Peak Performance

Highlights

• Research shows that even if their bodies are fresh, the physical performance of people who are mentally fatigued suffers. Put differently, the boundaries between mental and physical fatigue are not nearly as defined as we think.

• Additional research shows that people who are “chronic” multitaskers are worse at filtering out irrelevant information, slower at identifying patterns, and have worse long-term memories.

• If we cultivate a growth mindset and believe that skills come from struggle, then we are more likely to expose ourselves to the good kind of growth-promoting stress.

• studies show that people who react to stress with a challenge response have a higher growth index of stress versus those who perceive stress as a threat. In other words, if you frame stressors as challenges, you’ll release more DHEA than cortisol. As a result your growth index of stress will be higher, and you’ll actually experience health benefits instead of health detriments. And, according to the 2010 study on stress and mortality that we mentioned earlier, you might just live longer, too.

• Additional research, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, shows that instead of trying to calm yourself down, “reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement” is often advantageous. When you try to suppress pre-event nerves, you are inherently telling yourself that something is wrong.

• The sensations you feel prior to a big event are neutral—if you view them in a positive light, they are more likely to have a positive impact on your performance.

• By strengthening our prefrontal cortex, mindfulness allows us to recognize that we are having a stress response rather than automatically being overcome by it. It’s as if we are viewing our thoughts and feelings as a neutral observer and then choosing what to do next. A weak prefrontal cortex gets overpowered by a strong stress response. But a strong prefrontal cortex lets us choose how we want to respond to stress.

• Our subconscious mind functions in an entirely different manner than our conscious mind. It breaks from the pattern of linear thinking and works much more randomly, pulling information from parts of our brain that are inaccessible when we’re consciously working on something. It is in these parts of the brain, in the vast forests bordering the narrow “if-then” highway that our conscious mind runs on, where our creative ideas lie.

• We spend only about 20 to 25 percent of our total sleep time in REM. And, in an interesting twist, the longer we sleep, the greater the proportion of it is in REM. That’s because REM time increases with each sleep cycle. In other words, there are increasing marginal returns to sleep. Hours 7 to 9—the hours that the majority of us never get—are actually the most powerful.

• When we create a space in which to practice our craft, it is beneficial to surround ourselves with objects that invite desired actions and eliminate ones that do not. In his book The Evolving Self, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD, writes that being intentional about our surroundings is essential to eliciting our best performance. The things we work among, he writes, become “expansions of the self … things the mind can use to create harmony in experience.”

• If a friend of a friend becomes obese, your odds of gaining weight increase by 20 percent. Even if an acquaintance you barely know starts smoking, it affects the chances you’ll light up by 11 percent. In other words, the makeup of your social circle has profound implications for your own behavior. While what you do and when you do it is important, so is who you do it with.

• to hold such repetition for so long—6 months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

• A large part of our ego’s role is to literally protect our “self.” It is our ego that tells us to shut down and flee when faced with threats. When we transcend our “self” and minimize our ego, however, we can overcome the fears, anxieties, and physiological protective mechanisms that so often hold us back from achieving major breakthroughs. A whole new realm of possibilities emerges.

• Physiologically, we could push our bodies to true failure (i.e., injury and organ failure), but the brain comes in and creates a perception of failure before we actually harm ourselves. The brain, Noakes remarked, is our “central governor” of fatigue. It’s our “ego” shutting us down when confronted by fear and threat. In other words, we are hardwired to retreat when the going gets tough.

• •To the extent you can, link your activities to a greater purpose (more on how to do this in Chapter 9). This way, when you are faced with formidable challenges and your mind is telling you to quit, you can ask yourself why you are undertaking them. If the answer is “for someone or something greater than myself,” you’ll be more likely to push onward.