Peak Performance Newsletter #2 | The Passionate Performance Paradox and Dopamine Fasts
Hey All,
Long "What I've been thinking about" this week. I'm really happy with it. Curious what you think.
What I've been thinking about
Lately I've found myself thinking a great deal about fear and risk, in particular when your heart is on the line.
A common thread that attracts people to Peak Performance coaching is a desire to start something on their own. Underneath this is a fundamental desire to find out what you're made of. You want to put your heart on the line, and ideally win.
The thing is, when you first put your heart on the line, you're confronted with fear unlike anything before. Prior to that moment, you'd been playing a small game. You weren't really in the arena—there were layers of armor between the game and your heart; any wound was minor at worst. Now, with your heart exposed, what before would have been a simple scratch now cuts to the bone.
The result of this newfound mental vulnerability and emotional management is what I call The Paradox of Passionate Performance: at first, attempting to perform in something you're passionate about will lead to a substantial decrease in performance, contrary to popular belief. This is because you have to deal with a new caliber of fear, and that fear distracts you from performing at your best. There's a difference between playing a game you don't care about in your backyard and putting your heart on the line in the olympics.
A good analogy for this: I was once at a drum camp with a bunch of amazing world class drummers. Life-changing experience. Like... living legends. ANYWAY. One of the instructors (my favorite) was making a point about practicing seemingly needlessly complex coordination challenges. His point, summarized poorly below, was something like:
"The moment that you step on stage, something like 20-50% of your mental capacity will be gone from nerves alone. If you want to maintain your ability to play challenging things and/or meaningfully improvise in front of an audience, you need to intentionally expand that capacity as much as possible."
This is particularly a problem for those of us (the us is intentional, I am one of them) who initially found our drive for competence within the western education system. We were trained to rely on external validation and to find excellence within a container that is neatly constructed for us. It's no surprise that, when we first seek to pursue what we want in the complexities and chaos of the external world, we (and our performance) suffer.
Which leads me to the tactical meat of this email—how should we relate to the realities of risk when our heart is on the line?
It's clear that fixating on risk is not the solution. Not only does it lead to drops in performance in our craft, but in more complex decision-oriented crafts like business, we actually stop seeing opportunities in lieu of threats. This is because when the sympathetic branch of our nervous system gets activated (responsible for the traditional fight-flight and now the additional freeze-collapse aspects of our nervous system), our amygdala gets pre-conscious access to our sensory input. Our amygdala hijacks our consciousness to look for threats, robbing us of our ability to see opportunity. This makes perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint; there is no good reason to look for fruit in the trees if you are convinced that there is a lion waiting for you in the bushes.
Back to my original point. So clearly we can't fixate on risk. In the short-term it destroys performance. In the long-term it destroys our ability to see opportunity at all.
But we also can't ignore it. There's something real to it. And so I'm convinced the solution lies in a principled solution that involves setting boundaries for when to assess risk and when not. And ideally these boundaries allow for the maximum survivable time between assessment of risk.
An example that is close to home (namely, my life):
You've left your job to start a business. You have runway but you're burning money. You could use an arbitrary model to forecast burn, but that's inadequate in the early phases; investment opportunities present themselves all of the time and you need to be able to act on them without updating a model to make your decision.
One answer is to check your bank account every morning. But we know that's not helpful for the above reasons—it puts us in a mindset of fear and creates a sense of scarcity around money.
Another answer is to just never check it all! We're all smart here. We know that's not a real solution.
The solution? I think this is more art than science, but it is in checking your bank account as infrequently as possible without introducing the risk of devastating consequences.
For me, this is usually a monthly cadence. I could do weekly, but it's unlikely that I could set things horrifically off track in a month or less and the costs of a weekly check are me encoding in scarcity around money every single week, which is clearly not a way to win.
I choose money here because I think it's the most clear and relatable example, but I think there are other domains this can apply to. Hell even covid! Of course we all want to keep track of case growth in our area. But what's the right frequency to enable better decision-making and more effective action without getting you so emotional that it's now compromising your decision-making?
And finally, what to do in the meantime. My solution is to simply focus on:
Where you want to go. Your goals, mission, vision; whatever resonates best
The immediate behaviors you need to enact to get there. These are the leading indicators to the lag indicators that are your results. In general, habits are better than one-offs. Tracking them to push yourself is also a huge win.
I think there's an art to oscillating between these as well. Focus too much on your big vision and you can be overwhelmed with the gap between where you are and it. Focus too much on what's right in front of you and you can get lost in the weeds and the emotional rollercoaster of it all.
To summarize, I think the healthiest expression of action when playing a risky game with your heart on the line is to:
Track the risk, but check it at the least frequent interval that effectively mitigates the risk of ruin (devastating consequences)
When between assessments of risk, develop a healthy oscillation between your vision to create energy, and the actions you can and want to take today to create momentum.
I hope this is helpful. I've been incubating this for a few weeks as I've made all of the wrong decisions—checking my bank account too often, getting lost in my vision, getting too in the weeds, sometimes all in the same day—and wanted to pass the hard won wisdom to you. As you've likely heard me say about many things, I think the solution lies in a healthy alignment and proactive and intentional oscillation between these different modes. Dysfunction can arise even from apparently functional behaviors if we are not aligned and proactive in how we deploy them.
A Challenge
I was recently recommended an episode of Andrew Huberman's Neuroscience Podcast about Addiction & Dopamine.
It reminded me of the concept of a dopamine fast—the idea being that, because of technology, we are constantly bombarded by supernormal stimuli that desensitize us to the more normal stimulus of everyday life. One way to "reset" our dopamine system is to go some length of time with reduced exposure to those supernormal stimuli thus normalizing our receptors to everyday experience.
And so I'm taking a break! Addiction runs in the family and I can tell that my brain is a bit addicted after working for years in technology. For the next 30 days (the amount of time it takes for dopamine centers to normalize) I'm committed to:
No social media or otherwise superstimulating content (reddit, video games, the news, netflix)
Phone AND computers set to greyscale (the computer is a new one, will likely take off for meetings as it's distracting)
Minimal caffeine & alcohol
Let me know if you want to join in!
A Question
Where in my life would I benefit from making space for discomfort and fear? Where could I act despite discomfort and fear being with me, rather than waiting for them to resolve?
Hope you're well and enjoying your final weeks of summer!