What is 'Becoming Superhuman'?

(air hisses) (mouse clicks) (bright music) Headspace Studios. (upbeat music) Hi, I'm Dr. Sahar Yousef. Welcome to Radio Headspace, and to Monday morning. (upbeat music continues) I'm a cognitive neuroscientist and a lecturer at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. I'll be guest hosting Radio Headspace this week, and I am so happy to be here. My work is all about using science to help you get your most important work done in less time with less stress. I also founded a training and consulting firm called Becoming Superhuman, with fellow neuroscientist Lucas Miller, who's hosting the show next week. This week we'll explore how neuroscience can improve your life and discuss some powerful strategies that you can use to quickly get better focus. Today I'll talk about what you may be getting wrong about productivity and what Becoming Superhuman actually means. (soft relaxing music) The concept and the ethos of Becoming Superhuman, first it was grounded in the research that was being done. We could see that there was just so much untapped potential in how the brain can actually change for the better. We can raise the roof on basic cognitive functions like our attention span, our memory, our information processing speed. All of these things are malleable. If your cognitive function is not serving you, to some extent, you are in control of that, and that was a super aspirational and uplifting thing to experience working with people and seeing the amazing changes that they can undergo in just a matter of weeks. Becoming Superhuman is all about questioning the status quo. It's change. Change is possible. (soft relaxing music) I think one of the biggest mistakes that we see people make as it relates to day-to-day productivity is actually around choosing what to focus on. And listen, I'll be the first to admit, I love a to-do list. Big list maker over here. However, the research on to-do lists is rather abysmal, as it relates to actually being able to identify and prioritize what is actually gonna move the needle forward for you, your life, your career, your family, et cetera. (soft relaxing music) So take a step back, have the list. It's the backlog of every single possibility. It's your pantry, it's your refrigerator, it's the cans that you bought when we were mid-pandemic and thinking that we couldn't get access to food, that are just, like, collecting dust in your pantry. What we do not recommend doing on a daily basis is to literally empty your refrigerator, literally empty your pantry, throw it out all on the counter and on the floor and say, "Great, now that I can see everything, let me go ahead and figure out what I'm gonna make for dinner." No, of course not. Figure out what energy you have available to you this evening. What needs to get done? Right? What needs to get used up tonight? How much time do you have available? How many people are you...