1
Slowing Down, Speeding Up, and Your "Runaway Brain" . . . What Are We Talking About?

There is no such thing as overtraining . . . just underresting.

-Allen Lim, PhD founder, Skratch Labs

Slowing Down . . . What's That Mean?

From Robb:

Having spent almost a decade in the cycling industry, I had so many opportunities to learn about slowing down in order to speed up. But my thoughts were usually going so fast I probably missed most of them. That is, until my friend Allen Lim dropped this nugget on me one day. Dr. Lim is one of the world's leading authorities on exercise physiology, specifically in bicycling. Anyone outside of cycling may not know his name, but if we were to rattle off a list of athletes who have hired him to help them win races, medals, competitions, or contracts, that would be a heck of a list.

I first heard him say this right after he had finished consulting for a Tour de France team years ago. He was sharing his months-long experience with us and throughout the course of his stories, his quote made more and more sense.

For those who are unaware, and regardless of your opinion of cycling, the Tour de France is arguably one of the hardest, most grueling events in all of sports. And it requires quite an investment of suffering in order to complete the event. Competitors typically ride a minimum of 100 miles every day for three weeks straight. There are only two days off. The stages typically include climbing, sprinting, hours-long turns riding at the front to block the wind, and countless trips back and forth to the team car to gather food, water, and supplies. Got a bee sting? Road rash? Sunburn? Saddle sore? (Yes, that's a real thing and at least as painful as you can imagine it to be.) Too bad. You must deal with it and fight through the pain, because many of the medicines used to heal these problems are banned in and out of competition.

So Al was sharing with us that his job is to help the riders figure out ways to stay healthy and strong up to and through the last week of the race. A lot of riders believe that they need to grind it out no matter what, all day and every day. They have been told "it will only make me stronger for tomorrow, so harden the "f" up!" This is a mindset that many professionals carry into their sales, customer service, clinical, insurance, real estate, and trade careers. Spoiler alert: There's always a story about failure or burnout that follows the admission.

Al's job was to help the athletes learn, understand, and apply different techniques for doing just the right amount of work exactly when they needed to while racing, so that their bodies could fully recover between stages. Climbers should ride their hardest only in the climbs. Sprinters can sit in until the last possible moment. Domestiques (the guys who do all the grunt work and protect the team leader[s]) can take turns, never going a minute longer than they need to at the front of the pack.

The lesson for these cyclists is this: You think you are tired from working too hard. That's only part of it. You are actually tired from not taking the proper amount of time to recover. You waste energy doing things you don't need to do to achieve the goal. And then you don't value your "down time" enough to let yourself rest and recover properly. You are already thinking about tomorrow when you haven't even finished today. You're not fully present where you are right now, and instead you are creating turbulence, and that's what's exhausting you.

Cure for the Common "GO!"

Here's the deal: most of you reading this book aren't cyclists. But the lesson is still relevant for you, personally and professionally. Replace the word "cyclist" with "realtor" or "financial advisor" or "artist" or whatever your profession or your goal is.

Imagine a financial advisor studying for her Series 65. She spends a ton of time studying, typically after a full workday. She tries reading when she is tired. Her mind is elsewhere. She forgets what she read. And this happens over and over and over again. She starts thinking about what will happen if she doesn't get her studying done. It stresses her out. She stays up late and doesn't get a good night sleep. Every single appointment the next day is unproductive. Are you starting to see how the idea of "powering through" isn't serving you? Are you starting to notice that taking a little more "down time" will help you operate more effectively during your "up time"?

Stop trying to "fight through" to get what you want. Stop ignoring reality. Start rethinking how you approach things. Start putting the appropriate amount of time, effort, and mental bandwidth into not only working smarter but also thinking smarter. Thinking smarter means less small thinking and more big thinking, less overthinking, and more relaxing.

Real-Life Examples

When it comes to slowing down in order gain progress, there are examples we can find everywhere to understand the importance of this tactic.

An airline pilot's job is to safely travel from origin to the destination. If he can make it there on time, that's a bonus! But the ultimate goal is to get the plane safely to the destination.

How many times have you been on the plane, in your seat, slightly overheated, wondering when this plane is going to take off. All of a sudden the sweet, soothing sound of "Boi-n-n-ng" comes over the loudspeaker, followed by "Ladies and gentleman, this is your Captain speaking. We are currently number 12 for takeoff, but don't worry, we'll make it up in the air. So for now, just go ahead and sit back and relax, we'll be off the ground in just a bit."

You might think the pilot needs to speed up in order to achieve his goal. He needs to fly faster than he had planned in order to get to the destination on time. But there's more at stake here.

The pilot needs to get to the airspace where the destination air-traffic controller can get the plane in the queue to land. Once there, the pilot receives instructions on where to be and when (and at what speed) in order to keep the air traffic flowing smoothly.

Here's the best and potentially most overlooked part. In order for the pilot to achieve the goal (landing safely at the destination), the most important thing he needs to do is slow the plane down. If the pilot does not decrease the speed of the plane, it literally can't land, and he'll never achieve the goal.

How many projects, conversations, activities, meetings, and so on never got finished simply because you never took a second to "lay off the gas" in order to let things fall into place, instead of having the emergency brake pulled, bringing everything to a screeching halt?

Here's another example from football (the American type, not soccer). In order to snap the ball and start the play, everyone on the offense needs to be standing still. If someone on the offense rushes to start the play, they are penalized and subsequently get moved further from their goal. Even taking two to three seconds to stop and think can mean the difference between one step forward instead of two steps back.

Ever driven in the snow? If you have, you know that the worst thing you can do when sliding on a slippery surface is to steer the car back in the lane as hard as you can. If you haven't driven in the snow, I'll describe what happens. Your car is on its own course. All 100-200 pounds of you is not going to be able to get the two to three tons of automobile back on the road. No matter how hard you try or how fast you steer, you simply have to slow the car down. Only then can the tires grab and allow you to regain control. The car is downright out of control until you slow it down and take control of it.

Your mind operates the same way, and if allowed to careen along it can become a Runaway Brain. This is what we'll be talking about in the next few pages.

What's a "Runaway Brain" and Why Should You Care?

Take this yes/no quiz:

• Have you ever met someone for the first time, shook their hand, repeated their name, and then literally five seconds later you couldn't remember their name?
• Have you ever been reading something, reached the end of a page, and realized that your mind had been . . . elsewhere, and as a result you had zero idea what you'd just "read"?
• Have you ever had a day at work when you worked to the point of exhaustion, and then realized that you had just run in circles all day and therefore didn't actually accomplish anything?
• Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night and then not been able to get back to sleep because your mind was racing about something work related?

It's likely you answered yes to all four of these, but even if you said yes to only one question, you've experienced Runaway Brain.

How Your Brain "Runs Away"

Your brain "runs away" in two ways: Sometimes it runs away like a dog runs away - you open the door,...