Your
brain is very fussy. Neglecting it
causes problems that can undermine your performance by having you overlook
important factors, reach faulty conclusions and make poor decisions. But once you know why it’s so fussy you can
practice some simple techniques to optimise your performance.
Making sense
The
billions of neurons in your brain are only useful to you if they are
communicating with one another. Have you
ever had the experience of sticking your key in the ignition of your car and
discovering the battery is flat? Suddenly,
instead of being in a car that can take you wherever you want, you are just
sitting in a static hunk of metal.
Without that initial electrical spark to get the engine going the car is
totally useless. Your brain also needs
electrical sparks to be of any use. Each
neuron is separated from all the others by a microscopic gap called synapses. An electrical signal travels down the neuron
and gets converted into a chemical signal that is either excitatory, which tells a
neuron to do more of something or inhibitory,
which tells it to do less of something. In any given moment you have trillions
of these electrical and chemical signals surging through your brain. They give you the mental maps that enable you
to make sense of the world, learn and achieve things.
The
prefrontal cortex is a small thin layer covering the front of the brain and it’s
where we do a lot of our most complex thinking.
It is very delicate and needs just the right amount of chemical
stimulation. With too little you can become
unfocussed, forgetting or missing things that may be important. With too much you can get overly concerned or
even obsessed about things which will distract you from what you need in order
to succeed.
Chemical
Balance
Amy
Arnsten, a neurobiologist from Yale, has spent the last 20 years studying the
prefrontal cortex and her findings help to explain why it is so fussy and what
you can do about it. The synapses in the
prefrontal cortex only fire correctly when just the right levels of two
neurochemicals are present. These
neurochemicals are called dopamine and norepinephrine, and without them you
experience boredom and under-arousal. However,
if you have too much you experience over-arousal and distress.
It
is normal to experience different levels of these chemicals at different times
of the day. When you wake up or when you
are tired it’s difficult to get organised, make important decisions or do any
complex thinking. If you are very busy
at work and a serious new problem or deadline gets dumped in your lap you can become
over-aroused and produce massive levels of norepinephrine and dopamine. This causes your neural networks to
disconnect and can lead to synapses not firing properly or not firing at all,
which leaves you with incomplete mental maps and the inability to make good
decisions.
Your
brain chemistry is changing throughout the day because it is affected by
natural environmental stimulation. A
sudden shock like a near miss in fast moving traffic can have you very alert
and awake for the rest of the day. Going
for a walk in the woods or a local park after a busy day can help you feel
calmer. However, Arnsten’s studies have
discovered that you can shift and balance your chemical state with a few simple
mental techniques.
Increasing
arousal
The
brain responds to imagined situations in a very similar way to real ones. If you are feeling the need for more arousal
to increase concentration you can give your brain a boost of norepinephrine by
bringing in more ‘urgency’. For example
you can think about not being prepared enough for an important meeting or
missing an important deadline, this will increase norepinephrine (which is also
known as noradrenaline).
As
you probably already know adrenalin is the fear hormone that heightens our
alertness and focus of attention.
Norepinephrine has also been shown to play an important role in binding
circuits together in the prefrontal cortex, aiding concentration. However, there is a critical point in this
technique, you don’t want the thought of things going wrong to get out of hand
and take on a life of their own. That
will lead to over-arousal obsessiveness and distraction from the task at hand.
Another
way to improve concentration is to increase the dopamine levels. Norepinephrine is the chemistry of alertness, and dopamine is the chemistry
of interest. Good levels of both chemicals are required to
generate the optimum levels of arousal and performance. Dopamine is released when the brain discovers
something unexpected or new. Children
love novelty and can get very excited about it due to the high levels of
dopamine they experience. Humour is
about creating unexpected connections and hearing jokes or watching funny films
will increase your dopamine levels. Neuroscientists have also found that expecting
a positive event or reward – in fact anything that the brain perceives as a
reward, like an increase in status, autonomy or fairness – will generate
dopamine. Food, sex, money and positive
social interactions also boost it.
It
is worth noting here that research across a number of studies suggests that
using positive expectations and humour to increase arousal is better that using
fear. This is because the former
activate both dopamine and adrenaline, while the latter produces
adrenaline but the expectation of negative events reduces dopamine.
Dampening
arousal
Many
people are now suffering from information and work overload with an increasing
number of people on low wages having 2 jobs.
In his book ‘Your Brain at Work’, David Rock quoted a rather disturbing
study of 2,600 British workers that stated that half of them had seen a
colleague reduced to tears by work pressures and over 80% said they had been
bullied during their careers.
Over-arousal
is more of a problem than under-arousal and it is becoming endemic. Over
stimulation means too much electrical activity in the prefrontal cortex. This leads to the equivalent of blowing a
fuse in one or more of the normal circuits in your brain, creating a very
narrow focus. The circuits left open can
make accidental connections that are not real, but if you are in a heightened
state of alertness you think they are real and feel people are doing things to
upset you or to ‘get at you’ on purpose. You can also lose perspective and slip
into obsessing over tiny things because fewer connections are being made in your
brain.
To
reduce arousal it is good to reduce the speed of information flowing through
your mind. Make notes to get your
thoughts ‘out of your mind’. This allows
you to see them in a different perspective.
Another useful strategy to take the pressure off your delicate
prefrontal cortex is to activate other larger parts of the brain. For example taking a few deep breaths to
activate your parasympathetic system and focussing your attention on the sounds
around you to activate more of your senses.
When over-aroused it is also very beneficial to go for a walk, this
activates the motor cortex and increases the flow of oxygen and glucose to your
brain.
Unique
responses
We
are all unique and different, and our responses to stress vary
significantly. I recently gave a
presentation to the London Branch of the CIPD and really enjoyed setting the
scene, providing food for thought, provoking discussions and interacting with
the audience. However, giving a
presentation to a large audience of peers strikes fear into the heart of many
people, making them inarticulate and unable to think straight. On the other hand I would probably get
totally stressed serving a very busy crowd in a popular bar; having to juggle
and memorise numerous orders while taking money and dancing around my
colleagues! I’m always impressed with
Bar Tenders who can do all of that with a calm smile and genuinely cheerful
greeting, even towards the end of a night.
Our
response to stress is based on many things like experience, training and
according to Amy Arnsten, gender. Men
have a tendency to wait until the last minute to do something. When a deadline is still a while away there
is not enough stimulation or ‘urgency’ to focus their attention. It seems that Estrogen promotes the stress
response and this means that women have a tendency to get things done well in
advance because they want to avoid the pressure and increased arousal of an
impending deadline. Men tend to wait
until the last minute so they have enough norepinephrine and dopamine to focus
on the task.
Finding the
Sweet Spot
Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi the author of Flow: the
psychology of optional experience did extensive studies on what makes
people happy and his conclusions match the findings of Neuroscientists. If arousal is too low performance is low but
when it gets too high performance declines so there is a ‘sweet spot’ where you
have just the right levels of stress to make you alert and interested. Csikszentmihalyi discovered that the happiest
people were able to maintain a balance between seeking the right levels of
challenge and developing the right levels of skill to manage them. This requires a growth mind-set and a willingness to
continuously lean out of your comfort zone into the learning zone.
Dr.
Martin Seligman, the founder of the field of positive psychology thinks that
Flow is the most important driver of human happiness – more important than
money or any hedonistic happiness we get from a good meal or fine wine.
5 Tips for getting
it just right
With
an understanding of the above it is easier to know how to manage your brain and
achieve optimal performance. However, the
key to optimal performance is increasing awareness of how you are feeling
moment to moment and noticing when to take the action required to manage your
brain. Here are some tips to consider:
1. Practice being aware of your levels of
alertness throughout the day, notice when you have natural peaks and troughs. Use these for different types of work,
keeping your most demanding tasks for the times when you are naturally more
alert.
2. Boost your norepinephrine (adrenalin) when
needed by visualising a mild fear. For
example focussing on an important deadline and the consequences of missing it.
3. Boost your dopamine levels when needed by
introducing novelty. For example
changing perspective, using a humorous approach or expecting something
positive.
4. Bring your dopamine or adrenaline levels down
by activating other parts of the brain and giving the prefrontal cortex a
rest. For example by going for a walk,
focussing on your breathing or your direct experience like the sounds around
you or the sensations in your body.
5. Seek to balance the level of challenge you
have and the skills you need to develop in order to manage them
effectively. Develop a growth mind-set
and continuously lean out of your comfort zone into the learning zone.
Like
everything in life achieving optimum performance takes effort, learning new
things and most importantly applying them.
It is one thing to know something and a completely different thing to
apply what you know consistently. This
may seem obvious but just look at any smoker.
They know it will eventually destroy their quality of life and even
shorten their life but they choose to ignore that information. Neuroscientists are now giving us a detailed
‘user manual’ for our brain and achieving our optimum levels of performance. Ultimately a happier life depends on your ability
to understand your brain so you can learn how to use and manage it. Do let me know how you get on.
With best regards
David Klaasen
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