Brain boundaries
Turn off your mental autopilot and feel less stressed
Ever wonder where the day went? It’s not uncommon to reach the late afternoon and marvel at why you didn’t gain more traction on your to-do list. That’s because the work style most of us use is reactive, says Joe Robinson, author of “Work Smarter, Live Better: The Science-Based Work-Life Balance and Stress Management Toolkit.”
“It’s survival mode, and we go with whatever factors the most recent in our brain,” he says. “It’s autopilot and it causes stress in the process.”
Many of us are feeling overwhelmed, and remote working arrangements aren’t necessarily helping because they increase the amount and forms of communication you must track. The challenge is our brain’s instinctual reaction to overwhelm.
“We have a hangover from our ancestors that doesn’t really work in the modern world,” Robinson says. “Anytime your ‘ancient’ brain perceives that something is more than you can handle, it sees it as a threat and triggers the stress response. Stress today is social stress, but it still sets off the automatic response of fight or flight.”
It’s possible to manage our thoughts so we’re not just reacting in panic mode all day long. Robinson says setting these four boundaries will help you work in a more sustainable way.
1. Attention management
To get anything done during the workday with focused attention, you need to tap into your working memory. The human brain is limited to three or four thought chunks for only a few seconds, Robinson says.
“The more attention you have, the longer you are able to remember what you’re doing and the faster you get it done,” he says. “If you have a situation where your skills meet a challenge, you can have what’s called an optimal experience where you’re fully absorbed in the moment of what you’re doing. That’s as good as it gets.”
Unfortunately, interruptions blow up working memory. To regain your attention, calm your mind. Robinson suggests counting backward from 100 to zero in your brain. “Since we don’t do this every day, we have to pay attention to it,” he says. “If your thoughts stray, just come back to the next number down the line. The exercise is relaxing and calming.”
Exercise is also a good stress reducer because it brings your brain back to center. Or focus on your breath. “It massively increases your attention,” he says. “Deliberative breathing shuts down the acceleration of the stress response.”
2. Interruption management
In order to have more attention, it’s important to set the terms of engagement with your devices.
“The more you check email, the more you have to check email because you lose your ability to regulate your impulse control,” Robinson says. “Disruptions erode your impulse control, and interruptions make anything you do seem more difficult and aggravating than it is.”
The impulse control mechanism is located in a part of the executive attention function of the brain called effortful control, Robinson says. “Interruptions shred it and make us self-distract and lose ability to regulate impulsivity and stay on task,” he says. “Managing interruptions, then, is key.”
A study by Leslie Perlow, an assistant professor of business at the University of Michigan, looked at what would happen when employees had two no-interruption zones — no phone or email — in the day. Having a no-interruption zone in the morning from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. increased productivity 59% and a no-interruption zone from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. increased productivity 65%.
3. ‘Barking’ management
Another boundary your brain needs is the ability to let things go in order to return to work. Robinson calls this “barking” management.
“Does your dog bark hours, days, months or years after another dog walks past your yard?” he asks. “He drops the event as soon as it’s over like it never happened. But that’s not what humans do. We keep barking. We hang on to the event, and that’s what causes our stress — but we don’t have to.”
Hanging onto stress is rumination. Robinson says we can play a big role in shutting down this ancient reflex by managing the thoughts in your brain. Robinson suggests using a tool called “thought labeling.”
“We’re very verbal creatures, and a lot of words are flowing through our brain,” he says. “They attach themselves in a random way. They fuse with thoughts, feelings, emotions and moods in our brain and come out in the form of a thought.”
For example, if you have a confrontation with someone at work and your thoughts drive you to a conclusion that you can’t take it anymore, you’ll be worse off than you were because you’ve self-defined yourself as being in a bad state.
“Instead, tell yourself that a thought is not self-defining,” he says. “You can say, ‘I’m having the thought that I can’t handle this anymore.’ Labeling your thoughts as thoughts separates you from kneejerk, emotion-word fusings that hold you hostage to false beliefs. The stress response stops in three minutes after you turn off the false life-and-death signal.”
4. Refueling management
Sticking to the previous three boundaries requires giving your brain a break so it can rest and reset.
“We are not hard drives with hair,” Robinson says. “After two hours of time on task, the brain has to get off task to relieve strain and reboot.”
The brain needs daily, weekend and vacation resets. Robinson says productivity goes up after 10-minute breaks, 20-minute breaks and dramatically after a vacation. Recreation and relaxation also allow you to put away whatever you’ve been thinking about over and over and recover. If you don’t, you’ll come back to work the next day with stress still there.
“Managing stress is really all about managing our thoughts,” Robinson says. “We think because something’s in our head, we’ve got to pay attention to it. We don’t.”