How To Protect Your Mental Energy At Work

When it comes to building a business or advancing your career, what's your most important asset? 

Not time—hours don’t matter when your brain is incapable of making good decisions.

Not money—dollars can’t buy you clarity or stamina.

Mental energy is your most important asset.

If you are serious about growing your business or advancing your career, you need to accept that your mental energy levels are finite.

You must start conserving your mental energy by aligning everything around you with the positive results you want to achieve.

Why Mental Energy Depends On Willpower

You can’t increase mental energy, you can only protect it.

Mental energy, or brain power, depends on willpower, which is your ability to control your own behavior.

Willpower can be thought of as a kind of instinctual override, a way to interrupt your brain’s automatic processing in order to do something else.

If you’re hungry and come upon a table of free donuts in your company’s break room, the primitive part of your brain will process the event and say, “EAT!” But the more advanced decision-making part of your brain will tell you to keep walking and not take the bait.

Willpower is simply your ability to inhibit your brain’s natural inclinations. It’s your ability to make good decisions. The problem is, you only have a set amount of willpower each day, and even the smallest amounts of mental strain will reduce this amount.

A study published by the Journal of Personality shows that each person has his or her own individual willpower limit and this limit is depleted by mental strain. This mental strain can come in the form of extreme emotional stress (like your boss being a jerk) or in the form of making simple decisions (like answering the same question again and again by email).

Experiments published in Motivation Science show that making decisions leads to reduced self-control, including reduced physical stamina, reduced persistence in the face of failure, more procrastination, and less quality and quantity of arithmetic calculations.

Here's the most surprising part...

Making decisions depletes more mental energy than merely deliberating or implementing choices made by someone else. 

In other words, deciding drains you more than weighing options or following out your boss's orders. So, if you want to advance your career, you better start protecting your mental energy. If you fail to protect this important asset, you'll fail to prioritize effectively, produce efficiently, or navigate the company ladder. Here are 3 techniques for protecting your mental energy...

1. Avoid negative coworkers.

Negative people are mentally draining. The stress caused by dealing with a negative colleague will not only reduce your brain power, it will literally rot your brain. Listening to negativity for just 30 minutes starts to peel away neurons in your hippocampus, the part of your brain responsible for problem-solving.

A study reported in The Journal of Neuroscience shows that this neuron-peeling effect is caused by glucocorticoids released from adrenal glands during the stress of dealing with negativity.

The more time you spend working with negative coworkers, the worse off you are in every way. You’ll make worse decisions due to mental strain and damage your hippocampus. Your mirror neurons will cause you to copy their poor behavior. You’ll become more depressed and anxious. On and on. The only way to prevent this is to actively cut negative people out of your work life and instead team up with positive, like-minded people.

2. Line up your projects. 

Every business or career pursuit you engage in should benefit at least one other pursuit. Your pursuits should also be tied together, one after another, like pearls on a string. The closer the pearls are together, the more productive you will be and the more mental energy you will conserve.

If you’re trying to write your weekly report, don’t spend 30 minutes researching the data you need in the morning, an hour writing before lunch, an hour writing after lunch, and a few minutes editing at night. Instead, group all of these related pursuits together. Write for two hours, edit what you wrote, and find references immediately afterwards. Get it all done and move onto the next project.

You can apply this group technique to any pursuit, whether it’s preparing your next presentation or starting your own business. The key is applying your skills, methods, resources, and time to as many pursuits as possible and compressing all of these pursuits into the smallest block of time possible.

3. Create work rituals. 

When mice are first put into a cheese maze, their brain activity is robust and intense. The mice sniff and claw the walls, analyzing every part of the maze as they race through it to find the cheese at the end. But when the mice are put in the same maze day and after day, they find the cheese faster but their overall brain activity decreases.

Why does this happen? The mice have ritualized the process of finding the cheese. They’ve formed a habit.

Studies presented in Nature Reviews Neuroscience show that when you create a habit, a tiny part of your brain, called the basal ganglia, takes over a series of actions so that you no longer have to actively concentrate or make decisions. In this way, your brain conserves mental energy.

Habits are what allow you to tie your shoe, brush your teeth, or even drive home from work without thinking about it. These little habits rely on triggers, routines, and rewards. You create a habit at will by setting a strong trigger for a routine and then rewarding yourself for the completion of the routine over and over again.

The best triggers for new habits are old habits. It’s far more effective, for example, to get in the habit of exercising right after waking up (trigger) or right after getting home from work (trigger). By stacking new habits on top of these current habits, the new habits are much more likely to stick.

Your success depends on your mental energy and your mental energy consists of a set number of decision-making units. You can’t increase you mental energy once the day has started but you can conserve it by avoiding negative people, lining up projects, and creating and stacking habits. 

How do you protect your mental energy at work? Tell me in a comment below.

I also write for Fast Company and Entrepreneur Magazine:

• The Skills You Need To Grow Your Business
• 10 People Who Will Destroy Your Business
• 5 Benefits Of Being A Misfit Entrepreneur

Check out my book of personal and professional advice, Black Hole Focus: How Intelligent People Create A Powerful Purpose For Their Lives.