Podcast #1,043: Achieve Peak Performance by Learning to Shift the Gears of Your Mind

Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness

The Industrial Revolution changed the nature of work, so that many people labored in factories, continuously performing the same task, at the same pace, for the duration of their shift.

Two centuries on, even though most folks have moved from working with their hands to working with their heads and from manufacturing set outputs to solving complex problems, generating creative ideas, and processing information, we still tend to work as if we’re manning an assembly line.

My guest says that being stuck in this factory framework is to our detriment, and that there’s a much better way to do knowledge work, one that’s less like manning an assembly line and more like driving a car.

Mithu Storoni is a Cambridge-trained physician, a neuroscience researcher, and the author of Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work. Today on the show, Mithu offers a modern approach to achieving peak performance and explains why it’s better to impose the natural rhythms of our brains on our work than to impose the rhythms of our work on our brains. She shares why you should treat your brain like an engine with three different gears, how people have different “gear personalities,” and how to use environmental cues, specially structured 90-minutes cycles of work, and even caffeine to shift your brain into the optimal gear for different mental challenges.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Mithu’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #525 — How to Stress Proof Your Body and Brain
• AoM Podcast #743: How to Get Time, Priorities, and Energy Working in Your Favor

Connect With Mithu Storoni

• Mithu’s website
• Mithu on X
• Mithu on IG
• Mithu on LinkedIn

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. The Industrial Revolution changed the nature of work so that many people labored in factories continuously performing the same task at the same pace for the duration of their shift. Two centuries on, even though most folks have moved from working with their hands to working with their heads, and from manufacturing set outputs to solving complex problems, generating creative ideas and processing information, we still tend to work as if we’re manning an assembly line.

My guest says that being stuck in this factory framework is to our detriment and that there’s a much better way to do knowledge work, one that’s less like manning an assembly line and more like driving a car. Mithu Storoni is a Cambridge trained physician, a neuroscience researcher and the author of Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work. Today on the show, Mithu offers a modern approach to achieving peak performance and explains why it’s better to impose the natural rhythms of our brains on our work than to impose the rhythms of our work on our brains. She shares why you should treat your brain like an engine with three different gears, how people have different gear personalities, and how to use environmental cues, specially structured 90 minute cycles of work, and even caffeine to shift your brain to the optimal gear for different mental challenges. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/hyperefficient.

All right, Mithu Storoni, welcome back to the show.

Mithu Storoni: Thank you so much for having me.

Brett McKay: So, we had you on back in 2019 to talk about your book, Stress Proof. That’s episode number 525. You got a new book out called Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work. How is this book a continuation of your thinking and writing that you did in Stress Proof?

Mithu Storoni: So, when I wrote Stress Proof, the main focus was on the neuroscience of stress. And following the book, I’ve been working with various organizations in different fields to really dig deeper into the world of work and how stress manifests and really how the world of work functions. And while doing that, I realized that one of the biggest questions we ought to be asking right now is, is it really that stress arises on its own from the world of work as it is now? Or are we doing something fundamentally wrong in the way we work? And this set me down a rabbit hole and I started looking at why we work the way we do and why we in industrial urbanized societies have quantity of work, which is actually very comparably almost lighter than the work that many non-urban, non-industrialized societies do. And yet we still have this higher burden of lack of fulfillment, of mental illness, of stress, of burnout. So, all of these questions sort of led me to dig deeper into asking why we work the way we do and could there be something fundamentally wrong with the way we work? And that led to going down lots of rabbit holes and discovering that there is indeed something very wrong and very peculiar about the way we work. And that led to the book, Hyperefficient.

Brett McKay: Well, so, yeah, let’s get to that. The big overarching argument in this book is that the way, most white collar workers, knowledge workers work today goes counter to the natural way our minds and bodies want to work. What is that natural way?

Mithu Storoni: So, first we have to look at what is not the natural way. So we have from the era of Fordian assembly lines and Taylorism when mass production was a thing in productivity, we started adopting this model of assembly line style working which revolved around manual work, assembling things with your hands, working with muscle and in that sort of framework the faster you worked the longer the hours you put in, the more continuously you worked so the shorter your breaks or the absence of breaks even, all of these led to more products along the line and hence improved productivity and equated with success. Now after the Second World War when the kind of work we did started to change and a lot of work went from the hands to the head where people locked into offices, manual work, the share of manual work went down, the share of knowledge work went up, we started doing different kinds of work but we never really changed the way in which we worked and that should really strike alarm bells, looking back with a benefit of hindsight because when we started working with the mind we assumed that the mind works in exactly the same way as muscle, but it doesn’t.

With muscle you work when you work and your muscle rests as soon as you stop. The faster you work, the faster your products that are assembled get assembled. When you think about the mind at work, however, it’s very different. Putting the mind into this box of continuous constant paced working during an entire day, clocking in in the morning, clocking off late in the evening with an hour for lunch, putting that sort of assembly line framework on the mind is a very unnatural way to force the mind to work. We know that when it comes to the mind at work, the mind suffers from fatigue, just like muscle does. But unlike muscle, the mind doesn’t perspire, it doesn’t grow red, there are no sore joints in the head. And we have created a world where the signs of mental fatigue, which tend to be very subtle, are always ignored, especially when they are manifesting at 11:00 in the morning. So we are forcing the brain, the mind, to carry on working, ignoring fatigue. And when we start to do that, what happens is, the mind can continue working, but at a very low level. But when it comes to really thinking at sort of at really peak levels, at performing at peak levels, at thinking of innovative ideas, original ideas, solving difficult problems, for all of these things to happen, the mind needs to be in a particular state, a very fresh state.

It mustn’t be fatigued. It cannot do all these things if it has been working continuously for long hours. So the way we work, force the mind to work at a lower level to the level it could be working at. And instead of using this assembly line template, if we get the brain to work or get the mind to work in more of a rhythmic cycle, so cycles of on and off or cycles of high intensity followed by medium and lower intensity, we can keep mental fatigue at bay and we can let mental output continue and continue at a very high level.

Brett McKay: Okay, so just to recap here, whenever we work with our physical bodies, we naturally want to take breaks because our body, our muscles just can’t go on anymore. So, we take a break, we might even take a break on the weekend if you work in a manual labor job so your body can recover. With mind work, we don’t allow our mind that same sort of rest because you don’t notice the fatigue the same way you do muscle fatigue.

Mithu Storoni: Correct. So with mental fatigue because it manifests in such a subtle way, I mean, practically the way you would feel it is working on something really really well, you’re focused, you’re getting these great ideas and then about 20 minutes, 30 minutes down the line suddenly you find that your mind is kind of drifting, your thoughts are drifting, your attention is floating away. Now that is actually a sign that your mind is tired and that’s your brain’s natural mechanism to lower the load, to step off the pedal. But we interpret that as, oh, we are being distracted, we are not working hard enough, it’s only been 30 minutes, we should carry on, we’re clearly not aspiring, we’re not aching anywhere, there’s no reason to stop and if your manager sees you not working and you’re on the seat, again there is a perception that that equates to lower success, lower productivity, so we just force ourselves on. But as soon as you start to do that, the brain can indeed continue to work, we can work without having any sleep, but the level of excellence of your work immediately slides down.

Brett McKay: And adding on to that, even when we’re not working for the job we do to make money, a lot of just life requires a significant amount of cognitive work, paying bills, managing insurance, managing schedules for your kids. So, even when you’re off the clock, your brain never gets a break.

Mithu Storoni: This is exactly right and it’s actually a symptom of our time because in one way, we are making the world easier to handle with technology by simplifying things, by making things easier. We no longer need to post letters, we can type them in an instant, we no longer need to kind of have different notebooks and different records, we can put them all into a file in our computer. But what all of this is actually doing unbeknownst to us because we’ve evolved and we’ve trained ourselves to think that fatigue equates to actual physically manifesting fatigue, the kind of feeling your body in your muscles. But what this world is actually doing is it’s putting a huge load on our minds and because the mind’s fatigue doesn’t manifest in the same way, we are ignoring the fact that it exists. But by piling this onto the mind, the mind is having to struggle with a lot more than it used to have to do before this era of so much technology when we used to actually process information, process data in more of a distributed way, in more of an embodied way. So you’re right, we live in this world and in addition to this, while we are working, the workload itself is increasing. But at the same time, the way we work is not taking account that the mind is needing to take breaks because the brain is essentially creaking under the strain.

Brett McKay: So, something you do in this book is you introduce readers to a framework to understand how our mind works when we work and you call it the gear network. I thought it’s a really useful mental model. What cognitive and neurological processes does this gear network framework represent?

Mithu Storoni: So, when you’re working at any kind of knowledge work, it really helps to think of your mind in being in different states. And you can intuitively, you will all know this because you know that sometimes when you’re working on something, you need to be really deeply focused. Say you’re reading a really important report or email with lots of nuances within it, you have to focus completely on that. You might be doing a different task on a different day where you’re thinking of new ideas, new ideas for innovation. You might be in a software company, you’re trying to come up with a new product. In that sort of mental space, you want to be in a sort of slightly mind wandering, kind of gentle rambling state of mind when you’re thinking of new ideas, you want those aha moments of insight to appear. And there could be a third state of mind where you are just on automatic. You are just responding, reacting, you are working to a deadline, you don’t have time to think, you just need to react. So, these are all different states of mind that any worker, any knowledge worker will come across during a typical day’s work.

And what we know is that these different states of mind are tightly correlated to the activity of a particular network in the brain. Its official name is the locus coeruleus norepinephrine network. But essentially you can see it as a sort of gear network because your brain’s entire activity pattern changes when this network changes its pattern of firing. So if it fires very slowly, you’re in this very slow mind wandering state of mind. If it fires very fast, then you’re in this reactive state of mind without actually dipping into stress. And there is a Goldilocks zone right in the middle where the norepinephrine levels are just right to engage the part of the brain that sits at the front of your head known as the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for higher thinking, analytical problem solving. It comes alive when you’re playing chess, solving equations, solving difficult things. So, in this Goldilocks zone of this middle level of norepinephrine, which I refer to as gear two, this is where you reach the optimal state to do any kind of mental work that requires concentration, attention and focus.

Brett McKay: Okay. So yeah, just recap, there’s gear one. It’s when norepinephrine is at a low state, not firing off as much. This is when you’re daydreaming. This is when you’re recharging. Gear two, that’s when you’re locked in. As my teenage son would say, gear two is when you can do a lot of mental work. You can concentrate, you can problem solve. But you say with gear two, there’s two states. There’s like a low energy state and a high energy state.

Mithu Storoni: Right. So, gear one is mind wandering. Gear three is reactive. Neither of these two gears, these two extreme gears, allow you to sit down and focus. In gear two, you can, because this part of the brain is fully engaged because it responds to this specific level of norepinephrine. So in gear two, you’re in the right mental zone, just as your son puts it. But even when you are in the right mental zone, when you can focus, you can still find that there are little… There are small nuances about that. So you could be in a state of great focus, but you’re also able to kind of let your mind go every now and again, just to wander over an idea, just to kind of come away from a problem and look at it through different angles. You could also be in this optimal gear two zone and have really sharp focus and kind of charge ahead along different ideas. So you can feel the pace of your mind being slightly slower or being slightly faster. And this is what I describe as being low energy and high energy gear two.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. So, gear two is the ideal, but gear three, sometimes you need to be in gear three when the pressure’s on, right?

Mithu Storoni: Right. So, you know, taking a broad picture of this, when you’re doing mental work and generally when you’re doing anything where you’re engaging with the world around you during the day, gear two seems to be the state we all gravitate towards. It’s a state we like to be in. We feel good in because that’s where we can concentrate the best. But there is a spectrum of norepinephrine across gear one, gear two, gear three, where gear one, it’s very low, gear three, it’s higher. And all of these gears actually have a role to play. So, small bursts of being in gear three is actually very helpful. Not only is it helpful when we are in emergency situations and we need to react very quickly, it speeds up our thinking, it actually increases speed at the cost of accuracy, but there are times when that’s a helpful thing. And at this very high level of norepinephrine, you actually have a slight enhancement of certain types of learning and memory. So you remember certain emotionally charged situations really, really well. That’s because of this huge spike in norepinephrine you get being in this gear three situation.

But the thing with gear three is you mustn’t be in it for too long because as soon as you’re in it for too long, you have too much norepinephrine in there for you to be able to concentrate and pay attention. This is why you have to quickly come back to being in gear two again.

Brett McKay: Okay, so we shift gears based on context that we find ourselves in. But you talk about in the book that we all have a gear personality. What do you mean by gear personality?

Mithu Storoni: Right, so when you are doing anything at all and you as a human being have to pay attention to something to engage with it. And this applies to whether you’re working, whether you’re doing something at home, whether you’re cooking, whether you’re tidying something, all of these things need you to pay attention. And the ability to pay attention is optimal when you’re in gear two. Now, what is really interesting is that we all aspire to get into this gear two state. And when we do, we feel really good. And different people need a different level of stimulation to get there. So again, going back to this analogy of a gearbox of a gear network. If you imagine a set of gears, a gearbox, where it’s really hard to push the lever up, to push the gear up, stimulation and uncertainty and just excitement has that same effect on your brain. So just again, taking a step back, when we talk about these three different gears and this network in your brain that releases norepinephrine, what we know is that your brain is always trying to adapt to what is asked of it.

So, if you give your brain a challenge that’s difficult, it will step on the pedal and it will ramp up its gear to fulfill that challenge. And that challenge can be in the form of stimulation, it can be in the form of uncertainty, it can be in the form of excitement and different people will respond to the same level of stimulation in a slightly different way. So if we all start in gear one, some people will react very powerfully to a small amount of stimulation, their brain will crank the gear right up and they will go right up to gear two or even overshoot to gear three.

A different kind of person has a stiffer gearbox, and for this person, the same amount of stimulation will do very little. So for them, their brain will need a bigger sort of stimulus or a bigger reason to press on the pedal so they will react to a bigger volume, or bigger kind of intensity of uncertainty or of stimulation, and they will need that to cramp, to to kind of ramp up from gear one up to gear two. Ultimately, both people want to be in gear two, but the first person needs very little stimulation to get there. The second person needs a lot of stimulation to get there. And practically you can see this at play in any workplace or just amongst your amongst the people you’re around, there will be some people who get very rattled by the smallest uncertainty, by the smallest level of stimulation. And there are other people who need uncertainty, who need competition, who need threats, who need excitement just to stay in a happy mental space to get into gear two. And this is what I describe as gear personality, different people thrive in different environments.

I talk about work environments, but this is true really, of environments, at large, whether you’re talking about a city versus a very slow village, just all environments. And the reason for this is some people’s gears go up very slowly. Other people’s gears are very sensitive, and they move very easily. And one of the determinants of whether we are happy in what we’re doing. We’re happy in a particular workplace doing a particular type of work. This can be influenced by this gear personality. So, if you’re someone who loves uncertainty, who loves going into the unknown, and who needs that level of stimulation to be in the right mental space, then you would thrive in situations of being an entrepreneur or doing extreme sports or doing something really challenging, taking risks, whereas if you’re someone who is easily moved by uncertainty, then you would probably do much better in a different type of job, where you are in an environment with lower uncertainty, with lower volatility, where you have more control.

Now, this does in no way reflect on your intelligence. So, two people can have exactly the same level of intelligence, of ability, but where they thrive is starkly different, because of the way their gearbox reacts to the environment.

Brett McKay: As you were talking. This made me think of my wife and I and our different approaches to what time you should get to the airport. My wife, she loves getting there, like, the very last minute. She loves the challenge of me, like, Okay, how close can we cut it? So she has that I probably she has that stiff gear personality me, on the other hand, I’m like, I wannna get there an hour and a half before the flight leaves. I wanna have time just to relax. I wanna make sure we have time for any contingencies that might show up. So I probably have that more looser gear personality.

Mithu Storoni: Right. And very interestingly, procrastination actually comes into it also, because when we’re procrastinating, what we’re needing is we’re needing to create some kind of motivational drive to perform the action. If the motivation isn’t there already. And for some people, the slightest glimmer of threat provides enough motivation to actually get it done, whereas for others, you have to wait and wait and wait until not doing the task is just has got such severe consequences that it’s only at that point that your motivation reaches a threshold and you you go and tackle it.

Brett McKay: Is our gear personality. Is this primarily genetic?

Mithu Storoni: Yes and no. So, the gear personality actually research on that has started about 100 years ago, and you might have heard of the labeling of type A and type B personalities. And this labeling began about… In a paper published around about the First World War period where they found that different people are more susceptible to certain diseases, certain conditions, because of the way they react to certain situations. So we know that there is a difference in the way every human being responds and reacts to uncertainty, to pressure, but a large part of it can be modified and can be changed. Your environment is a big factor. So for instance, if you take people coming back from combat zones, take combat veterans coming back after these very, very frightening, threatening, high uncertainty situation, sort of way of living for months and months or weeks and weeks, then following that period.

These people are going to have a much higher threshold or uncertainty tolerance, whereas you can also have the reverse. You can take someone who has a very what I refer to as as a stiff gear, and if they are in an environment with very low uncertainty, and they’re suddenly put into an environment of high uncertainty or a period, they are going to appear to be hyper reactive to uncertainty until they adjust so the environment can modify it. But we also have these innate differences.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so we’ve talked about how it’s best to work in a rhythm. Can we use our body’s natural rhythm to make our work rhythm even more effective? Like our body has a circadian rhythm, so are we able to use that to our advantage, that we can work more efficiently with this gear metaphor?

Mithu Storoni: Yes, absolutely. So we do have these, as you say, circadian rhythms, but actually the brain and the body, we have so many rhythms that the brain follows many, many rhythms, and each rhythm is embedded within another rhythm. And we now know that within the brain, information is carried in the form of oscillations or waves, rhythms of waves. So rhythms, essentially, are fundamental to the way the brain exists. Circadian rhythms is something most of your listeners will be very familiar with. We all know about dark and light, and that we all have this 24 hour body clock. What is very interesting is, it seems that we also have some kind of a circadian rhythm in terms of the way the brain likes to work. So it seems that the first part of every day, so the hours immediately after waking up, and the last part of every day, so late in the evening or early at night, just before you’re falling asleep, those are two windows where creative thinking seems to happen best.

We also have a rhythm in terms of focused attention. So focusing, the ability to focus, to pay attention, seems to peak from around the mid morning to lunchtime, and again, from around mid afternoon to early evening. So these are two rhythms embedded within this circadian rhythm, and doing these kinds of work at these kinds of times can help you ride these rhythms and do them in a much better way than you would if you did them at different times. And another rhythm to just bear in mind here is immediately after lunchtime. We all have something called post lunch dip, which is a slight slump in the way we pay attention. And if you’re from the Mediterranean or from different parts of the world that have a tradition of a siesta, this is almost innately known to people who are in the habit of taking a short post lunch nap, but really, this dip in attention seems to be there in everyone.

You can override it with caffeine, and it doesn’t manifest quite as powerfully if you’ve had a good night of sleep before. But the reason why it’s significant is, if you’re trying to do focused work during this period in the day, you’re going to do it badly, and you’re actually going to work against your body’s physiology to force yourself to do focused work. So, rather than working as per a schedule or routine that everyone follows at the same pace. If instead, you tailor the work, the tasks that you have to do, and you divide them into the kind of work that they involve, and you time them to these peaks in the day, you’re much more likely to be able to do them with less effort and with much better quality of output.

Brett McKay: And this is all about being hyper efficient to the top.

Mithu Storoni: It’s all about being hyper efficient.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So just to recap there. So wake up to 9:00 AM, our brain is in that gear one mode. So that’s great for creativity. And then about 9:00 AM, to 1:00PM. That’s when it’s easier to shift into that gear two mode, naturally for focused work, then we have that post lunch dip. So maybe don’t do any don’t don’t have a working lunch, ’cause your brain is just not gonna be great for that. And then about 4:00PM to 9:00PM, we had that second peak of focused attention, where it’s easy to be into gear two. And then from 9:00PM, to when we go to bed, our brain, our mind, naturally wants to go to gear one. So again, maybe do some creative work. Don’t do any of that focused work. And again, these numbers we just gave were approximations. This is gonna change depending on your personal circadian rhythm. Some people are early birds and some people are night owls. That’s gonna shift depending on that.

Mithu Storoni: Exactly, exactly it shifts according to your own personal rhythm. Some people are shifted towards the morning, some people are shifted towards the night. And so you have to shift these rhythms with us that, it will also shift a little bit depending on your latitude, so where in the world you are, and also within these periods. Of course, you can tailor how you work depending on the kind of work you’re doing. So, if you’re doing work that involves focused attention, working in 90 minute rhythms, is extremely helpful, because what you’re trying to do is you want to be in that gear two state for as long as possible. But in order to be in that state, you need to kind of come up for air. You need to wind down to gear one very regularly in the form of breaks, and that lets you keep going. So, working in these 90 minute cycles, if you’re doing focused work also helps within this, this sort of schema.

Brett McKay: Okay, so when you’re in that focused work period, gear two, you don’t wanna stay in it indefinitely. So, maybe you could do something like the Pomodoro method, where you work like 25 minutes and then take a five minute break and then repeat.

Mithu Storoni: Right. That’s a very popular way of of tackling it, I actually use a slightly different approach. So, what I’ve done is I looked at how we used to work before these assembly line templates of work were imposed on us. So, I’ve looked at pre industrial societies. I’ve looked at knowledge workers in the form of great scientists and great thinkers, again, in the pre industrial 19th century era, and looked at how did they work when they actually produced their best kind of work. And so one way to do it is, just as you say, is to work intensely for a bit and then give the brain a rest. But if you’re doing that in the workplace, your manager is going to not be very happy if they find you vacate your seat every 20 minutes and take a half hour break. So you can fuse all of these together. And one way of doing it is by working in a very energy efficient way, by working to a kind of power law so you’re doing really intense work right at the start of every 90 minute work cycle.

And that intense work is something that you know you really, really need to pay attention, concentrate. It’s difficult, it’s challenging. It takes mental stamina out of you. If you can limit that to around about 20 minutes, around the time where you would stop, according to your Pomodoro technique. So, limit that to around 20 minutes, and then move to work that is lighter. You don’t have to stop working necessarily, but you move to work that’s lighter and do lighter work, sort of medium intensity work for the next 40 minutes or so, and then for the last 20 minutes you do really light work. So what this lets you do is, it lets you pace yourself without stopping work completely. And this is a very wise approach to take, because there is now data that shows that if you do really, really intense work for more than a total of four hours across the day.

When I say four hours across the day, I don’t mean you don’t do any other work. I mean the intense work specifically continues for more than four hours across the day, then the fatigue from that spills over into the next day. You don’t get rid of it, even with a good night’s sleep. So, if you can just space out your intense work to 20 minute bouts within each cycle, and then move to something lighter, you can carry on working. You can still do your full day of work without compromising your mental performance, both from the level of avoiding fatigue, but also from the level of preventing fatigue from in any way, disabling the quality of your mental output.

Brett McKay: So, gear two, that’s that ideal work state. What do you recommend for people who, if their day is punctuated by gear three moments, how long should they stay in that ideally? And then what should they do for recovery after they’re done with it?

Mithu Storoni: A very simple way to think of this is, again, with this sort of power law approach. So, the more intense your work, the longer your break ought to be, and the shorter you should do the work for. So, if your work is full of gear, three moments. First, try to keep those moments as short as possible, follow them with as long a recovery period as possible. And if that means you can’t actually leave your desk, then do very, very light work following those bursts of gear three activity. And you just have to buffer it with really long periods of rest and recovery. And as an analogy, if you look back to and I’ve cited these in the book, to pre industrial societies, hunter gatherer societies, whenever they had periods of really, really hard physical work, when they had hunt that would last a whole day, they would follow that with a few days of doing nothing.

Similarly, if they hunted every day, every morning, they would spend a burst in the morning working really hard, and they would always follow it by a long period of the day when they’re just pottering around, just doing very little physically, so we naturally gravitate to working in this way, and it’s unfortunate that we have imposed these templates in the way we work to prevent us from doing so. But if you are in gear three situations, the best thing you can do is just try to include as many breaks as possible, and try to limit the periods in gear three or as much as you possibly can.

Brett McKay: Are there things we can do to our environment or to ourselves, even to manipulate the gear shift?

Mithu Storoni: Yes. So coming back to the idea of your brain being an engine working in three different gears, your brain is an information processing machine, and it slices information depending on what is demanded of it. So, if it perceives that there is danger, that there is uncertainty, that the world is moving very fast, it starts processing information faster. If it perceives that the world is very safe or time is passing very slowly, it processes information slower. Your gear correlates to the rate or the speed of information processing. So when you are in that sort of very slow gear, one mind wandering state, your brain perceives that the world around you is slow, is slowly moving, and there’s also no imminent threat, no imminent danger of uncertainty. Similarly, if your mind is really racing, if you are thinking quickly, reacting fast, you’re doing it because your brain thinks that it’s necessary to do so. So we can use this to use, really three things to modulate the way your brain is processing information, and hence the gear you’re in.

One is by playing with your mind’s perception of time. And we all intuitively know this, because we know that faster music, speaking quickly, loudly, speaking [0:36:40.5] ____ all of these things, makes us more alert. Similarly, slow music, relaxing drum beats, the kind of music you hear in a hotel reception or in a dentist on a dentist chair, those types of music and sounds give you the perception that time is slowing down. So, you can modulate the apparent pace of your environment by being in an environment that’s calmer, that looks like it is slower. This is why nature gets so much praise when you’re talking about resilience, when you’re talking about relaxation, because in nature, if you’re walking through a park, walking through trees, there’s nothing there that shouts at you, that warns you of uncertainty or of danger, time appears to pass very slowly. So time is one factor. Another factor is uncertainty.

So, as soon as you think that there is an imminent deadline. As soon as you perceive competition, as soon as you perceive time moving so quickly that danger can appear at any moment, all of these things, again, puts you into a higher gear, which is why some people perform really well under pressure, and others don’t, because they need that pressure to raise their gear from gear one to gear two.

You can reduce that by creating a perception of security, of controllability, of transparency, by reducing the frequency of deadlines, so by having one big deadline at the end, but not having lots of small ones that constantly make you feel like you have to reach a certain point. And the third thing you can use is your cognitive load. So it sounds a little bit counterintuitive given the information, we’re always told about multitasking, but if you are doing something and it feels really boring and under stimulating doing something else on the side. So, make adding to that workload by multitasking can actually put you into the right gear. So, if you’re in gear one, it can put you up into the optimal gear two.

Similarly, if you are in gear three from having to multitask furiously, removing a few of those tasks and lightening your mental load can bring you back into gear two. So these are the three things physically. And a fourth thing of course is your body’s physiology. So, you can tap into your autonomic nerve network to slow down or to speed up.

Brett McKay: Yeah, some things you can do to speed up your nervous system. Cold can do that or hot being in a sauna can help with that. Another, I think one thing that office workers use to shift gears, they might not know that they’re shifting gears in their mind, but caffeine, having that cup of coffee, can help you shift up to that higher gear.

Mithu Storoni: Exactly. So, caffeine or coffee is the oldest gear shifter. We all know we all use it and we’ve been using it for a long time. And in fact, some researchers believe that coffee and the industrial revolution went hand in hand. And I’ve read some people even go so far as to say that it’s because of coffee that we managed these assembly lines and the era of the industrial revolution. So yes, coffee and caffeine raises your gear. If you’re in gear one, it’ll put you into gear two, but if you take too much, you could overshoot into gear three. And that’s when your thinking becomes too reactive. You miss nuances. You can use biases. You don’t see the whole picture. You mentioned physiology. Yes. So, cold exposure, heat exposure, anything that shocks your system, raises your body’s sort of fight or flight activity, that sort of response and alerting response, anything that does that will raise your gear and doing the opposite. So, calming your body down. And we know again of techniques like breathing exercises, stretching, relaxing muscle after contraction, all of these things lower your gear by creating a sensation of relaxation and calm.

Brett McKay: How can we use our gear network to have some control over our motivation to work? Because I know that’s a big issue. A lot of people have this, like, I just don’t feel like working. I got to motivate myself. How can this gear network help us do that better?

Mithu Storoni: So, in really in two ways. Now, motivation is a really big and important conversation we have to have today because our traditional markers of motivation are changing because of AI and automation and the way the work landscape is changing, the traditional guarantees of motivation a job, job security, career progression. All of these are changing. Now, motivation is very interesting because what you want to do when you’re working is you want to be in gear too. And the optimal state to be in within gear two is this sort of high energy gear two state, because in that state you are optimized for learning, for making progress and all of these things. What is very interesting is that your motivation pathways in the brain are in direct conversation with this network that I call the gear network. And if you can tap into a special kind of motivation known as intrinsic motivation, it’s basically being motivated by the pleasure, by the sensation of what you’re doing, not its eventual results. So for instance, if you feel intrinsically motivated while learning, it’s the feeling of learning, of accumulating knowledge, of having those, aha sparks about that’s why this happens or that’s so interesting.

That sort of feeling you get, that is what we call intrinsic motivation, as opposed to learning for an exam. So, you’re learning because you want to pass the test. So, if you can create the sensation of really feeling pleasure in the process and the feeling of what you’re doing, you immediately push yourself into gear two, specifically into this high energy gear two state. And that keeps you, that sort of locks you into gear two and you can carry on doing what you’re doing for long periods of time without feeling tired and without losing motivation. On the flip side, if you can use tools such as, what we’ve just discussed, your physiology, your environment, put you into gear two, you’re more likely to inspire motivation because you’re in that frame of mind where what you’re doing is most likely to bring you pleasure. So, it interacts in both of these ways. And I’m going to introduce a third thing into it, which is how do we get this kind of motivation when you start enjoying what you’re doing for its own sake? Now, this has really puzzled people for a long time because you can always tempt people with a carrot or a stick and we always have done. But how do you make someone get that motivation, that kind of inner fire from the inside?

And one way to do it, which also links into the gear system, is by something known as learning progress. It’s a mechanism coined by two researchers in Paris, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer and Frederic Kaplan. And what they’ve done is they’ve taken intelligent machines and they’ve tried to see what can we do to make these machines learn in environments that they have not been programmed for. And they’ve taken inspiration from how a child learns because when a child is learning or a young infant is experiencing the world, the infant does so without getting any external rewards. So, you’re not giving the child a prize or anything. They’re just exploring. They’re just finding things out for its own sake, because it’s pleasurable to do that. So coming back to this mechanism, what we know is if you are doing something that is resulting in a rapid and progressive accumulation of mastery in some domain, it doesn’t matter what that domain is, but it has to be progressive. So it mustn’t be, okay, I’m learning French. I’ve learned to so and so level, I’m done.

Instead, it should be continued progress. You’re never really reaching the end, but you’re making rapid progress as you go along. If you can put yourself into that frame of mind, whatever you’re doing seems to almost miraculously create a sense of intrinsic motivation and what you’re doing becomes pleasurable. And one of the reasons for this, or one of the factors in this, is that every time you are increasing your skills, you are stretching the skill set you already have. So you are just at the edge of comfort. You’re just at the edge of your sort of really comfortable gear two zone. And right at the edge of comfort, your norepinephrine levels are just optimal for you to really, really prime the ability to learn, to think flexibly, and to gain mastery over whatever you’re doing. And this is precisely the mindset that we see in people who experience flow. And flow locks you in to this gear two high energy state. So, all of these things come together with a simple principle of finding elements in your environment, in your work, where you can make rapid, continuous progress.

Brett McKay: Any advice on how to structure your work so you can create that feeling?

Mithu Storoni: So yes, you can do it in different levels. So if you are a manager, for instance, and you’re managing a team, and you have a bunch of tasks that you want to delegate, so one way of doing it is delegating your tasks and checking to see which members of your team are not just doing what needs to be done, but are actually making progress and making rapid progress. So, they may not have completed the task, but how fast are they making progress in it? You might find that a bunch of people are making great progress, but another group are really not making any progress at all. They’re doing things, but they’re not making progress. So shuffling the tasks around to fit to progress and not just output is one way of doing it from a manager’s point of view. If you are the team member and you are given a task by your manager to do, then one way to engineer this sense of progress is by using what I term as an 80% rule or an 80% heuristic, which is that whenever you’re doing something, try to find a difficulty level where what you’re doing is just 20% beyond your skill set. So, if you’re plunging into a task you know nothing about, first find a little island that you’re familiar with. It doesn’t matter how small it is.

It can be something really periphery and really inconsequential. Jump on that island and then expand into the territory of the unknown by only 20% at a time. Eventually, your island will grow and grow and that 20% chunk will be objectively bigger and bigger. But if you can carry on in this way, you will be able to really start enjoying what you’re doing and derive pleasure from it. And finally, if you’re sitting down to do a task and it just looks so boring and you have to read a report just in front of you, again using this strategy can help find one thing that you find really interesting or where you have some kind of a curiosity gap. And you make a tiny bit of progress by closing that gap. That creates momentum for you to jump to something else that’s interesting. So rather than read the whole report in order or do the whole task in order, jump from one island to another, find something really interesting, expand that a little bit, use that momentum to jump to a different island.

Brett McKay: Well, Mithu. This has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Mithu Storoni: So, thank you so much again for having me. The book is available in all bookstores. You can get it on Amazon. It’s also available on audio. And I have a website, mithustoroni.com. I’m also there on LinkedIn and on X.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Mithu Storoni. Thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Mithu Storoni: Thank you so much for having me.

Brett McKay: My guest today is Mithu Storoni. She’s the author of the book, Hyperefficient. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about her work at her website, mithustoroni.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/hyperefficient Where you can find links to resources where We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AoM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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