Getting more done — during & after Lockdown.
Understand your basic biology. Leverage its capabilities to your advantage & live a better life.
‘On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow ones own advice’ — Sam Harris
But listening to your own advice is hard right?!
As you sit at home, in these quieter times, how often do you fail to follow your own advice? How many times have you told yourself that you’ll use the time to workout more, learn a new skill, or start all the projects you intended on when times were less chaotic. How often have you set positive intentions for the day and failed to follow through?
If the answer is yes, some of the time, you are not alone. There is a simple explanation. Our mind is very rarely inclined to do what we ‘ask it to do’. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but unfortunately that’s just the brain nature has bestowed upon us.
In simplified terms our brain can split into two distinct parts, the ‘Thinking Brain’, and the ‘Feeling Brain’. The ‘Thinking Brain’ is largely comprised of the Pre-Frontal Cortex which is the rational, problem solving part. For the most part, it gives us good, actionable advice. It tells us, eat the healthier option at lunch, don’t have more than one drink at dinner, do your most important work now, so you don’t have to struggle against a deadline later.
Lurking behind our ‘Thinking Brain’ is the older, more instinctive counterpart, the ‘Feeling Brain’. Within this region, resides a constellation of neurons we call the Amygdala. These twin, almond sized nodes are the emotional centre of our brain. From the moment we are born into the world, our amygdala is constantly accumulating information from our interactions with the world, which it collates, in order to inform us on how to act down the road. Its primary focus is the avoidance of danger. The Amygdala, with the rest of the ‘Feeling Brain’ evolved into its current state much earlier in our evolutionary history than the ’Thinking Brain’. It developed at a time when Homo Sapiens were wandering hunter-gatherers. Our primary concern was to gather food, flee danger and avoid being eaten long enough to find a mate and pass our genes on to the next generation. It was a hostile environment, and dangers like famine, drought, predation and poisoning were abundant. Given our overarching evolutionary purpose of surviving and reproducing, the ‘Feeling Brains’ task of avoiding potential mortal dangers was a priority. As such, in order to aid our survival, our ‘Feeling Brain’ was given dominance over our later forming ‘Thinking Brains’.
Fast forward 100,000 years and we live in very different times to our Hunter-Gatherer ancestors. Technology, the product of our ‘Thinking Brain’ has mitigated so many of the immediate dangers that were of constant concern to our fore-bearers. Nevertheless, the overall hardware in our head has changed very little. Our ‘Feeling Brain’ still encourages is to act when there is little need.
Think of your own day to day lives. Have you ever decided to go to the gym in the evening, only to blow it off, sit at home and watch Netflix instead? That’s your ‘Feeling Brain’ sabotaging the plans of your ‘Thinking Brain’. The former anticipates the pending workout to be difficult and uncomfortable. It sees only black and white, and to it, those feelings entail danger. This leads it to override your ‘Thinking Brain’ plans to take the safer, more comfortable path of sitting at home in front of your TV. The short term challenge of the workout is weighed more heavily than the potential long term benefit of exercise. Have you ever promised yourself to only eat one Cookie at desert, but found yourself half an hour later having devoured the entire plate before you? Again that’s your ‘Feeling Brain’ hijacking the plans of your ‘Thinking Brain’. It senses an opportunity to gorge on high calories. As far as it is concerned, calories are precious and hard to come by. Famine is always around the corner and if calories are available, they must be consumed, as a hedge against future uncertainty. It has no idea that in todays western world, we are unlikely to encounter starvation anytime soon. Great sums of Calories are usually only a tap of the phone away.
By seeking comfort, our ‘Feeling Brain’ is constantly working against our better instincts.
But there is a silver lining. An antidote to our brain’s natural tendency to poor decision making. A tool to be leveraged to quell the constant angst between our ‘Thinking Brain’ and ‘Feeling Brain’. It resides in a pea sized node at the top of our Mid-Bain called the Basal Ganglia. Amongst other things, this pocket of Neurons governs an aspect of our behaviour we call habit. It is where our brain stores memory of your repetitive activity in order to automise it down the road, so that each time you perform the habitual task, you expend less energy.
We can use this little biological shortcut to our advantage! Let me give an example of my own during this lockdown. Whilst working from home, I have set my schedule to do my most difficult task on my to do list, first thing in the day. Some refer to this strategy as ‘Eating the Frog’ first thing, when your brain is sharpest and most able to deal with complexity.
After a month or so of Lockdown, this habit that I am seeking to build is still a work in progress. But with each repetition it’s getting easier! Of course my natural inclination, guided by my comfort seeking ‘Feeling Brain’ is to do easiest task first, all the while procrastinating on the more difficult tasks. In any case, each time I ‘Eat the Frog’ first thing in the morning, it makes the next time progressively less challenging. As a matter of experience, I feel that. Each time you perform the activity you intend to develop into a habit, neurons wire in our basal ganglia, allowing the next time performing the activity to be incrementally easier. Each time, the Basal Ganglia stores another recollection of the activity and seeks to automise it. Research shows that it takes 21 days of consecutive, repetitive practice to create a new habit.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Habits are built by small actions, but grow with daily repetition and persistence. They are also easier to form when tagged onto existing infrastructure in your daily architecture. Want to start journalling? Start writing 3 lines every morning as soon as you wake up. Want to start practicing meditation? Sit down and ‘meditate’ for 1 minute after brushing your teeth every day. Want to start reading more? Read 1 page each night right before you go to sleep. Building a habit doesn’t have to be difficult. Start small, persist each day, and momentum will carry you onwards from there. And celebrate the small wins! And each time you complete your habit and allow yourself the internal gratification of completing it, your brain will release a little burst of a ‘feel good’ neurotransmitter called dopamine. That, in turn, will help to encourage you the next time too.
Leave us to our own means and we’ll constantly be fighting a losing battle against our comfort seeking tendencies. It is a fact of our evolutionary biology that our ‘Feeling Brain’ has dominance over our ‘Thinking Brain’. Make no mistake about it, your willpower reserves to fight these tendencies through a given day are finite, somewhat like a battery.
Habits, or Systems, or whatever you would like to call them, are your brain’s own internal hack to counter the chaos that an undirected mind can cause.
So use the hack! Build your habits, they will build you a better life.
