Anxiety is a roadmap that points us to a real or imagined threat, pain from the past or something in the present that needs our attention. While anxiety can be debilitating and must be managed, we need it. If we disable or mute our anxiety indicators, we won't know where the problem is.

We need anxiety

Thoughts can help shape behaviour and therefore reality. But motivation is mostly a physiological issue, not a mind issue. The "fight, flight, or freeze" response is activated by a physiological mechanism inside the nervous system. When you are stuck in fight or flight, such as panic or racing thoughts, you are not able to think your way out. Turning the amygdala response off is the key to motivation. The amygdala is your panic button in the brain. If your brain is perceiving a threat, it will shut down your system (procrastination) or put it in hyperarousal (motivation).

You can't think your way out of stuck

"Mental" health has very little to do with our minds. A nervous system stuck in a fight, flight, or freeze response will show the exact symptoms as clinical depression or pathological anxiety. The nervous system is not an illness or disorder. It is doing exactly what it is designed to do. When a brain is stuck in fight, flight, or freeze it is misattuning to safety and danger in the environment. If we see mental health as an actual physical process, then we have a greater chance of finding our way to tools that can get ourselves unstuck.

Mental health is a physical process

The actions that destroy our plans and relationships are a suboptimal effort at self-protection. What we call “self-sabotage” often happens because if you achieve a goal, things will need to change. All change involves some degree of loss. Any change to our status quo can trigger a threat response as change requires risk.

Self-sabotage is a misnomer


Not all behaviour is acceptable, but all behaviour is functional. Behaviour modification without understanding behaviour will almost always make us inert. You don't need to make giant behavioural transformations to get unstuck-getting unstuck requires tiny micro-shifts, and those shifts compound rapidly. Once you're in motion, your cognitive work suddenly becomes powerful.

All behavior is functional

A psychotherapist insists, “‘Mental’ health has very little to do with our minds.”


Stashed ideas

There’s no such thing as self-sabotage. A psychotherapist debunks the most common concepts that keep us stuck

Increasing your productivity is easy. It’s just a matter of making a few simple changes to your routine, or behaviour, or thinking, and your productivity will soar.
At least, that’s what countless online articles claim. The actual science tells a different story. Even a modest amount of research reveals that some of the most commonly touted claims about how to boost productivity fall apart in the face of the evidence.

The Advice On The Internet About Increasing Productivity

It's regularly claimed that you'll be more productive if you get up early - very early. However, there are many reasons why waking up early could be actively unproductive.
Sleep is crucial for our ability to function, and depriving yourself of it does more harm than good.

Myth 1: Waking up at 4 am will make you more productive

<ul><li>The most successful people experience 24-hour days just like anyone else.</li><li>However, the ability to use those hours productively differs tremendously from person to person.</li><li>Context is everything.</li><li>It's far easier to use time productively when you have the money and resources.</li><li>Few people have the option to use that time 100-percent productively.</li></ul>

Myth 2: We All Have The Same 24 Hours A Day

<ul><li>The idea that constantly being busy is the only way to be truly productive is the default assumption for many people</li><li>In truth, it has long been known that multitasking or 'task switching' actually erodes your productivity</li><li>The human brain has limited resources when it comes to attention and working memory - our abilities to focus on and think about things</li><li>Overworking yourself will compromise your ability to do simple tasks effectively</li></ul>

Myth 3: Keeping Busy Means Being More Productive

<ul><li>According to many people, productivity is linked to happiness - the happier you are, the more productive you will be.</li><li>However, scientific studies reveal that happy workers are only 12% more productive.</li><li>Persuading people to be happy often backfires: If people believe they must be happy, it is harder for them to achieve their goals.</li></ul>

Myth 4: You Should Be Happy in Your Work

<ul><li>As much as we might want to believe otherwise, when countless people are working equally hard for the same goals, the most important factor is actually going to be... plain old luck!</li><li>You can't tell people to 'be lucky' in the same way you can cajole them to work hard.</li><li>Our brains are sensitive to the balance between effort and reward.</li><li>When the effort we put in is not rewarded as expected, it causes stress and negative emotions.</li></ul>

Myth 5: Hard Work Always Pays Off

How much truth is behind the productivity myths touted by influencers, and do we all need to be setting our alarms for 4am?

A neuroscientist debunks the biggest productivity myths | BBC Science Focus Magazine

<ul><li>A large percentage of the population believe they were born with an innate learning style. </li><li>Studies show no evidence for learning styles, and many researchers fear they may discourage proven educational practices. </li><li>People, especially children, are learning generalists who should engage in many different methods of learning.</li></ul>

Key Takeaways

A prevalent neuromyth is that of “learning styles.” According to this belief, people can be classified by how they learn best and should concentrate their educational efforts in that mode. If someone is an auditory learner, the idea goes, she’ll master a subject or skill faster and more effectively by listening to lectures than reading books or through first-hand experiences.The idea of learning styles has infected our education systems and people’s understanding of themselves. And psychologists worry this can have consequences in our <a href="https://bigthink.com/smart-skills/lifelong-learning/">lifelong-learning</a> pursuits.

The Neuromyth Of Learning Styles

There is a grain of truth to the myth. Namely, people do differ in their abilities and preferences. The VARK learning model, for example, classifies people as either visual, auditory, reading/writing, or kinesthetic (hands-on) learners. Each method is part of the learning process, and people will have their favourites. Such preferences are as true in education as anything else in life.Many proponents believe learning styles are inheritable, emerge early in childhood, have a physiological basis, predict learning outcomes, and are immutable.

The Elements of Learning Style

Recent studies found no supporting evidence that learning was enhanced by a slavish dedication to a student’s learning styleIn fact, despite broad acceptance, studies continued to show no benefit to a learning-style approach. As <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1041608009000375">one study’s authors</a> so aptly put it: “The most important finding of this study is, in essence, a non finding.”

The Learning Style Does Not Matter

Why then does the learning styles myth survive despite the evidence and experts’ red-faced arguments? Because like all neuromyths, it tells us something we want to believe. The classic music myth gives worried parents a sense of control. The 10-percent myth tells us we’re secretly super-geniuses who just need to unlock our potential.

Busting The Learning Style Myth

People prefer brain-based accounts of behaviour, and they like to categorize people into types. Learning styles allow people to do both of those things.It may also tie into common misconceptions of success.Success is complicated. It requires the right mixture of education, resources, skill, and luck. But we tend to streamline this equation into specialization equals success.

A Multi-Style Approach To Learning

Engage with subjects in as many material ways as possible. Read, converse, seek out examples, get hands-on, and experiment. While we may have preferences, we should also challenge ourselves to try new methods and re-engage with less-favoured ones. Each style is its own “genre” and each can be valuable in the creation of your lifelong-learning path.

Take The Generalist Approach

Learning styles are supposed to help learners take ownership of their education, but research doesn’t back up this well-intentioned myth.

Busting the learning styles myth: Why learning generalists perform best

Agile ways of working originated in IT, proving their worth in technology and software companies. In the past decade, agile practices have spread to other sectors, resulting in enterprise-wide agility in banking, retail, healthcare, and insurance (see sidebar, “Organizations are on the move”). Here, we look at heavy industries: oil, gas, mining, chemicals, and utilities. Agile working can make these <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-impact-of-agility-how-to-shape-your-organization-to-compete">organizations faster, more efficient, and more resilient</a>.

The Agile Model Of Working

Agile approaches have long been shown to work well when the product or process weighs little or nothing, such as in banking, technology, and insurance. Agile thinking is being adopted by different players in energy and heavy industries, evidenced by advanced-analytics cases and the experience (and working practices) of frontline workers. But still, to date, while aware of the benefits of agility, traditionally heavy-industry organizations have been slower to adopt agile ways of working across their entire organization.

Agile Working For Other Sectors

Enterprise agility cuts across the organization, digital and nondigital. We see impactful examples of agility in, for instance, <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/digging-deep-for-organizational-innovation">procurement</a> or continuous improvement, or analytics. Agile practices give autonomy to cross-functional teams (outside any digital initiatives) in any part of the organization; it can accelerate improvement programs of any sort that create business value. Heavy industries are highly technical, so they benefit even more from a model that focuses on effective cross-discipline working and bringing in a minimum-viable product (MVP) mindset.

Myth 1: The Value of Agile Working is limited to IT/Tech, Software, and Digital Products

Agile ways of working and thinking can apply not only to changes in equipment design but also to measurement and analytics. In a collaborative effort involving people inside and outside the organization, virtual “go and sees” were conducted with leading global mining companies and agile squads were institutionalized to drive change management. Advanced analytics were then used to deploy ten predictive models and two linear optimization models in an agile manner to achieve cost savings of approximately $3.5 million.

Seeing Is Believing

Any process run by people can be improved upon and can benefit from an agile approach of fast learning and high levels of ownership and accountability in teams. This applies across core run activities, such as production delivery or maintenance planning and execution. Introducing and maintaining agile working is worth not only the initial push but also the longer-term effort. At first, the language of agile can indeed be a block, but each organization already has its own terms of art (one might say jargon), and the language of agile working can match those terms.

Myth 2: Agile Working is Unsuitable for Regular Activities And Difficult to Introduce

Lean and agile ways of working complement each other, and the magic is in the combined recipe from both. In reality, both systems have been successful across a range of environments, and both share a similar set of foundational objectives: <ul><li>Transparently connect strategy and goals to give teams meaningful purpose; </li><li>Discover better ways of working to continually learn and improve; </li><li>Deliver value efficiently for a customer; </li><li>Enable people to contribute and lead to their fullest potential.</li></ul>

Myth 3: Agile and Lean are Different or Exactly the Same. Can they work together?

Lean organizations identify and eliminate activity that is not valued by the customer or end user. This systematic analysis of processes and value streams can reduce waste, variability, and inflexibility; it boosts performance in cost control, product quality, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement—often simultaneously. Lean thinking represents a mindset of continuous improvement and flexible working in which all employees contribute new ideas; the organization becomes better over time. Freed from non-value-generating tasks, people can focus more on what matters to customers.

What Lean Organizations Do

When run together, lean processes bring the holistic view and basic principles, while agile processes bring the ﬂexibility of short-cycle implementations (sprints) for continuous improvement. The lean approach tends to be more applicable to continuous improvements, providing directions or outside-in solutions to the value stream as part of the daily operational routine. The agile approach can bring the alignment and transparency of objectives to combine the expertise from the shop ﬂoor with short-cycle improvements.

Lean Plus Agile

Heavy industries have to manage multiple time horizons; that is, everything from problems solved over decades to problems solved in minutes. So while they have long capital planning, building, and maintenance cycles, they also have imminent demands. As agility combines dynamism with stability, a backbone of the right processes in governance, coordination, and transparency can exist alongside agile practices in planning, executing, and interacting with customers and suppliers.

Myth 4: Agile Working is Too Short Term to Add Value to Operations

Within each stage gate, agile thinking can accelerate and clarify a process; so within a design or planning cycle, an agile approach can shorten decision times and—by being inherently flexible—address and overcome delays.

Agile Works In Multiple Time Horizons

Safety is critical. Agile’s emphasis on transparency, ownership and reduced handovers is especially important and relevant. Successful efforts here engage employees and build a strong safety culture, which has always been—and should continue to be—at the heart of asset-heavy companies. Combined with greater empowerment, that culture could forge real safety ownership in the front line, led by strong role modelling from top management down.

Myth 5: Safety-Oriented Cultures Cannot ‘Test and Learn’

At the team level, where safety practice and culture is played out, an agile mindset means a continuous cycle of team learning and adaptation (learn fast) while managing risks effectively.   Any set of decisions can be made more transparent and more linear by an agile approach: decisions can be attached to a given point in time so that a series of small decisions becomes clear; these can be implemented in short learning cycles, reducing risks, correcting mistakes, and increasing the chance of success.

Working With Agility And Safety

Five agility myths in energy and heavy industries

<ul><li>ESP or the sixth sense is referred to as the process of perceiving without the use of the known senses</li><li>clairvoyance is one variety of ESP, where a person is able to gather information without the use of the physical senses</li></ul>

Extrasensory Perception (ESP)

<ul><li>New research led by the University of Melbourne found out that people could reliably sense that a change has occurred without being able to visually identify the change. </li><li>The research design involved presenting observers with a pair of human photographs for a short period of time, in some of which there would be minor difference, and asking:</li></ul>1) if there is a change, mostly answered correctly2) what the change was (from a number of alternatives), which the observers often couldn’t answer <ul><li>According to the findings, the results can be explained without invoking an extrasensory mechanism. </li></ul>

There’s no such thing as self-sabotage. A psychotherapist debunks the most common concepts that keep us stuck

A neuroscientist debunks the biggest productivity myths | BBC Science Focus Magazine

Busting the learning styles myth: Why learning generalists perform best

Five agility myths in energy and heavy industries

Debunking the sixth sense

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