There is a surprising connection between your intelligence and your mood. Smart people are more anxious. This smart person might be you or someone you know.
Have you ever noticed how your smartness is making you more anxious, restless and less joyful? There are many early signs we ignore before it’s too late.
Remember to bookmark this page and revisit it when you need a review.
The Signs We Ignore
· Firstly, the demands of your ‘executive-leader life’ and perceived delays in achieving your personal ambitions make large demands on you. The higher your sense of smartness, the bigger the belief you have in your ability to spot the problems to solve or imagine newer problems to solve. You might find the urge to take on all challenges thrown at you or yield to peer pressure and performance pressure. This comes with many benefits and hidden costs.
· Secondly, the smarter you are, the more aware you are about complexities and notice uncertainties in every situation. While you believe you have to have control over every situation, you are often unsettled by lack of clarity and certainty. You might also subconsciously react to all stimuli and triggers in your environment. This leads to an increase in workload and the insatiable urge to get more things done faster in increasingly less available time.
· Thirdly, your ability to perform better evaluations of every situation helps you find more options for every decision you need to make. This makes you become more indecisive. The more you delay decisions, the more anxious and unsettled you become. This taxes your brain more.
Unfortunately, this causes avoidable delays and unconsciously trains your thinking faculties to be in a perpetual state of motion.
The result of this is an overstimulated brain that cannot stay focussed on priorities. Overstimulated brains need to be tamed to stay in the lane to stop the emotional drain. When unattended, this can lead to chronic burnout and long-term damage to health.
We are creatures of habit.[and as per Newton's first law, every object will remain… in uniform motion… unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force.] Change of habit needs a determined external effort. For this, start by observing the patterns….
7 Patterns To Watch Out In “The Dark Side of Brightness”
1.Debilitating Overthinking:
When our mind wanders without attention, it engages in analysing sensory inputs, fearing the future and ruminating over past mistakes. People with higher intelligence are prone to overthinking and overanalysing situations. You might analyse every situation, imagine negative outcomes and want to make sense of everything you observe. This leads to problems getting magnified, distorted and misinterpreted. You would also generate a multitude of great ideas, possibilities and solutions. But, overthinking can often lead to excessive worry and unhinged anxiety by linking unrelated scenes subconsciously, adding fuel to the raging fire. When left unattended, this becomes a vicious cycle of overthinking and over-worrying like a hamster on a wheel – always busy but not getting anywhere!
2. Indecisiveness & Delays:
With the ability to think, analyse and process, smart people will have more solution paths than others. This can slip into analysis paralysis(better labelled as indecisiveness). Indecisiveness drains your energy and distracts your focus from tasks that matter. This could lead to delays in delegation, failures in execution, an increase in self-doubt and lowered self-esteem.
3. Paralysing Perfectionism:
The higher demands you make on yourself often lead to perfectionism. The higher expectations you have of others can lead to disappointment, frustration and conflicts that affect your mood. You might ruminate more over past mistakes and develop increased anxiety about what the future holds. Counter-intuitively, based on the perfect results from your past efforts, others will have higher expectations from you and you might silently reel under relentless external pressure for sustained peak performance. This leads to never-ending and ever-growing to-do lists. Long to-do lists combined with a trait of high expectations and the pursuit of perfectionism further leads to increased self-doubt and irrational fear of failure. Fear of failure will be more for those who view failure as a reflection of their “lack of competence” –developing an increased tendency for risk-avoidance and burnout.
4. Unhealthy Comparisons:
Comparison is the thief of joy. The habit of analysing inevitably develops the habit of comparing oneself against the achievements of others. When comparison is solely for inspiration, it aids you. When comparison focuses on relative gains and losses, it can only lead to feelings of inadequacy, jealousy and insecurity that keeps you stuck.
5. Oversensitivity:
A combination of higher intelligence and high empathy can help you develop acute awareness of the stress and pain of others. While this is beneficial in most cases, it can also affect your mood adversely. Oversensitivity to stimuli, deluge of information and hyper-awareness can lead to misinterpretation of social cues. As one famous CEO told me(in reference to one of his direct-reports I was coaching), “Wisdom lies in choosing your battles”. The deeper insight here is this – as a leader you can’t waste your time in reacting to all stimuli.
6. Background Processing:
Have you noticed how your computer slows down when you have too many applications open? Your brain works the same when you have too many open-loops. This slows you down, makes it harder to rest or shut down completely. When you are tired, hungry and don’t sleep well, your body releases cortisol. Disrupted rest also prevents your brain from flushing out accumulated cortisol, leading to heightened cortisol levels and associated health impacts.
7. Scattered Focus:
When you are trying to get one thing done, you are too often reminded of the urgency of other pending things.
You can resolve all problems on the dark side of brightness by disrupting unhelpful patterns you recognise.
3 Steps To Disrupt Patterns Before They Disrupt You
1) Gain Objective Outsider Perspectives For Non-Judgemental Insights
Increase your performance at work through non-judgmental, objective outsider perspectives. The best practice among every peak-performing leader is to engage an external executive coach to gain an objective outsider perspective. This can also help you find more balance, faster decision-making and stay ready for next level roles. Sometimes, just having a conversation with someone who listens in a non-judgemental manner can help you figure things out. I call this “Thinking outside your brain”.
2) Self-Adaptive Techniques For Better Stability, Productivity and Progress
Here are some techniques that can help you get the best out of your cognitive abilities. This has worked for every leader I have coached. (for severe situations, please seek professional medical attention instead).
· Quickly re-organise with 3 essential steps: I have shared this in a previous article.
· Adopt better Mental Models for better and faster decisions
· Manage information overload. Reduce consumption and focus on contribution.
· Train your focus and concentration, by giving full attention to whatever you are doing at any time. Better breathing and yoga techniques like pranayama can help greatly in calming your mind and increase the ability to fully concentrate.
· Get adequate sleep every day, find time for daily exercise and eat consciously. Your sleep, diet and exercise routines impact your physiology and cognition.
· Make witnessing a habit. Witness your thoughts, automated behaviours and actions. This will help you to spot thinking patterns that might not be helping you. An advanced technique – not easy for many – is to practice watching your thoughts without indulging in any action for prolonged times. This will train your mind for the deep focus that’s needed to produce quality outcomes.
· Journal daily without analysis or interpretation. Even if you cannot journal daily, use journaling as a process to reflect on your thinking patterns and other observations.
3) Mindset Shifts To Elevate Your Thinking
· You can’t solve all problems and not all problems need to be solved now.
· Make the right use of your abilities without coming across as not ready for next-level roles with higher responsibilities.
· Being comfortable with uncertainties is what builds your courage.
· Your serenity is directly proportional to your comfort level with the status quo.
· Wisdom lies in knowing which battles to choose.
Call To Action
In the end, we would rather be smart than dumb. However, smartness without awareness leads to chaos and frustration.
· Observe your situation and look for behavioural patterns that might be affecting your stability, productivity and progress.
· Review the 3 steps we discussed above and take action. Bookmark this page for periodic reviews.
· If you need help to explore your hidden challenges for the next level of your growth, visit NextLevelClarity.com
What strategies have you discovered to deal with the dark side of brightness?
