Peak Performance

Peak Performance shows you how to perform at your highest level by exploring the most significant factors that contribute to delivering our best work, such as stress, rest, focus, and purpose.

1. If people appear to get ahead more easily, they might be using performance-enhancing drugs, which have a high price. 2. Rest is just as beneficial for growth as stress, and, in fact, absolutely necessary. 3. Multitasking seems like it works but actually prevents peak performance.

After working 72 hours straight as an intern at Bank of America, Moritz Erhardt died. He is an extreme but, ultimately, one of many examples of how much we are pushed to overwork ourselves to compete. Burnout is real. Today, many people say they experience it frequently, if not constantly. And it’s only getting worse.

In the information age we live in, it’s easy to find resources that help us perform at peak levels. Unfortunately, however, this same connection gives us access to performance-enhancing drugs we wouldn’t otherwise have. About 30% of college students, for example, use Adderall, a drug originally designed to help people with ADHD focus. And yet, the Center For Disease Control estimates that only 6% of people actually suffer from ADHD.

While using performance-enhancing drugs is a symptom of people’s commitment to do whatever it takes to succeed, ultimately, it just leads to burnout.

However, there’s still hope for those of us who want to perform at peak levels but do so in a healthy, legal, and sustainable way.

Olympic runner and bronze medalist Deena Kastor has a rigorous training routine. One unexpected part of this routine is to sleep 10-12 hours every night. Kastor believes the real growth and formation of her ability to perform at her peak state don’t lie in the training itself, but in what happens in between training sessions.

Whenever you physically perform at high levels, your muscles break down. It’s when our muscles reform, however, that we actually gain strength. If we are constantly trying to train and perform, we never give our bodies the time they need to recover and rebuild the parts that have broken down.

The same is true for the brain and other components necessary for our success. What most of us don’t realize, however, is that this rebuilding process takes time, often more time than we initially assume. The next time you think you should be training when you are resting, think again. Recharging may be exactly what you need right now to keep building your strength.

Multitasking is connected to worsened long-term memory, a poor ability to filter information, and greater difficulty with pattern recognition. Multiple studies have shown that our ability to produce high quantities of…