Life-changing ideas and insights from some of the world's greatest thinkers.
The single best stimulus to make more and fresh mitochondria is exercise—but even your mitochondria can’t outrun a bad diet.
More than any other tactical domain we discuss in this book, exercise has the greatest power to determine how you will live out the rest of your life.
I felt myself falling into a different rhythm. I realized then that to recover from our loss of attention, it is not enough to strip out our distractions. That will just create a void. We need to strip out our distractions and to replace them with sources of flow.
The study found that ‘technological distraction’—just getting emails and calls—caused a drop in the workers’ IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that’s the same knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests, in terms of being able to get your work done, you’d be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot.
So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you’ll make more mistakes, you’ll be less creative, and you’ll remember less of what you do.
We cannot put off living until we’re ready. ... Life is fired at us point blank.
So we aren’t just facing a crisis of lost spotlight focus—we are facing a crisis of lost mind-wandering. Together they are degrading the quality of our thinking. Without mind-wandering, we find it harder to make sense of the world—and in the jammed-up state of confusion that creates, we become even more vulnerable to the next source of distraction that comes along.
A study of office workers in the U.S. found most of them never get an hour of uninterrupted work in a typical day. If this goes on for months and years, it scrambles your ability to figure out who you are and what you want. You become lost in your own life.
When we believe our youth are too fragile to deal with stress, but their brains are filled with images of Instagram perfection and YouTube moments of fame that they have no idea how to achieve, why would we expect them to be anything other than depressed or anxious when staring at their future?
‘You’re not a failure,’ I reassured her. ‘You’re just a high achiever who had learned everything you needed to know to learn in your last job in order to set high goals and succeed, and you just skipped over the learning part of this new life of yours by assuming that working harder would be the answer.’