Yesterday, my team and I submitted a scientific paper called, “Is Learning to Code in Python like Learning a Natural Language and if so, are Bilinguals Better at it?” for review in the journal Language Learning and I’m pretty excited about it. It’s a dataset I’ve been thinking about for a while. In fact, I remember talking about it with Adam Grant in his Re: Think podcast nearly three years ago![1] To celebrate this milestone, I’m taking the time to write this just for fun article, and then I’m going to dig some holes with my backhoe and build a fence to prevent my young horse from poisoning himself on maple leaves.
There’s never a dull moment around here.
Now, I’m going to assume that unless you drive heavy equipment for a living, I don’t need to explain to you why digging holes with a backhoe is fun. But I imagine you might a bit of context to appreciate why I found finishing the journal article “newsworthy,”especially since writing scientific papers is part of my job. In fact, when it comes to things like promotions or awards, an academic’s publication record is one of the main metrics (along with teaching, grants, and university and public service) that we are evaluated on. For much of my career, I’ve had three or four of these research papers in progress at any given time. If accepted, the one I’ve just submitted will be my 52nd published, peer-reviewed journal article. [2]
So what’s the big deal?
The answer, in a nutshell, is about how the process of writing article number 52 helped me notice changes in myself that might not have been obvious otherwise. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of revisiting a familiar place from your childhood. It inevitably goes one of two ways: (1) everything has changed and it’s almost unrecognizable; (2) everything has stayed the same and it’s obvious how much you’ve changed.
Sometimes old ways of being can be like that too. Like slipping (or squeezing) into an old pair of pants, incremental changes that have accumulated over time suddenly come to light. I talk about this in my new book, which takes a personalized neuroscience approach to effecting meaningful change (we’re still tossing around titles, stay tuned!).
In preparing for the book (while writing article 52, of course), I circulated a survey asking people about their personal development goals and what gets in the way (it’s not too late for you to weigh in, I’ve got about half of the responses I’d like!). I was not at all surprised to learn that the top two barriers people report are: lack of time, and lack of energy. Not only do I totally get it, I was feeling it more than average as I worked to complete article 52).
Though I don’t pretend to have more to do than the folks who filled out my survey, I do think that the demands on my time and energy lately have been “particular” in the breadth of content they cover. In the past two weeks alone (during which I wrote the majority article 52), I have been tasked with learning how to trim a duck’s wings (after one of my newest additions tried to become the frisbee in a game of fetch with my golden retriever), wedding dress shopping for my daughter, scooping my husband off the ground when his degenerative spinal condition left him temporarily unable to use his lower limbs, learning how to make a pear tart to celebrate my mom’s birthday, meeting with the folks at the National Institute of Health who work on cancer communication at Fred Hutch to discuss neurodiversity training, recording Episode 3 of Brains for Dinner, writing my new book baby, and remembering to celebrate my best friend’s last gnarly chemo treatment.
I’m not going to lie. It’s been a lot (but look at this pear tart!)
It’s so clear in times like this that no matter how I might try to get around it, I am a fundamentally limited human being, not a robotic human doing. Try as one might, you cannot squeeze more than 24 hours into a day, and boy have I learned the hard way that foregoing a good night’s sleep does not make one more productive. Of course, not even the waking hours are equipotential. For reasons that are probably related to a combination of pure energetic demands (think oxygen and glucose metabolism) and neurochemistry (think about how much better life feels after coffee), we run out of gas. Thinking (e.g., writing papers), feeling (e.g., love and empathy for my best friend) and connecting (e.g., supporting my daughter through a big decision) draw on the same set of neural resources and can feel even harder than the heavy lifting of a physically demanding job. For reasons I cannot recreate, my husband Andrea and I call this precious, limited, and not well understood mental resource “beans.” It may not be very flattering, but if he asks me to do something hard and I tell him, “I’m out of beans” he gets it. (Of course this means that being full of beans is a good thing in our world, but that’s another story).
Though being out of beans can be really inconvenient, particularly when one has a deadline approaching, I’ve learned to appreciate that our various human limits—be they beans, waking hours, or the number of things someone can focus on at once—actually create opportunities for us to behave in more aware, more intelligent ways because they force us to prioritize.
And this brings me (at last) back to the learning moment that article 52 helps me celebrate.
One day in early 2019, after about 3,500 (give or take) days on the job in which I poured all of my energy into teaching, mentoring and other physically, mentally, and emotionally draining activities only to end up with more things on my to-do list than I started with, something inside me snapped. Some would call this burnout, but that doesn’t feel quite right for me. After all, I began my academic training as a single mother with a four-year-old in tow. I’ve been tired for a long time, and there have certainly been times before and after this one where I felt both more “burnt” and more “out” (of gas). Perhaps we can call it a “burn up,” phoenix style, moment.
What happened was a confluence of pushes and pulls in my brain that created what I call a “knowledge avalanche” in my new book. You know those tipping point moments when some new event or piece of information changes the way you look at everything? Sitting down with my planner—which, at the time, consisted of a 16-hour day divided into color-coded-15-minute-chunks—I asked myself a question I hadn’t asked in way too long:
Why am I doing this?
Now, if you’ve ever heard me talk about Phineas Gauge, you probably know some version of the story about why I started pursuing a career investigating brain differences. If not, Emily Cooke wrote a great article about it which you can read in Nature if you’re interested.
But this was different. I was asking questions about the choices I was making on a day-by-day, fifteen-minute-by-fifteen-minute basis and how they were making me feel.
TLDR: I felt used-up and disconnected from my purpose.
Once I named this, I recognized (or remembered) that I was not living the life I wanted to live. I started making changes that I could feel instantly (hey, it only took me a decade or so to get there… ). The first step was reconnecting with activities and choices that made me feel good. According to the surprisingly fun book, You Only Die Once by Jodi Wellman, leading vibrantly alive lives includes paying attention to both purpose and pleasure. I think sometimes we decide “X” is our purpose, and then we do it so long that we don’t even notice when we don’t love it anymore (don’t worry, I still love it!). And then there’s the glaring fact that there just aren’t enough people out there encouraging us to do things BECAUSE WE ENJOY THEM.
Well, guess what?
Your brain is designed all the way down to the molecular level to motivate you to do things that feel good. Contrary to popular belief about dopamine being a pleasure drug that floods your brain when good things happen, it’s actually a chemical signal that your brain releases at the soonest point that it anticipates something good will be coming. Not only does this give you energy and all the good feelings, it also motivates you to do the work to get rewards, while helping you learn how to do things even better next time.
I love dopamine, while being ultimately aware of how her siren call can lead me to do things that aren’t good for me. Understanding how to work with your brain to supercharge your change goals is about realizing that those dopamine pushes and pulls are always changing your brain whether or not you put time for them on the calendar. The trick is learning how to work with them to change in the ways you’ve want to.
When it comes to energy and productivity, I’ve learned the hard way that sometimes when we spend all of our beans doing things we should do (damn, ok, that does sound like burnout), we don’t have enough left to do the things we want to do. Though this can feel counterintuitive, sometimes when you’re totally fried, you need to do more of the things that energize you. Time in nature and with my animal and human friends is the gasoline that fuels me. I now have a hammock in with my ducks and it’s insane how many beans I get back after a five minute duck break.
(I included a single-mom-reset photos below: the only picture that exists of me or my kid riding without a helmet—the horrors!)
My second “burn up” step was to stop doing things that didn’t really matter. This doesn’t have to be extreme as the deathbed test, but it is something I continue to need to practice. As my colleague, the brilliant author Margaret O’Mara advised me years later as I launched my first book baby, the answer to “Why am I doing this?” tends to fall into three buckets: (1) things I more-or-less have to do (taxes), (2) thing I want to do (play with ducks), or (3) things someone else wants me to do (80% of my emails).
I really like helping people and it feels like crap to say no when you think all someone is asking for is a little bit of your time… but the problem is that each of them thinks “it’ll only take 15 minutes of your time” without being aware of how many others are asking. If I say yes to even half of the things other people want me to do, I would never have time for bucket #2, the fullest, and most energizing bucket. And this is the only bucket my brain really cares about. Being healthy and prioritizing requires healthy boundaries. And I’ve learned if I practice dipping into my own want bucket (2) first, I have more beans left over for bucket 3. It’s way more pleasant than spending your life in buckets 1 and 3, looking longingly at the little feathered friends in bucket 2 who no longer remember what frozen peas taste like. At the very least, before I respond to a bucket 3 request, I check-in on the contents of buckets 1 and 2, to make sure there aren’t any serious purpose or feel good opportunities being neglected.
And here’s where the third, probably biggest, shift comes into play: I changed my story about the things on my calendar and what it means to be busy. Before the “big burn up” of 2019, too busy felt like a default from which I responded to opportunities to do “just for fun” things. I treated every entry on my calendar as a bucket 1 item, even if it was something I had chosen to do (e.g., one-hour weekly meetings with each of my trainees), without ever evaluating whether it was helping anyone.
What’s worse, in the process of trying to protect time for bucket 2 activities (which had their own color in the calendar), my “want tos”felt like “have tos” which sucked the joy right out of them.
Note, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t schedule and protect time for the things that you love. This is about the story you tell yourself about it afterward. One small hack is scheduling “open” time (if it makes you feel better you can add a general goal, like open “move my body” time or open “create” or “connect” time). Allowing yourself to choose amongst different things you might want or enjoy in the moment free from consideration of the outcomes can also go along way.
Another radical choice I made was to allow myself to cancel things, even if I was the one who had scheduled them in the first place! Maybe I was sick, overwhelmed, or busy with some higher-priority deadline that had popped up. I learned that being honest (within reasonable privacy limits) about why I was rescheduling meetings also had the surprise benefit of modeling to my mentees and colleagues that being a biological, fundamentally limited person and needing to shift prioritizes from time to time was OK. I didn’t want them to feel that their time wasn’t important to me. I wanted them to realize that the most respectful thing to do with their time was to show up to our meeting when you have the most beans to contribute.
I still do this.
I’ve never taken careful statistics, but I’m sure I cancel fewer than 5% of my meetings. (Occasionally I forget one which feels terrible, but that’s a different side of the being a limited human story). The thing is, when I do attend a meeting, I am reminded that it’s a choice, and that makes me feel better and be more useful when I’m in them.
Of course, I do understand that I am currently in an incredibly privileged position that allows me to cancel my meetings (I have more things in bucket 3 than in bucket 1 for sure). But I haven’t always been. And I’d be surprised if there aren’t some opportunities for you to prioritize the ways you’re spending energy in different buckets as well.
It was from this “burn up” place of making space for what mattered to me that the idea to write my first book, The Neuroscience of You, was born. Nothing about the demands of my day job changed. I didn’t even get a teaching release, let alone a sabbatical. In fact, the pandemic began about halfway through and turned all of our lives upside down. Finding time, courage, and the skills to write that book was the hardest thing I have ever done. It was also one of the most rewarding, and it changed my life in ways I could never have imagined.
Since that time, I have written fewer and fewer of these scientific articles. In fact, of the 17 papers that came out of my lab since 2020, only 3 were written by me. As I became more aware of my priorities, I spent more time and energy writing for the public, and discovered how much I loved it. My scientific skills were devoted to teaching and supporting the sense-making processes of my students and collaborators, who then did the bulk of the reporting.
But now, fresh from the sizzling feeling of fingers flying across the page, I realize that I never stopped loving the process of discovery involved in research. And I probably never will. In fact, with the new muscles formed by my public science communication habit, and a renewed awareness of my whys, I may love it now more than ever.
[1] This was one of my favorite podcasts ever. Adam is so knowledgeable, and his brain is so quick, it was like an idea playdate. I feel very fortunate for the chances I’ve gotten to share ideas with him (even if he and I disagree fiercely about glitter).
[2] This might sound like a not so humble brag but it’s actually quite average (or maybe even below) for someone in my field.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I will share with you something I came up with, “I followed up on a train of thought and found myself on a platform”.