphasize 'cognitive literacy':
understanding what's going on in the brain
and the body when we're performing at our very best.
Now this is difficult in the modern world
because most of us tend to be a little hyperanxious.
Daily problems that we all deal with-
anxiety, depression, right?
We now know, for example,
that a 20-minute walk in the woods
will outperform most antidepressants on the market.
If you take a walk in a part of nature
where you haven't been before,
you're not only gonna get serotonin, that calming chemical,
you're gonna get the dopamine
from novelty and complexity and unpredictability.
So you're gonna get some feel good, happy juice
and some calm.
And these are great tools to be able to reach for
in times of stress
rather than having to reach for psychopharmaceuticals.
On a certain level, we have a drug store in our brain,
the neurochemicals that show up in flow:
so dopamine, norepinephrine, anandamide,
endorphins, and serotonin.
If you were to try to cocktail
the street drug version of that, right,
you're trying to blend like heroin and speed
and coke and acid and weed-
and point is, you can't do it.
It turns out the brain can cocktail all of 'em at once,
which is why people will prefer flow
to almost any experience on Earth.
It's our favorite experience.
It's the most addictive experience on Earth.
Why?
'Cause it cocktails five or six
of the largest pleasure drugs the brain can produce.
We're all capable of so much more than we know.
That is a commonality across the board.
That's the largest lesson that 30 years
in studying peak performance has taught me.
And one of the big reasons is we're all hardwired for flow,
and flow is a massive amplification
of what's possible for ourselves.
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