Steven Kotler explains why crises trigger fear and paralysis: your brain evolved for immediate threats, not exponential ones. He recommends addressing fear first, then chunking problems into smaller tasks and rebuilding your daily schedule to regain focus.
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So, Stephen, I did this fall recently, I was on a Zoom call. I had 900 Mindvalley students on that call. I was there with one of our other teachers, Marissa Pierre. And I asked, I put up a quiz on Zoom and I asked people, what are some of the biggest challenges you're going through right now? Now, what is not surprising is that the number one challenge was fears around money with job losses, with the economy tanking, with people losing their job, obviously a fear around money is going to be there. 29% of people voted for that. But what I found fascinating and what I wanted to ask you is there was another group of 29% who voted for another feeling, and that was this. And it tied as the dominant feeling that people were having. And that was I'm feeling a lack of focus and procrastination. Now where's this coming from? Why are so many people having difficulty focusing on and procrastinating?
So it's interesting. Norepinephrine. Let me walk you through a couple of ideas and you'll totally get this in a second and then we can talk about how to fix it. It's worth kind of understanding that we're up against a series of fears that the brain is not prepared to handle. We are facing an exponential threat. The brain literally is linear by design and evolved in an environment that was linear. So it cannot quite rock exponential change. So when the disease doubles, the death toll numbers, the number of sick people doubles. Right. The brain can only react to that with uncertainty and anxiety. That's a natural reaction. That's sort of our built in reaction to this type of scenario. The other thing is the brain evolved in an era of immediacy, right? Threats were the tiger, the bush variety. You fought off the tiger, you ran away from the tiger, you got eaten by the tiger. Those were essentially your options, right? And when you're dealing with an exponential threat like COVID 19, what you're dealing with is a probabilistic threat, right? The economy might nose dive, this virus might get out of control and overrun the world's healthcare, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The brain doesn't know how to handle probabilistic threats. So it basically redlines and it won't shut off until the threat has gone completely. Completely. What fear is in the body, in the brain is both norepinephrine and cortisol and a little bit of norepinephrine. It's great. It's curiosity, excitement. I want to pay attention. Too much is anxiety. Oh my God, I can't stop paying attention, right? So norepinephrine does a couple other things in the brain. Not only does it say, oh, my God, I can't stop paying attention, but when we are dealing with a giant threat, the brain wants to limit your options. So the extreme example is fight, freeze, or flee, right? Like in extreme situations, brain says, okay, can't give you a lot of choices. You'll freak out. Have three. When the challenge is so great that you can't solve it, and that's what's going on, you procrastinate because you've got so much fear in your system, you can't get creative, meaning you literally can't get to the headspace. You need to solve this kind of problem. So the brain is just freezing. It's paralyzing you, right? So the solution is you have to chunk the problem down. You have to take the economics big thing, oh, my God, what can I do today? What can I do right now? And you want to really, really utilize the list on top of this because we've been cut free from our schedules, right? So you have to remake your work schedule at home. And if you're not used to doing that, it's a lot of to do lists, really chunk down smallly. So when you're really up against it, right. If you really want to solve the money problem and the procrastination problem, you have to start with the fear problem. That's the first problem you got to focus on.
I love the way you strung all of that together. Now, how would we tackle that fear problem?
This is one that we actually have great research on. Fantastic research on positive psychology. I spent 30 years kind of identifying six basic things that we should do to tune up our nervous system, in a sense. And we're three of them on their energy side, and three are sort of on the brain side, right? Three are going to help you tune up your body. Three are going to help you tune up your brain on your body side. These are fricking unbelievably obvious, right? The first one is you got to get enough sleep at night, right? The research says it's seven to eight hours and we're in a crisis. You can't skimp on it. Hydration, nutrition, we all know what that means. We're in the middle of a crisis. You can't skimp on it. The last one is social support. We need other people at a really foundational level. There's a lot of cognitive benefits, for sure, but it's so deep in Us that it actually, if we don't, we're not. We don't have social support, Our energy level is too low. We're trying to solve problems by ourselves. That's so hard. The brain wants a big network of people around you or a tight network of people who love you, who are going to help you fight through. So there's an energy penalty. So in this time of physical isolation, you don't want to socially isolate. You really want to reach out. Skype, phone calls, texts. This is the time to reach out. So those are the three on the energy side. Then there's three things you got to do for your brain to calm your nervous system down. And these are going to be totally familiar to the mindvalley Community Daily Gratitude practice. Right? We all know what that is. Either write down ten things you're grateful for or three things you're grateful for and turn one into a paragraph. But either way, you gotta feel the gratitude, right? That calms down your nervous system. Mindfulness itself, Meditation, breath work, right? Five minutes of gratitude should do that every day. Mindfulness. 11 to 20 minutes is what the research shows. And the last one is exercise. And this is not exercise for your body, but this is for your brain. So you want to exercise until it gets quiet upstairs. It's about 20 to 40 minutes in. That's actually the front end of a flow state. It's what's known as transient hypo fatality. But it doesn't matter for this purpose is what happens is when quiet upstairs, the stress hormones were flushed out of your system. So those three things, normally I tell people with peak performers do one a day. But during a crisis, when you're really stressed, when you really need your brain to be at its creative best, you need to be calm and not reactive. You want to do all three and you want to make sure. Like normally I tell people, performers with the energy stuff, hey, you could probably skimp on one a day and get away with it, right? So if you don't get hydration and nutrition, right? If you, if you're hanging out with friends and you got enough sleep, you're going to muddle through. But now you need all six on a daily basis as a kind of a foundation for peak performance, as a foundation for performing your best in a time of crisis. And what this is going to allow you to do is really sort of. There's a famous saying, right? Never let a good crisis go to waste. A ton is changing. There's a ton of opportunity there. And we can come out the other side of this if not being ready to, like, you know, seize the opportunity. At least having laid down the peak performance basics, laid in the habit, when the world restarts, we can come out strong and not burned out and crushed by what we're up against.
