Feed the Right Wolf

Over-arousal means there is too much electrical activity in the prefrontal cortex. To reduce this arousal, you might need to reduce the volume and speed of information flowing through your mind. When you can’t seem to think, writing ideas down to get them “out of your head” can help. If your stage doesn’t have to hold this information, there is less activity overall. Another strategy involves activating other large regions of the brain, which tends to deactivate the prefrontal cortex. One example is to focus your attention on the sounds around you, which activates brain regions involved in perceiving information coming into the senses. You could also activate the motor cortex, by doing anything physical, such as taking a walk, which makes oxygen and glucose flow to more activated areas of the brain such as the motor cortex. If one brain region is overly activated, you can sometimes solve this problem by activating another. This is a long way of saying, “take a walk when you’re stressed,” but it’s also helpful to understand why this works

Scientists have also found that expecting a positive event, anything the brain perceives as a reward, generates dopamine. Rewards to the brain include food, sex, money, and positive social interactions

Dopamine is released in a number of situations. First, the dopamine level rises when the orbital frontal cortex detects novelty, something unexpected or new. Children love anything new. The chemical rush from novelty goes from interest to an intense desire in a flash. Humor is all about creating unexpected connections. Watching funny film clips or telling jokes increases dopamine levels

Arnsten discovered that whether a synapse in the prefrontal cortex fires correctly depends on having just the right levels of two neurochemicals present. These chemicals are dopamine and norepinephrine. Without enough of these two chemicals, you experience boredom, under-arousal. Too much, and you experience stress, over-arousal. There is a sweet spot in the middle that’s just right. “We’re all very aware of this over the course of a normal day,” Arnsten explains. “For example, when we’ve yet to wake, or are tired at the end of the day, it’s very hard to get organized, or do any complex prefrontal cortex activity. Then when you’re too stressed, you get massive levels of norepinephrine and dopamine, and this causes all networks to disconnect, and leads to shutting off of nerve firing altogether. We end up with nerve cells saying very little to each other

In 1908, scientists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson discovered a fact about human performance that they called the inverted U. They found that performance was poor at low levels of stress, hit a sweet spot at reasonable levels of stress, and tapered off under high stress. The verb stress means “to emphasize,” and it’s not necessarily a negative thing. It’s wrong to think your performance would improve if stress disappeared from your life. It takes a certain amount of stress just to get out of bed in the morning. This type of stress is known as eustress, or positive stress. Positive stress helps focus your attention

Improve your mental braking system by practicing any type of braking, including physical acts

When we get distracted it’s often a result of thinking about ourselves, which activates the default network in the brain

To inhibit distractions, you need to be aware of your internal mental process and catch the wrong impulses before they take hold. It turns out that, like the old saying goes, timing is everything. Once you take an action, an energetic loop commences that makes it harder to stop that action

It’s starting to become clear why, when you’re tired, hungry, or anxious, it’s easier to make mistakes and harder to inhibit the wrong impulses

He found that those who resisted the chocolate gave up more quickly on a difficult task afterward. “Self-control is a limited resource,” says Baumeister. “After exhibiting self-control, people have a reduced ability to exhibit further self-control.” Each time you stop yourself from doing something, the next impulse is harder to stop

One poignant implication of your braking system being located in the prefrontal cortex is that your capacity to put on the brakes decreases each time you do so. It’s like having a car whose brakes pads nearly disappear each time you apply them, unless there is a long rest between uses

stopping yourself from acting on an urge is something you can do sometimes, but is often not that easy

if the error-detection circuitry fires too often, it brings on a state of anxiety or fear

Develop routines that can be repeated over and over again: How you call people. How you open up a new document, how you delete emails, how you schedule your time. The more you use a pattern, the less attention you will need to pay to doing this task, and the more you will be able to do at one time