Mark Stedman (2:57)
Acast.com burnout is real and it's measurable a report in early 2022 showed that one in workers were experiencing symptoms like fatigue, difficulty concentrating, loss of motivation, headaches, tummy aches, and difficulty concentrating. As behavioral scientist Thomas Curran discovered through a decade of research, the give it all you got mentality horrible bosses perpetrate is capitalism at its darkest and least humane. Now I can talk up a whole game about the cruelty behind capitalism and how companies like Amazon drive people to the brink of physical exhaustion and beyond. But right now, the sun's shining and my therapist says I should probably stop reading Grace Blakely. Suffice it to say, we have evidence to show that giving your work 100% of your energy leads to burnout. But there's a sweet spot, a magic number that allows you to give it some welly but leave some headroom. Let me introduce you to Carl Lewis and they get away for the third time of asking. Alan Wells had a good start, but Carl Lewis is going well and Emmett King's ahead of him. Emmett King is streaking ahead. Carl Lewis, he's got a lot of and Lewis comes. Carl Lewis, known to some as the master finisher, is an American track and field athlete. He's basically the track and field athlete with nine Olympic gold, one silver and 10 World Championship medals to his name. He was a sprinter and long jumper who competed on the world stage from 1979 to 1996. He set world records in the 100 meters, the 4x100 meters and 4x200 meter relays, and he still holds the indoor long jump record, has done so for 40 years. Now, I'm not an overactive man, but imagine doing something so well that no one has done it better in 40 years. Thing is, if you watch the start of one of his races, he's by no means the first out of the block. It often looks like he's speeding up to make up for lost ground, but in fact, everyone else is slowing down and he's just running at the same consistent pace. That pace frequently saw him best. Other sprinters who'd come out the traps like a bullet and this approach has become known as the 85% rule or the Carl Lewis Approach Turns out it's all in the body. Other athletes scrunch up their fists and their faces and get all tensed up, while the likes of Lewis are visibly more relaxed. So much so that pretty much any description of his running style talks about that relaxed fluidity. We can all agree, I think, that putting in 100% effort in sprinting just slows you down. You're just too tight. That's Andy Kidd, a sports therapist who specializes in helping sprinters stay relaxed. For him, it comes down to trust. Can you trust yourself to start off at the back of the pack, knowing you'll be able to sustain that pace and ultimately triumph over those that went off like a rocket? A couple of days ago, I watched a video of two people stacking cups. The object was to collect each cup and place it on a stack on a specific spot. One player started with the cups closest to him, while the other started with the cups furthest away. Each time they grabbed a cup, they had to run back to the starting point and place the cup on the stack. As you watch them, you think, surely the guy on the left is going to win. He's clearly ahead. He started off by collecting the cups closest to him, so for the first half of the race, he makes incredible progress. But as the race continues, he gets more and more fatigued and gradually slows down as his job is getting harder and harder. Meanwhile, the other guy is only now getting warmed up as he's done the hard yards of running all the way from one end of the line to the other, back and forth in gradually decreasing amounts, keeping his energy consistent. He wins. The reason why this method works has some of its roots in flow, which we covered in episode five. Flow is about ease, not going full throttle, balls out, guns blazing. When you're in flow, what you're doing feels natural, not strained, unlike, say, tunnel vision or hyper focus. You're aware of your surroundings. You have what we call headroom. And that headroom is what counts. It's what allows you to think, to take in the world around you, to track your surroundings and watch your exits. The rule doesn't just apply to your work, but to other aspects of your life. Obviously, we can see how it impacts exercise, but you can apply this to your diet, too. If you've ever struggled with making any kind of big life improvement, you'll know that sticking to it is hard. We talked about that a couple of weeks ago. And one of the things that can be tricky, especially if you're neurodivergent, is having something of an all or nothing mindset. Which may be partly why habits you want to stick to are still proving themselves elusive. So instead of aiming to eat nothing but healthy food for every meal, why not give yourself a day off? Turns out if you eat three healthy meals a day to help you achieve a calorie deficit, having a cheat day once a week runs to just over 85%. Saturday is treat day. For 24 hours, you can literally eat anything. Pizza, birthday pie, pints of cream. How you actually structure this is of course, up to you. The point is to build in some slack. And while we're on the subject, anyone who tells you they don't need slack or that it's just an excuse or you're not fully committed is dancing with different demons. Or they're just flat out kidding themselves because they're not comfortable with admitting they're human. Now, remember, we're talking about high performing people here. Lewis isn't the sole outlier. Hugh Jackman has also talked about giving it 85%, and people often see fellow sprinter Usain Bolt as an exemplar. The key is in the relaxed attitude before the race, because if your coach tells you to give it 100%, you're more likely to tense up and do a worse job. So last year I did a stand up course which culminated in me doing a five minute set in front of a warm crowd of friends and family. There was one act that stood out, not for their incredible material, but for how much fun they were having. They'd brought half their street with them, so when they came up to the mic, they were essentially just riffing in front of mates and it showed. Meanwhile, there were other comics who'd sweated every beat and were visibly performing at their capacity. And they were fantastic to watch, but you knew that level of intensity was just not sustainable. An American entrepreneur by the name of Sunil Gupta wrote a fair bit about how we can calibrate the amount of effort we need to give in any situation.
