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“At the peak” of Brad Stalberg and Steve Magness: prevention of spontaneous combustion (part one)



The book of Brad Stalberg and Steve Magness “At the peak: how to maintain maximum efficiency without burnout”arouses involuntary interest already in its background. She became the product of the creative tandem of a professional athlete and a financial analyst - two people who had absolutely nothing in common but the inglorious ending of a career. Both gave hope, worked like a damn, achieved considerable success ... and then burned out so much that they could not continue and left the profession. The book became their joint attempt to comprehend what exactly happened to them and is happening to thousands of workers in other industries and how this could be prevented. There is little journalism and many quotes from sociological and biological studies, which form the picture of what constitutes productivity, where its limits go and how to stay within these limits without bringing yourself to exhaustion.

Today we present the first part of the abstract of the main theses: the extent of the burnout problem, the causes of its occurrence and the ambiguous role of stress in our lives.

Why do we burn out


Representatives of different professions can develop a “burnt out” state for a variety of reasons, from acute perfectionism to heavy creative pursuits. Stalberg and Magness focus on the one that nowadays affects almost all areas and can be called the leading one - the exorbitantly high demands on productivity and the rate of professional growth in the modern "culture of success." This situation has developed for the most part due to the fact that in recent decades, workers are forced to pave their career paths in the face of fierce competition, which scientific and technological progress gives rise to in two ways:

  • Firstly, in principle, there are fewer jobs - the development of robotics and artificial intelligence allows delegating more and more functions to machines
  • Secondly, remote work and high mobility of the population makes the labor market global. Not only locals, but also workers from other regions now enter competition with each other, often combining a decent level with more modest demands.

As a result, in the eyes of people, work turns into a valuable resource worthy of all kinds of sacrifices, especially if you associate certain hopes with it - in other words, you have professional ambitions. The victims are primarily leisure, a measured routine of life and good rest.

Studies and surveys show that in the USA, which today are considered the homeland and the epicenter of a "culture of success", the state of affairs in which work is central to life and is always a priority is gradually turning from the inheritance of individual "rock stars" with a dizzying career, in option norm. Back in 2014, local residents admitted that they were tied to the phone: on average, they looked into it 150 times a day in order to respond to business messages in time and stay up to date with events. Two-thirds of Americans surveyed do not go out for lunch - they have to eat on the job or even do without food. 29% of respondents surveyed regularly work on weekends, 27% sit at work at night. According to rough estimates, if we summarize the processing and the missing days of vacation,we can safely conclude that the average American works not five, but six days a week (47 hours). The following sad story can tell a lot about the level of expectations: after Moritz Erhardt, an intern at one of the major banks, worked non-stop for three days and died of overwork, other representatives of the banking sector decided to take security measures and set a maximum working day for their interns - seventeen hours.other representatives of the banking sector decided to take security measures and set the maximum working day for their interns - seventeen hours.other representatives of the banking sector decided to take security measures and set the maximum working day for their interns - seventeen hours.

Can such a pace and load be considered acceptable with an eye to changing living conditions? My instinct tells me not, and many quantitative data support it. If we talk about the personal feelings of workers, then they clearly live to the limit: during the survey 53% of the respondent in the United States said they were exhausted by work, and more than half of the white-collar workers added that they simply were not able to absorb more information. If you look at the purely physiological reactions of the body, doctors associate constant stress with mental disorders, insomnia, obesity, infertility, blood diseases, cardiovascular diseases and a number of other consequences that threaten both quality and life expectancy.

The authors draw an amusing parallel, which clearly shows what superhuman efforts require the lifestyle characteristic of a “successful person”. In the second half of the twentieth century, many sports came up against the ceiling of human capabilities - athletes came to records that squeezed the body out of the resources of the maximum. Now, in order to get ahead, one had to overcome natural limitations. In such an atmosphere of insane pressure, more and more people began to artificially boost their abilities with special drugs - to use doping. Now, according to researchers, about 40% of athletes resort to this tool, and the trend seeps out from high-performance sports and into much less large-scale events. It would seem, what does mental workers have to do with all this? The most direct:In recent years, a symmetrical tendency has emerged in offices - employees desperate to hold out on pure will will begin to reinforce their productivity pharmaceutically. Especially popular are drugs for the treatment of ADHD, which help maintain concentration for longer and sleep less. This phenomenon is called office doping, although in reality, many students at prestigious colleges are accustomed to such measures as a student.although in reality many students of prestigious colleges are accustomed to such measures already in college.although in reality many students of prestigious colleges are accustomed to such measures already in college.

Alternative


So, the generally accepted understanding of performance is detrimental to our mental and physical health, and the requirements are disproportionate to the body's capabilities at the most basic level. What then to do, to abandon the idea of ​​improving in your profession?

Based on social and biological research, as well as their own experience in monitoring work processes, Stalberg and Magness conclude that the main trouble is not that we are too focused on continuous development, but that we are wrong in stimulating it. In modern society, the idea has developed that it is useful to suppress natural needs, that the maximum return on the body can be obtained only by constantly committing violence against it. In fact, adapting to the principles of the work of our body (and, in particular, the brain), we could very well achieve not worse results and at the same time do much less harm to ourselves. The first step to this is to understand what these principles are.

In three words, they can be expressed by a universal formula that works for all of our systems:

Load (stress) + rest = growth

According to this scheme, any development takes place, from pumping up muscles to learning the syntax of a new language: we make an effort, after that we relax and recover for some time and at the end of the cycle we adapt to the accepted load, no longer perceiving it as extreme.

It is easy to guess that the determining factor here is the balance between the correct amount of load and the right amount of rest (although the content of both is also of considerable importance, as we will see later). The "culture of success" focuses on increasing the volume of stress without balancing them with anything - this leads to burnout and exhaustion in the long run. However, if you hit the other extreme, the body’s abilities will reach a plateau - development will not occur.

Two faces of stress


The concept of "stress" has a bad reputation: in the minds of ordinary people, it is associated with something extremely unpleasant, and also harmful to health. Pop psychology teaches us that for our benefit, it’s better not to deal with stress at all - to avoid, neutralize, minimize. But in the scientific understanding of the term stress, in general, is a neutral phenomenon. Of course, under unfortunate circumstances, it can seriously harm us, but in successful circumstances it works in our favor.

The experiments of Hans Selye gave much to understand the nature and consequences of stress, who, in the interests of science, pushed several groups of rats (and subsequently humans) and observed how survival in such an unfriendly environment affects their condition. The following picture emerged: in the short term, the quality of life of the experimental one, of course, decreased, but after the action of the stressor ceased, his body began powerful work to adapt to new conditions. Later it turned out that this adaptive reaction occurs due to the molecules of inflammatory proteins and a hormone called cortisol.

Inflammatory proteins and cortisol are activated by stress and serve as biological messengers, telling the body that it is not able to cope with the threat. As a result, the body releases an army of biochemical building blocks and directs them into the zone under impact, making the body stronger and more resilient and increasing its resistance in the future.

But this is ideal. If stress is too strong or prolonged, adaptation becomes impossible and the opposite process begins - degradation. Selye called this state a stage of exhaustion. The body riots and starts the so-called catabolic process, that is, the process of constant decay. Instead of signaling repair and then calming down, the levels of inflammatory proteins and cortisol rise and become toxic. The adrenal cortex, which is forced to be constantly on alert, is produced and weakened, which over time can cause a lot of health problems.

Life-giving stress


We found that from the point of view of physiology, stress is a complex, dual, weakly controlled process. Now let's try to figure out what stress looks like from the outside, from the perspective of a person living an ordinary everyday life. Here again the problem of a shift in concepts arises: for most people the word “stress” is associated precisely with those negative manifestations that come at the stage of exhaustion: strong negative emotions, exhaustion, breakdowns. In fact, we are put into a stressful state by any situation that requires effort, any encounter with something difficult or unknown - that is, everything that allows people to grow above themselves.

In the case of mental work, stress occurs when we switch from a habitual mode of thinking to a particularly intense one. Using the terminology of the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, we call these ways of thinking System 1 and System 2, respectively.
System 1 is an energy-saving brain mode that we use by default, a kind of autopilot. It allows us to quickly, almost automatically respond to external stimuli, relying on the already existing model of the world in consciousness. For routine tasks in a familiar environment, this is enough. System 2 is more resource-intensive in terms of mental efforts, but also more effective: it carries out analytical work to introduce new knowledge into the general model, critically evaluates the incoming information, and connects creativity. When learning anything, we inevitably turn to System 2, which means we bring our body to that very state of productive stress.

At a deeper level, the difference between the two modes is what kind of neural connections they use. Our current knowledge is contained in a network of brain cells, neurons, the processes of which are interconnected through special connections, synapses. When we learn something new, new synapses form between neurons and an electrical impulse travels along these neural paths. At first, the connections are weak, but as a new skill is developed, the connections between neurons are strengthened thanks to a substance called myelin. The more we work on something, the more myelin is produced, which allows electrical activity to pass between neurons faster. The work of System 1 is based on the strong neural connections that already make up our second nature. System 2, by contrast, is designed to create and amplify new synapses. As ties strengthen,the brain spends less and less energy on an unusual operation, until it finally becomes part of our autopilot. Due to these movements, a gradual increase in competency occurs.


The lower limit of the amount of stress needed to stimulate growth is clear: in order to develop, we must overcome some resistance. Actually, this is what the popular advice on leaving your comfort zone comes down to: the tasks that we set for ourselves should be a little more complicated than we are guaranteed to be able to perform. However, in a culture that encourages burnout, the question of determining the upper limit, after which the recovery period must necessarily follow, is much more acute.

The good news is that for this we have an internal productivity barometer that allows us to estimate how many resources are still left in the brain. He was examined in detail by psychologist Mihai Chiksentmihayi - the same person who introduced the widely known concept of “flow state”. He summarized his research in the following chart:



Peak productivity, which, as a rule, is accompanied by the state of the flow, corresponds to the upper right fragment in the graph: the task of the maximum (for our current level) complexity combined with the maximum readiness of the brain to process information. In this square, the work is going smoothly and it does not make sense to interrupt it. But over time and energy consumption, if the task does not become easier, we move back along the horizontal axis and drop out of the flow state. Often it is replaced by a "dead end" - a feeling that the situation is out of control and you are slipping on the spot. This should be considered as a signal from the body that the supply of productivity is temporarily exhausted.

Even better news: if someone is not eager to constantly listen to their feelings, there are more objective calculations that you can rely on. The problem of crushing the working day into blocks of optimal length was once interested in specialists working in various fields. They observed the most productive employees, took measurements and received surprisingly similar results:

  • Meat processing plant: 51 minutes of intensive work / 9 minutes of a break
  • Agriculture: 75 minutes of intensive work / 15 minutes of break
  • Technology company: 52 minutes of intensive work / 17 minutes of a break
  • Research activity: 50 minutes of work / 7 minutes of a break

Although the specific relationship between work and rest depends on the specifics of work and individual choice, the general idea is clear: the alternation of blocks from 50 to 90 minutes of intensive work and respite from 7 to 20 minutes allows you to save the physical, cognitive and emotional energy required for high performance. The maximum reasonable length of a working session can be two hours.

Based on this, those who want to calculate the personal dose of acceptable stress should stick to these numbers. The authors advise moving from the lower border to the upper one - both to avoid a small but accumulating overwork, and because the ability to hold concentration for a long time develops over time. It is also necessary to consider that momentary productivity can be influenced by many factors, both external (weather, the results of past working sessions, expected remuneration, deadlines, people with whom you have to work), and internal (the impact of non-work stressors, degree of interest and motivation, physical and psychological health). Evaluate the circumstances soberly and make the necessary discounts.

Here, in full accordance with the covenants of the authors, we will interrupt. The next part of the article will be devoted to rest: how to optimally organize recovery periods, what happens to the brain when we leave it alone, and what common misconceptions exist on the topic of rest and productivity.

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