Build better brain stamina
In bookstores across the land productivity books tell us that the secret to mastering ultimate productivity is prioritisation. To an extent this makes sense. We’re shown tools such as divide your activity into quadrants, importance and time sensitivity and to fill our working day with the important and urgent things. This plan works to a degree but of course as well as leaving us with lots of things we never get round to doing, it works to eliminate downtime, to be more machine like in making every second count for something. In this episode we’ll look at brain stamina and how the productivity literature pleading for us to be more machine like, might be doing more harm than good.
From the industrial revolution to today’s digital age, man has quickly seized the advantages of machines to do things humans once did. Machines are obliging. Given little attention they will work long hours without complaint, asking for breaks or a once in a year vacation.
Despite digital advantages we recognise that humans still hold many advantages over machines yet we work alongside them and this sometimes blurs the lines. My PC for example is quite happy to remain on 24 hours a day. Me? Less so.
We are biological rather than mechanical or electronic beings. In a production line setting, we accept that whilst robots may perform tasks 24x7, human labour needs rest and cannot continue assembling parts continuously without a break. Yet research by Workthere shows the average worker in Britain now takes less than 34 minutes for lunch and well over half of workers skip their lunch break altogether.[1] Just over ten per cent of workers report feeling under pressure to skip breaks and work continuously without replenishment, in other words attempting to behave as a machine.
Let’s switch context for a moment and go outside for a run. Most of us even if we are not runners will intuitively appreciate that there’s a difference between a 5k parkrun and running a marathon. If I am attempting a 5k, I can achieve a certain pace and then I might “rest” for a few days before my next run. If I am attempting a marathon, I pace myself differently because running continuously for several hours takes its toll on the body. If I push too hard or attempt to run too fast from the outset, I risk stressing ligaments, causing an injury that can put me out of running for months.
Back to brain power. Like our ligaments, brains are part of our physiology. They will function at their best when they have a combination of nutrition, rest and properly paced activity. When we overwork, we do things that prevent our brains from performing at their best. If we eat poorly, maybe drink too much, if we work late, rise too early, don’t get enough sleep, then our brain does not have enough time to replenish energy and we certainly notice that loss of sharpness in decision making and memory. It may be harder to see stress on the brain than stress on our ligaments but the stress is there all the same.
As well as nutrition and recovery time, different workplace tasks place a different cognitive load on the brain, in other words make it work harder or at a gentler pace. Executive functions are those that allow the brain to give us creativity, decision making, working memory and emotional control. A typical meeting demands a lot from these executive functions. As brain energy depletes, we risk being unable to focus, follow directions or handle emotions terribly well without time to recover. A typical round of dealing with your inbox also places demand on your executive functions for judgement and decision making and formulating responses to the emails. A period in the day you carve out for reflection and high level planning might place a lower load on your brain.
What this means is a day that is packed with back to back meetings means you are demanding of your brain that it carries out a high level workout every hour or half an hour without time to recover. Skip lunch to cram in another meeting and you’ll see the impact on the quality of work you can achieve in the afternoon. Throwing in some caffeine can give the brain a short-term jolt into action but that extra energy still has to be recovered at some point. Although you can build stamina, you cannot defy the physiology of our make-up and eventually whilst packing in a quantity of meetings, the quality of your performance will steadily deteriorate. Your brain is not designed for back to back marathons. It is not a machine and eventually as we’re all beginning to realise, it can pick up injuries just as if not more serious than the physical ligament injuries we happily recognise in conventional exercise.
Want to create an energy boost? Here’s three things to try.
- Balance activities across your day. As you plan your day, try to look at the cognitive load of each activity and balance them throughout the day. If for example you have a big presentation to do and then an appraisal for a key member of staff that’s two heavy loaded activities so try to position them at different points of the day interspersed with an activity where the load on you is not so great.
- Build micro-breaks between high load activity. If you’re back in a physical office this might for example mean 50-minute meetings and 10 minutes to spend at the water cooler catching up with colleagues. If you’re working from home it might mean popping to the kitchen to rehydrate or grab some fruit or just stepping outside or doing a five minute mindfulness session.
- Don’t pack your breaks with other high load activity research shows that reading news websites and blogs triggers emotional reactions that form another high load on the brain so whilst it may feel like a logical thing to do during break is “catch up on the outside world” in reality your brain is working just as hard, just on another running track.
If you ever had to face the choice between more hours and more effective, I’m sure you’ll go for more effective. So give your brain a pat on the back for its already awesome athletic capability, treat it well and help it serve you with peak performance just when you need it most.
[1] Average UK worker takes just half an hour for lunch each day - Workplace Insight
