Chapter 3
Manage Attention
(How to Use Our Blobby Tissue Better)
Your brain consists of just two to three pounds of a blobby tissue. It doesn’t look like much, but it is considered by scientists to be the most complex object in the universe. It contains about 100 billion neurons and a trillion support cells. To put that in context, you have as many neurons as the total number of people born in the entire history of the world! Now, to understand how much messaging is happening inside this blobby tissue, imagine every person that ever lived is also fanatical about social media and has seven thousand friends on Facebook (each neuron is connected to an average of seven thousand other neurons) and sends between five and fifty status updates every second!
The brain is amazing. However, it wasn’t designed for the modern working environment and all the challenges, distractions and stimulations of life today. The brain evolved for a different world: a world of simple choices, of limited information and distraction—a technology-free world. For example, our ancestors needed good memories to be able to recall if this or that animal would kill them, or how to find the way home after a hunting expedition. They didn’t need to be clever and think about weighty problems of global economics, but they did need to spot signs of danger in the environment, and respond quickly. In other words, we’ve got pretty good memories, we’re bad at thinking and we’re distractible.
While biological evolution is very slow, cultural evolution can be astonishingly rapid. Our brains aren’t much different from those of our ancestors thousands of years ago, yet our culture has evolved, bringing with it new tools and technologies that change everything as far as the brain is concerned. We no longer need a good memory: When was the last time you tried to commit a new telephone number to memory? On the other hand, we have never thrown as much information and complexity at our brains with as much speed. We have never pounded our poor, overloaded neurons as hard and as relentlessly with so much distraction. We have never maintained a state of alertness as consistently as we do today, aided by our multiple pings and rings.
It’s About Attention, Not Time
Edward M. Hallowell, expert in attention deficit disorder (ADD), describes the experience of ADD like this: “People with untreated ADD rush around a lot, feel impatient wherever they are, love speed, get frustrated easily, lose focus in the middle of a task or a conversation because some other thought catches their attention, bubble with energy but struggle to pay attention to one issue for more than a few seconds… feel they could do a lot more if they could just get it together… feel powerless over the piles of stuff that surround them, resolve each day to do better tomorrow, and in general feel busy beyond belief.”1
Sound familiar? That description would apply to many of us in our daily lives. Hallowell, in his book CrazyBusy, explains that being busy is more akin to attention deficit disorder than many of us would like to accept—and that’s a problem. In her insightful book Distracted, Maggie Jackson describes attention as the bedrock of society. Our willingness and ability to think deeply, to ponder the complex rather than the superficial, to be focused rather than diffuse, are critical not only to our thinking but also to our morality, our happiness and our culture. She worries that, culturally, we are losing our powers of attention: that our lives of distraction are reducing our capacity to create and preserve wisdom. She believes this could have dire consequences: “We are on the verge of losing our capacity as a society for deep, sustained focus. In short, we are slipping toward a new dark age.”2
Whether or not you believe we are moving to some kind of intellectually dumbed-down, cultural dark age, I think we’d all accept that the multiple sources of information, stimulation and demand hitting our brains today scatter our attention horribly. We can get so used to being buffeted by each and every attraction, our ability to stay focused on a single task drops. In fact, many otherwise healthy people who need to focus are looking for chemical assistance. Many are reaching way beyond coffee and Red Bull. The latest trend is “cosmetic neurology”: to self-prescribe drugs for ADHD or narcolepsy to support fading powers of concentration. In a significant study of over 1,800 students, 34 percent had taken drugs like Ritalin and Adderall illegally to help them concentrate!3
I would argue that attention management is far, far more important than time management. We can put in lots of hours at work, or put lots into our hours at work, but our impact starts, our breakthroughs occur and our real relationships are built when we get the best from our attentional systems. After all, our ability to think is our most valuable capability: to prioritize the wheat over the chaff, to solve complex problems and to create new ideas. Our ability to be fully present in the moment is our most rewarding capability, allowing us to find real joy, to cherish moments and experience connectedness. We cannot hope to thrive and achieve all we dream of unless we manage our attention better.
Focusing Attention
Busyness is bad, but that doesn’t mean full and active lives are bad. Many of us have a lot of things we want to achieve, which will only be delivered with hard work. However, there is a huge difference between deep focus on an important activity, and hopscotching busyness. It’s not a quantity thing, it’s a quality thing. Days and lives crammed with deep immersion in projects, interactions and experiences that are truly meaningful to you, are the juice of life. That is mastery.
One Thing at a Time
Have you ever noticed that if you are walking while talking on your mobile phone and someone asks you a tough question, you stop moving while you think? You stop because you intuitively want to divert all your paltry mental resources to your prefrontal cortex. In fact, it was shown by the scientist J. C. Welch in the late 1800s that thinking makes us physically weaker! Welch asked people to squeeze a lever as hard as they could, and measured the force they applied. Then the test was repeated, this time giving people a mental task to complete simultaneously. When people were thinking really hard, the physical force they could exert reduced by as much as 50 percent!4
The converse is also true. Harold Pashler, distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, had people perform simple physical and intellectual tasks in tandem. He found that performance dropped significantly when the subject attempted to do more than one thing at a time, even though they were different kinds of tasks.5 Pashler would argue that part of the reason for this is dual-task interference: our brains are not designed to do two things at once, to multitask. Multitasking, it seems, can drop the performance of a Harvard MBA student to that of an eight-year-old.6 The only way to work around this is to focus on one thing at a time.
Get It Out of Your Head
Two Buddhist monks were walking together when they came to a river. Next to the river was a beautiful woman. She turned to the monks and asked them to carry her across the stream so she didn’t spoil her dress. The first monk, knowing that touching women was not allowed, apologized but said no. The second monk, without pause, picked her up and carried her across the river. They walked on for many hours and miles. Then the first monk turned to the second and asked why he had carried the woman. To which, the second replied, “I carried her a few steps across that stream; you have carried her many miles.”
In the opening I talked about the Zeigarnik effect and how a few minutes on a topic, left unfinished, opens the file so that the brain continues to work on the topic in the background. This is a great strategy to accelerate your ability to solve that problem quickly the next day. However, the Zeigarnik effect has a less than positive side. All open files demand attention from the brain. Open files clutter the brain and redirect energy; they reduce our thinking power, they distract our attention. The second monk was only able to get into the Zen of his walk because he had closed the file relating to the woman.
In his book Getting Things Done, David Allen describes the effect of carrying lots of open files as the “monkey mind”7—when our thoughts leap from task to task, from idea to idea. Anytime we have “a lot on our minds,” we are carrying lots of thoughts, worries or tasks in our heads. The executive network—the part of the brain’s attention system particularly tasked with focus—doesn’t know where to direct attention. A monkey mind struggles to focus.
In Getting Things Done, Allen suggests a simple tool for getting things off your mind that I mentioned in the opening. It’s so valuable I just want to expand on it here. I referred to it as a brain dump; Allen calls it a collection bucket. A bucket is something you throw stuff into. A bucket isn’t a to-do list of actions; it just collects stuff. That’s the beauty of it. There is no categorization happening at all when you decide what goes in the bucket: big and small, urgent and important, shopping items, creative insights and actions. The important thing is that you always have your “bucket” with you. You may be “old skool” and use a notebook as your bucket, or you may prefer to use your smartphone. Whenever a task, important thought or action comes to mind, don’t try to remember it—capture it in your bucket. You are not trying to do anything with it at this moment, you are just getting it out of your head to free up your prefrontal cortex to think better.
Buckets only work if we have confidence that we will respond to them. To make a bucket work, we need a habit of emptying it on a regular basis. If not, the brain will soon learn it can’t relax. Most people I’ve worked with review their bucket daily, at specific chosen points. It’s important to remember, when you review the bucket, that it isn’t an action list. It is likely to represent the intellectual flotsam and jetsam of your mental meanderings. Seeing these items listed allows you to stand back and make rational choices. You will find that many items can simply be deleted, many you will put in what Allen calls a “Someday/Maybe” file, and others you will choose to do. I have found my “bucket” to be a simple discipline that helps to get stuff out of my head, confident I will address what should be addressed. Doing this allows me to step back into the moment, focus and think better about the things that really matter.
Externalize Your Thinking
Have you ever tried to play chess only in your mind? It’s really hard, because not only do you have to decide the next best move, you also have to remember the positions of all the pieces. It’s much easier to play when you can physically see the board. When you have a board, you free your brain from the task of remembering where all the pieces are; it can focus all its intellectual capability on making clever moves. The same applies to our thinking at work: anything we can do to externalize our thinking will free up more intellectual horsepower.
One of the most important intellectual tools I possess is my humble whiteboard. Time after time, when I’m getting a little stuck or entrenched in my thinking, I leap up and grab a pen. I write all the elements of the problem on the board, then I start playing around with what I’ve written. The reason this really helps is that when we’re trying to think through a complex problem, we’re trying to do three things at once. We’re trying to hold all the different parts of the problem in our head, we’re trying to manipulate the concepts and organize them in a sensible way and we’re trying to solve the problem, all at the same time. My whiteboard frees my mind of the burden of holding all that information in my working memory. I organize it externally too, which allows all of my intellect to focus on solving the actual problem. My whiteboard makes me cleverer!
From Drowning to Immersion
When Laird Hamilton let go of the rope and dropped onto that wave, he wasn’t worrying about his inbox, or his board-shaping business, or what he would buy for dinner that night. He was focused, 100 percent, on the moment, on the task at hand. The single biggest concern of sports psychology is helping athletes to get into that state of peak performance called “the zone.” When an athlete is “in the zone,” they are operating at their best because they are entirely focused and immersed in the activity. However, this is not always easy to achieve: athletes, like all of us, get distracted easily.
So how do we get more immersed more frequently? How do we get into the zone? Dr. Daniel Gucciardi and James Dimmock, associate professor at the University of Western Australia studied this in professional golfers. They asked one group of golfers to focus on three specific aspects of their swing such as “head,” “shoulders,” “knees” (… and “toes”?); they asked another group of golfers to focus on a single, all-encompassing aspect of their performance that they wanted to achieve, such as “smooth” or “effortless.” When not under pressure, both groups performed strongly. (They were professionals after all!) However, performance differed greatly when the distractions were increased in the form of cash prizes. The pros who were concentrating on three aspects of their swing started faltering; those with a simpler focus continued to perform well.8
Focusing on multiple aspects of the swing, we might think, would help us stay immersed by keeping our attention on the activity. However, when we are under pressure or distracted, this requires too much cognitive effort, and we stall. We get lost in the mental jump between “head” and “shoulders.” We think of too much, we start drowning and we lose immersion.
To remain fully immersed in what you’re doing, you need to maintain a simple focus. This can take a number of forms. Most obviously, it’s about focusing on one thing at a time. However, it’s also about maintaining a focus on the “how.” Thinking about a single aspect of your performance within a task, one that stretches you, appears to be just enough cognitive demand to accelerate you into the zone. In the same way the golfers focused on “smooth,” I have often found single word challenges help me get in the zone. When approaching a complex task like designing a presentation or writing a proposal, if I set myself a challenge to make it “surprising” or even “beautiful,” I find I become more immersed, more quickly.
Stop Churning
One of the things that prevents us from becoming immersed in what we’re doing is the churn: the relentless washing-machine spin of fears and concerns. It feels terrible, it’s exhausting and it won’t surprise you to know that all those open files reduce your thinking power. As I mentioned earlier, you might capture these concerns in your bucket list, but when they are more emotive, that often doesn’t help. It’s easy to mistake this churn as a natural consequence of having too much to do—a consequence that won’t go away until we’re back on top, having done it all. In fact, that’s not why we churn. More important, there is a simple cure for churning.
A graduate student from Florida State University, working with psychologist Roy Baumeister, came up with an interesting little study.9 He asked some students to think about their final exams and others, the control group, to think about an important party at the end of term. Among those who thought about the exam, half were also told to make specific plans for their study regimen. Nobody was given any time to actually study.
He then tested the students to see if they were churning. He gave each person word fragments to complete. For example, subjects were asked to complete “ex**” and “re**” to make four-letter words. Each of these could be completed to form a study-relevant word (exam, read), but could also be completed to form a totally different word (exit, real). We would expect more study-relevant words from those people who had begun churning over their exams. This was very much the case: those with exams on their minds identified a lot more exam-related words than those who had been tasked with thinking about a party. However, those who had thought about the exam, but subsequently made a study plan, showed no evidence of the churn; the words they identified were no more exam-related than anyone else’s.
The starting point to massively reducing your churning is to catch yourself doing it—and stop. Take a few minutes to write down a plan of action. Additionally, rather than waiting for the churn to hit, many people I work with develop a discipline to write a plan at certain times of the day, the most common being when they arrive at work or just before they leave. Writing a simple plan doesn’t take long, but it’s the most powerful technique we know to free your mind from the churn, to allow you to immerse yourself in the task at hand.
… or Just Reschedule Churning
Ad Kerkhof is professor of clinical psychology, psychopathology and suicide prevention at Vrije University, Amsterdam. For thirty years he has studied the events and the thoughts that lead up to a person taking their life. He found that, before committing suicide, people experience a period of extreme rumination on their life. He has developed simple, effective techniques, based on cognitive behavioral therapy, which really work. One of these strategies worked so well he was tempted to try it on people who weren’t in the least bit suicidal; people who were simply churning or worrying. His evidence showed that this strategy worked on people with relatively mild cases of worry too.
Kerkhof suggests we should actively and deliberately worry, just not all the time. Instead we should set aside a couple of slots in the day, fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes in the evening, as our “worry time.” During that time we make a list of all our concerns, and think about them. When the fifteen minutes are up, we stop worrying.10 Whenever we feel a worry enter our head at other times of the day, we tell ourselves that we will worry about this, just not now. In effect, we procrastinate our worrying! If this sounds a little weird, it might be, but there is a wealth of empirical evidence to show it works. As Tom Borkovec, professor of psychology at Penn State, says, “When we’re engaged in worry, it doesn’t really help us for someone to tell us to stop worrying… If you tell someone to postpone it for a while, we are able to actually do that.”11 This technique has become known as stimulus control. By compartmentalizing our churns, we take control of them, leaving us free to think unfettered by the chains of concern.
Maintaining Attention
As I sit here at my desk I have the world at my feet. In a way that wasn’t available to even the richest rulers in recent history, I have instant access to a world of information, a world of television shows and a world of weird videos of tightrope-walking dogs. Our executive network is all that stands between a healthy, productive psychological existence and a meaningless life dissipated on a wave of information consumption. It’s just that we are evolutionarily primed to spot novelty. Managing our attention is more than the ability to focus deeply; it’s also the ability to maintain attention on a singular task for longer.
Reduce Switching
Multitasking can mean performing two tasks simultaneously, but the most common type of multitasking involves switching rapidly from task to task. Each time we move between tasks, the brain takes a little time to reorient itself to the rules of the new task at hand. The time taken for this reorientation creates what is called a “switch cost.” As mentioned at the start of the book, professor David Meyer has found that even if the cost of an individual switch of attention is small, the cumulative cost of regular switching is significant. He suggests multitasking, in the form of switching backward and forward between tasks, increases the overall time needed to complete the tasks by 40 percent.12
Big Chunking
The simple message of this is that we achieve more if we stay focused on tasks for longer. The more we switch backward and forward, the harder the brain has to work, and the slower we think. I call this strategy “big chunking” to suggest that we chunk our time into big chunks of activity, not micro-slices of tasks. For example, Teresa Amabile, Edsel Bryant Ford professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, found, in a study of nine thousand people in the creative industries, that subjects had more breakthroughs when they worked on a single project for a major chunk of the day.13
This might sound obvious, but it doesn’t feel that way. In fact, quite the reverse: A small amount of dopamine (a feel-good neurotransmitter) is released when we switch, helping us feel potent, effective and efficient. The more we bounce between report writing, phone answering and email reading, swatting tasks away, one by one, the more effective we feel. As the velocity of the demands increase, so does our dopamine. We have to learn not to mistake the buzz we get from multitasking for a rightly earned sense of effectiveness. This buzz perpetuates our illusion of efficiency; we delude ourselves into mistaking our ability to machine-gun disconnected tasks for working well. In fact, Jonathan B. Spira, an analyst at the business research firm Basex, highlighted the scale of the multitasking illusion. He estimated that the increased inefficiency and ineffectiveness of multitasking was wasting 28 billion hours of knowledge workers time a year in the US alone.14
Break your day into big chunks of activity. The more complex the task, the bigger the chunk of uninterrupted time it needs. Of course, life will intervene at times, the director will tap you on the shoulder and distract you, but your goal should be to maximize chunks of focused time.
… And It’s Not Just a Question of Practice
If you’re reading this and thinking quietly to yourself, “Okay, I get the general point, but I’ve multitasked for years… I’m an expert,” then I would ask you to think again. Multitasking is one of the few areas, intellectually, where practice does not make perfect. Researchers at Stanford University split people into those who were typically heavy media multitaskers, and those who multitasked less frequently. They expected to find that those with more practice in multitasking would have developed a greater capability in this area. Surprisingly, they found the exact opposite.15 Those people who multitasked a lot in their day-to-day lives underperformed on a test of multitasking ability. The reason for this is that serial multitaskers were less able to separate the wheat from the chaff; they got more distracted by irrelevant and unimportant information. The more you multitask, the more distracted you’ll be and therefore the worse you’ll be at thinking. So go ahead if you want to continue, but don’t say you weren’t warned: multitasking is reducing your intellect and performance.
Avoiding Distractions
How often do you switch tasks at work? Whatever the frequency you just guessed, I would wager you are underestimating it. A Boston College study, published in the fantastically named journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, found that people underestimated their frequency of distraction by a factor of 10.16 When working on a computer with a TV in the room, researchers monitored eye movements between the two screens. The participants estimated that they switched the focus of their attention every four minutes. In actual fact, their eye movements showed their attention switched every fourteen seconds! One study of office workers showed that people tend to hopscotch between activities every three minutes.17 This is worrying since professor of informatics Gloria Mark at the University of California found that workers took an average of twenty-three minutes to recover from interruptions like phone calls or answering email, and return to their original task.18
Some distractions are unavoidable. A lot, however, are self-induced. In fact, Mark found that 44 percent of all interruptions were self-initiated.19 If we’re really honest with ourselves, a lot of the hopscotching isn’t driven by necessity, it’s because the novel is more exciting and the simple is more attractive than a more intellectually demanding activity such as deep thinking. So we flip into our inbox, triggered by the ping of a new email; we flop into a chat instead of persisting in thinking through tough challenges.
It would be better to avoid the distraction in the first place. First on everyone’s list here should be the email notifier in Outlook. Turn it off, or even better, turn off Outlook while you’re working on a big chunk. You might turn your phone to silent or at least put the text notifier on silent. You could remove visual temptation. For example, my friend was regularly getting complaints from his wife about the degree to which he was “present” when they were together—his smartphone was always there, luring him away from her. He agreed that when they ate out in restaurants he would no longer place the phone on the dinner table. It worked; he was less distracted.
What distractions might you avoid and how will you go about avoiding them?
Machine-Gun in Bursts
To allow yourself to focus properly on chunks of activity, you also need to create the opportunity to address email and the simple tasks on your to-do list. I call this machine-gunning. This may sound extreme, but I like to imagine blasting through email and messages, killing off these distractions, before returning to my key priority areas for chunks of time. I seldom find much that will change the world in my daily inbox; however, that doesn’t mean I can afford to ignore it.
I have three rules for machine-gunning the inbox and other tasks:
• Choose a time. Machine-gun at certain, specific points of the day. For the rest of the day, the email is off and the task list goes unaddressed. You don’t need a to-do list to tell you what’s most important: you know that already (or, if you don’t, it’s not important).
• Time-limit the blasts. The nature of micro-tasks is that, if you are trying to get through them all, they can easily swamp your day. Give yourself a deadline, or even better, put a clock in front of you. This not only protects your time for the important stuff, it also creates urgency to your blasting.
• During these periods, follow David Allen’s two-minute rule: if there’s any item in your inbox or on your task list that will take less than two minutes, do it straightaway. Otherwise the cost in organizing or filing it anywhere will exceed the time required to actually do it.
Refreshing Attention
Muscles are designed for bursts of intense activity followed by periods of rest. You will realize how useless muscles are at continuous effort if you have ever held your arms outstretched for as long as you can. It gets pretty uncomfortable pretty quickly. The brain can be thought of as being like a muscle: it works best in pulses of activity. For an image of the most optimal way to use your brain (or body for that matter), picture a heartbeat monitor. Yet our busy lives these days are anything other than pulses of activity. For many of us, our experience from the moment we rise to the moment we sleep is one long, steady state of busyness—like a flat line on a heart monitor.
Perhaps the biggest challenge to our ability to think well in today’s world is what Linda Stone would call continuous partial attention.20 We pay partial attention to everything, continuously, because we don’t want to miss anything. We constantly scan the environment for information, messages, stimulation and threat. We are always alert, constantly connected, and continuously trying to optimize efficiency.
In the size of doses we serve ourselves, continuous partial attention is fragmenting, stressful and empty, and compromises our ability to think and focus. To gain mastery, the last thing you need to do is stay alert and immersed 100 percent of the time. Instead you need to think of your days as being intense pulses of focus and stress, followed by recovery.
So what is the right balance of focus and recovery? One recent study by the makers of the time-tracking effectiveness app DeskTime suggests that the optimum balance is 52 minutes of focus, followed by 17 minutes away from your desk. They found this through electronically monitoring the behavioral patterns of the top 10 percent most effective workers.21 I’m not suggesting you follow a 52/17 schedule rigidly, but that your day is a pulse. Intense activity is punctuated with recovery periods, allowing your body to relax and your attentional systems to regroup.
Involuntary Attention
Given the importance of attention, how do you refresh it when it gets tired? How do you increase your ability to focus? This was a question asked by psychologist Stephen Kaplan. He developed the attention restoration theory (ART),22 which splits attention into two types: directed and involuntary. Directed attention is effortful and focused, in which the executive network deliberately brings all our attention to bear on the project at hand. Involuntary attention is when inherently interesting things, such as the beauty of a sunset, naturally capture our attention. ART suggests that, as involuntary attention takes hold, it gives the parts of the brain associated with directed attention a chance to recover and replenish.
Given the importance of our ability to focus, Marc Berman, John Jonides and Stephen Kaplan decided to test what types of breaks would refresh the brain best. To do this, they had subjects take a walk. Some walked through a busy city; others walked through a wood. The results showed that the woodland walk significantly improved cognitive performance; the city walk didn’t.23 The reason for this is that, to avoid being hit by speeding taxis, directed attention could totally switch off. The pleasant sights and sounds of the woods, on the other hand, attracted involuntary attention, and gave directed attention a full break.
The moral of this story is not that we need the woods and trees, but that to replenish our ability to direct our attention we should find ways to trigger our involuntary attention. It does little to cognitively recharge us if we switch our attention from our work onto WhatsApp, the TV or Angry Birds; they all require focus.
Schedule Recovery
Hardworking consultants from the Boston Consulting Group were practically forced to take planned breaks. They committed to taking one night off a week, no matter how busy they were. Even this small step caused alarm in the consultants; they were afraid that they would disappoint clients, that their work would pile up or that it would have an adverse effect on their careers. Instead, the results showed increases in satisfaction, in career success, in development and in the value they felt they were contributing to their clients.24 The trick was scheduling these breaks, so they were more likely to be taken. How could you schedule your breaks?
Get Out of Your Head
As an information worker, it can sometimes be easy to forget we are not just a brain. Our work, our interests and our distraction involve us being relatively sedentary, staring at screens and thinking. However, in case you need reminding, you also have a body. To refresh your attention, you need to refresh your body. For example, you might start by breathing! Linda Stone found that 80 percent of people don’t breathe properly when they are typing (a thought that horrifies me after all the hours I’ve spent typing this book!). She called this email apnea.25 So get up, get moving and start breathing! Make sure there is aerobic exercise built into your routines, but even a slight increase in your breathing patterns (from a walk up the stairs, for example) will refresh attention.
Optimizing Breaks
You haven’t got much time to spare, so how do you make your breaks most effective? Here’s a little reminder of the four things you should build into your breaks to maximize their impact on your attention. If it helps you to remember them, use the acronym FAME.
Fuel: Boost your energy with water and food. About half the population walk around with mild to chronic levels of dehydration so make sure you drink some water. You should also try to eat low glycemic foods, such as nuts and beans, which release energy more slowly.
Attention: Think of attention as being of two types: focused, intentional attention and meandering, mind-wandering attention. If you have been focused, in your breaks you should de-focus. If you have been staring at your screen, turn away (switching to Google, Twitter and Facebook gives the brain no chance to recover).
Movement: If you have been physically passive during your period of activity, move. Change your actual pulse; get out of your head and into your body for a few minutes. Walk, do some stretches, climb some stairs. Anything that puts your body into motion and makes you breathe more deeply.
Emotion: A great way to recover quickly is to change your emotional tone. Use music, conversation or activity to change your vibe. (See Reversal Theory.)
… And Sleep
Cheri Mah, from Stanford, had basketball players keep a normal sleep schedule for a few weeks. Then she asked them, for five to seven weeks, to get more sleep: to take more naps and try to get ten hours of sleep a night. When they slept more, their three-point and free throw shooting averages went up by 9 percent!26 Sleep matters; it refreshes our attention and so it raises our performance. In fact, a lack of sleep due to our frenetic lifestyles is estimated to be costing the US economy $63 billion a year.27
Take naps when you can. Of course, as a resident of Spain, I love a siesta! However, one suggestion I love from Arianna Huffington, a passionate sleep advocate, is to set an alarm… to remind you when it’s time to go to bed!