Boosting Cognitive and Mental Health
Nearly every leadership role I’ve had carried workloads that felt endless. Even my longest and most efficient days rarely reduced my task list to zero. Yet I convinced myself that exerting a maximum effort each day was the best approach to my work.
Ignoring the toll it took, I believed myself when I told others that “I don’t feel stress.” Periodically losing my belongings, however, told a different story. Those episodes of misplacing my keys, phone, water bottle, or other essentials signaled to me that I wasn’t thinking my best and forced me to confront my limits. During one particularly stressful month, I locked myself out of my house twice and managed to drop my car keys down a storm drain. The Public Works Department wasn’t thrilled.
We need our memory to learn, synthesize, and lead. Yet our working memory is closely connected to stress. High levels of stress impair cognitive function; chronic stress can interfere with remembering otherwise simple things. To design our personal and professional lives for better thinking and memory, we must examine both the physical and behavioral factors that contribute to our mental recovery.
The essential practices to boost mental and cognitive resilience include:
Build focus time into both your schedule and surroundings to concentrate on the most critical items.
Do your most important work when you’re freshest. (For me, that’s in the early morning.)
Remove distractions by decluttering your environment: whether your physical work space or your notifications settings.
Sleep well to allow your glymphatic systems conduct a deep clean.
As we sleep, our brain consolidates our memories and helps us make connections between them.
Most adults need at least 7 hours of sleep to derive the full benefits of this process.
Fuel your brain by eating enough critical nutrients.
Protein and healthy fats help build and maintain critical neural structures.
Consuming enough vitamins and minerals facilitates important brain processes; deficiencies in these micronutrients often result in mental health challenges such as anxiety and depression.
Move your body to stimulate your mind.
Regular movement stimulates the production of substances such as BDNF that preserve brain health and enable neuroplasticity.
Get ahead of the challenge.
Understanding your values and personal sense of purpose helps you filter information effectively.
Noticing your thoughts helps surface assumptions, faulty conclusions, and other thinking traps.
Plan ahead to anticipate key choice points and reduce decision fatigue.
Extending cognitive resilience to your management practices
By understanding how memory works, and what role stress plays, we can extrapolate some key management practices to promote cognitive health.
Check in: At the start of meetings, ask about holistic well-being. Normalize talking about your teams’ full selves.
Offer supports: Many companies offer robust health supports that go unused. Invite your teams to explore how to improve their cognitive resilience using the guidelines above.
Offer a “Goldilocks” challenge: Build individuals’ capacity by adapting tasks to their Zones of Proximal Development. To meet people where they are, offer them just the right amount of cognitive load.
Put your teams in the driver’s seat. Give them autonomy and agency to define their work. Ask them, “What have you learned so far with this project? What has surprised you? Where do you need support?”
We have long considered the power of team learning and organizational learning when exploring management best practices. When we embed support for individual memory and cognitive health into our work systematically, we can drive major performance gains while mitigating risk of unforced errors. Focus, sleep, nutrition, and autonomy are just some of the practices that can make a huge difference at scale.
