PNTV: Your Brain at Work by David Rock (#285)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we have another great book, you, Brain at Work by David Rock. Your Brain at Work Subtitle Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus and Working Smarter All Day Long. Awesome book. It's basically a manual on the neuroscience of work. David Rock is a leading business consultant and author who's done an amazing job of integrating neuroscience and leadership. He spent several years working with and interviewing dozens of leading neuroscientists to boil down these ideas into an applicable, practical look at how we can use these neuroscientific principles at work. I love it. Philosopher's Note. Bunch of big ideas. Five of my favorite ones here. A couple other quick things. The way that he wrote the book is fascinating. He basically did it in the style of a play where you had different scenes throughout the book. So you didn't have chapters, you had scenes, right? And then he looked at two different people. I think it was Emily and Paul, who, who are a married couple. And we watch them go through their day. Scene one is kissing the kids and going off to work. And then what? Then scene two, scene three, scene four. And then we get to the end of the day, and then he walks us through two different takes. The first take is how most of us do it most of the time. Suboptimal, not knowing about this brain science, wisdom and kind of sort of stubbing our toe often, right? And then he says, okay, well, this is what was going on. Let's do take two. Let's look at what they just did and what would have happened if they made a tiny change. And he makes the point again and again throughout the book. That tiny, tiny, tiny changes in your brain and in your mind and how you're perceiving the world can make huge changes in your life. So anyway, you have take one. Suboptimal take two is the. This is your brain at work, optimally, and what these characters would do in that scene if they knew these things and applied them. It's a really cool, interesting way to approach sharing this wisdom. I enjoyed it. I think you might as well. So first big idea. This is scene one. Scene one. Emily, the woman in our story, just got a promotion a week ago, right? She kisses the kids, goes to work. Then what does she do? Well, in the first take, she jumps into email. Hundred emails come rushing at her, right? All of a sudden, her cortisol spikes and she's feeling that stress. Then what? Well, then she kind of sort of goes through the day and she's a little behind and she doesn't really get clarity on what's going to make this week awesome, what's going to make today awesome. So the lesson here, the very first lesson that David teaches us about, is the fact that we need to prioritize, prioritizing. We need to make prioritizing our day a priority because that's a very energy intensive thing to do. And he makes the point again and again and again and again that our brain has a very limited, our prefrontal cortex, to be specific, has a very limited stage, to use the play metaphor. There's a stage on which our life is unfolding. And he says it's more like your closet than it is a huge performance hall. It's a small stage. Your brain can only handle so much at one time and it gets easily depleted. So if you jump online and check your email first thing, it's actually really hard to recover from that. And then prioritize your day effectively because that takes a lot of energy and if you've already burned it, even just 10 minutes on email, he says, is enough to exhaust your brain to the point where you don't want to do the complex stuff, then you just do more easy stuff, checking more email and constantly reacting. So prioritizing, prioritizing is the scene number one first big idea. And this is life changing stuff to actually start your day. Your AM bookend that we talk about all the time, right? You've got, here's your day, you got your AM and your PM bookends. You have the most control over this. The middle of the day is harder to control. When we talk About Masterpiece Days 101 in our class on that, I talked about this idea from Darren Hardy and you need to take control of this AM1 bookend. I say in the note that if I had to isolate the primary reason why I'm able to sustain a reasonably high level of creative productivity, it's because I honor this. I do not check email until I've done something very constructive. I've done the most important thing that I've determined for that day before I hop online. So in addition to my fundamentals and the digital sunset from the night before, this is probably the most important thing I've done to, to change my life. And if you're waking up and immediately checking your emails, I highly, highly, highly encourage you to prioritize, prioritizing and slow down and identify what's most important for you. And if you really want to go nuts, be like Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, who says he doesn't waste a brain cell in the morning thinking about what he's going to do. He just does it. He's already decided he's done a meta prioritizing and he just has systems that, that he lets run throughout his day. We're going to talk about that in the third Big Idea. But that's our first Big Idea. Prioritize prioritizing. Huge. Life changing. If you're not already engaging in this creative work, the Deep Work, before you hop on email, try it. I promise you, A, you'll find it hard to do because you're so addicted to going online and B, you'll find extraordinary things come through if you just show up and let that compound over time. Second Big Idea is related to that one. But I think it's scene three. And in scene three we learn that constantly. I think it was the University of London, they did a study and they realized that constantly emailing and texting diminishes your mental capacity by the equivalent of reducing your IQ by 15 points if you're a guy, 5 points if you're a woman. Average of 10 point reduction in your IQ if you're constantly emailing and texting. And in addition to diminishing your iq, which then obviously diminishes your performance, you also are just bombarding your nervous system with more stimuli than it can handle. Your hormones of cortisol and adrenaline, all this are just constantly firing. And we did not evolve, as we talk about all the time, to have this much stimulation. Alberto Violdo says we get exposed to more stimuli in a week than our ancient ancestors were exposed to in their entire lifetimes. Right. He says it's as if the entire jungle is roaring at us. When we evolve to have a fight or flight response for one lion at a time. And not that often, but we're having. David mentions in jokes that in those 500 emails that are coming at you, how many of them are lions? Not too many of them, hopefully. Right. But that's how our body responds to that constant onslaught. Our IQ is diminished and our overall sense of vitality and well being is diminished. Lesson here is what we talk about all the time. Another little part of Masterpiece Days. We need to make waves. We need to be on and then we need to be off. Do the deep work. Turn off your text, turn off your email. In the last episode we talked about adding an hour to your day by blocking access to yourself. Why do you need to be constantly available? It was only a few years ago that you had to call somebody and leave A voicemail on their home answering machine. Right. If you wanted to get in touch with them. This idea that everything requires a two second response time is silly. See it for that. Do deep work and oscillate and know that being constantly on is diminishing your IQ and and your overall well being. The third big idea is your basal ganglia. So the prefrontal cortex has a very small and finite range of things they could pay attention to at any given time. But your basal ganglia can handle a ton. Puts things on routine. When I talk about in Habits 101, I talked about the fact that we need to use our willpower and our mental capacity, our prefrontal cortex functioning. We wisely to install habits that run on autopilot. Well, here's where our autopilot is. In our basal ganglia. That part of our brain is always looking for ways to routinize behaviors that we repeat. And David makes the point that we want to find as many ways as we possibly can to move behaviors out of our prefrontal cortex into our basal ganglia. Find simple ways to repeat certain things to, to save your brain cells from having your prefrontal cortex brain cells from having to figure everything out all the time. Because again, that's exhausting. And again, make a game out of it. Find little 4% ways you can improve. One of the examples I shared in the note is my commitment to do one sun salutation, 10 pull ups, 100 burpees, 1,000 meters of rowing and 10,000 steps. That's what I do every single day. Now I learned that when I do my burpees earlier in the morning, I get a mood boost which lasts throughout the day. I feel better throughout the day. And I also don't have that kind of looming sense. If it's like 5pm And I haven't done my burpees. I used to kind of dread that some days of oh man, I got to do them. And it took more willpower than I'd like and it wasn't as fun as I'd like. So I put those two things together and I realized, hey, I've got to do my burpees early. Let's set a goal of doing my first 50 before 8am Now I get up pretty early, right? So that's a few hours after I get up. But let's make that the goal. And then I did that for a while and then I had fun saying, okay, well let's program the basal ganglia. I don't want to think about it. Let's just make it automatic. How do I make it automatic? I made my meditation automatic because that's the first thing I do. And then I do five minutes of stretching right after I meditate. I don't need to think about that. Basal ganglia runs the show. So I wanted my basal ganglia to run the burpee show. So I set my watch for an alarm at 6:29am so that I started my first set of 10. I usually break my burpees into sets of 10. My first set, I would do precisely when the alarm went off. So it's 6:30am, 6:29, and I'd have 30 seconds, 45 seconds to wrap up whatever I was doing and then bang out my first set of burpees. Then I don't need to think about it. It's on autopilot. Thank you, basal ganglia. I'm just doing it. The alarm goes off, no willpower required. It's actually really exciting for me. Now I do it. I mark my calendar with a little one, right? Roman numeral one. Got the first one done. And I literally say to myself every time I do that, the first one's the most important. Nice job. And I give myself a little virtual high five. And then it's easy. An object in motion tends to stay in motion. It's then easy for me to do the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth set, either then or over the next hour and a half, right? Anyway, long aside, basal ganglia is your friend. Routinize as much stuff as you possibly can. Save your prefrontal cortex. Fourth, big idea to do all this stuff, to run a beautiful play that is our life, put on a great performance. We need to have a strong director. So we've got all these things going on on the internal stage of our mind. We need to have a director that can see what's going on in our minds. Dan Siegel, who wrote the foreword to this book, calls that ability mindsight, the ability to look inside your mind. Right. It's a form of mindfulness, self awareness, et cetera. Now, a lot of people call that the observer or. Or the witness perspective. Those are a little bit too abstract and cold for me. I really like the director. The director looks at what's going on and says, hey, you know what? That thought isn't particularly helpful. Or, let's focus our attention here, or let's prioritize prioritizing. That's your director making those decisions. When you find yourself getting a little off track, it's your director who says, hey, hey, no, no, no. I need you to play this role right now. Say it this way, right? They're helping the actors perform better. We need to build a strong director. You do that in a range of ways, right? But simply becoming aware of what's going on in your mind, learning these ideas. David makes the point again and again. Simply knowing these ideas is the most important first step. Because then you know when you're off and you can see and you can practice cultivating this ability to observe what's going on, obviously, meditation is another huge practice. And throughout the day, another idea that didn't make our list that I talked about in the note is reappraisal. The ability to step in between stimulus and response. This happens. Let me choose the optimal appraisal. He says this is one of the most important skills. That and the ability to see your mind. Those two skills are huge. We can talk about that all afternoon. Fifth big idea is our seesaw. This is another good one. One of the chapters in scenes is all about. Actually, one of the sections is all about being cool under pressure. So when things heat up, which is basically every day for most of us, right, we're dealing with a lot of stress and a lot of chaos. How do you stay cool under pressure? Well, one of the scenes and one of the ideas is about our emotions. When our emotions become too high and our arousal becomes too high, how do we manage that? He's got a really cool idea that I'm excited to share now. So basically, when you think of your brain, there's the prefrontal cortex, which is the rational side of your brain, right? To put it in very simple terms, the limbic system is where your emotions reside. So when you feel a strong emotion, whether it's fear or shame or excitement or whatever, that's your limbic system firing strongly right? Now, if it's a strong negative emotion. And you want to be able to dampen that and control that so you can stay cool under pressure. You don't get carried away and overwhelmed or angry or whatever. He says you need to remember that your prefrontal cortex and your limbic system act kind of like a seesaw, meaning that if your limbic system is really on, your prefrontal cortex is off, right? Hot and cold. So what's exciting is that if your limbic system is really hot, you want to go into your prefrontal cortex to cool it down. And he talks about ways to do that. When you experience high emotions, there are a lot of different things you can do. You can try to suppress it, which is to pretend that it's not there. Not particularly helpful. You can express it, which is just to say, I'm so angry right now, or whatever. That's not particularly helpful. Right. In most situations, nearly all situations. Then you can become dramatic about it and just kind of emote about it, etc. He says that what's most effective, the research shows, is if you label it. So if you have this high limbic experience of wow, I'm feeling this surge of fear, you want to notice that. That's your director noticing it. And then you say, I'm feeling fear. One or two words to identify the emotion. Not a whole wow, I'm feeling fear. And this is because this is like that situation that I messed up before. Oh my God, I messed it up a hundred times. I think it's because my father was an alcoholic and this happened to me and that happened to me. We're not talking about emotional drama right now. We're talking about labeling very simply that act. High emotion in the limbic system, moving to the prefrontal cortex by simply labeling the emotion one or two words. Dan Siegel calls that name it to tame it. It's awesome. Seesaw. High limbic. You can reduce the limbic load and intensity and arousal by going into your prefrontal cortex by simply labeling it. Then you're not suppressing it, you're recognizing, wow, I'm feeling this emotion come up. I see that now. The director is going to label that and then I'm going to do what needs to get done. I'm going to stay cool under pressure. Big idea. Seesaw. The director needs to be in charge. Make sure they are in charge. Build that ability. The basal ganglia. Super cool. This is where your habits on autopilot. Just imagine a team of pilots in your basal ganglia running the show. You want to groove as many things as you can to save your energy because it is finite. Your IQ going down by 5 to 15 points. If you have constant bombardment of texts and emails. Reduce that, slow down, make some waves and prioritize. Prioritizing are our five big ideas. I hope you enjoyed if you did Think you'll really like the book. It's a great practical look at neuroscience applied to our lives and to our personal relationships as well. There's a really cool theme as well between the couple and their kids and their relationship. David did a fantastic job. Thank you and I hope you enjoyed. What was the idea that resonated the most. Think about it. It's just reminding you of something you already know, write it down, share with somebody, and most importantly, figure out how you're going to embody it in your life more starting today. And make today an awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. 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