DIY Neuroscience - Train Your Brain for Peak Performance

Ever get frustrated that you’re not making enough progress on the important things?

Ever find yourself organising the sock drawer rather than cracking on with that ‘big hairy goal’ you have?

If your answer is yes, you’re not alone. In fact, this sort of procrastination is typical for most people.

I used to think that ‘do more, work harder’ was the answer – often burning the candle at both ends because I needed the urgency of a deadline to get a big task done. 

Turns out, though: your own biology is playing a much larger role in how you get things done (or not) than you probably realise. Fine tuning or massively changing your approach is possible, but first you need to understand how your biology works – and specifically: your brain.

Once you know how your brain works, and why it works that way, you can make changes that work with it, rather than against it. Harnessing the power of your brain in this way will make it easier to get traction on those important jobs that always seem to end up at the back of the queue.

Pragmatic insights from neuroscience

Thankfully, you don’t need to be a neuroscientist to make use of neuroscience. There’s a lot of material out there that makes it accessible (I’ve included a few recommendations at the end). Understanding how the human brain has evolved, and its role in what it actually means to be human, can give a different spin on anti-procrastination tools and techniques.

Your brain is not for thinking…

Let’s start with what the brain is actually for.

It's not unreasonable to believe that our brains evolved to help us think. Surely our ability to think in diverse and elaborate ways is one of the things that sets us apart from other species?

Apparently not. Our brains evolved to manage a process known as allostasis. Allostasis is like the process of keeping a ship afloat in changeable waters, taking action to plug any leaks and bailing it out, and changing course to avoid hazards or find treasure. For us humans, it’s the process of keeping our bodies functioning in a changing world and is characterised by constant tweaking and adjusting to bring everything back into balance.

Another way of looking at this could be as balancing the books for a complex organisation in a changing marketplace. Your brain has effectively evolved to be a sophisticated accountant that makes decisions about where to deploy its resources, or budget, to get the best returns for the body. In other words, your brain manages the body-budget.

Thoughts, memories and emotions are all by-products or spin-offs from the process of keeping the body-budget. They are things that help the brain keep the body-budget balanced (most of the time) in some way, shape or form. 

Your brain can predict the future…

Although we’re not talking clairvoyancy here, the ability to predict the outcome of familiar events and to prepare accordingly, is another ability your brain accountant evolved to do a better job of managing its body-budget.

If you can spot and be ready for trouble before it hits and prepare to respond to it then, evolutionarily speaking, you're more likely to get positive outcomes ‘within budget’ than if you don't. Our brains 'peer into the future', using past experience and real-time data to try and determine the best course of action for favourable outcomes.

To do this, the brain applies what's known as 'top-down processing' to the information it receives – analysing what your senses are communicating and then constructing a version of reality to help you better prepare for action. This all happens in a heartbeat – you often won't even be aware it's happening.

Simple examples include getting ‘butterflies in your stomach’ or sweaty palms when you find out that you have to give a big presentation. It’s not happening yet, but your brain is getting you ready, and it's learned that adrenaline can help, so it triggers a big dose to prepare you to deal with it.

Your brain can learn and adapt – but if you don’t use it, you lose it

Another aspect of the brain that helps it keep your body-budget balanced is its ability to learn and change.

Humans are born with many more neural connections than we will ever use. From the moment we arrive in the world (maybe even before) our experiences shape our brains – neurones that get used get stronger; those that don't will weaken or be repurposed. The human brain is incredibly flexible – the capacity for different parts of the brain to learn different things, known as plasticity, has given us tremendous evolutionary advantage. It means that if one part of the brain stops working, other parts can compensate to keep the overall system running. The flip side of this is hinted at above, that if we stop using our brains for certain things, the brain cells devoted to those things can get repurposed to support other functions. Basically, if you don’t use it, you lose it. This appears to happen the most in childhood, but it’s a process that continues right the way through our lives.

Harnessing your brain to achieve peak performance 

So how can you use this insight to get better at overcoming procrastination and powering through your priorities?

Create better business cases for your brain’s body-budget

We are wired to prioritise activities that have a positive impact on the body-budget. We’re attracted to activities that deliver value (that is, what your brain considers to be of value) quicker than those that take longer or don't deliver recognised value at all. This means that we should:

1. Make it more achievable: 

‘Big hairy goals’ can serve a purpose, but they can be so big that you can't relate individual tasks to achieving it. Wherever this applies, break the big goal down into smaller, more meaningful chunks – ideally with a simple reward attached. If you can't make completion of the component task feel rewarding in itself, make something that is rewarding contingent on completing it. This is a combination of the chunking down and positive reinforcement approaches to performance, or more specifically, productivity.

2. Save the hardest work for when we can work harder: 

It's easier to complete the more demanding tasks when you've had a good night sleep and you're feeling fit and healthy – who would have guessed! So, be honest with yourself: did you sleep well last night (or for the last few days)? Have you been eating properly? Have you been exercising? A well-oiled machine is going to do a far better job of tackling challenging tasks than one that's falling apart. And this is something your brain appreciates too. If your body-budget is already overdrawn, taking more out to get the task job is going to meet with resistance from your internal accountant.

3. Harness our circadian rhythm: 

There’s some evidence that suggests we have more energy at certain times of the day rather than others. This is the concept of circadian rhythms: daily peaks and troughs in energy. Reflecting on when you typically get your best work done during the day (are you more lark or more owl, for example) and scheduling the cognitive heavy lifting for then is likely to make it easier to do. A task will likely feel less challenging, and less of a draw on the body-budget, when you have higher, can-do energy at your disposal.

4. Know thyself: 

Work to better understand what your natural strengths are and how you can use them to accomplish the various tasks on your plate. Something you're already good at will take less of a toll on your body-budget than something you find challenging. Focus your energy on things you can influence: Your brain likes certainty. Focusing your energy on goal-related things you can't control will feel like a bad investment to your inner accountant. Focusing where you can have impact will increase the certainty factor and make it easier to make a worthwhile and ‘accountant approved’ withdrawal from your body-budget. A good example is networking. You want to grow your network or reach a particular person. You can't directly impact that, so quantifying success against it may not motivate you. But you can influence the number of people you reach out to, the quality of your LinkedIn profile, and the number of networking events you attend. Stephen Covey covers this beautifully in ‘The 7 habits of highly effective people’, where he talks about the circles of concern and influence in relation to proactivity.

Enhance your brain’s predictive power

Past experience informs what we do at a cellular level. So, not only are we attracted to activities that deliver value, but we also gravitate towards activities that seem to offer greater certainty of valued outcomes. Sometimes, though, your predictive brain is going to get it wrong, especially in new situations that only feel familiar. 

Be aware – your predictive brain can be wrong: 

Your brain is more likely to make incorrect predictions when you've been in similar (but not the same) situations, or when stress is around. In both situations it will be relying more on past experience and doing less to analyse what’s actually going on. The first step in correcting inaccurate forecasting is spotting it to begin with. The best way to do this in the moment is to maintain focus on the outcomes you’re hoping for and keep testing your responses and approaches against this. When you feel yourself going off course for any reason, try asking yourself the following questions in the moment:

1.     What outcome am I looking to achieve?

2.     Is what I’m doing likely to achieve it?

3.     What might work better/get me there quicker?

Where you discover that you’re working from an obsolete playbook, it’s worth digging deeper into your ‘archives’ to find out what triggered it. 

Albert Ellis’ ABCDE model enables this deeper reflection. His model explains how events and our beliefs about them generate emotions, which then underpin our behaviours. By spotting where we have unhelpful beliefs about events, often drawn from previous experience, we can challenge and then change them – to get different, better behavioural outcomes. There’s a link at the bottom of this article to some more detail on his model, and how to use it.

Train your brain: 

Your brain is adaptable, it can learn, and the best way to help it learn is to do little and often. Neurones that fire together wire together, so the more opportunities you can give them to fire together, the quicker and easier it will be to adapt. Whilst we're always likely to find new things harder to do, we can teach our brains to work in different ways through developing repeatable routines that we can practice and reinforce frequently. Doing so builds ‘neurological muscle’, which creates a solid foundation to underpin new behaviours, making them easier to sustain. ‘One and done’ rarely works when trying to change behaviour. Related to this is that theory (or training) alone is not going to be enough to effect a sustainable behaviour change. The practical application of your knowledge to create skill, repeatedly, with the option to tweak and adjust, will be what most effectively contributes to sustaining the changes that you want to make.

Fuel your productivity with the ultimate brain hacks

So, in summary, to make the best use of the formidable asset known as your brain in tackling procrastination and improving productivity, work on the following:

• Make your tasks look and feel more achievable and save your hardest work for when your energy is peaking in your daily rhythm

• Remember to fuel and maintain your body and brain – even an F1 sports car won’t win the race if the tank is empty and the tires are flat

• Understand your strengths and focus on things you can influence

• Get better at recognising when you’ve lapsed into using an out-of-date playbook

• When you do learn new behaviours, think little and often, creating repeatable routines to build neuro-muscle to back it up. 

Many of the people I work with struggle with challenges like these. Together, we’re working to overcome their challenges and move forward, with the personal impact and effectiveness courses and coaching that I offer. If you recognise yourself in this article and are keen to make a change, contact me for a ‘getting started’ conversation, at hello@redkitpd.com.

Further Reading

• Accessible neuroscience: Seven and a half lessons about the brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

• The habit of proactivity: Covey’s Circles of Concern, Influence and Control

• Challenging your outdated playbooks: Albert Ellis’ ABCDE Model

• Breaking big tasks down into smaller chunks: Chunking down method of goal-setting

• Understanding more about circadian rhythms: When by Daniel Pink