The Full Stack: On stress and performance

Hi pals! Welcome to The Full Stack, where we design a purposeful life through one proven concept each week, along with a practical experiment to bring it to life.

💬 Quote

💬 Concept

The set-up

In 1908, psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson studied the relationship between stress and performance by studying forty Japanese dancing mice:

• Enter the darker box = get shocked by electricity (in varying degrees)

• Enter the brighter box = good, no electricity

They varied the brightness of the boxes, to make distinguishing the colors a challenge. Then, they measured how many trials it took the mice to consistently choose the brighter box.

The findings

• Weak shocks: The mice struggled to learn, taking many trials to avoid the darker box

• Moderate shocks: Learning was faster, needing significantly fewer numbers of trials to learn

• Strong shocks: Here’s the counter-intuitive part — While one might assume more electricity = more stimulus to learning quicker, the stronger shocks actually caused major declines in performance again

The experiment’s conclusion? Too little or too much stress results in poorer performance, but there is a sweet spot to hit at a moderate level of stress.

Further theorizing and refining of the Yerkes-Dodson law (more of a concept than a law, tbh) highlighted how that sweet spot can differ between the complexity of tasks, and individual attributes like skill level, personality traits and confidence.

I’ll add another:

The number of high-stress tasks a person is juggling at any given time

The mice weren’t trying to juggle work and paying bills and eating healthy and sleeping enough and catching up with friends and everything else life has to throw at them, after all.

What we can learn from this concept

This nearly-120 year old experiment indicates that you perform your optimal best when you’re outside your comfort zone, but not when you’re forced all the way out into the outer realm of dangers.

1. You need enough stress to motivate you, but not too much that it’ll overwhelm you

2. Recognize that your capacity is a finite resource, and that you shouldn’t be juggling 20 high-stress balls at the same time

🎯 Discover your sweet spot

We all have our own relationship with pressure, so this is going to be a constant experiment. Pay attention to how your brain and body react to stress, and note the patterns in a journal.

⬆️ Introduce stress to manageable tasks

Introduce elements to keep your brain motivated and get to the finish line, like setting a time limit with a pomodoro, finding an accountability buddy for mutual progress checks, or building in public (my method right now!).

⬇️ Pump less adrenaline for complex tasks

More clarity and calm would help here, so you could create an environment that allows you to do that, like meditation sessions, limiting distractions on your devices, and breaking down big tasks into smaller steps, so they become less overwhelming over time.

While growth doesn’t happen in the comfort zone, it doesn’t mean that we should dive in headfirst into chaos either.

Or get electrocuted! 😅 

🧪 Experiment

Hypothesis:

Getting an accountability buddy for a complex task will help me work more efficiently.

Experiment set-up:

1. Pick a complex task you’ve been putting off, and find an accountability buddy (feel free to reply to this email, and I can be yours!)

2. Schedule regular check-ins — this could be a quick daily text or a weekly recap email

3. Track how much more progress you make when someone’s expecting an update.

For the first time — thank you for reading, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it!

Please feel free to reply with any of your thoughts, suggestions, or if you just wanted to say hi 👋

Cheers,
Jalyn

_{If you’ve reached this far down… I’m committed to bringing new ideas and experiments every week, so if you liked this concept, I’d really appreciate if you would forward this email to someone who might also find it interesting and helpful.}