Many of our students report strong ups and downs of their cognitive abilities. These variations may be attributed to several factors, one of this factors being stress. It has been shown that stress, especially chronic stress, reduces cognitive functions, including ability to remember things properly.
For a superlearner this may well be a vicious cycle. We work very hard to improve our productivity, so we feel bad not to use this ability. Consequently we find ourselves flooded with urgent and important things that push our time and productivity to the maximum. We do not feel stressed: after all, we use very intelligent and complex methods to do things right. However over time we notice that certain things start to degrade. We start to remember less and get more reasons to reread the text, we start to loose interest, we consume wrong food/coffee/food supplements. We cannot slow down any more, but we are becoming less and less productive, until we experience a serious failure. It could end with a personal burnout (sort of depression), immune system breakdown (pneumonia, inflammation, back ache), work catastrophe (project failure, scandal, financial crisis) or if we are lucky something as benign as 3 weeks exotic vacation. In any case we get a reason to rest up, and the cycle repeats itself.
I am not stranger to this cycle myself. With time I became vigilant. I am aware of mental resilience. I do use great tricks to avoid excessive stress: pomodoro time, laughter, surrounding myself with great people, doing the work that makes me feel good [had do give up any management inspiration], daily relaxation/meditation cycles, eat healthy food, sleep at least 7 hours. Effectively I should be invulnerable to stress, yet I experience all the signs of excessive stress 3-4 times a year. At least now I am smart enough to use the first “exit point” and delay all but absolutely urgent stuff for a week. A week is not sufficient to reduce the chronic stress, but more than enough to deal with most acute symptoms. After a week of “rest” (I work 40 hours instead of 80), I feel refreshed and come up with creative angles to handle my problems.
My next question to myself and to you is this: is it possible to stay super-productive and not to experience extra stress at all?
Currently I suspect that stress comes with lifestyle choices and type of personality that is probably common to everybody reading this post. Stress seams to be our body trying to cope with challenging conditions. Remember Jonathan’s “Progressive overload” lecture? If you do not allow sufficient recovery time, you are subjecting yourself to chronic stress and worse. But are we any good at judging what we can cope with and how much should the recovery time be? The sad fact is that stress affects our judgement. Moreover, choosing stress may be a result of moral values that are cherished by the people around us. We all want to be with interesting, empathic and successful people. These people did not become successful by lying on white beached and waiting for a coconut to fall…
Stress is our reaction to imbalance. The perfect way to fight stress would be recreating the balance.
I wish I had better answers for myself and for you how this can be done, but for now I can only promise to keep trying and put “finding balance” a high priority on my list…
