How to Fight Mental Fatigue with Dr. Oz

MIND FATIGUE

• Anybody who has to work their mind gets fatigued
• Dr. Oz is very measured about the time he lets his brain go and avoids mental work
• Try not to make decisions in the morning, except ones that are important
• Basic principles behind mental fatigue are that we tire in the afternoon
• Incidence of parole being granted by judges—less paroles are granted in the afternoon. This is a decision that requires a lot of effort, as it involves releasing someone who has done something bad back into the community
• We can do well throughout the day and then reach for anything nearby to eat in the afternoon, especially carbs
• Eating sugar turns your brain on and allows your brain to continue processing when it is beyond exhausted

1. OZ’ MORNING ROUTINE

• Get up at the same time every day, harness the power of circadian rhythms, helps to ensure he gets the same amount of sleep each night
• “I don’t want to work hard alone: I want to work smart and hard”
• Poor sleep takes away creativity
• Avoids eating first thing in the morning as we aren’t hungry when we first wake up. The first thing he might have a water & lemon juice
• 2-3 hours into your morning you might want a coffee, have breakfast—generally, you’ll get hungry a few hours into your day after you’ve arrived at work and done a few things
• For breakfast will eat something with rich antioxidant levels, with natural colors e.g. berries

WORK RELATIONSHIPS & BRAINPOWER

• Ideally, you can build relationships with trustworthy teammates
• Tactics to reserve your limited amount of brainpower: “I want to let other people do what they’re good at, so I can do what I’m good at”
• Dr. Oz micromanages but doesn’t want to have to decide in the moment
• The routine of doing a post-mortem after every show with his team, thinking of 3 things he would have done differently
• Avoid friction: well-oiled machines are streamlined, athletes avoid wasting movement in the moment of competition
• Not conflict-averse, but it is important to get conflict out of way to fix the problem, and after that don’t want to keep returning to the conflict day after day
• Careful about relationships: wanted to have lifelong partners, forgive mistakes

OPPORTUNITIES AND LEARNING TO SAY NO

• The most powerful word in the English language is no
• Many of us take on opportunities that are not “on-brand”
• Meaning of on-brand: you do it, it works and you’re happy you did it
• How you do anything is how you do everything
• Opportunity stress: more opportunities being passed to you creates conflict
• Have a not-to-do list
• Habits build on themselves as you create routines that allow you to elevate your game

FAILURE & SUCCESS

• Too many of us are failure averse, we hate failure because we think people won’t love us anymore, but we need to embrace the opportunity to be wrong once in a while
• E.g. during medical training the data for appendicitis was that they needed to operate 15% of the time inappropriately to get to all the cases (and prevent deaths and permanent damage)
• Any seasoned surgeon is going to have bad things happen—if you’re in the game you’re not going to get every shot
• The same theme is reflected by people who succeed: you can’t make the shots you don’t take