Why Do You Refuse to Recharge?
You make sure your laptop and phone get plugged in when the battery gets too low… so why don’t you recharge when your battery is low?
Your brain has more needs than your screens do (and in many ways is more powerful), but it’s regularly drained and not refreshed and recharged. Its basic maintenance needs are ignored – until you get sick or something else happens.
Your brain in peak performance and productivity
A perennial reminder that your brain is not a computer. It has a few more requirements to stay high-performing.
Some of these needs are physical, and it’s interesting how many people skip the first two once things get “busy”:
Sleep – Your brain runs tons of processes that you’re not conscious of all day and all night. There are a lot of things going on in the body while you’re sleeping, and if you don’t get enough sleep not all these processes are completed. One of the things that happens while you sleep is that cellular toxins are flushed out. Without enough sleep, you’re putting yourself at higher risk for things like Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.
Exercise – It’s important not just for your body, but for your brain. Exercise reduces your risks of cardiovascular disease like heart attacks and stroke. It also provides oxygen-rich blood to your brain. It’s essential to high performance.
Nutrition – the brain is an energy hog and needs good fuel to run at its best. (I find that a lot of high performers might skip the sleep and/or the exercise when time gets tight, but usually eat nourishing foods, which is something!)
Some of these needs aren’t as physical, but the brain still needs them:
Rest – After a period of hard work, rest is necessary. You probably are conscious of this when the effort is physical, whether it’s out in the yard or you’ve run a marathon or something similar. But your brain also needs a break after hard cognitive effort. Rest for the brain isn’t scrolling through “social” media or emails. That’s no rest for the brain at all. Instead, stare out the window or get a drink or play with your kid/partner/pet for a bit. Or even work on a craft or hobby you enjoy.
Socialization – yes, even introverts need some. Extroverts need a bit more. There was no such thing as pulling yourself up by your bootstraps or being a lone cowboy for our ancestors. We hunted, gathered, and defended from predators in groups. That’s how we took over the world, by working together. The need to be social with other humans is baked into our brains as a result.
Fun/joy – even when you derive satisfaction and pleasure from your work, you need other opportunities to have fun and enjoy life.
What rewards do you get from burnout?
When you don’t allow your brain to get the things it needs, you degrade its performance. In addition to that, you run the risk of burnout.
Quite often burnout announces itself physically. Arianna Huffington passed out and broke her nose (if I remember correctly). I’ve known other women to get very sick. Not just a cold, but something far more severe, sometimes requiring a hospital stay. Sleep and exercise both boost your immunity as well, so if you cut them out, you’re more likely to get sick.
And yet, we continue to avoid recharging. Even when we know all this is true, when time is tight you might cut back on sleep. Or skip your exercise time. Keep grinding away even though you’ve already put in hours of work. Blow off the girls’ brunch “just this one time”. Etc.
Why? Well, as any recovering addict will tell you, there are rewards to this behavior, even if in the long-term it’s unhelpful.
We Americans live in a “hustle-and-grind” culture. There is a social benefit to doing what everyone else is doing, particularly when all this can be documented on “social” media. But allow me to point out that when you’re so busy working, you don’t have time to notice what’s going on around you, like neighbors being deported or rights being chiseled away. As a result of having little time, you pay for more things (like food delivery), which fatten up corporate bottom lines.
Similarly, being busy is seen as a badge of honor in the US. I think if someone asks you how you’re doing and you don’t say “I’m busy” the cops come get you and put you in jail. However, being busy doesn’t mean you accomplished anything; you could be busy all day with nothing but email.
American women have been socialized to put everyone else first. We’re the social safety net in our country. We fill the gap since the U.S. doesn’t have actual social policies like other countries have. Of course you have to skimp on sleep and exercise, because your spouse/kids/neighbors/pets/neighbor’s pets and kids/customers/vendors always come first. And how’s that working for you? It isn’t. Take care of yourself first and then you’ll be able to help others.
All these things that could happen are far in the future, right? Dementia, landing in the hospital, those are problems for Future You. Right now Current You has an email she needs to send out!
Maybe you think other people who don’t work 15 hour days and take time to play cello or visit with friends are weak. Maybe you secretly (or not so secretly) believe that you’re better than these other people and it won’t happen to you. It’s certainly possible for some people to be a workaholic for a very long time. But have you read the studies about what people at the end of their lives wish they’d done more of? No one says work. They wished they spent more time with their families. More time doing things they wanted to do, not just what society wants them to do.
Let me ask you a serious question: are these rewards worth it? Seriously, is it worth risking your health to feel busy? To grind and hustle along with all those other grinders and hustlers? Do you wish you had more hours in the day to work and less for play?
I know some people might say yes. And if that’s the case, I can’t help you. I don’t help people be more productive and cut back on the hours that they work so they can… work more hours.
But if you don’t think the rewards are worth it, you can change how you approach work. You can build a better work-life harmony if you want to (and this I will absolutely help you with.)
Recap (tl;dr):
So many Americans ignore the basics that their brain needs for high performance, because there are short-term rewards for doing so. But failing to recharge periodically has long=term consequences, some dire.
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Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash.