- Why is our current way of working not working? Why do we try but fail to assimilate multiple input channels (phones, emails, meetings, etc) whilst not achieving deep work?
- From sleep and nutrition to mental resilience/focus and creativity, what are the key considerations for more efficient and happier teams?
- How to organise the working day to maximise efficiency, which ultimately positively impacts the bottom line?
Presentation given on 4 October at UCX 2025, Excel, London
Unified communications help us to bring people together and make it easier for us to communicate as a whole and as individuals. However, we are the elephant in the room; we know more about computers than we know about ourselves. So I am going to dive into the Quick Guide to our Operating System and compare us to a PC. It may be simplistic, but I hope it will serve our purpose.
- There are many makes and models of all sizes in various colours and languages. All are waterproof.
- Power supply – Gut biome
- Central Processing Unit – The brain
- Chipsets – Chemicals/hormones that switch different brain circuits
- Internal wiring – Axons
- Memory – Working, short and long term
- Macros – Habits
- Feedback loop – The nervous system
- Firewall – The autonomic nervous system (fight, flight or freeze) and (rest & digest)
- Back-up & maintenance – Sleep
Nutrition
Professor Tim Spector, King’s College, London
Let’s examine the power supply. Any interruptions will cause a drop in performance. Proper nutrition is essential for supplying our body and brain with the right balance of chemicals to enable us to function. What you eat is your choice, but I recommend a varied diet including plenty of protein, fruits, and vegetables. Incorporate low-sugar fermented foods such as kefir, kimchi, and kombucha, and ensure you include omega 3 rich fatty acids. Foods containing the two essential amino acids, tyrosine (which supports dopamine production for cognitive function, attention, and stress response) and tryptophan (which supports serotonin for mood, sleep, and well-being), will provide the brain with sufficient nutrition for the autonomic nervous system to operate properly.
Tyrosine, an amino acid important for neurotransmitter production, is found in soybeans, beef, lamb, pork, chicken, fish, nuts, eggs, cheese, yoghurt, beans, and whole grains. Tyrosine is a building block for dopamine, epinephrine and norepinephrine, which are vital for alertness, mood, and cognitive function.
Tryptophan, an amino acid important for neurotransmitter production, is found in chicken, turkey, fish, eggs, cheese, milk, nuts (peanuts, cashews, walnuts), seeds (pumpkin, sesame, sunflower), and soy products (tofu, tempeh), oats, quinoa, and bananas. Tryptophan is crucial for the body’s production of serotonin and melatonin, which regulate mood and sleep.
A report recently published said that there were now more obese children than malnourished ones. That means that the parents of these children and the environment they are living in are influencing the way they eat. Probably too many ultra-processed foods and fizzy drinks that do not provide good nutrition. We tend to overeat, so eat smaller portions and avoid these ultra-processed foods; aim to fast for at least 12 hours each day. Hydrate with water and be mindful that alcohol can destroy much of the beneficial bacteria in the gut.
Neuromodulators, Neurotransmitters and Hormones
We use neuromodulators and neurotransmitters to activate or deactivate our brain circuits. I am going to concentrate on adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, and acetylcholine. Hormones such as cortisol and melatonin are crucial in regulating wakefulness and sleep cycles. Proper nutrition ensures a balanced level of these chemicals. Imbalances, whether too low or too high, can lead to mental instability.
- Adrenaline – A hormone in the sympathetic nervous system, triggering the “fight or flight” response.
- Noradrenaline – A neurotransmitter, influencing arousal, attention, cognitive function, and emotional response.
- Dopamine – A neurotransmitter in the brain’s reward system, contributing to motivation, drive and satisfaction. It also influences movement, memory, learning, mood, and attention. Deficiencies in dopamine levels can cause Parkinson’s disease, and an imbalance can lead to ADHD.
- Serotonin – A neurotransmitter influencing mood and behaviour. It regulates sleep, appetite, and digestion. Low serotonin levels are linked to depression, anxiety, and other conditions.
- Acetylcholine – A neurotransmitter regulating heart rate, attention, focus, learning and memory.
- Cortisol – A hormone that regulates metabolism, blood pressure, circulation, inflammation, stress response and controls sleep cycles.
- Melatonin – A hormone regulating the body’s circadian rhythm and promoting sleep.
- Adenosine – A neurotransmitter that promotes the sleep drive.
What makes something personal to us is memory and the emotional connections formed through this interaction. We rely on working memory for our daily tasks, and these are usually discarded unless they are considered important enough to be stored in short-term memory, then transferred to long-term memory during sleep. This process occurs subconsciously. Having the right level of dopamine available can support working memory.
Habits are an effective way for the brain to operate on autopilot without effort. This means that breaking habits usually requires more effort and time. Addiction is a habit that becomes uncontrolled, driven by an increase in dopamine, a neuromodulator linked to motivation and drive. When a spike in dopamine does not return to its baseline level, it leaves you craving for more, which is then amplified by higher spikes. Everything from gambling, power, alcohol, and drug abuse is connected to this brain circuitry.
Sleep (Doctor Matt Walker, Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of California) is when all of the day’s efforts are stored in our memory, and our body and brain are flushed of harmful debris and then repaired. Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep repairs the brain, while non-REM (deep sleep) repairs the body. If there was only one thing you could do to look after yourself, it would be to get a good night’s sleep. This should be 7–9 hours of quality sleep, and the time you go to bed and wake up should be close to the same time every day (within 30 minutes). You need to align your sleep and waking patterns with your chronotype, which is your natural sleep and wake times, and we all differ in this regard.
The nervous system functions as a feedback loop, with the Vagus nerve being one of the most vital nerves in the body. It has sensory and motor functions connected via axons to major organs and to the brain. It is part of our immune system and serves as the main pathway for delivering serotonin to the brain. Serotonin is a neuromodulator linked to feelings of calm and fulfilment, or rest and digest.
The sympathetic part of our autonomic nervous system acts as our body’s defence mechanism against threats. This is also known as the fight, flight, freeze response. As the name suggests, it operates automatically, preparing the body for action by releasing surges of adrenaline, cortisol and dopamine. Parts of the body that are not needed to respond are shut down. It is only when the signal reaches the frontal cortex that you begin to interpret events and decide what action to take. The parasympathetic nervous system (rest or digest) response produces serotonin and acetylcholine and is calming.
The brain is a prediction machine. Anxiety and stress are part of our instinct to prepare for what might happen next and gather resources to handle it. These responses occur constantly, and in most cases, you don’t notice anything unusual. We have become used to hearing how anxiety and stress have a negative label, with emphasis placed on how it is becoming worse, but for most of us, we experience positive outcomes every day.
I often imagine myself in a coracle without a paddle on a river; sometimes the river is calm, and other times I am rushing through rapids. The water can be deep and threatening or shallow and sparkling. I may encounter obstacles along the way, but given time, I will find a way around them. I have fallen into the water several times but managed to scramble back into the coracle and carry on. Although it can be frightening at times, that body of water has carried and supported me throughout my life. I have been joined by family and friends, and although some have drifted apart, our connection has made us stronger. Outcomes depend on how you approach the many situations you face, and that depends on your mindset.
Stress is Enhancing
Dr Alia Crum, Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford University
Asking yourself questions gives you useful tools that can be implemented to improve yourself. This is very important because:
- When we assign performance or intelligence labels to things we excel at, we internalise that sense of self, which boosts our ego. However, if we don’t perform well, we internalise a sense of failure and associate our identity with that diminished performance.
- If you attach effort verbs to explain why you are good at something, as well as why you are not, then there is always room for improvement.
The Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) is the part of the brain that is activated. The Rostral area deals with emotion, and the Dorsal area with cognition.
- The stress response is mobilising resources to analyse what to focus your attention on.
- When discussing verbs like effort, persistence, practising, or analysing errors and why you did something incorrectly, going back to the drawing board to put it right is inherent to you. When you start viewing your successes within your failures through the lens of verbs, you’re engaging with something central to who you are. It’s machinery that exists in your brain, nervous system, and body, which you can activate. Focus on verbs, not labels. It is essential to do this when you have performed well in something.
- If you tell someone they are great or brilliant, you may undermine their future performance when they encounter challenges, because their emotional state will be affected.
- When you give someone feedback, and it is grounded in effort and persistence in problem-solving, you are providing them with a path to learn from their endeavours.
- Seek help from others in understanding why your performance was good or, more importantly, not so good. This will consolidate your future efforts.
- When there is no one to converse with or give you feedback, you can become your own teacher by writing as if to someone else, explaining how to adopt this mindset.
We only stress about things we care about.
- Acknowledge that you are stressed
- Welcome that you are stressed
- Utilise the stress response to achieve the thing you care about
Use positive affirmations with verbs – not labels
The Mental Health Continuum
Statistics show that chronic negative anxiety and stress are the most common causes of mental ill health, unless you were born with a mental illness or condition, or have suffered trauma. Here is a diagram of the Mental Health Continuum, illustrating how our lives can become unmanageable.
We are not taught about mental health, and no one wants to admit that they cannot cope. Everyone should have this chart available so they can understand their state of mental health. Every organisation should have this displayed so that people can refer to it or just point when they are feeling low. By normalising the conversation around mental ill-health, the stigma of personnel not coping will diminish, and organisations will be able to provide appropriate help and see their rates of sickness fall.
The Physiological Sigh
If you are feeling overwhelmed or in a state of panic, the quickest way to calm yourself is to use a breathing technique called the Physiological Sigh. This can also improve sleep, lower your heart rate and enhance mood if practised for five minutes a day. This works by utilising the fact that during an exhale, the volume in the diaphragm is constricted, inducing the heart to beat faster, whereas the brain wants it to remain constant, sending a signal to beat slower. By doing the following, your heart rate is reduced:
- Take a deep inhale for about 4 seconds, then take a short ‘top-off’ inhale to inflate the lungs to their maximum (this removes any carbon dioxide in the lung sacks)
- Release all the air with a full ‘lungs-to-empty’ exhale, around 8 to 15 seconds
- Repeat two to three times
As I have mentioned, communications flood us every day, much of it coming from our smartphones, which have become our main companions both socially and at work. It has been reported, we consume 74GB of information a day. 100 years ago, we would have consumed that amount in a lifetime! We can reach information overload very quickly, which hampers our ability to focus.
The Ultradian Rhythm
Internal clocks govern us; the most familiar is the 24-hour clock or circadian rhythm, but the one that controls our daily routine is the ultradian rhythm. Research from the Sleep Research Laboratory at the University of Chicago revealed that our minds naturally operate in 90-minute waves of high-focus activity. During these periods, your brain enters a state of enhanced cognitive function, where problem-solving abilities and creative thinking reach their peak.
A study published in the Journal of Cognition showed that professionals who aligned their work with these 90-minute cycles reported 40% higher productivity levels compared to those who worked in random time intervals. Even more impressive? These focused blocks resulted in fewer errors and higher-quality outcomes.
By working with your brain’s natural rhythm instead of against it, you’re setting yourself up for success. Think of it as surfing the wave of your peak mental performance – when you catch it just right, everything flows effortlessly!
- As you start your day and get yourself into a flow of sustained activity and mental focus, your body and brain start burning through a significant amount of oxygen, glucose, and other energetic fuels.
- Within about an hour and a half, you reach the apex of your productivity, entering what’s known as an “ultradian performance peak.”
- Meanwhile, the byproducts of all your mental and physical activity— metabolic waste, snippets of data, cellular debris—are building up in your system.
- After about an hour and a half or two hours, you begin experiencing this accumulation of all this detritus as stress. Your productivity and performance start to decline as your body enters what’s known as an “ultradian trough”—an energetic low point.
- You start feeling fatigued, groggy, irritable, distracted, hungry, or fidgety. Your attention might wander. Your body might feel heavy, your face slack, your eyes glazed, unfocused, or droopy.
- You might feel the urge to go to the toilet, or you might experience a sudden craving for sugar, carbohydrates, caffeine, or (if you smoke) a cigarette.
- You might also hear an anxious little internal voice saying, “Oh dear, it’s only mid-morning and I’m already losing it. How am I going to make it through the day?”
This is a moment to which you want to bring your awareness. Because the feelings you’re noticing right now are signs that your body is working exactly as it should be. These are your body’s flag-waving signals that it needs some down time—now, or as soon as humanly possible—in order to regenerate cellular fuel, rebalance your blood sugar and biochemistry, flush its detoxification systems, and repair damaged tissue.
Your brain also needs a break to sift through all the vast amounts of data you’ve taken in, tag it, organise it, and create important synaptic connections. These are the connections that allow your mental databases to merge and exchange information, producing those magical aha moments, creative insights, and brilliant solutions you kept wishing you had more of. These are the connections that allow important information currently piled up in your various mental inboxes to be sorted, labelled, and filed appropriately so that you can easily recall them later, whenever the need arises. These are the connections that determine whether you are a sparkling genius making great things happen or a grumpy, lumpen mass of flesh parked on an office chair wishing you were somewhere else.
In short, even if you don’t care that much about your health and happiness, if you care at all about your brain and your career, these signals your body is sending you at this moment matter. So now, let’s rejoin your body’s ultradian programme in action:
- Assuming you heed your body’s signals for a break, the moment you step away from external demands and take a few deep breaths, your body’s internal maintenance goes into high gear, tackling a wide array of internal detoxification, refuelling, and repair tasks that comprise what’s known as the “ultradian healing response.”
- During the course of the next twenty minutes (ideally), fresh stores of fuel in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) are delivered to your cells; blood sugar, hormones, and neurotransmitters are rebalanced; toxins are flushed; and many important maintenance tasks are completed.
- At that point, your frontline systems ramp back up and rapidly return to full capacity for another hour and a half or two hours.
But what if you ignore your body’s signals and skip that break?
Research shows that if we ignore our body’s signals, our energy and focus will eventually return to a somewhat higher level of functioning, but not nearly as high as before. After a missed or skimped-on break, our next ultradian performance peak will be significantly lower than our previous one, which means we won’t likely get as much done, or do it as well, and we also won’t feel anywhere near as good while we are doing it. For the next hour and a half or two hours, our body and mind will continue at markedly reduced capacity.
Skipping Ultradian Rhythm Breaks = Diminishing Returns, Escalating Risks
If we miss subsequent breaks as the day wears on, by mid-afternoon, we’re going to be feeling awful and in the grip of a slump from which no amount of coffee or sugar can extract us. Meanwhile, the expense of all this physiological overtime effort will be accruing. We can expect to see:
- Rising markers of inflammation
- Increased blood pressure
- Imbalanced blood sugar and insulin response
- Higher cholesterol
- Lowered immunity
- Imbalanced neurotransmitters
- Declining mental capacity
- Gaps in memory
- Disrupted digestion
- Imbalanced acid-alkaline levels
- Slowed metabolism
- Increased moodiness and emotional reactivity
- Increased sugar and carb cravings
- Diminished communication and relational skills
- Decreased observational capacity
- Declining motor skills
Additionally, as a result of these operational downgrades, we incur a wide range of secondary costs and risks:
- We can’t think straight, so our error rate increases, our reading comprehension is reduced, and our productivity plummets.
- Our peripheral vision narrows, so we miss things we’d normally notice.
- Our creativity declines, and it takes longer to think of good ideas and solutions.
- Our physical coordination is reduced, so we type more slowly, produce more typos and transposed numbers; our likelihood of stubbing a toe, spilling our coffee, or having more serious accidents rises precipitously.
- Our cravings for sugar and refined carbs incline us to eat junk food that further contributes to inflammation and blood-sugar imbalances, reducing our energy and resilience, and leaving us feeling unwell.
- Disruption of normal sleep patterns and decline in sleep quality further reduce our effectiveness, while further undermining mood, immunity, and cognitive performance.
If we ignore the breaks, we face diminishing returns and increasing risks at every level. The more ultradian rhythm breaks we miss, the more severe the damage. That’s why, by the end of the day, many people are shells of their former selves, walking bundles of numb and frayed nerves. It’s also why so many arrive home after a tough day’s work only to collapse on the sofa, binge on unhealthy food, have several drinks, or end up in irritably tense exchanges with their loved ones.
If we ignore our ultradian rhythms for days, weeks, or months at a time, the accumulated damage and distress become more tangible, producing a variety of nasty potential results:
- Flaring of inflammatory symptoms, like rashes, cold sores, and lymph-related bumps
- Back and neck pain, headaches
- Stomach pain, digestive distress
- Hormonal imbalances
- Brain damage and memory loss
- Mood imbalances
- Alterations to DNA (activating disease-causing polymorphisms)
- Accumulation of fat stores, especially around the belly
- Unconscious obsessive-compulsive behaviours like nail biting, cuticle picking, cheek or lip biting, hair pulling, and scratching
- Accelerated aging
- Hair loss and thinning
Eventually, the inflamed and diminished state of the body-mind (caused by the destructive effects of delayed maintenance, repair, and detoxification) can set the stage for serious conditions like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, autoimmune disorders, migraines, arthritis, depression, Alzheimer’s, and more.
But when you think about it objectively, it makes sense that extended ultradian-rhythm mismanagement can play a huge role in degrading our health, sanity, and general well-being: Whenever you repeatedly overdrive and under-maintain any system, it tends to fail.
How Can You Start Listening to Your Ultradian Rhythms?
- Start noticing that throughout each day, your body moves through a repeating, oscillating energy cycle, rising to an energy peak over an hour and a half to two hours, and then dropping into an energy trough that lasts about twenty minutes.
- Know that these low-energy troughs are your friend and that they have a purpose: Getting you to take a physical and mental break so that your body can repair, rebalance, replenish, reorganise, and detoxify its core systems.
- Be on the lookout for signals like fatigue, brain fog, loss of focus and productivity, yawning, fidgeting, difficulty keeping your eyes open, irritation, hunger, thirst, clumsiness, increasing errors, and any kind of bathroom urge.
- Watch for ultradian troughs to strike in the midmorning and midafternoon (within two hours of starting work and within two hours after lunch). At the first signs of depletion (or ideally, before), stop what you are doing and take a break: Twenty minutes is ideal, but any break (even five or ten minutes) is better than nothing. The longer your break is, the more repair and replenishing work your body will do.
- Give your body and mind a chance to shift gears. If you’ve been sitting still, move. If you’ve been moving, sit still. If you’ve been focusing intensely, let your brain shut down.
- Doing manual tasks is okay, but avoid any intensive demands or distractions, including the use of electronics and digital media.
- Consider setting a timed alert that prompts you to assess your state of energy and focus every ninety minutes or so. Once you become adept at noticing your energetic rhythms, you’ll no longer need an external alert.
Ultradian Rhythm Break Activities
Feel free to combine one or more of the following (based on what your body craves) for a total of ten to twenty minutes, or for however long you can manage:
- Go to the toilet (even if you don’t think you have to go).
- Get a drink of water or a cup of tea and enjoy drinking it slowly.
- Grab a healthy snack (avoid refined carbs and sugars) and eat it away from your desk and while not doing anything productive, demanding, or attention-distracting.
- Get outside and walk calmly (looking around you, not at your smartphone).
- Try a walking exercise.
- Stare into space or out the window, seeing if you notice an interesting shape, colour, or scene.
- Close your eyes and meditate or do deep breathing.
- Sit on a curb or bench and let your mind wander for a while.
- Walk around the building looking for things you never noticed before.
- Visit with a colleague or friend, expressing interest or positive feelings.
- Listen to a guided meditation or piece of calming music.
- Do a little restorative yoga (Shavasana is highly recommended).
- Do a mindless task, like refilling your stapler or cleaning out your purse or a drawer.
- Run a simple or pleasant errand (e.g., picking up flowers, shopping for a gift).
- Rub some lotion or balm into your hands, cuticles, and elbows.
- Waft some aromatherapy oils or flower essences around your space.
- Call a loved one to say hi or to express love and appreciation.
- Visualise how you want the rest of your day or evening to go.
- Make a quick list of things you are grateful for.
- Reflect on a list of your core values and notice which ones have been in play today.
- Consider the body position you’ve been in for the last hour, and assume some contrasting position. If you’ve been leaning forward, stretch backwards. If you’ve been sitting, stand up or lie down. If you’ve been still, move about. If you’ve been looking down, look up. If you’ve been focusing your eyes close-up, look far away.
How the natural environment impacts our brain function, mental health, and cognitive function
Dr Mark Burman – Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago
Recapturing attention – when attention is fatigued and depleted, we don’t have as much impulse control, we may behave more aggressively, and we may not be able to achieve our goals.
Directed attention:
We are bombarded by so much information that we have to make a choice of what to pay attention to, which humans are really good at, but we have limits on how much and how long we can remain focused. It is estimated that we consume 74GB of information a day. Compare that to 100 years ago, when that amount would have taken a lifetime.
Involuntary attention:
Automatically captured by interesting stimuli in the environment, such as bright lights and loud noises, which we have no control over. This is not affected by fatigue depletion.
Taking a walk in nature is like having a warm-up before doing exercise, it prepares the mind to focus again.
2008 study: To test brain function, walking (without phones or earbuds) in nature compared to walking in an urban environment. The ability to direct attention improved by 20% when walking in nature compared to when walking in the urban environment. The studies were done at different times of year, summer, when people enjoyed the walk and January, when they didn’t want to go for a walk. The results were the same, so it wasn’t mood-related. There is something profound about the way our brains process auditory, visual, and tactile information that is found in nature, which is beneficial for our ability to direct attention. Similar results were found in people with ADHD and those with clinical depression.
It is thought that the fractal patterns (shapes, sounds and even time, that are similar at different scales) found in nature provide softly fascinating stimulation – they allow the mind to wander, which is restorative. However, the man-made urban shapes and sounds are a harshly fascinating stimulation, and they consume all of our attention, which causes fatigue.
The impact of always-on communication devices demands a great deal of our attention because the inputs tend to be numerous and random, and social media channels are steering us in their preferred direction, ultimately to generate profit.
It must also be noted that, although the improvement in attention was not as substantial, viewing a picture of nature and listening to sounds found in nature did enhance attention, but it needed to be done in a different location from your desk or workplace. It was also observed that visiting an art gallery or museum (without phones) yielded similar results.
So let us map out our day:
Waking and Early Mornings:
We aim to achieve natural positive stress levels in our body and brain through the release of cortisol, adrenaline, dopamine, and acetylcholine.
- NSDR (Non Sleep Deep Rest) (Dr Andrew Huberman, Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology, Stanford University) protocol or Yoga Nidra (free to download)
- Meditation (free to download) Dr Wendy Suzuki, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at New York University carried out a study on 13 minutes of daily meditation, where participants concentrated on an area just above the forehead and simultaneously focused on nasal breathing. In most cases, the mind would wander, but the important thing would be to bring it back in line with the meditation routine. It was found that this improved focus during the day ahead.
- Cold shower/bath (spikes dopamine)
- The mouth biome contains bacteria, especially around the teeth, so floss at least twice a day
- Don’t look at your smartphone until after breakfast
- Hydrate (1 litre of water). Add a pinch of sea salt as a source of electrolytes
- Exercise – walk or run in nature. Exercise is essential for a healthy body and mind and longevity. 10,000 steps is a good target to aim for per day. Add 180 to 200 minutes of Zone 2 cardio per week plus VO2 max (intense aerobic exercise) at least once weekly.
- Look towards but not directly at the sun outdoors
- Have a nutritious breakfast after 1 hour of waking (cortisol inhibits digestion)
- If you can cycle or walk to work, do that instead of driving your car
- Try to find a route to work that takes you through nature
- To increase cortisol, drink coffee, and to extend the effect, have a grapefruit, but only in the morning
- If you are feeling groggy, you can increase adrenaline by carrying out rapid inhales and exhales. Take a deep inhale, followed immediately by a deep exhale. Repeat 25 times, then empty your lungs. Hold for 20 seconds and repeat for 5 minutes. Use caution when doing this, as it can cause blackouts.
Organising the morning for deep work:
- Only deal with the most important emails first thing and leave others for later
- Switch off your mobile and begin focused work. This will last over 90 minutes, but it can take time to reach the optimal level of performance. It’s better to work in silence, though some people find binaural beats at 40Hz or white, brown, or pink noise helpful (free to download).
- When using a computer, your eyes work hard during concentrated periods, so remember to maintain good posture, looking slightly down at the screen. Place a picture of nature on a wall where you can see it, and every 20 minutes, focus your eyes on it for 20 seconds. This helps relax your eyes and reduces strain. Learn to recognise when you are in an ultradian trough, usually within two hours of starting work, when you feel fatigue, brain fog, loss of focus and productivity, yawning, fidgeting, difficulty keeping your eyes open, irritation, hunger, thirst, clumsiness, increasing errors, or a bathroom urge. This is the ideal moment to take a 20-minute break. During this break, go for a walk outside—preferably in nature, or if not, visit a museum or art gallery—and while having a coffee or drink, handle any phone calls or pending emails.
- Depending on when you start work, you might only achieve one period of deep work in the morning, but it’s better to complete a body of quality work than to have to redo it.
Binaural Beats
Sounds of different frequencies played into each ear. The difference in frequency is called the binaural beat. These waveforms affect the brain in the following way and can be downloaded.
Delta – 4Hz – helps sleep
Theta – 4 to 8Hz – meditative
Alpha – 8 to 13Hz – increases creativity
Beta – 13 to 30Hz – improves memory & accuracy
Gamma – 30 to 50Hz – improves memory, cognition & mood
Midday to Evening
Many people work through their lunch break, but it isn’t beneficial for you. Turn off your phone and spend your lunch outdoors in nature. If you’re hungry, opt for a low-carb meal to prevent an afternoon slump. Take a walk or join an outdoor exercise session to boost your metabolism and help regulate your circadian rhythm through exposure to natural light.
Resume work aligned with your ultradian 90-minute cycle. After this period, you might feel sleepy, so consider using an NSDR (non-sleep deep rest) protocol for 10–20 minutes to boost dopamine levels and mental energy. Naps are not essential and should be avoided; however, if you do nap, set an alarm for 20 minutes to prevent sleep inertia, which can cause grogginess and low energy.
The purpose of meetings can be categorised into ‘creative’ or ‘administrative’ types. It may be best to hold brainstorming meetings in the morning, when deep thinking can maximise creativity. Conversely, administrative meetings are better scheduled for the afternoon, when cortisol levels are lower. Furthermore, only invite those who will have a direct impact on the meeting’s outcome.
Return to nature for the trip home and leave work behind. Be observant of the colours and shapes you see.
Eat dinner early so you can fast for at least 12 hours until breakfast. Include some higher-carbohydrate foods and protein to promote relaxation and sleep.
Bedtime and Sleeping
Doctor Matt Walker, Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of California
Begin dimming the lights shortly after sunset and avoid overhead and bright lighting. Reduce computer and phone screen brightness as much as possible. Although research on the effects of blue light from screens on the eyes is inconclusive, glasses that filter blue light are available.
Cool your bedroom by 1–3 degrees below usual and make it as dark as possible, or wear an eye mask. Remove clocks that emit digital light. To encourage relaxation, use the NSDR or perform the physiological sigh as previously explained.
As you fall asleep, you enter a light non-REM stage, followed by deep non-REM sleep. After Then, you return to light non-REM sleep, then enter REM (dream) sleep. The cycle then repeats. As the night progresses, the amount of deep non-REM sleep reduces in favour of light non-REM sleep.
Studies in sleep deprivation have found that with only 4 hours of sleep in one night, there is a 70% drop in natural killer cell activity – these are immune cells that kill cancer cells, for instance. Proteins such as Amyloid Beta and Tau are allowed to build up, linked to causing Alzheimer’s disease. A study involving 1.6 billion people in 70 countries found that when the clocks go forward and we lose one hour of sleep, there is a 24% increase in heart attacks the following day.
Sleep is the single most effective way to reset your brain and body health. A good night’s sleep depends on:
Quantity – 7 – 9 hours per night
Quality – not impaired by stimulants or anxiety or stress
Timing – chronotype – early or late
Regularity – within 30minutes each day
Take Aways
- Have a regular good night’s sleep
- Eat nutritious food
- Expose yourself to sunlight in the morning
- Explore your inner self through meditation
- Take low & high intensity exercise outdoors in nature
- Think of stress as enhancing performance
- Understand where you are on the Mental Health Continuum
- Use breathing techniques to control your heartbeat
- Get to know your ultradian rhythm
- Be kind to yourself and compassionate to others and smile!
Conclusion
There are many do’s and don’ts and a lot of information to absorb, but the key point is that if you take good care of your body and mind, recognise when you are most effective during the ultradian cycle, and manage your electronic devices—rather than letting them control you—your efficiency and wellbeing will improve during the working day. This will ultimately lead to better results at work and an improved bottom line.
