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, I'll play a snippet from chapter one of the book, which is all about how we can harness the power of play to make our work more energizing.

It was a starlit evening in the late 1990s at a small university in Ohio. A young graduate research assistant stood in the lab holding a rat in his palm. He delicately stroked the rat's white belly with a dry paintbrush, hoping that something interesting would happen. At first, nothing. But then, suddenly, the rat cried out. Except not in distress. If anything, the rat seemed to be laughing.

These scientists weren't tickling rats just for the fun of it. In fact, they were investigating the biological effects of play on the human brain, what lead scientist Jaak Panksepp called the biology of joy. At the time, the prevailing belief in the scientific community was that only humans experienced emotions. It was thought that emotions stem from the highly complex part of the brain that is unique to us, the cerebral cortex.

But Panksepp's discovery that rodents could laugh suggested an alternative, that emotions must come from much more primitive areas of the brain, like the amygdala and the hypothalamus. Joy, Panksepp showed, is a deeply primal experience. One of Panksepp's key findings was that rats love to play. He spent much of his experiment recording the sounds made by rats when they were playing. The noises were joyful, he later said. It sounded like a playground. The reason? Play releases dopamine. It made the rats feel good.

We can learn a thing or two from these rodents. Pangsepp's rats showed that if we want to find joy in what we're doing, it won't be solely down to the higher and most complicated parts of the brain, those associated with the cerebral cortex. It's also down to the more ancient, basic parts of our neurology, the same feel-good hormones activated in those rats. We too can release little dopamine hits that keep us happy and engaged.

But how? The answer can be found by studying what specifically elicits dopamine. As one article published by Harvard Medical School puts it, the hormone is activated by, quote, sex, shopping, and smelling cookies baking in the oven. In other words, by the activities we find fun. So if we want to harness the revolutionary effects of play, our second step is to seek out fun everywhere we go. And that starts by paying a visit to a Disney-fied version of Edwardian London. Experiment number three, the magic post-it note.

During a particularly exhausting phase working as a junior doctor, my housemate Molly and I decided to revisit a childhood favorite, Mary Poppins. We hoped that immersing ourselves in a world of animated birds, extremely bad cognac accents, and musical hits about suffragism would provide some relief, even if only for a couple of hours.

At the time, I was struggling to find motivation to study for my postgraduate medical exams. When combined with my hospital work, the looming deadlines and complex material felt overwhelming. The idea of sitting down to read textbooks at the end of my shift felt nightmarish. But as I rewatched Mary Poppins, something unexpected happened. The movie wasn't just a frivolous tale of a quirky nanny with magical powers. It held a profound truth.

One of the film's most famous songs is A Spoonful of Sugar, which Mary sings to the children when they're complaining about chores. I didn't remember many of the lyrics from my childhood other than the chorus. A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down in the most delightful way. And I wanted to sing that line, but we can't for copyright reasons. Watching this familiar yet forgotten scene 20-something years later, I heard how the song begins. In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap, the job's a game.

The rest of the song describes various ways in which larks, robins, and honeybees make their tedious tasks more enjoyable by singing while they work. Robins apparently sing their merry tune in order to move the job along. An analysis I was subsequently sad to learn is not ornithologically accurate. I decided to apply this idea to my own life. In a late-night burst of inspiration, I grabbed a sharpie and a post-it note and wrote nine simple words. What would this look like if it were fun?

I stuck the note to my computer monitor and went to sleep. By the time I spotted the note on my monitor the following day, I'd forgotten that I'd put it there. I'd just got back from work and was making a start on relearning some biochemistry pathways for my medical exam. I sat down with my usual grin and bear it expression, but when I saw the post-it, it got me thinking. What would this look like if it were fun?

The first answer came to me immediately. If this were fun, there would be music. I realized that memorizing tedious biochemistry pathways magically became a lot more interesting with the Lord of the Rings soundtrack playing through my headphones. Suddenly, music became one of the most important ways for me to bring more playfulness into my work. I also began to apply this method at work. At the time, I was on my geriatric medicine placement where the doctor's office was a small, scantily decorated room in the corner of the ward.

On one particularly grueling afternoon, when I was sitting in the office with an enormous list of tasks before me, I decided to apply the musical fun method. I didn't have any speakers with me, so I grabbed a bowl from the kitchen and put my phone in there to use as a makeshift speaker. I opened up Spotify and spent the rest of the day doing my tasks with the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack playing at a low volume. The effects were transformative. It just felt better.

What would this look like if it were fun has now become a guiding question of my life, and it's surprisingly easy to draw upon. Think of a task that you don't want to do right now and ask what would it look like if it were fun? Could you do it in a different way? Could you add music or a sense of humor or get creative? What if you set out to do the task with friends or promised yourself a treat at the end of the process? Is there a way to make this draining process a little more enjoyable? Experiment number four, enjoy the process, not the outcome.

There's another way to find fun in everything you're doing, and it doesn't even involve re-watching children's films from the mid-20th century. In fact, it's best demonstrated by a 5'7 Spanish teenager with bleached blonde hair. In August 2021, Alberto Ginez Lopez stepped onto the podium as the inaugural gold medal winner in sport climbing at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

Over the preceding weeks, the world had watched transfixed as he completed a series of astonishing physical feats on the multicolored walls of Tokyo's Aomi Urban Sports Park. Most impressive of all was the speed climbing, where you clamber up a wall as fast as possible, spider-style. Lopez reached the top of the wall in a dazzling 6.42 seconds.

But as the crowds watched Lopez and his fellow climbers scramble up the walls at dizzying speeds, they also noticed that this was quite an unusual sport. It wasn't just that the competitors tended to look rather more bohemian than your regular track and field athletes with locks of colourfully dyed hair and brightly coloured harnesses. They also seemed to be more relaxed. Rather than avoiding eye contact and watching tensely as their competitors took to the walls, many of the climbers seemed to be chatting jovially at the bottom and even sharing tips.

When they did take to the walls, their faces displayed none of the agonized intensity that most sprinters or even footballers tend to exhibit. In fact, they seemed to be positively enjoying themselves. Those climbers hint at our second way to find the fun, by emphasizing the joy that comes not from the outcome, but the process itself.

According to the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the biggest difference between climbing and, say, football, is that most climbers are completely immersed in the process, climbing the wall, rather than the end result, winning the game. The pioneer of the study of flow, that state in which we're so immersed in a task that the rest of the world seems to melt away, Csikszentmihalyi first developed his theories while watching climbers in the Alps as a teenager.

Csikszentmihalyi argued that if we can learn to focus on the process rather than the outcome, we're substantially more likely to enjoy a task. But how? It might be easy enough for rock climbing, which is inherently fun, to some anyway. But what if you find yourself in altogether more mundane or even unpleasant situations? Arguably, this is where the power of focusing on the process becomes even more powerful. Because with a little creative thinking, you can find joy in any process, however mundane it might seem.

Take the story of Matthew Dix, today a world champion storyteller and best-selling novelist. Years before he published his first book, Dix worked in McDonald's, and he hated it. The days felt endless, Matt once told me. It was the same routine over and over again, taking orders, flipping burgers, and handing out fries. There was no excitement, no spark, no challenge. And so Dix decided to see if there was any joy to be had, not in the job's outcome, his infuriatingly meager paycheck, but in the process instead.

he landed on a classic tactic, upselling. Some days I'd decide it was barbecue sauce day, he recalls. So for the rest of the day, I'd add a mini sales pitch to each order I took. The customer would order a Big Mac and fries and I'd ask them if they'd like any sauce with that. If they said no, I'd smile and say, well, I'd really recommend the barbecue sauce. There's nothing that beats that.

Usually at this point, they were a little taken aback and they'd say, okay, then I'll take the sauce. If they still didn't bite, I'd say, that's okay, but you're really missing out. My last customer was reluctant, but when she tried the sauce, she knew she'd made the right decision. Dix says that the effects of these little changes in his routine were unexpectedly significant. They were the kind of mini tasks that might, in his words, just make the customer's day a little better and definitely made me feel more energized on days that felt like they were dragging.

And they worked. Dix found himself looking forward to his shifts, eager to see how many people he could convince to try the barbecue sauce. The process was not inherently enjoyable, but Dix had created a way to enjoy it. And in doing so, he had found the fun in an uninspiring situation.

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.