Your Brain at Work Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Your Brain at Work

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Zusammenfassung von Your Brain at Work

Name: Your Brain at Work
Rating: 4.6 (208 reviews)
Author: David Rock

David Rock

Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

4.6 (208 Bewertungen)

20 Min.

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Inhaltsübersicht

Your Brain at Work
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Kernaussage 1 von 11

What’s in it for me: find out how to gain control over your brain.

More and more, it’s becoming typical for people to work in occupations that are mentally and creatively demanding. But with the constant advances in communications technologies, we’re also increasingly surrounded by potential distractions, which means that using our brains optimally will only get more difficult.

By exploring how our brains function in everyday life, Your Brain At Work provides many effective strategies for staying focused amid the noise and delivering great work under pressure. In short, the book will help you to not merely survive but to actually succeed in today’s demanding work environment.

In these blinks, you’ll discover that pushing yourself to work harder when your mind is already exhausted will always lead to poor performance.

You’ll learn why leaving your smartphone on and your email open while you work can actually lower your IQ.

You’ll discover why it’s always better to help others reach their own insights than to give them direct feedback and instructions.

You’ll find out why making yourself laugh when you’re faced with a challenging problem can actually help you to find the solution.

Finally, you’ll learn how to trick your brain into being interested and alert simply by using your imagination.

Your ability to think well is a limited resource, so conserve the resource at every opportunity.

We all know what it’s like to “burn the midnight oil.” The later we work into the night, the less we're able to think clearly, and when we notice that our attention is waning we tell ourselves that we should simply try harder.

But there’s reason to believe that you should give your brain a break instead.

We use a massive amount of energy in all our interactions with the world, which fatigues our ability to think clearly. This indicates that our capacity for active thought is limited.

Evidence for this limitation can be found as early as 1898, in a study where subjects were instructed to perform a mental task while putting as much physical pressure as possible on a machine that measures force (a “dynamometer”).

The results revealed that, when the subjects were engaged in active thought, their maximum physical force was reduced by up to 50 percent.

Furthermore, as you'd expect, performing more than one conscious process simultaneously is even more taxing. The result is that our performance quickly declines when we try to do several mental tasks at the same time.

For example, one study indicated that the constant distraction of emails and phone calls reduce performance in an IQ test by 10 points, on average. This reduced mental capacity is similar to that we experience after missing a night's sleep. One explanation for this effect is that such interruptions force the brain to spend too much time in a state of alertness.

So if we want to maintain a good level of performance, we have to conserve the brain's energy for only the most important tasks.

This can mean prioritizing certain tasks above others. But be aware that prioritizing is itself a task that drains energy, so make sure you prioritize when your mind is alert and fresh.

Another way to conserve energy is to turn tasks into routines, as these can be stored as patterns that won't require you giving your full attention to a task.

Our attention is very easily distracted, but there are strategies for staying focused.

In many ways, advances in modern technology have certainly made our lives easier. But the convenience they provide also comes at a great cost to our ability to focus: the ubiquity of always-on technologies, like the internet and smartphones, means that we have more potential distractions in our lives than ever before.

Whenever we're distracted, our attention is diverted, and refocusing that attention takes time and effort.

Optimal mental performance requires just the right level of arousal of your brain.

Which would you watch more intently: a once-in-a-lifetime solar eclipse that lasts only a minute, or the tree outside your window?

If you're like most people, you focus better when you're faced with a tight deadline, or when you are presented with something new and interesting.

Insights make it possible to overcome mental blocks that limit you to the same small set of solutions.

Have you ever had to deal with a challenging problem that demanded a creative solution, but were simply unable to get past a certain point? It's very common for people to “hit a wall” in their thinking: to reach, in other words, a mental impasse.

Often, the only way to break through this wall is through insight – a perfect solution that seems to suddenly appear out of nowhere, and which recombines what we already know in a brand new way.

Mindfulness can help you focus by actually changing the structure of your brain.

Improving the way your mind works, and thus increasing your ability to focus, first requires that you're able to observe your own thinking. This process is known as mindfulness, a concept that also refers to living in the present, having a real-time awareness of our experiences, and an acceptance of what is.

Although most people are able to be mindful to some extent, those who practice mindfulness and become adept at it have far more control over what they pay attention to.

Feelings of certainty and control are very rewarding to the brain, and you can activate these feelings yourself.

We've all experienced uncertainty and lack of control, and the deep emotional responses they trigger. Perhaps this happens while you're waiting to hear about that job you applied for, or when you're buried under a pile of work so high that you can't possibly manage it.

But why do we respond this way to uncertainty and the sense that we're not in control?

Regulating your expectations is key to a general feeling of happiness.

Have you ever become so excited over a certain prospect – say, when you truly believe you were just about to win a game of Texas Hold 'Em – that you felt terrible when it didn't transpire?

Why do unmet expectations make us feel so bad?

A feeling of relatedness to others and a sense of being treated fairly are primary rewards for the brain.

We often don’t think our feelings of relatedness to others, and of fairness, are crucial to our physical survival, but, actually, they’re as important as food and water.

This is because, for the brain, feeling socially connected and able to relate to others is a primary reward.

We are wired to feel rewarded for increases in our status, and can trick our brains into status rewards.

If you’ve ever gotten a kick out of winning an argument, spent money on clothes from a designer fashion store, or even felt good about meeting someone worse off than yourself, you know that feeling an increase in status can trigger a sense of reward.

This is because when we perceive an increase in our status, we get a positive emotional response: our dopamine and serotonin levels (chemicals essential to happiness) go up, and our cortisol levels (an indicator of stress) go down.

Feedback rarely creates positive change in others; instead, try helping them arrive at their own insights.

Have you ever tried to change another person’s thinking? We often believe the best approach is to give that person lots of feedback, but giving feedback actually doesn’t help improve performance. Instead, real change can occur only when the other person sees his errors for himself.

The reason that giving feedback is so ineffective is that is tends to make people extremely anxious. In fact, as one study revealed, when people hit an impasse in their thinking, telling them what to do so they can overcome the block actually helps them only 8 percent of the time, while telling them what not to do helps just 5 percent of the time.

Final Summary

The key message in this book:

It is a common misconception that, if you aren’t delivering your best work, you should simply try harder. Often, however, the brain just needs more fuel and rewards to keep going. The reason for this is that your brain gets tired and distracted easily, and is strongly rewarded by status, certainty and control. So, for your brain to work optimally, it helps to eliminate day-to-day distractions, find out ways to have more choice and autonomy in your life, and, most importantly, train your ability to reflect on your thinking.

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Worum geht es in Your Brain at Work?

Your Brain At Work (2009) explores the inner workings of our brains and provides many methods for us to optimize our thinking. Drawing upon thousands of neuropsychological studies conducted in the last 25 years, the book presents many strategies that will help us overcome distraction and become more focused.

Wer Your Brain at Work lesen sollte

Anyone who wants to learn how to control their thinking
Anyone who is interested in regulating their emotions
Anyone curious to find out how their brain is related to those of others

Über den Autor

David Rock is an author and business consultant. Rock works to connect neuroscientists with leadership experts to establish a science for leadership development (he coined the term “NeuroLeadership”). He is also the author of Quiet Leadership: Six Steps to Transforming Performance at Work.

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