Stress + Rest = Growth and Other Confirmation Bias
Diet Book Report: Peak Performance
Optimizing your life is not complicated. It isn’t easy, either.
The best ideas are always the simplest.
I’d heard steve magness and Brad Stulberg doing promotion for Peak Performance on a few of my regular podcasts. I was interested, but once it got the Morning Shakeout stamp of approval from Mario Fraioli, it was time to dig in.
Below is my attempt to capture the passages that filled my heart with the maximum amount of confirmation bias. Thus sharing the truest truth.
Because if I believe it, and the authors agree, it must be true.
1) ‘Stress + rest = growth. This equation holds true regardless of what you’re trying to grow’
Stress + rest = growth is introduced in the context of athletic performance. The formula is then applied to intellectual and creative pursuits through countless examples and is reinforced with data from researched studies.
I have been happy to pawn off these theories as my own to my colleagues all week.
[Kidding. I always, sometimes, give credit]
2) ‘The brightest minds spend their time either pursuing their activity with ferocious intensity or engaging in complete restoration and recovery.’
The authors referenced a study by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD, who spent 50 years collecting interviews from intellectual and creative geniuses across many disciplines and found that, much like successful athletes, all top performers, regardless of field, followed essentially the same process:
- Immersion: Complete focus and engagement. (Stress)
- Incubation: A period of rest where they are not thinking about their work. (Rest)
- Insight: The emergence of new insights or ideas following their period of rest. (Growth)
In the same way you can over-tax your body by running too many miles with too much intensity, your mind can become equally fatigued which can limit the growth potential.
But to be clear, it takes all three components for a breakthrough.
I conducted a study throughout college entirely made up of the incubation stage with no immersion. That was equally as ineffective as not resting at all.
But it was a lot more fun.
3) ‘Hours 7–9 — the hours [of sleep] that the majority of us never get — are actually the most powerful.’
Unsurprisingly, one of the most important parts of the rest variable in the growth equation is sleep. And often the most overlooked.
Not prioritizing sleep is understandable. The one resource that we can never increase is time. It is easy to side-eye the 8+ hours of seemingly unproductive time spent sleeping and pillage it for an hour or two to answer emails or binge watch Netflix in the name of catching up or ‘relaxing.’
One of sleep’s foremost benefits is the role it plays in how we consolidate and store — that is, how we remember — new information.
Not all sleep is created equal, though. Most benefits occur during the REM portion of the sleep cycle which only makes up about 20–25% of our sleep.
More importantly, the proportion of REM sleep increases with each sleep cycle. And as previously stated, the most beneficial sleep occurs in hours 7–9. So if you short yourself a few hours you may be missing out on much more than you think.
4) ‘For 99 percent of us, effective multi-tasking is nothing more than effective delusional thinking. ’
Your brain can only focus on one task at a time. The most productive among us limit their distractions.
Including and especially, your smart phone.
Sadly, several times during the reading of this book and writing of this post, I instinctively grabbed my phone and opened it for absolutely no reason.
No one said this would be easy.
5) ‘You can improve performance by priming yourself into a positive mood prior to important work that involves problem solving and creative thinking.’
This was some top notch #confirmationbias.
In a study done at Northwestern University, they separated two groups based on their self-reported mood. Positive or negative.
The subjects in the positive group were significantly more likely to solve challenging intellectual problems with creative insight.
The fMRI scans showed that the brains of the participants in the positive group had increased activity in the region of the brain closely associated with decision making, problem solving and emotional control whereas the negative group show no activity in this area.
When you’re in a bad mood, or your mind isn’t at peace, it is difficult to focus on anything other than what is bothering you at that moment. Your mind isn’t free to think creatively.
Be kind to yourself and others who are going through challenging times, and recognize that disconnecting “work” from “life” is an illusion.
6) ‘Just like diseases easily spread through tight-knit groups, so does motivation.’
They referenced several case studies and data that illustrated the impact that friends and co-workers can have on your behavior. And that having a positive attitude and showing motivation can be contagious. Unfortunately, so can negativity and pessimism.
Motivation is contagious.
This isn’t to say that you are helpless in the matter. If your circle of friends or colleagues have a negative attitude, with this new knowledge, you’re able to combat and influence positively with your own contagious, positive attitude.
But be careful how long you wait to ditch the Negative Nelly’s.
‘If we are constantly working against the mindset of those who surround us, it’s only a matter of time before we too, will get dragged down.’
7) Transcend Your “Self”
Admittedly, this chapter got a bit more self-help-y than the rest of the book. But in a good way.
Their main point was, to reach your full potential, you need a purpose greater than yourself. Basically, the mom lifting a car to save her baby scenario. Otherwise, your mind will act as a central governor and limit your performance.
In a paradoxical twist, the less we think about ourselves, the better we become.
The challenge in applying this from a management perspective is figuring out how best to communicate your employee’s contribution to the larger mission of your agency and why their role is important.
They had an illustrative example related to a job that you wouldn’t traditionally think of as having high satisfaction.
Hospital janitors who cleaned bedpans and mopped floors reported higher levels of job satisfaction when their job was being framed as integral to the healing of other people. The janitors were constantly reminded that by keeping the hospital clean, they were minimizing the chance of of bacteria spreading and harming already vulnerable patients. They no longer saw their jobs as just removing vomit from the floor; they saw it as saving lives.
Some hospitals even changed job titles from Janitor to Health and Safety Team Member or Environmental Health Worker.
Wrap-Up.
The information and examples in this book are ripe for application in life, running and the work-place.
Worth revisiting, for sure.
