For many of us, we spend every day griping about our bosses. How they are creating a toxic culture, how they take part in back-biting, favoritism, and good old sexism. And it’s fair to vent it out to someone.
However, this conversation you’re having with your friends and colleagues has another team involved. Namely, all the parts of your brain involved in dealing with the emotions and thoughts regarding your work.
Here’s the thing. While you’re complaining about your boss being terrible at his job, you’re being a pretty awful boss to your brain.
You’re way too indecisive
Much like a boss who has absolutely no clue what to do and would rather brainstorm for hours and present way too many ideas, you do the same.
By evaluating every possibility, you open yourself to decision fatigue. According to our good friend, Wikipedia, in decision making and psychology, decision fatigue refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision making.
Finally, after ruminating on so many choices and plans of action. That’s why you make irrational decisions.
The easiest way to avoid decision fatigue and overloading your brain, you need to stop evaluating so many options. There’s a fine line between the right number of decisions and the way too many decisions to make.
You create a noisy and toxic workplace
Thoughts are like a bunch of unruly children running in your house. They are also the things you have in your house, like plants, furniture, etc.
Leave them alone, and they’ll take over and completely wreck your house and your brain.
So, what do you do?
You Marie Kondo (AKA declutter) your house and set out to control those thoughts. You start outside, by decluttering your house and then move back in to deal with your brain. You can start by limiting the information, stop multitasking and you know, be decisive.
You make it work overtime
Like many of us working in corporate wonderland, our brain also works overtime when you, the boss (You) make it work way over the scheduled hours. And it’s well past time that we truly understood what happens when we deprive our brain of the sleep it desperately needs.
There have been many studies that link excessive sleep deprivation to irritable moods, and the impairing of brain functions such as memory and decision-making. It also negatively affects the rest of the body—it impairs the functioning of the immune system, for example, making us more susceptible to infection.
And the solution is quite simple. Much like our bosses must do, you need to give your brain some rest and recreation.
Go to sleep, my friend.
Be a good boss to your brain, even if your real-life boss won’t.
It’s your responsibility, mate.
