So, ever feel like the way you're working is slowly grinding you down into a state of quote, nervous exhaustion?
That same feelings physician noticed in workers over a century ago and termed that phrase before we became a society of so many knowledge workers, chained to devices, and endless digital inputs.
It's only gotten worse since then, and we have new words for it, burnout, overwhelm, wrecked even.
Well, my guest today has done a deep -dive into the science of how our brains actually work best. And what she discovered pretty much dismantles the industrial age approach most of us cling to in our workplaces and our lives.
Even when we're in control of our own schedules and maybe even work for ourselves.
Yes, it turns out we do this to ourselves often.
I'm raising my hand here.
Dr. Mithu Snaroni, a neuroscience researcher and ophthalmic surgeon, reveals revolutionary insights from her book, hyper efficient, optimize your brain to transform the way you work.
And in our conversation, she maps out a fundamentally different approach and one that aligns with our intrinsic rhythms of creativity and motivation and focus.
It's an approach that can transform our experience of work from one of grinding distress into a state of what she calls effortless effort.
We explore things like why the nine to five goes against how our brains function, and how simple factors like the wrong kind of light exposure can disrupt more of your core cognitive abilities.
And we unpack our three -step framework to not just avoid burnout, but to truly thrive.
Ideas that can reawaken your curiosity, tap into unseen well springs of energy, and allow you to create your best work while feeling fully alive and in turn your best life.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.
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So you know that moment when someone asks, how are you and you should kind of automatically respond, good, without even thinking about it?
I started wondering, what if we could actually mean it when we say, we're good?
That's one of the things that drew me to Headspace.
So Headspace is this app that helps me and a hundred million people with their mental health and wellbeing with guided meditations and mindfulness practices and breathing and calming exercises and so much more.
I am reducing stress, boosting my mood, and sleeping better.
The other night I listened to their night town sleepcast that had me drifting off literally, I felt like my eyes closed when I was just asleep.
And I literally just finished a 7 minute mid -day check -in meditation, which was just such a great reset for me.
So whether you're dealing with stress looking to improve your sleep or just wanting to feel more centered, headspace meets you exactly where you are.
Their quick on -the -go sessions help shift your mindset in just minutes.
Feel good and mean it when you say it.
For a limited time, get headspace free for 60 days.
Go to headspace .com slash good life 60.
That's headspace .com slash good life 60 to unlock all of headspace free for 60 days headspace .com slash good life 60 or click the link the show notes.
Good Life Project is sponsored by Wonderful Pistachios.
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Fascinated by the work that you've been doing, fascinated by the evolution of the work that you've been doing as well, and your sort of like recent deep dive into the world of productivity and efficiency.
And have a big curiosity around this work.
If I were to ask you what is the single biggest problem that your work on hyperefficiency solves or speaks to, how would you answer?
I would say the way we work needs to change, and it is alone, responsible for all the downstream effects of stress, burnout, just simply not enjoying work, dropping out rates.
And the system of work that we currently have is adapted or engineered to serve a way of working that involves manual work, that involves muscle work.
that involves an emphasis on quantity rather than quality.
Right now, the world is changing, the work landscape is changing, we are pivoting to needing to work to produce quality rather than quantity because machines are going to be doing, if not already, the quantity aspect of work.
We are now becoming the thinking workforce, the real brain capital in the economy.
And in order to be able to do that at our fullest potential, we need to radically rethink the way we work.
Hmm. What is the pain that this is causing us?
So, if we accept the fact that the way that we've been working probably never was working, but today it really isn't working.
How is this showing up?
How is this actually manifesting in pain, in terms of the work that we're creating, the things you want to put into the world, but also just on a personal level?
how's this affecting us?
So it really started at the, it started being described in the modern era around about the 19th century, middle 19th century when the industrial revolution was in place or was happening, and many people started working in offices.
And many American physicians actually described this as, and one in particular, George Miller Beard, as a disease of nervous exhaustion, which he referred to as neurasthenia and if we fast forward a hundred years and more very gradually the word stress the word burnout have been growing as cited issues in the workplace and have been increasingly recognised as leading to, as causing, work absence, sickness, low productivity.
In parallel with that the way we work is addressing new demands.
So as technology has improved and grown cheaper, companies are globalized, the boundaries between work and rest to work and home have become blurred.
Long before Covid, so Covid accelerated, even before Covid, the globalized way of working has caused us to adapt to working hours which are outside our time zones.
I was living in Hong Kong for a long time and people regularly kept New York time, they worked according to New York markets when in fact we were 12 hours on the other side of the world as an example.
So this need to synchronise work hours globally and work faster because of technology, because business happens at a faster rate, so synchronisation of the way we work, synchronisation of time, massive acceleration of time these are some factors that have been changing the burden of work and while we've seen these factors at play we have been talking about stress and burnout and ways to improve worker mental health in parallel and really both of these things Those converge on one point, which is the pattern of work that we do is extremely efficient or productive for muscle but not for the mind.
When you're working with the mind, you have to work using a very different template.
And had we recognised that back in the middle of the 1950s, when this huge transition to knowledge work first occurred, I think we could have reduced this burden by quite a lot.
That phrase, nervous exhaustion, as you described, which came into existence, it sounds like, well over a century ago, if you use that phrase right now and you talk to so many different people and you said, do you have any experience of nervous exhaustion?
I bet so many people would be like, Oh, yes, like this is you've just described my persistent state not just in work, but in life these days.
It's so interesting that that language, literally a century later is still so profoundly relevant.
Exactly. And it's a shame that we ignored it simply because back then we didn't have we are doing now.
I mean along with this phenomenon we've also technology has also helped actually paradoxically because technology has allowed the advent of various types of gadgets and improvements in measuring different aspects of our physiology for instance HRV measurements for instance being able to correlate HRV and measure the autonomic nervous system in other ways, also better diagnostic testing of markers, of excessive stress and the kind of connection that we're now discovering between heart health and brain health stretching even to gut health and brain health and heart health.
So technology has also enabled science to really reveal the underlying framework Behind these these conditions and behind this so -called nervous exhaustion So it's been a friend and an enemy if you like but you're right nervous exhaustion is Something we are now returning to Having sort of ignored it or forgotten about it or just largely just Side -stepped it for the best part of the last hundred and fifty years or so.
No, I mean it is so interesting right how Technology has given and taken simultaneously.
It's allowed us to flatten the world to feel like we can connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Which, in certain ways, is just a great blessing.
And at the same time, if we feel obligated to connect with everyone all the time, in all contexts, it's deeply stifling and alarming.
It doesn't let us have any kind of office switch. That nervous exhaustion, if you think in the context of the nervous system.
It basically just keeps it jacked 24 -7.
But also the point that you made, so much of that same technology is also allowing us to now measure and see the results of it, how it's actually landing within our physiology and psychology, but it seems like the big gap is, okay, so what do we do about this?
Right, exactly. So the first thing to be aware of is the fact that the way we work the traditional nine to five hours were really extremely efficient for producing goods and hence making profit and hence really boosting the economy of the world even but definitely of the countries that went through that system.
Back when the industrial revolution happened we know about the assembly lines and what they did to the Ford Model T and then eventually the car industry and eventually that assembly line template filtered into pretty much every aspect of our lives.
It massively exaggerated production in time and in space and it was a very good template to use and once we had that for manufacturing cars we actually started using the same template in pretty much all aspects of our existence.
So recently, even now, when you go to a hospital, when you go to a clinic, patients are given the same number of minutes or allocated the same number of minutes as if they passed by the clinician like in a sendy line.
Children go to school and they're taught subjects one after another without...
well there are pauses but they're not hugely significant pauses.
And that happens regularly throughout the day.
So this template of maximising perceived output by doing things in this extremely efficient, supposedly efficient way was one that was adopted widely.
And when in the 1950s, we shifted to a large degree from manual labour, so non agricultural work shifted from manual labor to mental labor.
When we started using the term knowledge work, that sort of era, we changed what we did, but we didn't really change how we did it.
So rather than clock in in the morning using a, you know, a factory clocking in system, we were present at work and that evolved to, we logged in, in the morning.
And until recently we log out in evening and it's traditional to take a lunch time break for lunch just as we used to do in the factories in assembly line style production methods.
Now the problem is, answering your question of what we can what can we do about it is we have grown to learn that the brain operates very differently from muscle and here are a couple of examples so with muscle so with any kind of manual labour, first of all you feel tired and you can tell when your muscle is aching, when your joints are aching and then you stop and take a break and in manual workplaces around the world such as construction sites, building sites and so on, there are laws about how heavy the object is that you're allowed to lift so the maximum kind of lifting weight for human health.
There are laws about how long you should be doing physical hard labour before you need a break.
And one of the reasons we have these laws is because these are things that are quite visible.
You perspire, you grow red, your limbs start aching, but when it comes to mental work, when you're working the same way with your brain, you don't have these laws.
There is no law on cognitive lifting, on mental heavy lifting.
There is no law on you can work only so many hours.
There's no consistent law, that is to say, only so many hours of doing any kind of mental work before your cognitive resources start waning and you start being affected.
But again, thankfully, because of technology, we are now realising what happens inside the brain when the brain is working.
And so we are now figuring out what sort of signature things like mental fatigue present us with.
And so the brain stops working when it rests, we all know that.
But the mind, unlike the muscle, rests, or must rest, while it works, and it works while it rests.
So that's one of the very potent differences between the mind and the muscle.
So if you take muscle, and you just make it work, you know it's working while you're making your hands move or while you're doing something physical.
And you know that in order to rest, you can just stop.
But that's not how the mind works.
If you put the mind through this nine to or actually for what for most of us is now 9 to 8 or longer, treadmill of work, your mind doesn't just stop when you stop it depends on its mental state.
It could be thinking about work, it could be so exhausted that it cannot fall asleep afterwards you know, too exhausted too wired to fall asleep.
So all of these things are really striking differences between the brain and muscle.
Another quite striking thing about the mind while it works is, if you look inside the brain and some great research coming first from Singapore and now from elsewhere confirms this, is if you look inside the brain and you look at the brain's what we call functional connectivity which means that you have these hardwired wiring inside the brain which are like highways and roads which are set in stone and then you have the traffic in your brain that can choose to go on certain highways depending on what the traffic is like.
So the information that's passing around your brain uses the most efficient pathways.
And what we know and what these studies coming from Singapore show is that if you look inside the brain of someone working really intensely on something, so applying sustained attention, then after pretty short time as short as 20 minutes and possibly even much much shorter, as short as five minutes even, depending on the intensity of work you're doing.
The route that information takes as it travels around your brain actually starts to grow less and less efficient, which means that the effort you are required to apply, so the way the work starts feeling harder, the more tired you become, That effort is almost like a compensation to overcome the inefficient way in which your brain is processing information so your brain literally grows less efficient the longer you work and this pace or this rate of efficiency decay depends on the load you are working with and that is of course specific to you, so depending on how good you are with certain things,
how easily your work is coming to you and so on.
But the bottom line is working in a sustained way across the day like we do for a large part of that period your brain is actually working in efficiently and there is no clear sign that it is doing so other than subtle signs like you might feel bored, you might start feeling more distracted, the same work you're doing might feel slightly harder to do.
But since these are not obvious signs, we tend to ignore them and the casualty is, first of all, we feel more and more tired, but also the output that you're producing is substantially worse.
You know, I posted a study on the fact that there are now AI agents who are able to perform tests of human fluid intelligence better than humans and this is as a result of supervised learning not unsupervised learning.
So they have to be trained, of course, unlike humans.
But you know, some of these tests that AI systems are being able to do successfully, as well as if not better than humans, they are, you know, these kind of little mental quizzes of, you know, find the missing figure or choose what goes here if this is the pattern in these six matrices and so on.
And these are kind of tests of fluid intelligence.
So you need to be mentally sharp in order to be able to do them.
So this aspect of mental sharpness and mental clarity decays really quickly with continuous work.
You can still work in an office.
You can produce heaps and heaps of quantity, you can write a hundred emails or, you know, a hundred suboptimal reports.
You can even produce a thousand ideas.
But in order to produce that one idea, you need to work when your brain is most efficient.
And so prolonged work, it works against your ability to produce good quality work, which today is probably the most important thing for knowledge workers to be focusing on.
And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.
Good Light Project is sponsored by Headspace.
So you know that moment when someone asks, how are you, and you just kind of automatically respond, good, without even thinking about it, I started wondering, what if we could actually mean it when we say we're good?
That's one of the things that drew me to Headspace.
So Headspace is this app that helps me and a hundred million people with their mental health and well -being with guided meditations and mindfulness practices and breathing and calming exercises and so much more.
I am reducing stress, boosting my mood, and sleeping better.
The other night, I listened to their Night Town sleep cast that had me drifting off literally.
I felt like my eyes closed and I was just asleep and I literally just finished a seven minute midday check -in meditation which was just such a great reset for me.
So whether you're dealing with stress, looking to improve your sleep, or just wanting to feel more centered, Headspace meets you exactly where you are.
Their quick on the go sessions help shift your mindset in just minutes.
Feel good and mean it when you say it.
For a limited time, get Headspace free for 60 days.
Go to Headspace .com slash goodlife60, that's H -E -A -D -S -P -A -C -E dot com slash goodlife60 to unlock all of Headspace free for 60 days.
Headspace .com slash good life 60 or click the link in the show notes.
Good Life Project is sponsored by ProLon.
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So The general container that constraints the rules of pretty much every work environment these days, especially in knowledge, work oriented work, thought based work is largely a carryover from physical labor based work, where it made some sense and then environment and where you had both natural triggers, your body just gets tired, you have to rest it, you're physically exhausted, you can't keep going.
And then you had legal structures that came in and said, in order for safety to prevail, you actually must rest in these different ways so that you can recharge because not only are you being inefficient but you're risking harm, danger to yourself and to others.
That sort of like all the assumptions of that workplace, the nine to five, the we'll just know when we're tired and take breaks and the existence of illegal structure That gets ported over to the world of knowledge work.
But the legal structures that say, you have to take these breaks, they're not there.
The physical triggers that we would normally have, our bodies just exhausted, my muscles literally can't contract anymore.
We don't get those same things when it's largely knowledge work, when we're thinking about things, so we get dropped into an environment where we're sort of like expected to work in the same way, but our brains don't function that way.
And effectively, we're setting our brains up to work against themselves because we don't have the built -in breaks.
We don't have the ways to observe ourselves and really understand and know when we're not functioning well anymore.
And in fact, if we feel like, oh, I'm tired, I'm exhausted, this is hard, but I'm on deadline to have to deliver the thing, I guess I just need to work harder.
It sounds like what you're saying is that's actually making the problem worse, not better.
Did I kind of get that right?
MS That's right. I mean, very basically, if you think about the brain as working in two modes, so the quantity producing mode, which required a very low level of complex thinking of idea generation of mental gymnastics.
That's a low that's the kind of the quantity focused mode.
So for instance, you can, you can reply to pretty much every email in your inbox, in some form after two hours of sleep the night before.
Okay, so you can reply, but if you've had two hours of sleep the night before what you're writing is not going to be of the best quality so if you are given an article to write, if you're a journalist or writer you have to submit let's say five thousand words by five o 'clock and you've started at nine in the morning and you've just had two hours of sleep the night before you can write something that amounts to that number of words but what you write is probably going to make very little sense and will not be original, will not be your best work and you might even have to labour for eight hours
to get those 5 ,000 words or 10 ,000 words out whereas if you had a fresh night of - a really good night of sleep and you're fresh in the morning and you know, you're not otherwise tired, you're not worried about anything you've had a good morning so far and you sit at your desk, you might be able to reel out those 5 ,000 words in a couple of hours and not only that but what you produce will be way more original and of better quality than an AI bot, than a chat GPT, or whatever the latest version is.
But when you're doing that kind of work your brain is not focused on quantity, it's focused on quality.
So if you want to produce quantitatively significant work, so read out lots of letters in the old days, lots of reports, file information, even do PowerPoint slides.
Something like that, then you can still do that in a sleep deprived state.
It's almost like the assembly line version of knowledge work.
CT This is exactly right, and actually that's the other aspect to it.
So, since around the mid 1950s, 1957, the majority of knowledge work, what we call knowledge work, has involved data gathering, data processing, data presenting.
So, if you imagine every organization as a pyramid, most layers of the pyramid were just doing these three things.
If you replace cars with data, and hands with minds, that's what we were doing, and it's only the tip of the pyramid at the top, the executive kind of peak.
People in that segment alone took the decision, solved the big problems, came up with the innovative ideas, and everyone else just circulated data, and back when technology was slightly slower, it's an understatement, it was much more important to gather data to process data and to present information than anything else for everyone else in the pyramid especially for the lowest layers of the pyramid.
Because that decided the bottom line that significantly influenced whether your product was going to be better than someone else's, you know, progress, competition, all of these things.
But now that we have AI assistants in pretty much every sector of the workplace now from medicine to law, to accountancy, to management, so every aspect of the knowledge workplace and why stop there?
Pilots flying planes.
Every aspect of pretty much every workplace now involves some kind of AI assistance and this means that the basic work of data gathering, data processing, data presenting, even making PowerPoint presentations.
This kind of work doesn't need to be done by junior -level members of the pyramid.
In fact, AI does it better and faster and more powerfully, so everyone in every layer of that organizational pyramid now has to act like the people at the top of the pyramid did 20 years ago.
So now everyone has an AI tool to do this quantitative work for them, but they have to decide how to make a presentation that no one else can make.
They have to come up with innovative ideas and innovative ways to use their AI tool in a way that takes the organization forward. So, I mean, yet another angle to this is that right now, the US economy, industrial growth, that is to say, is actually more driven by ideas.
So, by software, by innovation, and by different aspects of these things, by design than by actual product manufacturing, which says so much about where we've come which means that the ideas have much more weight than the actual product and any machine can make the product and if you extrapolate this to the brain and you look at these two aspects of the brain quality and quantity the quantity aspect is now being taken over by AI so the the biggest role of the brain in the workplace is generating the thought process, generating the planning, generating the ideas, and that's where working differently
comes in. Yeah, and if we're working against ourselves, then we shut down our capacity to do that effectively, and also just on a personal level, we add suffering to our own experience of work that doesn't need to be there.
And that ripples out into our physical health, our mental health, our relationships, our life.
It is such an interesting moment to be having in this conversation as you described, I recently heard a conversation between somebody who was a head of innovation for Adobe, like, this suite of software products.
I guess now it's SAS, where so many of the world's creatives, and agencies, and producers have used these tools for years to produce almost everything and anything that we see out there.
And he was saying, there's now so much AI built into their tools themselves, that the job of all these people is changing, you used to go to the tool as a source to produce the idea that was in your head.
Now the tool kind of does all that itself.
And the plus and the minus of that is, if you're the type of person where you really just wanted to do the data gathering, the basic processing, the basic production, this is going to be an interesting moment for you.
But if you're the type of person that actually says, But what if I could spend more time in the land of ideas, and innovation, and taking things to a place where they don't exist right now.
This is such an incredible moment, if also we understand how to treat our brains properly along the way and actually step into that mode of work where we can do it in a healthy way.
And I want to jump into some of the specific ideas that you offer.
But before we get there, there's something that's sitting on my mind that I really want to tease out with you a little bit, two domains where the early days of work tend to be pretty brutal are also two incredibly high stakes domains of work.
One of them is medicine, where I know you have that background.
The other one is the world of startups, very different worlds, but the early training for physicians, even though there's now all sorts of regulations, at least in the U .S. about what you quote, are and aren't allowed to do, whether those are by -to -by or not, a completely different conversation, but you know, classically the training is brutal.
It is relentlessly long hours, life and death stakes, incredibly fast pace, taking terrible care of yourself.
Oftentimes barely any sleep.
I don't have to explain that.
I'm sure you've lived your version of this, you know, like way back when startup life is similar in a lot of different ways, but the stakes aren't life or death.
They're often, you know, like game -changing innovation and often very large amounts of other people's money.
And yet these are two domains where the expectation is people are going to be able to make decisions and create outcomes that are as close to perfect and world changing and you're like, when the stakes are on the line as you could ever want and expect someone to make, how do we square this?
How do we square that environment with the expectation of what somebody is supposed to be able to deliver.
So a couple of things.
So we'll come to medical life last, because that's where, yeah, I can bore you with my own experience, but startups are, they're such an important area to focus on.
And I would say the following.
So the difference between medicine and startups, the biggest difference from my perception is that yes you want to enter medicine because you have some kind of an inner passion inner calling inner interest that leads you to medicine but ultimately when you're doing your training which lasts a very long time here in the UK you completely you're doing it on a day -to -day basis you lose the fact the idea that oh you always wanted to do this but because you are not responding to one core idea, you're responding to the whole system.
Now, when it comes to a start -up usually it happens in phases.
So, the start -up begins, especially the most gruelling part, with an idea.
You don't go to work every day in an office and think OK, I'm working towards a start -up.
You first have the idea, and then you go about it, so you have some kind of a personal vision that drives you to it and that vision that initial vision is really really important, that the passion that drives you towards that, the fact that you recognise it, you visualize it, you picture the end product which is consistent through your journey, so that vision is really important.
The second thing to remember with startups is the kind of person who leads a startup, so not works for it eventually, not someone who joins the team of a startup that that has already hatched but the person who actually creates a seed for the startup.
Usually people often tend to have a certain type of personality and that personality is a very high degree of uncertainty tolerance.
So if you're naturally a very very anxious person, you will not be driven to the startup journey if you're something else at least you won't be driven alone to the startup startup journey very easily so it usually it needs a certain type of kind of mental frame of of personality and usually people have a slightly better tolerance of uncertainty now if you put those two together with another third thing which is the fact that the startup journey happens in phases so as i said you first have the idea and then you start realizing the idea so putting it into concrete form.
Now the idea stage of the startup usually happens in a slightly less threatening and less uncertain setting.
The idea might not take complete shape at that stage but you have the idea in the first place usually when you're doing something else because you haven't begun your start up yet, okay?
And that idea generation bit is absolutely critical and pivotal to your startup journey because you have that as your guiding star, as your North Star to anchor on, as you carry on.
Beyond that, you're going to need fixes.
You will need adjustments.
You need to adjust your journey but the original idea had to be hatched before you began your journey and so when you are going about it in in my book I describe how certain ways of working can allow you for instance to work for longer periods throughout the day than the standard assembly line way of work so for instance we are better at innovative thinking and creative thinking first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening that's what our brain's physiology optimizes us for we are better at doing really focused work in the middle of the morning and up until lunchtime and in the middle
of the afternoon up until early evening again this is how our brain's rhythm works so anchoring onto this way of working and changing the pattern from consistent pace, the same kind of work and the same work matter throughout the day, changing from that to working in what I describe as rhythms, allows you to actually work for long hours across the day and keep your mind in an optimal state to do the work you're doing as best you can and a startup founder needs that hard work.
They cannot just take a day off, work from home or you know take long breaks.
So once you have the idea, fueling that sort of way of working allows you to be very productive across an entire day and then once the implementation stage has has gone through, I mean while you're going through it, you get all the you know the usual barriers, you get failures of expectations, you get things that suddenly emerge barriers that suddenly emerge out of nowhere and there you need problem solving you need to sit back and solve problems you need self -control to keep your eye on the ball so all of those things again although they are there they still don't push you away from your that original
big idea that's still up there as your north star but in order to navigate this again a different way of working this rhythmic way of working can be very helpful And then of course, finally, you know that there is an end, and startup founders everywhere, this journey is grueling, but they visualize the end, and they know the end will happen, and then it does.
And then once it does, it creates a new sort of standard, a new baseline for expectation, for uncertainty tolerance, for taking that journey all over again.
So that is sort of how startups navigate, and also during that journey the really important thing is to keep your brain in an optimal state to make the best possible decisions as you say and to figure out a way to go around the wall instead of just punching your way through it and again the way you work can shift your brain into very distinct states that are optimal for all of these things again i describe this in my book But things like waking up, you know, extremely early in the morning actually puts you in the zone of innovative ideas.
Playing around with your physiology when you're experiencing a road block can help you shift your brain into the right state, can, in effect, effectively change gears, change your brain's gears.
And, you know, one way to conceptualize this is your brain is your brain has a network which really works a little bit like a gearbox, and you can shift your brain's gears to shift into different mental states.
So this is another strategy to use during that journey, to reduce your reactivity to uncertainty and keep you in what I call gear two, which is an optimal mental state for this type of problem solving, and innovative work.
And then finally you get to your end, and then you do it all over again.
So, and another thing to just bring into it is this idea of intrinsic motivation, which is a technical term, but essentially just means that you can do really hard work, really tough work and keep going for really long hours, day after day, week after week, month Month after month, if you are able to get into a mental state by choosing what you're doing, in a way, by kind of figuring out when you're doing what you're doing, and by tweaking your goal, adjusting your goal, which is ideal in the case of a startup, so that the process of working feels so pleasurable that it creates almost an energy,
it creates rocket fuel inside you to propel you forwards and make you want to keep going even if the journey is tough, even if you're tired, even if the goal you are looking towards sometimes looks hazy, and this idea of, and that's separate to extrinsic motivation which is a standard motivation in any workplace, so you'll pay your salary.
You know your salary at the end, the promise of the job you have, the promise of career progression.
These are standard external motivations, which salaried jobs have. But when you're doing a startup, ideally you want to be so energized by the idea of your of your startup.
That just progressing towards it creates a sort momentum that keeps you going and you know as an aside if you look at the brain circuits the circuit for alertness for energizing your brain which I describe I call it the lcne network or the blue dot network this circuit is very closely tied to the circuit of motivation so when you're motivated for something and you will know this from your day -to -day life if you're working on something really late in the day, but you're really motivated by it, you suddenly derive energy from somewhere, even though you hypothetically, theoretically, should not have that energy
because you're sleep -deprived, you've been working for 14 hours, but suddenly you just have this energy.
So the motivation circuits release energy, and I'm speaking metaphorically of course, but they release a sort of a rocket fuel inside your brain that allows you to do...
to carry on working for long hours.
And many startup founders would tap into this source of mental energy to stay at their optimal.
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We've been referencing this in the context of a startup but everything you're saying, really, you can think about any person who's listening to this and they think about their work.
They can think about, okay, what are the expectations about my work hours?
Do the things that I'm doing match up with the natural rhythms?
where my brain is functionally working at its best or in the way that would align best with the type of task or project that I'm working on.
Like we can all think about that.
We can think about, is there intrinsic motivation here?
You know, like is the thing that I'm doing, does it matter to me or does it just matter to somebody else or some other project where I'm not really invested?
I don't particularly care in the outcome, but I know it's a part of what's expected from me, I'm going to check the box and do it because what you're saying is that activates, you know, a part of our brains in a way where it can either, you know, not add anything energetically to the ecosystem or all of a sudden when, in theory, our brain should be pretty drained.
It will, you know, give us energy.
You know, it's almost like, you know, it's, it's unlocking a wellspring of something we didn't know we had in there.
And I know so many people who've experience this, where they have a work a day job, where it's quite, it's fine, it's okay.
It's not great, but it's not terrible.
It takes care of letting them honor their values.
Maybe they have a really strong value around financial security, providing for family, and they appreciate that.
They don't have any intention of leaving it, but then they go home at night, and in theory, their brain should be pretty exhausted.
You know, they've worked hard. They've worked inefficiently and ineffectively.
They're not honoring their natural rhythms, And yet they go home and then there's this passion project that they're working on.
And all of a sudden they find themselves lit up and they can do the six to 10 at night when in theory the brain shouldn't really be primed for that, but there's something about that intrinsic connection with what they're doing that lets them say, oh, I am so energized by that.
I'm actually having trouble falling asleep after doing it.
So this is really applicable to anybody you know, in the context of any work that they're doing.
One big question that really jumps out at me is you describe especially understanding what are these rhythms that we have within us, you described how certain times of day tend to be more tied to different types of thinking.
And you describe them as, you know, like, we have these windows in the morning, and then later on the day, and then the midday.
How universal is that, like, is this true for everybody?
Or do We actually all have our own version of that, and if so, how do we determine what our rhythms are so that we can sync up the type of work that we're doing with our brain being able to do it optimally and us just feeling good while we're doing it?
So yes, we think most of us have this rhythm.
If you return to the idea of circadian rhythms, which most of us have heard of by now, the idea that we have this body clock, we synchronise it by looking at light in the morning and we fall asleep at a certain time every day because our body clock has adjusted to that.
So we have this circadian rhythm, now pretty much everything inside our physiology actually follows a kind of clock the clock's kind of uncontrolled span can vary so even our circadian rhythm is actually longer than 24 hours but we keep it at 24 hours by experience, because of the effect of the sun of the solar cycle.
So, in this way, different parts of our body, even different neural networks have their own clocks.
So, a liver has a clock, a liver has lots of clocks, our heart has lots of clocks, different regions in the brain have lots of clocks.
The reward circuit, the dopamine circuit, is actually responsible for our sense of time in many ways.
Coming back to whether we all have the same clock and what this rhythm actually looks like.
So one of the networks in the brain is based on the neurotransmitter stroke neuromodulator norepinephrine, and the circuit begins in a little area of the brain called the blue literally it's called the locus coeruleus in Latin it's blue because it contains norepinephrine or noradrenaline if you're in this side of the Atlantic and norepinephrine is really the chemical that causes your brain to wake up and we know this because when you're doing something when you're working out at the gym or running away from danger we talk about adrenaline running through the veins so the brain's equivalent of that is noradrenaline
or norepinephrine Now this norepinephrine circuit has a cycle so it increases its activity so the release of norepinephrine rises first thing in the morning from when you wake up across the day with a little bit of a dip around lunchtime and then it carries on staying high and then it declines again in the evening and there are certain things that it correlates with So it correlates with the way that the the light around you, so your ambient daylight shifts so when you first wake up in the morning the activity in this network is pretty low, very soft because you know you're in that hazy just -woken
-up state and I'm talking about very early in the morning so you say six or whenever it is you wake up and then at that time if you living against certain parts of the world this won't work on the North Pole.
When day first breaks light is redshifted.
We know because sunrises look red orange or very crimson orange and when daylight is red shifted we are also slightly sort of gently awake.
We're not you know really really brightly awake you know we're not in that mental state we are in after four cups of coffee in the middle of the morning, so that sort of gentle awakening state is really good for creativity because your brain is not in that highly focused kind of anchored state, it's in that state where your mind is drifting your thoughts are drifting across different ideas and you can sample things without committing to them and then as the day continues and the sun rises higher, daylight actually shifts towards a bluer end of the spectrum.
That's when daylight looks white.
And around about that time, again, depending on where you are on the equator, the brain's noradrenaline network, or norepinephrine, LC network, that network also continues to go more and more active to the point where you're naturally in a state of being able to focus, being able to really kind of look at your computer screen and understand the PDF that you're reading that sort of state you enter into that around about mid -morning and you carry on like that until around lunchtime when there's something called a post -lunch dip which is a phenomenon where you feel more inclined to sleep so you're
feeling quite inclined to sleep twice a day every 12 hours and then when that wears off around the middle of the afternoon your brain is back into the state of alertness and that cycle that sort of pattern mirrors itself in the evening so in the evening as the sun sets again there's a red shift in light and late in the evening is again when you enter this zone of creativity.
Now of course we all live in artificial light, many of to hardly see a sunset or sunrise so it's very likely that these patterns, or it's very possible that these patterns were kind of embedded into us when we were evolving in more natural surroundings and this may be why these things correlate, but modern medicine, sort of testing of norepinephrine levels they were first done in monkeys back you know around 100 years ago, a little under 100 years ago, these show that norepinephrine levels in the brain follow this kind of cycle.
And we also know that now looking at behavioral studies there are peaks of creativity and creativity peaks off -peak.
In other words, when you're not at work, that's when creativity seems to peak.
And focused work, focused attention also peaks in these time zones.
But taking this just one step further attention itself seems to have a cycle and the cycle means that attention waxes and wanes so it it's there and then it kind of recedes a little bit every 90 or so minutes.
Now it varies in some people and in some instances it can be 60 minutes, in others it's been measured to be around 100 minutes, but 90 minutes is sort of an average ballpark.
So if you do something that requires you to keep your attention focused for longer than 90 minutes, you are quite literally working against your own attentional rhythm and it's no coincidence that most films are 90 minutes long that many soccer matches are 90 minutes long in many countries and you can go on and on like that.
So we have these rhythms embedded in our brains.
They do vary slightly from one person to another in terms of the exact timing.
It also will are varied in terms of your geographic location, but by and large, we all have them and we can all tap into them.
So my curiosity here then is if so much of this is triggered to our environment and the light, the nature of light around us, how is living, not just in a world of internal light, but devices, is that hijacking these rhythms in a meaningful way?
Is it changing them?
Well, it is very likely to be because blue light and there's a paper I quote in my book, blue light puts you, it increases your alertness.
So for instance, if you are doing shift work at night and you really need to pay attention, then having ambient, having more blue light in the ambient lighting actually raises your alertness level.
Similarly, if you want to into a more creative setting, there is data that suggests that making the light around you more redshifted, so warmer puts you in a creative state of mind.
And coming back to your question, so part of my PhD in neurophthalmology involved looking at peopleometry, and I was doing this at a very exciting time when the melanopsin containing ganglion cells had recently been discovered.
These are special cells in the back of the eye that do not process visual information, they simply calculate and measure the light around you, the ambient light around you and they relay this information into the clock in your brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus and they set the time and these cells, the pigment in these cells, we're now discovering more and more since I did that research work but the the pigment in these cells respond to around 479 nanometers of light wavelength so this is at the peak blue end of the spectrum.
They also respond to bright light through your cones so bright light and blue light necessarily change your brain's perception of whether it is daytime or not and the time of day and not.
So, and we know of course that devices have blue LED lights.
So putting two and two together, data around this, research around this is sometimes quite difficult because it involves lifestyle observations but it's definitely very very plausible that looking at blue light is interfering with your body clock for sure.
Hmm. So if we zoom the lens out a little bit in this conversation, we say, Okay, so then again, I don't want to assume that everybody listening to this conversation is also a knowledge worker, you may be in the trades, you may work in a factory, you may work in your hands, you may be a craftsperson, maybe an artist working like very physically.
And I also don't want to in any way create a class structure between those like there is value in all work, whether you're working with your physical body, predominantly with your mind or some blend of both are going back and forth between the two.
I would actually interrupt you and say there is even greater value today, thanks to AI with working with your hands and craftsmanship, because this is something, the human element of this is something that cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence.
So I would argue and hope, of course, that this is one positive shift that AI may well bring to the world around us, because if AI takes over so much of knowledge work, we will return to valuing things made by human hands more than ever.
I hope that's right.
I feel like I see that trend coming as well.
I'm somebody who gets great joy actually working with my hands and in a physical creation process.
So, I'm trying not to project my desire for that to sort of like emerge as something that people center more and value more, but the trend does seem like, you know, it's heading in that direction.
If we think more generally about, okay, so I'm somebody who wants to be able to show up and whatever work that I do, I want to be able to create the best possible thing, outcome, deliverable, product, service, whatever it is, that I'm capable of creating both because maybe it'll help other people, it'll help me, it'll just make me feel good about myself.
And I want to feel good along the way.
Like, I want to feel psychologically and physiologically good along the way.
What are one or two of the first entry points that you might invite somebody to start thinking about re -imagining or dressing?
So I would, in a perfect world, I would start long before people enter the job world and remind everyone that the standard 9 to 5 way of working where you have one college degree, it's hit and miss whether you make it to college or not and that defines the rest of your life and you're defined by that, your job is defined by that, you follow a defined career path and that's it, you see your life ahead of you.
That sort of structure is now rapidly changing and I believe it will become extinct and instead but I think there will be greater emphasis on choosing a path, whatever that path is, with your hands, with your mind, creating, building, that you feel is a natural good fit for you, that you actually enjoy doing, and in an ideal setting, I would hope, I would wish that youngsters have the opportunity to make this choice without being burdened by societal expectations or pressure from a certain path that has been stereotypically the right one to take, but instead looking at something that's a really good
fit for you, for your skills, for your personality, something that makes you feel really good.
Because what that will do is that lets you follow and be guided by and be energized by intrinsic motivation because you will enjoy doing what you're doing just for the sake of it because it gives you pleasure.
So that's one thing.
Another thing I would say is that we need to really change this nine -to -five focus on work, and this is a separate argument from whether you want to work from home or work from office.
That's a different argument whatsoever.
What I'm describing is when you're at work in the office, rather than having a nine -to -five rigid strategy sitting at the desk in a very cramped bay with other workers on your right and left elbow to elbow noise open plan that sort of thing we need to change the entire ecosystem of that.
So for instance you know one idea is if your work is mostly creative, so for instance you might be writing at an you know might be a journalist you might be a writer you might be even uh working on the R &D section of your startup so for all of these categories I would suggest a working pattern where you start your workday very very early almost ridiculously early five thirty or six even where you have your creative your burst of creative ideas or where your mind is most fertile for receiving or generating creative and innovative ideas and then you you work early and then you just follow this rigid
nine to five or you know six to whatever pattern but instead you maybe take the period of the day when your creative skills wane, take that time a little bit lighter, so schedule in your meetings during that time and maybe even sneak in a break, a really long lunch break, have a nap and then rather than go to go home on schedule at 6 p .m or 7 p .m extend your day back into the creative window having offset so having kind of negotiated a break earlier on in the middle of the day and then do your do the rest of your workday then so instead of having this rigid pattern where you clock in clock out
work in a uniform way make this your pattern of working if you're doing creative work similarly if you're doing focused work focusing peaks in the morning and in the middle of the afternoon, so do not schedule meetings during that day, during that time of day, schedule meetings when during your creative peaks or during the most post -lunch dip and so again change the way you are working to suit this, also if you're using attention work in cycles, work in this rhythmic cycle in line with your attentional cycle, so a summary is and this is one way of looking at it if you take all the ideas from hyper
-efficient is you have to find your flame in work.
That's the first rule and that is more important today than ever before.
Whether you're doing knowledge work, whether you're doing manual work, it doesn't matter.
Finding your flame lets you enjoy the work.
And one of the ways to do it is for instance gradually improving, incremental improvement, finding a kind of a job or a startup kind of area that allows you to improve, that allows you to learn, and in a way that really energises you.
So finding your flame in whatever work you're doing will put you into the right mental state to do your best work, whatever kind of work you're doing.
Then the second rule is get in gear, and the get in gear aspect means that your brain is in certain gears for certain kinds of work.
So suit your work to the time of day.
And the third rule is run in rhythm, which is while you're working, respect the idea that there is a rhythmic aspect to your brain's physiology and work in line with this.
And of course, all of this is heavily underscored by the need for rest. need for rest and the need for sleep.
Hmm. I love that framework and that feels like a great place for us to come full circle as well.
So I'll wrap with the question I always ask in this container of Good Life Project.
If I offer the phrase, to live a good life, what comes up?
Live in line with your own compass.
So do something that gives you joy, that gives you energy, that brings good to the world, and make sure you enjoy every moment of it.
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Before you leave, if you loved this episode, you'll also love the conversation we had with Dan Pink about these scientific secrets of perfect timing for peak productivity.
You can find a link to that episode in the show notes.
This episode of Good Light Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathon Fields, Christopher Carter crafted our theme music, and special thanks to Shelley Del Bliss for her research on this episode.
And of course if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too.
If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you're still listening here.
Do me a personal favor a second favor, share it with just one person.
If you want to share it with more, that's awesome too.
But just one person even, then invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter, because that's how we all come alive together.
Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.
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