A few weeks ago, I published a post based on Jonah Sachs's book Unsafe Thinking: Can You Know Too Much?
Here are some more tidbits on stress, motivation, and flow.
Stress
Stress, or fear, focuses us. When we experience stress, fear, or anxiety, our levels of the hormone cortisol increase, and this often results in our taking action.
The increased cortisol also tampers down our ability to be creative, to look at situations with detachment, and to consider different possible courses of action, or even to delay action. If we feel fear, we are more likely to only react with the most obvious path, or paths, in front of us. In fact, we all can be manipulated by those who are able to raise our levels of stress and anxiety, because we lose the ability to look for alternatives. Once anxiety triggers cortical arousal, we are at a tremendous disadvantage.
Many of us think that we can solve this by avoiding stress. That's completely wrong.
When we avoid stressful and potentially anxiety-producing situations, we pretty much ensure that those situations and feelings will come back and we subject ourselves to living increasingly narrow lives.
What we can do is to change how we think of anxiety. We can coach ourselves to think positively about the situation and the sensations we feel; to perceive them as chances to grow. We can choose to tackle them while acknowledging that the feeling of anxiety is just part of the process of growth and success. This is tremendously powerful.
Motivation
There is this myth that if we love what we do, it will be easy to be successful. But success is never easy.
And we've all heard about all the studies showing that extrinsic motivations, like rewards or punishments, may, in some cases be short term motivators, but in the long run, they actually reduce our ability to achieve.
Sachs points to research that shows that competence, expertise, and accomplishment are all primarily driven by internal motivation. And also, that external motivation can actually provide a boost to internal motivation.
When rewards (or penalties) make us feel manipulated, coerced, or controlled, they hurt our performance. But when 1) we understand our motivation, 2) when the task is motivating, and 3) when we feel the reward is offered in an upfront way that is not manipulative (possibly when we ourselves have helped design the rewards), rewards can be motivating. We treat them as fun bonuses rather than as tools of control. They are especially helpful during the long "slogs" or boring parts of a project, when motivation tends to get bogged down.
Flow
Most of us have heard of flow, it's those moments of peak performance where we are immersed in what we are doing and we are operating at a high level.
Flow is a balance of difficulty and skill. Too much difficulty for our level of skill and we become anxious or lose the belief we can succeed. Too little difficulty (too easy) and we become bored and lose persistence of effort. This band of optimal performance, and learning, is right in line with Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development. Video game developers have become experts in constructing their games to keep you in flow:
- There are tangible goals
- You get valuable and quick feedback
- The challenges are just above your current skill levels
In real life, though, we don't have the luxury of game developers setting this up for us; we have to do this for ourselves with our own minds. Once we are familiar with setting goals, figuring out how to get the right feedback, and accepting challenges above our current skill levels, we can apply it to the most mundane or even challenging tasks to drive our own motivation and performance. What Jane McGonigal calls gamifying our lives.
I wonder how we would ever apply these to students and education. Maybe a future Edchat Interactive event could help here.