Are you tired of feeling drained and unfocused at work? Do you wish you could harness your brain’s full creative potential without sacrificing productivity? In this thought-provoking conversation, Dr. Mithu Storoni, a neuroscience researcher and ophthalmic surgeon, reveals revolutionary insights from her book Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work.
Imagine a world where you can effortlessly align your workflow with your brain’s natural rhythms, optimizing focus, creativity, and overall performance. Dr. Storoni exposes the flaws of the traditional 9-5 workday, shedding light on how our industrial-era approach to work actively undermines our cognitive abilities.
But fear not, for she offers a transformative framework to redesign your workday around your brain’s unique needs. Discover how to “find your flame” β the work that ignites your intrinsic motivation, “get in gear” by aligning tasks with your optimal cognitive states, and “run in rhythm” by respecting your brain’s neurocycles.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, knowledge worker, or simply seeking to unleash your full potential, this episode is a must-listen. Join us as we explore the fascinating intersection of neuroscience and work, empowering you to reclaim your energy, focus, and passion β one brain-friendly strategy at a time.
You can find Mithu at: Website | LinkedIn | Episode Transcript
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Episode Transcript:
Jonathan Fields: [00:00:00] So ever feel like the way you’re working is slowly grinding you down into a state of nervous exhaustion? That same feelings physician noticed in workers over a century ago and termed that phrase before we became a society of so many knowledge workers chained to devices and endless digital inputs. It’s only gotten worse since then, and we have new words for burnout, overwhelm, wrecked even. Well, my guest today has done a deep dive into the science of how our brains actually work best, and what she discovered pretty much dismantles the industrial age approach most of us cling to in our workplaces and our lives, even when we are in control of our own schedules and maybe even work for ourselves. Yes, it turns out we do this to ourselves often. I’m raising my hand here. Doctor Methasterone, a neuroscience researcher and ophthalmic surgeon, reveals revolutionary insights from her book Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work. And in our conversation, she maps out a fundamentally different approach, and one that aligns with our intrinsic rhythms of creativity and motivation and focus. It’s an approach that can transform our experience of work from one of grinding distress into a state of what she calls effortless effort. We explore things like why the 9 to 5 goes against how our brains function, how simple factors like the wrong kind of light exposure can disrupt more of your core cognitive abilities. And we unpack her three-step framework to not just avoid burnout, but to truly thrive. Ideas that can reawaken your curiosity, tap into unseen wellsprings of energy and allow you to create your best work while feeling fully alive and in turn, your best life. So excited to share this conversation with you! I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.
Jonathan Fields: [00:01:50] Fascinated by the work that you’ve been doing, fascinated by the evolution of the work that you’ve been doing as well, and you’re sort of recent deep dive into the world of productivity and efficiency and have a big curiosity around this work. If I were to ask you, what is the single biggest problem that your work on hyper efficiency solves or speaks to, how would you answer?
Mithu Storoni: [00:02:15] I would say the way we work needs to change, and it is alone responsible for all the downstream effects of stress, burnout, just simply not enjoying work, uh, dropping out rates and the system of work that we currently have is adapted or engineered to serve a way of working that involves manual work, that involves muscle work that involves an emphasis on quantity rather than quality. Right now, the world is changing. The work landscape is changing. We are pivoting to needing to work to produce quality rather than quantity because machines are. Going to be doing, if not already, the quantity aspect of work. We are now becoming the thinking workforce, the real brain capital in the economy. And in order to be able to do that at our fullest potential, we need to radically rethink the way we work.
Jonathan Fields: [00:03:20] What is the pain that this is causing us? So if we accept the fact that the way that we’ve been working probably never was working, but today it really isn’t working. How is this showing up? How is this actually manifesting in pain in terms of the work that we’re creating, the things you want to put into the world, but also just on a personal level, how is this affecting us?
Mithu Storoni: [00:03:41] So it really started at the it was started being described in the modern era around about the 19th century, middle 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution was in place or was, was, was happening and many people started working in offices. And many American physicians actually described this as and one in particular, George Miller Beard, as a disease of nervous exhaustion, which he referred to as neurasthenia. And if we fast forward 100 years and more very gradually, the word stress, the word burnout, have been growing as cited issues in the workplace and have been increasingly recognized as leading to as causing worker absence, sickness, low productivity. In parallel with that, the way we work is addressing new demands. So as technology has improved and grown, cheaper, companies are globalized. The boundaries between work and rest are work and home have become blurred. Long before Covid so Covid accelerated it. But even before Covid, the globalized way of working has caused us to adapt to working hours which are outside our time zones. I was living in Hong Kong for a long time and people regularly kept New York time. Um, they worked according to New York markets, when in fact we were 12 hours on the other side of the world as an example. So this need to synchronize work hours globally and work faster because of technology, because business happens at a faster rate. So synchronization of the way we work, synchronization of time, massive acceleration of time, these are some factors that have been changing the burden of work. And while we’ve seen these factors at play, we have been talking about stress and burnout and ways to improve worker mental health in parallel. And really, both of these things converge on one point, which is the pattern of work that we do is extremely efficient or productive for muscle, but not for the mind. When you’re working with a mind, you have to work using a very different template. And had we recognized that back in the middle of the 1950s, when this huge transition to knowledge work first occurred, I think we could have reduced this burden by quite a lot.
Jonathan Fields: [00:06:24] Hmm. That phrase, nervous exhaustion as you described, which came into existence, it sounds like, you know, well over a century ago. If you use that phrase right now and you talk to so many different people and you said, do you have any experience of nervous exhaustion? I bet so many people would be like, oh, yes. This is you’ve just described my persistent state, not just in work, but in life these days. It’s so interesting that language, literally a century later, is still so profoundly relevant.
Mithu Storoni: [00:07:01] Exactly. And it’s a shame that we ignored it simply because back then we didn’t have the means or the the instruments to measure it, quantify it, and address it in the way we are doing now. I mean, along with this phenomenon, we’ve also technologies also helped, actually, paradoxically, because technology has allowed the advent of various types of gadgets and improvements in measuring different aspects of our physiology. For instance, HIV measurements, for instance, being able to correlate HIV and measure the autonomic nervous system in other ways. Also better diagnostic testing of markers Of excessive stress and that kind of connection that we’re now discovering between heart health and brain health, stretching even to gut health and brain health and heart health. So we’re now technology has also enabled science to really reveal the underlying framework behind these, these conditions and behind this so-called nervous exhaustion. So it’s been a friend and an enemy, if you like. But you’re right. Nervous exhaustion is something we are now returning to, having sort of ignored it, or forgotten about it, or just largely just sidestepped it for the best part of the last 150 years or so.
Jonathan Fields: [00:08:29] Yeah. I mean, it is so interesting, right? How technology has given and taken simultaneously, it’s allowed us to flatten the world, to feel like we can connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime, which in certain ways is just a great blessing. And at the same time, if we feel obligated to connect with everyone all the time in all contexts, it’s it’s deeply stifling and alarming. It doesn’t let us have any kind of office switch, that nervous exhaustion. If you think in the context of the nervous system, it basically just keeps it jacked 24 over seven. But also the point that you made that so much of that same technology is also allowing us to now measure and see the results of it, how it’s actually landing within our physiology and psychology. But it seems like the big gap is okay. So what do we do about this?
Mithu Storoni: [00:09:26] Right, exactly. So the first thing to be aware of is the fact that the way we work, the traditional 9 to 5 hours were really extremely efficient for producing goods and hence making profit and hence really boosting the economy of the world even. But definitely of the countries that went through that system back when the Industrial Revolution happened. We know about the assembly lines and what they did to to the Ford Model T and then eventually the car industry. And eventually that assembly line template filtered into pretty much every aspect of our lives. It massively exaggerated production in time and in space, and it was a very good template to use. And once we had that for manufacturing cars, we actually started using the same template in pretty much all aspects of our existence. So even recently, even now, when you go to a hospital, when you go to a clinic, patients are given the same number of minutes or allocated the same number of minutes as if they pass by the clinician like an assembly line. Children go to school and they’re taught subjects one after another without. Well, there are pauses, but they’re not hugely significant pauses. And that happens regularly throughout the day. So this template of maximising perceived output by doing things in this extremely efficient, supposedly efficient way was one that was adopted widely. And when, in the 1950s, we shifted to a large degree from manual labor, so non-agricultural work shifted from manual labor to mental labor.
Mithu Storoni: [00:11:20] When we started using the term knowledge work, that sort of era, we changed what we did, but we didn’t really change how we did it. So rather than clock in in the morning using a, you know, a factory clocking in system, we were present at work And that evolved to we logged in in the morning and until recently we’d log out in the evening and it’s traditional to take a lunchtime break for lunch, just as we used to do in the factories in assembly line style production methods. Now, the problem is answering your question of what we can. What can we do about it is we have grown to learn that the brain operates very differently from muscle. And here are a couple of examples. So with muscles. So with any kind of manual labor, first of all you feel tired. And you can tell when your muscle is aching, when your joints are aching. And then you stop and take a break. And in manual workplaces around the world, such as construction sites, building sites and so on, there are laws about how heavy the object is that you’re allowed to lift. So the maximum kind of lifting weight for for human health. There are laws about how long you should be doing physical, hard labor for before you need a break.
Mithu Storoni: [00:12:42] And one of the reasons we have these laws is because these are things that are quite visible. You perspire, you grow red. Your, your you know, your limbs start aching. But when it comes to mental work, when you’re working the same way with your brain, you don’t have these laws. There is no law on cognitive lifting, on mental heavy lifting. There is no law on you can work only so many hours. There’s no consistent law, that is to say, only so many hours of doing any kind of mental work before you start. Your cognitive resources start waning and you start being affected. But again, thankfully because of technology, we are now realizing what happens inside the brain when the brain is working. And so we are now figuring out what sort of signature things like mental fatigue present us with. And so the brain stops working when it rests. We all know that. But the mind and like the muscle rests or must rest while it works. And it works while it rests. So that’s one of the the very potent differences between the mind and the muscle. So if you take muscle and you just make it work, you know it’s working while you’re making your hands move or while you’re you’re doing something physical and you know that in order to rest, you can just stop.
Mithu Storoni: [00:14:01] But that’s not how the mind works. If you put the mind through this 9 to 5 or actually for what? For most of us, it’s now 9 to 8 or longer. Treadmill of work. Your mind doesn’t just stop when you stop. It depends on its mental state. It could be thinking about work. It could be so exhausted that it cannot fall asleep afterwards, too exhausted to wired to fall asleep. So all of these things are really striking differences between the brain and muscle. Another striking thing about the mind while it works is if you look inside the brain and some great research coming first from Singapore and now from elsewhere confirms this is if you look inside the brain and you look at the the brain’s what we call functional connectivity, which means that you have these hardwired wiring inside the brain, which are like highways and roads which are set in stone. And then you have the traffic in your brain that can choose to go on certain highways depending on what the traffic is like. So it actually uses the information that’s passing around your brain, uses the most efficient pathways. And what we know and what these studies coming from Singapore show, is that if you look inside the brain of someone working really intensely on something, so applying sustained attention, then after a pretty short time, as short as 20 minutes, and possibly even much, much shorter, as short as five minutes, even depending on the intensity of work you’re doing.
Mithu Storoni: [00:15:36] The route that information takes as it travels around your brain actually starts to grow less and less efficient, which means that the effort you are required to apply. So the way the work starts feeling harder, the more tired you become. That effort is almost like a compensation to overcome the inefficient way in which your brain is processing information. So your brain literally grows less efficient the longer you work. And this pace, or this rate of efficiency decay depends on the load you are working with. And that is of course, specific to you. So depending on how good you are with certain things, how easily your work is coming to you and so on. But the bottom line is working in a sustained way across the day like we do for a large part of that period. Your brain is actually working inefficiently, and there is no clear sign that it is doing so, other than subtle signs like you might feel bored, you might start feeling more distracted. The same work you’re doing might feel slightly harder to do, but since these are not obvious signs, we tend to ignore them. And the casualty is. First of all, we feel more and more tired.
Mithu Storoni: [00:16:57] But also the output that you’re producing is substantially worse. You know, I posted a study on the fact that there are now AI agents who are able to perform tests of human fluid intelligence better than humans, and this is as a result of supervised learning, not unsupervised learning. So they have to be trained, of course, unlike humans. But, you know, some of these tests that AI systems are being able to do successfully as well as, if not better than, humans. They are, you know, these kind of little mental quizzes of, um, you know, find the missing figure or choose what goes here if this is the pattern in these six matrices and so on. And these are kind of tests of fluid intelligence. So you need to be mentally sharp in order to be able to do them. So this aspect of mental sharpness and mental clarity decays really quickly with continuous work. You can still work in an office. You can produce heaps and heaps of quantity. You can write 100 emails or 100 suboptimal reports. You can even produce a thousand ideas. But in order to produce that one idea, you need to work when your brain is most efficient. And so prolonged work works against your ability to produce good quality work, which today is probably the most important thing for knowledge workers to be focusing on.
Jonathan Fields: [00:18:33] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Sounds like the way you’re describing it. So the general container, the constraints, the rules of pretty much every work environment these days, especially in knowledge work oriented work, thought based work is largely a carryover from physical labor based work, where it made some sense in that environment and where you had both natural triggers. Your body just gets tired. You have to rest it. You’re physically exhausted, you can’t keep going. And then you had legal structures that came in and said, in order for safety to prevail, you actually must rest in these different ways so that you can recharge, because not only are you being inefficient, But you’re risking harm, danger to yourself and to others. That sort of like all the assumptions of that workplace, you know, the 9 to 5, the we’ll just know when we’re tired and take breaks and the existence of a legal structure that gets ported over to the world of knowledge work. But the legal structures that say you have to take these breaks, they’re not there. The physical triggers that we would normally have our bodies just exhausted. My muscles literally can’t contract anymore. We don’t get those same things when it’s largely knowledge work, when we’re thinking about things. So we get dropped into an environment where we’re sort of like expected to work in the same way, but our brains don’t function that way. And effectively, we’re setting our brains up to work against themselves because we don’t have the built in breaks. We don’t have the ways to observe ourselves and really understand and know when we’re not functioning well anymore. And in fact, if we feel like, oh, I’m tired, I’m exhausted. This is hard, but I’m on deadline. I have to deliver this thing. I guess I just need to work harder. It sounds like what you’re saying is that’s actually making the problem worse, not better. Did I kind of get that right?
Mithu Storoni: [00:20:35] That’s right. I mean, very basically, if you think about the brain as working in two modes, so the quantity producing mode, which requires a very low level of complex thinking of idea generation, of mental gymnastics, that’s a low that’s the kind of the quantity focused mode. So for instance, you can you can reply to pretty much every email in your inbox in some form after two hours of sleep the night before. Okay, so you can reply, but if you’ve had two hours of sleep the night before, what you’re writing is not going to be of the best quality. So if you are given an article to write, if you’re a journalist or writer, You have to submit, let’s say, 5000 words by 5:00, and you’ve started at nine in the morning and you’ve just had two hours of sleep the night before. You can write something that amounts to that number of words, but what you write is probably going to make very little sense and will not be original, will not be your best work, and you might even have to labor for eight hours to get those 5000 words or 10,000 words out. Whereas if you had a fresh night of a really good night of sleep and you’re fresh in the morning and you know you’re not otherwise tired, you’re not worried about anything, you know, you’ve had a good, good morning so far, and you sit at your desk. You might be able to reel out those 5000 words in a couple of hours. And not only that, but what you produce will be way more original and of better quality than an AI bot, than a the ChatGPT or whatever the latest version is. But when you’re doing that kind of work, your brain is not focused on quantity. It’s focused on quality. So if you want to produce quantitatively significant work. So reel out lots of letters. In the old days, lots of reports, file information, even do PowerPoint slides, something like that. Then you can still do that in a sleep deprived state.
Jonathan Fields: [00:22:43] It’s almost like the assembly line version of knowledge work.
Mithu Storoni: [00:22:47] This is exactly right. And actually that’s the other aspect to it. So since around 90, the mid 1950s. 1957 the majority of knowledge work, what we call knowledge work has involved data gathering, data processing, data presenting. So if you imagine every organization as a pyramid, most layers of the pyramid were just doing these three things. If you replace cars with data and hands with minds, that’s what we were doing, and it’s only the tip of the pyramid at the top. The executive kind of peak. People in that segment alone took the decision, solve the big problems, came up with the innovative ideas, and everyone else just circulated data. And back when technology was slightly slower at an understatement, it was much more important to gather data, to process data, and to present information than anything else for everyone else in the pyramid, especially for the lowest layers of the pyramid, because that decided the bottom line that significantly influenced whether your product was going to be better than someone else’s, you know, progress, competition, all of these things. But now, now that we have AI assistants in pretty much every sector of the workplace, now from medicine to law to accountancy to management. So every aspect of the knowledge workplace. And you know why stop there. Pilots flying planes, um, every aspect of pretty much every workplace now involves some kind of AI assistance. And this means that the basic work of data gathering, data processing, data presenting, even making PowerPoint presentations, this kind of work doesn’t need to be done by junior level members of the pyramid.
Mithu Storoni: [00:24:42] In fact, AI does it better and faster and more powerfully. So everyone on in every layer of that organizational pyramid now has to act like the people at the top of the pyramid did 20 years ago. So now everyone has an AI tool to do this quantitative work for them, but they have to decide how to make a presentation that no one else can make. They have to come up with innovative ideas and innovative ways to use their AI tool in a way that takes the organization forward. So, I mean, you know, another yet another angle to this is that right now, the US economy, industrial growth, that is to say, is actually more driven by ideas. So by software, by innovation and by different aspects of these things, by design than by actual product manufacturing, which says so much about where we’ve come, which means that the ideas have much more weight than the actual product, and any machine can make the product. And if you extrapolate this to the brain and you look at these two aspects of the brain quality and quantity, the quantity aspect is now being taken over by AI. So the biggest role of the brain in the workplace is generating the thought process of generating the planning, generating the ideas. And that’s where working differently comes in.
Jonathan Fields: [00:26:22] Yeah. And if we’re working against ourselves, then we shut down our capacity to do that effectively. And also, just on a personal level, we add suffering to our own experience of work that doesn’t need to be there. And that ripples out into our physical health, our mental health, our relationships, our life. Um, it is such an interesting moment to be having this conversation as you described. I recently heard a conversation between somebody who was, I believe, the head of innovation for Adobe like this, you know, suite of software products. I guess now it’s SaaS where, you know, so many of the world’s creatives and agencies and producers have used these tools for years to produce almost everything and anything that we see out there. And he was saying, you know, there’s now so much I built into their tools themselves. But the job of of all these people is changing. You used to go to the tool as a source to produce the idea that was in your head. Now the tool kind of does all that itself. And the plus and the minus of that is if you’re the type of person where you really just wanted to do the data gathering, the basic processing, the basic production, this is going to be an interesting moment for you. But if you’re the type of person that actually says, but what if I could spend more time in the land of ideas and innovation and taking things like to a place where they don’t exist right now? This is such an incredible moment. If also we understand how to treat our brains properly along the way and actually step into that mode of work where we can do it in a healthy way, and I want to jump into some of the specific ideas that you offer.
Jonathan Fields: [00:28:00] But before we get there, there’s something that’s sitting on my mind that I really want to tease out with you a little bit. Two domains Means where the early days of work tend to be pretty brutal, are also to incredibly high stakes domains of work. One of them is medicine, where I know you have that background. The other one is the world of startups. Very different worlds. But you know, the the early training for physicians, even though there’s now all sorts of regulations, at least in the US, about what you are and aren’t allowed to do, whether those are abided by or not. It’s a completely different conversation. But, you know, classically, the training is brutal. It is relentlessly long hours, life and death stakes, incredibly fast pace, taking terrible care of yourself, oftentimes barely any sleep. I don’t have to explain that. I’m sure you’ve lived your version of this. You know, like way back when. Startup life is similar in a lot of different ways, but the stakes aren’t life or death. They’re often game changing innovation and often very large amounts of other people’s money. And yet these are two domains where the expectation is people are going to be able to make decisions and create outcomes that are as close to perfect and world changing. And, you know, like when the stakes are on the line as you could ever want and expect someone to make. How do we square this? How do we square that environment with the expectation of what somebody is supposed to be able to deliver?
Mithu Storoni: [00:29:29] So a couple of things. So we’ll come to, um, medical life last, because that’s where I can bore you with my own experience. But, you know, startups are a there are such an important area to focus on, and I would say the following. So the difference between medicine and startups, the biggest difference from my perception is that yes, you want to you enter medicine because you have some kind of an inner passion, inner calling, inner interest that leads you to medicine. But ultimately, when you’re doing your training, which lasts a very long time here in the UK, you completely you’re doing it on a day to day basis. So you lose the fact, the idea that, oh, you always wanted to do this, but because you are not responding to one core idea, you’re responding to a whole system. Now, when it comes to a startup, usually it happens in phases. So the startup begins usually, especially the most grueling part with an idea. You don’t go to go to work every day in an office and think, okay, I’m working towards a startup. You first have the idea and then you go about it. So you have some kind of a personal vision that drives you to it. And that vision, that initial vision is really, really important, that the passion that drives you towards that, the fact that you recognize it, you visualize it, you picture the end product, which is consistent through your journey, That. So that vision is really important. The second thing to remember with startups is the kind of person who leads a startup, so not works for it eventually.
Mithu Storoni: [00:31:11] Not someone who joins the team of a startup that that has already hatched, but the person who actually creates a seed for the startup. Usually people often tend to have a certain type of personality, and that personality is a very high degree of uncertainty tolerance. So if you’re naturally a very, very anxious person, you will not be driven to the startup journey. If you’re doing something else, at least you won’t be driven alone to the startup startup journey very easily. So it usually it needs a certain type of kind of mental frame of of of personality. And usually people have a slightly better tolerance of uncertainty. Now, if you put those two together with a with a The third thing, which is the fact that the start up journey happens in phases. So as I said, you first have the idea and then you start realizing the idea. So putting it into concrete form. Now the idea stage of the startup usually happens in a slightly, uh, less threatening and less uncertain setting. The idea might not take complete shape at that stage, but you have the idea in the first place. Usually when you’re doing something else because you haven’t begun your startup yet. Okay, so and that idea generation bit is absolutely critical and pivotal to your startup journey, because you have that as your guiding star, as your North star to anchor on as you, as you carry on. Beyond that, you’re going to need fixes.
Mithu Storoni: [00:32:53] You will need adjustments. You need to adjust your journey. But the original idea had to be hatched before you began your journey. And so when you are going about it, in my book, I describe how certain ways of working can allow you, for instance, to work for longer periods throughout the day than the standard assembly line way of work. So for instance, we are better at innovative thinking and creative thinking first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening. That’s what our brain’s physiology optimizes us for. We are better at doing really focused work in the middle of the morning and up until lunchtime, and in the middle of the afternoon up until early evening. Again, this is how our brains rhythm works. So anchoring onto this way of working and changing the pattern from a consistent pace, the same kind of work and the same work matter throughout the day, changing from that to working in what I describe as rhythms allows you to actually work for long hours across the day and keep your mind in an optimal state to do the work you’re doing as best you can. And a startup founder needs that hard work. They cannot just take a day off work from home or, you know, take long breaks. So once you have the idea, fueling that sort of way of working allows you to be very productive across an entire day. And then once the implementation stage has has gone through, I mean, while you’re going through it, you get all the, you know, the usual barriers, you get failures of expectations, you get things that suddenly emerge, barriers that suddenly emerge out of nowhere.
Mithu Storoni: [00:34:43] And there you need problem solving. You need to sit back and solve problems. You need self-control to keep your eye on the ball. So all of those things again, Although they are there, they still don’t push you away from your that original big idea that’s still up there as your North Star. But in order to navigate this again, a different way of working, this rhythmic way of working can be very helpful. And then, of course, finally, you know that there is an end and, you know, start up founders everywhere. This this journey is grueling, but they visualize the end and they know the end will happen. And then it does. And then once it does, it creates a new sort of standard, a new baseline for expectation, for uncertainty tolerance, for taking that journey all over again. So that is sort of how startups navigate. And also during that that journey, the really important thing is to keep your brain in an optimal state, to make the best possible decisions, as you say, and to figure out a way to go around the wall instead of just punching your way through it. And again, the way you work can shift your brain into very distinct states that are optimal for all of these things. Can I describe this in my book? But, you know, things like waking up, you know, extremely early in the morning actually puts you in the zone of innovative ideas.
Mithu Storoni: [00:36:17] Playing around with your physiology when you’re experiencing a roadblock can help you shift your brain into the right state, can, in effect, effectively change gears, change your brain’s gears. And you know, one way to conceptualize this is your brain, is your brain has a network which really works a little bit like a gearbox. And you can shift your brain’s gears to shift into different mental states. So this is another strategy to use during that journey to reduce your reactivity to uncertainty and keep you in what I call gear two, which is an optimal mental state for this type of problem solving and innovative work. And then finally you get to your end and then you do it all over again. So, um, and another thing to, to just bring into it is this idea of intrinsic motivation, which is a technical term, but essentially it just means that you can do really hard work, really tough work, and keep going for really long hours, day after day, week after week, month after month. If you are able to get into a mental state by choosing what you’re doing in a way, by by kind of figuring out when you’re doing what you’re doing and by tweaking your goal, adjusting your goal, which is ideal in the case of a startup, so that the process of working feels so pleasurable that it creates almost an energy. It creates rocket fuel inside you to propel you forwards and make you want to keep going, even if the journey is tough, even if you’re tired, even if the goal you are looking towards sometimes looks hazy.
Mithu Storoni: [00:38:11] And this idea of. And that’s separate to extrinsic motivation, which is a standard motivation in any workplace. So your pay, your salary, your salary at the end, the promise of the job you have, the promise of career progression. These are standard external motivators which salaried jobs have. But when you’re doing a startup, ideally you want to be so energized by the idea of your of your startup that just progressing towards it creates a sort of momentum term that keeps you going. And, you know, as an aside, if you look at the brain circuits, the circuit for alertness, for energizing your brain, which I describe, I call it the LCCN network or the blue dot network. This circuit is very closely tied to the circuit of motivation. So when you’re motivated for something and you will know this from your day to day life, if you’re working on something really late in the day, but you’re really motivated by something by it, you suddenly derive energy from somewhere, even though you hypothetically, theoretically should not have that energy because you’re sleep deprived. You’ve been working for 14 hours, but suddenly you just have this energy. So the motivation circuits release energy. And I’m speaking metaphorically, of course, but they release a sort of a rocket fuel inside your brain that allows you to do, to carry on working for long hours and many start up founders would tap into this source of mental energy to stay at their optimal.
Jonathan Fields: [00:39:55] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. You know, we’ve been referencing this in the context of a startup, but everything you’re saying really, you know, like you can think about any person who’s listening to this and they think about their work, they can think about, okay, you know, like, what are the expectations about my work hours? Do the things that I’m doing match up with the natural rhythms where my brain is functionally working at its best, or in the way that would align best with the type of task or project that I’m working on. Like, we can all think about that. We can think about, you know, is there intrinsic motivation here? You know, like is the thing that I’m doing. Does it matter to me? Or does it just matter to somebody else or some other project where I’m not really invested. I don’t particularly care in the outcome, but I know it’s a part of what’s expected from me. So I’m going to check the box and do it, because what you’re saying is that activates a, you know, a part of, of our brains in a way where it can either, you know, like not add anything energetically to the ecosystem or all of a sudden when in theory our brains should be pretty drained, it will give us energy, you know, it’s almost like it’s it’s unlocking a wellspring of something we didn’t know we had in there. And I know so many people who’ve experienced this where they have a sort of like a work a day job where it’s quite it’s fine, it’s okay, it’s not great, but it’s not terrible. It takes care of letting them honor their values.
Jonathan Fields: [00:41:26] Like maybe they have a really strong value around financial security, providing for family. And they appreciate that they don’t have any intention of leaving it. But then they go home at night. And in theory, their brains should be pretty exhausted. You know, they’ve worked hard, they’ve worked inefficiently and ineffectively. They’re not honoring their natural rhythms. And yet they go home. And then there’s this passion project that they’re working on, and all of a sudden they find themselves lit up and they can do the 6 to 10 at night, when in theory, the brain shouldn’t really be primed for that. But there’s something about that intrinsic connection with what they’re doing that lets them say, oh, like, I am so energized by it. I’m actually having trouble falling asleep after doing it. So this is really applicable to anybody, you know, in the context of any work that they’re doing. One big question that really jumps out at me is you describe especially understanding what are these rhythms that we have within us. You described how certain times of day tend to be more tied to different types of thinking. And you describe them as, you know, like we have these windows in the morning and then later in the day and then the midday. How universal is that? Like, is this true for everybody? Or do we actually all have our own version of that, and if so, how do we determine what our rhythms are so that we can sync up the type of work that we’re doing with our brain being able to do it optimally, and us just feeling good while we’re doing it.
Mithu Storoni: [00:42:53] So yes, we think most of us have this rhythm. If you return to the idea of circadian rhythms, which most of us have heard of by now, you know, the the idea that we have this body clock, we synchronize it by looking at light in the morning and we fall asleep at a certain time every day because our body clock has adjusted to that. So we have this circadian rhythm. Now, pretty much everything inside our physiology actually follows a kind of clock. The clock’s kind of uncontrolled span can vary. So even our circadian rhythm is actually longer than 24 hours. But we keep it at 24 hours because of the of the effect of the sun of the solar cycle. So in this way, different parts of our body, even different neural networks, have their own clocks. So our liver have clock, our liver has lots of clocks, our heart has lots of clocks. Different regions in the brain have lots of clocks. The reward circuit. The dopamine circuit is actually responsible for our sense of time in many ways, coming back to whether we all have the same clock and what this rhythm, this rhythm actually looks like. So one of the networks in the brain is based on the neurotransmitter stroke, neuromodulator norepinephrine. And it’s the circuit begins in a little area of the brain called the blue dot. Literally it’s called the locus ceruleus. In Latin it’s blue because it contains norepinephrine or noradrenaline if you’re in this side of the Atlantic, and norepinephrine is really the chemical that causes your brain to wake up. And we know this because when you’re doing something, when you’re working out at the gym or running away from danger, we talk about adrenaline running through the veins.
Mithu Storoni: [00:44:51] So the brain’s equivalent of that is noradrenaline or norepinephrine. Now this norepinephrine circuit has a cycle. So it increases its activity so that the the release of norepinephrine rises first thing in the morning from when you wake up across the day with a little bit of a dip around lunchtime. And then it carries on staying high. And then it declines again in the evening. And there are certain things that it correlates with. So it correlates with the way the the light around you. So your ambient daylight shifts. So when you first wake up in the morning. The activity in this network is pretty low, very soft because you know you’re in that hazy, just woken up state. And I’m talking about very early in the morning. So say six or whenever it is you wake up. And then at that time if you live in again certain parts of the world, this won’t work on the North Pole. When day first breaks, light is redshifted. We know because sunrises look red, orange or very crimson orange. And when daylight is red shifted, we are also slightly sort of gently awake. We’re not, you know, really, really brightly awake. You know, we’re not in that mental state we are in after four cups of coffee in the middle of the morning. So that sort of gentle awakening state is really good for creativity, because your brain is not in that highly focused, kind of anchored state. It’s in that state where your mind is drifting, your thoughts are drifting across different ideas, and you can sample things without committing to them.
Mithu Storoni: [00:46:41] And then as as the day continues and the sun rises, higher, daylight actually shifts towards a bluer end of the spectrum. And that’s when daylight looks white. And around about that time, again, depending on where you are on the equator, the brain’s noradrenaline network or norepinephrine LC network, that networks also continues to go more and more active, to the point where you’re naturally in a state of being able to focus, being able to really kind of look at your computer screen and understand the PDF that you’re reading, that sort of state you enter into that around about mid-morning, and you carry on like that until around lunchtime when there’s something called a post-lunch dip, which is a phenomenon where you feel more inclined to sleep so you feel inclined to sleep twice a day, every 12 hours. And then when that wears off around the middle of the afternoon, your brain is back into the state of alertness. And that cycle, that sort of pattern mirrors itself in the evening. So in the evening, as the sun sets again, there’s a red shift in light. And late in the evening is again when you enter this zone of creativity. Now, of course, we all live in artificial light. Many of us hardly see a sunset or sunrise, so it’s very likely that these patterns, or it’s very possible that these patterns were kind of embedded into us when we were evolving in more natural surroundings. And this may be why these things correlate, but modern medicine sort of testing of norepinephrine levels, they were first done in monkeys back, you know, around 100 years ago, a little under a hundred years ago.
Mithu Storoni: [00:48:33] These show that norepinephrine levels in the brain follow this kind of cycle. And we also know that now looking at behavioral studies, there are peaks of creativity. And creativity peaks off peak. In other words, when you’re not at work, that’s when creativity seems to peak. And focused work focused attention also peaks in these time zones. But taking this just one step further, attention itself seems to have a cycle. And this cycle means that attention waxes and wanes. So it’s there, and then it kind of recedes a little bit every 90 or so minutes. Now it varies in some people, and in some instances it can be 60 minutes. In others it’s been measured to be around 100 minutes. But 90 minutes is sort of an average ballpark. So if you do something that requires you to keep your attention focused for longer than 90 minutes, you are quite literally working against your own attentional rhythm. And it’s no coincidence that most films are 90 minutes long, that many soccer matches are 90 minutes long in many countries, and you can go on and on like that. So we have these rhythms embedded in our brains. They do vary slightly from one person to another in terms of the exact timing. It also will vary in terms of your geographic location, but by and large, we all have them and we can all tap into them.
Jonathan Fields: [00:50:03] So my curiosity here then is if so many, so much of this is triggered to our environment and the light, the nature of light around us. How is living not just in a world of internal light, but devices? Is that hijacking these rhythms in a meaningful way? Is it changing them?
Mithu Storoni: [00:50:25] Well, it is very likely to be because blue light and there’s a paper I quote in my book. Blue light puts you increases your alertness. So for instance, if you are doing shift work at night and you really need to pay attention, then having ambient having more blue light in the ambient lighting actually raises your alertness level. Similarly, if you want to dip into a more creative setting, there is data that suggests that making the light around you more red shifted. So warmer puts you in a creative state of mind. And coming back to your question. So, um, part of my PhD in my in neuro ophthalmology involved looking at pupillometry, and I was doing this at a very exciting time when the melanopsin containing ganglion cells had recently been discovered. These are special cells in the back of the eye that do not process visual information. They simply calculate and measure the light around you, the ambient light around you, and they relay this information into the clock in your brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus. And they set the time. And these cells, the pigment in these cells. We are now discovering more and more since I did that research work. But the pigment in these cells respond to around 479 nanometers of light wavelength. So this is the peak blue end of the spectrum. Um, they also respond to bright light through your cones. Um, so bright light and blue light necessarily change your brain’s perception of whether there is whether it is daytime or not and the time of day and not. So um, and we know, of course, that devices have blue LED lights. So putting two and two together, you know, data around this research around this is sometimes quite difficult because it involves lifestyle observations, but it’s definitely very, very plausible that looking at blue light is interfering with your body clock for sure.
Jonathan Fields: [00:52:34] Hmm. So if we zoom the lens out a little bit in this conversation, we say, okay, so and again, I don’t want to assume that everybody listening to this conversation is also a knowledge worker. You may be in the trades, you may work in a factory, you may work in your hands, you may be a craftsperson, you may be an artist working like very physically. And I also don’t want to in any way create a class structure between those, like there is value in all work, whether you’re working with your physical body, predominantly with your mind, or some blend of both, or going back and forth between the two.
Mithu Storoni: [00:53:05] I would actually interrupt you and say there is even greater value today, thanks to eye with working with your hands and craftsmanship, because this is something the human element of this is something that cannot that cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence. So I would argue and hope, of course, that this is one positive shift that I may well bring to the world around us, because if AI takes over so much of knowledge work, we will return to valuing things made by human hands more than ever.
Jonathan Fields: [00:53:41] I hope that’s right. I feel like I see that trend coming as well. Um. I’m somebody who gets great joy, actually working with my hands in, in a physical creation process. So, um, you know, I’m trying not to project my desire for that to sort of emerge as something that people, um, center more and value more. But but the trend does seem like, you know, it’s it’s heading in that direction. If we think more generally about, okay, so I’m somebody who wants to be able to show up and whatever work that I do, I want to be able to create the best possible thing outcome, deliverable, product, service, whatever it is that I’m capable of creating, both because maybe it’ll help other people, it’ll help me. It’ll just make me feel good about myself, and I want to feel good along the way. Like I want to feel psychologically and physiologically good along the way. What are 1 or 2 of the the first entry points that you might invite somebody to start thinking about reimagining or addressing?
Mithu Storoni: [00:54:47] So I would in a perfect world, I would start long before people enter the job world and remind everyone that the standard 9 to 5 way of working, where you have one college degree, it’s hit and miss whether you make it to college or not, and that defines the rest of your life, and you’re defined by that. Your job is defined by that. You follow a defined career path and that’s it. You see your life ahead of you, that sort of structure is now rapidly changing and I believe it will become extinct. And instead, I think there will be greater emphasis on choosing a path, whatever that path is, with your hands, with your mind creating, building that you feel is a natural good fit for you that you actually enjoy doing. And in an ideal setting, I would hope. I would wish that youngsters have the opportunity to make this choice without being burdened by societal expectations or pressure from, you know, a certain path that has been stereotypically the right one to take, but instead looking at something that’s a really good fit for you, for your skills, for your personality, something that makes you feel really good. Because what that will do is that lets you follow and be guided by and be energized by intrinsic motivation, because you will enjoy doing what you’re doing just for the sake of it, because it gives you pleasure.
Mithu Storoni: [00:56:18] So that’s one thing. Another thing I would, uh, I would say is that we need to really change this 9 to 5 focus on work. And this is a separate argument from, you know, whether you want to work from home or work from office. That’s that’s a different argument whatsoever. What I’m describing is when you’re at work in the office, rather than having a 9 to 5 rigid strategy of sitting at the desk in a very cramped bay with other workers on your right and left, elbow to elbow noise, open plan, that sort of thing. We need to change the entire ecosystem of that. So, for instance, you know, one idea is if your work is mostly creative. So for instance, you might be writing at a, you know, might be a journalist, you might be a writer, you might be even working on the R&D section of your startup. So for all of these categories, I would suggest a working pattern where you start your workday very, very early. Almost ridiculously early. 530 or 6 even where you have your creative, your burst of creative ideas, or where your mind is most fertile for receiving or generating creative and innovative ideas. And then you you work early, and then you don’t just follow this rigid nine to 5 or 6 to whatever pattern, but instead you maybe take the period of the of the day when your creative skills wane.
Mithu Storoni: [00:57:50] Take that time a little bit lighter. So scheduling your meetings during that time, and maybe even sneak in a break, a really long lunch break. Have a nap. And then rather than go to go home on schedule at 6 p.m. or 7 p.m., extend your day back into the creative window. Having offset. So having kind of negotiated a break earlier on in the middle of the day. And then do your do the rest of your workday then. So instead of having this rigid pattern where you clock in and clock out, work in a uniform way, make this your pattern of working if you’re doing creative work. Similarly, if you’re doing focused work, focusing peaks in the morning and in the middle of the afternoon, so do not schedule meetings during that day. During that time of day, schedule meetings when during your creative peaks or during the most post-lunch dip. And so again, change the way you are working to suit this. Also, if you’re using attention, work in cycles. Work in this rhythmic cycle in line with your attentional cycle. So a summary is and this is one way of looking at it.
Mithu Storoni: [00:59:01] If you take all the ideas from hyper efficient is you have to find your flame in work. That’s the first rule. And that is more important today than ever before. Whether you’re doing knowledge work, whether you’re doing manual work, it doesn’t matter. Finding your flame lets you enjoy the work. And one of the ways to do it is, for instance, gradually improving incremental improvement, finding a kind of a, a job or a or a startup kind of area that allows you to improve, that allows you to learn and in a way that really energizes you. So finding your flame in whatever work you’re doing will put you into the right mental state to do your best work, whatever kind of work you’re doing. Then the second rule is get in gear. And the getting gear aspect means that your brain is in certain gears for certain kinds of work. So suit your work to the time of day. And the third rule is run in rhythm, which is while you’re working, respect the idea that there is a rhythmic aspect to your brain’s physiology and work in line with this. And of course, all of this is heavily underscored by the need for rest, need for rest, and the need for sleep.
Jonathan Fields: [01:00:24] Hmm. I love that framework, and that feels like a great place for us to come full circle as well. So I’ll wrap with a question I always ask in this container of Good Life Project.. If I offer the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?
Mithu Storoni: [01:00:40] Live in line with your own compass. So do something that gives you joy, that gives you energy, that brings good to the world, and make sure you enjoy every moment of it.
Jonathan Fields: [01:00:54] Mm. Thank you.
Mithu Storoni: [01:00:56] Thank you so much for having me.
Jonathan Fields: [01:00:58] Before you leave, if you love this episode, you’ll also love the conversation we had with Dan Pink about the scientific secrets of perfect timing for peak productivity. You can find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adelle Bliss for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project. in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did, because you’re still listening here. Do me a personal favor. A seven-second favor. Share it with just one person. I mean, if you want to share it with more, that’s awesome too. But just one person even. Then invite them to talk with you about what you’ve both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter. Because that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.