What to develop to compound your peace and
performance in the right direction
You can tolerate this era.
You can tolerate the constant inputs. The new tools. The faster cycles. The next “urgent” thing. The low-grade exhaustion that you call normal. You can even tolerate another burnout, because plenty of high-functioning professionals do.
The question is: do you really want to live on reserve battery mode?
Because AI and overinformation are not neutral. They don’t just “change how we work.” They change what your brain rehearses all day: urgency, comparison, vigilance, self-doubt, and the subtle belief that you’re always behind.
Used well, they can compound:
- mental energy
- decision quality
- quality of life
- excellence that feels clean
- time saved from fewer reworks
- peace of mind from certainty in yourself and your growth
Used poorly, they compound the opposite: scattered effort, noisy thinking, brittle health, and a life that looks impressive but feels thin.
This is a two-part piece. Part 1 covers what’s genuinely useful about this era, as well as the first two capacities to build so it helps you rather than harms you. Part 2 continues with the remaining five capacities.
Part 1: What’s useful about this era (and why it still drains people)
1) AI really does reduce time for many tasks. It also adds a new tax: rework.
If you’re honest, AI has shortened the time it takes to produce drafts, summarise, synthesise, and get moving. That’s not hype; it’s lived reality for many teams.
It’s also mainstream now: Microsoft/LinkedIn’s 2024 Work Trend Index reported 75% of knowledge workers use AI at work.
But here’s the part people gloss over because it’s less sexy: AI often shifts the work from creation to correction.
Zapier calls this “AI workslop” and found:
- 58% of enterprise AI users spend 3+ hours per week revising or redoing AI outputs
- some reports summarise this as around 5 hours/week spent fixing AI mistakes
So yes: faster output. Also: a new layer of verification, editing, and cleanup. In practice, a lot of people aren’t saving time— they’re moving time into the “fix and apologise” bucket.
The direction you compound depends on whether you build the capacities to use AI as leverage rather than as noise.
2) Since COVID, mental health isn’t as taboo. That’s progress. It’s also become a content casino.
We’re more willing to talk about anxiety, burnout, therapy, and boundaries. That shift matters. And the scale of the issue is real: the WHO reported a 25% increase in anxiety and depression globally in the first year of the pandemic.
At the same time, mental health has become a cultural pulpit. Everyone has a microphone. Everyone has a “framework.” Everyone has a diagnosis for you in 12 seconds.
And relationship dynamics have gone mainstream too. “Gaslighting” wasn’t niche— Merriam-Webster made it Word of the Year 2022, noting a huge spike in lookups.
This is where people get stuck:
- more awareness, less wisdom
- more vocabulary, less discernment
- more “doing something,” less doing the right thing
If you don’t build new capacities, you become someone who is permanently informed, permanently anxious, and permanently performing self-improvement.
So here are the first two capacities. They don’t sound glamorous. They’re the difference between compounding peace and compounding drift.
Capacity 1: Being in your body— without turning life into a trauma documentary
If you’re neurodivergent, you may relate to Sheldon Cooper’s line:
“My body and I have a relationship that works best when we maintain a cool, wary distance from each other.”
That joke lands because it’s painfully familiar: many high-functioning minds live from the neck up. Especially the ones who learned early that thinking faster, performing harder, giving more, and “being fine” kept them safe and valuable.
Here’s the twist: neurodivergent people often pick up a lot of signals. We just don’t always know how to read them, so we override them— until the body forces a system shutdown.
And a necessary correction, because the internet is currently drunk on nervous system content:
Not everything is trauma. Not even “small-t trauma.” But if something leaves a mark on you— tension you can’t drop, sleep that degrades, agitation that sticks, dread that follows you into neutral moments— then you deal with it so it doesn’t stack up against you.
This is especially relevant for the hyper-rational professional who prides themselves on logic.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Over-rationality is often the most socially acceptable form of over-emotionality. It’s the person finding 103,039 reasons to justify something while their body is screaming.
You make your best, wisest, cleanest decisions when your head, heart, and gut are in sync— not at war.
Why “affirmations” often backfire
People love telling you to say: “I am safe. I am calm. I am happy.”
But if your cortisol and adrenaline are sky-high, your brain knows you’re lying. The dissonance can clench you tighter.
Try a truth your nervous system can accept:
- “I am making us safer.”
- “I am training my body to settle.”
- “I can do one clean next step.”
Or do what many contemplative traditions do: name the action.
Sitting. Breathing. Writing. Reading. Talking. Feeling.
It sounds almost stupid— and that’s why it works. It stops the mind from spiralling into commentary and brings you back to something verifiable.
Capacity 2: Taking care of the body as a performance asset— not a moral theatre
Move. Eat. Sleep. Not perfectly. Eighty percent.
Don’t make one bad day three.
Snacks are fun. Eat the cake if you like it. Just don’t eat five slices because you’re stressed and calling it “self-care,” then marinate in invisible guilt. Cake isn’t the enemy. Guilt-drenched cake is.
Taking care of your appearance isn’t automatically vanity. When you like what you see, life gets easier. On the not-so-good days, it can be a small consolation that keeps you upright.
If vanity is the dubious life goal that gets you into the gym— start there. We can purify motives later. First, build momentum.
Why this matters more now
We’re living longer. Many chronic diseases develop over decades, and earlier onset means you can spend a long time living with deterioration if you ignore the basics. Your brain-body link affects everything: self-belief, resilience, cognitive clarity, tolerance for uncertainty, and how quickly you recover from stress.
Your body can work for you— or it can quietly become an opposing faction.
And here’s the bigger point for high-functioning professionals:
Peace and performance are not opposites.
A regulated body doesn’t make you soft. It makes you harder to destabilise.
And can’t stomach calling your body a performance asset? If you treasure your body, call it devotion then.
Continued in Part 2
In Part 2, we’ll cover the remaining five capacities that stop AI and overinformation from eating your life:
- Decluttering and closing loops (why “open tabs” quietly drain energy— the mental stickiness often discussed via the Zeigarnik effect)
- Critical ignoring (because we don’t just have overinformation, we have over-false information, and “choosing what to ignore” is now a core competence)
- Integration over overconsumption (why hoarding protocols creates learned helplessness, and how AI can create an illusion of progress)
- Having a life (why optimisation can become a cage; why weekends should restore, not perform)
- Acceptance without mediocrity (you don’t need to be your best every day; standards and state are different)
Want to know more?
Book a Performance Call to discuss your situation, or join us at our next 20/20 session where we dive deeper into the neuroscience of leading through constant change.