Kwik Brain Episode 22: How To Calm A Busy Mind (And Prevent Brain Burnout) with Julia Funt

Welcome to Kwik Brain, bite-sized brain hacks for busy people who want to learn faster and achieve more. I'm your coach, Jim Kwik. Free your mind.

Let's imagine if we could access 100% of our brain's capacity. I wasn't high, wasn't wired, just clear.

I knew what I needed to do and how to do it. I know kung fu.

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How do you calm a busy mind and prevent brain burnout? That's the question, right? Because how can you achieve your crucial priorities when you're drowning in busywork? In this episode, we're going to talk about the power of whitespace, the strategic pause taken between activities. And according to our guests, it's this vital, open, fluid, flexible time that makes the smartest of us even smarter. Isn't that exciting? And it's the most endangered element of modern work because it's the opposite of the relentless busyness that drains your best mental performance and your productivity. Now, when we perform complex, intensive tasks without giving our brains time to recuperate, we experience cognitive fatigue. Right? We've talked about it in prior episodes. Cognitive fatigue, decision fatigue. This depletes our brain's limited resources and negatively impacts performance. Research suggests that the only way to truly recover from cognitive depletion is by giving our brains a break. And that's what we're going to be talking about here. It's an essential component of insightful problem solving. You know, that aha moment is being able to form connections new connections between prior experiences and the problem at hand. And in the brain, this requires communication between the executive frontal lobes and the memory areas of the brain. Communication between these brain areas is often impaired by mental fatigue and chronic overload. So to help prevent this busy brain burnout, I want to introduce you to my friend Juliet Funt. She's the CEO of White Space at Work. This session is from a live talk she did at one of our recent brain conferences to a group of high achievers. I hope you enjoy.

Now, here's the truth. The truth is that men more easily than women do tolerate silence in conversation. The small gaps, the interstitial time. But the truth is that all of us, regardless of gender, now are becoming less and less comfortable with the pause, with the moments in our life and our work that we allow to remain unfilled and ready for what might come. Because our connection is constant, our minds are buzzing, our schedules are overflowing, and the pause, in all its beauty, is becoming a memory. And this loss, this loss of time with no assignment, is one with hefty, hefty costs to our minds and our lives and our creativity and our work. And we are progressively more used to seamlessly connected activities, but if we step back for a minute, we see that our time is no less than under attack. Emails, meetings, ever-present smartphones are gobbling it up, and consequently we are so fried we belong in the food court of a county fair. And it's a gigantic problem for creative people, for high-minded people, because when talented people don't have time to think, life and business always inevitably suffers. Now instead of thoughtfulness, most folks typically choose instead exertion. They put the pedal to the metal as fast and hard as humanly possible. And everybody's exertion story looks a little bit different from others. So this is a room full— you are a room full of health-minded, high-minded, high achievers. So perhaps some version of the following might look familiar to you. You get up in the morning, you hit the snooze button, you sleep for 5 more minutes, you get up, you shower, you brush, get into the kitchen looking for breakfast, maybe avocado toast, maybe egg white omelets. Haha, yeah, right. You grab a kombucha and an Exo bar and you head off to your morning routine. You do a 5-minute journal and then some cardio and then some squats and then a little inversion, time for meditation, then mindfulness. You do a little Reiki on yourself and don't forget your Bulletproof Coffee. And then you start checking your email and your Facebook and your Instagram and your Twitter and there certainly is a lot of information to digest, but that's okay because you read really fast. And then you start checking your inbox. 1 for emergency, 2 for time-sensitive, 3 for this can wait. You end up with 227 1s and a 3. You go to a meeting and another meeting and a lunch and a little hot yoga, and then suddenly you get a message from your mom who has learned how to text. She's trying to book tickets for Thanksgiving and she can't figure out how Orbitz works, and she thought that you could help. And you text back, Mom, I'll text you back later. And you rush around here and you rush around there, and you rush around here and you rush around there, and all day long you almost pee.

Oh, my God.

But actually, there is no peeing. We have no idea how this works. It's some sort of magical, spontaneous reabsorption. We just— okay? And this is how we're going to be superheroes? This is how we work? This is how we live? This is how we create? And it's a little funny, but what does it cost? What does it cost you? What does it cost you in creativity, in productivity, in engagement? What does it cost you at home? So my life and my work is I spend 100% of my time studying, talking about, consulting about, and speaking about unnecessary busyness and its opposite, the pause. The beautiful time that is liberated when we remove some of that frenzied, low-value activity and we call this found capacity Well, I will tell you that Whitespace was originally created not for individuals or for entrepreneurs. It was originally created, our body of content, for executives who wanted to unburden their busy teams and make them more thoughtful to regain professional capacity in corporations. But I will also tell you that it is incredibly applicable to be transferred to you, to the entrepreneur, to the individual, to anyone who is trying to be more thoughtful. anybody sitting in this room. And I will also make kind of a humble admission that I do not come naturally to the pause. I don't come to the pause because it's part of my core self. I come, as I arrive every day at my desk, with my core self, with my driven Manhattan-born workaholic tech-addicted self. But I know that if whitespace can solve my busyness problem. It can solve anybody's busyness problem. So let's explore it. So let's say, what is white space? It is a strategic pause taken between activities. It is the open, flexible, fluid, beautiful time that lurks in between the activities of your busy, busy day, and it is the It's the oxygen that allows everything else to catch fire. Now, here's what's important to remember. It's a pause in your schedule, but it's actually far from empty because in white space, the mind wakes up. And if you took an MRI scan of your brain during this supposed pause, you would actually see amazing, amazing complex activity in the default neural network of your mind, activity that has been linked to insight, introspection, creativity. memory, creativity, all in this supposed pause. Now, the name came from looking at the white spaces on the calendar and realizing that on the days where there was more literal white space, that everything was different, that everything worked better, that it made us more calm and confident and patient and present. And here's the really cool news. The cool news is that if I lock the door right now to your small business, to your home, to your giant company, you'd already have all the white space you need. You don't have to get it or acquire it or find it. It is there. And it's just buried under junk. So that is our assignment for today, is to liberate some of that beautiful time and bring it to your disposal. So the benefits of white space include heightened creativity, improved execution, more productivity, engagement with everything you touch. But there is one piece of benefit surrounding creativity that I want to go into a little bit further, and I'm going to do it using our theme for today. It's actually building on something that Jim said earlier. Now, you would think, in order to be a superhero, that you would have to have some sort of intrinsic superpower, right? You'd think that you'd have to be like Aquaman or Thor or Superman, that it's just in you somewhere. And interestingly, fascinatingly, it's not true. In fact, some of the most powerful superheroes had no intrinsic power, but they used creativity and ingenuity to fill the gap. It was their ideas. It was Ant-Man in his victorious pursuit of the Pym Particle. It was Iron Man and the creative design of the suits. It was Hawkeye who made arrows, and these arrows could explode, and they could drop nets, and they could turn into 10 other arrows, and all of these were ideas. They had no innate power, none. And this is the kind of gap-closing creativity that all of us are in search for. So how do we do that? Well, it turns out that when we're in pursuit of an idea, an aha, game-changing breakthrough idea, what has to happen is that our mind has to talk to itself. What has to happen is that the memory center of the brain needs to connect past experiences To the current problem. And it does so by having the executive frontal lobe say hello and communicate to the memory center of the brain. But when we are in cognitive overload, when we are mentally fatigued, the lines fizzle and the communication gets cloudy and we cannot make that transfer between the executive frontal lobe and the memory center of the brain. And this is why we need some white space. This is why we need some open fluid time. And I will tell you that in this amazing weekend, you're going to hear mounds of content. You're going to hear truckloads of 35 speakers of brilliant tips and tools and stuff. And you're going to walk out of here with all your stuff. And I am here just as one voice to also say, let's leave a little space.

So here's what you do right now. I want you to take out your phone or your calendar and answer this one simple question: where can I schedule white space tomorrow? Where can I schedule white space tomorrow? And you schedule it and you treat it as the most important time during your day because that's time with you and that's time well spent. White space is your daily routine that allows the frontal lobe to regroup and reengage effectively, leading to more efficient neural processing, increased productivity, and creativity. And let me know your experience of having daily white space. So tag me @JimKwik, K-W-I-K, and tag Juliette @WhiteSpaceAtWork, and work is abbreviated W-R-K, on Twitter. So I want you to enjoy the rejuvenation effects and the creativity effects from white space. Because it's surely going to help you to activate more of your Kwik Brain. Want to double your brain speed and memory power? If you'd like to learn rapidly and get ahead faster, I'd like to give you my brand new Kwik Brain Accelerator program. You will discover exactly what I teach my clients to learn, read, and remember anything in half the time. There is no charge. It's my gift to you for being one of our subscribers. That's K W I K brain dot com, or simply text the word podcast to nine one six eight two two seventy two forty six, and we'll send you a direct link. That's nine one six eighty two brain. Growing up struggling with learning challenges from a childhood brain injury, it's been my life's mission to help you have your very best brain so you could win more every single day. Now. Want more quick brain? Here are four ways to fast-track your results and lock in what you just learned into your long-term memory. Remember fast, F A S T. The F stands for Facebook. You're not alone on this journey. I invite you to join our free private online group. There you can connect with me, your fellow brain lovers, links to resources, and even submit your questions for me to answer in future episodes. Go to quickbrain.com. That's kwikbrain.com. The A stands for apply. Act on what you learned today. Remember, knowledge is not power, it's potential power. It only becomes power when you use it. So use what you just learned. The S stands for subscribe. Don't miss the next episode and other free brain training. And finally, the T stands for teach. You want to learn faster now? The key is to lock it in right away by teaching it to someone else. When you teach something, you get to learn it twice. Here's a simple way to do that. Leave a review on iTunes. Leave a review with your biggest takeaway from this episode. You could also post and share this podcast on your social media. It helps us spread our mission of building better, brighter brains. And of course, tag us so our team can properly thank you. #KwikBrain, K-W-I-K Brain, Mine is @JimKwik, K-W-I-K, on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. So, what does FAST stand for? Facebook, Apply, Subscribe, Teach. I'll see you in our next episode of Kwik Brain. Until then, remember, you are faster and smarter than you think. Thanks, Jim.