You’re running a deficit you’ve normalised.
Here’s an insight from sleep research that anyone concerned with their performance should take note of; moderately deprive someone of sleep for a few weeks, say, habitually six hours per night instead of the ideal 8. Their cognitive performance drops in every way measurable. Decision making, memory, learning, cognitive agility, threat detection, impulse control, the list goes on. All negatively affected.
However, the individual will rate themselves as unaffected. Their perception is that they can manage perfectly fine on six hours. Sure enough force them to sleep eight hours a night for a few weeks and their cognitive and physical performance improves.
They are running a deficit, but they have normalised that deficit and calibrated their subjective experience around that level being normal.
I argue that this phenomenon isn’t isolated to sleep. In the same way that our perception of our performance calibrates to our tiredness in response to sub optimal sleep, I observe the same happening in relation to our energy levels, motivation, joy, drive, and stress.
How many of us have normalised a high level of ambient stress, or pushing ourselves through instead of being enthusiastically driven in our pursuits?
The truth is, this has become normal for us, but it will never become optimal.
Some may argue that this is simply the price of success, it’s simply what working hard feels like and we should toughen up and crack on. I don’t entirely agree, and here’s why.
It is a demonstrable fact that the rewards for our best work, are disproportionately large in comparison to the rewards for our average or shallow efforts.
The potential reward for creating something exceptional will be orders of magnitude larger than that for creating something ok.
The gains for deep, focused, deliberate practice (or training) out pace the gains of junk volume.
The returns on our deepest focused efforts far outweigh the rewards of a routine meeting or being prompt at replying to emails.
Examples abound.
The point being that a focus on bringing our excellence, even if we do less in total, produces tangibly better results than a focus on doing the most we can. So work hard, absolutely. But when hard work begins to erode our capacity to produce our best, it becomes evidently counterproductive.
I invite you to take a minute. Pause, reflect on this question. Are you running a deficit you’ve normalised? When was the last time you felt on fire? When was the last time you were at your absolute best?
Thoughts and reflections welcome.
On June 11th, I’ll be hosting a Healthy Discussion on just this. How to optimise energy over a long time frame. Join me. Totally free.
