Why We Are So Tired All The Time
so there’s a talk i was going to give
before the calvin 19 lockdown there’s a
talk i’d like to give which is an
epic tale of change and hope and there’s
a talk i think i need to give which is
very specific to this time and place we
find ourselves in now
so let me start telling you this is not
a zoom background these are real trees
this is a real sky
and i’m in a real place somewhere called
abbey fields in colchester in essex and
i’ll tell you a little bit more
later why i chose to be here because
it’s an important part of what i want to
share with you
today so about nine months ago i was
invited to take part in
ted x colchester and i was very excited
by that i’d spent
10 years doing research into how the
world was changing and why the world was
changing
research took me all the way around the
world and i i presented it into a book
and particularly about what we could do
as human beings to thrive in this
emerging new world that we find
ourselves in and that’s kind of why i
was invited to talk at the event and i
was
i was excited about that and then of
course covered 19 came along
the event was meant to be in april 2020
and understandably and quite rightly
it was cancelled and then about a month
ago the organizers came back to me and
said
why don’t we actually do them online why
don’t we record the talks we were going
to give and we can present them in a
different way and i was i was excited
about that and i
started to prepare and i started to
practice now i’ve done a lot of speaking
in my time and i
i found that um that this new thing i
was trying to do was
was kind of difficult i found it
difficult to concentrate
and particularly i began to realize how
tired i was
as i started to confront that i realized
it wasn’t particularly about preparing
for giving a talk just how generally
tired and exhausted i was finding myself
i was kind of hacking through every day
and i started to talk to my friends and
they were kind of reporting the same
thing and very quickly i realized just
collectively we’re exhausted
i started to wonder about that then i
took my first major trip
you know i’m down here in essex and i’m
from yorkshire up north so i hired a car
and i
drove up there and i found the whole
thing kind of overwhelming and difficult
and
at first i thought well it’s just
because i haven’t done it for a while
but really when i thought about it i
thought i shouldn’t be
this tired so that’s really what i want
to talk to you about today which is
why are we so tired all the time more
crucially what can we do about it
and so it goes back to some of the
research i was doing into
neuroscience and how our brains work and
if you look at the history of
neuroscience it goes right back to stone
age man
stone age man performed this procedure
which called was called treponation
people that must have been experiencing
some kind of mental illness they would
punch a hole
in their skull using a piece of flint
which seems pretty crude by today’s
standards but
if you look at fossil remains it looks
like a number of those people
lived for quite a long period of time
after that which suggests it might have
been
successful but it wasn’t until about
2500 years ago that we really started to
get into it
and a greek philosopher called
hippocrates came along and his
suggestion
which today doesn’t seem that radical
was that we did our thinking
in our brain before that we’d assume
that the thinking went on in our bodies
which is
kind of interesting because that is
coming around again now that we’ve
actually started to understand a little
bit about how the body works the
new new kind of research is suggesting
that we do
thinking in our brain but also there is
stuff going on in our body too which
points to
unconscious kind of activity which which
is crucial i think to what i want to
talk to
about you today so that’s the way we
thought and for the next
two and a half thousand years the
assumption from man was that we had this
brain
and in the brain thinking happened the
victorians particularly got very
interested in this and they started to
take dead bodies and take them apart and
pull out the brain
and cut them up and put them in for more
formaldehyde and
if you go to any victorian medical
museum you’ll probably see a brain
in a jar but in the 1970s we started to
see things a bit differently
digital electronics had come along we
were able to kind of look at brain
activity and electrical activity in the
brain on a far more
granular level and what neuroscientists
began to realize that was that the brain
wasn’t this fixed object
it was changing and is reconfiguring
itself all the time
something you get got called
neuroplasticity
and the phrase that emerged during that
time was that neurons that
fire together wire together
so in other words as we started to think
about things and we started to take
action
about what we were thinking about those
neurons began to kind of form
bundles and we began to realize that’s
kind of how
habits formed at the same time
though some research that was done in
the university of california pointed to
something
very interesting which even today most
of us haven’t really kind of got our
heads around
what scientists in the university of
california in san francisco did was they
started to
try and record the time lag between when
we had a thought to do something
and when we actually did it and what
they found
was quite disturbing what they found in
the majority of cases
was that the neuron that fires to do
something happens before we think about
it now that’s one of those things you
just need to think about a bit because
using our brain our brain his brain’s
work what
so in other words the neurons of fire
for an action happen before
our thought now what this pointed to is
that
our idea of free will and our idea that
we’re actually doing things consciously
isn’t actually correct it was so radical
that for about 20 years it kind of got
put on the edge of science but again in
2007
scientists in the max planck institute
in in germany
did a similar but more detailed
experiment and categorically proved this
to be the fact so what this is pointing
to
and why it’s crucial to why we’re tired
all the time is an awful lot of what we
do is unconscious
an awful lot what we do is habitual and
that’s the crucial thing that i realized
what’s happened over the last few months
is all our habits
all our unconscious processes that we’ve
developed over years and years over the
course of our life
have been disrupted so if you look at
what happened to me i had my work and i
used to get on a train and i’d drive
different places i’d get up in the
morning and i’d
i’d uh quite often have a ritual where i
would go outside
i’d do yoga classes i’d do other classes
there’s different places i went
i had a whole series of things i i did
that suddenly
i couldn’t do no wonder i’m so tired
because what i’m now having to do is be
conscious of everything i’m doing
85 to 90 of what i was doing beforehand
was a series of habits that i was just
triggering and suddenly i’m having to
think about things
now that was hard enough into lockdown
but at least i was in the constraints of
my house and at least the rules were
quite
kind of clear but now as we’ve moved out
of the lockdown
where the rules are a lot more open to
interpretation suddenly the world seems
like a really dangerous place
so my trip up north is a really good
example and once upon
a time i would have got in the car and i
would have driven and i would have been
listening to the radio and
when i drove into a service station even
though i was conscious of what i was
driving
there’s a lot of things i didn’t need to
think about i would get out
i would get the petrol pump out i’d put
it in the car i wouldn’t actually be
having to think much about that i’d walk
into the filling station
i’d join the queue i’d pay but suddenly
the world seems dangerous and i’m having
to think about it should i do this
and should i touch this and should i do
this i’m having to think
think think all the time so what’s
happened to most of us
is suddenly we’ve moved from a period
where 18 90
of what we’re doing is habitual we’re
not having to think about it to
pretty much everything we’re having to
do having to think all the time
and negotiate we’re not triggering those
patterns
so we’re actually fighting against the
wiring in our brain
this explains why a number of people i
think have wanted to rush back suddenly
to go to
mcdonald’s or coffee shops i was really
surprised when the lockdown
ended around the corner from where i am
there’s a drive through
costa and there’s this huge long queue
and i’m like why would people drive
and queue for like hours to get a paper
cup of coffee or tea
something they probably have learned to
make at home which they can’t go into
the cafe to
sit in a car park or in the back of the
car why is that
and it’s a pull to the familiar it was a
pull to the habitual
so what we’re having to do is broker all
the time which is why we’re so tired
so what’s the solution to this well it’s
three things
and it’s why i’ve decided to do this
outside you know
we spend a lot of time in our rooms in
our office particularly if you’ve kept
working
you know on zoom at your desk the first
thing is to do is to go outside
get outside get into the great outdoors
and allow your brain to expand allow
yourself to be in places that are safe
and feel safe because only when you’re
in a safe places you can let your guard
down you’re not having to worry all the
time
the second thing is to give yourself a
break i mean give yourself a break
emotionally but quite literally give
yourself a break
one of the things we’ve tried to do is
we’ve tried to port what we’re doing
beforehand
into this new paradigm we find ourselves
in we’re trying to run hour-long
meetings that we used to run
as an hour-long meeting online and
that’s just dumb we need to give
ourselves more time
we need to give ourselves more space we
need to be more concentrated
in what we’re doing we need to recognize
how difficult it is
but the reason i chair about this
because the big opportunity here
is we were in a world that a lot of us
realized was working in a way that we
weren’t very happy about
a lot of us saw this as an opportunity
for change
and what’s happened is all our habits
have been broken
now there’s a pull to go back to how
things were i keep hearing now we need
to get
back we need to get back we need to get
back but the great opportunity now is we
can create new habits because breaking
habits is the hardest thing
it’s why it’s so difficult to lose
weight to get fit to stop smoking to
change your diet whatever it is
we’ve broken those habits so if we
really do want to create a world that
works in a different way a world that
we’re
happy to be in collectively and
individual
individually we have the opportunity to
create new habits
and that’s an idea i think is worth
sharing