How to Calm Your Mind: Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times PDF

ALSO BY CHRIS BAILEY The Productivity Project Hyperfocus VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com Simultaneously published in hardcover in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada, Toronto, in 2022 First United States edition published by Penguin Life, 2022 Copyright © 2022 by Chris Bailey Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. A Penguin Life Book LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Bailey, Chris, 1989– author. Title: How to calm your mind : finding presence and productivity in anxious times / Chris Bailey. Description: First United States edition. | New York : Penguin Life, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022038483 (print) | LCCN 2022038484 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593298510 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593298527 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Calmness. | Anxiety. | Stress management. Classification: LCC BF575.C35 B34 2022 (print) | LCC BF575.C35 (ebook) | DDC 152.4— dc23/eng/20220921 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038483 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038484 Cover design: Lynn Buckley Cover art: White Snow / Shutterstock Designed by Cassandra Garruzzo Mueller, adapted for ebook by Molly Jeszke pid_prh_6.0_142058442_c0_r0 For my family You are the sky. Everything else—it’s just the weather. P EMA C HÖDRÖN Contents PREFACE Why We Need Calm CHAPTER ONE The Opposite of Calm CHAPTER TWO Striving for Accomplishment CHAPTER THREE The Burnout Equation CHAPTER FOUR The Mindset of More CHAPTER FIVE Heights of Stimulation CHAPTER SIX Stimulation Fasting CHAPTER SEVEN Choosing Analog CHAPTER EIGHT Calm and Productive CHAPTER NINE Where Calm Lives Acknowledgments Notes Index P R E FAC E Why We Need Calm I did not intend to write this book. A few years ago, I plunged deep into a state of burnout, and soon after experienced an anxiety attack while speaking in front of an audience of one hundred people (a story I’ll share in the first chapter). Out of necessity for my own mental health, I dove headfirst into the science surrounding the topic of calm: poring through journal articles, chatting with researchers, and running experiments on myself to try out the ideas I encountered and try to calm my mind. I write about productivity for a living—and really enjoy doing so. In the midst of my burnout and anxiety, though, my thinking was alternating between restlessness and insecurity. If I was exhausted and anxious while deploying the very productivity strategies I was writing about, what right did I have to give that kind of advice in the first place? Something was missing. Fortunately, after digging deep into the research, I found a very different idea from the one I had been telling myself. Driven initially by selfpreservation, which quickly turned into a curiosity I could not extinguish, I discovered how misunderstood the state of mind we call calm is, to the extent that it is understood at all. While it’s true that anxiety—the opposite of calm —is our responsibility to deal with, many of the factors that lead us to feel anxious are hidden from view, making them difficult to identify, let alone tame. I’m probably not the only person who has been feeling more anxious than usual. I type these words in 2022, two years into what we all know has been a particularly stressful time. If anxiety has creeped in for you, too, know you are not alone, and you shouldn’t beat yourself up over it. Certain sources of anxiety (and stress) are easy enough to spot, like a global pandemic, news about war, or having an overly demanding job. But many more sources are neither obvious nor apparent—including the ones we’ll cover in this book. Some of these factors include the extent to which we’re driven to accomplish more; the numerous invisible sources of stress buried within our days; the “superstimuli” we tend to regularly; our performance against the six “burnout factors”; our personal “stimulation height”; the amount of time we spend in the digital world compared with the analog one; and even what we eat and drink. These sources of anxiety are the metaphorical dragons I would eventually encounter in my journey to calm. In this book, I’ll break down these ideas and more. Luckily, there are practical, tactical strategies—many of which you can invest in right away— that can help you overcome anxiety and burnout, all while reclaiming calm. * * * As my experiment to tame stress and burnout while finding calm progressed, I was relieved to discover that the productivity advice I’d been giving wasn’t wrong. It was, however, missing a critical piece of the productivity picture. Productivity advice works. Good productivity advice (there’s a lot of fluff out there) helps us take control of our time, attention, and energy, which frees up mental and calendar space for what’s meaningful. That enriches our lives. It also reduces stress and lets us stay on top of things. Given all we have to juggle, this is more essential today than ever before. But it’s also crucial that we develop our capacity for healthy productivity in our lives and work. When we face anxiety and burnout, we become less productive without realizing it. Investing in calm is the way to maintain and even grow our capacity for productivity. Finding calm and overcoming anxiety make us more comfortable in our own skin, while at the same time helping us to feel at home inside our mind. We build a larger, more expansive reservoir of energy from which we can draw throughout the day. This allows us to work productively and live a good life. By bringing more calm to our day, we invest in the missing piece that fuels our efforts—in work and life—to become sustainable over time. Encountering the ideas in this book, I felt all of the productivity advice I had been giving lock into place with a satisfying click. During this journey to calm, my productivity levels rose dramatically as I became less anxious and burnt out. With a calm, clear mind, I could write and connect ideas with relative ease; when I would typically have written several hundred words, I found myself penning a couple thousand. With less anxiety I became more patient. I listened more deeply and became far more engaged with whomever I was with and in whatever I was doing. My thoughts were crisp, my ideas sharp, my actions more deliberate. I became more intentional and less reactive, my mind no longer frazzled by outside events. And I connected with the purpose behind my actions, which made my days feel more meaningful. In practice, the productivity benefits of calm can be profound. And regardless of your circumstances—including if you have limited time, budget, or energy—calm is attainable. This book explores the strategies that will help get you there. (We’ll see just how much time calm earns us back in chapter 8.) This leads us to an exciting conclusion: even after setting aside the plentiful mental health benefits of calm, reducing anxiety is worth our time. Because calm makes us more productive, we more than make back the time we spend trying to achieve it. * * * A s I went through my personal journey, I began capturing all that I learned about the topic of calm into something that vaguely resembled the outline of this book. I started the process reluctantly, knowing I’d need to reveal the more challenging, personal parts of my story. But the phenomena of anxiety and burnout are too universal to not talk about. By sharing my journey and the lessons I’ve taken from it, I hope to clear some of the path to calm for you, too. We’re living through an anxious time. And assuming that you don’t live under a rock, there seems to be an awful lot to worry about. I’m not going to rehash those reasons (we hear enough about the world’s problems), but it’s worth saying that it’s tough not to feel anxious in the modern world. Calm isn’t about ignoring reality. Instead, it provides us with the resilience, energy, and stamina to navigate this ever-changing environment. While I initially sought calm as a means to overcome anxiety, I’ve come to see it as the secret ingredient that has led me to a deep presence with whatever it is I’m doing. And because it makes us more productive, we shouldn’t feel guilty for investing in it. On the surface, calm is the opposite of a sexy productivity hack. Yet, much like the yeast in bread or the dash of salt in your favorite recipe, even trace amounts of calm improve our life, helping us to feel present and happy. An even greater amount of calm leads to far more, letting us feel focused and comfortable in everything we do. Calm provides us with roots, making us more engaged and deliberate in our actions. It makes life more enjoyable while also saving us time—and what is better than that? By the end of the book, I hope you’ll find the same thing I did: that in an anxious world, achieving calm is the best “life hack” around. CHAPTER ONE The Opposite of Calm I didn’t think of calm as something worth seeking until just a few years ago. Usually when I’ve felt calm, I’ve stumbled into the feeling by accident: relaxing on a beach in the Dominican Republic after disconnecting from work; surrounded by loved ones over the holidays; or finding myself with no plans or obligations at the start of a long weekend. Aside from happy accidents like these, calm has not been something I’ve sought out, found attractive enough to pursue, or even paid much mind to. That was, until I experienced a total absence of it in my life. Unfortunately for me, I can pinpoint the exact date (and time!) when it became evident that all traces of calm had fallen out of my days; this realization coming to a head in an instant, like a cast-iron bathtub plummeting through the floor of an old apartment building. As I mentioned in the preface, I was onstage when it happened. Anxiety, the opposite of calm, touches everyone differently: for some, it’s an ever-present companion; for others, it’s a rare occurrence. For me, anxiety has always been a low-rumbling presence. It was on this day in particular that this rumbling anxiety—which had been growing steadily noisier for several years, as the stress of work travel accumulated—erupted into a full-blown panic attack onstage in front of a one-hundred-person audience. Moments before the talk, waiting to go onstage, I felt... off. My mind raced far more than usual. It was as though I could keel over at any moment and give in to what felt like a bout of vertigo. Luckily for me, I snapped back to attention as my name was called. Bounding up the stairs and grabbing the slide clicker, I dove right in to my talk. A minute or two in, I was feeling pretty good, and the dizziness had subsided. Then it happened: an all-encompassing, sinking feeling engulfed my entire mind and body as I plummeted into a deep pit of nervousness. I felt as though someone had injected my brain with a vial full of liquid terror. As I stammered and stumbled on my every word—there might as well have been a dozen marbles in my mouth—beads of sweat began to form on the back of my neck. My heart rate escalated, while I again felt like fainting; my pre-talk vertigo feeling was back for round two. I pushed ahead, stumbling through my talk on autopilot. Gripping the podium so I wouldn’t fall, I apologized to the audience that had gathered there to see me. I blamed my sweating and stammering on having a bad case of the flu, which I think they bought (thankfully). In my mind, this also engendered enough sympathy to get through the rest of my talk, even though I still felt like giving up, walking off the stage, and never looking back. I finished the speech to a lukewarm reception. I considered that a win. * * * I mmediately following the speech, head down, I took the elevator up to my hotel room, where I collapsed on the queen-sized bed. With a slightly more settled mind, I replayed the events of the day in my head. The whole time was a blur, a series of events so nebulous and stuck together that nothing was distinguishable from anything else. My fists clenched as I did my best to relive my faltering onstage, cringing at the memory. I also played back the previous night, when I arrived at the hotel. Stepping into my room after a long day of travel—one day of travel in a string of many others—I took a bath, one of my favorite ways of relaxing on the road (that and a substantial amount of delivery food, obviously). If I have enough time to spare the night before a talk, I’ll almost always take a soak in the tub, while listening to nerdy podcasts, relieved to have gotten to my destination on time. The night before this particular talk, I sat in the tub, lost in thought, as the water cooled around me. My eyes drifted around the bathroom to the hair dryer tucked on a shelf beneath the sink, to the small flowery-smelling bottles of shampoo and conditioner lined in a row, and, eventually, to that circular, metal overflow face plate at the front of the bathtub, midway between the drain and the faucet. In it was a reflection of my face, warped by the curvature of the metal. If you’ve ever swiped to the wrong screen of an app on your phone and accidentally fired up your front-facing camera, you probably recall the shock of seeing your own face reflected back at you. I had this same reaction to my reflection in the metal plate. I looked forlorn, tired, and, more than anything else, just totally depleted. I’m really not in a good place right now, I remember thinking at the time. For years leading up to this point, productivity—the topic I was onstage that day to speak about—had been my obsession. I had built my career, and for a large part, my life, around the subject. Even as I write these words, after embarking on the journey that became this book, it continues to be my passion, one that has evolved as I’ve defined the place it deserves to have in my life. But at that moment, something else became very obvious. As important as this ever-present interest was to me, and as far as exploring it had gotten me, I had failed to define boundaries around my pursuit of productivity. I felt anxious, burnt out, and depleted, like so many others who take on too much —maybe like you have felt a time or two. Stress had built up in my life with nowhere to go. Snapping out of the pre-talk daydream and slowly getting up off the bed, I packed my suitcase, swapped my white dress shirt for a hoodie, put on headphones, and, probably brooding a bit, walked to the train station to begin my trek home. On the train, I had the chance to look back even further. Looking Back As I began deconstructing my situation, one thing stumped me. I had always thought that some event, like an onstage panic attack, would happen because I wasn’t investing in self-care. But I had been taking care of myself. I actually thought I was doing a pretty good job at it! There is an ungodly amount of advice out there for how hardworking people can take care of themselves. Leading up to the onstage panic attack, I practiced quite a bit of it, including meditating daily (typically for thirty minutes at a time); attending silent meditation retreats once or twice a year; working out several times a week; getting massages; occasionally visiting the spa with my wife; and reading books, listening to podcasts, and even taking baths on the road—often after indulging in some delicious Indian food. Investing in self-care has served as a counterbalance to my passion for productivity, which is primarily about optimizing the benefits and contributions of work. I thought all of this would be enough—and more than that, I considered myself lucky to be able to do it all. Not everyone has the luxury or privilege to take a weeklong vacation to disconnect from the world on a meditation retreat, or the budget for a couple of massages a month. Given all the selfcare I was pouring precious time and money into, it surprised me that the low-level anxiety would have the room to metastasize into a full-fledged anxiety attack. I realized I needed to go deeper to actually find calm. That’s what would eventually set me on the journey that became this book. * * * T oward the end of each year, usually over the holidays, I like to reflect on the year ahead and think about what I’ll want to have accomplished by the time it’s over. (I use this future-past tense deliberately: I find it a fun and helpful activity to mentally fast-forward, and imagine a future that I haven’t yet created for myself.) Each year I set three work-related intentions— projects I’ll want to have finished, parts of my business I’ll want to have grown, and other milestones I’ll want to have hit. I’ll also mentally hit fastforward to think about my personal life at the end of the year, and what three things I’ll want to have accomplished by the time the year is done. This particular year, the three work intentions came easily, because they were projects I already had the ball rolling on: write an audiobook on meditation and productivity (which had a deadline); make sure the talks I gave that year were fun and helpful (they were already scheduled); and get a successful podcast up and running (because who doesn’t have a podcast these days?). And even though I also typically set three grand personal intentions, after experiencing the ill-timed panic attack, I narrowed my intentions to just one: figure out how to take care of myself, properly. And to accomplish that, I in turn focused my thinking onto a simple question: What did I have to do for me to experience calm and make it last? A Quick Lay of the Land At the beginning of the journey, I sought only to settle my scrambled mind. But as the project progressed, I would unexpectedly come to view productivity and calm—as well as many related ideas—very differently from how I did before. Just a few of the lessons I learned, which I’ll walk you through in the chapters to come, include how: Calm is the polar opposite of anxiety. Our constant striving for accomplishment can ironically make us less productive, as it leads us over time to experience chronic stress, burnout, and anxiety. Most of us aren’t the cause of our own burnout—and better yet, there are scientifically validated ways of overcoming burnout. There are also ways to deconstruct the phenomenon of burnout to understand your situation better, like by examining how you fare with the six “burnout factors,” and minding your “burnout threshold.” There is a common enemy of calm that we must face down in the modern world: our desire for dopamine, a neurochemical in our brain that leads us to overstimulate ourselves. Lowering our “stimulation height”—which is determined by how much dopamine-releasing stimuli we attend to on a regular basis—gets us closer to calm. Many sources of stress in our lives are hidden from our view, but can be fun to tame through a “stimulation detox,” which is sometimes referred to as a “dopamine detox.” Resetting our mind’s tolerance for stimulation leads us to become calmer, less anxious, and less burnt out. Nearly all habits that lead us to calm exist in one place: the analog world. The more time we spend in the analog world, as opposed to the digital one, the calmer we become. We best unwind in the analog world, acting in accordance with how our ancient brain is wired. We can invest in our calm and productivity at the same time. We become far more productive when we work deliberately and with intention, not when our mind is anxiously tugged in many directions at once. There are even ways of calculating just how much time we can earn back by investing in calm. Above any single lesson, one of the most significant mindset shifts I’d personally make relates to the last point, productivity. In an overanxious world, I would eventually come to believe that the path to greater productivity runs straight through calm. By the time my own journey was said and done, I had stumbled upon countless tactics, ideas, and mindset shifts we can all adopt to find calm in our lives—even during the most hectic days. I’ll begin sharing these with you by exploring the two primary sources of modern anxiety: the “mindset of more” and our tendency to fall victim to superstimuli—highly processed, exaggerated versions of things we’re naturally wired to enjoy. We’ll explore how these factors influence us to both structure our lives around the neurochemical dopamine, and embrace abnormal levels of chronic stress. Where helpful, I’ll share stories from my own journey, ideas from interesting researchers I met along the way, and, of course, share practical advice to help with all of these impulses. After exploring the factors that drive us from calm, we’ll dig even deeper into how we can fill our days with calm, covering topics like how stress works, our common anxiety “escape hatches,” why we shouldn’t feel guilty about investing in calm, and other specific strategies we can invest in to overcome anxiety. Throughout the book, I’ll also share what I learned from a bunch of experiments I tried in my own life, including compartmentalizing when and where I cared about productivity; conducting a one-month dopamine fast to try to destimulate my mind in the most extreme way possible; and resetting my tolerance to caffeine. * * * L et’s begin this dive into calm by covering a subject near and dear to me, one that I would need to develop a healthier relationship with in order to find calm. That topic, as you might have guessed, is productivity. Whether we’re aware of it or not, the world we find ourselves in leads us to think quite a bit about how much we accomplish. As I found firsthand, this drive toward greater productivity and accomplishment can lead us to believe an incredible number of stories about ourselves—regardless of whether they’re true—while taking on a significant amount of chronic stress in the process. As soon as you’re ready, let’s cannonball straight into the deep end and explore what I’ve come to think of as the “accomplishment mindset.” CHAPTER TWO Striving for Accomplishment Forging an Identity It would be impossible for me to share what I’ve learned about calm without first talking about accomplishment—and how we construct our identities out of what we achieve. In large part, our identity is made up of the stories we believe about ourselves—as well as the stories others tell us about who we are. If you could rewind a videotape of your life—moving in fast-reverse through the celebrations, triumphs, and challenges—you’d reach a point at which your identity hadn’t formed yet. You were just a kid, absorbing the world with all the wonderment of a figurine looking up inside of a snow globe. You were also gathering evidence of yourself—stories of the world around you, and about who you believe you are.... Wide-eyed, inquisitive, and with your cheek pressed against the wet, grassy ground—maybe poking at a frog with your index finger—you hear the muted background hum of your aunt talking to one of your parents about how curious a kid you are, with words not intended for you. A story begins to form in your mind: Am I curious? Well, I guess I am. What does this mean?... Fast-forward to high school—the first year, physics class. Physics never connected with you, but for some reason, your teacher has just... some perfect way of explaining how elements of the world interact with one another. Maybe I am scientifically minded? I mean, I’ve always been pretty logical. What does this say about me?... Hit fast-forward again, and push play right when you get to the week you’re starting your second job. In a meeting, offhandedly, your new boss— your favorite boss still to this day—comments on how reliable you are in your first week, and how you always seem to have some magical ability to get everything that’s on your plate done. Of course I’m reliable. That’s part of who I am; I guess I’m just productive. Over time, memories accumulate like evidence—of who we’re becoming, and eventually, of who we believe we are. * * * I n my own story, I carried around narratives identical to these—that I was curious, logical, and productive—until I eventually embarked on a yearlong productivity project, where I researched and experimented with as much productivity advice as I possibly could. At the beginning of the project, straight out of university, I declined two full-time, well-paying jobs to make zero money for a year and explore the topic of productivity as thoroughly as possible. (In Canada, we can defer repayment of our student loans for a while, which made the project a whole lot easier.) As you might imagine, an endeavor like this had a way of reinforcing the narratives I believed about myself. Some of the narratives that the project reinforced were true, like that I was deeply curious about the science of productivity. As weird an interest as it is, that one’s still true today—maybe even more so. But I had started to construct other narratives, like that I was some kind of superhumanly productive person. This identity was built on less stable ground, and, unfortunately for me, the more ideas and strategies I experimented with, the more evidence I saw for this particular story. This only served to make me more ensconced within it. Of course, the stories didn’t just come from me. For example, after I watched seventy hours of TED Talks in a week (to experiment with information retention), the TED Talks organization wrote that I “might be the most productive man you’d ever hope to meet.” This felt pretty damn great at the time. Even if I recognized it was a little over the top, hearing the quote read back to me repeatedly in interviews and before talks was no doubt shaping the stories I told myself (not to mention my ego). With time, more complimentary quotes rolled in—fuel for the fire that would forge my newfound identity. I knew a good amount about productivity, and like to think that I really had learned or even developed the strategies to approach my work in an intelligent way. You might expect that this is the case, given I’ve spent so much time researching, thinking about, and experimenting with the topic. Carpenters should know how to build furniture, teachers should know how to teach, productivity researchers should know how to get a good amount done in the time it would take others to do a little. But in blindly accepting the narrative that I was unstoppably productive, I, like so many others, failed to account for the fact that there was a point at which I could push myself too far. I knew a lot about productivity—but there was also a lot I didn’t know. Crucially, I didn’t have a proper perspective on how productivity deserved to fit into the broader picture of my life. Maybe, just maybe, I was a bit more stressed than I was letting on to myself, and constantly being on the road for work was wearing me down more than I cared to admit. And perhaps I had trapped myself in a story; one that, in practice, was impossible to live up to, and would eventually drive me to anxiety and burnout. Ideally, in forming an identity, we pick attributes of ourselves that are stable over time, and structure our identity on top of what we most deeply value. But we often pick parts of our life that are not—including what we do for a living. Of course, as soon as our work—or anything else, for that matter —becomes a part of our identity, losing it feels like losing a piece of ourselves. I had made this same mistake: in my eyes, my work was no longer something I did, it had become a part of who I was. Every complimentary email from a reader, blurb from a media outlet, and kind remark became yet another piece of evidence for this narrative, another pail of wet concrete poured into the foundation of this newfound hyperproductive identity. Burning out, falling deep into an episode of anxiety onstage, and even simpler moments like the memory of seeing myself in the bathtub plate, would insert a wedge between myself and who I believed I was, stark reminders that the evidence on which I based a large part of my identity just wasn’t true. I would be stretching the truth if I said that I realized all of this on the train ride home after the event. But one thing became apparent on that trip: I had taken my single-minded pursuit of productivity to a place where its foundation was no longer stable. Something was missing. The Birth of a Mindset To help kick off the book, here’s a deceptively simple question for you to reflect on: How do you determine whether a day of your life went well? Honestly think about this question for a minute or two, in whatever way you’d like. Journal about what comes to mind, pause and reflect for a minute or two, or talk it through with your spouse or partner (a favorite technique of mine). If you’re like me, you might find this question a fun one to turn over in your mind for a bit. (I’ll be here when you’re done.) * * * I f you gave the question some thought, you probably realized that there are countless ways you can measure a day—depending on the values you focus on as you answer the question. Some different answers that I’ve heard (along with their corresponding deeper values in parentheses) include: the extent to which you were able to help other people, whether personally or through your work (service); how many tasks you crossed off your to-do list (productivity); how much you were able to savor your day (enjoyment); how much money you made (financial success); how engaged you were with your work or life (presence); how many deep and genuine moments you shared with others (connection); and whether the day made you happy (happiness). These are just a few examples. In addition to your values, how you measure your days could also be informed by elements of your life like the culture you live and work inside of, your stage of life, your upbringing, and what opportunities are available to you. Someone raised by investment banker parents is likely to evaluate their days differently than someone raised by free-spirited parents living out of a Volkswagen van. It should be said that there is no correct answer to this question. While most of us don’t step back at the end of each day to evaluate how things went —not all of us have a practice like journaling or meditation, for example—on some level, often subconscious, we do reflect on whether a day was good. As long as you’ve enjoyed how you’ve spent your time, and live in accordance with what you value, you’re going to feel pretty good about how your days unfold—regardless of whether they look ruthlessly competitive or like some far-out hippie adventure to others. If you’re satisfied at the end of each day, that should be enough—it’s your time to spend however the heck you want. However, despite the myriad ways we can measure how we’ve spent our time, or ways our values and environments differ, most of us seem to measure how well a day went by how much we were able to get done or how productive we were. This is typically the case at work. But if you’re anything like me, you may also take this attitude home with you. The Accomplishment Mindset If you were to rewind the tape of your life yet again, you would hopefully find your younger self giving little thought to how productive you were, or how much you were able to accomplish in a day. Occupying fewer stories about yourself, you also thought less about what was expected of you and had fewer expectations of yourself. If you’re similar to me, your younger self was a freer spirit—following the proverbial wind, and doing things simply for the sake of doing them. Maybe you built time capsules, biked to new places, and cooked up kitchen concoctions that, while fun to make, were actually gross, sloppy mixes of flour, ketchup, and other random condiments you could reach on the kitchen shelves. Every once in a while, maybe you even had the freedom of mind to stumble into boredom—which led you to brainstorm more novel ways to spend your time. Maybe you built a blanket fort out of the chairs and the couch in the living room, or attached all of the fruit stickers to the bottom of the wall cabinets in the kitchen. (When was the last time you were bored?) When you were younger, you didn’t give much thought to measuring your days. Of course, as we progress through life and accumulate real responsibility, this changes. We’re taught to measure our time—and often even our worth—against the benchmark of accomplishment.[*] As adults, this weight of responsibility can drive us away from serendipitous adventure. Even in kids, this mindset can form quickly. When we start school, we enter into a system with targets that we compete against others to achieve: the better our grades, the further we’ll make it in the school system, and the further we’ll make it in life. Good grades are how we become a rocket scientist, a brain surgeon, a high-flying CEO who sails the skies in a Gulfstream. The more focused we are as we work, the more resourceful we’ll become, and the more driven we are, the more accomplished we’ll become. We then enter the workforce with ever more immediate targets to strive for— higher salaries, performance bonuses, and rungs climbed in the organizational hierarchy above us. Regardless of how far we get, we strive for more. Such is the nature of the accomplishment mindset: once we begin shooting for more success, we tend not to stop. As we grow up and accumulate more responsibilities, there are more options for things we can do with every minute of our time, and not all these options are created equal. Continually asking ourselves whether there are more important alternatives to what we are doing—what an economist might call the “opportunity cost” of our time—leads us to feel guilty and doubt whether we’re spending our limited, valuable time on the best possible activity. Responsibility makes how we spend our time more consequential, because it raises this opportunity cost. If the thought of going on an adventure were to pass through our mind, the very next thought might be all of the more important things we could do instead. The laundry needs to be folded. The dog needs to get walked. Emails need to be answered. Real life gets in the way. Even if your attention to responsibility and opportunity cost is initially limited to work, you may also reach a tipping point of sorts where your relentless focus on productivity becomes a mindset that spills into your personal life. Instead of productivity being just a set of practices to which you can turn when you have more work than time to do it, getting the most done with every moment is always on your mind—including when you actually would just like to relax. I call this the accomplishment mindset. The accomplishment mindset is a conditioned set of attitudes and beliefs that drives us to constantly strive to accomplish more. This mindset leads us to always want to fill our time with something—and feel guilty when we’re spending our time in a “nonoptimal” way. It’s the force that tells us, when we’re out enjoying a latte with a friend, that we should really go home to get a head start on dinner; the voice telling us to catch up on our podcast queue while we’re relishing a beautiful walk through the park. Above all else, the mindset leads us to continually think about the opportunity cost of our time—and how we can use our limited time to achieve more. Most of us don’t evaluate our time and intentions through this mindset 100 percent of the time. But, as we move forward in our lives and careers, we seem to measure more of our hours, days, weeks, and years against the yardstick of accomplishment. Telling ourselves the story that we’ll set the mindset aside when we retire, we keep on trucking. Relaxation can wait, and so too can savoring the fruits of what we accomplish. Being an “accomplished person” can become a part of our identity. When our list of work accomplishments fuses with our personal identity, we see our success as a part of who we are. In her book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard makes the case that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. I would extend this to how we measure our days, too: how we measure our days is how we measure our lives. When we measure our days by how much we’re able to accomplish in them, and we’re not careful, we measure the sum of our days this way, too. * * * S chool and work can make us care a bit too much about productivity and accomplishment, but they obviously serve an important purpose. They have built the modern world as we know it. It’s hard to overstate just how much better off we are in the modern world. If you took a farm laborer from two hundred years ago and brought him to a nice grocery store, he probably would not be able to process just how bountiful it is. And grocery stores are nowhere near the most luxurious trappings of modern life. Once the poor guy calms down (which might take a while), you could very slowly pull your phone out of your pocket and show him how the device lets you connect with anyone on earth, at any moment, in under one second. Thanks to economic progress, over the last two hundred years, the average American’s yearly income has gone from $2,000 a person to $50,000—and that’s after accounting for inflation. And while we’ve become twenty-five times more affluent, the price of many goods has also come down, in large part due to technological progress. The $1,000 that you spent on a TV eighty years ago gets you a lot more inches and pixels today. And it’ll even be in color! As you would hope, it’s not just those of us in wealthier countries that benefit from this growth. Over the last two decades, the number of people living in extreme poverty around the world has more than halved. Twenty years ago, 29 percent of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today, 9 percent do. Economic indicators like these matter a lot. As renowned researcher Hans Rosling wrote in Factfulness, “The main factor that affects how people live is not their religion, their culture, or the country they live in, but their income.” For all of these reasons, I am not about to make the case against economic growth, which, assuming the benefits are spread fairly among us (a strong assumption), truly does make our lives better. But this modern world has come with a price: anxiety. The systems we live and work inside of—and the mindsets they lead us to adopt and the stress they lead us to take on—are significant contributors to this. Productivity and accomplishment are incentivized whether we’re at school or work. In the long arc of time, the more productive we are, the more “successful” we tend to become. Modern society places a high prize on traditional measures of success, like money, status, and recognition—ignoring less quantifiable measures, like how happy we are, how deep and fulfilling our relationships are, and whether we make a difference in the lives of others. And the way we get to become more accomplished is through becoming more productive, accumulating enough productive days that they lead to an “accomplished” life. As we spend more time in systems that reward productivity, we become convinced that productivity and accomplishment are what matter most. Eventually, this becomes the default way we measure how well we’ve spent our time. The Wonders of Productivity Advice In this chapter, I’ve focused primarily on the costs of striving for productivity at the expense of your well-being, but there are great benefits to be had, too, especially when you give your productivity practice boundaries. If the mental image the word “productivity” conjures up for you feels cold, corporate, and all about efficiency, you’re not alone. But you need not worry. There are far friendlier approaches to the subject, and productivity advice doesn’t have to turn you into a robot addicted to accomplishment. I view productivity as simply accomplishing what we set out to do— whether our intention is to clear all the emails from our inbox, decide between a few candidates to hire onto our team at work, or relax on a beach while drinking two piña coladas (one for each hand). In my eyes, when we set out to do something, and then do it, we’re perfectly productive. Framed a different way, productivity is not about striving for more—it’s about intention. This definition works across every context, regardless of what area of our life we’re operating in. But even with this (hopefully more human) definition, productivity and accomplishment are two sides of the same coin, even when what we intend to “accomplish” is a day of relaxation. I’ll set aside this friendlier definition for a moment because it’s worth evaluating the pursuit of accomplishment using a more traditionally accepted definition of the term: making progress toward our goals and accomplishments (to become more successful by traditional measures). Productivity tactics are neither good nor bad. Methods, habits, and strategies that lead us to become more accomplished can be deployed for incredible purposes. I found this firsthand: productivity is one of my favorite topics in the world, and focusing on it has led me to create a substantial amount of work that I am proud of, a degree of success I probably would not have achieved otherwise. But at the same time, this focus on accomplishment has driven me to burnout and anxiety. In the productivity space, the idea that striving for more accomplishment can lead to both success and harm is rarely discussed, if at all. So let’s talk about it. For good reason, the draw of productivity advice is difficult to resist. Every single day, there are things that we need to get done, at work and at home. We live big lives, filled to the brim with responsibility. In one day, we might have ten hours of work to get done (in eight), while working from home with a sick kid in the other room, while somehow finding time to pay the overdue bills piling up in our email inbox. On another day—maybe even on the weekend!—we may need to catch up on chores around the house, while cooking dinner for our extended family, while hopefully scraping together enough time to properly unwind. Productivity advice works remarkably well in situations like these. The productivity advice that actually works more than pays for itself—we make back the time we spend on it and then some. By accomplishing what we have to do in less time, we carve out more time for what’s meaningful—people, hobbies, and work we can connect with on a deeper level. As a simple example, take prioritizing the tasks that comprise your workday. By spending just a few minutes at the start of each day defining what you’ll want to have accomplished by the day’s end, you figure out what your most valuable tasks are, and in the process understand where your time is best spent and where it isn’t. Just a few minutes of planning can save you hours in execution later on, especially if doing so helps you zero in on your most essential tasks on a given day, or stop working on a project that would be better delegated to someone else on your team. Imagine, for a second, that you’ve won some one-in-a-million contest through a high-end housecleaning service that provides you with a full-time butler for life. (His name is Kingsley.) The man provides you with more free time every day, by cleaning up after you and your family, cooking meals, managing your calendar (which he calls your “diary”), chauffeuring you around town, and more. The best part: Kingsley’s handsome salary is paid, in full, until his retirement, fifty years from today. You don’t even have to tip him (that’s included)! While this scenario is sadly a pipe dream for nearly all of us, the best productivity tactics and strategies can confer similar benefits. Like Kingsley, they provide us with more of the most valuable resource we have at our disposal: time. This is the promise, and wonder, of productivity advice. By developing your capacity to get things done, you have more time, attention, and energy to bring to everything that you do. You might even become more successful to boot. But unlike with a butler, this advice should come with an important caveat: it’s helpful provided we at some point stop our striving. Productivity advice is powerful, but it requires boundaries. Without them, this obsession with accomplishment can diminish our productivity, because it drives us away from calm. The Opposite of Calm A few months after my panic attack, work finally slowed a bit and I could begin deconstructing what had made me so anxious and burnt out. I’ll get to the science of burnout in the next chapter, but first let’s decipher what it even means to be calm—the end result that we’re after. Researchers, I quickly discovered, do not study calm as a standalone construct. Most of us know what calm feels like, and its definition is right there in the dictionary—smack-dab between “callus” and “calomel”—with descriptions such as “a quiet and peaceful state or condition” and “without hurried movement, anxiety, or noise.” But the term does not have a commonly agreed-upon clinical definition. Few, if any, have even been suggested. Calm is also not a branch of psychology that is studied, nor is there a validated, reliable instrument designed to precisely assess how calm someone is. (After many hours of scouring various academic search engines, I was happy to have finally found the Vancouver Interaction and Calmness Scale. In this scale, however, “calmness” refers to how sedate a patient receiving mechanical ventilation is in the ICU—including whether they’re pulling out their lines or tubes!) Forget how elusive calm is in everyday life. It’s even elusive in the research! Thankfully, there is a way we can circumvent this lack of an official, clinical definition, while staying true to the research. We can do this through exploring anxiety. While research regarding calm is very scarce, the research that does exist points to a curious idea: calm is the polar opposite of anxiety. We can begin to form our own definition of calm by exploring its opposite. When we’re anxious, we feel inner turmoil; ruminating, while filled with dread about what’s to come. Research suggests that we may also feel nervous or on edge during anxious periods, while unable to stop our worrying. Other signs of anxiety include having trouble relaxing, feeling restless, annoyed or irritable, and frequently afraid, as if something terrible might happen at any moment. I think of my own anxiety as a sort of rolling impatience, where anxious moments of the day crash into each other like waves. Calm is the opposite of all this turmoil. Luckily for us, research provides insight into exactly how the states differ. Importantly, while anxiousness is an unpleasant emotion characterized as a state of high mental arousal, calm is a pleasant emotion characterized as a state of low mental arousal. Research has confirmed that calm and anxiety exist on a continuum with one another, with one recent study published in the American Psychological Association’s renowned Journal of Personality and Social Psychology demonstrating that anxiety doesn’t go from “zero to intense” as we think, but should instead be thought of as a continuum that ranges “from high calmness to high anxiety”: Put differently, calm isn’t just the polar opposite of anxiety—anxiety is the polar opposite of calm. Not only does overcoming anxiety get us closer to calm, but when we foster high levels of calm in our life, we have further to go before we become anxious again. Calmness makes us resilient against future anxiety. Taking these findings together, we can define calm as a subjectively positive state characterized by a low level of arousal, with an accompanying absence of anxiety. As we move away from the High Anxiety side of the spectrum toward High Calmness, our feelings of contentedness grow deeper as our mind becomes more relaxed and serene. Eventually, with our thoughts still and our mind settled, we experience calm. In this state, we are also less emotionally reactive to the events of our life. It should be said that we don’t always experience anxiety and calm in the same way. Our subjective state is continually in flux. For this reason (and with the assumption you do not suffer from an anxiety disorder, which I cover briefly in the box below), we should be thinking about anxiety and calm not as traits we have, but rather as states we pass through, depending on factors such as what’s happening in our lives and how much stress we’re under at a given time. Anxiety is a normal response to a stressful situation, especially one we interpret as threatening. There’s nothing wrong with you if you experience it. Some days are full of calm but contain an anxious moment or two—like when our airport shuttle arrives to pick us up thirty minutes late. On the flip side, days full of anxious moments might be punctuated by refreshing periods of calm—like when the stress of work evaporates the moment we walk in the front door at home, and our kids run to hug us at our knees. This path to calm—which involves reducing anxiety but also investing in strategies that get us to the other end of the calm spectrum—is one in which we’ll eliminate stress, overcome burnout, and resist distraction, while becoming more engaged, present, and productive. Before going any further, I should put on my legal hat (it’s like my regular hat, but it charges me by the hour), and mention that the advice in this book should not be construed, and is not intended to serve, as a substitute for advice from a trained medical professional. You should absolutely consult with a doctor if you are experiencing levels of anxiety that are preventing you from functioning in your day-to-day life, or in any way make your mind feel like an unpleasant place to spend time. If you’re curious about whether you might have an anxiety disorder—also called trait anxiety, as opposed to state anxiety—and you don’t want to speak to a professional, I highly recommend searching for the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7. This free test, which is available online, serves as a screener for generalized anxiety disorder. It’s just seven short questions, takes a minute or two to answer, and will ask you how often you experience anxiety symptoms like the ones I mentioned a few paragraphs ago—which I’ve adapted directly from this test. The bottom line: get help if you need it—or even if you just think you might! My intention with this book is to help with the low-level subclinical anxiety that so many of us experience, especially in the modern accomplishment-obsessed world. The Productivity Spectrum Now that we’ve defined calm, let’s get back to productivity and accomplishment. As with calm and anxiety, we all fall on a spectrum of sorts with regard to how highly we value and think about productivity and accomplishment. On one end of the spectrum is the person who never thinks about productivity or what they want to accomplish with their time. This isn’t ideal. An obsessive pursuit of productivity can negatively affect our mental health, but we do need to set and then work toward a few goals. We should probably try to earn a livable paycheck, help those around us, and live in a way that will minimize our future regret (in my opinion, minimizing regret is one of the most important ingredients of a good life). Someone who never thinks about what they want to get out of their time rarely sets out to make their life better, or live in a way that’s congruent with what they value. We’ve got to spend at least some of our time working toward our goals. Plus, our mind craves having things to engage with throughout the day. (Engagement makes us happier than almost any other ingredient in our life—more on this later.) On the opposite end of the spectrum is someone who is constantly driven by an accomplishment mindset, and values accomplishment and productivity above all else—including other great ingredients that make up a good life, like happiness, connection, and calm. For this person, productivity is basically a religion that they practice at work and in all parts of their lives. As productivity and accomplishment became tangled up with the stories that made up my identity, I moved close to that end of the spectrum. If stories about your own success have become entangled with your identity, or you find it difficult to set the accomplishment mindset aside, including when you want to relax, perhaps you’ve moved on over to this side of the spectrum, too. When achievement drives most of what we do, we run the risk of not taking time to recharge, slow down, or appreciate the fruits of what we accomplish—all of which, ironically, make us more motivated and productive in the long run. We need to spend at least some of our time refueling, or we run the risk of burning out. Reflect on where you fall on the spectrum, particularly if you care about productivity and accomplishment more than most. As it relates to calm, the accomplishment mindset can be a double-edged sword when we take it too far: it leads us to less joy, while causing us more stress. Let’s cover each of these ideas in turn. Less Joy An early discovery I made in my quest for calm was the extent to which the accomplishment mindset inhibited how much joy I experienced each day. The reason for this was simple: the mindset turned pretty much everything in my life into a to-do item. As the saying goes, when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. A similar idea rings true here: when you see everything you do through the lens of the accomplishment mindset, everything in your life looks like something you have to get done. In this way, an accomplishment mindset compromises how much joy you experience each day, as you alternate between periods of productivity, as well as guilt (when you’re not being productive).[*] I found this from firsthand experience. Instead of savoring delicious meals, I ate them while distractedly listening to a podcast or watching a YouTube video, in a two-pronged attempt to both fit more into that time, while trying to absolve myself of the guilt I felt taking a break (a subject we’ll dig in to in chapter 8). I chose busyness over genuine enjoyment, stubbornly and repeatedly. When I had scheduled a conversation with a friend at the end of the day, I couldn’t escape the shackles of the mindset then, either, thinking about what I had to get done when I got back to work the next day. As I became unusually concerned with how productive I was, I’m sad to say that even the most enjoyable activities in my life—time with my wife, meals, and other incredible experiences—became to-do items. Even vacations became something to get done, rather than enjoy. Productivity became the end I was seeking. Of course, productivity is a terrible end in and of itself: it should be thought of as a means to a more important end, such as having more free time, financial freedom, or more space to genuinely connect with others.[*] As many of us do, I lived life at capacity, with little slack or free time in my schedule. At least, this was the story I had convinced myself of. It turns out I did have the time—I just wasn’t spending it on activities that made me engaged or calm. Each time I hit a productivity milestone, the accomplishment mindset took over once again, and I focused on the next thing I needed to get done, never fully appreciating that I had achieved the last thing. An accomplishment mindset is nice to have when we’re at work, on company time. Work is how we exchange our time for money. We are paid for our productivity over an arc of time, assuming things are fair. Productivity leads to micro-accomplishments, which lead to more substantial achievement. But when we’re not careful, the same mindset that leads us to achievement at work can prevent us from enjoying the best parts of our life when we’re not trading our time for money. Instead of enjoying moments, we tick boxes, all while spending less time savoring the fruits of our accomplishments—the vacations, the two-story house, the quality time with family—the things we work so hard for in the first place. If you lose sight of this, as I did, you may also find that everything becomes work—something you need to do to get a result. Your to-do list becomes a diary of stuff you have to do, not things you get to do. It’s surprisingly easy to bully yourself into becoming a more productive person. After all, it’s impossible to want to improve your life without first deciding how you don’t quite measure up to others. This is what can make self-improvement a trap, especially when you take the accomplishment mindset to the most extreme.[*] Unlike me, you hopefully haven’t moved this far to the end of the productivity spectrum. But the point stands regardless: without boundaries, the accomplishment mindset leads us to experience less joy, especially when it’s time to relax. When we’re striving for accomplishment all of the time, we never truly enjoy where we are, what we’re doing, or, most important, whom we get to do it all with. A Mirage of Productivity A second cost of the accomplishment mindset is one I’ve already alluded to: it leads us to become needlessly busy, especially with small, unimportant tasks, because it pushes us to fill each moment of our lives to the brim with activity. This busyness is often just a signal we send to the evaluating part of our mind that we’re moving forward toward our intended accomplishments— even if we’re just bouncing between apps, scrolling past social media updates, or impulsively reading the news. We feel less guilty engaging in mindless scrolling than when resting and recharging—even though doing so saps our energy, and stresses us out. Some busyness is obviously just a fact of life, and a result of our accumulating meaningful responsibility—but at the same time, the era of pocketable internet devices has introduced a whole new and unnecessary layer of busyness to our day. Just a couple of decades ago, this layer of activity didn’t exist! Today, when we have a few minutes to spare between meetings, we tend to focus on things that keep our minds stimulated instead of planning what we want to get out of our time. Refreshing our email one more time, rechecking Instagram, or doomscrolling our way around Twitter, we feel busy—and this busyness tricks our mind into thinking we’re accomplishing something. But it’s really just a mirage of productivity. Unfortunately, this busyness also drives us from calm, because it leads us to take on more chronic stress than is necessary.[*] As I delved deeper into the research surrounding anxiety and calm, eliminating sources of chronic stress in my life—a great number of which stemmed from this unnecessary busyness layer brought on by the achievement-driven mindset—led to the best progress I made in achieving greater calm. I cannot underscore this point enough: chronic stress, much of which stems from the accomplishment mindset, is perhaps the largest roadblock you’ll need to tackle to achieve lasting mental calm. Let me explain. In a nutshell, we experience two flavors of stress in our life. The first kind, acute stress, is stress that is temporary and often one-off—one rebooked flight, a Lego block that we step on in the middle of the night, or an argument with our spouse that’s finally resolved. Thankfully for us, our bodies are designed to deal with acute stress—for most of human history, acute stress was the primary type of stress we’ve experienced. We human beings were nothing more than delicious prey for millions of years, devoured by leopards, snakes, and giant hyenas. Our body’s stress response provided us with the physical and mental stamina to face down threats like these. Acute stress is, by its very definition, short-term and temporary. You may be familiar with how your body responds to episodes of acute stress: it releases cortisol, a stress hormone, which activates your body’s stress response. This stress response provides us with the mental and physical stamina we need to fight back against whatever happens to be stressing us, so we can get on with our lives. Your body floods with adrenaline, your pupils dilate, and you either run away, or slay that killer hyena like the badass that you are. Stress gets a bad rap, but unfairly so. The truth is more nuanced: stress isn’t fun while we experience it, but it gives our life meaning. Acute stress is akin to a tunnel we must navigate through to arrive at a better place on the other side. Great memories are often the result of experiences that feel stressful in the moment. Weddings are stressful. So is cooking a weekend dinner for your extended family. So is speaking about your work in front of a hundred people. But experiences like these are what make life meaningful. As psychologist Kelly McGonigal so eloquently put it in her book The Upside of Stress, “If you put a wider lens on your life and subtract every day that you have experienced as stressful, you won’t find yourself with an ideal life. Instead, you’ll find yourself also subtracting the experiences that have helped you grow, the challenges you are most proud of, and the relationships that define you.” Acute stress provides us with memories to look back on, experiences that end up feeling rich, and challenges from which we have little choice but to grow. * * * "C hronic” stress, though, is the opposite. It’s the no good, very bad type of stress that feels like it’s never going to end and that we face over and over again—chronically. Instead of the one-time canceled flight, it’s the grueling traffic we encounter every damn day on our way to work. Instead of the occasional argument with our spouse, it’s the irreconcilable feelings that arise whenever we talk to them. There is an end in sight with acute stress, even when the stress is at its peak. Our body has a chance to recover after we’ve passed through the stressful experience. The same thing cannot be said about chronic stress. Unfortunately for us, in the modern, accomplishment-driven world, sources of chronic stress are endless. Some of them are even hidden—the result of our unnecessary busyness. Many sources of chronic stress are easy to spot: struggling financially to make ends meet, dealing with constant negativity from our annoying coworkers, and having to care for ailing family members are all experiences that don’t let up and that cause us strain. But other sources of chronic stress are hidden. We often even choose to pay attention to these sources of stress because they stimulate our mind to feel productive. Some of this stress is even addictive, because it’s stimulating or provides us with validation—despite the fact that, on some level, our mind appraises the stimuli as threatening. For example, you may find that Twitter is stimulating and addictive—but think also about how your mind is invariably shaken up after using it. Or you may find that, while Instagram is equally stimulating, you feel inadequate after spending time in the app, because, as Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen put it in her congressional testimony, the app is about two things: bodies and comparing lifestyles. Social media is full of content that makes us feel inadequate and causes us unnecessary stress. Many, if not most of our largest sources of distraction are also sources of chronic stress. This is particularly true during anxious times, when a higher proportion of the distracting content we consume is threatening. As stimulating as email, social media, and the news can be, we often pay attention to these objects of attention because they’re stressful—not to mention novel and threatening. Many of these stressful websites and apps also provide variable reinforcement—which means sometimes there’s something new and stimulating to check out, and sometimes there isn’t. This makes these sources of chronic stress addictive. Stress can also be addictive because it’s familiar, like a toxic relationship we’ve grown comfortable inside of, which would leave an odd-shaped hole in our life if it were gone. The news is a terrific example of a stressor that we’ve grown accustomed to being stressed out by, especially in recent years. Though we consume the news by choice, usually to stay informed, doing so leads us to become far more stressed than we might realize. Ironically, this provides us with a diminished mental capacity to deal with news stories directly affecting us and those we love. One study found that participants who watched six or more hours of news coverage about the Boston Marathon bombings experienced a higher level of stress than someone in the marathon who was directly affected by it. Another study found that watching wall-to-wall coverage of domestic terrorist attacks led viewers to develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Worse yet, watching negative news has been shown to lead viewers to consume yet more threatening content in the future, fueling what some researchers call “a cycle of distress.” If you read and watch a lot of news, let research like this give you pause. This applies to other sources of distraction, too: just because something stimulates your mind does not mean that it makes you happy or that it’s not stressful or threatening. The opposite is often the case. Drinking a delicious cup of coffee, we might exhale a relaxed aah after taking the first sip. We never do the same after checking social media. Unfortunately, our body cannot distinguish between acute and chronic stress: it mobilizes in the same way for both. Like a parachute, our body’s stress response is designed for only occasional use. Over millions of years, the system was designed to help us mobilize so we can overcome occasional, substantial, life-threatening stressors—and glide back to earth afterward. Our desire for busyness, driven by the accomplishment mindset, can cost us when we’re not careful. We must rein the mindset in—even when accomplishment is what we seek in the first place. So how can we do so? To end the chapter, let’s cover two helpful strategies for reducing the costs associated with the mindset and the stories we tell ourselves about productivity. These strategies can help us move away from the extreme polar ends of the productivity spectrum, leading us to experience less stress and more joy—while leading us to greater calm. The two strategies: define your “productivity hours” and create a “stress inventory.” Let’s cover each of these in turn.[*] Productivity Hours The accomplishment mindset needs boundaries—without them, it tends to take over your life. (We’ll cover reasons it does in chapter 4.) After realizing that I filtered most moments of every day through the lens of becoming as productive as possible, I started to carve out time to purposefully not care about productivity or accomplishment—and set up those boundaries. This way, I could get work done within the hours I chose, while making time for some much-needed calm. This went against basically every instinct I had developed studying productivity. But defining hours to not care about productivity or accomplishment worked surprisingly well. Actually, I take that back: I was shocked by how well it worked. Ever since, at the start of each day, I’ve defined my productivity hours. Simply put, this time is when you do your work—whether office work or housework. (I find it helpful to define hours for both so I can create boundaries at work and at home, but your system may vary.) During these hours, the idea is to work on stuff you have to do that has some time pressure associated with it. You adopt the accomplishment mindset in these hours— spending time on your most valuable tasks, while finishing what you can. How many hours you need depends on factors like how many demands you have on a given day, how honed your productivity practice is, and whether or not you have a personal butler who follows you around wherever you go. The more highly you value traditional measures of accomplishment, the more productivity hours it would be worth devoting to your work each day. Implementing this tactic is simple enough. To define these hours, at the start of each day (or at the end of the previous), examine what you have on your proverbial plate—how many meetings you have and when they occur, how much work you have to get done, and how many things you have to do around the house—and choose the hours of the day when you’ll do this work. If you have an inflexible nine-to-five job, your hours should probably include your entire workday (minus lunch and other breaks). Of course, you’ll have some productivity time where you accomplish nothing at all, even though you’d like to, maybe because, for example, you’re stuck in tedious meetings that you really don’t need to be in. But here’s the key: if you had the choice to skip the meetings and work more directly toward accomplishing your goals during that time, you would, because you’ve adopted the accomplishment mindset. Productivity hours are a helpful tactic for dealing with the stress of work because they dictate that there is some end in sight—even during those times when you’re totally swamped and have only an hour or two of personal freedom in the evening. Luckily, because you’ve chosen that you’ll step back from work during this free time, productivity guilt is far less likely to creep in. You can compartmentalize the stories, the stress, the work anxiety—and the accomplishment mindset—while carving out some real leisure time in the process. Even during hectic periods, when it may make more sense to define your free hours (rather than your productivity hours), you’ll create a little pocket of time to not worry about getting stuff done. Guilt and chronic work stress won’t bleed into this time, especially after you’ve made a habit out of keeping this time strictly personal. There’s also what can be thought of as a “deadline effect” with productivity hours. When you give yourself a limited amount of time to get anything done—a deadline, in other words—you have no choice but to hunker down and act like some Devout Productivitian. As you get better at figuring out how many hours you need, you will likely surprise yourself by how much you’re able to get done. Deploying this tactic will likely free up a surprising amount of time for you. I’ve found it fun to use these productive hours for deliberate skill development, too—including learning photography, new programming languages, and how to play the piano (which I’m still terrible at). You don’t have to be too intense about it; relax, unwind, and get stuff done. Remember that productivity doesn’t have to be overly stressful, especially when you work calmly. Generally, concern yourself more with your direction than with your speed. Thoughtful deliberateness trumps directionless hustle, and what you lose in speed, you’ll more than make up for in deliberateness. Over time, be sure to make an effort to use productivity hours to focus on increasingly important tasks at work and at home. Your phone, social media, and other distractions will always await you on the other side of these hours —these hours are for working on things that lead you to keep up and make progress. If you’re doing knowledge work, be sure to work a bit more slowly than you think you should, and devote plenty of time for reflection—two crucial productivity factors for doing work with your mind that let you work more strategically and less reactively. You will probably find that working more slowly saves you time in the end. When accomplishment matters, focus on productivity. When meaning matters, be sure to set productivity aside. Obviously, do calibrate this advice for the kind of work you do and the life you live: if you’re a sales representative, you may need to connect more often in the evening than if you’re a novelist. But, when work imposes itself unavoidably on your personal hours, batch together small tasks to trade in the chronic stress of ongoing distraction for the acute but contained stress of work. Another powerful reason these hours work is that it’s worse to always be kind of working than to work extra hours during which you’re focused and productive. Blocks of focused work lead to engagement, which makes us feel like there’s a purpose behind what we’re doing. Conversely, spasmodically checking work email all day long leads to needless chronic stress. If you don’t get paid extra to be on call, consider whether you need to be, especially if work is a significant source of chronic stress for you. Do this regardless of how needed your work makes you feel. Use your leisure time to relax, connect, unwind, and find calm, perhaps by filling your time with a few ideas from chapter 7. During these hours, step back from what makes you feel anxious. Don’t worry about output, productivity, results, or cramming more into your time. This is time for you to benefit from the fruits of your productivity, not add to your lists of accomplishments. Maybe enjoy something on your savor list (an idea from chapter 4). Guilt is a form of internal tension, and at work it’s often our brain’s way of telling us that we should be working on something else—that we should consider the opportunity cost of our time. If you’re not used to disconnecting intentionally, guilt will arise during this leisure time, especially as you settle into a rhythm of taking this time each day. This is normal: just notice the guilt, and try a strategy or two from later in the book (chapter 8) to keep guilt from ruining your leisure time. Guilt will arise during your productivity time, too. When it does, consider whether you’re working with intention, and on the best possible thing. If you decide to try this tactic of defining your productivity hours on for size, I hope you find what I did: that productivity hours compartmentalize the stress of work, while carving out time for joy. If you’re looking to get even more out of this time, here are a few more tips I’ve found helpful: Remember that understanding how many productivity hours you’ll need every day takes time. You’re almost guaranteed to not get it right at first and to give yourself way too many and then too few hours. But, over time, you’ll become more aware of your daily capacity for accomplishment. If you’re struggling with how many hours you should set aside, reflect on things like how many tasks are on your list for the day, how many meetings you have, how worn out you feel, how much energy you have, and how long you think the tasks on your plate will take to complete. Try to maintain a bit of space between entering into productivity mode for work and home and family life. This lets you transition from one role in your life (being a leader, mentor, manager, problem solver, executive, or student) to another (being a parent, grandparent, friend, or role model). Keep a “later list” for when you’re in leisure mode. Or, at the very least, capture the to-dos and work ideas that come up somewhere so you can put them out of mind, yet still take advantage of them later. Remember: the less often you switch between the two modes, the more deeply you’ll be able to both work and relax. Be religious about stopping at the end of your productivity window of time. It can be helpful to set an alarm for one hour before the hours end. Oddly enough, it can also be helpful to stop working in the middle of a task, because your mind will continue subconsciously thinking about it until tomorrow. Experiment to find what works for you. Try to limit your switches between the two modes. The fewer times you switch between productivity mode and leisure mode, the less mental whiplash you’ll experience from constantly switching back and forth—and you’ll feel more in control of your day as a result. Remember also that it’s okay to ease into productivity mode. It might take you several minutes to switch from one task to the next, or to start working in the first place, and that’s okay. Normal, even. Be flexible if you’re on a roll when you reach the end of your productivity hours and want to keep working. Consider treating yourself: if you have a flexible work schedule, try working fewer hours the day after you get an inordinate amount of work done. Another way to treat yourself (again, if you have a flexible schedule) is to work fewer productivity hours on days when you work on a lot of tasks you’ve been procrastinating on. Don’t enter into productivity mode first thing in the morning. Please, I beg of you. Wake up slowly, ease into the day, and reflect on what you want to get out of it. Hardly anything will make you feel less in control than checking your email immediately after sleep. Slow mornings lead to deliberate days. At home, try focus sprints. If you have a few chores to do, try setting a timer on your watch or smart speaker for fifteen minutes and challenge yourself to get as many dishes done (or [insert item here]) as possible. A short burst of fifteen minutes of chores around the house can accomplish as much as thirty to forty-five minutes of fragmented activity. I’ve found that the key with these smaller blocks of time is to not become too rigid about interruptions. It’s okay to be interrupted, especially by people you love. Remember: people are the reason for productivity. Don’t forget that when your kid or your spouse needs a hug. Productivity hours, and the structure they provide, are a great way to define boundaries around work every day. And better yet, over time they’ll lead you to make more progress toward your goals. The art of productivity is knowing when we should care about productivity in the first place. The Stress Inventory On top of containing the accomplishment mindset within your productivity hours, it’s worth writing down a list of stresses you face in your life— whether those sources of stress are chronic or acute. This is the second strategy to add to your tool belt, which has the added benefit of being a helpful list to refer back to as you read this book. Here’s the challenge: take out a sheet of paper, and list everything in your life that is stressing you out. Do not leave anything out. Think through your entire day: look through your morning routine to your work (which may be worth dedicating an entire separate page to) and your responsibilities in your personal life. Don’t worry about which sources are chronic or acute, large or small; which stressors you should probably just suck up; which ones you’ve been meaning to deal with. Get it all out of your head and onto the sheet of paper. Remember also to broaden your definition of stress, and include many of the distractions you tend to that serve as small but hidden sources of stress. Seeing all of the forms of stress you face in front of you lets you step back from it all—even if you perceive some of those sources as positive. Once you’ve captured the stressors you face, sort everything into a sheet with two columns on it: one for the sources of stress you can prevent, the other for ones you cannot.[*] Before you do this step, a word of warning: your sources of unpreventable stress will likely outnumber what’s preventable. That’s normal and to be expected. Dealing with Low-Hanging Fruit Stress makes us feel busy, and busyness makes us feel productive and important. But in this way, living with the accomplishment mindset can make us unnecessarily stressed. This is what makes the exercise I’ve just covered helpful: you can step back from the stress in your life to see how much of it is actually necessary. In conducting this activity myself, I was surprised by just how many preventable sources of stress I faced—especially sources of chronic stress. Examples included: news websites, which constantly exposed me to information my mind perceived as a threat but that I felt compelled to check anyway; nightly news broadcasts, which left me anxious right before going to bed; unnecessary email refreshes—where I would encounter stressful fires to put out and new tasks to get done; one toxic relationship that was affecting my stress levels, which I engaged with regularly; performance metrics I would refresh regularly—podcast downloads, website visitors, and book sales—which made me feel either elated or depressed, depending on the numbers that day (or hour); two consulting clients that provided me with far more stress than the others combined; Twitter, which gave me a steady stream of negative, angerinducing updates; and Instagram, which showed me things to be envious of and inbox messages to get through, blended in with more novel images that kept me hooked. Depending on how entrenched a source of stress is in your life, taming it can require quite a bit of work. It isn’t always as simple as deleting your Facebook account—though I have yet to meet someone who regrets doing so. Coming up with a plan to eliminate a toxic relationship will probably prove more difficult than dealing with the mental stress you face from having a cluttered house. Similarly, finding a way off the work project that causes the majority of your work stress may prove more difficult than stepping back from an unimportant after-work club. You’re likely to have resistance to this activity. But if you’re serious about finding calm, I’d encourage you not to bypass it. This resistance is part of the process. And as I’ll get to in the next chapter, chronic stress can be far costlier than you think. * * * I dealt with my own preventable sources of stress in turn. I replaced news websites and broadcasts with a subscription to the morning paper—trading in news sources that refreshed every five minutes for an analog briefing that refreshed once a day. I made sure to always have a specific and meaningful reason for checking social media accounts. With email, I limited myself to one check a day outside of productivity hours (that I batched with other small tasks that came up). Advice like this is far easier to give than it is to implement. But if you’re feeling stressed, anxious, or burnt out, you need to eliminate preventable sources of chronic stress from your life. Take your pick from the list you came up with, but do tackle a few. If this is tough right now, don’t worry: I’ll provide you with additional strategies for doing so in the chapters to come. For now, do what you can. Even when a source of chronic stress is difficult to eliminate—whether because you’ve grown accustomed to it or would find it complicated to remove from your life—doing so is almost always worthwhile. Every source of negative chronic stress you cut from your life is one less fake feeling of productivity that’s cluttering up the time set aside for real accomplishment, and one less contributor to burnout, which we’ll turn to in the next chapter. As I found firsthand, burnout is something you should never have to face. Much like the accomplishment mindset, it also drives us away from calm. CHAPTER THREE The Burnout Equation Unresponsive to Stress If, after reading that last chapter, you’re still in need of an extra push to tame the unnecessary chronic stress in your life, here’s a lesson that I learned the hard way: the ultimate result of chronic stress is burnout. As the World Health Organization defines it in its International Classification of Diseases, burnout is the direct result of “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”[*] It is impossible to experience burnout without first experiencing unrelenting chronic stress. This is what makes dealing with your preventable sources of chronic stress critical, even if you have to grasp at opportunities to do so or your mind resists the process. Because otherwise, burnout awaits. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, each time we encounter a stressful situation, our body activates its stress response, unleashing cortisol, the stress hormone, on our body and mind. The intensity of this stress response depends on two things: how long we’re exposed to the stress, as well as the severity of the stress. Giving a three-hour lecture in front of 250 judgmental strangers will elicit a stronger stress response than watching some over-the-top cable news show for thirty minutes. Either way, cortisol mobilizes our bodies to confront a perceived threat. In this way, stress isn’t just a mental challenge we face—it happens inside our body, on a chemical level. A few months into my journey to calm, while conducting more research into stress and anxiety, I spat into a plastic test tube for a period of a few weeks in the name of understanding my burnout situation. After taking a comprehensive burnout test—the Maslach Burnout Inventory—I found that, as expected, I was diagnosable as having burnt out. But at around the same time, I also became curious about what my cortisol levels were up to, and took the saliva cortisol test. When we experience a significant amount of chronic stress over an extended period of time—say, after being assigned far too many projects at work or, in my case, after constant business travel—our body gets fed up with constantly going through the whole rigmarole of the stress response. Research has found that when we experience chronic stress for too long, our body “responds by eventually downshifting cortisol production to abnormally low levels.” Researchers describe that it’s as though “our body’s stress response system itself has been burned out” (emphasis mine). Usually, our cortisol levels are highest when we wake up in the morning. This is, in part, what mobilizes us to get out of bed. This can also be why we have a tougher time getting out of bed when we’re going through an especially stressful period. Our body has downregulated how much cortisol it produces. Figuring that our daily stress will produce it anyway, our body stops its routine cortisol production. Studies suggest that those diagnosed with burnout have far lower cortisol levels in the morning compared with subjects who are not burnt out.[*] A saliva cortisol test is a less reliable measure of burnout than the Maslach Burnout Inventory (which I’ll get to in a second). But I was too curious not to give one a shot. What I found stunned me. Here’s a graph of what our levels should look like over a given day, spiking in the morning and falling to more reasonable levels for the rest of the day: Adrenal Function Graph Shading represents normal range. Mine couldn’t have been more different. When my test results came back, I found that my cortisol levels had essentially flatlined: Adrenal Function Graph Result Shading represents normal range. My body had completely burnt out. On a chemical level, my body’s stress response system had essentially collapsed. Even in response to positive stress that I was excited about—giving a talk in front of a group of people or going on a vacation—my body refused to mobilize. At the same time, my mind refused excitement about opportunities that came my way. I had nothing left to give. If I had made more of an effort to stop feeding myself chronic stress, I would have fared far better. Instead, I found myself having to climb out of a positive diagnosis of burnout. The Burnout Equation After exploring the research further, I uncovered a few curious ideas about burnout and how it leads us away from calm. One of these ideas relates to what burnout really is. Feelings of exhaustion are so commonly associated with burnout that people use the two terms interchangeably. But those who make this association miss a full two thirds of the burnout equation. Contrary to common belief, burnout is not just exhaustion. Burnout does leave us feeling exhausted—as well as fatigued, depleted, and worn out. But we also need to feel two other things: cynical and unproductive. To be fully burnt out, we need all three. Cynicism is a feeling of detachment in which we feel negative, irritable, withdrawn, and in some cases disassociated from the work we’re doing. It’s the deeper source of that take this job and shove it attitude. With this dimension of burnout, appearances can be deceiving: just because work appears meaningful on the surface doesn’t mean it feels that way when we do it. Just ask any healthcare worker who has had to navigate the pandemic. Burnout was a phenomenon initially observed in healthcare—a field that appears to be meaningful on the surface, but that, when you look at the dayto-day activity, is full of sources of chronic stress. (The field, of course, is also chock-full of more meaningful sources of acute stress.) On top of feeling cynical, we also need to feel unproductive—as if we’re not good at what we do or we’re not accomplishing enough, like our efforts serve to benefit no one. This dimension of burnout has the potential to fuel a downward spiral: the more burnt out we feel, the more meaningless busywork we engage in. This projects a mirage of productivity to our evaluating mind, but makes us even less productive over time, especially as we take on more chronic stress. We’re not officially burnt out without all three ingredients—exhaustion, cynicism, and feeling unproductive. Given that this is a book about calm, burnout may seem like a diversion, and, as you’d expect, burnout and anxiety are considered separate constructs by researchers. But burnout is worth exploring, if only because the relationship between burnout and anxiety is so strong. One study found that 59 percent of those diagnosed as burnt out were also diagnosed with an anxiety disorder—possibly because of chronic stress, given research shows that anxiety can be considered a “condition which acts as a protective factor against threatening situations.” Another condition that overlaps with burnout is depression, which many of the ideas in the book may help with. In one study, 58 percent of those clinically diagnosed as having burnt out experienced depression or depressive episodes. While the exact relationship among all three phenomena is unclear, they likely share common antecedents, including chronic stress and other biological factors. Of course, even setting aside a diagnosis of burnout, experiencing just one of the three characteristics of burnout is distressing and can serve as a stepping-stone to the full-blown condition. Generally speaking, if you’re feeling exhausted, focus on your workload. If you’re disengaged, invest in social relationships, and find ways of connecting more deeply with your coworkers if you can. If you’re cynical, identify whether you have the resources you need to do your job, and again whether you can double down on relationships at work. * * * A s I reflected on the events of my work and life that led to the crescendo of the onstage panic attack, little memories flickered through my mind like sparks, reminders of just how depleted I had been. Completing simple tasks felt like moving a mountain. This is a lesson I’d constantly relearn in my journey to calm: that the most simple moments where something didn’t feel quite right were the experiences I had the most to learn from. The struggles to get even the most basic tasks done; the times I’d repeatedly reread an email before considering how to respond; the times I could feel my heart sink on a Sunday evening, dreading having to work the following morning. In another such memory, I recall trying to get some work done on a plane. Responding to emails with my laptop open in front of me, I found myself staring at the same few unimportant emails in my inbox for most of that twohour flight. Responding to these messages required only a few words and not much thought—but at the time, the task felt like the biggest chore in the world. My mind had thrown in the towel, and I couldn’t mobilize to take on the challenge. Sitting on the plane, I also felt the urge to distract myself to escape this frustration—engaging in busyness to feel productive. I probably should have just closed my laptop and fetched a novel from the overhead compartment. Instead, I engaged with the same pointless few tasks over and over again. I’d wait for emails to come in—and then quickly delete them to reconnect with the mirage of productivity. Refreshing my social media feeds one more time on the laptop, I’d again convince myself I was doing something useful. These distractions fueled the cycle of chronic stress that led me to feel exhausted, unproductive, and cynical. When I was on a deadline and needed to get stuff done, I was still pretty good at resisting distraction—I set an intention to do something, tamed distraction, and got to work. Off the clock, though, the trap I continually fell in to was engaging with chronic stress when I didn’t need to—especially the sources that provided me with validation, like email. Even after doing my best to tame all the chronic stress I could, I knew I had more work to do. That’s when I spoke with Christina Maslach. The Canary Christina Maslach is a social psychologist and professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. She’s also the co-inventor, along with Susan Jackson, of the Maslach Burnout Inventory, the single most commonly used instrument for measuring burnout, which has been referenced in scientific literature tens of thousands of times and translated into nearly fifty languages at the time of writing. In doing a deep dive into Maslach’s vast body of research, I came across some additional ideas about burnout that put my mind at ease. The first relates to the ideas of individualism and stress. As I chatted with Maslach, it became clear that one of her greatest frustrations with the popular narrative surrounding burnout is how, much like with the chronic stress we face, we assume that burnout is entirely our fault. As she put it to me, “So much of how we handle burnout is to weed out the people who ‘can’t take it,’ while telling everyone else to exercise more, meditate, eat healthfully, and take sleeping pills. But what people don’t realize is that burnout is not an individual problem to solve—it’s a social problem.” As Maslach has written, if we’re “finding that [our] workplace is becoming more and more difficult to deal with, then it begs the question of why less attention is being paid to fixing the job” than to fixing us. Unfortunately, in the modern workplace, where there’s burnout, there’s often also a culture of covering it up. This makes sense: burnout is often perceived as a sign of weakness in workplaces that place high expectations on what employees accomplish with their time—where pretty much everyone is also likely working at capacity. If everyone else can handle the heat, you should be able to, too. Fortunately for us (and for our mental health), Maslach couldn’t disagree more strongly with this notion. “Burnout is viewed as an individual disease, as a medical condition or a flaw or a weakness. The truth is that, even though some of us wear burnout as a badge of honor, it’s usually a sign that we’re working in an unhealthy workplace that’s not a good fit for us.” And, if we’re experiencing burnout, others likely are, too. Maslach even goes so far as to identify an occurrence of burnout as a “canary in the coal mine.” The story behind this turn of phrase is a curious one. Canaries take in a large amount of oxygen, and because of this, they can fly at higher altitudes than other birds. Because of their biology, they get a dose of oxygen both when they inhale and exhale. This means that in an underground mine full of toxic gases like carbon monoxide, the birds get a double dose of any poison that’s in the air. Sending canaries into coal mines alerted miners to possible dangers before they entered: the canaries were poisoned instead of them. (Poor canaries.) Maslach considers the canary in the coal mine to be an apt analogy for burnout. In workplaces where she has conducted burnout surveys, she describes the astonishment that those team members experience when they learn that they’re not the only person on the team who feels exhausted, cynical, and unproductive. At one such workplace she surveyed and debriefed, “it was almost a source of pride to work late into the night and not leave until the job was done.” When she shared her survey results onstage for this particular team, describing just how many of them admitted to being burnt out, she almost immediately lost control of her audience. People stopped listening: “everyone just started turning around and talking to one another.” The moment she gave people a chance to step back, “they realized just how bad the problem was.” Had the first case of burnout been more openly discussed and dealt with, perhaps the workplace could have halted its wider descent into toxic levels of overwork and flagging productivity. In an oddly roundabout way, Maslach herself is quite adept at identifying social environments that have spiraled out of control, including ones others have brushed off as normal. Burnout is, of course, one such phenomenon. Another is one that she encountered early in her career, in 1971—three years before the term “burnout” was even coined by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger. At the time, she was dating a man named Philip Zimbardo (whom she would later marry). He was conducting an experiment at Stanford University that investigated the effects of perceived power and group identity. The experiment designated participants as either “prisoners” or “prison guards,” and got them to live out these roles in a mock jail for two weeks. If you’re familiar with the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, you’ll know that it very quickly spiraled out of control. Prison guards turned abusive toward people who had assumed the role of prisoners, who began to think of themselves as actual prisoners, not just people in a study. They quickly internalized the stories they had about their role, which became their assumed identity. While the experiment was disastrous, luckily for everyone involved, one person questioned its morality: Christina Maslach. In fact, as Zimbardo, who ran the experiment, would later recount in his book The Lucifer Effect, of the fifty people who visited the experiment, Maslach was the only one who questioned it and suggested that it be stopped. She was the canary in the coal mine. As Maslach would later put it, participants in the experiment had ?

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