Sneak Peak Anne-Laure Le Cunff, PhD:The Neuroscience of Overthinking

0:00Anne-Laure Le Cunff:I tend to work with people who are quite ambitious and because of that, the type A kind of people who tend to maybe be perfectionists or are really focused on being successful on what I call linear goals. And I help them become a little bit more experimental, trying new things, exploring maybe a different path, something a little bit different, letting go of that idea of traditional success. So it's interesting because normally people would spend a lot of time reflecting on it. And the problem is that at least with the people I work with, a lot of ambitious people are also other thinkers. And so I try to get them out of that and say, stop thinking about it.

0:37Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Let's actually experiment. Let's actually run an experiment. Let's try something different. What's really interesting with experiments is that you're not starting from a goal and a binary definition of success. You're not saying I'm going to do this thing because I want to succeed. You're saying I'm going to try this thing because I want to learn something new. And that's it. So I would say if you're in that situation, asking yourself, OK, what is a potential different approach to this? And let me try it. And I have the hypothesis that it might help, but my hypothesis might be wrong. And that's OK.

1:12Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Right. As a scientist, when you don't get the result you expected, you don't blame yourself. You just say, oh, OK, interesting. Didn't see that one coming. What can we learn from this? So I would say, pick something that you've been doing in a way that you think has been detrimental to your business, your mental health, your relationships, whatever that is, and then ask yourself, how could I do this differently? And the reason why my book is called Tiny Experiments is because I tell people to keep it tiny. At first, you have no idea what's going to work. So just try to do the thing differently for maybe a week, maybe two weeks max, and pay attention to what changes.

1:50Anne-Laure Le Cunff:at the end of the week or the two weeks you can look back and have this honest conversation with yourself how did that feel so it feels like probably and i love tiny experiments but it feels like a lot of people will probably go wrong because january the first rolls around and actually it's not a tiny experiment it's the biggest experiment of their life and that's probably so so where where do people go wrong when they set uh an experiment that's far too big for them Well, you already mentioned too big. That's a big problem. I call that the maximatist brain. And it's our tendency whenever we decide to do something new or to implement a change to just go for the biggest, most impressive version of it, because it feels good, right?

2:34Anne-Laure Le Cunff:You feel like I'm making a change. And so that's why I always tell people, if you're hesitating in between running your experiment for six weeks or six days, go for six days and always try to go for the smallest version possible. That is going to be enough for you to just have a feel for whether this is helping or not. That's one problem. Another problem is when we copy paste our experiments from other people's experiments. So you might have a buddy who does something. that's something that happened to me with YouTube, for example, where everybody around me was starting a YouTube channel. And so I felt that kind of pressure that nobody was putting on me.

3:13Anne-Laure Le Cunff:I did that to myself and I said, oh, wait, I also need a YouTube channel, right? We very often do that. And again, this is part of being ambitious. And you normally also have the kind of friends who do a lot of cool things and you feel like, wait a second, am I a fader because I'm not doing this thing? Am I missing out on something? So that's another mistake. And this is also why I tell people, again, don't overthink it, but keep it quite small because you can realize very quickly that even though your friends have been raving about this thing, maybe you don't like it. Maybe it's not for you. So those would be the two main things, making it too big and also copy pasting your experiment from someone else.

3:50Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So I did that with YouTube. I said, OK, I'm going to record and publish a YouTube video every week until the end of the year. And that was about two, three months. I did it I hated it and so what did I do at the end of the experiment