This blog comprises show notes for my CoolTimeLife podcast entitled Your Brain is Like a Bath Sponge. When you learn to recognize the power of breaks, decompression, and stepping over that line between work and home life, that’s when you can truly capitalize on your metabolic strengths and be the best you can be.
What is your attention span? How long do you think you can focus on something before you need to move on to something else? This is a component of your mental metabolism, and it might not be as long or as thorough as you think it should be or would like it to be.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s bad.
I myself, have an attention span of about 15 minutes. That’s it. After that, I need to move on to something else, if just temporarily. What I have discovered about myself is a two-minute data break in which I read the news headlines on Twitter or a news site, is enough for me to step away from my work for two minutes, refresh my brain, refresh my entire outlook, and then go back to the work at hand for another 15 minutes.
This on-again-off-again approach to work fits my attention span perfectly, and allows me to regain the momentum that my work requires.
So I ask you to consider the same thing. What is your attention span? It is not wrong to need to move away from your work on a regular basis. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that guarantees a much greater level of excellence, correctness, accuracy, and productivity. You cannot expect your brain or body to continue working at a standard level of 100% attention or 100% exertion all the time. We move up and down throughout the day and throughout the hour.
So, think about your attention span. How do you work well What do you need to do? Do you need to stand and move around on a regular basis? Do you need a squeeze ball to absorb your energy while you are working? Take time to think about what makes you feel more comfortable and bring that into your workplace. This becomes part of your recipe for excellence and for your capacity to focus, negotiate, and survive the day in a healthy fashion.
Similar to this is the notion of decompression.
The black light aquarium room at Google.
This image shows a black light aquarium room. Here’s a wonderful concept, one that many organizations have embraced, if not in an actual aquarium room, then in approaches that do the same type of thing, including designing people-friendly buildings from the ground up. They focus on the fact that people do indeed need to decompress in order to perform better.
So, a bunch of people crashed out in La-Z-Boy chairs and bathtubs in a dark room, lit by black lights, with aquariums everywhere. They stare at the fish and relax. Is this a good use of company time? Some will say “yes,” others “no.” But the point is, this room was not devised to let people sleep through the afternoon or burn off a hangover. This is a place that helps the brain decompress. Companies need creativity from their people, and this involves social creativity – the ability to interact and work together.
You don’t get creative by staring at a blank sheet of paper or a blank PowerPoint slide. Creativity does not come from this, in fact the opposite happens. Your brain compresses under pressure.
Think about a bathroom sponge for a moment. If you took a sponge and compressed it in your hand, it would become very small, obviously. Once you let go of that sponge, however, it re-expands to its original size. Your thinking brain is similar to this in the fact that when it is under pressure or stress, it compresses, metaphorically, which limits the space available for creative thought.
Any time you can decompress, whether it’s in a black light aquarium room or more realistically, something like taking a walk around your building, looking up at the sky and thinking about nothing. When you think about nothing, your brain has a chance to re-expand and reorganize itself into the machine of creativity that it likes to be. It comes down to a simple observation: a stressed brain cannot work as well as a decompressed brain.
My Challenge to You
How can you decompress to ensure you get the most from your thinking brain and your body? It’s a matter of five minutes or even two minutes spent decompressing turning into an hour’s worth of top-quality work. That’s a powerful ratio.
Not doing this – simply soldiering on – yields only mediocre work, which means a different and lower type of quality gets to your end customer. Decompression keeps things in check.
As for the commute home, whether it’s driving, taking transit, cycling, walking, or simply walking from your home office to the kitchen – these are all additional opportunities for decompressing and stepping over that line between work life and home life. This is a concept that seems to be less and less possible – in fact the term work-life balance is often eclipsed by the newer term, work-life integration, implying there is no longer any line between the two worlds.
But it remains vital to step over this line at some point, in order to facilitate the onset of healthy sleep. Sleep is the single greatest contributor towards quality work. Effective sleep is based on the hormone melatonin being introduce into your bloodstream, and melatonin is triggered first by your body’s perception of the sun moving toward the horizon, and the subsequent onset of diminishing natural light, and secondly by the awareness that work has been replaced by home life.
Yes, you want to be on, you want to be productive during your working hours whether these are 9-to-5 or otherwise, but there comes a time when you have to step over this line and declare work done for the day. This is not easy, especially with emails and other messaging coming in at random times.
It is vital to keep in mind that your metabolism is built to respond to urgency, including signals and cues that hint at the dangers of the unknown – initially a a primordial self-preservation reflex, now part of the compulsion to reward and respond to every message that appears on your phone. As innocuous as they may seem, these are cues that stimulate your body back into action at a time when it should be winding down toward healthy sleep.
By stepping over the line that separates work and home life, you help encourage a smoother slide into healthy sleep, maximizing the potential for a great day of profitable work tomorrow.
This is the transcript of the CoolTimeLife podcast entitled Your Brain is Like a Bath Sponge. If you would like to listen to it, you can check it out at our podcast site here. If you would like to review other podcasts in this series, visit my podcast page at stevenprentice.com/podcast.html
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Steve Prentice 