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Mark Brisley
Managing Director and Head of Dynamic Funds

Dr. Brynn Winegard
Business Brain Expert

PRESENTATION

Mark Brisley: You are tuning in to On The Money with Dynamic Funds. A podcast series that delivers access to some of the industry's most experienced active managers and thought leaders. We're sitting down to ask them the pertinent questions to find out their insights on the market environment and navigating the investment landscape.

Welcome to another edition of On The Money. I'm Mark Brisley, head of Dynamic Funds. Given the circumstances in which the world has had to adopt in 2020, the unfamiliar conditions that have changed our routines, personal and professional activities, and the way we work, it's not surprising that we think more and more about how we are processing these conditions, and ultimately, how our brains are functioning with such tumultuous change.

I recently had the chance to sit down and talk with today's guest and discuss insights about how to fork burnout, increase productivity, improve motivation, and ensure your day and time was optimally designed to make maximal use of our own brains.

The tips and techniques shared in this discussion busted myths, challenged conventional wisdom, and provided a comprehensive framework for how to think of and use our own brain newly. Today, we discuss with Dr. Brynn Winegard some of these pointers from her proprietary research that will be included in her upcoming book, WFH: A Brain-Based Perspective for Redesigning Your Workday To Feel More Motivated and Get More Done.

Consistently ranked in the top three in the world for human behavior experts working in business, Dr. Brynn is a multiple award-winning professor, speaker, expert in business brain sciences, and specializes in formulating motivation, productivity, and peak performance tips from frontier in neuroscience research. We're very pleased to have her join us today. Dr. Brynn, welcome.

Dr. Brynn Winegard: Thanks, Mark. Thanks for having me.

Mark Brisley: Seeing as how brain science is a topical area for people these days, especially as we've all been forced to work from home, redesign our workday, deal with unprecedented levels of stress and strife, what are some of the surprising issues you've witnessed workers dealing with lately?

Dr. Brynn: It's such a good question and I think when we look at the research, there's an array, of course, of responses from people who suddenly found themselves at home in such a contextless circumstance. As they were thrust from the office space to their makeshift offices, the array of emotions and the challenges that people have expressed really do run the gamut, but I think some of the major ones have stood out.

There's been these top three that I talk about regularly with people who write to us and tweet to us. One of the first ones is Zoom fatigue. Zoom fatigue is very real. It is a challenge with how our brains process social information. The original research, actually, on Zoom fatigue came out in 2014 when there was anxiety and depression and body dysmorphic type issues with teenagers who were using FaceTime when Apple launched FaceTime.

What we figured out was that, effectively, they felt self-conscious all the time. When they were using FaceTime, they were on camera, they were on display, and they weren't interacting with people in a normal way because they were way too conscious of themselves. What we saw was things like anxiety peak, depression peak, again, their sense of self and their pickiness around their own body and their body image, that started to really dip in terms of the metrics.

That first foray into the research really helps us to understand what we started to see with this pandemic as people worked from home, which was Zoom fatigue, that included self-consciousness. A lot of companies, as an example, were using Zoom to try to increase a sense of comradery and togetherness and connectedness and decrease feelings of loneliness and isolation, but in actual fact, the way that people were receiving it, was that they were on display. They were feeling self-conscious, they were feeling a lot less confident and a lot more dissociated, even, from the content that they were producing.

We saw this whole cascade of effects, basically, that are associated with Zoom fatigue and again, that FaceTime fatigue we saw in teens in the early 2010s. That was the first one, is that people were really struggling with being on camera all the time effectively.

The second one was just that, and we talked about this at the Q3 Townhall and a little bit at your NSM this year, but the idea that, in VUCA circumstances: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous circumstances, which a global pandemic, certainly, falls under that category, people's brains go haywire. Your brain isn’t working the normal way. Under duress, people's emotions are different. The decision-making skills are different, for sure. How they feel, in general, is depressed. Ultimately, we're now not dealing with a person under normal circumstances, we're now dealing with a brain that is stressed with all kinds of other factors.

The third thing, and we have great research that shows that there is about 500 emotions that humans can feel that we can name in psychology and certainly, in neuroscience, but people can only usually name about 11 of them. The emotion that they weren't naming was grief. What they were feeling, and what a lot of this stress and emotion that they were not able to grapple with was really because the grief that they were feeling was over the loss of a life that once was, over the office that once was, over the routines and patterns and behavior that once was.

When you start to realize that that's what people are going through, is in fact high levels of grief, which has very known and knowable stages and is very stressful for people. That just compounded what we were starting to see which was this constellation of adrenal fatigue and burnout and depression, anxiety. People just not coping as well as you might anticipate somebody who is otherwise in a comfortable home circumstance, is otherwise finding their day more up to them. They have a lot more control, theoretically, over their day.

What we expected to see, which was, you're comfortable, you're in your home, your day is your own. You get to make it up. There's a lot of autonomy in that. In actual fact, we saw opposite. We saw people completely overwhelmed, feeling Zoom fatigue, and going through significant grief, effectively, at the loss of yesteryear, of the life that was pre-pandemic.

Mark Brisley: Yes, thinking about that, I think back to when this all started when we first found out that we were going to probably be in a work from home environment for a while. I know when I think about my own team, there's probably two types of people. The person that said, "I got this. This will be great. I'll get into a zone." There were other people that probably were, "I can't do this."

Then as it's unfolded, people have probably come to the conclusion that it's true or not true. The question is, what are some of the myths or misconceptions that you've witnessed workers having to deal with as this has unfolded since really looking back to March until the current time period?

Dr. Brynn: One of the fundamental truths of a human's brain's ability to predict time and space and themselves. It's very interesting that, actually, we're not very good at predicting ourselves in the future, so, how much energy we will have, how much motivation, how much productivity, how we will feel, and how much time we will have. We also don't predict time very well.

What's very interesting is that, especially as I mentioned earlier, we expected people to feel, when they were working from home and they were suddenly thrust into the circumstance, that they would find a lot of choice and a lot of control and autonomy in their circumstance of being able to work from home. In actual fact what we found was what we call expectancy violations with having overestimated how much they could get done in one day and how much they could get done in a week, as an example.

What that does is when, as an example, you put your list together the night before, best practice. We talked about this at your NSM. You have everything you want to do the next day, you know what that list looks like. People make these laundry lists for themselves. The stuff that they want to get done the next day.

Then the next morning comes, they've got their coffee, they're ready to go. What happens? They get a fraction of what they wanted to get done, done. In that day, they look at it at the end of the day and they're disappointed in themselves.

That expectancy violation, and it's exactly as it sounds, a violation of what you expected from yourself in terms of your ability to produce and your efficiency and your effectiveness, creates a circumstance where you are disappointed in yourself, where you are much less confident in your core competencies and in your intrinsic motivation. That disappointment leads to further levels of, if not self-consciousness, disappointment in yourself and a real feeling of restlessness, but also, of a lack of skill.

People almost felt like beginners again. Like they were on a learning curve for how to manage themselves and their time and their resources back in this new work environment. It wasn't netting good results. It was creating a further compound to this depressive circumstance where they just don't feel like they have self-efficacy. That serves to increase adrenal fatigue and burn out. It decreases your ability to manufacture serotonin, which, of course, is more or less the happy hormone. It decreases those dopamine feedback loops, which is the get it done hormone. We started to see real adrenal fatigue and burn out, anxiety, depression, and just effectively, decreases in motivation.

It was this vicious cycle, effectively, that people overestimate what you can get done and you think that that's just the mark of a high achiever. In actual fact, it's the mark of somebody who's created a self-handicapping circumstance where they will ultimately, not only not be able to get everything done they want to, but later they will kick themselves and they will berate themselves. That will create a circumstance where they're way less motivated and way more anxious. You could imagine how that neurophysiological level is like a cocktail of disaster for future productivity, and certainly, as we look at sustainable work habits.

Mark Brisley: That's really interesting, this overestimation of what you can accomplish in a day. One of the things, I think, we all hear is, "Since I've gone to a work from home environment, I'm working more. I can't pull myself away from the desk." Or, "Not having that commuting time is making me stay in a work environment for a longer period of time." I often hear people say, "And I can't turn it off." From a brain science perspective, is that true? Is that real? Is that what's happening to people?

Dr. Brynn: When your office is your house, you never leave the office. You could work all hours of the day. People do experience what contributes also to the Zoom fatigue, but is what we consider-- This isn't a word, but it's contextlessness. There's no context around when to work and when not to work. In some ways, too much choice, too much control, too much autonomy, not enough structure doesn't create a happier person. It creates a person who is lost and rudderless. Some people revel in that. They just love that, but it is very high levels of ambiguity. Everyone has varying levels of tolerance for ambiguity, for how much they can cope with just a blank slate, if you will, of a day.

You've got 24 hours at your disposal. You can sleep when you want, eat when you want, work when you want. To your point, what we found was that yes, people were just working longer hours because there is only so much Netflix you can watch and there was only so many walks you could go on. Ultimately, that was the challenge, was that their home was their office and they never left it.

Certainly, quarantine was the worst time, but we even saw this through the summer, which is that, "Yes, if you're there, why not pick it up?" What we especially saw, is if not formalized work happening in the evenings into the wee hours of the night, as an example, we saw much more in the way of messaging systems, Slack teams. Those types of messenger communications through staff members who were looking for connection and looking for commiseration, but really, not giving their brains the opportunity to rest and to step away from work and to do something else.

That, historically, has been what has been brilliant about having an office space you can go to, is that that's a context, it's a circumstance, there's a time frame that is normative, 9 to 5. When you leave, that's when you do your personal things and the other stuff in your life that matters to you like spend quality time with your kids and go for a run, fix up your house, whatever it is.

Without that context anymore, yes, people were starting to find that they were working more hours, they were working into the evenings, they were working throughout the weekends. There just really wasn't enough structure and enough context to be able to say, "Okay, this is where I stop." That moment of, this is where I stop, this is what my day looks like, really requires a lot of self-discipline.

There's no shame in not having had that discipline because there's also a lot of guilt associated with not keeping up with your colleagues and being a good teammate and certainly, in a VUCA circumstance, that is one where people really do start to regress to-- It's a good thing. It's a pro-social emotion, but the pro-social emotion is going to work the collective, helping others out, working when others are working, doing more for the team, and picking up more than your end of things.

People were overextending themselves and really, again, starting to feel, yes, rudderless and it's an unsustainable way to work. We saw high levels of anxiety, which we know that anxiety often leads to depression, and depression often leads to anxiety, they're comorbid. They live together. If you start to feel a little bit anxious, not very far down the line is that whole cascade of neurochemicals that will create a circumstance for negative effect and effectively depressive symptoms.

Mark Brisley: I know a lot of our listeners are going to be thinking, "Okay, if I have more self-awareness, then, of what's happening to me, I'm going to be looking for some tips and advice on how to use my brain better through the day," but just before I get to that, and this is somewhat of a personal question, but like many Canadians, a lot of us were used to commuting to the workplace. For many of us, that was taken away in a more permanent work from home environment.

I think I realized how much of that commuting timeframe was downtime for me, which has been taken away, to some extent. What are some of the things, in terms of structuring your day, that you're seeing that can help people replace that period of time that they may not have even been aware of was so important to decompress from the workplace before getting home and into the family life and those types of things?

Dr. Brynn: I think that really speaks to almost the need for a Pomodoro Technique or what we consider to be time blocking, where, I actually advocate that you get up early, but you don't necessarily start work right away. What you do is a moment, maybe, of meditation, and where you really do start to connect with what it was you wanted to get done, that you plan to get done.

Same on the back end of your workday is that you would take that time to, if not meditate or visualize or something that formal, but you take that time, to your point, decompress and change and move through context. Because context lead also to personas and normative behaviors and therefore, normative emotions.

As an example, the difference between feeling revved up and geared up and amped up to do your day. Then there's a gateway you've got to pass through in order to be calmer and start to wind down for the evening with your family and into bedtime.

To your question, Mark, it's not terribly personal, I don't think, because I share it with all of my audienceship, but is the idea that for me, actually, the last thing I do in my day is I work out. I don't work out first, because my job is as a knowledge worker, my most important priorities in a day typically require me to think and me to produce information from my brain.

What I do is I actually work out at the very end of my day. I use that time, almost like commuting time, as you described, to go through the gateway of changing contexts. This brings me to one of my key pointers because we wouldn't bring you down if we're not going to bring you back up again. It really allows for your brain to shut off. There's nothing quite like being fully, conscientiously immersed in physical activity, to allow your brain to actually relax.

I use that end of day workout because I don't want to spend my best energy on the treadmill, I want to spend my best energy on the brain work I have to do for the day for my job, but then second to that is, it's basically my commute back to family life, back to home life, back to relaxation.

I've often talked about, there's this inverse relationship between brain and body. What happens is that many people believe they're resting their brain when they're sleeping, but in actual fact, while you're sleeping is when your brain comes alive and vice versa. Despite how it feels while you're awake, your brain actually takes second fiddle to your body's energy requirements and oxygen requirements and water requirements. Despite how it feels, when you're sleeping, you feel like your brain is off and when you're awake, you feel like your brain is on. It's actually the inverse.

In wakeful hours, the moments that you spend exercising and I mean even just a light walk, those are the moments, in fact, that your brain gets to go offline and say, "Okay, I'm going to properly rejuvenate myself." The body is using up the good energy, certainly, and the oxygen, but that's really when your brain gets to take that moment to-- I want to say, it's a refractory period, but almost like to zone out, daydream, doesn't have to think of anything actively, your body is going through the motions, and you're on autopilot. It's a very valuable brain space akin to meditation and visualization for, in wakeful hours, renewing a lot of those neurochemicals that you would have depleted through your working hours.

Exercise of any kind is what I consider to be like-- movement is magic for the brain. It's because the minute that the body gets going, the brain says, "Okay, I can take a beat, I can daydream. I don't have to do anything exceptional." That's when we see that refractory period, that's when we see those neurochemicals replenish. It's when we see parts of the brain that are associated with pleasure and with replenishment. Those are the parts of the brain that start to become active.

Whether it feels like it or not, and this is another thing, the human experience is that like, "No, I don't want to go to the gym, I don't want to have to go and do exercise. That feels like exertion after the end of a long day." Actually, your brain craves it at a level that you don't have conscious access to, but it's very much required and that is, to your point, what I use as commute time, basically, from my work brain to my home and restful brain.

Mark Brisley: You have shared some really eye-opening thoughts with me around the importance of, first of all, sleep, but also diet, something that we probably don't think too much when we think about how our own brains are working.

Let's get right into every parent's favorite subject, which I think we've all come to a level of self-awareness has probably not been good for us either, mobile technologies. Your comment that your mobile phone is not your brain's friend. I'm probably as guilty as many on this call that are first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Can you touch a little bit more on that for us?

Dr. Brynn: You got it. Basically, all technology is not your brain's friend. Not really. Your brain was really evolved in a time when technology didn't exist, and of course, technology has changed more in the last seven years than in all the history of the earth. That's stressful for the brain, is trying to keep up with that level of acceleration, of innovation.

That level of overstimulation, you're constantly overstimulated. Those technologies, they emit a blue light which perturbs the pituitary gland. That pituitary gland is moderated by the hypothalamus, which of course, is part of your emotional and stress response in your brain.

The pituitary gland decides things like how much sleep you're going to get and how hungry you are and how much water you need, how happy you are. I'm simplifying, maybe oversimplifying, but those technologies really do mess with your brain in a way that you can't anticipate. You'll feel the effects of later, there's long term ramifications for that.

The hypothalamus, pituitary, and adrenal axis is an axis that goes through your body and connects brain and body through chemical messengers. Technology, and specifically, your mobile device which you keep close to your face and emits this blue light, it is the technology that will do the most damage to that HPA axis.

That HPA axis is the primary axis involved in biofeedback loops. When you hear about things like dopamine feedback loops or biofeedback loops, it's the HPA axis that is communicating within and through the body and vice versa, back to the brain. That blue light and all technology, really, including your television, and your computer monitor, your tablets, it wouldn't matter. They are all interfering with the normal cycling of the HPA axis.

The HPA axis is what also moderates your circadian rhythms, that 24-hour cycle that decides light versus dark and day versus night and therefore, sleep versus waking hours. It perturbs your ultradian cycles as well, which are the 90-minute cycles. We think somewhere between 90 and 120 minutes cycles that your brain operates on throughout the circadian rhythms.

You can imagine, then, that what seems like such a benign thing is to wake up and start with your mobile device in your face and the opposite end of the day when people say, "Well, I'm just going to go to bed, but you know what? I'm just going to answer a couple of emails in bed from this device." It's messing with your HPA. It's also, therefore, messing with your ability to sleep, produce melatonin, which, of course, sounds melatonin, serotonin, they're linked. They sound alike for a reason. How happy we are and how much sleep we get are intrinsically linked because they're sister hormones to one another.

Then there's another factor there, all together, and mobile devices, in particular, are very challenging. Also, because from a psychological perspective, so less about the neurochemistry and more about the fact that I often liken your mobile device to an infant that never grows up. If you're a parent, you know the experience of having to listen for your infant to cry, you're always attuned to it subconsciously even when you're doing something else, you're sharing your brain, listening for that baby.

What happens is that you know that baby's going to need you, and you're on high alert, but as your child grows, you stop sharing your brain so much.

Well, your mobile device is like an infant that never grows up. It will eventually need you, and you know that. If you're constantly sharing your brain again, maybe not the conscious experience of doing this, but subconsciously, you're sharing your brain with that mobile device, no matter where it is. One of my pieces of advice around mobile devices is certainly not to start or to end your day with it.

The second piece is, especially through moments when you need to concentrate and you really are wanting to have your full faculties and cognitive capacity at your disposal, I often say, put your mobile device in another room because many different studies have shown that even when that device is off, it's not receiving your transmitting, it's not a function of the electronics even, your brain is sharing space with it, thinking, "I might have to monitor it subconsciously because it might need me at some point."

People will tweet me afterward and say, "It sounds like the craziest thing. I've put that mobile device in the other room, I locked it in a drawer in two offices over and I was able to focus. Finally, I was able to get what I was floundering to get done. I was suddenly able to give all of my cognitive faculties to that task and get it done in record time."

My advice around mobile device, all technology truly, and certainly, for your kids is that your brain is really not designed to interact with it the way that we would like, and it's having a hard time. There's just no way your brain can adjust as fast as technology is advancing, and that blue light, it does perturb how it is that your brain functions and creates neurochemistry that makes you happy and functional and productive and motivated.

Mark Brisley: If we think about sleep as one way to feed the body and can't be understated as you say, food itself and feeding your body, and by extension, your brain, we've talked a little bit about that. I think I've read more articles in the last three or four months about, are you snacking more now that you're working from home? What are you putting into your body? Every magazine is talking about things like brain food. Is this something that we need to be thinking about? Maybe as a follow-up to that question, is brain food a real thing?

Dr. Brynn: That's such a great question. We often say, you are what you eat, but I also advocate that you eat what you are. Your brain, as an example is mostly fat and then protein. There are no carbohydrates in there, except for flowing through your bloodstream in the form of glycogen and glucose, and it's a lot of water. When we look to, well, what is sort of ideal brain food, for me, it's a composition, not just of the macronutrients, which is fat, protein, and carbohydrates, but also a real focus on micronutrients.

You know you and I, Mark, have spoken about this, but what I really advocate is that instead of-- If you've ever watched anything around nutritional information, diet information, you'll hear all kinds of different diets problematize fat in the early '90s and then problematize carbohydrates and so on. Instead of focusing on that, certainly for weight loss, I'm not really focused on weight loss.

If we look at performance and if you think of yourself as a high-performance athlete and your brain is its own machine that you have to fuel, you really want to be focused on what the ketogenics often advocate, but that's the idea that you're getting equal calories from fat and protein. Keto, certainly, advocates for more fat. At a very distant third, macronutrient would be carbohydrates. What you eat with that, when people say brain foods, well, it really depends about what you need and what you're lacking.

For me, it's more around, well, make sure that you're eating what you are because that's how your brain will replenish itself and how your body will replenish itself. Now, that's not to say that you don't need carbohydrates, but in good news, just about everything we eat has carbohydrates, and specifically, everything we eat that's nutrient-dense, you will find fairly high in carbohydrate, high enough, certainly enough to fuel your body and your brain.

What I mean by micronutrients or nutrient density is the things like vitamins and minerals and so on, but if, instead of focusing on calories or even on macronutrients, like fat protein, carbs. If instead what you focus on is the food in front of you being high in micronutrients, high in its nutrient density, what you will find is that in actual fact, God made it perfectly, it was in fact made high in fat, relatively high in protein, and then typically, with a good amount of carbohydrates.

If you look to the vegetables in front of you, you'll see very high levels of micronutrients. Fruits, of course, nuts high in fat, high in micronutrients, to some extent, some protein and always some carbohydrate. The stuff that's jam-packed within vitamins and minerals that you need to manufacture the neurochemistry that you need to be happy and productive, those are typically the right formulation for both brain and body.

Then, of course, it can't be overstated that the inverse is true, that when we start to look at processed foods, I use the example at the NSM of a big slab of steak as an example, what are we looking at? We're looking at high fat, sure; we're looking at some protein, sure; but we're looking at very few in the way of micronutrients.

It's not nutrient-dense food.

Depends on who you talk to, they'd say, "Well, isn't it good to have protein and fat?" It is, except for that there's not anything else in there, there's a little bit of iron, there's a couple of B vitamins, but basically, it's not nutrient-dense food. It's not micronutrient-dense food. That's where I would ignore the South Beach diet, ignore the zone, ignore the big macronutrients, and instead, focus on the micronutrients and jampacking as much micronutrients into everything that you can eat.

Two things will happen. One is, you'll have a lot more energy and you will be giving your body and your brain what it requires to manufacture the chemicals it needs, which of course, increase your energy and all that, but also, you'll be satiated quicker. People often tell me that when they start eating the brain food, which is not any particular food, I'm not advocating one food over another, if what you start to do is you start to focus on micronutrient consumption, and therefore absorption, what you start to find is that you're satiated faster, you have more energy longer, you aren't consumed with thoughts of food, you don't have these surges in insulin that keep you running back to the fridge or to the cupboard.

People do find that they're more motivated to exercise, they feel better as they exercise, their recovery is faster, their brain is clearer and more capable of focusing. Weight loss comes easier if it's something that you're trying to do.

Of course, you got to eat what you are, not just become what you eat. Water is really important, hydration throughout the day. Typically when we see people with headache, actually, they're dehydrated. You've probably heard before that by the time you feel thirst, you're dehydrated at the cellular level and those cells are body cells, not brain cells. By the time you're dehydrated at the body's cellular level, your brain has already given up two liters of water at least.

Your brain, somewhere between 8 and 10 volumetric liters of water, you've depleted it significantly and you can't focus and you can't manufacture the right neurochemicals, and you can't be productive or motivated if you're not properly hydrated. There again, by the time you're feeling thirst, it's too late if your brain has already given up because it takes second fiddle in waking hours to the body, it's already given up liters of water to your body. I advocate not doing big gulps once you feel that thirst, but sip all day long, even if you don't feel thirsty because that's in fact ideal.

Sipping rather than gulping will also help with absorption of the micronutrients that are required and will help with making sure that everything's functioning the way it should for both brain and body and producing, not just a happy person, but a person who is physically more capable. The whole system starts to work a lot better when we focus on proper levels of hydration consistently throughout the day and those micronutrient-dense foods.

Mark Brisley: I'm glad you just justified the gigantic water container that's been on my desk for the last several months. For someone who's listening to our call, there's such great information and context here about what's happening to us and the need to be more self-aware, but for someone who says, "I've heard everything Dr. Brynn is saying, and boy, there's a lot of things here I probably should be changing. These are big things that I have to restructure my day or my week." What's some of your advice to break this down into maybe smaller pieces or chunks to get someone started on thinking more about how to actually take action?

Dr. Brynn: Where I like to start is with one thing, I call it the rule of one. It's effectively to say, "Listen, do less, not more." That's a fundamental rule of thumb, both from a psychological perspective as well as from a neuroscience perspective, because the brain doesn't multitask. That's a fallacy. We don't actually do multiple things at once. Your brain is not a parallel processor, it is a singular processor, a serial processor.

What that means, also, in life is that, when you look at, "Well, where should I start on this? My goodness, this is a lot of information." Don't do it all at once, start with the thing that you want to do that may be an easier quick win or that you have a very high priority around.

Start there and experiment with it and work it out for yourself because everyone is different. I joke that, as much as it's all science, it's an art too. In the sense that, we're painters and I'm giving you a bunch of colors in your palette, but how you paint your painting, that's going to be up to you. What colors you choose, that'll be up to you. Before you start with a full complement of colors, let's say, on your palette, I say start with one and see how that works for you. What do you want to work on?

Then that extends too, to, not only cognitive prioritization of what do you want to get done, what matters to you, but it also really helps with conscientiousness and mindfulness and what we consider to be cognitive deliberateness around how you do what you do, and therefore, why you do it. We think that there are basically four resources in the world: time, money, relationships, and purpose. You can't find purpose if your brain is constantly toggling between a whole series of disconnected priorities.

Really, that priority is where I would say, Mark, start with the one thing that you want to work on, see how it goes, and then ladder up from there and go to the next thing after you've mastered the first. Whatever that is, are you going to work on diet, are you going to work on sleep, are you going to work on exercise, are you going to work on mindfulness, conscientiousness? There's all kinds of factors here.

Then from there, you ladder up and you reorganize your day, and you realize you've got to work with your ultradian cycle the right way. Your circadian rhythm is like no other, so you've got to think about your own sleep patterns for yourself, as well as your own wakeful patterns, your eating patterns, your exercise patterns, and your productive patterns.

These are things I encourage people to think about more deliberately, less conventionally and more purposely for yourself and experiment with. Then focus on the heaviest and highest priority thing for you and see how it goes. You've got to walk before you run, baby steps. Once you've mastered the first thing, you'll feel this highest level of self-confidence and competency, this idea that the opposite of an expectancy violation, you'll feel masterful. Then as you work through it, that masterfulness will start to bleed into other priorities and other ways of improving yourself and improving the use of your brain.

I'll say that we do really great research that shows that it doesn't matter where you start, it just matters that you start. A more conscientious focus on your brain actually has your brain being more conscientious about you and functioning better for you.

It's almost as if your brain is like a three-year-old without supervision. The minute that you start paying attention to it, and actually conscientiously and concertedly operating it and considering it and working with it, as opposed to convention or non-consciously working against it, then it knows you're paying attention to it, and it starts to perform better.

I could show it to you in an fMRI, where I say, "Okay, go about a regular activity, let's say, that you do on autopilot," certain parts of your brain will light up. Then I say, "Okay, now do that same activity again, but with your brain in mind, conscientiously thinking about the fact that you are operating your brain and your brain is operating you." New parts of your brain also light up that basically show us that your brain is now more performative, it's more functional, it's more motivated, it's more productive. All because you consciously made a decision to be mindful about it and conscientious about it.

For that reason, I hope it's music to people's ears to hear there's no right way. There's no wrong way. It doesn't matter where you start or what you start with, your performance and your cognitive and neuroscientific performance will improve.

Mark Brisley: There's so much to think about for us as individuals, Dr. Brynn. We will definitely have people on this call that have responsibility for employees or will manage teams. To close off with one final question for you, leadership has been tested during this pandemic and this environment. These are things that leaders probably should be aware of even in normal times, but as we think about leading people or being a supervisor of people right now. Based on all this information you've shared with us today, what's some of your advice for leaders to be more cognizant and aware of what's happening to their teams and how they're behaving as well as leaders understanding what it is you're trying to illustrate?

Dr. Brynn: It's a billion-dollar question, Mark, and it's a great one. I think, one of the truths is, when we think about ourselves as leaders, again, doing it in the most conscientious way possible is, there's no blanket answer because the real question is, what do they need from me right now in order to feel mobilized, to do their work and to manage these VUCA circumstances, and manage the volatility, the uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity? I think if you approach your people less with answers and more with questions, like this great quote I read recently, it says, the quality of your life is directly proportional to the quality of the questions that you ask. This includes leadership and management.

I think as you approach the people that you are responsible for directing, especially from a neuroscience perspective, a big proponent that before you can assert a directive or any guidance, you really do have to ask the questions. We do have really great research that shows that the more you listen, and this is going to sound awful, but even if you're gapping out and you're tuning them out and you're not even really paying attention, people will feel heard. That's important for people to calm their nervous systems and to be able to cope at the emotional level with the VUCA circumstances they find themselves in.

Starting with questions is very helpful for, really, getting a sense of what it is that they need from you right now, which will change on a daily basis and it'll change between people you manage, of course. What one person needs is going to be different in any given day than the next employee or direct report.

The idea that, starting with a question, that gives you time to figure out what they need. It also gives them time to feel heard. That is very important for them being able to calm their nervous systems and get done what they have to get done.

As you think about empowering people to cope for themselves because you can't do that for them, they have to want it, they have to do it for themselves, to do their jobs for themselves here again. I hear from a lot of managers who say, "I've never picked up more Slack in my life. I'm starting to feel very micromanage-y because I'm not watching the work get done." That, I think, is really a product of, first of all, evidence thereof that those people aren't able to focus and they're not able to manage their own neurochemistry in order to calm down enough to actually be able to get the stuff that they want to get done.

That's really what we're in the job of doing. It sounds crazy, but you're really in the job of calming their nervous system long enough to give them the resources, if you are a gatekeeper, that they need and otherwise, have them feel heard. Even if you don't do anything with it, that's what the research shows, is that even if you have no advice, no guidance, no extra resources, you have no answers, what the research shows is, the longer in that conversation that you listen, the more heard they will feel, and then, therefore, the calmer they will feel. That is how to manage a brain in chaos during VUCA circumstances.

I say, as a basic key take away or applicable, "Well, what can I do here?" Start with questions and see about how that helps with their performance and with them feeling calmer and with them more capable of managing themselves, and therefore, their workload.

I think if there was one more thing I would say is to manage expectations of yourself and of them. The truth is that when the brain is in a more chaotic space, its contextlessness, it's in a VUCA circumstance, that is when you really have to whittle it down to the highest priorities.

The rule of one applies here too, where it is to say, what's the one thing you want to get done today, or what's the one thing I expect of that direct report? Because you can't give them a laundry list. Just like they can't give themselves a laundry list and then come away disappointed, if you do the same thing, you will be disappointed. It's around listening, asking the right questions, listening, and then helping co-create, what is the top priority? What's the one thing for the day? The rule of one. What is that one thing that we want to focus on for the day because then everyone has the win.

As a manager, you watch progress happen. Most people have pleasing instincts, so they feel like they've accomplished what they needed to accomplish. They feel accomplished and satisfied with their day. No one's had any expectancy violations. Everyone is feeling squared away in terms of what they were hoping for. Then, yes, there's been enough listening happening and co-creation of priorities and conscientiousness around it that people's nervous systems are calmer. They're more capable of coping with the extra stuff that everyone is feeling now and will continue to feel if they work from home.

Even if we have a vaccine and we're still working from home, we'll be in a circumstance where your dog is at your feet, and your kid is asking a question and someone's knocking on the door. There's just so many distractions at home, that it's not a great place often for people to be able to focus. Those are the two key takeaways, is start with the questions and manage expectations, what's the one thing?

Mark Brisley: Well, Dr. Brynn, as you've talked about time, time even has a premium on podcasts, unfortunately, but these subjects are just so important. It's almost, to some degree, unfortunate that we're talking about it during a pandemic and a not-so-normal time because it's clearly just as important when we're not going through something like what we're experiencing right now. I really wanted to thank you for these insights, and you definitely have busted some myths and challenged conventional wisdom. Just really happy that you were able to join us, so thank you.

Dr. Brynn: Thank you, Mark. Thanks for having me.

Mark Brisley: In the meantime, I encourage all of our listeners to follow Dr. Brynn on her social media platforms, and as well, you can find her content directly on drbrynn.com. As I mentioned at the top of the podcast, to look for her upcoming book, WFH: A Brain-Based Perspective For Redesigning Your Workday To Feel More Motivated and Get More Done. This has been another edition of On The Money. Thank you so much for joining us.

Mark Brisley: You've been listening to another edition of On The Money with Dynamic Funds. For more information on dynamic and our complete fund lineup, contact your financial advisor or visit our website @dynamic.ca.

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