Building A Second Brain is a course described as helping people get more done, faster, with less effort.
And it's is so much more than a productivity course. It's a program that can enhance your health and wellbeing. It’s also a source to more consistently trigger an in-the-zone flow state, where you feel your best and perform at your best.
Four years since taking the course, then building my own Second Brain and practicing the habits to offload the information overwhelm most people experience in this pandemic laden, always now, instant feedback, data driven, social media world, I was back for another round of learning.
This time I joined the team at Forte Labs, the company producing the Building A Second Brain program, as an Alumni Mentor to help guide a group from the 1,000+ students who signed up for its fall live cohort and who its founder, Tiago Forte, referred to as Architects, inspired by the Christopher Nolan movie Inception. An apt comparison given the concepts presented and the ideas that could come from them.
The outcome of Building A Second Brain is not just to offload and organize the firehose of information. It's about illuminating ideas and insights, expressing them in some form of creation, online or offline. The Second Brain signature system being CODE: Capture. Organize. Distill. Express.
Along with 19 other Alumni Mentors, we shared with a group of these Architects our processes and workflows over 5 weekly sessions that complimented the two main sessions Forte hosted each week. During that time, I took my group through a live case study walking them through the CODE system to produce a blog post about the benefits or proper breathing, based on the the book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. Here's a link to a short overview of how I did it.
Plus we did a lot of breathing, both to start the sessions out and because we talked about the subject a lot as we went through the case study. Breathing can give you the power over your autotomic nervous system, allowing you to better manage your stress, anxiety and emotional response to challenges.
It's a perfect compliment to manage overwhelm and help you build and maintain your Second Brain. Breathing is also a key tool to help you get into a flow state, where productivity, creativity and learning are all significantly enhanced (but more on that later).
It wasn't just their productivity tools, processes and workflows that the Mentors were there to share, it was helping them through the challenge of what this course can bring up. As you begin to build a Second Brain, you also examine the workings of your first brain.
Forte expressed the challenge during one of the mid-point sessions when he said: How you show up here is how you show up everywhere. Where you're stuck in this course is where you are stuck in everything else.
The challenge was also well expressed by one of my Mentor colleagues, Lindsey Honari: Building a Second Brain isn’t about living your ‘best’ life or creating this optimal experience. It’s about something that supports you at your worst, most chaotic moments.
I’ve experienced this many times with my Second Brain, including three years ago when I was traveling for many months and was in the beautiful town of Luang Prabang in Laos. Unfortunately, I jumped the wrong way and ended up with a broken ankle. Luang Prabang is a lot of things, but a place you want serious medical attention is not one of them.
The lack of mobility made it difficult to do just about anything to take care of myself. A broken ankle doesn’t allow for much sleep, especially in the first several days. So I didn't get too much of it for several weeks.
What I did get was a lot of new information to manage along with a weak mind and body to deal with it. Between the US State Department, flights to Bangkok to get proper treatment, new doctors when we got back to the US, health insurance, travel insurance, physical therapy, concerned friends and family... having a system to process and organize the information gave me the confidence that it was under control and I could focus my limited strength on getting better. (Which I did.)
Second Brain for Health and Wellbeing
Supporting you at you worst, most chaotic moments is probably enough of a health and wellness benefit of Building a Second Brain, but it goes further.
The single most valuable benefit of Building A Second Brain for your overall wellbeing is reducing the cognitive load you carry around in your brain. All those open loops, worries, tasks, things you want to do someday, they all hang around in your brain, the weight results in unnecessary stress and anxiety.
"Up to 80 percent of office workers (according to one estimate) suffer from something called continuous partial attention," James Nestor writes in Breath. "We’ll scan our email, write something down, check Twitter, and do it all over again, never really focusing on any specific task."
Most of us never calm down, always in a state of heightened alert, always worried like our evolutionary forefathers concerned about the lion's attack.
As you build your Second Brain, all of those worries and open loops are offloaded to your system where you know they're available when you need them. Nothing you need to ruminate about. As you orient your Second Brain to what you want to create, it drives what you consume, leaving the click bait, anger driven content out of focus, calming your day.
Any tasks and ideas can be put into your Second Brain, allowing you to more easily drift off to sleep at night without the cognitive load in your mind holding on to them, never letting you get into full brain-restoring REM sleep long enough to show up the next day in a healthy state.
Improve your sleep, and you improve nearly every aspect of your life.
"Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day," Matthew Walker, PhD writes in his book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.
"Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer. Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease. Inadequate sleep—even moderate reductions for just one week—disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic. Short sleeping increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming blocked and brittle, setting you on a path toward cardiovascular disease, stroke, and congestive heart failure... sleep disruption further contributes to all major psychiatric conditions."
Reducing cognitive load will contribute to better sleep, and the number one activity I recommend to begin to reduce your cognitive load is a regularly weekly review. It's where you go through all your open loops, your email, your note taking app, your task list, your calendar, etc and plan out your week, blocking off time on the calendar for all your projects. This process will have one of the biggest impacts on reducing your cognitive load, improving your sleep, resulting in improved wellbeing and allowing you to be more present for all the activities you care about.
The Flow State
One of the magical benefits of creating a Second Brain system is by reducing cognitive load and organizing your information around clear goals, you've created the environment and key conditions to enter a flow state with much more consistency.
Flow increases creativity and innovation, skill acquisition, learning and memory, empathy, productivity, grit and persistence, collaboration and cooperation. It heightens information processing.
McKinsey & Company found a 500% increase in productivity by executives who regularly access flow states.
Harvard found subjects to have three days of heightened creativity after a flow state.
Advanced Brain Monitoring & DARPA found subjects to have a 490% increase in skill acquisition.
While in flow, time slows, perception heightens, motivation amplifies, and learning becomes easier. We become, as Steve Kotler, author and founder of the Flow Research Collective, would say: Superman.
What the research into flow states show is that flow follows focus. With your Second Brain offloading information, closing open loops, and defining goals more clearly, you can begin to find focus more consistently.
There are many flow triggers both for individuals and groups that have been identified to help reach a flow state. Some of the key flow triggers that show up when you build a Second Brain include:
Risk
Clear Goals
Complete Concentration
When Forte discuss flow during one of the Building A Second Brain sessions the ideas that came out of the chat conversations around how to create the flow trigger of Risk included:
Commitment to someone else
Tell people I interview that I’ll share my notes
Create something live
Bet money against yourself
Making bigger, bolder claims or promises
Here are some ideas that came out of the conversation around how to create the flow trigger of clear goals:
Have a project list
Have a goals dashboard
Define outcomes
Define you 12 favorite questions or problems
Weekly review
Defined milestones
Vision Board
Define what you want to experience
Develop a philosophy of life for yourself
Connect the goals to your why and your projects, the through line
Set the environment to have cues on the goals
And finally, here are some ideas that came out of the conversation around how to create the flow trigger of complete concentration:
Put on headphones
Meditate before you start
Play lists that motivation
Have a dance before working
Mood lighting
After Forte’s session on flow, I reviewed with my Mentor group the four phases of flow, or what I refer to as a Flow Wave. With each phase, you can build a habit ritual to ride yourself in and out of flow with consistency.
The four phases are:
Struggle - This is when you’re gathering information. It is often unpleasant. This is where you are uploading all your information into your brain. You could be thinking about things and not producing anything, which can be frustrating. This phase is messy.
Lots of people get stuck here and don’t move on or get distracted and knock themselves out of flow. Then they have to come back to this phase and repeat it’s struggle again.
Release - Instead, you can step into the release phase. This is where you take your mind off the problem… simply stop thinking about the problem.
For example, going on a walk, doing some light gardening.
During free Tuesdays at the museum, I like to take a 20 min walk to the museum and spend just a few minutes there looking at one of the exhibits to kick up the pattern recognition system in art and head back to get into my flow state work.
Watching television or listening to a podcast, on the other hand, boosts up your brain wave speed, making it very difficult to get into flow.
Flow - Once you move into the release and into flow, nitrite oxide flushes all the stress hormones out of your system and replaces them with a cascade of feel good neurochemicals:
Norepinephrine
Dopamine
Anandamide
Serotonin
Endorphins
In flow, you move the information from conscious to unconscious processing. You experience transient hypofrontality, where you executive, inner-critic part of the brain goes quiet. Your actions are happening with little effort. Time and sense of self falls away.
Recovery - Then you must take a break. This is so important. Flow is neurobiologically expensive. You need a recovery to replenish those feel good neurochemicals.
If you set a timer and come out of flow after 90 minutes, take a 20-30 minute walk or yoga, or whatever restorative activity you enjoy.
Then you can start the process all over again.
Flow Wave Habit Routine
Combine the flow triggers with habit design, and you can create a Flow Wave Habit Routine.
Here's one of my Flow Wave Habit Routines I use for creating and producing:
It begins by getting a good night of sleep. My company, Stamina Lab will soon be publishing research that shows the more REM sleep you get the more likely you are to get into a flow state. Plus as Dr. Walker noted, sleep key to health and wellbeing.
STRUGGLE
Ensure I have time blocked off on my calendar during weekly review so I don't have to think about time or other tasks
Setup the notes I need, organize them. If it's my first flow session of the day, have them up on my computer so it's the first thing I see when I log on.
Read through my goals and outcome. Scan some of the key notes.
Leave the phone out of my work area.
If someone is in the house or around, be sure to let them know I'm dropping into flow and let me be.
RELEASE
Go make some green tea.
I also often step into the garden for a few minutes, or walk outside to a vista.
Some stretching works well
FLOW
Unlock the computer
Turn on the Endel sound wave app and set the time for 90 minutes.
Close my eyes for a few deep breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth to stimulate my sympathetic nervous system for some focus.
Drink some green tea for some more alertness.
Dive in.
RECOVERY
After the timer ends, even in mid-sentence (ideally in mid-sentence or creation to help you pick up again for the next session), get up and stretch. I'm usually spent anyway.
Step outside for a short walk, ideally with some rejuvenating nature.
Smile to celebrate and enjoy the feeling.
This Flow Wave Habit Routine is built with many flow triggers and utilizes behavior designed to enhance the natural neurochemical output that comes with a flow state. And you feel great during and after as long as you don’t stay in flow too long.
Flow enhances wellbeing. It's an autotelic experience - it is its own reward.
More productive, less stress, happier, healthier, more creative, innovative and learning more rapidly. It's a powerful state that anyone can access.
Each of my live Building a Second Brain Mentor sessions were done in a flow state, and I walked away needing a recovery and also so full of energy. Goals and purpose were fully integrated with the Architects who showed up for my weekly sessions. They were everything, and what they reflected was invaluable.
Sharing my Second Brain, which can be messy in places and revealing of what I am thinking, dreaming, or trying to improve, was a bit uncomfortable, as other Mentors also commented on in our group chat. It was sitting with that feeling and hearing the students continued gratitude and feedback where I learned my biggest takeaway from the experience, how valuable vulnerability is in helping others grow and learn.
Building A Second Brain is a practice and four years in, it's still very much evolving for me. Even still, it's essential to save my best ideas, organize my learning, dramatically expand my creative creative output, and allow me to more consistently drop into flow to enhance my overall wellbeing.
What Next?
Learn more about Building A Second Brain here and contact me about how I can help you get started with your weekly review and introduce you to some of the fundamentals of the Second Brain system.
I do a deep dive into how to consistently get into flow as part of the SecondBrain SuperPowers program I produce with fellow Building A Second Brain Senior Mentors . We go over all the flow triggers, take you through an exercise to build you own Flow Wave Habit Routine, and share a bunch of other insights and lessons. Click here to get notified when enrollment is open.