TALKING POINTS
Daily Performance
This reference helps you talk about what you have learned with others. Talking Points also serve as a reminder for when, in the future, you want a refresher on the main highlights of this course. Schedule tea with a friend and have a conversation about this subject!
In an ideal world, my brain would be firing on all cylinders every single day, but that's not always the case. What are some obstacles that get in the Way?
The environment has countless distractors. Some are work related but many aren't. Regardless, research from UC Irvine has shown that we need an average of 25 minutes to return to a task after a distraction. Think about that - a frivolous text message or email could pull you away from an important project for almost a half hour. You can imagine how this adds up over the course of a day!
But the amount of mental energy you bring to your day determines how well you can move through these distractions and remain effective. And a lot of aspects of your lifestyle determine how much mental energy you show up with day by day.
Can't I just drink coffee if I'm feeling sluggish?
Yes, absolutely! Caffeine helps but it's an imperfect solution here. First, if your brain is tired and you caffeinate it, you're more prone to make errors. Second, caffeine is in no way a panacea to optimize brain performance. You're basically leaving a lot of performance on the table when you don't attend to all the different aspects of lifestyle that uniquely support mental functioning, even if you drink coffee.
What are some key aspects of cognitive function that are relevant to daily performance?
The most obvious aspect of cognitive function is arousal, which basically just means how awake your brain is (this, of course, is a major reason why most of us drink coffee - caffeine tends to enhance arousal). This affects thinking speed, or how quickly you can process information.
Vigilance, or alertness, is your ability to sustain focus on a task at hand. This means you can filter out information and stimuli that isn't immediately relevant to what you're doing, like intrusive thoughts, text message notifications, birds chirping outside, etc. A person with ADHD, for instance, tends to have a really hard time with this.
Then there is self-control, which is more commonly referred to as willpower. Willpower helps you control your thoughts, your emotions, your impulses, and your performance. The problem is that our willpower is finite, and it gets expended whenever you have to control yourself in the face of any frustrating situations you confront throughout the day. This is one reason why you feel tired and mentally depleted after dealing with a long commute in heavy traffic.
Can we do anything to enhance these aspects of cognitive performance?
We all have good days and bad days, of course, and we even show fluctuations within the day. But research has unveiled things that we can do with our lifestyle and our environment to enable us to be our best self in life almost all of the time.
This goes way beyond coffee - it includes exercise and physical activity, specific nutrients, sleep patterns, light exposure, and targeted exposure to certain forms of stress (like heat, cold, and fasting).
It also means the intelligent use of digital tools, like an activity tracker (think Fitbit or Apple Watch), and the humanOS platform, to assess how we are doing and set goals for better performance in the future.