BONUS EPISODE: Recharge Your Batteries With Feel-Good Tasks (Chapter 8 Feel-Good Productivity)
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In case you haven't heard, my brand new book, Feel Good Productivity is now out and it's actually a New York Times and also Sunday Times bestseller. So if you've ordered a copy, thank you so much. If you've read the book already, I'd love it if you could leave a review on Amazon. And if you haven't yet checked out the book, you might like to consider checking it out.

In this bonus episode of Deep Dive, we're going to play a snippet from chapter eight of the audiobook, which is all about how we can recharge our proverbial batteries. Recharging isn't just a simple matter of mindlessly zoning out every night. It requires understanding how to rest in a way that energizes you. 2020 was a hard year for the lexicographers at Oxford University Press.

In addition to their main role, compiling the Oxford English Dictionary, every year they sit down to nominate their word of the year, new coinages that capture the essence of the last 12 months. For years, their nominations had made the news for capturing the global zeitgeist. 2008, credit crunch. 2013, selfie. 2015, the face with tears of joy emoji.

But 2020 was harder than ever before. As COVID spread, a panoply of new terms erupted into the lexicon. Lockdown, social distancing, super spreader. In the end, the OED could not settle on just one word. They wrote, given the phenomenal breadth of language change and development during 2020, Oxford Languages concluded that this is a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in one single word.

To me, though, the true word of the year was nestled on page six of the OED's report: doom scrolling. Like most people, I spent vast chunks of my rest time in 2020 mindlessly reloading social media.

I should be relaxing, I found myself thinking. And yet, instead, I seem to have ingested 2,500 tweets about the economic effects of lockdown on luxury candle makers in Vermont. Most of us have experienced the perils of doom-scrolling. After a long day of work, you settle into your favorite spot on the couch, phone in hand, ready for a few minutes of relaxation. Yet, instead of the peaceful break you planned, you get sucked into an endless vortex of negativity, consuming one distressing story, tweet, or video after another.

The first victim, our mood. We think we're resting, but it doesn't feel like it at all. In the last chapter, we talked about the tendency to burn ourselves out through overexertion, bringing down our mood by doing too much and not taking enough breaks at work. The solution, we learned, was to conserve our energy more effectively.

But we can also burn ourselves out in our time away from work. Doom scrolling, binge watching TV shows, mindlessly checking emails or WhatsApp notifications. These are the ways we sabotage our feel-good emotions during our downtime. The resulting stresses contribute to what I call depletion burnout. It comes from not giving yourself enough time or space to truly rejuvenate. Try this simple experiment. Set a timer for five minutes and make two lists.

The first is the list of things you tend to do when you're feeling drained of energy. The second is a list of things that tend to actually recharge that energy. If you're anything like me, you might find that the two lists look very different. So for example, under my list of things I do when I'm feeling drained of energy, I've got scroll Instagram, scroll TikTok, lie on the sofa and search endlessly for a random movie to watch on Netflix, scroll through Twitter, feeling incensed about what's going on in the world, order an unhealthy takeaway.

And the things I do that actually energize me are, for example, go for a walk, play some guitar, reach out to a friend and suggest grabbing dinner, do some yoga or stretching, or head to the gym for a quick workout. This difference between what we do automatically when we're feeling drained and what would actually rejuvenate us shows that the ways we rest are rarely restful.

And it raises a question. How can we break the doom scroll, binge watch, takeaway cycle and start engaging in activities that actually make us feel good? It sounds obvious, yet we don't always use our breaks or our time off doing things that make us feel good. These are the things that truly recharge our energy, helping us avoid burnout. Key idea number one, recharge creatively. Have you ever become completely immersed in a creative task, writing a poem, learning a song, drawing a picture, and found that by the time you finished, you've completely forgotten your worries?

According to a team of psychologists from San Francisco State and Illinois State Universities, this is a scientifically verifiable phenomenon. They argue that creative activities are particularly likely to make us relax. And they have four characteristics that are especially helpful in making us feel good. Ones that I like to remember using a simple acronym: C-A-L-M. CALM. The C stands for competence. So first, creative activities unlock our sense of competence.

We learned in chapter two that when we feel like we're gaining new skills, we get a boost of energy. Well, that's particularly likely when you're doing something creative. As you write that poem or craft that song, you experience a sense of improving at your craft, and so your competence grows. The A stands for autonomy.

Second, creative activities play to our feelings of autonomy. This concept too was introduced in chapter two, where we learned that a sense of ownership over our work is highly energizing. Similarly, when we engage in creative activities, we're likely to feel the same sense of autonomy that helps us rejuvenate. For example, if you take a painting, you've got control over exactly what you're painting and how you're painting it.

The L stands for liberty. So third, creative activities give us a feeling of liberty. They help us properly disengage from our work. It's hard to remain in work mode when you're fully focused on learning to play the guitar. That gives us a feeling of freedom that takes us away from the rest of our working lives.

And the M stands for mellow. So finally, creative activities help us mellow. Done right, creative activities are relaxed and low stakes. Practicing your knitting skills by making a sweater for your friend with some soft background music, rather than, say, entering the sweater into a high-stakes knitting competition with 2,000 rivals and a looming deadline, helps escape the stresses of work time.

So in summary, CALM stands for competence, autonomy, liberty, and mellow. And in the supplementary PDF, you'll find a nice diagram that says exactly that with some cute little icons above each word. So creative tasks done properly can unlock our energy in at least four ways. But this raises some questions. In practice, how can we tell which creative tasks are going to calm us? And how can we integrate them into our lives? Experiment number one, CALM hobbies.

Former US President George W. Bush, King Charles III of England and pop sensation Taylor Swift have more in common than you might think. There are the obvious similarities, of course. They're all absurdly wealthy. They're all the subject of wild conspiracy theories. They're all prone to going on opulent tours around the world. But they also share something more unexpected, a love of painting. Bush paints military veterans. King Charles paints slightly twee Scottish landscapes. Swift paints all sorts, seascapes, flowers, foliage, usually in bold, atmospheric colors.

Painting is, to my mind, the quintessential calm activity. However inexperienced someone is when they begin painting, by sticking with it, they'll continue to gain competence over time, they generally have autonomy over what they're painting and how they're painting it, it's likely detached from their day-to-day work and so hobbyist painters experience the feeling of liberation, and it's generally a mellowing, relaxed activity.

But what makes painting particularly important is that, for almost everyone, it will only ever be a hobby. It's something you enjoy purely on its own terms, with no end point in sight and no monetary benefit to be found. Hobbies are the first way we can integrate calm activities into our lives. The defining characteristic of a hobby is that it's low stakes. There's simply no way to win or lose a hobby, nor to turn it into a business. Very few of us are likely to discover in adulthood that we're professional standard painters, especially not George W. Bush.

How can we maximize the potential of these creative hobbies? The trick is to ensure that they remain just that, distinct from your work, with no clear end point and no stress. To this end, it can be helpful to make sure that your hobby has clear boundaries. Establish specific times for your creative activity and distinguish it from your work and daily responsibilities. Try dedicating a particular room or space to your hobby, turning off work notifications during your creative time, or setting a regular schedule for when you'll engage in your chosen activity.

Next, continually remind yourself that the hobby should be enjoyed for the process rather than any kind of high-stakes goal. As you paint, play, or build, remind yourself that this is an arena in which quality doesn't matter. So allow yourself to make mistakes, experiment, and grow at your own pace. Your primary goal is not to become an expert or a master. It's to enjoy and to recharge.

Above all, resist the urge to turn your hobby into work. In 2017, George W. Bush published a collection of his paintings called Portraits of Courage. Critics were generally surprised by the quality of his handiwork, even if he did give some of his subjects somewhat misshapen features.

But going public with your hobby in this way, trying to put it into the public eye or even monetize it, is risky. It means you might no longer view your hobby as true recreation and instead see it as another side hustle. If you want to properly recharge, you need to maintain areas of your life in which personal advancement doesn't feature at all. Experiment number two, calm projects. Another way to recharge your energy creatively is by undertaking a specific project. Unlike an open-ended hobby, a project has a definite beginning and end.

projects can be particularly useful in building our sense of competence and autonomy as they give us a feeling of accomplishment when we reach our end goal. Before I started writing this book and after I'd gotten over my junior doctor meltdown, learning about productivity was my creative project. For months, I'd get home from work, put on some music and read about the science of getting things done.

I was developing competence because I was constantly learning about the latest psychological research. I had autonomy because I could do whatever I wanted during this time, and I could explore the methods creatively on my own. I had liberty from my day job as a doctor, which was entirely different to the experience of being a nighttime productivity expert. And at the time, the stakes felt low, so I'd feel relaxed and mellow while reading. And to be fair, when I signed this book deal, the stakes were raised a little.

A calm project, and again that's C-A-L-M, can be almost anything creative that has a clear end point. You could take up photography, setting yourself the goal of taking a photo every day for a year. You could learn to code, setting yourself the goal of creating a text-based role-playing game. You could develop the skill of quilting, setting yourself the goal of creating a gift for your mum's next birthday. And if you want to further supercharge the effects of your calm project, consider incorporating people into it.

As we saw in Chapter 3, when we undertake a task with friends or as part of our wider community, we harness the energy that comes from human connection. We thrive in environments where we can learn from one another, exchange ideas, and celebrate our successes together. If your Calm project involves painting or drawing, you could join a local art class or meetup group where you can share your progress.

If you're passionate about writing, you could become part of a writing group or attend workshops where you can grow together as writers. Whatever your project, when you build a community around your project, you harness the recharging power of people. I hope you enjoyed that little snippet of my brand new book, Feel Good Productivity. I had so much fun recording the audiobook in a studio in London. It was a lot of hard work, but quite a lot of fun. And so if you fancy listening to the entire book, it is available to purchase wherever audiobooks are sold. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode of Deep Dive.