Productivity and Stress

Top tips for increasing productivity!

Jul 29, 2024

Hey Brain Rewirers,

Welcome to this week's newsletter! I’m sharing the science behind some top tips to improve productivity.

Productivity

We’ve already covered how to scientifically set and achieve goals, and how our motivation and productivity are linked to our circadian rhythms. What else can we do to improve our productivity? Well, these top tips all revolve around the idea of appropriate stress levels.

Stress

Stress has gotten a bad reputation recently, and I completely get why. It is bad to be constantly living in a state of stress. Chronic stress has many negative impacts on our brain health and our overall health¹. But, acute stress plays an important role in motivation, alertness, and productivity^2,3. We need some level of physiological stress to perform optimally.

Acute stress (Figure 1) leads to hippocampal neurogenesis in rats⁴, and improved performance in humans³. Meanwhile, chronic stress (Figure 2) can lead to changes in brain structure, affecting the communication between the frontal cortex, which makes rational decisions, and the amygdala, which handles emotions. Therefore, it’s important to maintain a healthy balance of stress to promote alertness and focus for work, while also allowing ourselves to rest and relax.

Depiction of our body’s acute stress response, including the parasympathetic nervous system which helps us relax, and the sympathetic nervous system which puts us in fight or flight. Created with Biorender.com.

Depiction of the chronic stress response. Created with BioRender.com

If you want to learn more about different types of stress, how they affect our brain, and how we can use this knowledge to our advantage, get a copy of Rewire!

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Top Tips for Productivity

Microbreaks

Taking intentional, short breaks from working can actually improve productivity. They help us to restore our attention and focus back on the task⁵. Microbreaks improve cortical attention control and boost subcortical arousal⁵. Additionally, microbreaks can reduce fatigue⁶. Importantly, the breaks actually need to be a break – scrolling on your phone doesn’t count! In fact, staring out at a green space improved subsequent focus and attention more than staring out into a grey space⁵. So, next time you’re feeling your productivity waning, try taking a one-minute break and looking at a plant!

One well-known method for microbreaks is the Pomodoro Technique.

Cold Plunge – voluntary stress!

Voluntarily exposing ourselves to moderate, controllable stress improves performance⁷. Feeling that we have control over the stress and being able to interpret the stress as beneficial is integral in being able to perform⁸. Feeling that we don’t have control over stressful situations causes impaired cortical functioning – meaning we are less able to focus and be productive⁹. Therefore, willingly choosing to partake in controlled stress can improve our response to uncontrollable stress by giving us a sense of confidence. And a great example of voluntary stress is a cold plunge!

Avoid Phones in the Morning

We’ve briefly talked about brain states when waking up, but let’s run through them again together. As we go from a sleeping state to a waking state, our brains transition from delta waves of deep sleep to theta waves of light sleep, and finally alpha waves of wakefulness. Theta waves are associated with a daydreaming state and relaxation, which is how we should feel as we wake up. However, going on our phones when we wake up disrupts this gentle progression and promotes alpha and beta waves, associated with a state of higher alert^10,11. This disruption of the natural sleep/wake cycle can impact our focus later in the day, causing us to be more easily distracted¹². This is especially true because social media use can elevate dopamine levels¹³. A dopamine spike in the morning will leave us chasing that dopamine high throughout the day¹⁴.

In fact, the presence of phones at any time of day drains our cognitive capacity. So, I’d encourage the removal of your phone from any working area¹⁵.

Binaural Beats

Binaural beats have been shown to promote training and learning¹⁶. Binaural beats occur when your ears hear tones of slightly different frequencies. This frequency difference causes a change in the phase of the sound wave each ear hears, which is detected by neurons in the brainstem and creates the binaural beat¹⁷. When gamma frequencies are used for the binaural beats, they produce gamma oscillations in brain waves, which play a role in attention¹⁸ and memory¹⁹. Binaural beats have been shown to improve attention²⁰ and creativity²¹.

Playlists of binaural beats can be found on most music-streaming apps!

Fun Fact

Brain signals can travel up to 330 miles per hour!²²

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Until next week,

Nicole x

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Rewire With Nicole Vignola

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