Your brain is very fussy. Neglecting it causes problems that can undermine your performance by having you overlook important factors, reach faulty conclusions and make poor decisions. But once you know why it’s so fussy you can practice some simple techniques to optimise your performance.
Making sense
The billions of neurons in your brain are only useful to you if they are communicating with one another. Have you ever had the experience of sticking your key in the ignition of your car and discovering the battery is flat? Suddenly, instead of being in a car that can take you wherever you want, you are just sitting in a static hunk of metal. Without that initial electrical spark to get the engine going the car is totally useless.
Your brain also needs electrical sparks to be of any use. Each neuron is separated from all the others by a microscopic gap called synapses. An electrical signal travels down the neuron and gets converted into a chemical signal that is either excitatory, which tells a neuron to do more of something or inhibitory, which tells it to do less of something. In any given moment you have trillions of these electrical and chemical signals surging through your brain. They give you the mental maps that enable you to make sense of the world, learn and achieve things.
The prefrontal cortex is a small thin layer covering the front of the brain and it’s where we do a lot of our most complex thinking. It is very delicate and needs just the right amount of chemical stimulation. With too little you can become unfocussed, forgetting or missing things that may be important. With too much you can get overly concerned or even obsessed about things which will distract you from what you need in order to succeed.
Chemical Balance
Amy Arnsten, a neurobiologist from Yale, has spent the last 20 years studying the prefrontal cortex and her findings help to explain why it is so fussy and what you can do about it. The synapses in the prefrontal cortex only fire correctly when just the right levels of two neurochemicals are present. These neurochemicals are called dopamine and norepinephrine, and without them you experience boredom and under-arousal. However, if you have too much you experience over-arousal and distress.
It is normal to experience different levels of these chemicals at different times of the day. When you wake up or when you are tired it’s difficult to get organised, make important decisions or do any complex thinking. If you are very busy at work and a serious new problem or deadline gets dumped in your lap you can become over-aroused and produce massive levels of norepinephrine and dopamine. This causes your neural networks to disconnect and can lead to synapses not firing properly or not firing at all, which leaves you with incomplete mental maps and the inability to make good decisions.
Your brain chemistry is changing throughout the day because it is affected by natural environmental stimulation. A sudden shock like a near miss in fast moving traffic can have you very alert and awake for the rest of the day. Going for a walk in the woods or a local park after a busy day can help you feel calmer. However, Arnsten’s studies have discovered that you can shift and balance your chemical state with a few simple mental techniques.
Increasing arousal
The brain responds to imagined situations in a very similar way to real ones. If you are feeling the need for more arousal to increase concentration you can give your brain a boost of norepinephrine by bringing in more ‘urgency’. For example you can think about not being prepared enough for an important meeting or missing an important deadline, this will increase norepinephrine (which is also known as noradrenaline).
As you probably already know adrenalin is the fear hormone that heightens our alertness and focus of attention. Norepinephrine has also been shown to play an important role in binding circuits together in the prefrontal cortex, aiding concentration. However, there is a critical point in this technique, you don’t want the thought of things going wrong to get out of hand and take on a life of their own. That will lead to over-arousal obsessiveness and distraction from the task at hand.
Another way to improve concentration is to increase the dopamine levels. Norepinephrine is the chemistry of alertness, and dopamine is the chemistry of interest. Good levels of both chemicals are required to generate the optimum levels of arousal and performance. Dopamine is released when the brain discovers something unexpected or new. Children love novelty and can get very excited about it due to the high levels of dopamine they experience.
Humour is about creating unexpected connections and hearing jokes or watching funny films will increase your dopamine levels. Neuroscientists have also found that expecting a positive event or reward – in fact anything that the brain perceives as a reward, like an increase in status, autonomy or fairness – will generate dopamine. Food, sex, money and positive social interactions also boost it.
It is worth noting here that research across a number of studies suggests that using positive expectations and humour to increase arousal is better that using fear. This is because the former activate both dopamine and adrenaline, while the latter produces adrenaline but the expectation of negative events reduces dopamine.
Dampening arousal
Many people are now suffering from information and work overload with an increasing number of people on low wages having 2 jobs. In his book ‘Your Brain at Work’, David Rock quoted a rather disturbing study of 2,600 British workers that stated that half of them had seen a colleague reduced to tears by work pressures and over 80% said they had been bullied during their careers.
Over-arousal is more of a problem than under-arousal and it is becoming endemic. Over stimulation means too much electrical activity in the prefrontal cortex. This leads to the equivalent of blowing a fuse in one or more of the normal circuits in your brain, creating a very narrow focus. The circuits left open can make accidental connections that are not real, but if you are in a heightened state of alertness you think they are real and feel people are doing things to upset you or to ‘get at you’ on purpose. You can also lose perspective and slip into obsessing over tiny things because fewer connections are being made in your brain.
To reduce arousal it is good to reduce the speed of information flowing through your mind. Make notes to get your thoughts ‘out of your mind’. This allows you to see them in a different perspective. Another useful strategy to take the pressure off your delicate prefrontal cortex is to activate other larger parts of the brain. For example taking a few deep breaths to activate your parasympathetic system and focussing your attention on the sounds around you to activate more of your senses. When over-aroused it is also very beneficial to go for a walk, this activates the motor cortex and increases the flow of oxygen and glucose to your brain.
Unique responses
We are all unique and different, and our responses to stress vary significantly. I recently gave a presentation to the London Branch of the CIPD and really enjoyed setting the scene, providing food for thought, provoking discussions and interacting with the audience. However, giving a presentation to a large audience of peers strikes fear into the heart of many people, making them inarticulate and unable to think straight. On the other hand I would probably get totally stressed serving a very busy crowd in a popular bar; having to juggle and memorise numerous orders while taking money and dancing around my colleagues! I’m always impressed with Bar Tenders who can do all of that with a calm smile and genuinely cheerful greeting, even towards the end of a night.
Our response to stress is based on many things like experience, training and according to Amy Arnsten, gender. Men have a tendency to wait until the last minute to do something. When a deadline is still a while away there is not enough stimulation or ‘urgency’ to focus their attention. It seems that Estrogen promotes the stress response and this means that women have a tendency to get things done well in advance because they want to avoid the pressure and increased arousal of an impending deadline. Men tend to wait until the last minute so they have enough norepinephrine and dopamine to focus on the task.
Finding the Sweet Spot
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi the author of Flow: the psychology of optional experience did extensive studies on what makes people happy and his conclusions match the findings of Neuroscientists. If arousal is too low performance is low but when it gets too high performance declines so there is a ‘sweet spot’ where you have just the right levels of stress to make you alert and interested.
Csikszentmihalyi discovered that the happiest people were able to maintain a balance between seeking the right levels of challenge and developing the right levels of skill to manage them. This requires a growth mind-set and a willingness to continuously lean out of your comfort zone into the learning zone.
Dr. Martin Seligman, the founder of the field of positive psychology thinks that Flow is the most important driver of human happiness – more important than money or any hedonistic happiness we get from a good meal or fine wine.
5 Tips for getting it just right
With an understanding of the above it is easier to know how to manage your brain and achieve optimal performance. However, the key to optimal performance is increasing awareness of how you are feeling moment to moment and noticing when to take the action required to manage your brain. Here are some tips to consider:
1. Practice being aware of your levels of alertness throughout the day, notice when you have natural peaks and troughs. Use these for different types of work, keeping your most demanding tasks for the times when you are naturally more alert.
2. Boost your norepinephrine (adrenalin) when needed by visualising a mild fear. For example focussing on an important deadline and the consequences of missing it.
3. Boost your dopamine levels when needed by introducing novelty. For example changing perspective, using a humorous approach or expecting something positive.
4. Bring your dopamine or adrenaline levels down by activating other parts of the brain and giving the prefrontal cortex a rest. For example by going for a walk, focussing on your breathing or your direct experience like the sounds around you or the sensations in your body.
5. Seek to balance the level of challenge you have and the skills you need to develop in order to manage them effectively. Develop a growth mind-set and continuously lean out of your comfort zone into the learning zone.
Like everything in life achieving optimum performance takes effort, learning new things and most importantly applying them. It is one thing to know something and a completely different thing to apply what you know consistently. This may seem obvious but just look at any smoker. They know it will eventually destroy their quality of life and even shorten their life but they choose to ignore that information. Neuroscientists are now giving us a detailed ‘user manual’ for our brain and achieving our optimum levels of performance. Ultimately a happier life depends on your ability to understand your brain so you can learn how to use and manage it. Do let me know how you get on.
Remember . . . Stay Curious!
With best regards
David Klaasen
