where the threats that we face are probabilistic:

Terrorists might attack.

The economy might nose dive, right?

These are 'probabilistic dangers.'

The problem is, the brain's designed

not to turn off the fear response

until a danger is gone completely.

But probabilistic dangers never are gone completely

so we tend to be a little more hyperreactive.

So how do you tune up the nervous system

rather than having to reach for psychopharmaceuticals?

I often define 'peak performance'

as getting our biology to work for us

rather than against us.

What I'm really talking about are the systems

underneath what we call motivation,

learning, creativity, and flow.

'Flow' is an optimized state of consciousness

where we feel our best and we perform our best.

The research says there are three tools you can reach for:

Gratitude has really precise impacts

on the brain and anxiety.

I like to write down 10 things that I'm grateful for

and I write down each one three times.

Gratitude is literally you're just pointing out

to the brain things that have already happened

that are good.

And it tilts this ratio

so we're taking in a lot less negative stuff.

This, by the way, lets more novel stuff come through.

Gratitude can work as a 'flow trigger' that way.

The second one is mindfulness-

11 minutes a day of mindfulness practice.

You know, follow your breath,

focus meditation basically, is enough

to really calm down your nervous system,

make you less emotional-reactive.

Your third option is exercise-

20 to 40 minutes worth of exercise is enough.

And if you're exercising for mental hygiene, right,

for cognition, and I wanna get into flow,

you wanna exercise until basically the voice in your head

gets really quiet and your lungs open up.

Both things happen

because there's a global release of nitric oxide,

it's a gaseous, signaling molecule

that's sort of everywhere in the body.

One of the things it does

is it flushes stress hormones out of your system.

It'll reset the nervous system

sort of back to baseline, back to zero.

When I talk about peak performance,

we always emphasize 'cognitive literacy':

understanding what's going on in the brain

and the body when we're performing at our very best.

Now this is difficult in the modern world

because most of us tend to be a little hyperanxious.

Daily problems that we all deal with-

anxiety, depression, right?

We now know, for example,

that a 20-minute walk in the woods

will outperform most antidepressants on the market.

If you take a walk in a part of nature

where you haven't been before,

you're not only gonna get serotonin, that calming chemical,

you're gonna get the dopamine

from novelty and complexity and unpredictability.

So you're gonna get some feel good, happy juice

and some calm.

And these are great tools to be able to reach for

in times of stress

rather than having to reach for psychopharmaceuticals.

On a certain level, we have a drug store in our brain,

the neurochemicals that show up in flow:

so dopamine, norepinephrine, anandamide,

endorphins, and serotonin.

If you were to try to cocktail

the street drug version of that, right,

you're trying to blend like heroin and speed

and coke and acid and weed-

and point is, you can't do it.

It turns out the brain can cocktail all of 'em at once,

which is why people will prefer flow

to almost any experience on Earth.

It's our favorite experience.

It's the most addictive experience on Earth.

Why?

'Cause it cocktails five or six

of the largest pleasure drugs the brain can produce.

We're all capable of so much more than we know.

That is a commonality across the board.

That's the largest lesson that 30 years

in studying peak performance has taught me.

And one of the big reasons is we're all hardwired for flow,

and flow is a massive amplification

of what's possible for ourselves.

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