The 5 Things Your Brain Obsesses Over Every Single Day | David Rock

0:00I'll give you the model sort of briefly because there's a lot to say about each one and then we can dig in where you want. But A is for autonomy, which is feeling in control, feeling like you're making the choices. You're an autonomy and fairness person. I spotted it straight away, right? You like probably like, yeah, like they're close together. Fairness is sort of a close second for you. I can spot people's like profiles really fast. Oh, wow. Wow. So A is for autonomy. R is for relatedness, which is basically about having things in common with someone or even better shared goals with someone, right?

0:33So we have relatedness because we're both trying to do our best to improve the world in similar ways. We're both from the Commonwealth. We've got different ways that we have relatedness, right? We don't have competing goals. If we discovered we were competing for something, it would be like, okay, maybe I'm not going to tell you as much, right? So relatedness is really anchored on shared goals with someone. So much interesting and scary research, like when someone is in your out group as opposed to in group. So relatedness is, you know, out group or in group. When someone's in your out group, you're actually motivated when they lose more than when you win.

1:10Wow. Yeah, yeah, it's really scary. So people who are different to you, you get really, really motivated by them, like, being unsuccessful. And it's the Schadenfreude effect. There's studies directly reading the brain on this in all sorts of different studies. So you like it when someone fails? You like it when someone fails. You won't admit it, but someone who's in your out group, someone with a competing goal to you. It could be a sports team. It could be a competitor at work. It could be someone you just decided you don't like, but someone you've decided you have competing goals with. So they're in what's called your out group, right?

1:39When an in-group member wins, you're motivated, you're excited. When an in-group member loses, you're threatened, right? When an out-group member wins, you're threatened. And when an out-group member loses, you're even more excited than when an in-group member wins. Right. It actually explains a lot, right? I mean, there's a lot to this so much so I wrote a whole book on it. So then the F is for fairness. So status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness. So I published this in 2008. It's got a couple of thousand academic citations now, and it's used in organizations. We teach it in organizations as a foundation of basically why people do what they do.

2:18It's kind of the primary colors of motivation, but also of psychological safety and belonging and inclusion. And it's the primary colors of many things to do with sort of how we interact. So all of that came to me, or the framework finally came to me at the bottom of a swimming pool, having what I call a level five insight. So I created a scale for the strength of insight called the Eureka Scale. And this was definitely a level five insight. A level five insight changes your life, like changes how you see the whole world. Wow. I feel like I had that with this when I finally, after eight years, got to the point of exactly what it was for me where I was funneling, funneling, funneling self-compassion, which is such a cringe word in the UK, was this eureka moment where I was like, oh my gosh, that's it.

3:02Amazing. Yeah. When you have that big moment, you have aftershocks. It keeps coming back. It's like you remember it forever. It's like, yeah, that's a level five. Level five changes how you see the world and it's just like you can't avoid it. You have to do something about it. to do it. Whereas a level four is like motivated. You remember it from months or years, but it's not life changing. Uh, but level four, if you're a trainer or author or screenwriter or, you know, poet or artists of any sort, you're trying to give people level four insights that just basically change how they see the world.

3:34So how can you, so you were like, you're an R and F, how can you see this in people? I don't really know. Um, I haven't really unpacked it, but I, I do it with, I can see it in a whole group sometimes, which is really spooky. So I'll quite often present to like a workshop for an hour or something. And I'll write down on a note what I think the whole group's profile is, like what the highest scarf domain is for people. And I'm most of the time really right. I don't know. It's just a sense. So if you're an F, you're more driven at wanting to be fairness. If you're an S, you're more driven towards status.

4:08Yeah. R was what? Relatedness. Relatedness. Okay, yeah. If you relate and have a, okay. You can definitely sort of see where people's attention is. Like if you're watching someone, if their attention is on really themselves and trying to look good, that's status. If they're on trying to work out everything, that's certainty. If they're trying to like stay in charge, right, it's autonomy. If they're caring about everyone else and trying to bring everyone together, that's relatedness. And if they're caring about how everyone's feeling and sort of, you know, fairness, you can sort of see. So you can really hear it in people's language pretty quickly.

4:38We created an AI in my day job. we created an AI that can really, really quickly in a few minutes detect your, what we call scarf profile and also the scarf profile of anyone you're talking to and tell you how to motivate them better and all this kind of stuff. So, which is a whole thing. Yeah. I'm just thinking about how good that will be when you're meeting a partner. Think about where you are with, with someone. Yeah. You're often partnerships don't work because you've got like scarf conflicts, like you know two status people is not great no you imagine people that are obsessed with status is not great no no no I think there's another term for that but we won't go into that um okay so you mentioned to me before I sat down I said and we kind of spoke a little bit about it but you know I said you know how do you just keep going and I've always been told that these like 90 minute blocks of work so Oliver Berkman came on here um and he said to me when I was writing my book only do 90 minute blocks of work because your brain kind of can't concentrate after that and it's really important that you give yourself space which is interesting because that I guess stuck in my brain as 90 minutes and so I kind of look at the clock and go yeah okay maybe this isn't going to be the best but you've made me rethink about it a little bit differently now sitting here and you said actually it might be 15 minutes or it might be a couple of hours so how can you focus and sustain your focus when you really need to so maybe it's those deadlines or yeah you've got a few crazy weeks coming up how do you sustain good brain energy yeah no it's a great question so I um I wrote four books in 10 years and gosh it took me eight years to write one it took well it's taken me the last it's taken me the last 10 years or more to write the next one because I was so exhausted.

6:27But almost the entire four books were written on a long flight between Sydney and New York, right? So I'm Australian originally, if you haven't worked that out yet. And I moved to New York 16 years ago. But before that, for literally seven years, I was traveling back and forward, literally four to eight times a year between New York and Sydney, trying to get the business going, trying to kind of break out into something. and most of the books were written on this really super long flight. And what I found is I could focus for like 12-hour blocks if I do it right, even on an airplane, and more.

7:05Like out of 24 hours, because it was 24 hours door-to-door, I could do like 15 to 18 really high-quality focus hours and I would just break the back of writing. And I found if I wasn't flying for a while, I just like was – it's like it's not writer's block, it's airport block. I'm not like I can't focus. I just found you could focus. Because think about it. People bring you food. There's no distraction. There's no Wi-Fi. Still not great Wi-Fi. So it's okay. No distraction. People bring you food. There's a bathroom right there. And if you need to nap, you can. And this was an economy most of the time.

7:39But if you need to nap, you can. You just shut your eyes. And just no one's going to disturb you. So you can really go deep into your brain. But what I found is, of course, after an hour or two, you get really tired. Now, the 90 minutes is a reasonable thing to say, but for some people it might be 45 or 50, and for some people it might be two or three hours. And it will also depend, like if you get up at 5 a.m., have a good cup of coffee, a bit of fruit, you might be able to do two and a half hours of amazing work and you shouldn't stop, right? If your brain's quiet, especially if it's like a Monday after a restful weekend, you might be able to do hours of focus.

8:13It's more about noticing when you need to stop, noticing when you're just no longer really able to focus. as opposed to like 90 minutes, 90 minutes. But as a general guide, it's okay. What it's really about, and this is in the first part of Your Brain at Work, is I unpacked in that book the mechanisms of thinking, which is working memory, right? I mentioned working memory before. So the mechanisms of working memory, there's an amazing scientist at Yale in the States, Amy Arnston is her name, and she basically unpacked how working memory works. and it involves getting just the right amounts of dopamine, we mentioned, and norepinephrine, which is brain adrenaline.

8:55So one of those is alertness, dopamine, and one of those is – sorry, alertness is norepinephrine. Right. And the other is interest, which is dopamine. Right, okay. So it's getting quite good amounts of alertness and interest, right, to actually billions of points across the brain just to hold a thought. Right. So to hold any sort of thought involves literally putting the right amount of these chemicals for billions of points right across the brain. So you need pretty good amounts of these two things. The problem is when you first wake up, you don't have much of either. You're like groggy. You can't really think straight yet.

9:32So you don't have much alertness, not much interest yet. And then what happens, sometimes we have too much of one or the other. Like you go to the TED conference, you've got way too much dopamine from way too many amazing ideas. You're like, idea overwhelm, too much dopamine. And then you can go into shutdown. I went into shutdown a little bit at TED. Because also I felt like I was missing out if I wasn't going. And then I was going and not kind of been taking everything. I was just sitting there at the end of Richard Dawkins was speaking. And I was like, I don't know what he's saying by this point.

10:04It becomes blah, blah, blah at some point. Yeah, it's dopamine overload. So sometimes we have too much dopamine. But what we mostly have is too much adrenaline, too much norepinephrine, which kicks in with threat response of any kind, and not enough dopamine, right? So you want to have quite good amounts of both but not too much. But you need quite good amounts. It's a little bit individual, so some people need lots of both to even be out of focus at all. Are we not in dopamine overload right now because of our phones and all of the distractions? We're more in noradrenaline overload. Really? Because everyone talks about dopamine land and dopamine overload and all of that type of stuff with our phones and the constant instant reward.

10:43But a lot of the stories we're seeing are threat producing. So it's the threat response from the social media that we're seeing as opposed to the social media. But what about the constant scrolling? What if you're scrolling? Both of these things are activating dopamine too much, depending on what you're scrolling, right? Yeah. If you're scrolling actually interesting, amazing things and you're scroll, scroll, scroll, you're getting dopamine overload. But a lot of the time you're getting dopamine and norepinephrine overload because these things are making you anxious, right? So you're basically getting too much of both and you're getting to level two threat.

11:17See how there's a whole language starting to form, right? So all these pieces, these chunks that I'm telling you, we call neurointelligence, right? So learning about three levels of threat, learning about like working memory, dopamine, all this, this is neurointelligence. And we think this is essential for managing yourself in today's world, is neurointelligence, right? So basically, to get back to your question, what I worked out was that when I'm on a long flight, I can work for, say, an hour, hour and a half. And if I watch something that raises my adrenaline, I'm wrecked for the rest of the flight.

11:52So if I watch a scary movie, and all movies are scary, they try to get you, because basically when you're in a threat state, you shut out what's on the side and you pay attention, right? So most movies are drama, action, whatever. They try to like create a threat response in you to keep you focused. And, you know, things that don't do that are kind of boring to people, right? So what I would find is if I watched a movie, I would have to finish the movie and I would be exhausted and not be able to write much more. And I realized, oh, there's enough like, you know, brain adrenaline and just being in an airplane.

12:26I probably need to just keep my dopamine up. I probably need to keep it interesting and I realized like oh okay so I've got to do something interesting and novel and so we would search for stand-up comedy and I would watch chunks of stand-up comedy for like 5 to 10 minutes as my brain refresh and I would do like an hour, hour and a half and then do 10 minutes for stand-up comedy and then an hour, hour and a half and another 10 minutes for stand-up and now it's time to eat something and while I'm eating something I'm doing more stand-up comedy because it's resting for my brain. It's funny. It's not cortisol.

13:01And then I would get back to it. And then I'd do a few rounds of that. Then it's time for a nap. Nap is a fantastic reset. Is it? A fantastic reset. It resets the dopamine and norepinephrine really nicely back to it. So it'll bring you down in a good way. And so I learned to nap as well, short naps. I can nap on a floor anywhere. What about people who can't nap? Because I meet people where they're like, so I'm the person that can get on a plane and go and just pass out. Very, very quickly. Yeah, me too, yeah. I don't know how I've managed to train myself to do that, but I have. Survival. You had to.

13:34Survival. Probably had to. Yeah, well, I think it was probably from my modeling days before when I was on plane to plane to plane to plane to plane, and I never knew where I was sleeping, where I was going. So I just learned to sleep when I can. Yeah, sleeping when you can is a good thing. So I learned to nap a long time ago. It's super helpful. So basically that resettles the chemistry, and you can really feel it. Even like a five-minute nap, just being checked out for even one minute, you come back actually being checked out. Just practice. Just practice. Just like try to go internal and practice.

14:05And I like to focus on dreams I've had before that I can remember and I try to like repicture the dream and it sort of pulls me back in. That's cool. So anyway, what I was saying is the way I would work for hours and hours and hours productively is focus until I could tell my focus was loose was going and then something interesting and novel so stand-up comedy if i'm on a plane talking to a fun friend doing you know looking at something online that's actually interesting to me like something i'm you know something i haven't done for a while they'll be interesting to look at so i'm just i'm just trying to work with novelty and interest and like oh what am i interested in what would be interesting and i'll do that for a little while right or something novel, right?

14:50And so I'll just do that. And then I can do, you know, I recently was in sort of a hermit mode, finishing this new book, and I was doing 18 hours a day in one place, not on airplanes, but I was in the woods, my house I've got in the woods, and I was doing literally 18 hours a day for a couple of weeks, just focusing this way, and got an incredible amount. I was exhausted at the end of it, but I got an incredible amount done that I couldn't have got without understanding my brain.