The human brain is an endlessly fascinating organ. While it weighs only about three pounds, it powers every facet of your daily activity, from operating your lungs and heart to calculating complex equations.

Here are just a few facts about the brain:

• About 60% of its weight is fat.
• It contains between 85 and 100 billion brain cells.
• Information travels inside your brain at about 268 miles per hour; the fastest speed recorded by a Formula 1 car was only about 246 miles per hour.
• The brain is fully mature by about age 25, but you continue to make new neurons throughout your lifetime.

Of course, all these fascinating facts don’t help us much on an average Wednesday afternoon when we’re thinking about the activities and chores that await us after work, feeling overwhelmed with too much to do, or even struggling to stay awake.

You can improve your brain function in both the short- and the long term. Here are four strategies to help you make the most of your organic personal supercomputer.

Prioritize Your Day

Feeling overwhelmed or anxious can trigger a stress response in our brains. Most of us know this response as the “fight or flight” instinct; we recognize the rapid heartbeat, increased respiration, sweaty hands, and anxious moments that can trigger it.

One way to help reduce the risk of inducing a stress response is to prioritize by importance, urgency, and energy. A valuable tool for prioritization is the Eisenhower Matrix, which will quickly reveal where you should spend most of your time and energy.

In addition, manage your day according to your natural energy rhythm as much as possible. Most people are at their peak brain function early in the day, but some find they are better able to achieve deep focus in the afternoon or even at night. Establish when you do your best work and prioritize important tasks for those periods.

Cut Down on Brain Drains

Our conscious thoughts fall into five functional categories:

1. Understanding: Taking in new information, processing its meaning, and appreciating why it’s important.
2. Deciding: Asking, “Is this task something I should do? Is this information something I should retain? What should I have for lunch?”
3. Recalling: Pulling information from the archives and back into the forefront of thought, such as someone’s first name or a task assigned at a meeting.
4. Memorizing: Filing or incorporating information into long-term memory for later use.
5. Inhibiting: Filtering everything around us to establish what’s important to deal with and what’s not.

When we allow all five of these functions to run unchecked, none of them can operate at their peak performance. Think about your computer or smartphone; if you have too many programs, apps, or windows open, your computer will operate sluggishly and burn a lot of energy to do so.

To maximize any one of these functions, try cutting down on some of the others. For example, to maximize understanding and deciding while working on an important presentation, eliminate distractions that trigger your inhibiting function. Close e-mail, turn off notifications, shut your office door, and put on some non-distracting music or white noise to drown out physical distractions.

Give Your Upper Brain the Upper Hand

Our brains have multiple sections and lobes. The top of the brain—the cerebrum or cortex—makes up about 85% of our brain. This is where we do our creative, strategic, and productive work. We need our upper brains to show up for important tasks every day.

You can give your upper brain the upper hand with a few simple strategies:

1. Singletask: Everyone has heard about “multitasking,” but this was actually a term invented for IBM computers in the 1960s. Studies have shown that what we think of as multitasking—performing multiple tasks simultaneously—is actually rapid context switching, and it is typically a very inefficient way to work. Instead of multitasking, try “single-tasking”—working on one task at a time while eliminating distractions to maximize focus.
2. Create novelty: Focusing on one task at a time doesn’t mean focusing on one task for an entire day; after all, doing deep work on a single task takes a lot of energy! Spend a couple of hours on one task, then switch up activities to give your brain novelty and allow some of those cognitive functions to rest. Better yet, spend a little time cloud-watching.
3. Strategically plan activities you enjoy: What work activities energize you? Which ones do you wake up looking forward to doing? Those are the activities that fire up your upper brain. Schedule them strategically throughout the day and week to always have something to boost that upper brain.
4. Pause and breathe: There is tremendous restorative power in simply pausing for two or three minutes to take some long, deep breaths. In fact, pausing and breathing for even 30 seconds can buffer your body against stress for three to four hours.

Sleep!

A 2023 Gallup survey revealed that 53% of American adults report getting 6 to 7 hours of sleep per night, 20% report getting 5 or less, and the average adult needs between 7 and 9 hours of sleep per night. Participants in this survey seem to understand that their sleep habits are less than ideal; 57% of them said they would feel better if they got more sleep.

Sleep performs several functions for brain health:

1. Brain cleansing: Every night, your brain cells shrink slightly during sleep to get a “bath” in cerebrospinal fluid to wash away waste. When this process is inhibited by shorter sleep or sleep cycles, the brain can build up “plaque,” which has been correlated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
2. Memory writing: During the day, our hippocampus holds information in short-term memory. Think of this short-term storage as a thumb drive—you need to regularly download it, or you won’t have enough space for more information. Stage 2 of your non-REM sleep is when your hippocampus downloads all this information to long-term storage. If you don’t sleep long enough, your brain can’t download everything, so you start the next day with less short-term memory available.
3. Decreasing negative emotional impact: As we sleep and download all that information from the hippocampus, the brain sorts out what’s important to remember and what’s not. As a result, it discards some of the negative thoughts or memories that impact us, giving us a happier start to the following day.
   

Set yourself up for a good night’s sleep by practicing good sleep hygiene. Try to go to bed and get up at the same time every day (or close to it). Set up a bedtime ritual or routine that signals to your brain that it’s time to start releasing sleep hormones. Stay away from screen input about an hour before bed, and minimize heavy meals and alcohol in the evening.

If you have sleep disturbances or wake up tired more often than not, consult a doctor for a better analysis. Solving a problem such as snoring or sleep apnea can give you a new lease on life and reduce your risks of other long-term or chronic illnesses.

We can easily take our brains for granted. Even those of us with reasonably healthy habits might only rarely consider brain health and resource management. But just taking a few simple steps toward better brain function can make a huge difference in your daily productivity and your long-term health.

To learn more about your brain, listen to our on-demand webinar, Your Brain at Work: Discover Secrets to Catapult Your Success.

Self-Check

1. How will viewing your day from a resource management perspective change how you approach the day?
2. What can you do to maximize productivity and focus?
3. What one strategy can you put into action today?