peak.md

Peak Performance

Notes by Christopher Durr

Introduction

The bar for human performance is at an all-time high. New athletic records are being set weekly. College admissions requirements are at unprecedented levels. Cutthroat competition is common in nearly every corner of the global economy.

Data shows the use of antidepressants by Americans has risen by 400 percent in the past decade and anxiety is at an all-time high.

The epidemic of stimulant use in America is simply a symptom of modern life: on your game 24/7, tethered to your email, needing to perform better today than you did yesterday

Studies have found that over 57 percent of medical residents and up to 46 percent of bona fide physicians meet the criteria for burnout. Other research shows that over 30 percent of teachers suffer from burnout as well.

Section 1: The Growth Equation

The Secret to Sustainable Success

The brightest minds spend their time either pursuing an activity with ferocious intensity, or engaging in complete restoration and recovery.

A common process across almost all great intellectual and creative performers, regardless of their field:

1.Immersion: total engagement in their work with deep, unremitting focus

2.Incubation: a period of rest and recovery when they are not at all thinking about their work

3.Insight: the occurrence of “aha” or “eureka” moments—the emergence of new ideas and growth in their thinking

Performance Practices

• Insert short breaks throughout your work over the course of a day.

• Strategically time your “off-days,” long weekends, and vacations to follow periods of heavy stress.

We have a single reservoir of brainpower for all acts of cognition and self-control, even those that are unrelated.

stress + rest = growth.

• Remember that “stress is stress”: fatigue on one task spills over into the next, even if the two are completely unrelated.

• Only take on a few challenges at once. Otherwise you’ll literally run out of energy.

Rethinking Stress

Stress isn’t just harmful; it can also serve as a stimulus for growth and adaptation.

Growth comes at the point of resistance; we learn by pushing ourselves to the outer reaches of our abilities.

The greatest gains often follow immense struggle and discomfort.

Only seek out support after you’ve allowed yourself to struggle.

The little voice inside your head saying, “I can’t possibly do this,” is actually a sign that you’re on the right track. It’s your mind trying to pull you back to the familiar path that represents your comfort zone.

• Think of a skill/capability that you want to grow.

• Assess your current ability to perform this skill/capability.

• Actively seek out challenges that just barely exceed your ability.

• If you feel fully in control, make the next challenge a bit harder.

• If you feel anxious or so aroused that you can’t focus, dial things down a notch.

Stress Yourself

Performance Practices

• Define a purpose and concrete objectives for each working session.
• Ask yourself: What do I want to learn or get done?
• Focus and concentrate deeply, even if doing so isn’t always enjoyable.
• Single-task: The next time you feel like multitasking, remind yourself that research shows it’s not effective. Keep in mind Dr. Bob’s secret: “Do only one thing at a time.”
• Remember that quality trumps quantity.

Identify what interrupts your deep focus. Common intruders, many of which are enabled by smartphones, include:

• Text messages

• Social media

• The internet

• Television

• Remove distractors: Remember that only out of sight truly leads to out of mind.

• Divide your work into chunks of 50 to 90 minutes (this may vary by task). Start even smaller if you find yourself struggling to maintain attention.

• As you develop “fitness” in whatever it is you are doing, you’ll likely find that you can work longer and harder.

• For most activities and most situations, 2 hours should be the uppermost limit for a working block.

When you try to suppress pre-event nerves, you are inherently telling yourself that something is wrong. Not only does this make the situation worse, but it also takes emotional and physical energy to fight off the feeling of anxiety—energy that could be better spent on the task at hand.

Performance Practices

• Remember the power of mindset: How you view something fundamentally changes how your body responds to it.
• In situations when you feel the sensation of stress, remind yourself this is your body’s natural way of preparing for a challenge; take a deep breath and channel the heightened arousal and sharper perception toward the task at hand.
• Challenge yourself to view stress productively, and even to welcome it. You’ll not only perform better, you’ll also improve your health.

The Paradox of Rest

• Sit in a comfortable position, ideally in a quiet space.

• Breathe deeply for a few breaths, in and out through your nose.

• Allow your breath to settle back into its natural rhythm and focus on only the sensations of breathing, noticing the rise and fall of your abdomen with each breath; if thoughts arise, notice them, but then direct your focus back to the rhythm and sensation of your breath.

• Set a timer so you don’t have to think about time. Start with just 1 minute and gradually increase the duration.

Grow your mindful muscle. The best way to do so is by practicing mindfulness meditation:

1. Choose a time when other distractions are minimized, such as first thing in the morning, after brushing your teeth, or before going to bed.
2. Sit in a comfortable position, ideally in a quiet space.
3. Set a timer so you aren’t distracted by thoughts about the passage of time.
4. Begin breathing deeply, in and out through your nose.
5. Allow your breath to settle back into its natural rhythm and focus on nothing but the sensation of breathing, noticing the rise and fall of your abdomen with each breath; if thoughts arise, notice them, but then let them go. Direct your focus back to the sensation of the breath.
6. Start with just 1 minute and gradually increase duration, adding 30 to 45 seconds every few days.
7. Frequency trumps duration. It’s best to meditate daily, even if that means keeping individual sessions short.

• Apply your growing mindfulness abilities in everyday life.
• Have “calm conversations” during stressful periods.
• Realize when you want to “turn it off” and then choose to leave stress behind. Pausing to take a few deep breaths helps to activate the prefrontal cortex, your brain’s command and control center

Even when it feels like our brains are “off,” a powerful system, the default-mode network, is running in the background, completely unnoticed by our conscious awareness.

• When you are working on a strenuous mental task and hit an impasse, stop working.
• Step away from whatever it is you are doing for at least 5 minutes.
• The more stressful the task, the longer your break should be.
• For really draining tasks, consider stepping away until the next morning.
• During your breaks, if you aren’t sleeping (more on this soon), perform activities that demand little to no effortful thinking.

To reap the benefits of stress, you need to rest.

Rest Like the Best

Nature inherently makes us feel good and improves our mood, thereby hastening our transition from the stress of hard work to a more restful state and promoting mind-wandering and subsequent creativity.

Have the courage to takes breaks throughout the day, especially when you are stuck or feeling unbearable stress; the more intense the work, the more frequent the breaks.

• Take a walk lasting at least 6 minutes to increase creativity and decrease the ill effects of sitting. If you can, walk outdoors, but even taking a few laps around the office provides big benefits.
• Put yourself in the way of beauty. Being in nature, or even just looking at pictures of nature, helps with the transition from stress to rest and promotes creative thinking.
• Meditate. Begin with a few mindful breaths, focusing only on the breath. Then, consider shifting to open-monitoring meditation, scanning your body and shifting your awareness to all of its sensations.
• Hang out with friends! At the end of hard work—be it with your body or your mind—surrounding yourself with friends in a laid-back environment fundamentally alters your biology from stress to rest.

You can’t nap your way to growth, be it physical or psychological.

For a better night’s sleep, follow these tips, consolidated from the world’s leading researchers:

• Ensure you expose yourself to natural (i.e., non-electric) light throughout the day. This will help you maintain a healthy circadian rhythm.
• Exercise. Vigorous physical activity makes us tired. When we are tired, we sleep. But don’t exercise too close to bedtime.
• Limit caffeine intake, and phase it out completely 5 to 6 hours prior to your bedtime.
• Only use your bed for sleep and sex. Not for eating, watching television, working on your laptop, or anything else. The one exception is reading a paper book prior to bed.
• Don’t drink alcohol close to bedtime. Although alcohol can hasten the onset of sleep, it often disrupts the later and more important stages.
• Limit blue light exposure in the evening.
• Don’t start working on hard, stressful activities—be them mental or physical—after dinner.
• If you struggle with a racing mind, try inserting a brief mindfulness meditation session prior to bed.
• When you feel yourself getting drowsy, don’t fight it. Whatever you are doing can wait until the morning.
• Keep your room as dark as possible. If feasible, consider black-out blinds.
• Keep your smartphone OUT of the bedroom entirely. Not on silent. Out.

Regardless of the work you do, take at least 1 off-day every week. Time your off-days strategically to follow periods of accumulated stress. Remember, the more stress, the more rest that is needed Furthermore, to the extent that you can, time your vacations strategically to follow longer periods of stress.

On both single off-days and extended vacations, truly disconnect from work. Unplug both physically and mentally and engage in activities that you find relaxing and restorative

Section 2: Priming

Optimize your routine

You can improve performance by priming yourself into a positive mood prior to important work that involves problem solving and creative thinking

• Reflect upon the activities in your life that are most important to you.

• Determine what state of mind and/or body they demand.

• Prime yourself for performance by readying your mind and/or body prior to key activities.

• Test and refine various priming techniques, eventually developing customized routines.

• Be consistent: Use the same routine each and every time you engage in the activity to which it is linked (more on the importance of consistency in a bit).

• Remember the impact of mood on performance; positivity goes a long way.

• Create “a place of your own” in which you do your most important work.

• Surround yourself with objects that invite your desired behaviors.

• Consistently work in that same place, using the same materials.

• Over time, your environment will enhance your productivity on a deep neurological level.

Minimalist to be a Maximalist

• Reflect on all the decisions that you make throughout a day.
• Identify ones that are unimportant, that don’t really matter to you.
• Automate as many of the decisions that don’t really matter as you can. Common examples include decisions about:

1. Clothing
2. What to eat at meals
3. When to complete daily activities (e.g., always exercise at the same time of the day so you literally don’t need to think about it)
4. Whether to attend social gatherings (It’s not always a good idea, but during important periods of work, many great performers adopt a strict policy of saying no to social events.)

In addition to eliminating as many decisions as possible, don’t devote brainpower to gossip, politics, or worrying about what others think of you. (Unless, of course, your core mission is to be an elected official—then these things are, in fact, critically important.)

In addition to reflecting upon daily decisions, think about the second- and third-order effects (e.g., commute time, financial pressures, etc.) of larger life decisions, like where to live.

Positive energy, motivation, and drive are all contagious. Do what you can to cultivate your own village of support, to surround yourself with a culture of performance.

Remember that by being positive and showing motivation, you are not only helping yourself, but you are also helping everyone else in your life.

Unfortunately, negativity and pessimism are also contagious. Don’t put up with too much of either. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

The best performers are not consistently great, but they are great at being consistent.