Your Brain At Work

Your Brain At Work helps you overcome the daily challenges that take away your brain power, like constant email and interruption madness, high levels of stress, lack of control and high expectations, by showing you what goes on inside your head and giving you new approaches to control it better.

You might know that your willpower is limited, and that all you can do to get it back after a long tiring day is rest, get plenty of sleep and recover.

Well, your ability to think and solve problems is the same.

A study way back from 1898 had its participants exert physical force on something called a dynamometer, while solving a tough mental task in their head.

When people thought hard about the problem they had to solve, they lost up to 50% of their physical force.

Yes, thinking is exhausting, and eventually, your brain needs to take a break.

Things get even worse if you multitask (lucky for you I wrote the number 1 guide on the web to stop doing it), it lowers your IQ by up to 10 points.

The effect is similar to missing a night’s sleep and is caused by your brain being in “alert mode” for too long, until it loses its grip on things.

Rock suggests 2 solutions to this:

Ruthlessly prioritize your tasks (which is a thinking act in itself and will take a mental toll, so do it in the morning when you’re still fresh). Turn your most important tasks into habits and let them run on autopilot, thus conserving energy.

“Ha, I told you I was right!” Feels good to say that sometimes, right? Of course! You can admit it. It’s ok. We all crave a little status sometimes. That’s why we buy fancy designer clothes, spend hours arguing with our friends about who’s right, and feel better when we see someone who’s a few steps behind us in their journey. That’s because feeling a sense of elevated status leads to higher dopamine and serotonin levels (2 of your happiness hormones) and lower cortisol levels (a stress hormone). This even helps you think better, because thanks to those hormones, your neurons can connect faster, meaning you take less time to process information. Some computers have an overboost function, where the processor can go beyond its usual speed for a little while. This is similar, but it’s your brain on steroids we’re talking about here! Here’s where it gets interesting: Because your brain uses the same neurons to perceive yourself as it does when it assesses other people, you can just increase your status over your own, past self, and trigger the same effect! Honing your skills, for example by…