State Changes and Doing Your Best Work
Some time between my late teens and early twenties, I became depressed. The clinical, long-term variety of depression that keeps a person from doing things they ought to do, like turn in college essays. So I took a few years off school, and after a period of odd jobs and wandering, I landed at a Zen center in California. That was where I learned to breath. Which is a funny thing to say, considering that I had been doing it my whole life.
Breathing is weird. It happens all by itself, but you can also control it. It’s where the involuntary and voluntary sides of your nervous system meet. Given that breath plays a big part in how you oxygenate your body and mind, which affects how calm or excited you feel, and given that you can control it, you have a powerful lever to change your state.
In physics, there's this concept known as a "state change" - when water transitions from liquid to gas while boiling, or from liquid to solid while freezing. Starting in the 1970s, self-help movements adopted the term “state” to describe something different but equally important: the combination of thoughts, feelings, and physiology we experience at any given moment.
Psychological and physiological state changes are powerful tools for emotional self-regulation and stress management, both of which enable us to tackle difficult tasks. When someone says exercise makes them "feel better," they're describing a state change. The same goes for a brisk walk, deep breathing, an ice bath, a sauna session, or a short nap.
In the Zen center, I learned how breath could dial me up or dial me down. Breathing in more than you breathe out is a good way to get excited; and the reverse is also true. If you’re curious, you can try out different breathing patterns here and gauge their effect. The breath has the additional role of focusing one’s attention, like one of those laser pens that cats chase. This is why Buddhists use it to meditate.
And that was my gateway to state changes, or methods that help bring energy and focus to work, studies, health, family, you name it; i.e. they maximize what you can make or do, and how deeply you connect.
You can crystallize this in a simple equation:
Impact = Energy x Focus x Time x Purpose
This relationship is multiplicative rather than additive - if any factor drops to zero, the others become irrelevant. They work together as a system. Zen might substitute Presence for Impact. Which, fine.
The human ability to influence one’s state is a form of liberation, and you face no gatekeeper. We can consciously activate physiological levers to transform our thinking and feeling in moments. Why? Because the old dualism of mind and body is bunk. Every part of your nervous system is a component of your body, and if you get your heath right, you’re a long way to getting your brain right.
While much snake oil has been sold promising personal transformation, I'll focus on evidence-based approaches that have worked for me: sleep, breath, movement, and nutrition, as well as intermittent energy renewal and digital hygiene. These simple interventions can create profound long-term changes in my life at work and at home.
While this advice is often funneled into executive coaching, it deserves broader application. Teams and organizations that master energy and attention management reach their goals earlier and make better strategic choices (i.e. they choose better goals). Front-line workers and individual contributors who interface directly with customers and operations can make enormous contributions through both their work quality and their ability to provide feedback about on-the-ground realities to leadership, which is all too often insulated from the ultimate consequences of high-level decisions.
Two crucial resources underpin consistent, high-quality work and presence:
1. Mental Energy: Think of your brain like the body of an athlete - it strengthens with exertion, but it needs to recover. It is an energy tank that needs nightly refilling as well as regular renewal throughout the day. It recovers through proper sleep, exercise, nutrition, hydration, and strategic breaks. Intermittent energy renewal. Basically, during the day you want to move between the quadrant on the upper right and the quadrant on the lower right, spicing it now and then with a little stress. If you can do this, you avoid the quadrant on the lower left, where bad things happen.
2. Working Memory: This is your brain's workspace for managing the 3-7 pieces of information we can remember simultaneously. It's where complex thinking happens, but it's easily disrupted (and filled up) by interruptions and unfinished tasks. Digital hygiene - limiting notifications and addictive websites - plays a crucial role in preserving it. The more interruptions you are subject to, the more of your working memory is consumed by tasks you have set aside, limiting the space available for the new task at hand.
The most effective state change method I can recommend is intermittent energy renewal, or deliberate rest. When starting focused work:
Set a timer for 60-90 minutes (following what’s called an ultradian cycle, which is a cycle that happens more than once a day)
Take the planned break before reaching exhaustion
During breaks, choose simple, engaging rote activities (walking, juggling, breathing exercises, simple games like Two Dot)
Avoid mentally taxing or emotionally intense activities during these renewal periods (no doom-scrolling!)
To protect working memory during focus bouts:
Limit interruptions and distractions
Minimize unfinished tasks or "open loops"
Disengage from social media and non-essential messaging
Focus only on information necessary for your current work
My main point is the mental energy and focus are really the results of a bank shot. You’re not going to just squeeze more out of yourself with energy drinks and caffeine. You have to rest, reset, intermittently renew your energy, and energize the body in which your brain resides. If you are a founder: investing in your health is investing in your company. These are not separate things. More broadly, investing in your health is investing in your work, as well as your relationships.
These practices contrast with what you might call linear work. Just pushing through, hour after hour, that thing colleagues and bosses sometimes praise or brag about in a boiler room. It’s a young man’s game. By the time you’re 30, your capacity to exert energy and absorb stress starts declining on a physical level, and is only sustained through constant and deliberate maintenance. It’s not about *lots* of rest, but a higher frequency of short breaks, and underlying habits to sustain health.
These recovery periods are an interval method for the brain, similar to what athletes develop to increase the strength of their muscles, by stressing them with reps, and then letting them rest.
Through these practices, you can harness state changes to maximize both your professional impact and personal presence. While there's nothing magical here, the cumulative effect of these small adjustments is transformative over time.