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I listened to the Rich Roll Podcast, above, where Dr Andrew Huberman, an American Neuroscientist and Tenured Professor at the Department of Neurobiology at The Stanford University School of Medicine, talked about how one can hack human behaviour, especially in the field of work.

I found it incredibly fascinating with lots of actionable points around learning and working. Some of the key themes that resonated with me are:

Understanding how humans work: On why the early stages of work tend to be stressful.
Pushing through pain points: On the power of mental reframing.
Seeking motivation from within: Especially on large projects where you’re just a cog in the wheel.

Over the next paragraphs, I will give a high level overview on the three points above.

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Understanding How Humans Work: The early stages of learning something new tends to be stressful

“I think we need to get comfortable as a culture in trying to understand our species and how we work. That the early stages of hard work and focus are going to feel like agitation, stress and confusion because that's the norepinephrine and adrenaline system kicking in. None of us would expect to walk into the gym and do our PR lift or Performer go do something without warming up.”
Dr Andrew Huberman

The agitation that comes when doing something new ehh. I can put my hand up as having experienced this in my lifetime. Understanding the scientific reasons for it was illuminating for me.

To actualise our goals, we need to do the work required. However, the early stages of the work needed on actualising that goal such as writing a book, learning a new language or learning how to program tend to be stressful. This state of stress then puts us off from going ahead with doing the work. This means that we end up not doing the series of steps necessary to complete our work.

The brain also needs to warm up and start to hone in which circuits are going to be active and it's unreasonable for us to think. Oh, I've got an hour. I'm going to plop down and write beautifully for an hour or my best work. We need to accept that there's a period of agitation and stress that accompanies the dropping into these highly concentrated states our feelings and our thoughts and our memories and our all that is very complicated”
Dr Andrew Huberman

The key takeaways for me here are:

Be at peace with myself that the early stages of learning that new skill might be stressful and still do the work.
Be kind to myself during the learning process.

Pushing Through Pain Points: The power of reframing.

During the journey - doing the work- of achieving a goal, we tend to meet obstacles.

As Marcus Aurelius said over 2000 years ago,

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

The quote above begs the question: What practical steps do we humans have at our disposal to get past obstacles?

In comes Dr Huberman and the power of reframing as a tool.

We humans can learn to push past pain points by mentally reframing the events that caused the pain. Mental reframing according to Dr Huberman is not a feel good thing but a nuerochemical thing. Mental reframing triggers dopamine which suppresses norepinephrine. Norepinephrine is defined in the britannica as a:

substance that is released predominantly from the ends of sympathetic nerve fibres and that acts to increase the force of skeletal muscle contraction and the rate and force of contraction of the heart. The actions of norepinephrine are vital to the fight-or-flight response, whereby the body prepares to react to or retreat from an acute threat.

Dopamine as currently defined by pharmacology is:

confers motivational salience; in other words, dopamine signals the perceived motivational prominence (i.e., the desirability or aversiveness) of an outcome, which in turn propels the organism's behaviour toward or away from achieving that outcome.

Let’s put this in practice by using an a hypothetical example.

Peter is a 28 year old man trying to break into a software engineering career from a non traditional background(digital marketing).
He has gone to a web developer bootcamp to learn how to build web applications.
On graduating from the bootcamp, he has been able to secure some interviews but unable to convert any of the interviews to a job offer.
He becomes disheartened and he starts to tell himself that he is not meant for software engineering.
However, one Saturday morning, he learns about the power of using mental reframing as a means to push past pain points and sets out to apply it.
He begins to tell himself that the fact that he is getting called for interviews shows that his cv is giving positive signals to potential employers.
And that he will use the interview process so far to fine tune his interview skills to enable him convert an opportunity to a job offer.

By reframing his experience, Peter is able to gain some control of the process to enable him overcome his obstacle: Obtaining a job offer as a software engineer.

Seeking Motivation From Within: Especially on large projects where you’re just a cog in the wheel.

Have you ever been on a large project where:

You do not have control of the project journey and feel frustrated on how it’s been executed?
Milestones for the project which have been set to which your inner core has no connection to? Which in turn makes you feel incredibly demotivated to work?

Some of us have been there. This is where Dr Huberman talks about the power of duration path outcome and self rewarding some aspects of a process. The summary here is that we have the power to define milestones within the larger project for ourselves that we can emotionally connect to. By doing this, we get the control needed that enables us to power through the project.

Summary

There were a lot of gems in the podcast but the three I shared above are those that resonated within me. To recap, the three tools are:

Understanding how humans work: On why the early stages of work tend to be stressful.
Pushing through pain points: On the power of mental reframing.
Seek motivation from within: Especially on large projects where you’re just a cog in the wheel.

I hope you found this useful and practical. Life is a journey and I strongly believe in making the best of that journey. Doing so means that we seek practical/actionable ways to improve ourselves.

The comments section is open and would love to see your thoughts on this article

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