Find Your Energy ‘Sweet Spot’
Best-selling author, biohacker, and angel investor Tim Ferriss does his best writing late in the evenings. In fact, he does his best writing between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.!
Kurt Vonnegut did his best work between about 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. Still others like Charles Dickens did their best work from 9 a.m. to around 3:00 p.m.
And still others like Mozart worked in spurts throughout the day, but generally did no creative work during regular working hours.
As much as we’d all like to have unlimited energy and cognitive powers like Eddie Morra in Limitless, there is no super drug like the fictional NZT (and believe me, I’ve researched and tried just about everything out there).
For now, we need to understand that we have energy cycles. Just as there are sleep cycles for stages of sleep that last 70 to 90 minutes, there are similar rhythms that dictate how alert and energized we feel when we’re awake. These 24-hour cycles are referred to as the ultradian rhythms. We don’t stay equally energized and alert throughout the day.57
Research suggests it is best to take breaks from work every hour to hour-and-a-half. Ideally, during your breaks you should engage in more mindless or less cognitively demanding tasks.58
When you are engaging in cognitively demanding tasks, your brain is mostly producing a lot of fast waves when measured on an EEG. These fast waves represent high levels of cortical activity and are called beta waves. When you’re resting or engaging in less cognitively demanding activities, your brain goes into a slower state. When recovering between bouts of work, you want to get your brain into more of an alpha state, which is a slower, idling state.
Ideally, you would want to engage in some of the strategies outlined in the upcoming books in this series, such as Heart Rate Variability biofeedback, exercising, mindfulness meditation, or any other activity you can do mindfully such as walking, cleaning, sorting, etc. You can also get more tips from my website: FriesenPerformance.com
While not exactly the same as your energy cycles, some research has found correlations between two of the Basic Personality Tendencies and whether you are more of a morning or a night person. Generally, morning-people tend to be higher on Motivation, whereas those who are night-owls tend to be higher on Negative Emotions.59 Of course, there are many exceptions to this.
The bottom line: It’s important to know what times during the day you work best. Some of us do our best work in the morning, others in the afternoon, while others late in the evening. If you don’t already know this about yourself, set up a little experiment where you try doing your work at different times of the day and see what works best.
Once you know what time of day you do your best work, plan your day accordingly. Definitely don’t waste this precious commodity on tasks like email, meetings, or phone calls. If you do your best work in the mornings, then that is when you need to schedule work on your big, important goals.
For many, remembering to pull yourself away from what you’re doing is the hardest part of staying on track. This is especially true for those high on the tendency of Motivation. I know this is the most difficult part for me. Once I get into something, it’s really hard for me to disengage and work on something else if the first task isn’t complete.
One solution is to set a timer on your computer or phone to go off in 60 to 90 minutes to remind you to stop what you’re doing for about 5 to 15 minutes. I used this strategy when studying at university while trying to learn content for exams and it paid off.
How to Tame the Beast of Technology
In today’s modern world, we are constantly hyper-connected with our smartphones, tablets, computers, or smartwatches. These technologies have led to tremendous progress, but they’re not without their downsides.
Don’t get me wrong here. I’m no Luddite. But reaching our potential means going against the grain. To be successful, you have to not only battle yourself, but also the external world’s pressure to stay with the status quo. Without plans and strategies, you will be victim to the wind, getting blown every which way. You need to seize the rudder and steer yourself in the direction you want, not what society wants from you. Not even what the lazy and self-protective part of you wants.
One example how modern technology gets in our way is by distracting us constantly. Our smartphones and computers are the biggest culprits. We are bombarded with texts, alerts, alarms, calls, emails, social media status updates and on and on. Not surprisingly, there are brain mechanisms that are at play here. Suffice it to say — you guessed it — our dopamine reward systems are in play again.
Every time you engage with your gadgets by doing things like checking email, texts, social media, and surfing the net, the dopamine reward pathway is activated in your brain. Dopamine’s role in the brain is pretty complicated, but one of the things it controls is your motivation to seek out or search for things that are potentially rewarding or pleasurable. Note I used the word “potentially.”
The more unpredictable getting a reward or experiencing some pleasure is, the more the dopamine system kicks in, which makes you want to keep searching and checking. And make no mistake, this mechanism in your brain is very strong. Turns out our text messages, emails, phone calls and social media posts arrive fairly randomly, which enhances your dopamine response even more!
Decades ago, psychologists discovered the best way to control both animal and human behavior was by using rewards. They found that the most effective timing and frequency of rewards was to use variable schedules of reinforcement. We now know that this is related to the dopamine response noted above. And guess what? Checking email, texts, social media, and surfing the web provide us with a variable schedule of reward reinforcement. So it’s no wonder we can’t get anything done!
If you’re going to make any progress in athletics, art, business, or your profession, then you need to take back control of your life. You need to engage in what Cal Newport calls Deep Work — engaging in deep, distraction-free work.60
Even if you are not Very High on the tendency of Motivation, you can take back control of your productivity. So how do you do it?
The overall solution is to hack your brain and hack your environment. First of all, you need to schedule time to work on your important goals. This has to be given the same priority level as something like a doctor’s appointment. It’s basically non-negotiable. When the time comes to work on that goal, you need to eliminate any possible distractions. So turn off your phone, email, social media, and even your Internet if possible. Without any beeps, buzzes, or alerts from your devices, the dopamine reward-seeking pathway in your brain will relax a little and let you get down to business. You should start using this strategy when you’re doing any important work.
Get to know the Settings tab on your devices. Stop all the email, social media, and other alerts from popping up. If you don’t know how, check YouTube for instructions on how to do this on your specific device. This will prevent distractions and allow you to better focus on what really matters to you. In addition, on most smartphones, you can use the Do Not Disturb setting. Basically, it prevents your phone from ringing or alerting you about anything. If you’re afraid you’ll miss an emergency call, you can set your phone to alert you only when someone from your Favorites calls, or if someone calls twice in a row. You can also schedule your phone to go into Do Not Disturb mode at specific times each day when you know you’re going to be focusing on important tasks.
Another problem is email. Although it seems glaringly clear now, it took Tim Ferriss and his book The 4-Hour Workweek to point out the obvious. Set particular times during the day to check your email. He recommends we even put this schedule on our email signature or autoresponder, so others don’t freak out when we don’t instantly reply to their emails.
The same idea can be used for checking social media. Allow yourself to only check at pre-planned intervals, either as breaks during the workday or after work. This takes willpower at first, but once you’ve made
it a habit, it will become automatic and no longer require you to exert any willpower.
I’m not at all against email and social media. But use it to reward yourself after you’ve completed tasks. This one I learned from my mother. She’d get up early in the morning on weekends and complete all of her household chores like cleaning and vacuuming before she allowed herself to sit down and enjoy the rest of the day in leisurely activities, which for my mom mostly involved reading and more reading. Rewarding yourself after you’ve done work will serve to make you less distractible and also motivate you to engage in difficult tasks, since our brains are primarily motivated by rewards.
How to Let Go at the End of the Day
Many high achievers have a hard time disengaging and detaching from work when they get home or when it’s time to relax. They also have a hard time acknowledging success.
Those of you who are on the higher side of Motivation will be most susceptible to these, due to your tendency to work long and hard and to place high standards on yourself. If you are also high on Negative Emotions, winding down and acknowledging what went well may also be hard for you. There are some simple strategies you can implement at the end of the workday to help with this:
Write down or mentally review what you accomplished today. You want to do what I call the 3 Things Exercise. First write out or mentally review three things that you did well today. This could be as simple as remembering to take breaks every 90 minutes. For those of you who are average-to-high on Negative Emotions or Motivation, this part will be challenging. Your mind will have little difficulty picking out what you did wrong or didn’t achieve. This exercise will help force your mind to see things realistically and acknowledge what went well. The more you do this, the easier it will become, as your more dormant realistic and optimistic neural networks will be getting a daily workout.
Next, write out or mentally review three things that did not go so well. But you must then do the following. Reframe these in terms of what you learned from the experiences and provide yourself a set of instructions on how to improve upon them. So maybe you were training and got a stomach cramp after eating too close to practice. Instead of saying, “I learned to not eat too close to training”, say “I will eat at least 180 minutes before training.” Or better yet, use what we learned about If-Then planning by saying “If it is three hours before training, I will eat.” As noted earlier, your mind responds well to specific instructions on what to do, and not so well in terms of what not to do. It’s like a race-car driver. They are instructed to look where they want to go, not at the wall they are trying to avoid.
For any unfinished tasks, write down exactly when and where you will finish them tomorrow or later in the week. You need to write down exactly where, when, and how you will do this. For example, “I will call the supplier back right after my lunch break tomorrow at 1 p.m.” This will help you mentally let go of any lingering unfinished tasks that are taking up space in your working memory.
Make a plan via a to-do list for tomorrow. The plan will take into consideration what you learned from the preceding steps, but also what your weekly goals are. This was also outlined earlier in this chapter.
On your way home, get in touch with some of your values and goals that revolve around your family, health, hobbies, community, or other areas other than work. If driving, you can record yourself describing these goals and values so that you can listen to them. Or once you arrive home and turn off your car, take a few minutes to either mentally review these goals and values or read them. For the latter, you can have them written out in your smartphone’s notes feature, or have it written out on paper you keep in your wallet or glove box for easy access.
Resources
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Baumeister, Ph.D. and Tierney: http://goo.gl/HMMEoL
The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It by Kelly McGonical, Ph.D.: http://goo.gl/CQ2l13
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport, Ph.D.: http://goo.gl/VHHHoH
The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss: http://goo.gl/gia0E5
CONCLUSION
The fact that you have arrived at this point in the book tells me that you are someone who wants to achieve big and meaningful goals in your life. You want to make sure you’re doing everything in your power to make your dreams a reality.
You are now in possession of an effective step-by-step process to get you there that is derived from the three best sources of knowledge — science, experience, and results. So you can feel confident that following the steps in this book has brought you closer to your goals than ever before.
At the beginning of this book, I asked you to answer the questions below:
Have you:
Felt different from others, but were not quite sure why?
Felt unsure of your purpose in this life?
Wondered whether you were focusing on the right goals in your life?
Felt certain paths you took, or decisions you made, just didn’t seem to fit?
Wondered whether your chosen career path was right for you?
Felt you were just going through the motions in your life?
Had trouble staying motivated and focused on a big goal?
Established your big goals, but couldn’t seem to stay motivated long enough to make them a reality?
Felt unsure of yourself and in your ability to accomplish your goals?
The information, strategies, and exercises in this book should help you gain some clarity and actionable strategies for any of the above questions you answered yes to as you begin this journey.
My main objective in writing this book is for you to have a logical step-by-step process for figuring out how to work effectively toward the dreams and goals that are right for you.
In this book, you learned that, to be successful, you need to adopt particular ways of seeing the world, including:
Accepting yourself for who you are and working with or around what you are given. This includes knowing your personality, values, strengths, weaknesses, and passions.
Living your life and setting goals congruent with your personality, values, strengths, passions, mission, and purpose, not based on your immediate urges, moods, or circumstances.
Knowing that you have much more control over the trajectory of your life than you or others realize. At the same time, you know that even though you are steering your ship, you can only control yourself. You understand and accept that you can’t control what the world throws in your path, but you can control how you react to these obstacles. You refuse to be a victim of life. You know that you can anticipate and act before the world acts upon you. You know that if you keep pushing forward you will eventually reach your destination.
Accepting that you will repeatedly go through tough times. Tough times are par for the course for those who do big things. You know that’s how the world works, and so there is no point fighting or complaining about it. Without difficult times and failures, there is no learning. You reframe setbacks as opportunities for growth. You know that nothing worth achieving comes without a struggle. You know there’s a difference between suffering and struggling. As the Dalai Lama wrote: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” You now know that successful people struggle and feel pain, but don’t suffer because they are living their lives and pursuing goals that are in line with who they are, what they value, and what they believe to be their purpose or mission. To them and to you, it is worth it.
So the question becomes, do you want to live with regrets because you didn’t do all you could to achieve your dreams and goals?
Or do you want to be able to look yourself in the mirror each day and confidently say you are doing everything in your power to reach the right goals for you?
I believe that the fact that you read this book to the end means your answer is the latter.
By reading this book and applying what you learned, you ha
ve taken the first step to unleash your potential. There is no more need to settle for a life of living below your true potential. You are now armed with knowledge of who you are, what you really want, and how to make it happen. You now have a path to achieving great things with your life and I’m confident that you’re going to make it happen!
At the same time, I hope you saw that the process is not necessarily easy or simple. I hope this book helped you realize that we only get one shot at this life and that you don’t want regrets. You now know how to make sure you’re focusing on and achieving the right goals for you. You’re ready to tweak your mind, body, and brain to achieve and perform at the highest level.
Want more? Check out my website FriesenPerformance.com for information on how to take your game to the next level, including free information such as articles and podcast interviews, in addition to online programs, workshops, personal coaching/consulting, speaking engagements, and information on the release date for the second book in this series.
You can also join my mailing list at FriesenPerformance.com to stay up do date on ways to take your performance in sports, work, and life to the next level!
Notes
[←1]
Dr. Joanne Wood’s study: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/20/7/860.abstract
[←2]
Awaken the Giant Within and Unlimited Power by Tony Robbins http://goo.gl/lJw02A and http://goo.gl/9yelC4
[←3]
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey: http://goo.gl/g79501
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