Why The Science Of Feel-Good Productivity Will Transform Your Life In 2024
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By the way, in case you haven't heard, my brand new book, Feel Good Productivity, is now out. It is available everywhere books are sold. And it's actually hit the New York Times and also the Sunday Times bestseller list. So thank you to everyone who's already got a copy of the book. If you've read the book already, I would love a review on Amazon. And if you haven't yet checked it out, you may like to check it out. It's available in physical format and also ebook and also audiobook everywhere books are sold.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to Deep Dive, which is normally the weekly podcast where I have the immense privilege of sitting down with entrepreneurs and authors and creators and other inspiring people, and we find out how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help build a life that we love. This episode is a little bit different because, as you may or may not know, my brand new book, Feel Good Productivity, is now out. Yes, it's out finally. After three and a half years of work, it is finally available for purchase in stores all around the world. And

And in this episode, I thought we would include the segment of the audiobook that's the introduction to the book. So if you haven't yet listened to the audiobook and you want to get a flavor for what the book is about, this is the introduction. It's the first chapter where I lay out the thesis of Feel Good Productivity, which is what it's all about. And I tell the story of how I first discovered the principles of Feel Good Productivity.

So, if you're interested in checking out the book, there will be links in the show notes. If you want to check them out, you can go to feelgoodproductivity.com. You can check it out on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Waterstones or, you know, wherever you normally get your books. And I'd really appreciate your support. If you've gotten value from my content, I would love it if you could buy a copy of the book. But hopefully, this introduction gives you a bit of an idea as to what's going on with the book and then you can decide whether it's something you might like to hear more of. So, without further ado, here is the introduction to Feel Good Productivity, read by me. ♪

Merry Christmas, Ali. Try not to kill anyone. With these words, my consultant breezily hung up the phone, leaving me to handle an entire ward of patients alone. I was a newly qualified junior doctor, and three weeks previously, I'd made a rookie error, forgetting to fill out a form to request the holidays off. Now here I was, managing a hospital ward on my own on Christmas Day.

Things had started badly and rapidly got worse. When I arrived at the hospital, I was met by an avalanche of patient histories, diagnostic reports, and cryptic scan requests that would have made more sense to a seasoned archaeologist than an on-call radiologist. Within minutes, I was confronted by the day's first emergency, a man in his 50s who had collapsed from a severe cardiac arrest. And then one of the nurses informed me that a patient urgently needed a manual evacuation, if you know, you know.

At 10.30am, I looked around the ward. Nurse Janice was sprinting up and down Corridor A in a panic, her arms overflowing with IV drips and medication shots. On Corridor B, a stubborn elderly patient was loudly demanding his misplaced dentures. Corridor C had been taken over by a drunken exile from the emergency department, wandering the corridor and shouting, Olive! Olive! I never learned who Olive was.

And every minute, somebody was making a new demand. Dr. Ali, can you check on Mrs. Johnson's fever? Dr. Ali, can you help with Mr. Singh's elevated potassium? I soon found myself starting to panic. Medical school hadn't prepared me for anything like this. Until then, I'd always been quite an effective student. Whenever the going got tough, my strategy was simple. Work harder. It was a method that had got me into medical school seven years previously. It had allowed me to secure a handful of publications in academic journals.

It had even allowed me to launch a business while I studied. Discipline was the only productivity system I knew, and it worked. Except now, it wasn't working. Since starting as a doctor a few months previously, I'd felt like I was drowning. Even when I worked late into the night, I couldn't see the number of patients or finish the paperwork that I needed to. My mood was suffering too. I'd enjoyed my medical training to be a doctor, but I was finding the actual job utterly depressing, constantly worrying that I might make a mistake that would kill someone.

I stopped sleeping, friendships faded, my family stopped hearing from me, and I just kept working harder. And now this, Christmas day, alone on a hospital ward, failing to get through my shift. Everything came to a head when I dropped a tray of medical supplies, sending syringes flying across the linoleum floor. As I forlornly looked down at my damp scrubs, I realized I had to figure things out, or my dream of becoming a surgeon would slip through my fingers. That night, I hung up my stethoscope, grabbed a mince pie, and opened my laptop.

I'd once been so productive, I thought. What had I forgotten? During my first year at medical school, I'd become obsessed with the secrets of productivity. I'd stayed up night after night making notes on hundreds of articles, blog posts and videos promising the key to optimal performance. All the gurus emphasized the importance of hard slog. A Muhammad Ali quote came up a lot. I hated every minute of training, but I said, don't quit, suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.

As Christmas turned to Boxing Day, I stayed up, poring over my old notes, and wondered whether that was where I was going wrong. Did I just need to regain my old work ethic? But when I returned to work the next day, resolving to just do more, it made no difference. Even though I stayed on the ward until midnight, and even though I was reciting Muhammad Ali's line to myself during my toilet breaks, I wasn't getting through my paperwork any quicker. My patience was still getting a tired, ineffective version of Ali, and I was still displaying a conspicuous lack of Christmas cheer.

At the end of my hardest day yet, I felt completely underwater. And then from nowhere, I remembered some words of wisdom from my old tutor, Dr. Barclay. If the treatment isn't working, question the diagnosis. Slowly and then all at once, I started to doubt all the productivity advice I'd absorbed. Did success really require suffering? What was success anyway? Was suffering even sustainable? Did it make sense that feeling overwhelmed would be good for getting things done? Did I have to trade my health and happiness for, well, anything?

It would take me a few months, but I was stumbling my way to a revelation that everything I'd been told about success was wrong. I couldn't hustle my way to becoming a good doctor. Working harder wasn't going to bring me happiness. And there was another path to fulfillment, one that wasn't lined with constant anxiety, sleepless nights, and a concerning dependence on caffeine. I didn't have all the answers, not by a long shot,

But for the first time, I could make out the beginnings of an alternative approach. An approach that didn't hinge on exhaustingly hard work, but on understanding what made hard work feel better. An approach that focused on my well-being first and used that well-being to drive my focus and motivation second. An approach I would come to refer to as feel-good productivity. The surprising secrets of feel-good productivity. Back in medical school, my obsession with productivity had led me to tack on an extra year to earn a psychology degree.

As I started putting together the pieces of feel-good productivity, I remembered a study I'd been tested on, one that involved a candle, a book of matches, and a box of thumbtacks. Picture yourself with these three objects before you. Your task is to stick the candle to the corkboard on the wall so that, when it's lit, the candle wax won't drip onto the table below. You find yourself puzzling over the items, turning them over in your hands. Can you think of the solution?

And here in the supplementary PDF you will find the diagram, but I'll just describe it to you because I know that you might be listening to this while driving or something. Basically, it's a diagram of a candle, three matches, and a box of thumbtacks. So when presented with this problem, most people only consider the candle, the matches, and the thumbtacks. But more innovative minds recognize the potential of the thumbtack box. The optimal solution to the puzzle involves viewing the thumbtack box not just as a container, but as a candle holder.

And again, in the supplementary PDF, you'll see what this looks like in diagrammatic form. Basically, the box is attached to the wall using the thumbtacks, which are these little pin thingies. The candle is on top of the box and the matches are underneath. And so the idea is that if the candle drips, the wax goes onto the box rather than onto the floor, thus solving the problem. This is the candle problem, a classic test of creative thinking.

First developed by Karl Dunker and published posthumously in 1945, it has since been used in countless studies, testing everything from cognitive flexibility to the psychological fallout of stress. In the late 1970s, psychologist Alice Eisen used it as the basis for an influential experiment to study how mood affects people's creativity. Eisen began by dividing her volunteers into two groups. One group was given a small gift, a bag of candy, before facing the candle problem.

The other group started the task with no such incentive. The theory went that those who were given the sweets would have a more positive mood when they tried to solve the puzzle. Eisen found something interesting. Those whose moods were subtly improved by the gift were significantly more successful in solving the candle problem. When I first read about Eisen's experiment during my psychology degree, I found it interesting but not exactly transformative. Personally, I'd never felt the overwhelming urge to stick a candle to a wall.

But coming back to it as a junior doctor, I realized that Eisen's insight was quite profound. It suggested that feeling good doesn't just end with feeling good. It actually changes our patterns of thought and behavior. I now learned that the study had become the cornerstone of a wave of research exploring the way positive emotions affect many of our cognitive processes. It showed that when we're in a positive mood, we tend to consider a broader range of actions, be more open to new experiences, and better integrate the information we receive.

In other words, feeling good boosts our creativity and our productivity. One of the first people to explore how exactly this works was Barbara Fredrickson. A professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Fredrickson is one of the leading figures in positive psychology, a relatively new branch of psychology that focuses on understanding and promoting happiness. In the late 1990s, Fredrickson proposed what she called the "broaden and build" theory of positive emotions.

According to the broaden and build theory, positive emotions broaden our awareness and build our cognitive and social resources. Broaden refers to the immediate effect of positive emotions. When we're feeling good, our minds open up, we take in more information, and we see more possibilities around us. Consider the candle problem. In a positive mood, participants were able to see a broader range of potential solutions.

Build refers to the long-term effects of positive emotions. When we experience positive emotions, we build up a reservoir of mental and emotional resources that can help us in the future. Resources like resilience, creativity, problem-solving skills, social connections, and physical health. Over time, these two processes reinforce each other, creating an upward spiral of positivity, growth, and success.

The theory suggests a whole new way of understanding the role of positive emotions in our lives. They're not just fleeting feelings that come and go without consequence. They're integral to our cognitive functioning, our social relationships, and our overall well-being. Positive emotions are the fuel that drives the engine of human flourishing. Why feel-good productivity works When I first started learning about Broaden and Build, I caught a glimpse of a different way of thinking about my life.

For years, I thought that by simply hustling harder, I could achieve the things I wanted. If I wanted to be a good doctor, the life ahead of me would be defined by grinding, unrelenting work. Now I could see another way. Fredrickson's theory suggests that positive emotions change the way our brains operate. Step one is feeling better. Step two is doing more of what matters to us. But why, I wondered. The more I read, the more I realized that the explanations are varied and in some cases remain unclear.

But scientists have started to home in on a few answers. First, feeling good boosts our energy. Most of us have felt an energy that's not strictly physical or biological, one that doesn't come from sugar or carbohydrates, but from a mix of motivation, focus, and inspiration. It's the energy you feel when you're working on a particularly engrossing task, or when you're surrounded by inspiring people. This energy has many different names. It's been labeled as emotional, spiritual, mental, or motivational energy by psychologists,

zest, vitality, or energetic arousal by neuroscientists. But if researchers can't agree on what to name it, they're agreed that it makes us focused, inspired, and motivated to pursue our goals. So what's the source of this mysterious energy? The short answer, feeling good. Positive emotions are bound up with a set of four hormones, endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin, which are often labeled as the feel-good hormones. All of them allow us to accomplish more.

Endorphins are often released during physical activity, stress or pain, and bring about feelings of happiness and diminished discomfort, and elevated levels usually correlate with increased energy and motivation. Serotonin is connected to mood regulation, sleep, appetite and overall feelings of well-being. It underpins our sense of contentment and gives us the energy to tackle tasks efficiently.

Dopamine, or the reward hormone, is linked with motivation and pleasure, and its release provides a satisfaction that allows us to focus for longer. And oxytocin, known as the love hormone, is associated with social bonding, trust, and relationship building, which enhances our capacity to connect with others, boosts our mood, and in turn impacts our productivity. All this means that these feel-good hormones are the starting point of a virtuous cycle.

When we feel good, we generate energy, which boosts our productivity, and this productivity leads to feelings of achievement, which make us feel good all over again. Second, feeling good reduces our stress. In addition to the broaden and build theory, Barbara Fredrickson also developed what psychologists call the undoing hypothesis. Fredrickson and her colleagues were interested in decades of research showing that negative emotions cause the release of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol.

This isn't a problem in the short term, it's the mechanism that motivates us to run from danger. But if we experience these negative sensations too often, we become riddled with anxiety and our physical health suffers. The continuous activation of these hormones can even increase the risk of developing heart disease and high blood pressure. Not ideal. Fredrickson wondered about the flip side. If negative emotions have these harmful physiological effects, then perhaps positive emotions could reverse them. Might feeling good reset the nervous system and put the body into a more relaxed state?

To test this out, Fredrickson came up with a rather mean study. Researchers told a group of people that they had one minute to prepare a public speech that would be filmed and judged by their peers. Knowing that the fear of public speaking is practically universal, Fredrickson hypothesized that this would elevate the subject's levels of anxiety and stress. And it did. People reported feeling more anxious and experienced increases in heart rate and blood pressure.

Next, the researchers randomly assigned participants to watch one of four films, two evoking mildly positive emotions, the third neutral ones, and the fourth sad ones. And they then measured how long it took the participants to recover from the stress. Their findings were intriguing. The participants who watched the positive emotion films took significantly less time to return to their baseline state in terms of heart rate and blood pressure. And those who watched the sadness-evoking film took the longest time to return to baseline.

This is the undoing hypothesis that positive emotions can undo the effects of stress and other negative emotions. If stress is the problem, then feeling good might just be the solution. But the final and perhaps most transformative implication of feel-good productivity goes well beyond any one task or project. Because third, feeling good enriches your life.

In 2005, a team of psychologists read all the studies they could find on the complex relationship between happiness and success. They delved into 225 published papers, which involved data from over 275,000 individuals. Their question, does success, as we're often told, make us happier, or could it be the other way around? The study offered hard evidence that we tend to get happiness wrong.

Individuals who frequently experience positive emotions aren't just more sociable, optimistic and creative, they also accomplish more. These people bring an infectious energy to their environment, proving more likely to enjoy fulfilling relationships, get higher salaries and truly shine in their professional lives.

Those who cultivate positive emotions at work morph into better problem solvers, planners, creative thinkers, and resilient go-getters. They're less stressed, attract higher evaluations from their superiors, and show a higher degree of loyalty to their organizations. Put simply, success doesn't lead to feeling good. Feeling good leads to success. And we have a diagram in the book here which basically summarizes what we've just said, which is that feeling good firstly boosts your energy, secondly it reduces your stress, and thirdly it enriches your life.

And there are some cute little icons in that diagram, but obviously you're listening to the audiobooks, you can't appreciate the illustrative prowess that went into these, but that's okay. How to use this audiobook. Back in that first harrowing year as a doctor, most of these discoveries were still years ahead of me. I was working endless shifts and trying to shoehorn my productivity research into the fleeting breaks between visiting patients. But even the basic insights I uncovered were enough to cause a dramatic change in my relationship with work.

When I started to let go of my obsessions with discipline and focus instead on making work feel good, my horrific shifts started to get easier. Soon, my mood started to improve too. I remember one appointment with an elderly patient a few months after I discovered feel-good productivity. "'You know, doctor,' she said, "'you're the first one in here who has smiled all week.'" These new perspectives wouldn't just alter my approach to being a doctor. They would alter the direction of my life altogether."

For the first time in years, I began to see the opportunities beyond the confines of my work, my friendships, my family, and the other passions that had sidelined. And I soon found myself wanting to share my discovery. For a few years, I'd been running a YouTube channel on which I posted study tips and technology reviews. Now I started sharing practical insights that I'd learned from psychology and neuroscience, using myself as the guinea pig, experimenting with everything I learned and the strategies I thought might work.

As my radical notion that success doesn't have to be tied to suffering started to gain traction, I started to get more and more emails from my viewers. High school students aced their exams. Business owners doubled their income. Parents managed to balance work and family life better, all by applying the strategies I was sharing. Even seasoned professionals worn out from the grind of corporate life were discovering fresh energy, motivation, and a new direction.

And so was I. The more I read, the more my philosophy developed. Eventually, by following the same principles and strategies I was learning about, I realized that I wanted to take a break from medicine to pursue something new. That's when I knew I had to write this book. What's contained in this audiobook isn't just another productivity system to help you get more done at any cost. It's about doing more of what matters to you. It'll help you learn more about yourself, what you love, and what really motivates you.

My method has three parts, each of which tackles a different aspect of feel-good productivity. Part one explains how to use the science of feel-good productivity to energize yourself. It introduces the three energizers that underpin positive emotions, play, power, and people, and explains how to integrate them into your daily life.

Next, part two examines how feel-good productivity can help us overcome procrastination. You'll learn about the three blockers that make us feel worse, uncertainty, fear, and inertia, and how to overcome them. When you remove these blockers, you won't just overcome procrastination, you'll feel better too. Finally, in part three, we'll explore how feel-good productivity can sustain us in the long term. We'll delve into the three different types of burnout, overexertion burnout, depletion burnout, and misalignment burnout.

and I'll explain how we can harness three simple sustainers, conserve, recharge, and align, to make us feel better not just for days and weeks, but for months and years. Every chapter contains its fair share of practical tips, but my goal in this book isn't to offer you some sprawling to-do list. It's to offer you a philosophy, a new way of thinking about productivity that you can apply to your own life in your own way.

My hope is that you leave this book an amateur productivity scientist, as it were, finding some methods that work, discarding others, and working savvily to see what helps you feel good and achieve more. That's why every chapter contains not only three simple science-backed ideas that you can use to rethink productivity, but also six experiments that you can implement in your own life. If an experiment works for you, great. If it doesn't, then that too is a helpful insight.

By the end of the book, though, you should have a toolkit for applying feel-good productivity to your own work, relationships, and life. I only hope it works as well for you as it has for me. Because if there's one thing I've learned by immersing myself in the science of feel-good productivity, it's that it applies in every sphere. It turns daunting tasks into engaging challenges. It leads to deeper connections with peers. It drives meaningful interactions in what you do every day.

By understanding and applying what makes you feel good, you won't just transform your work, you'll transform your life. Feel-good productivity is a simple method, but it changes everything. It shows that if you've ever felt underwater, you don't have to settle for staying afloat. You can learn how to swim. Let's dive in.